Out and About 18 Say What Again? Yes, Now It's Sexism

[HKHaugan]

Out and About 18  Say What Again?  Yes, Now It’s Sexism

 

Here we go again.  Sexism.  Another one of those weapon words.  This one is designed to penetrate the heart and induce self-doubt, guilt and condemnation.  It immediately sounds and is accusatory.  It comes from the quiver of ‘ism’ arrows intended to penetrate a person’s self-concept and categorize people.  Take a suspected offense, aim it at a suspect and fire away.  So all men are prejudiced and discriminatory toward all women.  It implies that being a man by nature means anti-female just as ‘racism’ maintains that physiology determines prejudice.  It’s strange the opposite is seldom heard.  Any way it’s just another part of the spirit of paranoia that grips the mind when it loses its God-centeredness.  This is just another reminder of satan’s four-fold plan of separation---first, doubt God’s Word, second, doubt God, third, think and act apart from God and fourth, get someone else involved  (Gen.3:1-7).

 

Before we get into ‘sexism’, which we will get into in detail in the next segment, let’s take a moment and consider what ‘isms’ are.  Words originate as a way to describe an area of human activity.  In our time pompous purveyors of profundity in self-impressed thinking are hard at work making up words to maintain their angry self-induced frustrations.  Take the following words and ideas---race, sex, religion, economics, society, culture, male, female, liberal, conservative, Catholic, Protestant, Anglican or any denomination and add ‘ism’ to them or some form of them.    As soon as ‘ism’ is tacked on they become separators, dividers, isolators that attempt either to preserve what is believed to be a truth or launch an accusatory attack.  As disciples of Jesus we need to be aware of words.  As Scripture says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding (Prov.3:5).”  It’s up to each of us to determine the spiritual attitude conveying what is being said and the spiritual dimension from which it comes. 

 

Again, here is the personal subtlety of sin at work.  ‘Isms’ are strictly man’s invention to describe a concept that gives me in my individual aloneness personal control in how I see the world.  It’s a system of thought I develop, or learn from someone else, in order to gain control and justify myself in any given moment when I need to make a choice.  “Now that I have a word for it I can apply it whenever I need ‘to be or not to be’ in any situation.”  It gives me or someone else an identity I can categorize and accept or reject.  As soon as I do that people are no longer people they are categories, impersonal entities I can either include as acceptable or target for rejection in my personal world.  “These are my kinda people” or “They ain’t like us.” This is how sin isolates us and we in essence become our own gods fulfilling William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’ in which he shakes his verbal fist at God and existence and angrily declares, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”  Say what?

 

Add to this the need that comes from sin to develop my own morality apart from God.  I assume personal perfection or someone else’s and excuse error in judgment as part of my learning process being ‘trial and error’, the perfect learning system?  Say what?   Without God I become the one who sets the standards for right and wrong in spite of my own inconsistency.  But I need to establish how others fit in.  This is where ‘isms’ are the easy way out and in.  while bathing in the denial of my own imperfection I can, with one ism, dismiss whole groups of people based on their physical appearance, nationality, culture, religion and political affiliation.  In one mental moment I can rise above humanity and the universe itself declaring my divinity.  Say what?

 

Paul really got it right when he said,

“Basically, all of us, whether insiders or outsiders, start out in identical conditions, which is to say that we all start out as sinners. Scripture leaves no doubt about it: 
   There's nobody living right, not even one, 
      nobody who knows the score, nobody alert for God. 
   They've all taken the wrong turn; 
      they've all wandered down blind alleys. 
   No one's living right; 
      I can't find a single one. 
   Their throats are gaping graves, 
      their tongues slick as mudslides. 
   Every word they speak is tinged with poison. 
      They open their mouths and pollute the air. 
   They race for the honor of sinner-of-the-year, 
      litter the land with heartbreak and ruin, 
   Don't know the first thing about living with others. 
      They never give God the time of day.
This makes it clear, doesn't it, that whatever is written in these Scriptures is not what God says about others but to us to whom these Scriptures were addressed in the first place! And it's clear enough, isn't it, that we're sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else? Our involvement with God's revelation doesn't put us right with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else's sin (Rom.3:9-18 The Message).

 

The next segment on sexism gets us into more spiritual reality.  Just ask, ‘Say what?’