simple disobedience

the words are those of "the apostles and elders", and they came up in the daily office a few days ago:

". . . it has seemed good to the holy spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. if you keep yourselves from these, you will do well." (acts 15:28-29)

many times we have read this passage, the conclusion of what we sometimes call the council of jerusalem, the first synod of the emerging church of the first century, and we have described them as freeing us gentiles from the requirements of the laws of moses.

we do a good job, for the most part, of not following the mosaic law from which we have been released. seldom, however, do we notice that the council of jerusalem did leave us with some restrictions: "to abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication."

it strikes me that we do very poorly these days in observing these restrictions.

most of the food we eat has been sacrificed to the idol of cheapest-for-me-damn-the-results-for-anyone-else.

every day the weapons bought and operated by our taxes shed the blood of the (mostly) innocent throughout the world (not that jesus has suggested it is our job to decide who are the guilty and to shed their blood).

the commandment against food that is strangled is certainly violated in spirit if not in the letter itself in almost everything we eat from the chicken and cattle and pork food factories that provide us with our cheap-to-us food.

and it is hardly possible to go through the check-out lines at the stores selling the strangled food without noticing the popularity of fornication. if we do not commit it ourselves in fact, it constitutes some of our most popular "amusements."

should it surprise us if we do not "do well?"