I was recently asked the meaning of the following biblical texts:

 

“And another of his disciples said to him: Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him: Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead” (Mt. 8:21-22).

 

And

 

“But he said to another: Follow me. And he said: Lord, suffer me first to go and to bury my father. And Jesus said to him: Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another said: I will follow thee, Lord; but let me first take my leave of them that are at my house. Jesus said to him: No man putting his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Lk. 9:59-62).

 

I gave the following answer:

 

First everyone is born spiritually dead (Eph 2:1, 5; Col. 2:13) but Christ raises the dead and makes them faithful (Eph. 2:3). Christians have a duty to practice the corporal works of mercy of burying the dead, but it is not an absolute duty. For the Christian, burying the dead is important as all the corporal works of mercy are important. However, they are secondary to the spiritual works of mercy. The faithful are the only ones who can practice the spiritual works of mercy (“go thou and preach the kingdom of God”) but any pagan can do the corporal works of mercy. Our Lord would have clearly known the man’s familiar status, like he knew the status of the woman at the well (Jn. 4), and known that his father had unbelieving family to bury him. St. Augustine said:

 

But the Lord Christ when He is preparing men for the Gospel, will have no excuse from this carnal and temporal affection interfere. It is true that both the law of God prescribes these duties, and the Lord Himself reproves the Jews, because they destroyed this very commandment of God. And the Apostle Paul has in his Epistle laid it down, and said, “This is the first commandment with promise.” What? “Honor thy father and thy mother.”’ God of a surety spake it. This young man then wished to obey God, and to bury his father; but it is place, and time, and circumstance, which is in this case to give way to place, and time, and circumstance. A father must be honored, but God must be obeyed. He that begat us must be loved, but He that created us must be preferred. “I am calling thee,” saith He, “to My Gospel; I have need of thee for another work: this is a greater work than that which thou wishest to be doing. ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ Thy father is dead: there are other dead men to bury the dead.” Who are the dead who bury the dead? Can a dead man be buried by dead men? How can they lay him out, if they are dead? How can they carry him, if they are dead? How can they bewail him, if they are dead? Yet they do lay him out, and carry, and bewail him, and they are dead; because they are unbelievers (Sermons on Selected Lessons of the Gospels, Sermon 50:2).

 

Second, this is another example of the absolute devotion the Lord Jesus places on his elect. Jesus said, “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it” (Mt. 10:37-39). The devil makes the same demand on his followers. In the same chapter, the Lord spoke that “brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son; and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death” (10:21). That text is coming home for many of us.

 

Third, “bury my father” is an Aramaic idiom, meaning, take care of my father until he passes. What the man was doing was placing his father before God. Jesus was not forbidding him from burying his father. Jesus was just forbidding him from placing his father before God and the Gospel. The principal applies to all the faithful.

I shouldn't find this article shocking but I am always saddened but our once Christian country falling deeper into a sea of sexual retardation. I wonder how low the neo-pagan US will go before it cannot be distinguished from Sodom of old. Is this your common experience? Do you share the values of the “the hookup” generation?

Morning Edition, June 8, 2009 · The hookup — that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students — is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating.

It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.

Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.

"The idea used to be you are going to date someone that is going to lead to something sexual happening," Bogle says. "In the hookup era, something sexual happens, even though it may be less than sexual intercourse, that may or may not ever lead to dating."

Young people from high school on are so preoccupied with friends, getting an education and establishing themselves, they don't make time for relationships.

New Goal: Fun, Not Marriage

"Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing," says 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh, who graduated from college in 2005 and now lives in Boston. She says that among her friends, dating is a joke. "Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliche — isn't that funny?"

It seems it's far easier to have casual sexual encounters or hookups, though several national surveys of college students found a stalwart 28 percent who remain virgins. The term "hookup" is so vague, however, it might well encompass someone's idea of virginity — it involves anything from kissing to fooling around, oral sex and sexual intercourse.

"For me, it's been anytime that I was attracted to a guy and we spent the night together," Welsh says. "It has been sex; it has just been some sort of light making out. That's the beautiful thing about the phrase. Whatever happened is hooking up."

Bogle interviewed college students on a small and a large campus, as well as recent college graduates, to find out what was going on. The hooking-up phenomena has been traced back to the 1960s and the 1970s, when male and female students were thrown together in apartment-style dormitories, and there was a revolt against strict rules on having a member of the opposite sex in your dorm, lights out and curfews.

"What you see on college campuses now, even in some cases Catholic campuses, is that young men and women have unrestricted access to each other," Bogle says. Throw in the heavy drinking that occurs on most campuses, and there are no inhibitions to stand in the way of a hookup.

The alumni Bogle spoke with were less into hooking up after leaving college, but she says that's changing. It is catching on among young working adults, mainly because of the Internet and social networks.

The Evolution Of Dating

Dating itself represented a historical change. It evolved out of a courtship ritual where young women entertained gentleman callers, usually in the home, under the watchful eye of a chaperon. At the turn of the 20th century, dating caught on among the poor whose homes were not suitable for entertaining, according to Beth Bailey's history of dating, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America.

Young couples would go out for a movie or dinner. The expectation was that dating, as with courtship, would ultimately lead to a relationship, the capstone of which was marriage. Precious few of these young women attended college.

According to experts, the main reason hooking up is so popular among young people is that in the United States and other Western countries, the age at which people marry for the first time has been steadily creeping up. As of 2005, in the United States, men married for the first time around the age of 27, and women at about 25 years of age.

Bogle says the hookup is what happens when high school seniors and college freshmen suddenly begin to realize they won't be marrying for five, 10 or 15 years.

Prioritizing Career And Social Life

Marriage is often the last thing on the minds of young people leaving college today.

"My first few years out of college was about trying to get on my feet and having a good time," Welsh says. Dating and a relationship interfered with that.

Avery Leake, 25, knows what this is like from the other side. He's in a relationship now, but he says that, in general, most of the young women he used to meet "just wanted sex. They're independent." Being in a relationship was not important to them, especially if it interfered with their careers or their pursuit of advanced degrees, he says.

Leake found that he was also up against women who had as much money as he had, if not more, and he says dating had just become too expensive. "You used to be able to get away with paying $30 for a dinner and a movie," Leake says. "Not anymore."

Empowerment Or Loss Of Intimacy?

A number of experts accept this relaxed attitude toward sex outside of relationships as a natural consequence of the sexual revolution, women's growing independence and the availability of modern contraceptives. But Deborah Roffman, who conducts human sexuality workshops for middle- and high-school-age students and their parents, sees that as a distorted view of liberation.

"It's not a new model. I think most people would probably look back and agree that this has been a more traditionally, or at least stereotypically, male model," says Roffman. "What I've seen over the last few years is girls adopting a more compartmentalized view, and feeling good and empowered by it."

She's not convinced that this is a good thing for women, and says that being able to say yes is only one way of looking at freedom. She would feel much better if young men also were developing a greater capacity for intimacy.

Being able to engage in intimate relationships where men and women bring all of themselves to the relationship is the cornerstone of family, Roffman says.

But young people like Elizabeth Welsh don't see the hookup as an obstacle to future relationships:

"It is a common and easy mistake," Welsh says, "to assume that the value of friendship and those relationship building blocks have no place in longer-term relationships."

If you're honest and open about what you're doing, and willing to commit to a relationship, she says, a hookup and friendship can be fused into a lifetime partnership.

Partnership Still The Ultimate Goal

At 25, May Wilkerson would like a relationship, but not a family — not quite yet. She's lived a lot of places: Argentina, Canada and Paris. Wilkerson says she hasn't found much intimacy with the men she's encountered.

In New York City, where she moved two years ago, people seem even more emotionally detached, and she thinks it is because so many of the people who come to the big city are focused on success.

"For many of us, the requisite vulnerability and exposure that comes from being really intimate with someone in a committed sense is kind of threatening."

And the thought of being in love with someone, Wilkerson says, "is the most terrifying thing."

Yes, she has been in love, but the guy wasn't quite into it. There was one older guy who was serious; he used to bring her cupcakes. She couldn't work up an interest in him.

Today, Wilkerson says people hook up via the Internet and text messaging.

"What that means is that you have contact with many, many more people, but each of those relationships takes up a little bit less of your life. That fragmentation of the social world creates a lot of loneliness."

Hooking up started before the Internet and social networks, but the technology is extending the lifestyle way beyond the campus. Deborah Roffman says no one is offering this generation guidance on how to manage what is essentially a new stage in life.

The dilemma for this generation is how to learn about intimacy, she says: "How am I going to have a series of relationships that are going to be healthy for me and others, and going to prepare me" for settling down with one person?

Wilkerson doesn't really focus on the concerns of people like Roffman, who fear that hooking up doesn't bode well for the future of young people. She thinks young people will be able to sort it out for themselves.

"We all attended health class in middle school and high school. We know about condoms and sexually transmitted disease. Sex is fun, and a lot of people would argue that it is a physical need. It's a healthy activity."

The following article is by Douglas W. Phillips, Esq. I share his thoughts on the subject. What also strikes me on the subject is how the devil does not sleep. On Sunday, a pro-abortion doctor is killed by what the press will call a pro-life Christian. On Monday, military recruiters were killed by what appears to be a radical Muslim. The pagan and unthinking world will apply their standard logical fallacy of false analogy to the situations and conclude that religious people of any kind are cut from the same cloth. Devout Christians and the pro-life movement will suffer for the death of Dr. Tiller. May God deliver us from our enemies and our friends! 

Summary: For well over twenty years, the pro-life community has been exposing the evil deeds of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was regularly picketed over the years. Thousands came in the Summer of 1991 and were arrested outside his clinic. In 2001, on the ten-year anniversary of “The Summer of Mercy”, thousands again protested his abominable practice. His office was bombed once, and he was even shot in 1993 in both arms (his shooter remains in federal prison for attempted murder to this day). Tiller was also the defendant in a series of legal challenges intended to shut down his operations, including two grand juries that were convened after citizen-led petition drives. Through the course of all these means to shut down George Tiller (both lawful and those unlawful), he was never stopped. But yesterday, he was gunned down while serving as an usher in a Sunday-worship service at Reformation Lutheran Church.

“Tiller the Killer” is dead. Who will mourn for this man? Perhaps the bigger question is this: Who will mourn for the more than 60,000 babies that Dr. George Tiller brutally murdered in the most horrific manner imaginable over his lengthy career as America’s most notorious provider of late-term abortions?

The names of these babies are unknown. On the other hand, we do know what happened to the bodies of these children made in the image of God: “Tiller the Killer” would vivisect these children up to nine months into their lives; next, this professing Christian would baptize the mangled remains of the children he murdered; then, he would place their bodies into his Auschwitz-like crematorium; and, finally, he would take the ashen remains of these children and place them in an urn.

Tiller’s career was more horrifying than any horror movie ever produced, because there was nothing pretend about his bizarre and diabolical practices. On Sundays, George Tiller worshipped in his Lutheran Church where he served as usher. But on Monday through Friday, he chopped up children — and he did so in the name of Jesus. He even boasted about it. Because of Tiller, Wichita, Kansas became the destination of choice for women all over America to come and have Dr. Tiller take care of their “problem.” These are the facts.

And yet his death is tragic. It is not a tragedy that Tiller will never be a killer again. Will anyone argue that it is a tragedy that the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will never again be dishonored by this church-going Sweeney Todd of the medical profession?

The tragedy is two-fold: First, by breaking the law of God (murder) in order to advance the law of God (punishing a murderer), the shooter demonstrated that he was a lawless individual and that, whatever his motivations, his cause was unholy. He cannot expect the blessing of God on his efforts, but rather the contrary. God was certainly capable of shutting down George Tiller without private individuals breaking His law by taking matters into their own hands. The ends do not justify the means. Pragmatic responses to evil produces short term victories and long-term heartaches.

Second, Tiller’s executioner has played into the hands of the community of abortion apologists — those in the press and elsewhere who look for every opportunity to shift the debate away from the bloodshed of babies. These individuals are hell-bent to justify America’s idolatrous practice of child sacrifice to the gods of feminist self-determination, and the wrongful killing of an abortionists only furthers their cause.

Back in 2003 when Paul Hill was executed for killing Dr. John Britton (a noted abortionist in Florida), I offered the following on why vigilante justice in the cause of the unborn is immoral:

    The common law defense of justifiable homicide is derived from the case laws of Exodus which make clear that one may use lethal force if necessary in defense of self or others where imminent life-endangering harm is threatened and lethal force is necessary to prevent the crime. In addition, lethal force may be used in defense of country, or by the state against those criminals lawfully convicted of a capital offense.

    So where did Paul Hill go wrong? Practically speaking, Mr. Hill acted as executioner, not rescuer. Having determined that the abortionist in question was guilty of past murders, and would probably commit future murders, Paul Hill stalked, hunted and executed the abortionist. The problem here is that the biblical jurisdiction to execute rests only with the state. There is no provision in Scripture for vigilante justice.

    And what of Hill’s argument of justifiable homicide? Under biblical and common law, justifiable homicide in defense of others requires: (a) a clearly identifiable victim; (b) an aggressor who is presently engaged in a clear life-threatening act of violence against that specific victim; and (c) a reasonable determination that lethal force is necessary to prevent the specific life threatening act of the willful aggressor against the innocent party.

    Paul Hill failed each of these tests: Who was the victim here? We don’t know. In fact, we don’t even know for sure what the abortionist was going to do that day. We may presume he will be about the business of killing babies, but that is not sufficient to make a claim to justifiable homicide. Nor was the abortionist being stopped from a crime in progress. He was simply gunned down in his parking lot. Nor was Paul Hill rescuing a victim from an observable and specific criminal act. Nor must we conclude that executing him was the only way to stop this man from future acts of murder.

    Paul Hill lacked the jurisdiction to execute another. He never found himself in a circumstance which warranted justifiable homicide, as defined at biblical and common law. His was an act of premeditated murder, and for that God’s Word required his execution by the state.

For the cause of the pro-life movement to succeed, we need the blessing and favor of the Lord. Only this will win the day. And we cannot presume to have God’s blessing and favor unless we love the Lord with all of our hearts; unless we become men and women committed to his law-word revelation; and unless we recognize that judgment begins first in the house of the Lord.

This means that the millions of professing Christians who use abortifacient contraceptives need to humble themselves before the Lord and change their practices. It means that we must embrace a 100% pro-life apologetic, rejecting all forms of abortion and refusing to embrace “ends justifies the means” reasoning. It means that we need to be serious about not voting for individuals who sanction the murder of even one child. It means that we need to embrace a life-ethic which is different from the world — we must love life, love children, and embrace them as God’s gift.

Moreover, we must view the cause of Christ as more important than the pro-life movement. This means that our duty to obey Christ and to honor His name is more important than defeating abortion in America, as badly as we may desire that outcome.

I conclude with this thought: George Tiller is dead. For whom shall we mourn?

First, we mourn for the many children he murdered whose names will never make headline news, but whose murder were painful, violent, and bloody at the hands of this man. Second, we mourn for the future children who may be killed as a result of the way the pro-abortion movement will capitalize on this unlawful killing. Third, we mourn for a nation that has broken covenant with God, and that is deserving of God’s just wrath for its complicity in child sacrifice.

Finally, our mourning must lead us to prayer for the Church. God forbid that the blood of the innocent would be on our hands. If we would humble ourselves before the Lord and simply refuse to tolerate abortion in our own ranks, who knows what great things might be lawfully done, with God’s blessing, to bring murderers like George Tiller to an appropriate and earthly justice?