Relax, I haven’t fed a “one armed bandit” or visited an “adult” business. Cindy and I are eating at great restaurants and seeing some great shows…….including a Chicago concert. This, incidentally, was our first date….almost 50 years ago. We are staying at a very nice hotel and the place is not only beautiful, it is spotless. If you drop a napkin on the floor somebody scurries by and picks it up in minutes. At night, landscaping crews manicure every plant. A cleaning crew shampoos the carpet at the front door every night. The carpets in the casino are vacuumed several times a day. A maid sterilizes our room every day while we are out.
But, the dirt is just under the spotless patina. Everywhere you go, there are images, some of them 5 stories tall, of half or fully naked women. The images of men fortunately are only half naked. The hotel room has a well stocked minibar. In addition to salty snacks, it has a full compliment of hard liquor………and a nice selection of condoms. Just in case.
A prostitute recently killed a “customer” in the fancy hotel we are staying at. I’m told that this happens every day in this spotless city. The only reason that it made the news is that the customer’s wife is suing the hotel for negligence. The locals are outraged……..not by the murder, but by the lawsuit.
I have been struck by how much effort the businesses and people here go to……to maintain the veneer of beauty…..to keep the dirt covered up…..to make “sin city” look nice. The amount of money that they spend on clean-up and maintenance is staggering.
And that got me thinking. How much of my energy……how much of my resources…….do I spend covering up the dirt in my life? How hard do we work as a society…….to gloss over our failures? How hard do we work to redefine our sin out of existence……to put lipstick on the pig.
Anger, jealousy, greed, hate, dishonesty, lust, disrespect……the list goes on:
A poor family crosses our border illegally, looking for a better life……we worry that they are using up our resources. We cover our reaction with a veneer of justice when greed is at the core of it.
A child is unhappy with his life and believes he would be happier as she. We allow this, to the point of excluding his parents from the conversation, and we call it self actualization.
We allow terrorists to disrupt our campuses…….to attack Jewish students…….and we dress it up as free speech.
Our prime time television experience is littered with sex and murder. We call it entertainment……..and we pay for it by spending our money at the businesses that sponsor it.
We share a Facebook post that is riddled with lies and hate……..we tell ourselves that this will improve our society.
“Hate cannot drive out hate…..only love can do that.”
MLK , Jr.
Every one of us participates in one or more of these efforts to cover up the wrongs in our culture. And it is far worse than it was when I was young. I wonder what our culture will be like when my son is 70 years old.
God quietly reminds us:
Love God……Love everyone else.
The solution is that simple.
We are slowly but surely drifting away from these two bedrock rules for living.
We sit by and watch as our entire culture morphs into Las Vegas…….a veneer of beauty covering a core that gets uglier with every passing year.
See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known.
Moses, Deuteronomy. 11: 26-28, ESV
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Paul, 2 Chronicles, 7:14, ESV