Let's play a word association game--what words come to your mind when I say, "Miley Cryus?" How about, "outrageous," "vexatious," "galling," or "insufferable?" She may be all of those things in your mind, but there's something that she's doing to our society, along with a lot of other people.
There's a age-old question, "Does life imitate art?" or, "Does art imitate life?" Let's think about that for a while.
Celebrities compose part of the artists-elites of our society. They shout at us from their movies and the grocery store magazine covers. Their words and deeds carry a message.
Their language consists of grade school grammar (if that advanced). Just listen to almost any interview with a college or professional athlete and you'll hear double negatives abounding along with multiples of "ain't." They have no clue as to how to construct a proper sentence in English.
What's amazing in all of this is that when they're quoted in newspapers and magazines such as "Sports Illustrated," the editors don't correct the horrendous grammar or vulgar language for publication so, if our heroes talk that way, why can't we?
In the summer of 1946, a group of Missouri school teachers complained to the Federal Trade Commission that Dizzy Dean's broadcasts were "replete with errors in grammar and syntax, and were having a bad effect o the pupils." ("He slud into second base!") We hear no such outcry today. Dizzy is a linguist compared to today's athletes.
When we look at the lives of the artists-elites of our society, we see lives that are a mess. They wreak havoc everywhere they go. It seems their mission is to shock us; at least it gets there names in the paper.
Our society likes to see what the celebrities are (almost) wearing as they hang on their every word. These celebrities, these serial monogamists who run through one marriage after another as often as they change their socks, their child custody cases, their scrapes with the law, their fights, their overdoses, and their DUIs, these elites have no problem appearing before us every four years to tell us for whom we should vote, as if we should listen to them.
But what they're doing to our society is far more dangerous; they are giving permission--they're giving us permission to use their language and to live as they do morally. After all, we hear their language on the big screen. We see their portrayal of an immoral life style on the small screens, right there every night in our dens.
On other shows, we hear the audiences applauding (on cue) the latest examples of their misbehavior or life styles. We take it for granted that a couple is living together with no marriage license, "That's just what people do," we hear on every hand.
Their language? "That's just the way people talk today." Their fractured marriages and remarriages? That's just what people do today.
But when the public hears and sees all of this, it presents a drip-drip-drip to the saturation point of permission--we talk and act this way; we imitate.We have their permission to do so. They make it acceptable.
We should expect nothing else of the unbeliever; he can do nothing else. It's for certain that he can't imitate Christ, that he's always under the control of his sin nature. Even his good works, as Augustine said, are "splendid sins."
But you and I? We can, as we submit to the Scriptures, imitate Christ, full of grace and truth.
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