I have some news for you. You will be forgotten. In a hundred years, your name will not be remembered: you will no longer be a parent, a grandparent or a great-grandparent. You will be a name that has to be discovered by genealogists. The ephemeral of your life — your flickr photos, the job you did, the work that you did, the prizes you won — will be naught.
This world considers you disposable, and the people it honours are random. But even if you are a celebrity now, you will be a footnote in 100 years: hardly anyone talks today about Clara Bow , and the same fate will happen to the reality stars of this period.

Fashions fade, and the issues of each day will not bother the next generation. The group that is not triumphant will not be in fen years. And it matters more that you have wisdom and integrity, than if this world praises you. In fact, the way to bet is that praise you will not get.

Ecclesiastes 9:11-18

¹¹Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all. ¹²For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them.

¹³I have also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed important to me. ¹⁴There was a little city with few people in it. A great king came against it and besieged it, building great siege-works against it. ¹⁵Now there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man. ¹⁶So I said, “Wisdom is better than might; yet the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heeded.” ¹⁷The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouting of a ruler among fools. ¹⁸Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one bungler destroys much good.

Now the second passage today refers to a controversy that this age does not have. We do not have a problem with legalism, but with tolerating licence. And we are no longer under the regulations of religious law, but under a greater law. For the law of love is terrible. It requires that we have empathy with all others, and work graciously with all others.

But empathy hurts. I once wandered around Kings Cross (this was many years ago, with my (then) wife: we got off the underground and were trying to find the Hard Rock Cafe, (which was a mistake — Crap food, bad trivia). And the sex workers were out, with their cute bodies and dead eyes. Unfortunately, I have empathy and I can’t switch it off — which makes me immune to street workers but not other forms of game.

Paul’s argument here about slavery is around restricting our life by regulations. If rely on regulations or standards to be righteous, you will fail. For by your own standards you will be judged, and that judgement you will fail.

Galatians 5:1-15

¹For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

²Listen! I, Paul, am telling you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. ³Once again I testify to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obliged to obey the entire law. ⁴You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. ⁵For through the Spirit, by faith, we eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. ⁶For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.

⁷You were running well; who prevented you from obeying the truth? ⁸Such persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. ⁹A little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough. ¹⁰I am confident about you in the Lord that you will not think otherwise. But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty. ¹¹But my friends, why am I still being persecuted if I am still preaching circumcision? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed. ¹²I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!

¹³For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. ¹⁴For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁵If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

Now, we may be saved. We may talk about the fact this is the work of Christ, and not our own doing. However, we still have to deal with the consequences of our actions: we still have to deal with disease and disability, and we need to understand that some restrictions and rules within society make it stronger. The current fashions are damaging: there is no question that marital stability matters. For Children. But it is the reality of a marriage — which involves men having to care for women who at times drive them crazy, and women choosing to respect and submit to men who at times are quite foolish — is not just a name, as marriage is not just a marriage ceremony. It is not merely a chance for a wonderful demonstration of a woman’s inherent bridezilla tendencies. It is not the map that counts, nor the word, but the reality.

One of the reasons gay marriage enjoys increasing support is because it doesn’t appear to harm anyone. The only threat, is seems, comes from those who defend traditional marriage and wish to force their morality on others. Our culture is fickle. It says “live and let live” when it comes to the most powerful human bonds and the most enduring institutions, but it insists on protecting the “other” with fundamentalist zeal when it comes to trans fat, cigarettes, and carbon emissions.

The unspoken secret, however, is that homosexual behavior is not harmless. Homosexuals are at a far greater risk for diseases like syphilis, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, gonorrhea, HPV, and gay bowel syndrome. The high rate of these diseases is due both to widespread promiscuity in the gay community and the nature of anal and oral intercourse itself. Homosexual relationships are usually portrayed as a slight variation on the traditional “norm” of husband-wife monogamy. But monogamy is much less common among homosexual relationships, and even for those who value monogamy the definition of fidelity is much looser.

Gay marriage will also be harmful for our society. We must consider why the state has, for all these years, bothered to recognize marriage in the first place. What’s the big deal? Why not let people have whatever relationships they choose and call it whatever they want? Why go to the trouble of sanctioning a specific relationship and giving it a unique legal standing? The reason is because the state has an interest in promoting the familial arrangement which has a mother and a father raising the children that came from their union. The state has been in the marriage business for the common good and for the well-being of the society it is supposed to protect. Kids do better with a mom and a dad. Communities do better when husbands and wives stay together. Hundreds of studies confirm both of these statements (though we all can think of individual exceptions I’m sure). Gay marriage assumes that marriage is re-definable and the moving parts replaceable.

By recognizing gay unions as marriage, just like the husband-wife relationship we’ve always called marriage, the state is engaging in (or at least codifying) a massive re-engineering of our social life. It assumes the indistinguishability of gender in parenting, the relative unimportance of procreation in marriage, and the near infinite flexibility as to what sorts of structures and habits lead to human flourishing.

It may seem Neanderthal to think the state should not confer the rights and privileges of “marriage” upon whomever it chooses by whatever definition it pleases, but give it time. Experiments in sexual freedom have a tendency to blow up in the laboratory of real life. Would anyone say the family is stronger today because of the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce laws? Human nature and divine design are not set aside as easily as our laws and traditions.

Now, we should not merely beat up teh gayz. Far too easy a topic. But instead we need to look at the heterosexual hell modern feminism has made of marriage. The inherent move from the power structure of patriarchy that falls out of an agricultural existence (if not hunter-gatherer life) is hard-wired into out lizard brain, and runs our natural tendencies of attraction. We have forgotten history.

My comment was directed less at material and more at “moral progress” the sense that We Today Know Better. It’s the tendency to look at the past as inherently benighted because, well, because it was the past and owing to “progress,” the present always knows more than the past. Knowledge, not to say wisdom, is cumulative and the longer the human race “evolves,” the smarter we become, the more knowledgeable, the more sophisticated, etc. This applies no less to moral and political things than to technology and science. In the past there was ignorance and superstition. The present knows better.

As to the first, I know you are right. BUT—I don’t detect a great awareness of it among the younger generation or anyone else. Now, the young people I am around are basically already “winners”, hence selection bias. They have their prestige educations and have jobs and have begun careers and so they don’t see any reason to fret. But, also, a few times a year I teach seminars to young kids either just of out of undergrad or going through grad school. The show the same level of imperturbable confidence that it’s all going to be fine for them when, by the numbers, that can’t be true for all of them. The ones who want to go into academia, my friends and I actively try to knock some fear/sense into, since it’s almost certainly not going to work out for most of them. But they all seem to think “I’m the exception.”

As to the second point, from what I can tell, the entire millennial generation, and even Gen Y and probably Gen X, all believe that our time is morally superior to the past. To them the past is just a garbage heap of homophobia, racism, misogyny, colonialism, jingoism, superstition, the whole litany. In all these respects and many others we have—they firmly believe—made “progress.” So, even if the economy is bad right now, well, what’s that compared to progress and justice?

This is explains, at least in part, why the younger generation—even with the sky-high public and private debt and dismal job prospects and all the rest—is so solidly liberal. The “Rat Choice” conceit that people always vote their narrow economic interests is patently false. Younger people today vote “social issues” as a way of signaling that they are not losers (no matter their jobless status) but that they are part of the in-crowd because they think like the in-crowd. They are “with it.”

I am not sure. It may be because I was once young and thought I knew everything and that the “gummint” would provide social justice. Provided I stayed in the union and voted Labour. (In those days, being in the union was compulsory, voting in strikes was enforced by hard men watching open hand ballots — but I did not vote for the union oppressors, even though I did not like the tyrant we had running the country, who left the place bankrupt). I deal with young people who believe the current pretty lies: and I know that those lies have changed during my life.

But the fundamental nature of humanity has not.

[Lizard brain? Neanderthal? Well, yes. Because we have not evolved that much. The next generation is made up of those who procreate. Which is another reason why teh gayz marrying ain’t smart. The older version, when it was called taking a mistress or lover and a form of adultery had the virtue of ensuring that most people did procreate].

We have a duty to do good. We have a duty to advise. We should refrain from doing evil. We need to rely on the grace of God, who gave us freedom from bein compelled into regulation and sin. But this world is fallen, and we live with the consequences of not merely our wrongdoing, but that of our society. The further we stray from the reality principle, the worse we do.

And the less likely it is that the wise will be praised, but instead they will be mocked.
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Update

Brother Aaron (you can take a preacher’s kid out of the church, but he’s still a preacher) has some wisdom for the younger people who think they have it all together. The fact he’s a good 30 years younger than me makes me quietly giggle.