A Double Heart And A Forked Tongue

Devotional for Sunday, December 28, 1997 by Ken Stright

Friends, freedom is not the right to act like the devil or destroy the fabric of society, which, in most democracies, is considered to include the greatest good for the greatest number of people. VLTs, massage parlours, gambling, and drinking to excess are simply symptoms of a sick and sinful society that has no concept of how to control its own lustful appetite, and has even less of a clue how to help the poor and powerless and homeless and helpless and other victims of such a society.

There is a flip side to wanton living. (I love that word wanton. It takes the bite away from what I really mean. I mean evil living.) The flip side of wanton living is what happens to the poorest sectors of society. The prophets denounced the society their people lived in, not only for the wealth of the few with their pursuits of pleasure but also for how the poor, the orphaned and the widowed were treated by such a society. The Psalmist is crying out about evil days and evil ways, about wagging tongues and evil-speaking in high places and lies becoming the norm and people speaking with a double heart (or as North American native folks were quoted as saying about whites and the treaties they made, "they speak with a forked tongue," which means saying two things at once and probably meaning neither of them).

Prayer: God, help us say what we mean and mean what we say and seek to serve to the best of our ability, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Ken Stright <kennethstright@yahoo.ca>
Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia, Canada

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