I recently ran across an article in the journal Psychological Science called “The False-Hope Syndrome: Unfulfilled Expectations of Self-Change.” In it, Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman describe the cycle of failure when we give ourselves unrealistic expectations, faulty self-assessments, and inadequate tools for self-change. 

It says, “Why do people persist in attempting to change themselves, despite repeated failure? Self-change is often perceived as unrealistically easy to achieve, in an unreasonably short period of time…embarking on self-change attempts induces feelings of control and optimism that supersede the lessons of prior experience…Some sorts of self-change are feasible, but we must learn to distinguish between realistic and unrealistic self-change goals, between confidence and overconfidence. Overconfidence breeds false hope.”

Every person sitting here in this room is here because they believe that they can change.  Either presently or at some point in the past, we have been unhappy with some defect in our character, some prior action that we are ashamed of that we want forgiveness for, maybe some present habit that we want freedom from. The gospel call has come to us with the great hope of transformation. For some, it was the words, “believe and you shall be saved.” For others, it was “keep the law and you shall be saved.” But fast change often doesn’t last very long, and I’ve been left with the lingering question, do we have a realistic understanding of how rare lasting change can be? 

While statistics vary, one study shows that 85% of addicts in recovery relapse in the first year. Some of the reasons they discovered were 1. Withdrawal. Withdrawal symptoms include cold sweats, restlessness, vomiting, insomnia, and a general feeling of unwellness that can last from 6 to 18 months depending on their frequency of prior use.  2. Mental health. Often, the addictions themselves are not the problem, but the underlying problems are anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. 3. People. Whatever your choice of addiction, you will likely surround yourself with like-minded people who enjoy the same things and keep you in this cycle, making it difficult to be sober. 4. Places. A person’s habitat is based on their habit. A person struggling with addiction has to change the places they frequent that will likely cause them to be triggered. 5. Things. This could be items like wine glasses clinking, a show, or a game that reminds us of a past life. 6. Poor self-care. Poor self-care sends the message that your well-being is not important, and consequently, you are not important. This includes things like diet that can affect mood and this can trigger a relapse. Others include 7. Getting into relationships and intimacy too soon in ways that mask the real issues that need to be dealt with, . 8. Pride and Overconfidence, 9. Boredom and Isolation, and finally 10. Uncomfortable Emotions.  

So what distinguishes the gospel from another self-help message? This is a question I’ve been asking myself since the pandemic. This introverted and reflective period of time has allowed me to watch myself in ways I haven’t previously. Patterns of myself, cycles of my being. Sometimes the problems we seek to solve are unable to be solved because we’ve misdiagnosed the problem. “Thus says the Lord concerning Shemaiah the Nehelemite… Shemaiah has prophesied unto you, and I have not sent him, and caused you to trust in a lie.”

This is how Jeremiah 29 ends, with God having to correct the words of a prophet who gave a false diagnosis to Judah. This false prophet, along with another false prophet in the previous chapter Hananiah, were prophesying to Judah that their time in captivity would be relatively short. Hananiah boldly proclaimed, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying, I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two full years will I bring again into this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place.” (Jeremiah 28:2-3). Five months later, this prophet died. In the following chapter Jeremiah sends these words to Babylon, letting the exiles know that their time in Babylon shall indeed be very long, seventy years to be exact. It came with this warning, “let not your prophets and your diviners…deceive you….for they prophesy falsely in my name...after seventy years have come to pass at Babylon, I will visit you, and perform my good word towards you.” (Jeremiah 29:8-10). Their time in Babylon was not going to be 2 years, but 70, an entire lifetime. The false prophets predicted fast change, and they were sorely mistaken.

The first step in any addiction recovery is to admit the truth. Now many of you sitting here might not struggle with alcohol dependency, so I hope we can take these principles and draw from them what applies in our own life. In the twelve step program for Alcoholics Anonymous this truth is “1. We admit we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.” When the disciples questioned Jesus saying, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus replied, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” (John 14:5-6). If we’re looking to follow the Master, if we’re looking to find Jesus, we know where to find Him, we find Him wherever truth is allowed to shine.  We follow Him when we follow after the truth.

When reading passages like Jeremiah 29, there is a temptation to read prophecy and focus on the numbers and the correlation to time. The seventy years might have to do with seventy weeks in Daniel 9 beginning at the building and restoration of Jerusalem, etc. One key experience that can get lost in this pure approach of numbers, is what the sentence of 70 years actually meant for the people who were living through the experience of an exile that would last a lifetime. 

Some events in life are life-changing. They alter the course of our reality for the rest of our lives. There are traumas in life of which there is no bouncing back. There are parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, and those who have endured physical and emotional injuries that are lifelong. There are diseases and cancers that erode an individual, and rob them of strength until their dying breath. There are some captivities that we do not recover from. Some losses, which we experience, no amount of time can assuage the grief. It is a sadness we carry with us to the grave, like the loss of a child. Captivities of this nature are essentially permanent. This life will pass and we will die in our captivity. So what do we do? What do we do with the permanent grief we carry with us? With the life long injuries that forever affect and change the course of our futures? 

The first step, like any step to recovery, is to admit the truth. As Jeremiah 29:28 says, “your exile will be long.” Yahweh does not offer false hope to the exiles. They will spend the rest of their lives in exile. They will die in a foreign land. This kind of truth telling is also something that is also important for our transformation. While, I often seek to avoid labels, I’ve started to doubt whether or not I’m doing myself a service when I use language that disconnects me from the former versions of myself. Phrases like, “I’m a new person,” or “I’m no longer that person” or “I’ve been made new.” While yes, it is important to celebrate our victories, and acknowledge our progress and successes, I don’t want to lie to myself by creating a narrative that doesn’t keep me accountable to all the versions of myself that I have been, and the challenges that I will have to continually acknowledge as I embark upon this journey of self-transformation. ...

The Mark of Cain

By Kendra Arsenault

“16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” (Revelation 13:15-17).

I recently moved to a city that still has “Blue Laws” in place. This is particularly interesting to me because Blue laws show the history of a city and the history of its values. It’s also something I’ve often heard talked about in sermons regarding future Sunday laws. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with what a “Blue Law” is it’s a law that was created back in colonial times and still stands today, but is not enforced. The fear surrounding “Blue Laws” is that the laws that prohibited work on Sunday back in the early 1900s will be reinforced at the end of time since they’re still technically a law. While on a city tour a few weeks ago, the tour guide shared with us some of the more unknown blue laws that are still on the books today. Some of these would be quite interesting if they were brought back.

1. Duels can be carried out to the death on Sunday as long as the governor is present.
2. It is illegal to take a lion to the movies. (This particular law was created due to this eccentric and wildly wealthy woman who apparently, before the days of wild animal regulations, would bring her pet lion to the movies.)
3. It’s illegal to play the fiddle (this may have been an attempt to systematically remove the homeless and other beggars and poor from the city). 
4. It is illegal to bathe unless your doctor gives you a prescription. BUT, it’s also illegal not to bathe before going to bed.
5. Roosters may not go into bakeries.
6. It is illegal to eat peanuts in church.

Aside from some of these quirky laws, we learned about the history of how the city treated convicted criminals. During Revolutionary times when America was struggling for independence from England, there was a particular pardon called, the “Benefit of Clergy,” which allowed members of the church to be tried by their parish rather than by the state and thus escape the death penalty. In exchange, they would receive a branding on their thumbs. This branding included a T for theft, an F for felony, and M for murder. This was a one-time branding. If they were convicted again, they would receive the full penalty for their crime. This branding often made them unemployable tho and turned them into homeless wanderers, often dependent upon the kindness of family and friends for food and shelter, or working laborious jobs that no one else wanted. To be branded with this mark ensured that you would live a hard life.

This branding for the criminals of old, reminded me of a similar story in the Bible, where God branded a murderer rather than give him the death penalty. This branding sentenced this murderer to a life of wandering and reflection. This branding is the Mark of Cain.

The mark of the beast is often spoken of as a terrifying branding that will be forced upon the faithful if they’re not so very careful. Maybe it’s an implanted chip or a change made to our DNA through a vaccine, but whatever it is, it’s always this external force that we must be vigilant to guard against. It’s a principle in exegesis to return to first mentions in order to gather more insight on how a mysterious term might be used in different parts of Scripture. The first mention of a mark, is the mark given to Cain.  And it was not a mark forced upon him in his innocence. It was not a mark that he received because he lacked discernment or did not watch carefully what was happening in the world around him. It was a revelatory mark, a mark that revealed a hidden secret, his very real guilt, the guilt of bloodshed. 

When I think about the Mark of Cain, I see it as the mark of violence. October is Domestic Violence Awareness month and I thought it would be appropriate for us to discuss how violence shows up in prophecy. The mark of the beast is not something external that is placed upon the innocent thus turning them evil. It is a mark that reveals what is already in the heart. And as wide as the gap between Cain and Abel, there is a crying contrast between those who earn the Mark of Cain, and the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. 

In contrast to those who bear the mark, Revelation goes on to describe another kind of people saying,  “Then I saw the Lamb standing on Mount Zion, and with him were 144,000 who had His name and his Father's name written on their foreheads.” (Revelation 14:1). 

Jesus is spoken of in contrast to the beast, as a Lamb. His followers, bear His mark. The mark of Abel. The mark of being slain, the mark of those victimized by the Cains of this world. Jesus in so many ways, is our example, a model after whom we pattern our lives. But Jesus is more than that, He is savior, a Savior from ourselves. 

“David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin,  surveyed 5,000 people for his book, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill, and found that 91% of men and 84% of women had thought about killing someone, often with very specific hypothetical victims and methods in mind. Though we may like to think that murderers are either pathological misfits or hardened criminals, as author David Buss highlights, the vast majority of murders are committed by people who, until the day they kill, seem perfectly normal.”

Now this book goes on to highlight the ways our brains have been wired to deal with perceived danger and that at times, our brains misfire. The rage we experience in a traffic jam or when someone says something cruel and injurious to our ego and we go red with rage, all of this a misfire since there is no real existential threat of danger, no, kill or be killed scenario happening. And yet violence is incredibly accessible for us. 

October is Domestic violence awareness month, and Domestic violence statistics since the pandemic have risen. Families have been under incredible amounts of stress since the pandemic, financial stress, the loss of family members, where one or both financial providers have been fired from work. There have been lots to be angry about. Mallory Littlejohn, Legal Director, Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation paints this picture.  "It's a really horrible situation. Imagine needing to wake up in the morning, go to work, take care of your kids, because they're homeschooling, [but] you're working from home and so was your abuser." Data obtained from the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline received 28,749 calls for help in 2020. That's a 16% increase from the previous year and at its busiest, the hotline received almost 150 calls in one day.”

This is a single hotline number, in a single state. 30,000 calls that year. Multiply that by 10 states, by 50. Violence is its own epidemic and it is rising. But there is a beacon of hope in it all.

Jesus is called “Immanuel” God with us. The book of Revelation ends with the declaration, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:3). Jesus is the ultimate pattern of what it means to dwell well with other people. He has lived with contentious, judgmental, even violent dome...

 Every since I was a young girl, I have often had dreams that predict something in the future. It’s never a significant something. Sometime’s it’s an old friend that I haven’t connected to in a while, who calls me the next day out of the blue. Other times it’s an odd piece of clothing that I recognize from a dream I had the night before. Once I dreamed of a friend in tears, who I found out the next day her grandmother had just passed away. At this point, I think it’s a pretty universal experience to have one of those moments where a person calls or texts you and you say to yourself, “I was just thinking about that person!” I don’t believe my dreams are prophetic in the way that we see prophecy working in the Bible. But I do think there is something mysterious about the fabric that connects us all. Like the gravitational mesh that holds the earth in the middle of space, a mesh that is affected by the presence of earth and changes shape because of it, there seems to be a mesh of spiritual gravity that connects all of us. Maybe it’s the thing we call “intuition” or a “sixth sense.” So many of us, due to the busyness of life, become numb to our bodies, and the inner voice of truth that speaks in the silence of stillness. It is the still small voice that tells us uncomfortable truths.

 Recently I had a dream, which is sometimes my body’s way of telling me things that I do not want to hear. In this dream, I was in a rainy marsh in the middle of no distinct place. There were various animals around in the greenery, many taking shelter because of the rain. A family of finches sheltered in a bush; a mom and several babies puffing their bodies and fluffing their feathers to keep the rain from soaking into their coats. Suddenly, I see a lost little duckling, soaking wet and dragging its little feet on the muddy ground. It was all alone. Tired, hungry, and lost. The little duckling was trying to drink from the muddy waters beneath his feet, and began to get sicker the more he drank from the contaminated streams. My compassion went out to this little duckling and I gathered his little body into my arms and brought him to a nearby pool. The water was cleaner. Immediately he took a drink and life began to be restored to his weary little body. He began swimming after the tiny crawfish that darted beneath him. Suddenly he got stuck in the sand below and soon would drown without my help. I quickly dug him out of the sand and brought him back to the surface. But now I was worried. How would this little duckling be able to survive on his own? I turned my back for just a moment and death was close at his heels. I gathered him into my arms once again, and this time as I did so, something strange happened, as in dreams they often do. I could see him trying to contort his little body into the shape of a finch. Like the family of finches we had seen earlier--he was trying to be like one of the little ones. He not only wanted, but needed to be accepted into this family of finches in order to survive. Afterall he was all alone. But in order to survive, he had to make changes that were painful to him and deceitful to himself. He had to become something he was not, in order for others to love him. My heart grew deeply sad as I watched this duckling change his shape. Something about him deeply resonated with myself and how I operated in the world. 

 We are not a species that can survive in isolation. We must have community. As someone who was born of an afro-latina immigrant mother, I come from a long history of women, people groups, who often have to contort themselves in ways that are painful and destructive in order to find acceptance in the struggle for survival. I began to ask myself, “What ways have you molded yourself and contorted your identity for the sake of survival? What Bible characters can you think of that needed to do the same?”

For starters, I’d venture to say, most of all the women. Living in a patriarchal society, women lived and still do live at a disadvantage. This disadvantage forces them to accept norms, and double standards, that they would not have to accept, if they were truly equal.

I was recently scrolling through my Twitter feed, and read this quote from @_bryana_joy, another woman who is tired of the gendered discrimination that women often face at the hands of religious leaders. She wrote, “I want @garyLthomas (& @Zondervan!) to know that for an untold number of women, his words in Married Sex are triggering trauma responses & great anguish this week. We. are. tired. We are so, SO tired of being told that men desperately need sex & we don't. We are SO tired of being told that our bodies have an almost-mystical power over men & that we need to use our sexuality strategically to retain our husbands' affection. We are so tired of being treated like a separate species primarily defined by our sex appeal. I want @garyLthomas to know what it's like to be a woman suffering with vaginismus/dyspareunia & forcing herself through agonizing pain & hours of dilator therapy every week in sheer terror that the man she loves will leave her if she can't fulfill his sexual expectations...I want @garyLthomas to recognize that scaring women into performing sexually by threatening them with the collapse of their marriages leads to serious trauma, insecurity, & an inability to trust their husbands—even when their husbands *aren't* raging sex machines.” 

Women. Are. Tired. Tired of the contortions that are unnatural to themselves, that are forced upon them by institutions claiming to know God. As a woman, I can concur, we are tired. All throughout the Bible we have seen the effects of inequality, but have normalized as some idealized form of “the way the world should work.” In the story of Abraham and Sarah, if inequality were not at works, she would not have to accept being taken to the house of Pharaoh. Hagar would not have to accept being treated like cattle serving no greater function than to bear a child. Leah would not be forced to remain in a marriage where she was unloved and unwanted. Jochebed would not have to settle for being merely a wet nurse to her own child. Ruth would not have to beg for the hand of an older man, nor Esther contend for the affection of the king among his many wives. 

These stories that make up our sacred history, do not reflect the ideals of God, but rather the effects of sin. The ideals of God can be found however, in day He had created to set aside as a tool to cut through the systems of men, and create an ideal of equality. This day was a foretaste of the New Earth, a moment where the chains of gender inequality, racial inequality, and the nationalism that fueled bigotry against the immigrants would be broken. A day where the covenant of marriage and the equity of one’s wealth was not shared merely between spousal parties. It is a day where all humanity is tied together in a common marriage, the Sabbath. 

The Sabbath, which has often been the marker of what makes an Adventist an Adventist, was the first piece of scripture that I had ever memorized. Little did I realize how much wisdom was packed into this little passage of sacred text. Coming from an agostic home, but joining a community of Adventists when I was twelve the first verse I ever learned to memorize was Exodus 20:8-11 in the KJV.  “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days thou shalt labor and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work. Thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle...