How many of you ever heard your grandmother say, “If you can’t say anything nice then don’t say anything at all.”? (I am now faced with the dilemma over whether I should follow grandma’s wisdom or let ‘er rip…)
Information. We live in an age of it. Good; bad; excruciatingly bad; life altering bad.
Most information comes to us from standard media outlets, news, radio, papers, magazines – old school formats a generation grew up on. Videos, blog, podcasts, live streams now add to the overwhelming mountain of… stuff. The trouble with stuff is that there is no way to filter out good stuff from bad stuff during the course of a day. It’s a crap shoot at best. So we dabble in stuffication – the art of creating a world-view of truth out of stuff.
One of the rules of stuffication is that my stuff matters more than yours, even if we share the same thread of stuff, because my other threads, which you have no access to, bring a truer picture to the matter. The corollary to this is I will berate, criticize, harangue, make your life an on-line hell to prove my point. Grandma is rolling right now.
The media, are masters at the corollary. Smooth, artful jabs followed by bone crunching upper cuts of accusation. Before you know it, you’re being pummeled by the left and then the right. You thought you were fighting one person and suddenly blows are coming from all around you. It’s a street fight!
An accusation comes to steal, kill and destroy. It has no other purpose. People deliver them, not some spiritual bogey man with red horns and a pointed tail. Accuser. You. Me. Every one of us, at one time or another. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. When they’re up; when they’re down. Accuser = satan.
Flip Wilson was a comedian who crafted the line, “The devil made me do it.” Any time he was convicted of wrongdoing, “the devil made me do it” was the pat answer he issued to swells of laughter. Devil = false accuser, slanderer.
Consider that an action was undertaken and then deemed inappropriate all because of an accusation was made against someone. What if the action was appropriate? If you answer that question without thinking it through you’ve missed the point. Appropriate of not, the action came because of an accusation.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and you gotta-do-what-ya-gotta-do to make it big. Bullshit on all of that. That comment is spewed hourly across the airwaves by those striving to justify the past accusations they’ve committed, the present one’s they’re getting ready to level, and the future ones that they don’t have a clue about yet. I’m tired of playing advocate for the accuser; defender of the false assumption; believer is a greater truth at the expense of wrongful charge. Get behind me, satan.
The disciples of Jesus went out into the community and prayed for the sick and lame. When they returned to him to tell him of all the wonders that had happened under their hands, he responded, “I saw satan fall like lighting.” Did the spiritual bogey man suddenly materialize and take a jolt from heaven? You’re 21st century people, think. What has been the point of this message? What did Jesus mean?
At this very moment, in Chicago, four young people sit in a cell charged with a crime against a young man who was of a different ethnicity and operating as best he could within a limited mental capacity. These four people tortured this young man and became the satan to him. I can say this without using the term “allege” simply because they embraced the nature of stuffication by publicizing their actions for the entire world to see. This action became the public organism of the satan, their demon for life.
Healing restores and removes. Wholeness comes when accusations lifted up by a community are replaced by the goodness of what God has done. Accusations = satan fall through praise of God’s goodness.
If you think for one moment that you’re going to help these people with a God who tortured, beat and then crucified his son so that his wrath would be soothed, maybe you can’t see what that type of belief has already produced in their actions.
God loves those four young people just as much as He love you right now. There is nothing that either you, or I, can do to change that. Those young people, all of them, are living in hell right now. You going to play their satan, or their deliverer? What role did the disciples take? You are a disciple, right? Grandma…
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