The Daily Beast

Ayesha and Kehlani

While the political scene continued to wring its hands over Donald Trump, another conversation about men, women, and the good was happening on social media.

A young female rapper named Kehlani was having a bad time. She had been dating an NBA player when something went wrong. Next her ex-boyfriend posted a picture on Instagram of them watching TV together in his bed crowing a bit about having her back. She then posted something about being in the ER after a suicide attempt.

As all of us know the Internet can be a cruel place. On Twitter a lot of criticism came down on her about cheating. Some speculated that the suicide attempt was bogus. Others jumped into expose the double standard of expectations on women’s sexuality verses men’s.

I’m not normally up on all this gossip but I caught a piece on the Daily Beast  pointed out that it seems that among a certain group of men the piece described as “misogynists” hold many celebrity women to the standard of Ayesha Curry.

I knew who Stephen Curry was, a top NBA star from the Golden State Warriors and a public Christian but I had never heard about his wife. She’s also a very public figure who presents herself on social media as a Christian, a devoted wife and mother, and someone who contrasts herself with other celebrity women like Kim Kardashian and the lifestyles they represent.

This raises for me interesting questions.

In this world where especially on social media we see a race to the bottom here we see a group of young men and women who see this conservative Christian woman as a standard against how other women should be judged. Is that fair? Is it surprising?

How do cultures work with respect to morality?

How do our individual choices impact culture and how do cultures impact our individual choices?

From Judges to Ruth

Over the next 5 weeks we’re going to be looking at these questions through the lens of the last few chapter of the book of Judges and a small transitional book about a non-Israelite widow named Ruth. Many of our our issues from today, from Trump to Kehlani to Ayesha find resonance in these stories. We’ll also see how this intersects with the stories from last week of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection and all of this should point to the Gospel and how we are to live in the complicated, mixed up world we find ourselves.

Corruption

Before Lent we were working our way through the book of Judges. If you want a brief, YouTube video summary of the book this is a great one. Israel failed to take the land as God had commanded through Joshua and Israel had promised to him and this has led to their own decline and moral corruption. What we find in chapters 19 through 21 is the nadir of that process. In the longer perspective of the story of God and Israel we have arrived once again at a moment when it seems that God’s entire project of reclaiming humanity seems lost. God has acted on our behalf, handed the ball to us and we have messed up so badly our lot seems irredeemable. This is where Ruth will come in later, but we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.

You can read the story for yourself but here are some elements.

• Another Levite (the tribe set apart by God) behaving badly
• The Levite and the concubine’s father not paying attention to her interests
• The Levite puts unfounded faith in God’s people as opposed to the others
• Even kinship fails at Gibeah
• Gibeah is the new Sodom, but no angels to protect the weak this time
• The unworthy Levite makes a moral show in a ghastly way
• Leaderless Israel tries to bring justice but mostly accomplishes bloodshed
• Leaderless Israel tries to fix its mistakes but only brings more bloodshed and then repeats the abuse of women that started the sad tale.
• Israel winds up playing a sanctimonious moral game that appears religiously faithful but is actually a self-serving sham that exposes her corruption and helplessness.
• Two refrains are repeated
  • In those days Israel had no king
  • Everyone did as seemed right in their own eyes

Kingship

Before we go too hard on the kingship angle we should look ahead, even past the book of Ruth to the book of Samuel. If the book of Judges is a set of stories to illustrate our corruption and what we do without leadership, the book of Samuel, and Kings after it are books that describe how leadership fails. Is the Bible confused?

The Bible is actually being very realistic about all of this. After wandering around Judges we might be temped to say “a king can fix this!” That answer then gets played out in Samuel when despite Samuel’s warnings Israel receives exactly the kind of king they believed they needed, Saul.

Do you know where Saul was from and where he ruled from? Gibeah. That same town that had descended to become like Sodom. Jabesh Gilead, the town that was slaughtered in order to provide wives to the tribe of Benjamin would be a town that Saul would save. Shiloh, the place where the girls were kidnapped would be the place where Eli would raise Samuel with his two corrupt sons. In the end Saul’s kingship would descend into tyranny and Israel would lament having the king it wanted just as they earlier lamented having no king.

Big Picture, Little Picture

We began talking about Kehlani and Ayesha. You’ll notice how very quickly that whole conversation will begin to focus on large social evils. Both sides get very moralistic very quickly.

• “Ayesha morality is lovely. The rest of you are corrupt and stupid.”
• “You’re putting your faith in Ayesha? Well all you wankers praising her are not Steph Curry yourselves and just give it time. Their relationship will fail or some falsehood will be exposed!”
• “Who are you to say that Ayesha is morally superior to Kim Kardashian and others like her posting sketchy pictures of herself. Who are you to slut-shame Kehlani. If she decides to step out on boyfriend 2 because she’s really in love with boyfriend #1 who are you to judge. Isn’t her personal happiness what really matters?”

We pay all this attention to a distant moral social narrative when this isn’t really a narrative that we control. The narrative we do control, the one about the choices in our own life is easy to avoid by pointing fingers at one another.

CS Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain noted this dynamic and it makes his list of examples of human wickedness that we paper over and use to feel good about ourselves.

2. A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of morality, a reawakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the millennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. But we must learn to walk before we run.

Lewis, C. S. (2001). The Problem of Pain (p. 54). New York: HarperOne.

We might love to talk about the big corporate sins and on the way posture ourselves to appear to be above it all. Because I name my white privilege and because I strike a posture against sexism or racism or whatever ism I know to be bad, and because I maybe even as a Calvinist profess that I know I am the burdened by sin that somehow this makes me enlightened enough or conscious enough to no longer be blinded or bound by it.

The story of the collapse of Israel here is all about posturing for public morality while our core is corrupt. When it comes to ourselves our own self-serving bias insures that we are of course “good people” and that others might do monstrous things but we would never.

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart’s in the right place’ and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

Lewis, C. S. (2001). The Problem of Pain (p. 49). New York: HarperOne.

Big corporate corruptions and small personal ones are pieces of a whole. The domestic dispute of a sanctimonious temple servant that resulted in a civil war and the slaughter of towns and a tribe was not an accident or an isolated incident. It is the working of regular, common sin, the kind that inhabits and imprisons us all. The only way the sin gets countered, and the dynamic starts working in reverse is by means of sacrifice.

Ruth and Christ

What we will see in the upcoming weeks is the story of a non-Israelite woman who changes future of kingless Israel. That story will exemplify and culminate in the coming of Israel’s true king who brings justice to the personal and justice to the social.

We don’t know the future of Ayesha and Steph, we know they are living publicly in a high voltage, high visibility context and we know that all of us are weak and prone to corruption, but we pray that God will preserve them and bless them. We certainly also want the best for Kehlani for her future.

What we see is that all good things come through sacrifices and that these sacrifices are always costly. Our sacrifices are so often pitted against our passions, our desires and even our legitimate interests.

It is in this context that we understand the cross of Christ. How the King of the Jews was became a sacrifice for his people.

• He became the husband the Levite wouldn’t become
• He became the judge who could call Gibeah and Benjamin to account
• He became the sacrifice to replace the towns and villages of the slaughter of Israel’s civil war

The Easter word is then true. The sacrifice becomes the greatest king of a kingdom that will never end. He is given the highest place that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bown.

Gratitude

Gratitude to this risen king then becomes justification for every day, regular, ongoing sacrifice.

• to love the unlovely
• to care for the undeserving
• to expend oneself for those who can’t see their blind bondage to sin
• to protect the weak and heal the broken
• to do all this though you fail

All of this until the returning king comes so that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.