Ephraim: Fruit in the Desert

By Jessica Greer

The Americana of the 1990s established a melting pot of postmodern myths as cultural instincts overtook principles of truth. The emergence of the Evangelical Right asserted itself with the antidote for all the immoral chaos that plagued a backslidden America.

Marrying politics with religious tenets, the solution for an epidemic of teen pregnancy, Hollywood sexualization, and the overall pervasive sexual thrill that became an adolescent pastime was to incentivize a commitment to virtue.

God will give you the desires of your heart, they said, through the prudish walk of abstinence. Purity Culture evolved out of the need for teen sexual accountability, and branded Christian youth as soldiers on the front lines to achieve the sexual demoralization of the culture.

Churches began focusing their discipleship programs on the teenager, encouraging teens to abstain from sexual relationships until marriage, presenting the benefits of avoiding sexual promiscuity.

The AIDS epidemic devastated the gay community only a decade earlier. Teen pregnancy created an undercurrent of single mothers, keeping women from economic mobility and opportunity, resulting in impoverished children riddled with educational obstacles.

The effects spiraled into exponential negatives: the sexualization of women, demeaning of females in the workplace, sexual harassment, date rape, misogyny, addiction to pornography, compulsory abortion.

While there were more than twenty reasons to discourage adolescent sexual promiscuity, the abstinence movement began to engulf all areas of the Christian teen.

There were growing cultural boundaries to further ensure purity, such as the nunnery of women as a pre-marriage phase. It was ritualistic Catholicism, Protestant-style.

“Today cannot be understood until tomorrow” rang true of the complexities of Purity Culture. The insidious creeping of cultural group-think was not recognized until the coming of age arrived.

Collective thinking was not merely a by-product of church culture; it was the central energy behind the millennial zeitgeist. Group identity drove the marketplace, digital innovation, news cycles, pop culture and political persuasions. Even outliers and rebels were swept up into labels.

The individual went extinct. Instead, the human desire for individuality bled into the deeply subjective realm. The real became a version of many versions, the truth determined by inconsistent perceptions.

It would be years before Purity Culture was given a name, after the deconstructionism of the faith was jolted by questions demanding explanations for countless lives erupted in fallacy.

The lonely road of abstinence had promised prosperity, eternal romance, and guaranteed material comforts. To marry without blemish was to attain to a provisional entitlement, so the church kid married. They need not worry about the deeply wicked inequities of their deceitful hearts, only the behaviors they exhibited; or even worse… only the public persona they displayed around approving and disapproving adults.

This was the cognitive dissonance that birthed many Evangelical millennials.

Perhaps the brokenness of the church kid doesn’t look like a poorly tattooed face or even a series of terrible romances gone awry.

It’s a bit more Cain than that. It is a rejected offering.

Genesis 4:5-7 says, “But on Cain and his offering [God] did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.’”

This intimate pep talk that God gives Cain is affectionate. God encourages Cain. I can relate to this Cain moment, looking back at the unintended consequences of my own self-righteousness.

Cain’s downcast response reflects the disillusionment that the dutiful Christian feels when all they have done “right” has collapsed and the center of all religious formulas has not held their fragmented world of chaos together.

To be told by God that our very best is, in fact, closer to sin than not.

That coming of age era in adulthood is portrayed in the media as the pinnacle of progress that magically transforms us into wise, financially stable, relationship-centered adults. Sure, there can be some struggle, maybe a little inconvenience – but nothing too long and too suffering-ish.

When tragedy strikes, when darkness descends, when we are held accountable to the very fullest for our own choices, when we are excruciatingly separated from our comforts and when even our best falls beneath low – that is when we enter that desolate place known in Hebrew as midbar; the desert.

It is in this wilderness that God intends to actualize freedom by forming each person into an individual. Genesis 1:2-3 “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.”

God calls us out, formless and empty. The children of Israel are delivered into a desert, without an identity, without a basic civilization. God begins to shape them by organizing them with principles for governing, preserving them with sanitary and kosher laws, establishing their culture and customs with the tabernacle and the priesthood.

This was not a “feel good” coming of age experience. On the contrary, there was sin, failure, death, repentance, and intercession.

So much of the “deconstructing faith” movement is simply the disillusioned adult church kid feeling cheated by reality, as if God arbitrarily chose Abel over Cain.

Instead, consider that God intentionally separates us for good. He calls us out of our culture, our communities, our formulas, maybe even our families, to bring us into a place where we can get to know Him, as He shows us how He intends to be worshiped, reveals to us truth, and carves us into individuals who are holy and set apart for His purpose.

Esther, Ruth, Moses, Samuel, John the Baptist, and Jesus were all separated from their own original lives to serve outside their comfort zones. What does Joseph say years after his brothers had sold him into slavery, which was only the beginning of his personal trauma? “But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance” (Genesis 45:7).

It is about being separated for a purpose greater than ourselves.

To become a stranger, a Martian, an immigrant in our conditions is to be separated from what is natural to us, from what is comfortable and predictable. It is a terrifying and painful land to abide in.

However, it is also a place where we are called out of the collective and into an opportunity to be formed. God is good. Doing God’s will is not doing what we feel.

Joseph named his second son Ephraim, saying, “It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering” Genesis 41:52). That was before he was reunited with his family.

We are all born into culture, into community, and into family on some level. However, contrary to postmodern nihilism, we are not mere constructs meant to replicate impressions of impressions.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made, with the radical belief that we have been reconciled to Christ by His crucifixion and resurrection. Facing a desolate place of hunger where we cannot meet our own needs is precisely the point.

Even before we enter the barren land, we are already living in a dying, collapsing world of uncertainty. We just had the colorful trappings of earthliness cloaked over this reality.

“In my weakness He is strong,” Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12;9. God doesn’t raise us up like our parents to become independent of Him, as if mature Christianity is a life with less and less struggle over time.

He separates us for Himself. Jesus says in John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, My servants would fight to prevent My arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now My kingdom is from another place.”

I feel bad for Cain. He desired that immediate pat on the back. God challenged him to think outside the material world, to do what was right and not assume his self-righteous posture.

Joseph experienced his own rejection, but he was able to rule over that sinful, earthly, disillusioned response. Rather than stiffening his neck, he absorbed ongoing trials while God fashioned him into a uniquely powerful individual.

A tale of two church kids. Maybe Cain, too, had a vision, a God-given glimpse of his future… but God’s rejection of his offering did not add up to his religious expectations. That coming-of-age moment is not necessarily coming into our own, but decreasing immensely as God begins to introduce Himself to us.

Moses encounters the burning bush in a wilderness, after fleeing his princely kingdom. Ruth was a widowed, impoverished immigrant in a foreign land. Samuel was separated from his mother in childhood.

Collective thinking entitles us as masses to strive for an equitable generic experience by numbing the pain, usurping responsibility, and outsourcing our struggle; but the individual is separated from the cultural lump… trusting in the hope that He will make us fruitful in the land of our suffering.