The end of Matthew 18 is often referred to as the ‘Church Discipline’ section by churches who actually obey these commands of our Lord.  All the other churches seem to ignore it and then both sets of churches attack the other.  Jesus’ words are mostly contained in four books which the average person can read in about ten hours, all if it important.  Often these books get divided up into sermon size bites and we forget that the whole, chapter, book, Bible goes together. There are a lot of ideas all connected in this chapter, children, lost sheep, sin, forgiveness.  But the main idea I want to bring out is about lost sheep.

Christ the Good Shepherd. Bartolome Esteban Murillo. 1617-1682. Oil on Canvas. Madrid Spain.

I have seen almost no evidence that the church in America cares at all about lost sheep.  A recent study showed that a large percentage of ‘evangelicals’ think that ‘evangelism’ is wrong.  I mean really, the contradiction is right there in the word, no need to get into doctrinal statements or verse exposition.  The church doesn’t address the lost outside the Church.  And searches on church discipline don’t turn up much either.  There are no studies on Jesus’ words here because no one knows them.  The Church doesn’t address the lost in the Church either.  My experience bears this out as well.  Almost all attempts I have made to reconcile or have-it-out to see who is correct Biblically, to correct or be corrected, have come to nothing. No one seems to care.  We are encouraged to take the easy way out and just leave or let the other person leave.  Attempt to pursue another person and professing Christians talk about restraining orders and taking their lame excuse for a case before godless men(I Cor. 6)!  Our communities are large enough that we never really have to see that person, we can just go to the new church-plant-of-the-month and pretend everything is fine.  But it’s not fine.

I get tired of walking this road, of saying these things, but I was confronted with a few verses that bring it all together.  The Lost Sheep isn’t just a person without Jesus, who needs to make a commitment of faith.  It is someone who has been living in the light and then rejects it.  They are a sheep who have strayed from the flock, from orthodox in practice, orthopraxy.  It’s not about church membership.  If you claim the name of Christ, take communion, and then err without repenting, you are a lost sheep.  Peter speaks of these sheep in 2 Peter 2:20-22:

For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.  For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.  But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.

It is worse for sheep to stray than to have never been sheep.  You should want to correct your erring brother over saving others, or getting new converts.  In Matthew 18 Jesus says you leave the 99 sheep and go to rescue that sheep.  You don’t just go down to the market and get another sheep.  Because the errant sheep is in peril, and you love that sheep, that sheep is valuable.  Correction should come before evangelism.

I’ve said before we aren’t ‘adults’, we are children.  And that’s why Jesus connects these things in a back and forth in these verses.  The disciples are on a high because they don’t have to pay the temple tax.  They are wondering about the ranks in this army which they think Jesus is building to overthrow Rome.  He brings them back down and tells them they must be like children.  But do not be stupid.  Sin is serious.  Do what is necessary to address it in yourself.  Then he adds the children into the lost sheep image.  These children are sheep, they were probably Jewish children in the covenant.  They had a certain type of infant faith.  Yet as they would grow the Pharisees would destroy that promise and turn those children into copies of themselves, sons of Satan(John 8:44).    Jesus does not want any of these children to be led astray, as many would be and the Romans would wipe  out so many.  Leading sheep astray is serious evil.

He then goes into the so-called church discipline section.  Brothers in sin, are connected with the lost sheep.  Don’t you care for your lost brother as the shepherd who goes after that lost sheep?  You should.  Two thirds of this procedure have nothing to do with the formal church.  Most situations should be resolved brother to brother.  You are your brothers keeper.  My point here isn’t getting into the details or to consider traditional wisdom on best practices, but simply to encourage you to do it, to work it out.  At least try. Go talk to your brother.  And be willing if other people ask you to help them talk to someone.

Prov. 27:6 Faithful are the wounds of a friend;

Then you bring in more people as you need them.  The point is to bring them back not scare them away and gloat over how much better you are, or to gossip about their sin.  Sometimes it might not work, take heart, God is with you.  And he will respect the decision of the church on such matters.  What we do on earth has eternal consequences.  Don’t throw up your hands and say it’s up to God, in heaven, some day.  He has given us these tasks, this is our work now.  Don’t say vengeance is God’s.  This isn’t vengeance, or punishment, this is correction or discipline.  It’s about restoration and unity, and if it is successful, James says in  5:19,20:

Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him;  Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.

Oh how wonderful to rejoice over that lost sheep.  But then Peter wants some clarification on the forgiveness side.  Jesus says pour out your forgiveness, because God has forgiven you much more. Don’t be stingy.  This is the type of interactions which can not be faked.  This is the moving of the spirit.  I hate to think that the failure of the church all around to restore those lost sheep or to prevent those children born into Christian homes from falling away, is simple ignorance.  Maybe they haven’t heard this spoken clearly, Lord.  I pray it is not a lack of the Spirit.

Y logo.

I usually get accused of being stodgy or negative, but generally reality is worse than I think.  I assume things are better than they are not worse.  The ‘Y’ logo was like this.  It has bothered me for a while that the ‘Young Men’s Christian Association’ has been turned into—just—‘young’.  I think it is very fitting.  The Christian part obviously has been removed from our culture.  And referring to or organizing something around men is also out, thank you feminists.  And even the association is mostly gone.  Young people don’t form associations or become members of churches, because then they might be associated with the negatives of any human collaborative effort.  We are not joiners.  We do worship youth, however.  We love youth, anything youth do is good, correct, right, moral.  Parents go to the churches their kids like.  Parents let their kids dictate everything, because they know how to work technology.  And most of the people in those ‘Y’ gyms are there pretending they are a lot younger than they really are.  Worshipping youth.

But then on looking into the history of the YMCA logo, it’s even worse.  The original logo contained a Bible verse and a Bible. Oh my.  Long before the days of multiculturalism, it was a verse about bringing the world together under the Gospel.  John 17:21.  It was in Roman numerals! Who knows what those are anymore?  This verse is Jesus praying for his disciples in the garden sweating blood.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one”

Original 1871 Crest.

What a beautiful, sentiment, goal, war cry!  The old logo reiterates the importance of this plea by calling out all the populated continents.  And in the background is the ‘chi-rho’.  The first two letters of ‘Kristos’, ‘Christ’ in the Greek alphabet ‘X’ and ‘P’.  This monogram was one of the earliest symbols of the Christian.  You find it carved all over ancient caves and rocks in Turkey to this day.

What a shame.

This university ‘cheating’ scandal, has brought a few things to light.  I can hardly write that sentence with a straight face.  There is nothing unifying about those things we call ‘universities’ today, and there is hardly an aspect of those fractured—things—which is not cheating every student in some way.  But one of the most annoying aspects is the feigned hatred for aristocracy.  When I was a child and thought as a child people would often say to me “life isn’t fair.”  I thought if people stopped saying that maybe it would be.  But then I gave up my childish ways and realized that life is not fair and it never will be.  But many today still think as children.  And we are all reaping the consequences.

Women and Children First. Those with power have a greater duty to lay down their lives. The Wreck of the Birkenhead. Thomas Hemy. c.1892.

Jesus said the poor would be with us always.  In context he was making it clear that worship of the Father through the Son is more important than social problems.  We are worshipping creatures, we are here to worship, and if we worship the wrong thing i.e. the created rather than the creator, the poor/social problems/whatever, instead of Yahweh through his son Jesus the Christ, we are going to make a huge mess of things.  Christ also made other stunning statements to our snowflakes yearning for fairness.  He says he spoke in parables so that some people would not understand(Matthew 13).  He was fulfilling prophecy, glorifying his father, not enlightening those who didn’t want the light.  That doesn’t sound fair.  Even more unfair is the Parable of the Talents Jesus tells in Matthew 25.  He concludes saying:

For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Nothing about this seems fair to us.  Each servant was given a different amount in the beginning and though the two servants who invested got the same percent back the servant with the most money was again rewarded when the wicked servant was rebuked.  Moe went from 5 to 11, Larry went from 2 to 4, Curly went from 1 to 0.  That’s not fair.  Because the point is not about money or status the point is about how you handle the responsibility given to you.  It’s about the relationship between you and your creator, not you and other men.  That brings us to a key concept in our politics and social concerns today, envy.  Envy is the sidelong glance.  ‘But what about him’ Peter says.  Jesus replies “what is that to you, follow me”.   Even in a perfect world were everyone followed Him, there would be a million inequalities. That’s how God wants it.  Those inequalities are opportunities for conflict, as well as reconciliation and stronger relationships.  It’s easy to get along with people who are just like you.  But when people are richer or poorer than you, you have to work a little to sacrifice or humble yourself.  Jesus divided Eve from Adam so that they could relate to one another in a richer, deeper way.  Men and women can complain about what they don’t have and compare themselves to the other, or they can be faithful with what they do have.  The wicked servant was not appreciative, he thought God was stingy.  He thought it was a zero sum game and was to afraid to take risks or to profit.  He was probably a Socialist and those who take his side are guilty of envy.  Envy used to be considered a bad thing, because God said so.  It was one of the seven deadly sins.  Sadly today in America it is considered a virtue.

There will always be rich and poor, gifted and ungifted, beautiful and ugly.  God likes it that way.  Every system we have devised to try to eliminate these differences has resulted in death and destruction and slavery, often on a large scale.  There are types of equality which are good.  Equality before the law is good, no matter who you are you should get a fair trial if you are wronged or accused of wronging someone.  Conservatives speak of equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome.  The outcome side is that impossible task which Marx and all who follow him pretend they can fix.  The opportunity side is somewhat doable, by striving for a merit based system.  By rewarding people for what they can do instead of who they are, or who their parents are(( Even this is arbitrary, what do you have that you were not given? God gives some abilities (Exodus 31) and some status (Romans 13), some neither.)).  This is what seems to upset a lot of people about the cheating scandal.  But while the U.S. has done far more here and by extension around the world to bring this about, inequality of opportunity will always be with us.  In this country upward mobility or the measure of the poor’s ability to become wealthy is better than almost anywhere[2. I would argue even the nations Slovenia, Chile, Italy, and the UK, where it is better, that fact is due to American thinking being exported].  But it is declining.  I think one major reason for that decline is the establishment of Envy.  Attacks on the 1% are more common, so why bother?  What is in fashion is attacking the 1%.  What is out of fashion is minding your own business and achieving the most you can.

And that gets back to Jesus’ words.  What matters is your relationship with your creator.  Do you appreciate and enjoy and make the best of what he has given, you?  Or do you grumble about the neighbors and go vote for Bernie?  There are some vestiges of this left in our culture, like that catch phrase from Spider Man, : ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’  And that’s what we forget.  Since aristocracy is a fact, what do we do about it?  It used to be that those with more were held to a higher standard.  A gentleman was not just someone who had more, it was someone from whom more was expected, by himself, his family and society.  You get the perks but you also have the duties.  We see the breakdown of this all around.  Children of the wealthy are party girls and playboys, they don’t lead by example with what they have, they exploit it for selfish ends.  Unlike the English gentleman who laid down his life in war for his country, the wealthy of today party, drink and have sex in ways unbecoming of the worst heathen from days gone by. We see it in the Kardashians, Hiltons, Trumps and even the British royal family.  One example of this done right is the speeding rules in Iceland.  The highest speeding ticket in the world is from Iceland.  Because it’s a progressive system.  The more money you have the higher the fine.  Which is how it should be.  Not because speeding matters at all, it doesn’t, but because if you believe there should be a penalty, it should hurt the same for everyone.

This was brought to light recently with the prostitution scandal involving Robert Kraft.  People are suggesting that he is receiving harsher treatment because he is a high profile person.  But that’s good, he should be held to a higher standard.  Just like Gregg Gianforte should be picked on for knocking down a reporter, when the average person might not be.  If you want the power and the money and the influence, you should use it for good.  People are watching.  Bad behavior should be condemned and punished.  You can’t champion bad behavior in the wealthy as a right of passage and also suggest you care about the poor and repressed.  Bad behavior by those who can, is the same abuse of power as that which you see in whatever social problem.  When the Kennedy’s are caught with a woman under the desk, it’s not cute.  It’s abusive.  They are supposed to represent the people, to be selfless.  Their sin trickles down or up whichever way you want to look at it.  Bad men elect bad leaders and bad leaders encourage bad men.  Whichever side you are on, you have a responsibility to stop evil in yourself.  We are to emulate the king, Jesus and to model our leaders after him.  He sacrificed everything.

I never stop marveling at the way Christian peoples older than 1960 sacrificed so much for the future of their progeny.  Especially the founding fathers, promising and many of them actually giving up their lives   fortunes and their sacred honor.  Then we started passing laws making it almost impossible for families to pass down their hard work to their children.  We started wracking up debt which God knows how many future generations it will take to pay back. And we build national retirement systems and healthcare systems, which are just pyramid schemes on the backs of our children and their children.  

We are selfish. We only care about ourselves, right now.  I think this leads to a couple of large scale problems that are related.  Vaccines and the Church.  Vaccines work on a population level not on an individual scale.  Inoculating a small percent of people doesn’t really do anything.  But when entire populations are inoculated many many lives are spared and many diseases have been irradiated all together.  This is indisputable medical fact.  But today we play the small game.  We find the most diseased tree in a forest more healthy than any forest in history, that we know of (we don’t know much about the ancients), and we make that tree the rule.  But this was always the case.  There are always a few people who react poorly to any medical treatment.  That’s just the way it is.  But we can’t define the process based on those few.  At a certain point, maybe but that’s a first world problem.  You have to solve all the 3rd world problems first.  And you can’t lament every pioneer who got hurt along the way.  Those men of old sacrificed for the greater good.  They put their shoulders to the plow and carved out civilization so that their children would not have it so hard.  They were playing the long game and so they won it.  We amplify every small problem on blog posts and semi-news organizations to the point that we forget all the good that has been accomplished.  We pick nits.  We are focused on our narrow selves instead of the large scale as it relates to disease and many other things.

There are a lot of examples but I am reminded of one concerning air travel.  We all want everything to be safe, but the reality is that accidents do happen. It’s because sin is in the world.  Despite modern man thinking he can overcome anything, the problem is not a lack of education or a lack of government safety.  Sometimes there is no one to sue.  But it might seem like a good idea to demand 100% success in airplane flights.  No accidents ever.  And it might be possible, but it would cost a fortune.  As a result air travel would be so expensive that people would drive instead.  But since driving is much less safe than even mediocre air travel, the end result would be more people dying in cars.  This perceived problem of the imperfect plane is exacerbated very similar to the vaccine that harmed that one kid.  A plane crash makes the news everywhere.  But the fact that over 100 people die every day in auto accidents goes unnoticed.  This is the problem of the seen and the unseen from Bastiat.  Focusing on the small personal thing can result in the greater system going to pot.[I actually wrote this before the recent grounding of Boeing 737 Max planes, but the overreaction proves my point.]

And it’s the same with the Gospel.  We think it’s all about us and our church or our town or our country.  If things aren’t working out then it’s the end times or something.  I always remember old Christians talking to each other when I was a kid.  They reminded me and one other that no one is necessary.  God is doing a big work, he doesn’t need you.  The Church has grown for 2000 years, and is still growing today. There were many losses along the way, caualties, lost battles.   But you can’t focus on these look at the glorious big picture.  I can’t remember the movie, but I  have an image in my head of a War movie where a tremendous victory has been won.  The parades are marching down the streets of the America confetti everywhere.  But even as all the celebration is going on, the military is knocking on the door of small town America and handing grieving families a flag.  There are always casualties in war on the winning side.  And this is a war.  Since the introduction of the camera, we don’t win wars anymore, because we don’t like to see even one casualty.  We focus on the grieving family instead of the parade.

So you had a bad day at work and come home and throw your Christianity in the garbage.  Well maybe it’s not so dramatic but we do the same thing in many small ways.  Because we think it’s about us being saved from our problems right now.  Instead of saving the whole earth from the enslaving rule and reign of demonic powers.  I was surprised to travel the world and hear different people talk about their nations.  Almost every people has pride.  And often it is pride in old accomplishment.  They are in a sense has-beens.  Uncle Rico lived back in 1982, but the Greeks lived back in 300 BC. when Hellenic culture brought many good things to the world.  The Acropolis today is no longer a shrine to a pantheon of gods is is a shrine to a Greek people who founded Western Civilization.  The Italians look back with pride on the Renaissance when their art and culture raised the bar for the world.  The Spanish once ruled the seas.  French once had the lingua-Franca.  The coptic Christians and the Armenian Christians seem to fight over who has the older church.  The Egyptians point to the pyramids.  The Chinese claim an almost-science older than anything in the west.  The sun never went down on the British Empire.  And then there is America.  I think we are at that tipping point.  The MAGA hat is the sign of the end.  We are becoming has-beens, harkening back to those better days when we won WWII and  saved the world.  When we advanced manufacturing of everything, invented the modern world and went to the moon.  This time has the air of the Greek man on the sidewalk surrounded by graffiti sprayed on horrid modern human hives, reminiscing about the good old days 2300 years ago.  Or the Armenian girl in Lebanon assuring me that she is part of the oldest church in the world.

The Jews are still looking for the messiah to bring them back to the glory days of Solomon, and the king who would make the world their footstool.  The Muslims think they were promised the world.  And endless angst fueled destruction has been the result.  But we ‘Mericans are falling into the same trap.  The world was not promised to America it was promised to the body of Christ, the congregation of God’s people, the Church.  It includes everyone.  Maybe God leaves this land barren without one single Christian and moves his focus over to Korea or China or West Africa.  So be it.

It is a strange thing because on the other side from the ‘Mericans living the glory days of the 4th of July , are the crazy secularists, burning everything down.  Even a lot of ‘Christians’ are in this camp, foolishly destroying all the tenants of their faith.  Their misplaced faith isn’t in this nation it’s in multinationalism, globalism, pluralism and ultimately in the uber selfishness of sexual perversion.  This conflict has come into vivid contrast the past few weeks in the Methodist church.  While many liberal branches sell out to the PC culture of perversion, the churches in Africa are standing firm on orthodoxy.  They will inherit the Earth.  Destroying the idols of both the nation worshippers and the diversity worshippers.

We need to pull our heads away from the self centered world we build on our portable phones and look around at what is going on in the bigger screen God lays out for us every day.  We were not promised perfect comfort and ease if we accepted Jesus.  It’s not about us.  Church isn’t about feeling good for the rest of the week.  It’s not a cry in for the gay guy and his supposed persecution.  We were promised that Jesus would rule the world and if we accepted this truth we would be spared the destruction and further, we would be blessed.  It’s a war and we are called to fight for the hearts of the world enslaved to all these old lies.  But we can’t enshrine ourselves in the stone memorials of our past victories never to fight again.  We can’t live in the good old days.  The work is not finished.  We want to finish the race faithfully. Our best day should not be the 4th of July 1776, or the 8th of May 1945, it should be tomorrow.

Did our forefathers really believe the Church was only a building?  Then why did they build schools, orphanages, hospitals, villages, cities, states, kingdoms and nations?  Why did they move to the jungle and live in huts, or the dessert and live in caves.  Why were there always priests and chaplains on ships, in battle and in prisons?  Why did they express their faith in the rich images of literary, painted, sculpted, symphonic and performed metaphor?  Not to mention protecting the institution of the family as sacred.

The reality is that to congregate, hear preaching, sing songs and pray, you need a location.  We aren’t disembodied souls.  The early church met in Mark’s mother’s house, probably because she was well-off and it was large enough to fit them.  Later Christians advanced the art of architecture, making buildings larger and more beautiful.  And why wouldn’t they?  Do we hold this against them?  These communities poured their blood and sweat into cathedrals, monuments to their faith which stand to this day.  Those rock are crying out.  It’s strange that what we hear are dissonant tones, especially considering the amazing acoustics.  There seems to be a growing dislike for excellence in anything, except the function of our devices.  When they go wrong we lose it.  But everything else is no longer a pursuit of excellence, what is it a pursuit of?

Why is attempting to build a church building by the best theology you can find somehow suspect?  Is it more appropriate for the government, hopelessly lost in their humanism, not knowing what a male or a female is, to build buildings and we simply rent them?  The fact is we paid for them.  The state doesn’t have any money they must first get it from us.  Why do we let them have the power over our money?  Isn’t it all about power?  The church isn’t allowed to exert power, to pursue excellence, that’s intimidation.  But the state can be all powerful?

Why do we shoehorn the reach of our faith out of every aspect of life?  Why do we consider this more Christian? Why are we hiding our light?  Our faith is limited to a small corner of our heart, expressed only, just a bit, when we, *shh* meet together.  Oh my that was hard to say, to admit.

We are to take every thought captive.  Jesus is King.  That’s a fact, he is reigning on high. That’s the Gospel. He earned this exalted position by laying down his life as the perfect sacrifice.  We are to go into the whole earth baptizing everyone.  It’s a geographical mission, we should claim territory.  There was a territorial aspect to the ruling effect Satan and his demons offered to Jesus in the wilderness.  We shouldn’t be afraid to boldly build buildings.  Everyone else builds buildings which expound their religion.  That’s why we have so many dark, confused, sharp, ugly buildings.  Cathedrals were engineered and crafted over generations to fit in more windows, to bring in more light, we are the light of the world.  We have the word of God, we are at peace with him.  Everything we do should reflect this.  We don’t have to fit the gospel into architecture, like Rosie O cramming into her jeans.  It’s there already, men at peace with God, free of sin are able to build and create and reflect the glory of God in everything they do.  What do you spend your money on that’s so much better than a beautiful building?

Hypocrisy is not just a statement about the individual, it’s a statement about culture.   Though you may not think something is wrong, you know that most people do, so you hide it.  Today that is going away.  Or it’s probably just changing, porn and abortion are fine in the public square, but liking Columbus is not.   I think a culture which hides it’s Biblical sins is far healthier than one that broadcasts them on social media.  And by inference the people in those cultures are worse than the supposed hypocrites in our history.  Norm MacDonald has a great line as part of his life-as-comedian—thing:  “People say the worst part about Cosby was the hypocrisy.”  “I think it was the raping.”  And I think this reveals that our attacks on hypocrisy are just a way of lowering the standard.

St. Peter’s Social Justice Campaign. Martyrdom is doing exactly what you know society dislikes, because it is right. Crucifixion of St. Peter. Guido Reni (1575-1642). Oil on Canvas.

We started this nutty trend in the church because culture said that those people in the 50’s were squares and we needed to get with the times.  So we wrecked the whole country.  But we are really just a different type of hypocrite.  Instead of disliking people because they are from Africa, we dislike them because they are from the past, a Christian past.  We make ridiculous categories just like they did, rather than judging people by the content of their character.  But that’s the point, what is content and character now?  It’s talking about things, emoting, wokeing, being in the social justice group.  I don’t even know what any of these words mean.  But I am certain they mean that people are attacking sense and reason and therefore Christianity.  And who wouldn’t think it was wrong the way they wrongly tell the story?

The reality is that all the people screeching ‘hypocrite’ are the real hypocrites.  Where is the proof of their success?  What ever happened to all Obama’s promises of hope and change and uniting the world and solving racial strife?  The reality is that the founding fathers of this nation brought together people from all the major Christian denominations and united them to defeat the most powerful military on the planet.  That unity brought about peace and prosperity the world has seldom known, to this day.  That’s the problem with social justice warriors.  They worship a false god, which turns the worshipper into a deaf and dumb fool, a hypocrite.  They don’t meet their standards, often they don’t even try, and when things fall apart, they are never heal accountable.  Christians for the last 2000 years brough us to this place, not by caring or being concerned about social justice.  They did it by mortifying their flesh.  Repenting, putting to death their own sin.  This is the Gospel.

Jesus didn’t say go and join a group that cares about social justice.  He said go and repent.  If you want a better world, you have to start with yourself.  If you want your group to be better you have to be better.  It’s easy to care and be woke and go on a social crusade.  It’s difficult to put yourself aside and treat other people better in every circumstance.  But that’s what Christianity does, that’s why it changed the world.  The current young person, supposedly cares about the problems of society while they create more of them every day.  You can’t sleep around, get divorced, quit hard things, let a screen raise your kids, let a screen be your interaction, lie on your resume, cheat your boss by being lazy, change your sex, pretend homosexuality is normal, kill your own baby, and a myriad of other sins and expect society to be healthy.  Being in the right group or not being in the wrong group is no weapon against real evil.  You can’t remake the world in your image and your rules and expect anything good to come of it.  But you can get enough people together who believe the same way and you can all pretend everything is fine,  for a while.

So, the problem is no that people in the past had sin which they tried to prevent, the problem is that you have sin you don’t care about.   The problem is not having a standard personally or as a collective that you can not meet, the hypocrite.  The problem is that “the Biblical standard has not been tried and found wanting it has been found difficult and left untried”.  And as a supplemental flourish the anti-Christian, yells ‘hypocrite’ as they flee down the road to their own destruction.  Peer pressure is good if it’s in the right direction.  Social shame is good if it’s in the right direction.  Treating yourself as a member of a group to absolve your sins, or treating other people as a member of a group to attack them is never good.  No one is guilty because they are a Hatfield, or a Capulet, or a Trump supporter, or because they lived before 1980.   It’s Marxism, it’s tribalism.  It always leads to tribal war, and all those eyes missing.  We need to judge people based on their character, starting with ourselves.  And that’s what Christians have done for 2000 years arbitrary ditinctions like race, class, tongue, tribe and nation, have been falling away.  The whole reason we first worlders can care about social justice is because of all the Christians who went before us.  They sacrificed their lives to spread the gospel, bring peace to all men.  They cared about the poor and the weak.  Satan came along and corrupted this fruit and made it a false god.  Please don’t worship this idol.

I really do hate to disenchant—anything.   I was tempted to title this “A Star is Fallen.”  Which has as much rich connotation as the title of this movie.  But then I wonder if that isn’t just what good criticism is for, to prevent art from disenchanting us.  Can I recommend this film?  Does it enliven the soul more than crush it?  There are so many wonderful aspects to it.  It does story telling in the medium of the motion picture very well.   This is art, done by talented artists.  They know their audience and the tools of their craft and they connect the two in a production that is not only entertaining but will grab your emotions in the way they wanted to grab them.  But like the movies stumbling alcoholic lead, it is a mix of excellence and shocking evil.  Is this just the reality of the world?  You have to take the good with the bad.  That is the truth, Jesus comes to us and finds us where we are.  You can’t make the art you wish people would understand, you have to make the art that works for your audience.  But you should bring them up to something better as well.  Is the lure of the bottle enchantment?  It promises, a sort of bliss.  Is it disenchantment to get between a man and his drug of choice?  Is it pessimism to remind him that this journey into fairy land will leave him embarrassing himself in the gutter? I don’t think that it is.  The Scripture is full of warnings.  But as I think of them they all are for the young man.  Each generation as it passes down should warn.  But there is the reality of the other man, the old man in all it’s meanings.  The old man is our decades of wrongs committed and received.  The old man is old, his ways are set, his path is known.  So there are two camps.  The young man who needs a warning and the old man who needs the grit and shock to speak to his scarred soul.

First to the young man, to the child held in Jesus’ arms.  Woe to you who corrupt him.  And there is much to corrupt here.  The whole opening scene is like those violin shrieks at the climax of a horror flick.  And it really makes no sense.  It seems to be nothing more than a woke dog whistle to the lapping QWERTY community.  It makes absolutely no sense to discover a female singer in a drag bar.  It’s not witty or provoking, it’s just messed up.  There was a time when the gay person would make for a good plot twist, like a man who was left-handed in ancient Israel.  But now it’s just gratuitous perversion.  And then there are all the casual sex scenes.  I think it is precisely this type of portrayal which has led to the casual sexual reality which so many teens now live in.  This is not love, it’s lust and when you wake up in the morning , the fools gold is seen for what it is.  And the movie does get to some of this reality.  In the beginning, foolish couples come together and all the flaws and the realities are hidden.  Young lovers think they are invincible, but they often end in tears.  And so A Star get’s this right. But this is the wisdom of hindsight the old man can appreciate, the young will only be enticed.

But this is not the worst thing.  Crying in a mansion, now a star, over a tragic love story is nothing compared to turning to drugs or prostitution, homeless on the streets of La La Land.  There is a certain annoyance at the film/music industry for their constant self adulation.  They make movies and write songs, about making movies and writing songs.  As with the gay theme, this used to be a device of self aware writing.  Authors made jokes about their own art, which is to come out from behind the curtain of the artifice.  Ovid said the purpose of art was to conceal itself, but more on him later.  This device used to be subtle, now it is little more than formulaic narcissism. The problem is summed up in one line describing a love song in the movie “It just fell out of me, I guess and onto this page.”  Which is such an amazing lie.  Not only did this song not happen this way, it wasn’t even written by uber talented Gaga.  It required at least three other authors, and probably a whole supporting cast.  These things don’t just happen.  I hesitate to say ‘spoiler’, because good art can’t be spoiled by revealing plot lines.  But while it is good to keep up hope and to dream big.  Rock stars don’t walk into your bedroom and whisk you away to be rich and famous.  It doesn’t even happen to one percent, maybe one percent of one percent.  And that’s fine, a thing worth doing is worth doing badly.  Singing and writing for it’s own sake is fine.  But you should be prepared for the hard work.  Especially in a culture so driven by envy as our is.  Success takes a lot of blood sweat and tears, on your part individually not to mention the grand scale.  Without the men of old, pioneers carving civilization of out a wilderness fighting beasts, and weather and sinister men we wouldn’t be playing around writing music at all.  On a larger scale it took almost 1200 years from when Jesus the Christ laid down his life for his bride, for the first love song to be written, Le Roman de la Rose.  Before that romance was not a thing.  However you take the Song of Solomon, no one took it the way we do until Guillaume de Lorris, or his world, created his poem.  Some suggest that Ovid did the same thing 2000 years ago but his amores are generally thought to be satire.  And so this elaborate scaffold built by our forefathers is simply discounted.  Christ bids men to consider the cost, before foolishly rushing in.  You probably won’t become a rock star, and even if you do, there is a high cost. Again the film got to some of these themes.  Ally’s father lives his live in obscurity, believing he had the talent of Sinatra without the random luck.  Jack’s brother is always the voice of reason, reminding us that the reality behind those rose colored glasses is thorny. Hit movies don’t just happen they require thousands of hard working people, and a decadent culture. And good writing requires countless hours of good reading, good listening.  You can’t work out what you haven not worked in.

There is another lesson mostly ignored, also from Ovid.  He spoke for the ancient pagan world in his Metamorphosis.  Things are always changing into other things.  It just happens.  If the fates decide or maybe just because.  Darwin took up his mantle and so fish evolved into monkeys and on to men.  But that’s not how it happens.  Bad men stay bad, and they certainly stay men.  The film is on point for a bit.  Change requires a great shock and even then a lot of hard work is required to recover, sober up, go a different way.  We all need the blood of Jesus and real repentance when we hit bottom.  This world required a great creator, a storyteller, putting each element in it’s rightful place.  And when you leave your place only destruction happens.  Men don’t become women.  Everyone doesn’t become a movie star because they want it.  And alcoholics aren’t saved by their energetic loving young wives.  A Star only get’s one of these right.  Suicide doesn’t morph into sacrifice, it is a selfish thing, again the voice of reason “it was his fault”.

But the movie is very beautiful as a tale to the old man.  This is the reality of our world.  Each and every young person is dropped into this mess to find their way.  We can’t have the ideal world, we can’t have the ideal song, we can’t have the ideal relationship.  We have to make the best of what we do have.  And so the poetry of the music isn’t Dante or T. S. Elliot, but it is ours.  It speaks to the American in our language, with our rudimentary working knowledge of music.  I wish it could be better, that we could desire more and work with richer poetry, but we don’t, we are here.  The movie even gets to this struggle with the pop pull of the new star vs the rich texture of the old cowboy.  This journey has to be at least a little autobiographical for Gaga.  The contrast is stark, and true.

So as to this love song, which didn’t just happen, it has some truth in it.  Many of us are tired of broken relationships, and “giving our heart away to another stranger”  sounds like a familiarly horrible proposition. “I don’t want to start another fire.” The past has been a mess, we want to grab on to something young and undefiled and hold onto it forever.  All performed by Gaga reaching down into her soul and evoking the best of our diva canon, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion and Whitney Houston.  Both rhyme and reason together, and that rhyme can powerfully pull at your emotions.  Which may be what we need to awake us from the ashes of our loves lost.  The textured vocals and the crescendo, climaxing in the final frame will grab you, as if you don’t ever want to hear another song again, in it’s finality.  What a farewell.

And the love relationship is a completed sale.  In fact, Gaga and Cooper are still selling it on the stage of the Oscars and in the tabloids to this day.  I have always known Gaga had talent in theory, despite the reality as it is applied to her freak show.  Madonna Part Two.  Sadly because that is what the American people wanted.  Americans don’t long for Catholic school girls beautifully executing delightfully artful sonnets.  We want angsty semi-clad pop tarts, in meat dresses who may or may not be alt-sexual.  And so we made a Gaga.  Until now I have avoided this parade.  But she really does sell the story from the screen with Bradley Cooper.  Even given all the gratuitous flirtations with evil, it comes together as a true thing.  I really believe she did love him, thick and thin.  She stood by and wanted him to be remade, and he almost was.  He really loved her, he gave her the chance, he gave her what he had.  He passed on the fire he once sang, that needs to be spread to the world.  But sometimes it’s too little too late. The despair of failure, he couldn’t hold her back.  He didn’t cling to the success, he drowned in the flaws.  In the end he did not pull her down, though he did break her heart.  Emotional journeys should be for the purpose of setting us back down on earth better men.  Old made new.  And there are a few of these moments pressing through the looking glass here.  So this only to think through the siren song and put some true words to the conversation of this mess we call Hollywood.