Amusement and the god of entertainment

Sometimes I feel like I could preach for an hour on a particular topic.  I'm pretty sure I'm the only one at church who feels that way, but some topics can easily be soapboxes for me.  This past Sunday, I preached on the god of entertainment (we are in a series on false gods).*  In doing an early Sunday morning run through of the sermon, it quickly became apparent that this sermon was way too long for me, coming in at nearly 40 minutes (I try not to preach more than 30, with rare exceptions).  So the difficult question surfaced: what do I have to cut to get this down to 25 minutes?  This is probably a good situation in which to find yourself; it's better than having to face the question, "What can I add to get this up to the right length?"  If you find yourself with a 10-minute sermon and you can't think of anything else to add, it's going to be a tough time for you sermonically.

So the gist of the sermon was this: entertainment is a gift from God, but it becomes an idol when it diverts and distracts us to the point that our most important relationships suffer.  The main part that was cut was a section on the concept of "amusement."  Here it is:

     Many forms of entertainment we seek because we want to be amused.  I never realized what the word "amusement" meant.  The Muses, according to Greek mythology, are the personification of knowledge and the arts: literature, dance, music, science, geography, math, philosophy, drama, and inspiration.  Music is an art of the Muses, and a museum used to be where you'd go to worship the Muses.  They were all about thoughtfulness, reflection, and creativity. 
     Now when you take a Greek word and put an "a" on the front of it, it negates the word.  It makes the difference between "theist" (someone who believes God exists) and "atheist" (someone who believes God does not exist).  Therefore, the word amusement basically means the lack of thoughtfulness, reflection, and creativity. 
     There's nothing wrong with a good laugh; it can help us cope with things that would otherwise drive us crazy.  But I have to wonder, does the god of entertainment really want to help us or hurt us?  Are we, as Neil Postman so aptly titles his book, amusing ourselves to death?  TV, movies, games, social media all promise to add value to your life - but they take it from you, one hour, one game, one newsfeed at a time.  We sit in front of the TV and say, "there's nothing on!"  maybe what we mean is "meaningless!  Meaningless!  It's all meaningless!"  As Kyle Idleman writes, "never in the history of humanity has there been so much entertainment and so little satisfaction."

* - shout out to Kyle Idleman for his excellent book Gods At War: Defeating the Idols that Battle for Your Heart (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013).

Some Random Thoughts as I Sermonize

I'm writing a sermon on Revelation 3:16 (where Jesus says to the church of Laodicea, "So, because you are lukewarm - neither hot nor cold - I am about to spit you out of my mouth.").  This is a challenging verse for many reasons, and I want to list out some random thoughts about it, why it's challenging, and some implications for us today.

• Why is it better to be cold than lukewarm? (see verse 15, where Jesus wishes they were either hot or cold, but not lukewarm).
• Their lukewarm status derived in part from their sense of self-sufficiency; "I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing" (v. 17).
• It is apparent that the city's water supply itself was neither hot nor cold.  Nearby Hierabpolis was known for their hot springs, and Colossae for their cold water, each of which serves a purpose (hot for washing and healing/bathing, cold for drinking and gardening).  Laodicea brought their water in through aqueducts from several miles away, and the water lost much of its heat in the process.  And it is possible that the mineral content of the city's water made it barely drinkable.
• Laodiceans were wealthy, which is attested through several facts: the city was famous for producing black wool; in AD 60 there was an earthquake which leveled the city.  Rather than accept imperial aid for rebuilding, the citizens rebuilt out of their own means; the city minted its own coins, the wealthy erected statues all over the city, and Laodicea was home to a well-known medical school.
• What was the church there doing before it went lukewarm?  What does a "hot" church look like?  (Please read that question in the right context!)
• Some great thoughts by Spurgeon on this text:
• "[God] judges a church not merely by her external activities, but by her internal pieties; he searches the heart, and tries the reins of the children of men.  He is not deceived by glitter; he tests all things, and values only that gold which will endure the fire."
• "To be slandered is a dire affliction, but it is, upon the whole, a less evil than to be thought better than we are; in the one case we have a promise to comfort us, in the second we are in danger of self-conceit."
• On what the lukewarm Christian says: "We are not to be so greedy as to be called miserly, but we will give as little as we can to the cause.  We will not be altogether absent from the house of God, but we will go as seldom as we can.  We will not altogether forsake the poor people to whom we belong, but we will also go to the world's church, so as to get admission into better society, and find fashionable friends for our children!"

Today's Miscellaneous Thoughts

Thing #1 Today was a good day at church. It is the first Sunday since returning from a mission trip to Albania (which was a profound trip, by the way), so I was anxious to be there. The sermon (remember, preaching is good, preaching is good) was about the parable of the Good Samaritan. Most of you know that story well, and even if you don't, you know what a "good Samaritan" is. Actually, if someone called your good deed an act of a "Samaritan," and you understood the historical relationship between Jews and Samaritans, then you might not be so humbled by their "compliment." To be a Samaritan in Jesus' day was not a good thing. The Jews perceived them similarly to how we today might perceive, let's say, a homeless, hillbilly half breed from the other side of the tracks (my apologies if you live on the other side of the tracks). The point of Jesus' story was that the person who got it right, the one who cared for the needs of the beaten and robbed man, was the hillbilly half breed, not the priest/minister/pastor, and not the pious, perpetually-volunteering churchgoer.

One strong point Andy, the preacher at my church, made was that our society is becoming more like the priest and the Levite: not that we don't care, but that our lives are so busy that the needs of our neighbors become invisible. We're so busy in our compartmentalized lives that we probably don't know our neighbors' names, let alone their concerns and needs. This is a problem for America, not just for Christians.

Thing #2 I was reading the July 22 issue of Christian Standard today at McDonald's (I took it from the church; Cincy's conservative, but not that conservative) because the title intrigued me: "Preaching: Like Everything Else, It's Changing!" The writer of the cover story, Chuck Sackett, is someone I respect a lot, so the article carried more weight for me (plus I knew I'd agree with his concerns about modern preaching). After expressing concerns about the long-term effects of using video and other media in sermons ("Might it be possible that too much video puts the mind to sleep and then the challenge arises to 'wake it up again' with 'mere' words?"), he asks this brilliant question: "Have preachers given up on words? Or have they merely lost the ability to use the right ones?"

Sure, compared to many other countries, most Americans have more of a "sprint" attention span than a "marathon" attention span. I think part of the reason is that we just don't try hard enough to engage people with wordsmithing. Yes, this blog is guilty of posting rough drafts and often ill-thought-out sentences. Lynne Truss wouldn't always be proud of me. But I try. I must try, because as a teacher (though presently without a classroom), I am a mechanic of the mind, and words are my tools. Our lives revolve around words. A person cannot "change their mind" without words. Without words, there is no persuasion, understanding of experience, conversion, debriefing, mutual understanding, apology, story, organization, or progress. So we might as well use words shrewdly.