Iniquity

A Texas man stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas. There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."

Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

So, the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut. In the absence of healthy gut flora, brewer's yeast had taken up residence in his stomach, and was turning any starch he ate into alcohol—and enough to inebriate him. The problem is by no means common, but happens from time to time. Usually, it's after a round of antibiotics that inadvertently wipe out the good bacteria that our bodies need to stay healthy and in balance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The man's staggering experience is a powerful picture that sometimes we look for external explanations for internal problems, but sometimes the real problem is inside, deep inside in our life.

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.

A Lutheran church has stood at 400 S Logan Street in Denver since the early 1900s, but as of recently it has become unoccupied. In April of 2017, the church was reopened as a place of worship for the followers of a brand-new religion: “Elevationism,” dedicated to the spiritual benefits of cannabis.

It’s only fitting that the home of the International Church of Cannabis is in Denver, a city that is literally a mile high. The church’s overgrown, antiquated exterior is in striking contrast with its flamboyant technicolor interior, complete with a huge “WEED” sign, rows of pews to smoke on, and a neon rainbow mural on the ceiling.

Elevationism does not have any specific dogma, nor does it require conversion from other religions, so long as its adherents recognize cannabis as a sacrament.

The church was opened on April 20 (420 is a popular code for marijuana) and recently launched BEYOND, a fully immersive, meditative experience with projection mapping, laser lights, and sound. BEYOND begins with a nine-minute guided meditation and contemplative journey through the wisdom of the ages, followed by a 25-minute psychedelic light show set to your favorite classic rock songs.

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, ...

Author Rosaria Butterfield says that being born with a sin nature is a little bit like inheriting a garden. In a radio interview Butterfield put it this way:

Let's say that you inherited an enchanting garden. And for 10 years, you just let it thrive. You let it do anything it wanted. You never pruned back the weeds. You never got rid of the pests. You never worked with the roses. You just let it quote-unquote "thrive."

And after 10 years, what is it? It's a disaster. It might even be way past the point of no return. And you go to a master gardener and you say, "Hey, this is not fair. I want my money back. I just did everything I could to let this garden thrive. I let it do exactly what it wanted." You know, the master gardener's going to laugh at you and say, "Buddy, gardens come with weeds! It's part of its nature and by failing to deal with that, you destroyed it."

People magazine once undertook a part-serious, part-tongue-in-cheek survey of its readers on the subject of sin. The results were published as a "Sindex," with each sin rated by a sin coefficient. The outcome is both amusing and instructive. Sins like murder, child abuse, and spying against one's country were rated the worst sins in ascending order, with smoking, swearing, and illegal videotaping far down the list. Parking in a handicapped spot was rated surprising high, whereas unmarried live-togethers got off lightly. Cutting in front of someone in line was deemed worse than divorce or capital punishment. Predictably, corporate sin was not mentioned at all. The survey concluded, "Overall, readers said they commit about 4.64 sins a month."

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course calculating our sins (according to our standards) is not this easy or precise. In the Bible, sin is not just a few bad acts that we do. It is a power that we are in (See Romans 3:9). As the writer Dorothy Sayers once said, "[Sin] is a deep interior dislocation at the very center of the human personality." The 20th century poet W.H. Auden called sin "The error bred in the bone."

In Fleming Rutledge's new book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, she acknowledges the difficulty that modern people have with the concept of God's wrath. Nevertheless, she writes, "there can be no turning away from this prominent biblical theme." But forget the Bible for a moment: don't we have wrath, too? Rutledge writes:

A slogan of our times is "Where's the outrage?" It has been applied to everything from Big Pharma's market manipulation to CEOs' astronomical wealth to police officers' stonewalling. "Where the outrage?" inquire many commentators, wondering why congressmen, officials, and ordinary voters seem so indifferent. Why has the gap between rich and poor become so huge? Why are so many mentally ill people slipping through the cracks? Why does gun violence continue to be a hallmark of American culture? Why are there so many innocent people on death row? Why are our prisons filled with such a preponderance of black and Hispanic men? Where's the outrage? The public is outraged all over cyberspace about all kinds of things that annoy us personally—the NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome—but outrages in the heart of God go unnoticed and unaddressed.

If we are resistant to the idea of the wrath of God, we might pause to reflect the next time we are outraged about something—about our property values being threatened, or our children's educational opportunities being limited, or our tax breaks being eliminated. All of us are capable of anger about something. God's anger, however, is pure. It does not have the maintenance of privilege as its object, but goes out on behalf of those who have no privileges. the wrath of God is not an emotion that flares up from time to time, as though God had temper tantrums; it is a way of describing his absolute enmity against all wrong and his come to set matters right.

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.

The hit TV show Breaking Bad follows the story of Walter White, a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, turns to cooking crystal meth to provide for his family. As he develops a taste for the trade, Walt slowly turns into a bold but degenerate thug. But the show doesn't soft-peddle the consequences of sin. The show's creator, Vince Gilligan, said, "If there's a larger lesson to Breaking Bad, it's that actions have consequences …. I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something."

In one of the most memorable scenes of season four, the biblical implications of Gilligan's vision become clear. Walt's younger accomplice Jesse Pinkman commits murder and then attends a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in hopes of finding relief. After Jesse shares a thinly veiled version of his crime, the group leader counsels self-acceptance. "We're not here to sit in judgment," he says, to which Jesse explodes:

Why not? Why not? … If you just do stuff and nothing happens, what's it all mean? What's the point? … So no matter what I do, hooray for me because I'm a great guy? It's all good? No matter how many dogs I kill, I just—what, do an inventory, and accept?

It's not surprising that Vince Gilligan believes in hell and judgment for human sin. He said, "I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell."

Fritz Haber is probably the most important person in your life that you've never heard of. He was a secularized Jew in Germany who started to make his mark just prior to World War I. Haber was a chemist, who was married to a brilliant woman named Clara. Before World War I, in the midst of a looming food shortage in Germany, Haber discovered a way to separate the nitrogen out of the air that produced an ammonia drip. This ammonia could be put into fertilizer. Fritz Haber is the one of the main reasons that the world today can support almost seven billion people through fertilizer.

If this is all you know about Fritz Haber's life you might think, This man was good because he made a tremendous difference in the world. But there's more to Fritz Haber's life. He was also a very loyal German who signed up to fight in World War I. As the war progressed, he made an ammonia gas that could kill enemy soldiers.

In 1915 at Ypres, Belgium, Haber turned on his gas machine, and a great green cloud about the size of a whale emerged. The soldiers on the other side could see it coming across the no-man's land. As it approached, every living thing in its path dried up and died. Then it hit the Allied soldiers on the frontlines, and it killed every last soldier. The lingering gas even hurt innocent civilians. Haber thought this was a grand success.

The German officials agreed. Haber went back home to visit Clara, and she expressed outrage at his gas machine. The very thing that he had used to save lives was now an instrument of death. Clara confronted him, but he did not want to listen to her. So in the middle of the night, she took his service revolver, walked out into their garden, and shot herself in the heart. The next morning Haber put on his uniform and went back to the frontlines to unleash more of his deadly gas.

After the war Haber tried to help Germany pay the tremendous war reparations by devising a process to distill gold from seawater. But when Hitler rose to power, he decreed that all the Jews who worked for Haber had to be fired. Haber resigned in protest and left Germany, but no one would receive him. He died alone, unloved.

Is the world better or worse because he lived? How do we categorize Fritz Haber? You and I are no different than Fritz Haber. We don't easily fit into the category of good or bad. But we don't have the right to examine ourselves. The final judgment is not left to us. Scripture is very clear that God has declared us all unrighteous. Like Haber even the good things we do are tainted by underlying wickedness.

Psychiatrist Scott Peck wrote of meeting with a depressed 15-year-old named Bobby, who was increasingly troubled after his 16-year-old brother killed himself with a .22 rifle.

Peck tried to probe Bobby's mind, but got nowhere. Searching for ways to establish a bond, he asked what Bobby had received from his parents for Christmas. "A gun," Bobby said. Peck was stunned. "What kind?"

"A .22."

More stunned. "How did it make you feel, getting the same kind of gun your brother killed himself with?"

"It wasn't the same kind of gun." Peck felt better.

"It was the same gun."

Bobby had been given, as a Christmas present, by his parents, the gun his brother used to kill himself.

When Peck met with the parents, what was most striking was their deliberate refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part. They would not tolerate any concern for their son, or any attempt to look at moral reality.

Two decades later and after his conversion to Christianity, Peck wrote about this encounter:

One thing has changed in twenty years. I now know Bobby's parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no vocabulary for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.

Interestingly enough, although Peck often worked with convicted prisoners, he rarely found evil there. He finally decided … "The central defect of evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it." This definition is reflective of Jesus' far greater severity in dealing with religious leaders than with prostitutes and tax collectors.

For some reason, human beings can't walk in a straight line. There's just something about our inner orientation that causes us to walk in a crooked or warped way. That's the conclusion of Robert Krulwich, science correspondent for NPR. In an interview on Morning Edition, Krulwich cites a study from Jan Souman, a scientist from Germany, who blindfolded his subjects and then asked them to walk for an hour in a straight line. Without exception, people couldn't do it. Of course everybody thinks they're walking in a straight line, until they remove the blindfolds and sees their crooked path.

Krulwich observed,

This tendency has been studied now for at least a century. We animated field tests from the 1920s, so you can literally see what happens to men who are blindfolded and told to walk across a field in a straight line, or swim across a lake in a straight line …, and they couldn't. In the animation, you see them going in these strange loop-de-loops in either direction. Apparently, there's a profound inability in humans to [walk] straight.

According to this research, there's only one way we can walk in a straight line: by focusing on something ahead of us—like a building, a landmark, or a mountain. If we can fix our eyes on something ahead of us, we can make ourselves avoid our normal crooked course. Kurlwich concludes, "Without external cues, there's apparently something in us that makes us turn [from a straight path]."

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice." —H. L. Mencken

• If life is a machine, then sin is a bad gear that makes the machine malfunction.
• If life is a kingdom, then sin is a terrorist movement in the kingdom.
• If life is a family, then sin is a feud between family members.
• If life is a body, then sin is an untreated disease that poisons the whole system.
• If life is a river, then sin is mercury or arsenic that pollutes it.
• If life is a garden, then sin is the army of slugs that eat your tomatoes.
• If life is a computer, then sin is a virus that destroys your hard drive.