A RANT ON THE WAY TO SENIOR SAINTS BREAKFAST

Yesterday, driving to our Senior Saints breakfast at church, I pretty much lost any of the saint I might have possessed, though, unfortunately, I kept the senior. Why? The litter. We were traversing a road that is a major beltline to our city. The ditches and shoulders of the road were strewn with litter tossed from passing vehicles. Littering upsets me greatly. I claim no righteous reason for that. It may be my OCDness that desires everything to always be in its place, and the side of the road is not trash’s place. It may be my aversion to folk’s laziness that they would not take care of their garbage the way it ought to be. Or to their narcissism evidenced by their thinking only of relieving themselves of their waste and not of their trashing someone’s yard, or the city’s road; or, not thinking that, if that trash ever gets picked up and disposed of, someone else will have to do it. Or, it may simply be because litter ruins the aesthetics of the scenery. Litter is plain ugly. Dirty. Unsightly. But the thing that mostly was riling me was the blatant hypocrisy of the self-righteous leftists, the movers and shakers of the popular post-modernity culture. And their disciples. This I began to spew out to my wife. “Climate activists preach saving our planet from global warming and have successfully indoctrinated a whole generation in our schools, inculcating them to be rabid recyclers. They convinced them we can’t even use straws. Yet, that same generation they have converted into save-the-planet-ideology automatons are the ones who are littering our roads and planet. What hypocrisy! I am condemned for not recycling but they throw all their trash out the window.” I should have stopped there, but I tied it to another hypocrisy of today’s contemporary culture. “They continue to preach we are all racists and need to treat everyone equitably. Okay, right. I agree we should treat everyone equitably. But why are those who are taught to scream racism at everybody and everything so rude? So mannerless. Go out into the service sector. Everywhere, folks who are supposed to be serving you are rude. Devoid of manners. Totally lacking in a show of respect for others. Those in customer service, well, used to serve customers.” Of course, not all are rude. There is some wonderful, well-mannered folk in customer service. But, rudeness and lack of manners are systemic. For all their preaching of treating folks equitably, many folks who are quick to holler, “racism” are mannerless and rude. I concluded my rant with, “With all their teaching about saving the planet and everyone being racist, why don’t they teach students not to litter and teach them some manners.” That question could be answered from many angles, but every one of those involves this; For their beliefs, these see-racism-everywhere-save-the-planet advocates have nothing transcendent upon which to base their sanctimonious sententiousness. I do not have space to flesh that claim out, but, basically, it’s this: If all there is is matter, then, in the end, nothing matters. Or, put another way, if matter is all that matters then nothing matters. Environmentalism tries to make saving the planet matter. But with no basis, it doesn’t matter because it's all matter. So, people litter. Leftists, for questionable motives, try to make all “races” equally matter. But, if all we all are is matter, no race, no one matters. Thus, there is no need to treat one another mannerly. Over and over, because they have no transcendent basis for their ideologies, manufactured moralities, and minus-god religions, their hypocrisy manifests itself. They reveal this hypocrisy by being racist against those they claim are racist. They may protest that it matters that we save a threatened snail. But since all is matter, they show nothing matters when they advocate killing babies in the womb. They cannot live consistently with their beliefs. The bases of their beliefs are untenable. Only Christians can live consistent with their beliefs. The operative word there is “can.” Often, many don’t. But, since their beliefs are based on the transcendent God, His transcendent Word, and, thus, transcendent reasons, there is a basis for consistent living in this world. And because of that, none are better stewards of our planet than true believers in Christ. They do not litter, choke dolphins with straws, or treat anyone, whatever his “race” rudely. They are not hypocrital--though they may go off on an occasional rant against leftists. Oh, and by the way, another Senior Saint coming to breakfast noticed the litter along the same road en route. She didn’t just rant. She said, “It made me want to get out and do something about it. Pick it all up.” That senior had a more saintly reaction than I. ---Pastor Clifford Hurst