Jesus' General: Two Years Have Passed and Not a Thing Has Changed

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Two Years Have Passed and Not a Thing Has Changed

Posted by Austin Cline

The coincidental confluence of two entirely separate events has inspired a rather unusual sermon today. First is the release of results from a rather disturbing poll: 57% of white evangelicals say that the use of torture is "sometimes" or "often" justified. The "good news" here is supposed to be the fact that this drops all the way to 43% when evangelicals are reminded of the "Golden Rule." In other words, when forced to think about themselves being tortured instead of faceless foreigners, a small majority of white evangelicals are able to be selfish enough to oppose torture. That's the good news!

I've already written about this poll in more depth on my own site, so let's move on to the second item: this is just about my second anniversary posting sermons here! Yes, that's right, I've been posting here just shy of two years — and over 90 sermons are available here, now. I was looking back over the list of sermons with thoughts about creating an index of them and I took a closer look at the first ones I posted. My first thought was "Wow, I posted two a day to begin with? I don't even remember it — that sure didn't last long."

My second, third, and following thoughts were fairly unprintable...because in light of the first item above, they are as relevant now as they were then: not a damned thing has changed. I could publish those images and that text today without any of it seeming dated — in fact, that's precisely what I'm going to do. It might seem like "cheating" to simply republish something old, but given the confluence of events here I think it's appropriate. Also, I rather hope that the number of readers has grown at least a little bit over the past two years so these old images will be new to them.

I'm only reproducing the small versions here and clicking on them won't open up the large versions like they usually do. Instead, clicking on the images or the titles will take you back to the original sermons published two years ago. Once there, you can open up the large images by clicking on the small images included in the original sermons. I hope you find them as provocative, disturbing, and even upsetting as they were originally. If they don't bother you, then you simply aren't paying close enough attention.