Daily Lesson for December 15, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Isaiah chapter 9 verses 18 through 21:

18 For wickedness burns like a fire;
it consumes briers and thorns;
it kindles the thickets of the forest,
and they roll upward in a column of smoke.
19 Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts
the land is scorched,
and the people are like fuel for the fire;
no one spares another.
20 They slice meat on the right, but are still hungry,
and they devour on the left, but are not satisfied;
each devours the flesh of his own arm,
21 Manasseh devours Ephraim, and Ephraim devours Manasseh;
together they are against Judah.
For all this his anger has not turned away,
and his hand is stretched out still.

The LORD has to be put out with so much of the way we sometimes treat each other. The wood is dry and the fire danger is extremely high and here we are playing with matches, lighting little fires. Don't we know we're bound to get burned ourselves?  Don't we realize that a conflagration knows no boundaries, no bounds, no Left from Right?  God sends his rain on the just and the unjust. So too the fire scorches the earth. And in the end the whole land is destroyed.

Here's a modest proposal: no more sharing of fake news. It's a violation of the Commandment, "Thou shall not bear false witness."  That makes its transgression one of the biggies -- big because a community cannot exist on lies and falsehoods.

Friends, this means everyone: Everyone from the National Enquirer to the deans of our schools to nice, old grandmothers in their living rooms. This is how we kill a country, how a plague wipes out a whole people: with the share button on Facebook.

We can talk. We can even argue. But let's do so with respect and with character and with actual arguments and points and good facts and not with ad hominem attacks, aspersions of character, name calling, "trolling", threats or semi-threats of violence, aggression, bullying, and other forms of community destruction. Sure, we can wrestle things out. But let's remember we have a God to answer to.

Isaiah says, the Left devoured the Right and the Right the Left. And the frenzy was never satisfied until the whole nation was eaten up. This is a cautionary tale. We are no more immune than the children of Israel.

Dr. King said, "We must learn to live together as brothers lest we perish together as fools."

Another modest proposal: Let us quit fooling around with the matches.