Therefore your daughters play the whore,
and your daughters-in-law commit adultery.
I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore,
nor your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery;
for the men themselves go aside with whores,
and sacrifice with temple prositiutes;
thus a people without understanding come
to ruin."
I thought about this passage again and realized it doesn't necessarily need to identify only with religious forms of corruption, prostitution.
[Although that was the context it was referring to. Remember? The Israelites enveloped some of the Canaanite traditions, one being sexual orgy-like rituals - even in the temple - to bring about fertility, rain, good fortune for good crops. And even though this practice is heinous enough, you could even imagine this being abused: "No really, I had fertility in mind....I was thinking of the common good," the Priest says, after being caught in the act.]
Anyway, remembering this context, I also thought of our own contemporary context. We live in such a lopsided world, and our own lopsided nation. the poor continue to grow poorer and the rich more and more wealthy. Politicians, in their filthy-richdom, ask social justice activists, on good days when they're not avoiding the truth, "How do I do this? How do I advocate for the poor? I don't even know any poor people?" And in our ignorance - gradations of ignorance reflecting variations of wealth - we help the chasm grow.
In some of the politics of the extreme Right, women rich and poor are scolded for working when they have children at home: as if the two weren't intrically connected, as if there were some other magical option. Poor, single mothers must work to provide for their families.
Or I think of sex workers; a profession that has persisted for at least thousands of years. Why does it exist, persist? If we continue to forge a culture that provides benefits and breaks for those who don't even need them, then the poor have to forge their own - somewhat dangerous, somewhat primitive - way. This has often involved drug-related or sex-related career paths.
I'm not saying it's a good idea -- we know about the harmful aftermath of such professions and the unsafe effect on homelife.
But what I am saying is that we're in need of "Jubilee," which was a regular practice in the Old Testament times. An opportunity to cancel all debts and start over. If you never get to start over, you continue to fall back -- how can you ever catch up? Despite what movies like to show, it is very hard to go from an uneducated prostitute mother of three to a salary-earning, college (or even high school) educated professional. There are so many kinks to work out.
So maybe the blame should not be on the victims of the web of "whoredom," but instead, on the manufactures who built the web. Who built the web?
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2 comments:
Wow, that's a BIG question!
When I think about what I know of history, it seems that the web has been there forever. Maybe it started when Cain killed Abel so that his sacrifice would be the acceptable one. Or when the people began to build the tower of babel to get up to heaven (that is an interesting story - God says to himself, "There is nothing they won't be able to accomplish." So he confuses their language. I often wonder what God thinks of us now, with all that we've accomplished. We're still so divided by our differences, and it's weird to think that those differences that keep us from working together were actually part of God's plan. Not that God wants us hating each other, but he knew that if we all spoke different languages and had different cultures, we would have a lot more problems getting along. This blows my mind. Aren't we taught that God is all about peace and harmony? So, why did he create the differences which caused divisions in the first place?)
Anyway, I think the root of the web is SIN. It's selfishness. It's I am more important than you. My needs are more important to me than your needs. So whenever that stuff started, that's when the web began forming.
Ever since then, it's just been growing and growing, because each culture and generation after the first one has maintained that web.
Whenever a person or group or country or generation oppresses another, they are maintaining that web. The Babylonians oppressed the Israelites, the Romans oppressed the Christians, then the "Christians" oppressed the Muslims and they fought right back, then the Europeans oppressed everyone else, then the american colonists oppressed the native americans, and the native mexicans, and the transplanted africans, etc. I love my country, but it's really hard for me to look at our history of how we got to where we are today and be proud of it.
And all through out these time periods, the chasm between the rich and the poor has been maintained. (I read your post, Kendra, where you linked to the discussion of Luke 16 - good stuff!)
The chasm between the wealth of our nation and the poverty of others is HUGE. Ridiculously huge.
So I guess I see the web as being created by our own selfish sinful nature, that sinful nature that is in every person, and that over time has compounded and grown exponentially to cause the craziness we have today.
The scary and confusing thing to me is, how do we combat it? I feel like we're in the Matrix, fighting this unstoppable web that exists, and we don't even have a Neo. How do I even begin to change things?
(I'm looking forward to discussing this stuff with you while you're here!!!)
Oh, PS....I LOVE that God mentions the "terebinth" as a tree that gives shade. I wonder, is that tree where the idea for "Terebithia" came from (as in the book and now movie "Bridge to Terebithia")?
I just have to get my little plug in there for it - FANTASTIC book, one of my favorites as a child, and an equally FANTASTIC movie.
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