Spinning a cocoon

 This week's verses are Isaiah 5:11-12:

Beware, those who get up early to drink beer,
those who keep drinking long after dark
until they are intoxicated with wine.
They have stringed instruments, tambourines, flutes,
and wine at their parties.
So they do not recognize what the Lord is doing,
they do not perceive what he is bringing about.

  On the surface these verses are about drinking beer. A religious person could read them and think to themselves, "well, I don't drink alcohol or listen to secular music, so I'm fine. I'm nothing like those people God is challenging there." But it's the part after the "so" that is the punchline of the message. The problem isn't the music or the drink but the fact that those people are not tuned in to what God is doing.

Imagine you spend all day listening to the best and most uplifting Christian music you can find. If you're just listening to it because you like it and because it's good music, and you're not living any of it out, it's just music. You're basically using the music to escape an encounter with God, not to facilitate it. The fact that it is "Christian" music doesn't change the fact that you're just entertaining yourself.

It's a bit like if you gulp down a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and tell people that you're not a glutton or a drunkard, but that you just really love Jesus and have to celebrate the Eucharist with as much of his blood and body as your stomach and liver can endure. Are you really fooling anyone in that case?

Why pick up the wine? Why tear the loaf? Why play the music? Is it for you, or is it for him? Are we like those people in these verses who were so wrapped up in luxury that they missed what God was doing? If you're wealthy enough to be reading this on a computer of your own, you probably have access to luxuries that Isaiah could only have dreamed of. 

We can literally spend every second of our lives being entertained now. We don't need to pay musicians to play music, or a chef to cook something other than what our relatives have always cooked. It's a click away. We don't need to wait till certain times of the year to have alcohol. It's in every store and restaurant.

And alcohol isn't our only luxury drug. We now have refined sugars, caffeine, and video entertainment. You can watch a show any time of day or night. Could even King Solomon have snapped his fingers and had a three hour drama production performed in front of him at 2am with no preparation time if he was bored and didn't want to sleep?

The problem is that we become used to these luxuries. People can't spend five minutes waiting in line without desperately pulling out their phones. We binge watch hours of shows and consume a dozen different podcasts and then are too tired and too busy to spend ten minutes in prayer with God, or to sit for five minutes at a quiet corner of a park and appreciate the unpredictable order of his creation.

God was about to bring a curse onto the people in Isaiah's time because of their sin, and what Isaiah was saying to the people of his time was "Watch out, guys. Pay attention. Don't get caught up in chasing the next dopamine hit." God was speaking to his people, warning them about what was going to happen, and the people with the noise canceling headphones on were going to miss the announcement.

Is it possible that God is speaking something to us now, and we're too comfortable being entertained to listen? Do our rich princely habits or early to rise late to bed lifestyle get in the way of our connection to God? Are you spinning yourself deeper and deeper into a cocoon of comfort that may finally lull you to sleep?

Schedule a pause and see what God is saying to you. Turn off the TV, skip the elaborate meal plans, the packed schedule of things, and make some time to listen and look around. At very least, it creates space to say thank you. But maybe you'll be surprised at what you notice.