THE SIRENS' SONG

In 1991, law school applications hit record levels, just as L. A. Law peaks in TV's ratings. Farrah Fawcett debuts in Charlie's Angels and the national rush to the blow dryer nearly cripples the power grid. Happy Days Arthur "the Fonz" Fonzarilli gets a library card and applications for library cards increase 500% across the United States. Visits to the emergency rooms across the country mysteriously start rising on one particular day of the week. It remains mysterious until someone figures out that it coincides with the end of each episode of ER, as people glut their local emergency rooms, demanding whatever treatment they saw that night on TV.

Some of the above examples are innocuous (blow dryers); some are good (library cards), some may be hazardous to your financial and physical health (nonsensical ER visits). But they do show us something about magnetic persuasion. Culture is a magnetic persuader. Its magnetism can come close to blowing out power grids, while increasing both library use and ER visits Such power is awesome.

The Greeks told a story about Ulysses as he sailed for home. Having been warned by the enchantress Circe, Ulysses knew he would soon sail close to the rocky coasts of the Sirens. These were half women, half bird sea nymphs who lured sailors to shipwreck with their irresistible singing. Ulysses yearned to hear the song of the Sirens, but his problem was that if he and his crew heard their singing, he knew they too would crash into the rocks.

Ulysses devised a plan. He sealed the crew's ears with wax and had himself tied to the mast. In this way, he heard the Sirens' song, but no harm came to him and his men.

The world often has its way with us. Many a life has been wrecked because of its siren song. The church throughout the years has both heard and succumbed to its music. For some reason, there is built into us the desire to please the world and to cater to its never-ending whims from generation to generation.

Way back when, a long, long time ago, when the church was in its baby stage, it heard the Sirens' song. Back then, those coming into the church had cut their intellectual teeth on Plato and Aristotle, the Greek philosophers, two pagans revered by the world. To show the world that the church was with it, they said, "Me too," and looked for and eventually found ways to compromise the Bible and the boys of philosophy in direct rebellion to what Paul says in I Corinthians about the incompatibility of Greek thought and God's Word. The Sirens' song of Greek philosophy was too just too irresistible.

The song has had a thousand verses, mutating across the ages. As self-help-to-riches books weigh down the book shelves of every Barnes and Noble, we find the church saying, "Me too," and "finding" those same success principles in the Word, thereby turning the Bible upside down (from theocentric to anthropocentric) to become a book God wrote to guide us to wealth. The song is just too powerful for us.

The Sirens' song turns deadly for the church in more ways than one. If we could think of the one thing about the church that is most offensive to the world, wouldn't it have to be the Cross? Paul called it an "offense" and a stumbling block. All this talk in the Bible about the "blood" and the "Cross." Such talk makes the world sick to its stomach; the gore is just too much for its refined sensibilities.

The Sirens start to sing. The church hears its music, and adds her "Me too." In response to the music, the sermons of the church begin to delete words like "Christ," "Cross," and "blood." Instead, we hear words like, "success," "goals," and "dreams." "Christ," "Cross," and "blood" are the vocabulary of the theocentric. "Success," "goals," and "dreams" are the lexicon of the anthropocentric.

Just when we think the church has reached its limit of ways to respond to the music, we find ourselves, as usual, wrong again. The trend is now to listen to the music and change the architecture of the church itself. No longer does a church look like a church; it's built to resemble a mall.

But something darker lurks architecturally-a strange absence of the Cross. Inside and outside the building churches are taking down the Cross; removing it not only sermonically but also physically. The world's lyrics sing about how the Cross is offensive, so the church responds by removing it, so as not to offend.

If the church removes the Cross, it has no message ("I preach Christ and Him crucified," said Paul), there ceases to be a reason for its existence and it may as well become a mall where the nice, the slender, the fit, and the successful can congregate once a week, sip lattes, and exchange pleasantries on how nicely their bank balances and dreams are coming along.

The Sirens' song is as old as Genesis 3. We can't help but hear it; it's always number one on the pop charts east of Eden. But we can be thankful that there's always been and always will be a remnant throughout the ages, a remnant that lashes itself to the mast and sails into the storm, not becoming monks and hiding from the culture, but carrying the Cross into its teeth.

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor