Jacob 2

Here’s my sermon, as best as I can remember it, with maybe a little editorial spiffing up for posterity. As you’ll see, I’m speaking to the men of the community:

God has charged me to act well in my office. That’s the only way, he says, that I’ll not have to answer for how you act. You know me. I work hard to be your leader. But I worry about you more than ever. So I come here today to speak of God and what he wants from both you and me.

You’re good people. You obey God in all the exterior ways. But I’m getting so that I can read your minds. And I don’t like the text. It’s like a novel whose story’s getting more and more twisted. What’s going on in your secret lives makes me blush. I can hardly name some of it. But I will.

I will because of how you’re wrecking the emotional lives of your wives and kids. God loves their innocence. But you’re fouling it. They’re here today to hear words of healing and comfort from me. But that’s not what they’ll hear. Not today.

This sermon is like a stone in my stomach. It’s hard and nasty. It hurts. It makes me have to speak in ways that will stretch the wounds you’ve already made. I can’t even think about healing words till I do some surgery. It’ll be like digging into everyone’s flesh to pull the arrowhead out of it.

Besides my own inner need to speak up, God himself told me to talk to you today. The topic he gave me: your two lusts.

The first is your lust for gold, silver, and other so-called precious metals. This has been a problem from the moment we got off the boat over a half-century ago. We have a lot of ore deposits. I love the things you make with the metals you find, many of them religious artifacts, some beautiful.

But money has turned into a competitive sport. Or the new aesthetic: “more is more,” some of you have started to say. And the more you have, the more you show off: designer robes, embroidered hats, gaudy jewelry looped in your ears and draped on every limb. To say you’re pretentious would be a kindness.

Do you think God likes this? Is that too rhetorical a question? I’ll answer it anyway: No. Of course he doesn’t. If you keep up this pride-fest he’ll reign his blows on the whole culture.

I hate to say it, but sometimes I wish he would. He could impale you all like some brute warrior. Or flatten you with the blink of his eye.

But more than wishing he’d hurt you, I wish he could rinse this particular trait from your lives. I wish that somehow he could make you turn around. Because ultimately you’re destroying yourselves.

Replace hoarding with generosity. It’s a free land, we’ve always said. And part of that freedom is to be free with wealth. Share. If you want to get rich, do it to build God’s kind of society on earth. If you hope for the coming of the Anointed One, you probably will get rich: God has promised to prosper people of faith and good works. But if he does, it’s for one reason—to make poor people’s lives better. To clothe them. Feed them. Liberate them. Heal them.

For you to do otherwise is to insult the God that gave everything to you. He, in fact, owns it all and does nothing but share it. You own a little and do nothing but guard it. God understands a truth that you don’t, or won’t. It’s this: you’re all made of the same genetic material. And someday you’ll all decay into the same elements.

But let me move on. I wish that I could say your worst problem was pride. It’s not. If your first lust is for money, your second lust is for sex, sex, sex. You construe that God okays prostitution because he let David and Solomon have hundreds of wives apiece. Nice try. Although I’m not crazy about marriage-by-the-multitude, it’s not prostitution.

God says he brought you out of Jerusalem and wants you to be even better than the best of Jerusalem. So here’s the rule on marriage: one wife for every man. And no concubines, which are a little too close to prostitutes for me and or God. God loves sexual holiness. He hates unmarried sex. He also hates men paying for sex.

So let’s stick with the marriage rule. If God wants to change it because of slow population growth, that’s his call. But not now. We’re doing just fine, thank you.

God says, “I’ve heard the sobbing and seen the tears of women everywhere—including prostitutes—because of men’s obsession with sex. And there’s no way I’m going to let men get away with that in this special land to which I’ve led them. If they try it, I’ll curse the ground they walk on.” This is nothing new. Lehi taught the same thing. But teachings have a way of wearing off.

The Lamanites have their problems, no doubt. But in these matters, you’re worse. I may not have put a curse on the ground—yet. But you’ll have to deal with the fallout of your wives and children not trusting you. A lot of you are still alive thanks to my patience. But your hearts are long since dead.