Old Man

The actor Bill Murray has often struggled to walk down the street without people wanting to get his phot. Sadly, he confessed that he often acted like a jerk. Murray said.

People would say, “Can I take your picture?” And I would be the kind of [jerk] that would say, “It’s ‘May I take your picture?’” Do you know how many times I said that to no avail? Absolutely no avail. But I wasted a whole lot of time that way, doing stuff to make it acceptable on my stupid terms, trying to make life more like I like it. What a screw head. So now what I do for a living is, I take cellphone photographs. I’m not an actor. I am a donkey that is photographed with people who don’t know how to operate their own cellphone camera. That’s what I do all day long. I don’t regret it. I don’t resent it. This is what I do, and it’s so simple, and I’ve realized how much energy I was wasting resisting it. It was just crazy, and when it finally hit me, I went: Oh, my God, what a jerk. How could you have been a jerk for that long?

Then during the interview Murray started tearing up.

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.

London's metropolitan police force has seen just about everything in terms of crime, and they've saved much of the evidence. A forward-thinking officer in 1874 began saving items from historic cases to show new recruits. The museum includes items like: Letters from the Jack the Ripper case, an oil drum used to dissolve murder victims in acid; Cannibal Dennis Nilsen's cooking pots; The umbrella-fired ricin bullet that the KGB used to kill a Bulgarian dissident in London during the Cold War; Items that once belonged to Charles Black, the most prolific counterfeiter in the Western Hemisphere, including a set of printing plates, forged banknotes, and a cunningly hollowed-out kitchen door once used to conceal them.

The museum houses evidence from some of the most twisted, barbaric criminal cases of recent history. It is not open to the public, as some people think it's just too gruesome for public viewing, but it is used as a teaching collection for police recruits. It also may show the monstrous side of humanity, what we have been and still are capable of doing to each other.

Stephen Steele writes about sculptor Gillian Genser who was experiencing headaches, vomiting, hearing loss, confusion, and suicidal thoughts. For years, doctors were baffled by what was afflicting her. They asked if she was working with anything toxic, and she assured them she wasn’t. She told them that she only worked with natural materials. They prescribed antipsychotics and antidepressants, but nothing seemed to help.

Finally, she saw a specialist who tested her blood for heavy metals and found high levels of arsenic and lead in her system. She was shocked, but still confused—how had she ingested those dangerous compounds? Finally, she talked to one doctor who was horrified to hear that she had been grinding up mussel shells for the past fifteen years to use in her sculpture. She had no idea that mussels can accumulate toxins over years of feeding in polluted waters.

The most fascinating thing about the story is who the sculpture was meant to be. It was Adam, the first man. Genser recognized the irony herself. She said: “It’s very interesting and ironic that Adam, as the first man, was so toxic. He poisoned me. Doesn’t that make sense?”

Steele comments,

And it makes perfect sense, because that is what Adam, the first man, did to all of us. He poisoned us. He rebelled against God – and we are contaminated by that rebellion. The message of the Bible, however, is that a second Adam – Jesus Christ – has come to cleanse us from this in-built corruption, as well as the other poisonous thoughts, words, and deeds we add to it during our lives. It doesn’t mean those who trust him will be perfect. Like Gesner, we will suffer the effects of Adam’s poison for the rest of our lives – but it will no longer define us forever.

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.”

On the afternoon of August 4, 1949, a lightning storm started a small fire near the top of the southeast ridge of Mann Gulch, Montana, a slope forested with Douglas fir and ponderosa pine. The fire was spotted the next day; by 2:30 p.m., a C-47 transport plane had flown out of Missoula, carrying 16 smoke jumpers. Fifteen men between 17 and 33-years-old parachuted to the head of the gulch at 4:10p.m. Their radio didn’t make it. Its chute failed to open, and it crashed. They were joined on the ground by a fireguard, who had spotted the fire. Otherwise, the smoke jumpers were isolated from the outside world.

The smoke jumpers were a new organization, barely nine years old in 1949. To them, the Mann Gulch fire, covering 60 acres at the time of the jump, appeared routine. It was what they called a “ten o’clock fire,” meaning that they would have it beaten by ten o’clock in the morning of the day after they jumped.

The rest of the story is long and complex, but only three men survived. Two of them managed to run for their lives and made it to the top of a nearby ridge. The young men at Mann Gulch had been trained to never, under any circumstances, drop their tools.

One of their tools was a Pulaski, a combination axe and pick that is very useful in fighting forest fires. It’s not useful to carry it up a 76 percent slope when a grassfire is racing toward you at 610 feet per minute. And yet, the reconstructed journeys of the victims of the fire show that several carried their Pulaskis a good way up the hill as they raced for their lives.

In short, more of the men may have lived if they had been trained to drop their tools—tools that worked in normal circumstances but became unnecessary baggage in a crisis.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the race of life, we need to drop the sins that so easily entangles us (Heb. 12:1). Such as: the love of money (1 Tim. 6:10), resentment (Eph. 4:31), envy (1 Cor. 13:4), and pride (Prov. 29:23). We are to take hold of self-denial (Matt. 16:24), what is good (1 Thess. 5:21), our progress (Phil. 3:16), and wholesome teaching (2 Tim. 1:13).

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.

Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. People also found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate.

During the pandemic, bad behavior of all kinds has increased. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars, and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently, as a result, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. In 2020, the US murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.

What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms suggest few possible explanations:

We’re all stressed out: One explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. Everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge.

People are drinking more: People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs. A lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance. Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019.

We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us: The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Extraordinary times reveal that our civilized veneer is very thin. Stress strips away the manners that people use as masks and shows true character of the old nature. Only the new nature that God implants in the redeemed can cope with stressful, disruptive times (2 Cor. 5:17; Rom. 8:1-39).

"There's an app for that"--yes, even if "that" means each one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the classic vices of Christian moral teaching.

Lust: Tinder

Gluttony: Yelp

Greed: LinkedIn

Sloth: Netflix

Wrath: Twitter

Envy: Facebook

Pride: Instagram

You can view the slide shared at the Mockingbird Festival here.

The renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles told this story in a graduate class at Harvard University many years ago: “A highly regarded psychiatrist recently told me in despair: ‘I have been doing therapy with a man for 15 years. He is as angry, as self-centered, and as mean as he was the first day he walked into my office. The only difference is that now he knows why he is so angry and mean.’”

Dr. Coles pointed out that although the psychiatrist provided his client with insight as to how his childhood emotional wounding had affected his adult dysfunction, the man still hadn't changed. Coles asked, "Could we conclude that what this man needed wasn’t just information but transformation? But is transformation possible for human beings?”

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.’

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, ...

Celebrity chef, writer, and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, who wore a tattoo on his arm that read in ancient Greek, "I am certain of nothing," committed suicide on June 8, 2018, at the age of 61. In an interview for Men's Journal from 2014, Bourdain was asked: What are the benefits of hedonism, and what are the risks?

Bourdain replied, "Look, I understand that inside me there is a greedy, gluttonous, lazy, hippie—you know? I understand that. … there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons, and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy. … I'm aware of my appetites, and I don't let them take charge."

When asked: How should a man handle regret? And what's your biggest regret?

Bourdain replied, "Regret is something you've got to just live with, you can't drink it away. You can't run away from it. You can't trick yourself out of it. You've just got to own it. I've disappointed and hurt people in my life, and that's just something I'm going to have to live with. … You eat that guilt and you live with it. And you own it. You own it for life."

In an interview, Alain de Botton, a famous British atheist, said, "I love the concept of original sin, the idea that we're all fundamentally broken and fundamentally incomplete." When asked why de Botton explained:

Because [original sin] seems to be such a useful starting point … Imagine a relationship in which two people think they're great—you know, perfect—that's going to lead to intolerance and terrible disappointment when they realize that they're not … perfect. Whereas imagine a relationship that begins under the idea that two people are quite broken and therefore they need forgiveness …

When asked to define "broken" he replied:

By broken I mean "not quite right" … So that's why the concept of original sin seems so plausible and applicable and also kind, because it basically says, "Look, when you meet someone new … just assume that something major has gone wrong here." Treat everybody you meet as though they were laboring under some really big problem, basically. That's the starting point of any encounter.

In the fall of 1989 Princeton University welcomed into its freshman class a young man named Alexi Santana, whose life story the admissions committee had found extraordinarily compelling. He had barely received any formal schooling. He had spent his adolescence almost entirely on his own, living outdoors in Utah, where he'd herded cattle, raised sheep, and read philosophy. Running in the Mojave Desert, he had trained himself to be a distance runner.

Santana quickly became something of a star on campus. There was just one problem: Santana's story about his life was a lie. Princeton officials eventually learned that he was actually James Hogue, a 31-year-old who had served a prison sentence in Utah for possession of stolen tools and bike parts. He was taken away from Princeton in handcuffs.

The history of humankind is strewn with crafty and seasoned liars like Hogue—from high finance people like Bernie Madoff, to politicians like Richard Nixon, and even scientists like Jan Hendrik Schön, a physicist, whose purported breakthroughs in molecular semiconductor research proved to be fraudulent.

Lying, it turns out, is something that most of us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fundamental to us as our need to trust others, which ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric.

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."

Bible scholar N.T. Wright uses the analogy of waking up in the morning for how some people come to Christ through a dramatic, instant conversion and others come to Christ through a gradual conversion:

Waking up offers one of the most basic pictures of what can happen when God takes a hand in someone's life. There are classic alarm-clock stories, Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by a sudden light, stunned and speechless, discovered that the God he had worshipped had revealed himself in the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. John Wesley found his heart becoming strangely warm and he never looked back. They and a few others are the famous ones, but there are millions more.

And there are many stories, thought they don't hit the headlines in the same way, of the half-awake and half-asleep variety. Some people take months, years, maybe even decades, during which they aren't sure whether they're on the outside of Christian faith looking in, or on the inside looking around to see if it's real.

As with ordinary waking up, there are many people who are somewhere in between. But the point is that there's such a thing as being asleep, and there's such a thing as being awake. And it's important to tell the difference, and to be sure you're awake by the time you have to be up and ready for action, whatever that action may be.

There is a Japanese word, kintsukuroi, that means "golden repair." It is the art of restoring broken pottery with gold so the fractures are literally illuminated—a kind of physical expression of its spirit. As a philosophy, kintsukuroi celebrates imperfection as an integral part of the story, not something to be disguised. The artists believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

In kintsukuroi, the true life of an object (or a person) begins the moment it breaks and reveals that it is vulnerable. The gap between once pristine appearance and its visible imperfection deepens its appeal.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Christ, power and grace of—Jesus is the ultimate Kintsukuroi artist. He takes our broken lives and makes them new. (2) Suffering—We probably shouldn't take this idea of beautiful brokenness as a symbol of how suffering makes us better. In the face of serious life damage, some tragedies are not "for the better" but are just that: tragedies, for the worse, which we would have been better off without. But kintsukuroi nevertheless remains a wonderful illustration for the Christian life, which holds symbols of both life and death in one ruddy old jug.

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.