Flesh

Outside St. James Church in Shere, England, you will find a metal plaque marking the site of the cell of Christine Carpenter, Anchoress of Shere 1329.

An anchoress was a person who would withdraw from common life to dedicate themselves to God and bind themselves to the church by living the rest of their earthly life within a small cell. Much like many anchorite abodes, Christine’s small cell was attached to the church and installed with a small opening through which she would receive food, and a squint window into the church that allowed her to participate in services.

As noted on the plaque, Christine’s life as an anchoress began in 1329. She explained to the Bishop of Winchester that she wished to be removed from the world’s distractions to lead a more pious life. This request was granted following queries into Christine’s moral qualities and chastity, and she was sealed into the cell in July of the same year. As she began her lifelong vow of seclusion, a burial service was read for she was considered dead to the sinful world, the cell being her symbolic tomb.

Despite her oaths, Christine broke out of the anchorage after almost three years and attempted to rejoin society. Having broken her holy vow, Christine was threatened with ex-communication. It is perhaps this threat that led Christine to return to seclusion and isolation. By October of 1332, she had called on the Pope to pardon her sin on the condition she return to her anchorage. This she did, and there she remained for the rest of her mortal life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It may sound attractive to seal ourselves away from worldly temptations. However, God calls his people to something much more difficult: Dying to the world while still living in it (Gal. 6:14). We are to be living saints (Phil. 4:21, Eph. 4:12), in the world with all its temptations and trials, so that we become testimonies to God’s grace and salvation.

Paul Ford writes in an article on Wired, what happened when he switched his weight loss meds and found a miracle cure. Decades of struggle with an insatiable desire for food, gone in an instant. But his reflection on the experience is less of an advertisement as it is a probing of human nature amid advances in pharmacology. He writes:

This is a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old — and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection. But I have no more virtue than I did a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli to gloopy chicken. Is this who I am?

How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride?

On this front, the parallels between Ford’s weight loss drug and every other drug are almost obvious (whether they be coffee, THC, or any fill-in-the-blank name brand). The alluring promise that frailty is simply a matter of chemistry. More interesting is what happens to Ford himself after the one signal pathway is silenced — his brain averts its gaze elsewhere:

Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume — there was sudden silence. It was confusing. […] “I urgently need, I thought … Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The flesh is never satisfied and cannot be conquered by human will or science. Impeding one of the desires of the flesh simply ignites another. The church of big pharma might provide a kind of cure, but there is no panacea for human nature, except “the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

In the popular, BBC murder mystery series Broadchurch, the mystery is who in this lovely little seaside town could have murdered a child. The local detective, Eli Miller, is dubious that anyone from the town could’ve done it. This is a tight knit community of good people. She says, “We don’t have these problems.” In response, Detective Inspector, Alec Hardy argues with her.

Hardy: Anybody’s capable of murder, given the right circumstances.

Miller: Most people have moral compasses.

Hardy: Compasses break.

Tim Keller adds: “The fictional detective inspector is telling us exactly what the Bible says. You must not be in denial about your capacity for evil. You will do some really bad things in your life that will utterly shock you, unless you get ahold of this particular truth from the Bible. Blame shifting is therefore one of the most dangerous things that you can do.”

Legend has it that G. K. Chesterton, the famous philosopher/theologian, was asked by a newspaper reporter what was wrong with the world. He skipped over all the expected answers. He said nothing about corrupt politicians or ancient rivalries between warring nations, or the greed of the rich and the covetousness of the poor. He left aside street crime and unjust laws and inadequate education. Environmental degradation and population growth overwhelming the earth’s carrying capacity were not on his radar. Neither were the structural evils that burgeoned as wickedness became engrained in society and its institutions in ever more complex ways.

What’s wrong with the world? As the story goes, Chesterton responded with just two words: “I am.”

His answer is unlikely to be popular with a generation schooled to cultivate self-esteem, to pursue its passions and chase self-fulfillment first and foremost. ... (But) maybe there is something to Chesterton’s answer after all. In fact, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was fond of saying that original sin—the idea that every one of us is born a sinner and will manifest that sinfulness in his or her life—is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically verified. Everyone, whether a criminal or a saint, sins. Insofar as that dismal verdict is true, it’s hardly surprising that there is a great deal wrong with the world.

Tesla’s latest Full Self-Driving software now lets you decide how much of a “jerk” you want to be on the road, says Yahoo. The Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta lets you choose from three driving “profiles” that dictate how the car will react to certain situations on the road. Each mode, “Chill,” “Average,” and “Assertive,” varies in terms of aggressiveness (and potentially safety).

An image posted to Twitter gives us a more detailed glimpse at what this actually means. In the description beneath the “Assertive” option, Tesla notes the vehicle will “have a smaller follow distance” and “perform more frequent speed lane changes.” The vehicle will also “not exit passing lanes” and “may perform rolling stops.” It’s not entirely clear whether this means cars won’t come to a full stop at stop signs.

In “Chill” mode, the vehicle will “have a larger follow distance and perform fewer speed lane changes,” while “Average” mode means the car “will have a medium follow distance and may perform rolling stops.”

It’s hard to tell just how much these FSD profiles change the way the vehicle drives, and if they push the limits of safety, especially when traveling in the rain or snow. If the descriptions of these profiles are accurate, this means that a Tesla in “Assertive” mode may follow behaviors that tend to be more dangerous no matter the car you’re in.

Possible Preaching Angle:

At birth we are pre-programmed for Assertive mode in life since we are programmed by the flesh. When we are given new life by the Holy Spirit, he begins implementing a new program of Chill mode through the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:16-23).

The Good Place is a popular comedy TV show that follows four humans and their experience in an imagined afterlife. People accumulate points based on their good and bad actions on earth and then they’re sent to either “the good place” (heaven) or “the bad place” (hell).

But the characters soon realize that there is a problem in heaven—everything is wonderful, but no one seems happy. One of the Good Place’s residents says, “You get here, and you realize that anything is possible, and you do everything and then you’re done. But you still have infinity left. This place kills fun, and passion, and excitement and love.”

In the show’s final season, to counter the boredom of an eternal existence, the characters decide that the best solution is to give people an escape. The main character explains:

When you feel happy, and satisfied and complete and you want to leave the Good Place for good, you can just walk through [a door leading out of heaven] and your time in the universe will end. You don’t have to go through it if you don’t want to, but you can. And hopefully knowing that you don’t have to be here forever will help you feel happier while you are.

When one of the residents of the Good Place asks what will happen when they pass through this door, the main character says he’s not sure: “All we know is it will be peaceful, and your journey will be over.” They encourage them to have the time of their lives, and then, “when you’re ready, walk through one last door and be at peace.” The show’s argument, then, is that when heaven becomes unbearable, people should have the choice to end their time there on their own terms and in a peaceful manner.

In the 1920s, the American Tobacco Company wanted to make their main brand, Lucky Strike, stand out from the other tobacco products on the market. So, they hired an advertising expert named Albert Lasker. In his book The Attention Merchants, here’s how author Tim Wu describes Lasker’s strategy:

Lucky Strike was presented as a health tonic—specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes. With a new claim that roasting “removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation,” including “harmful corrosive acids.” The Lucky Strike slogan became: “your throat protection … Against irritation … Against cough.” There was even a secret process involved: “the toasting process includes the use of the ultraviolet ray … heat purifies and so toasting—that extra, secret process—removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation and coughing.”

To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a “precious voice” campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers … [He also recruited doctors to tout the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes.] One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with a copy: “20,679 physicians say Luckies are less irritating … Your throat protection.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, the world, the flesh, and the devil will take something that pollutes or kills our spiritual life and try to convince us that it’s actually good for us.

For the last 20 years sociologist Peter Simi has spent time with and studied white supremacist groups and individuals. Many groups, such as the White Aryan Resistance, Nazi Lowriders, and Public Enemy No. 1, have allowed him as an observer into their private meetings. Simi explains how difficult it is for those leaving the groups, giving a specific example.

A young woman named Bonnie and her husband were fully indoctrinated and committed to white supremacist beliefs. In a domestic dispute unrelated to their white-power group, a relative shot their daughter. At the hospital two black doctors saved her life. This changed Bonnie and her husband, who then “tried to retrain their minds, free themselves of racist views.” They even went so far as to move to a nearby Southern California area with numerous black and Latino families.

Things became undone one day when Bonnie realized she had received the wrong order after going through a local drive-thru restaurant. The clerk refused to correct the order when she went inside. All the workers were Mexican and didn’t speak good English. Bonnie became enraged, swore at the clerk, told her to get out of her country, exclaimed “white power” and left displaying the Nazi salute.

After that eruption, Bonnie collapsed in her car outside of the restaurant, crying, asking herself why she did that. Why had she reverted to a state of hate that she had been trying to push away? It was clear to Simi that she felt shame about how she had reacted. Simi believes that for many, being part of white-power groups becomes like an addiction. Those who try to quit hating usually will relapse, because racism burrows deep into the psyche, and merely leaving the group cannot expunge it. Simi calls this ‘the hangover effect.’ He has tried to get mental health services for some white supremacists who are on the fence about leaving, or have already left, their hate groups. But few counselors will agree to take them on. Simi says their response is: ‘We’re not qualified.’

Of the hundreds of men I’ve counseled about their sexual addictions, not one has told me that after masturbating he felt stronger, more confident, and more vitally connected to the deep part of his soul. Debates over whether or not masturbation is a sin totally miss the point. The crucial question is not whether masturbation is right or wrong. The question is, as it is with any thought or behavior, does it hinder our spiritual, emotional, and social maturity? Does it stand in the way of love?

Walt Whitman, one of the greatest of American poets writes in, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" of his capacity for evil:

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, ...

As kids, we almost all inevitably faced the same temptation at one point or another—to slip our favorite candy bar into our pocket at the store without paying for it. So easy, and harmless, right? That's what Idris Allen, a 38-year-old New Jersey man, seemed to be thinking , when he robbed the exact same 7-Eleven store at knifepoint four different times in four days—just to avoid paying for candy. It started on December 8, 2015 and escalated to the third heist December 11th consisting of "several Reese's Peanut Butter Cups."

Here's how one newspaper described the fourth and final theft:

Approximately, 14 hours later on the same day, the defendant wearing the same clothing from the robbery the night before, came back to the 7-Eleven, went to the back of the store, took merchandise, and left the store, only to be followed by the shift manager from the first robbery, who jumped over the counter, alerted the police and pointed him out around the corner.

Allen pleaded guilty to first-degree armed robbery.

Potential Preaching Angles: How representative of humanity's battle with sin! Over and over, "as a dog returns to its vomit," we return to the same sins, even though they never succeed in satisfying us like we seem to think they will.

In an interview for Rolling Stone, actor Jeff Bridges was asked what advice he wished he would have received at age 20. Bridges said:

I got the advice—I just didn't take it! My dad would say, "It's all about habit, Jeff. You gotta get into good habits." And I said, "No, Dad, you gotta live each moment. Live it as the first one and be fresh." And he says, "That's a wonderful thought, but that's not what we are. We are habitual creatures. It's about developing these grooves." As I age, I can see his point. What you practice, that's what you become.

In the dynamic relationship between love and knowledge, head and heart, the Scriptures paint a holistic picture of the human person. It's not only our minds that God redeems, but the whole person: head, heart, hands. Christ takes captive our minds but also our kardia, even what Paul calls our splagchna, our "inner parts" that are the seat of our "affections."

Contemporary science is starting to catch up to this ancient biblical wisdom about the human person. Scholars at UCLA and McMaster University have been conducting experiments that are shedding light on our "gut feelings." Their studies point to the way microbes in our stomachs affect the neural activity of the brain. "Your brain is not just another organ," they report. "It's … affected by what goes on in the rest of your body." In fact, Scientific American reports that there is "an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it our 'second brain.'"

No wonder Jesus invites us to follow him by eating and drinking (John 6:53-58). Discipleship doesn't touch just our head or even just our heart; it reaches into our gut, our splagchna, our affections.

Editor's Note: For more info see also: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/18/244526773/gut-bacteria-might-guide-the-workings-of-our-minds. Or http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/."

In states where it's not illegal, it's relatively inexpensive to buy and keep a baby lion or tiger—generally comparable to the price of a fine pedigree dog. Tiger cubs are incredibly cute and fun, except that in the space of just a year or two they become adult tigers weighing several hundred pounds and capable of ripping to shreds—and eating—their owners. What's more, tigers are notoriously untamable, fickle beasts, playful one moment and deadly the next, making no distinction between human friends and human enemies. When casual big-cat owners realize they can't control their now-adult tigers, they call Joe Taft, founder of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Indiana.

Joe's sanctuary for abandoned wild animals is the second largest in the nation and provides a habitat where lions and tigers and such can live out their days peacefully. Although Joe and his team try to avoid letting the big cats reproduce, sometimes, well, accidents happen. Cats will be cats, I guess. When there's a new cub born on the grounds at EFRC, it's hand-raised by humans until it is ready to live in the wild.

In 2002, Joe was raising one of these cubs in his own home. It was a boisterous, wild thing, growing bigger and bigger every day. Still, Joe was fully capable of controlling his tiger … until the man had a heart attack and subsequently underwent quintuple bypass surgery. As you can guess, having a tiger for a roommate—even a young one—was quite dangerous for a cardiac patient. Suddenly, Joe's own home became a very real threat to the weakened and recovering man. There was only one thing to do: Joe had a steel fence built around his couch. And Joe Taft spent the bulk of his recovery time caged in his living room, eyeing his things from behind bars while the tiger roamed freely through the rest of the house, pacing and roaring and keeping Joe a literal prisoner in his own home.

Possible Preaching Angles: Now, metaphorically speaking, guess which character in that story is you and which is the tiger. Sin is like a tiger, prowling 'round your life as if it owns you, threatening your very existence with its mere presence, staring at you through the cage that imprisons you—a cage of your own making. And you're the man on the couch, seeing freedom beyond the wire but too weak to master sin by yourself.

In 2009, a German scientist named Jan Souman took a group of subjects out to empty parking lots and open fields, blindfolded them, and instructed them to walk in a straight line. Some of them managed to keep to a straight course for ten or twenty paces; a few lasted for 50 or a hundred. But in the end, all of them wound up circling back toward their points of origin. Not many of them. Not most of them. Every last one.

"And they have no idea," Dr. Souman told NPR. "They were thinking that they were walking in a straight line all the time." Dr. Souman's research team explored every imaginable explanation. Some people turned to the right while others turned to the left, but the researchers could find no discernable pattern. As a group, neither left-handed nor right-handed subjects demonstrated any predisposition for turning one way more than the other; nor did subjects tested for either right- or left-brain dominance. The team even tried gluing a rubber soul to the bottom of one shoe to make one leg longer than the other.

"It didn't make any difference at all," explained Dr. Souman. "So again, that is pretty random what people do." In fact, it isn't even limited to walking. Ask people to swim blindfolded or drive a car blindfolded and, no matter how determined they may be to go straight, they quickly begin to describe peculiar looping circles in one direction or the other.

Commenting on his performance in the gangster drama Black Mass, actor Johnny Deep said, "I found the evil in myself a long time ago, and I've accepted it. We're old friends."

In his book Newton: On the Christian Life, author Tony Reinke recalls a metaphor John Newton used to illustrate the effects of indwelling sin:

Imagine a Christian sitting down with a blank page and pen. He begins to write out his perfectly scripted life, explaining how he would love others, how he would structure his prayer life, or how he would [build a beautiful Christian family]. But indwelling sin and Satan crouch at his elbow, disrupting every pen stroke and messing up every word and sentence as our Christian friend tries to write the script.

At every point in the Christian life [our own flesh] and Satan jab our elbow, and our pen skids across the page as our perfect plan is reduced to scribbles. This is a metaphor of the Christian life with indwelling sin. Yet the biggest problem is that sin is not at our elbow—our sin is in us!

The spiritual disciplines … are so easy that any adult human being can do them. There are no particular skills required to be alone, to be silent, or to abstain from food. Yet on the other hand, they are so difficult, and so perfectly calibrated to reveal the true condition of our hearts, that no one can "succeed" at them. Indeed, the secret of the classical spiritual disciplines, and all disciplines that tame power, is how reliably they lay waste to whatever sense we may have of ourselves as competent agents in the world.

Take fasting and food, where I can offer a personal testimony to the humbling effect of the disciplines. My annual fasts during the seasons of Advent and Lent are darkly comical reminders of how completely undisciplined I truly am in my relationship with food. No matter how minimal the fast I set out to practice—one Lent it simply was leaving milk out of my tea—I find that I am almost never able to keep it to the end. Among the most pitiful moments of my life was that day, about two weeks into Lent, when I desperately and furtively opened the refrigerator, fully aware that I was breaking the most minimal fast conceivable but feeling completely unable to go on without milk in my tea. It was the sweetest, and the bitterest, cup of tea I have ever had.

When we practice the spiritual disciplines, we discover how deep runs our commitment to our own autonomy and comfort, and how addicted we are to the approval of others, the sound of our own voice, and the satisfaction of our appetites.

At her rental house, which she named "The Critter Café," Christine Bishop was a well-intentioned rescuer of stray cats, dogs, and lost ducks. Then someone dropped off a cage of pet rats. Soon neighbors were complaining of a stench from the house, and could see rats running outdoors.

When officials entered the house, they found the rats had totally over-run the house. They initially removed 1,500, and estimated that at least a 1,000 remained. The property-owner, Dale Carr, says the rats are feral, so "they'll bite, carry ticks and fleas, and are susceptible to rabies and disease." Township Supervisor Brian Werschem says this number of rats "… can breed 1,500 rats every three weeks, so if they're not removing them at a rate of 100 per week, they're not making progress."

The next step in the plan is to wrap the house and fumigate it, which "could cost the owner nearly $30,000, not including cleanup and disposal cost."

A 2009 report from Edinburgh University found that a third of scientific medical researchers admitted anonymously to scientific fraud, with nearly three-fourths saying they had witnessed deliberate warping of data to achieve desired results. Daniele Fanelli, the report's author, wrote, "I had naively assumed that scientists would be principled [but scientists] are human beings driven by their interests, hopes, and beliefs. Given opportunities to cut corners by falsifying data, they may well do so." Furthermore, the science journal Nature estimates that around a thousand incidents of falsification or plagiarism [of scientific studies] go unreported in the U.S. every year.

Possible Preaching Angles: Sin; Original Sin; Depravity—Even scientific research, which should be completely objective, can be warped by the researchers (the scientists), who like us, are sinful.