Elvis Has Left The Parking Lot

"Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid." Matthew 5:14

""Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him" 1 John 2:15

Today on the way to work I listened to a radio story about Noi, a film about a Icelandic student who is trapped in his isolated village. The story mentioned that the father in the movie is an Elvis fan and "The Ghetto" figures big in expressing how the boy is caught. Since I had just written about a Christian ghetto, I started thinking about another ghetto I had visited. While in Germany I visited the Juda Gasse in Worms. Worms was as a part of the SWM; Spyer, Worms and Mainz, the three cities along the Rhein which had sizable Jewish populations. I can't remember whether it is Yiddish or Hebrew but SWM means "onion". The Juda Gasse was a Jewish Ghetto. The Jews in Worms did not choose to live there. It was imposed upon them. In contrast, the Christian ghetto is self-imposed. One of the marks of the ghetto is containment. In the Presley song the young man turns angry from his environment. Our self-imposed containment need not make us angry. If we step back from something in the mainstream culture, let us be pleased to do so and not be angry. In other words, we need to maintain a sense of humor. Humor is seeing the obvious in surprise form. If you define humor you can't see it. I don't think I'll be seeing the movie just because I doubt it's my genre. At the same time, I thought about the Christian ghetto and wondered with it really existed and whether we could really engage our culture with the gospel message. Oh,...its time to park and get out.

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