Let's pray and ask the Lord's blessing in our time. Our God, thank you for meeting with us in our worship service. And we love the means of grace. And now we ask that as we consider, as we really begin to consider the antidote to these things from your word, we pray that you will give us understanding, but also our Lord, let us be committed to solutions. We pray in the name of Christ, who is the answer to all of these things. Amen. Amen. Okay, we're in Chapter 6, and it's an interesting title. If you don't have the book, there's more copies over there. Again, thanks to Joe Matone for these. Interesting title, Plastic People and Liquid World. And I'm going to give you a quick summary of what Dr. Truman has, but then I want to begin dealing with the antidote today. Remember, last week was first part of the antidote. You may not have gotten it. But remember, folks, there's a self-destructive power of idolatry and evil and sin and foolishness. And it doesn't, if I could put it this way, it doesn't win in the long term. So rather than bemoaning all of these things, which is easy to do, say, Lord, thwart them, stop them. All right, so that's the first part of the antidote. We'll get to the second today. Okay, Sam, we're using the analogy of bad viruses. One of you reminded me the worst viruses are man-made ones, and so we're dealing with these man-made viruses, and we're also dealing with the antibodies to the virus. So I have a portion of one text today that's the framework for everything. Genesis 1 and verse 26, just the first part. Second part we'll deal with next week. Let us make man in our image. Let us make man in our image and after our likeness. And it's that word, this is not God speaking to angels. Angels didn't create anything. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are speaking with one another. And when it says, let us, make man in our image, that means that part of our imaging God in the world is to be in community. It's because God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are in communion and fellowship with one another. We are made for community, and I don't want to digress too much. But this was why when the government shut everything down, for how long a period of time you knew the kind of havoc this would wreak with people. Yes, some people got to be quarantined, no doubt, but people are made for community. So keep that in mind because it's going to come up a lot in this class. And also Genesis 1 to 3, dealing with God making man, making woman, that's next week, work and so on, marriage. These are all part, go together to be part of the antidote, going back to the way God made things. But anyway, today we're dealing with community. Okay, let's deal with plastic people. Last week we introduced the concept, you know, plastic, it's malleable, you can form it. And Dr. Truman, in this section, really has three headings. One, what is a person? Because, folks, our culture does not know how to define what a person is. It can't even define man and woman anymore, let alone what personhood is, okay? What is a person? And as Dr. Truman points out, we are more than that of which we are made. If you commit a crime and there's your DNA that's somehow on that person, they can connect you as the one that did it by your DNA. But DNA is not who you are. DNA is what you are, is a unique biological entity, but it's not who you are, okay? So who are we, all right? Well, on the one hand, and Nan touched on this last week, we are free and we are intentional. That's the big word today, intentional. Think about what you're doing, doing it intelligently, you hope, okay? And in that sense, we're not robots, folks. We know God is sovereign, but we're not marionettes. We have a liberty to operate in a certain way. In that sense, we're free and intentional, but We are also formed by our backgrounds, by our experiences, and by our surroundings. And you can't get away from that. We are with Greek background, Italian background, Russian background, Ukrainian background, the area in which you were brought up, rural or suburban or whatever it would be. These all influence the way we make decisions, okay? But in any case, we always want and need to be part of a group in which we are accepted and affirmed. We're made that way. A family, it's just unnatural if you sever yourself from your family. And when you're in a community of a union, for example, or you're in a fraternal organization, you function together. And we think like this, we incline to this, because we're made in God's image. So, are we free and intentional? Yes. Are we formed by our backgrounds and experiences? Yes. But in both cases, we want to be part of a community. And this is the kind of thing I mentioned last week. young people, and they still do, but in the 50s and the 60s, it was your hairstyle, your jeans, or whatever, and you wanted to be accepted by your peers. And what do you do? You end up following what they're doing, not being really free and intentional. But that's for another day. Now this next section is critical. In my opinion, this is probably the most important contribution Dr. Truman makes to understanding the strange new world. The politics of recognition. Normally you say, well, I'm part of a family, I'm part of a church, there's no politics involved. Uh-uh. We're dealing with huge political issues when we're dealing with marriage and with gender today. And that goes back to especially the influence of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich. They saw change in society as being driven by politics. Why? Because they didn't believe in God. And so what are the forces that change? Well, for them, and today, it's politics. And we all want to be recognized as part of a community, and that enters into politics, as you're going to find out next week and the week after. So, for example, we all want to be recognized as part of a community. Church. There's certain rules of recognition within a church. You profess faith in Christ, you follow Christ, and so on. You're part of that community. The nation or the state, the nation-state is a relatively new idea, you have standards of patriotism that we're supposed to follow to be part of a state. Or in families, standards of behavior, don't let your family down, don't become a blight on your family, so there's certain standards of behavior. Now these Well, we'll talk about technology in a moment. What a time for that. So these real communities, though, of church, nation-state, and families, are now challenged by imagined communities. We'll deal with that in a moment. taken to a whole new level by technology. And there's where the politics is going to come in, because you want a legalization of your imagined community. So we have real communities of family, state, and nation, and church. Now today, I can't overstate this, these real communities are being challenged by imagined communities, which is the title of a book actually, taken to a whole new level by technology. What's an imagined community? The phrase was coined by Benedict Anderson, who was a political scientist and historian. And basically he says this, until recently, There were cultural things. that brought about real community. Let me use patriotism for a minute. We learned, my country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, this land is my land, this land is your land, America the beautiful. We learned these things. And we have national holidays. We have Presidents Day. It used to be Washington's birthday, Lincoln's birthday, Martin Luther King Day. We have Veterans Day. We have Fourth of July. And those days and patriotic music and speeches, they helped to form a very real community that we know of as the United States of America. And now, in one sense, it is an imagined community because you don't know everybody in America, but you know this stuff. that binds it together. So in that sense, it is a real community and it's a way of thinking, okay? It's a way of thinking that comes with some authority. When you sing the national anthem at a baseball game, it evokes, I hope, it evokes feelings of patriotism and a renewed commitment and you take your hat off, you know, all those things, okay? So that's, and you can think of that in church life, you can think of it in your family life, right? Okay, so you hug your family members, you give them a kiss, and those things bond us, okay. So that's a real community. Today, with the explosion of media, at least two things are at work. There's a contesting of our former loyalties. Maybe your mom and dad abused you. The nation's not all it's cracked up to be. Churches, look at the scandal. And so you have a lot of contesting of these former loyalties driven by the media, and I'll give you an example of this in a moment, and then it's not only contesting what you've been loyal to, but it gives a multitude of other options in the media. Media's not bad, but we've just got to deal with the reality of it. Now let me give you an illustration. I would imagine most of you don't realize that when television came out in the 50s, television incidentally would have come out earlier, but the technology, we had the technology for it in the 30s, but all of that and the material went for the war effort. So after the war, and after the war in Korea, then people bought TVs. When television started, it was on for three hours. It was on from like eight o'clock at night till 11 o'clock, and I can still remember the signing off thing. And then television proliferated, and incidentally, the two most popular television programs, one was big-time wrestling, and number two was Milton Berle. Then, as television develops, you have three major networks. You have ABC, you have NBC, and you have CBS. That's where you got your news from. You had radio stations too, but in terms of television, you had three channels. You've got hundreds of cable TV channels, and then you've got the Internet along with it. They're not bad things, but think of what that does. You're no longer channeled into thinking the way Walter Cronkite tells you to think, or Huntley and Brinkley tell you to think, or Peter Jennings wants you to think, but you think the way you want. And you can pick whatever the media is that satisfies that desire, and that changes from media being a means of some kind of unity to media being a means of social warfare. Because you're, and this gets into a whole other area, when you're dealing with visual media, it plays on your emotions more. There's a difference between content by word and content by pictures. Not to say one's wrong and the other's right, but it plays on your emotions more. and you get very visceral, very gutsy about things. And so you've got the media normally that would be used to promote unity, now it's used to promote basically what's becoming a civil war in our country. And that's not too strong a statement. So Dr. Truman, says today everything from the former age with media has changed national narratives are no longer the means for social unity but have instead become battle zones, and it's very hard to be part of an imagined community when the nature of what is to be imagined is itself a primary source of division. But not only are the narratives of nations being contested, they're facing challenges from other narratives and other ways of being imagined communities. I'll give you an example, China. What's happening in China? You can't stop the Chinese people from getting internet. They've got connection with the outside world. And there's another community out there that challenges theirs. That would be an example of what we're talking about. A moment's reflection indicates this. Now listen carefully. The language of community is now routinely applied to categories that have little or nothing to do with nation or religion or family. There's the black community, the LGBTQ plus community, the Asian community, the disabled community, even, this was a new one on me, even the BDSM community. How would you like to be united in this? Bondage? Oh, I'm sorry, page 120 at the bottom. bondage, discipline, dominance, and submission, and sadomasochism. That's a community? Yeah, there are people, that's where they get their jollies. The use of the word community, top page 121, for these various groups indicates both the collapse of traditional notions of belonging and the rise of a vast and growing number of alternative ways of human beings imagining their relationship to those around them. When identity is grounded in psychology, that is, rather than family, nation, church, for example, and the internet allows for the indulgence of any and all means of thinking about that identity, the concept of community lacks any real solidity. That's liquid world. People can now pick and choose their communities, and that means that they can pick and choose their identities. And that pretty much nails what we're saying here. And he uses an illustration, and I thought of it. I pledged allegiance to ISIS on the internet. Pray tell, what on earth does that mean? I pledged allegiance to ISIS on the Internet. I mean, you're either with ISIS and fighting with them or not, but that's the idea. That's my identity, is with ISIS via the Internet. So it's no longer geography. But time and space have been transformed by the internet. Not just the internet, but the sheer volume of information that you have that bombards people. And here, it's interesting, Dr. Truman alludes to something Karl Marx said. This is where you get liquid world from. Karl Marx said in one of his writings, all that is solid seems continually to melt into air. And that is kind of what we're dealing with. So again, Dr. Truman, this is on page 123. The ability for a single narrative or a small handful of narratives to dominate the airwaves is long past. In this sense, we might argue that there is one unifying narrative that lies behind the diversity of competing narratives that are offered. It is that of, listen, the power of the individual to choose his or her identity. That's plastic people. No longer Are we presented with powerful fixed narratives such as that of nation, family, or even bodily sex? Now we are free to choose the narrative to which we wish to belong, the imagined community that will provide us with our identity and purpose. We can focus on these narratives that make us feel good and that confirm our chosen view of the world and ignore those that present challenges to this. And incidentally, P.S., this happens in church life. where people say, I don't want to listen to that doctrine, that sound doctrine. I don't like that. That bothers me to hear about God's sovereignty and sin. Give me a place where I don't hear that. Excuse me. That's exactly the problem here. I'm going to choose my narrative of what I want. And then, Dr. Truman, if the Reformation made religion a choice and represented a key move in placing the individual at the center of things, the Internet has extrapolated that to vast swaths of life. We can now choose our narratives and our communities more easily than previous generations chose clothes and shoes." Wow, what a statement. Okay, so that's basically plastic people and the introduction of liquid world. What's liquid world? Well, you've got plastic people, quote-unquote, who can make and remake themselves as they want. And you can do this on the internet. And you get this in Walt Disney's song. You can be anything you want to be. Excuse me, you can't be anything you want to be. I can't be God. So things like that. But so you have plastic people who can make and remake themselves as they wish in a world in which what was once solid has become constantly fluid and changing. And that, when I look over here at Ellie, see, that's a tremendous challenge for young people. Because it's like being on a merry-go-round that's going faster and faster and faster and faster. How do I get off this thing? So here's the liquid. The liquid is not family, church, nation, state, but race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, victimhood, oppressors, all right? That's the liquid that you people want to be in one of those things. But there's still the quest for recognition. You still go, we go back to that, God made us for community, through a constant connection People feel more affinity for someone or some group on sometimes another side of the globe, more than their own family or their church or their state. And I mentioned this in the sermon, people sitting down at a meal, when that would be a solidifying time for the family. and everybody, including mom and dad, are on their cell phones. Well, that's a picture of the liquid world that we're in, and who knows what's going on in their minds then. So it's no longer, we're almost to the end of this, no longer shared narratives, family, state, church, shared narratives that have historically given acceptance and recognition. Dr. Truman writes again, in the past, civil society was possible because whatever the differences that existed between citizens, there was a deeper narrative, a deeper sense of identity and community that all shared and that served to relativize such. Therefore, when an election was won by one party, Adherents of the other party respected the results because something deeper than party politics. The nation itself was strong enough to provide a sense of underlying unity. But as the elections of Donald Trump in 2016 and Joseph Biden in 2020, each of which was contested incidentally, have demonstrated, this is no longer the case. Modern American society is fragmenting because the imagined communities to which people choose to belong lack any shared narrative. And therefore the terms of recognition that one group wishes to see American society adopt are often antithetical to those of others. Now we're going to be getting into the politics of this later, not today. And this leads to further conflict because the very, listen carefully, the very existence of alternative narratives is a threat to a given community's identity. Example. Not throughout the educational establishment, but in much of it. And certainly in the prevailing leadership of modern public education. Parents are the enemy. The children are ours. We teach them, get out of the way. Whereas we say, excuse me, you got the shoe on the wrong foot. The children are not the state's, they're ours. But you see the conflict that's coming in school boards, you see the conflict that's going to affect legislation eventually. So there's a popular example of it. All right, so it's no longer the shared narrative, and that brings challenges to traditional freedoms, speech, religion, and business practices, and so many other things. Now, I want you to read, when you're home, Dr. Truman's conclusion. Let me just read pages 126. This is bottom of page 126. The conclusion is excellent in this chapter. Today, the self is entirely plastic, and the external world, right down to our bodies, is liquid, something that offers no firm ground upon which to build an identity. That, no doubt, helps to explain, for example, the catastrophic levels of depression and anxiety in the West, which, on the whole, enjoys greater material prosperity, excuse me, I've got coffee, excuse me, security, than has been typical throughout human history. Yes, we are wealthier and healthier than our ancestors in the 16th and even the mid-20th centuries. But listen to this, but we don't know who we are anymore. As terrifying as that is to contemplate, it seems undeniable we don't know who we are anymore. Jean-Paul Sartre 20th century philosopher, his comment that man is condemned to be free seems to capture something of our moment in time, for freedom without belonging is a grim burden to bear. Read the conclusion, it's powerful in the book. Again, let us make man in our image. Everybody has a quest for community. And now, because of proliferation of technology, people can imagine their communities. All right, let me wrap up. This is Antidote Part 2. Part 1 is the self-destructive power of evil and sin and foolishness and so on. Here's Antidote Part 2. Folks, the Church has And it is to proclaim the great narrative. Basic thing. People need a story out of which they live. And the Word of God gives us that story. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And he made man, male and female. And he made us in his image. And yes, there's a fall. But there's redemption in Christ. And there's redemption of people. And we're part of that. And there's a new heavens and new earth. That is the grand narrative. All right? And so the church has that. And we're to proclaim it. Now, listen carefully. This will always have compelling power because it is true and meets humanity's deepest need. Paul goes to Rome, and all the seeds of these things— I don't know so much about the Internet, but they had a highway system, but the information, superhighway, but Paul goes to the beast, to Rome. And I'm sure people would have told Paul, you're not going to best Caesar in Rome. Look at the power that he's got. Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's God's power unto salvation to all those who believe. And that's what, as I say, the church maintains. And it focuses on Christ and his work. So the church has and is to proclaim the great narrative, number two. in the world as a global, the church is in the world as a global village. And that's not a bad term actually, a global village. The transnational character of the church brings solidity to liquidity in the world. Let me say it again, in a world that's a global village, The transnational character of the Church brings solidity into a world of liquidity. What do I mean by that? They're real communities, folks. The Church isn't an imagined community. It's a real body of people. And so they're communities of people who are at peace with God through Christ. And so what does the Gospel do? Jews and Gentiles, or Muslims and Muslims and Jews, poor and the rich, they're brought together in Christ. And that is an antidote to the world's imagined communities that will never satisfy. And finally, antidote number two, if you want to just summarize it, let the church really be the church, folks. That's what this is. We talked about being salt and light, and we talked about the mission of the church, but the church is an organism. Let it be the church. What do I mean by that? Men and women who are transformed by grace. That's an antidote to the world. Men and women who are not ashamed of being men and women, but they're transformed by grace. Marriage that really displays Christ and the church. That's what the church is meant to be in a world that questions marriage. And sovereign grace that really rescues from sin and misery, where you can say, I know where you're coming from. Let me give you an example. I was thinking of this working with Jen Greenberg and domestic abuse and the number of women who are abused by their husbands. What's the attraction of lesbianism? A woman finds a compassion and a warmth and an empathy in another woman that she really ought to get from a man. And that helps you kind of rethink, not rethink your convictions, but rethink why it's so important that the church be the church, okay? So, we'll do a little bit more with this, but that's crucial. In imagined communities, you gotta have real communities, and the Lord's building that, okay? I went over, but y'all got here a little bit late, too, I'm sorry. I hope you know Penny Ann Matone. Hey, Penny Ann, need to know her. Did you help with the meal today? No, well, you can help eat it. You can have some of it. Okay, questions, comments, arguments? Debate, yeah, Joe. I don't know if you're following this story in the news right now about this. Well, that's one, but the other one is this guy who was a nuclear person in the U.S. government. Oh, yeah. It's the first time I heard that term. When he said, this guy's totally confused. He's non-binary, but he says, My being is fluid, exactly what he says. It's a common, it's actually a common term. Fluid can be a solid. It was the first time I heard that term used, but you just. Yeah, well plastic is another one that's very common. You know that people, they're not grounded in anything. They're fluid, they're fluid. You get a sponge. You're almost an antidote, the antidote three. Okay, you got to be grounded in truth. Okay, but we'll come to that. Other things? I thought you were going to refer to the fellow, I'm going to say he's a wacko. I don't care if he's got a PhD or not. The best thing that we can do for the planet is die. No, really. Don't reproduce, just die. Until all human beings die, and then the planet will be fine. Oh my God. And, yeah. Anyway. That's not God's vision. No, it isn't. No, he's not saying. No, I'm not saying it is. I'm saying bad news. This is insanity. Okay, anything else? Alrighty. Mr. Toto, would you mind leading us in prayer and asking the Lord's blessing on the food? Mr. Matone, what have we got today? Kale, abaca, chicken franchise. All right, there you go. Paul, why don't you lead us in prayer? Oh, Father, we thank you so much for this day to worship with you and to be among our Christian brothers and sisters. And to hear the word, we just thank you that we are not fluid, we are seating on the floor. And we just thank you for the renewal that we've had today. Amen. Thank you, Lord. Joe for providing it for us, and we just ask that you bless it to our use as we go out into this world and spread your word. Amen. Amen and amen.