I’ve received some helpful, and some unhelpful, feedback to last week’s post about nightmare at the Cornell fraternity. I’d like to follow up on that soon, because I think there’s some important things I didn’t say, mostly because I was trying to make one particular point rather than several. Bottom line: I stand by every word in that post, but I also stand by more words than are in there, and I think it might be helpful to say those, too.
But in the meantime, very briefly, a thought about yet another depressing headline.
Caleb Flynn, a former worship pastor, was found guilty by jury of his peers of murdering his wife, and sentenced to life without parole. His motive was another woman. He had a long running adulterous relationship with someone who at one point shared the stage with him in leading worship at a church, and both she and Flynn fantasized about his wife’s death via text.
When a story like this comes up, the dominant evangelical response is about lust. We tend to hammer home the deceitfulness of sexual desire, how a churchman coddled lust in his heart and adultery in his bed day after day, month after month, until finally he stands in an orange jumpsuit listening to a letter his preteen daughters wrote him. And this is true. Sin is extraordinarily deceitful. In particular, we underestimate the importance of our fantasies, and how those fantasies bind with our will over time and make us capable of things we never imagined. Truly the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
But I want to make the very quick point that Flynn’s lust was not his biggest sin. His lust did not kill his wife. His lust did not land him in federal prison. No, it was greed that did that. And it’s important to say this because greed is a much less comfortable topic for evangelicals than lust.
