GLEANINGS from the Daily Office – Run Forest, Run!

GLEANINGS (from the Daily Office) – Run Forest, Run! – Year One, Proper 27, Monday, November 9, 2015, Revelation 18:1-8

“Come out of her, my people lest you take part in her sins,”

Come out, out of Babylon. What was Babylon? Modern day Iraq. Simply put a nation. How was it used? To convert people. In a brilliant move, the Assyrians transported Jews to Babylon. There, as the plan goes, the Jews would forget their God and in time their identity in Him. They would abandon their practices. They would assimilate. They would eat Babylonian food, wear Babylonian clothes, and ultimately bend the knee to Babylonian gods. “For her sins are heaped as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.” Run Forest, run!

We live in Babylon! That’s right. We live in Babylon. But John this is a great nation and we have exported good around the world. Is? No. Was? Maybe. I’ve seen with my own eyes what our cocaine fix did to the Bolivian family.  I’ve stood on the graves of those slaughtered in Rwanda by our lofty politics. Our great good (I mean that sincerely) cannot hide the bad. The fruit is mixed.

It is most difficult to gain perspective on the culture that sustains us but we have embraced the values of Babylon. Her pillars? Narcissistic hedonism, autonomous individualism, absolute relativism, and reductive naturalism.

We are “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Ask Neil Postman. The selfie culture is the logical end of a people who have made “I have the freedom to offend” to say “I have the right to not be offended.” The almighty self can now dictate what others say. It is, after all, all about me. Rules? Whatever works for me! Faith? I believe what I can taste and see and will brook no rule based on something other.

We will struggle with who we are until we know where we are living. It’s Babylon by another name. Atlanta. Boulder. Washington DC.

–Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”–