Your secrets are no secret.

We live in an age of few secrets. The CIA and the FBI maintain records on millions of US citizens. Meth addicts comb through your garbage, looking for any useful information in defrauding you. Our cellular phone calls can be monitored at anytime. Video cameras stare at us at traffic lights, ATMs, and street corners. A few clever taps of the keyboard and some 22 year old hacker in Finland is strolling through your Internet history. You are public knowledge. Just Google yourself sometime – its amazing what is out there for anyone to view. At the same time, the technology that enables all of this to happen distracts us from face to face communication, to the point of creating a society made up of citizens who are strangers to each other personally but known to the world publicly.

Genesis 21:22-34
“At that time Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, said to Abraham, "God is with you in all that you do. 23 Now swear to me right here in God's name that you will not deceive me, my children, or my descendants. Show me, and the land where you are staying, the same loyalty that I have shown you."  24 Abraham said, "I swear to do this."   25 But Abraham lodged a complaint against Abimelech concerning a well that Abimelech's servants had seized.   26 "I do not know who has done this thing," Abimelech replied. "Moreover, you did not tell me. I did not hear about it until today." 27 Abraham took some sheep and cattle and gave them to Abimelech. The two of them made a treaty.   28 Then Abraham set seven ewe lambs apart from the flock by themselves. 29 Abimelech asked Abraham, "What is the meaning of these seven ewe lambs that you have set apart?" 30 He replied, "You must take these seven ewe lambs from my hand as legal proof that I dug this well."   31 That is why he named that place Beer Sheba, because the two of them swore an oath there. 32 So they made a treaty at Beer Sheba. Then Abimelech and Phicol, the commander of his army, returned to the land of the Philistines.   33 Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer Sheba. There he worshiped the Lord, the eternal God. 34 So Abraham stayed in the land of the Philistines for quite some time.”

Abraham had double-crossed Abimelech not too long before this encounter, so Abimelech was naturally a little wary of Abraham. He establishes a treaty with Abraham, but makes him promise that there will be no more deception. Abraham complains to Abimelech that his servants had seized a well that Abraham had dug. When Abraham sets apart 7 female lambs as a testimony to his honesty, swearing an oath regarding it, his reputation was reestablished with Abimelech.

We are a society in contradiction. We try to cultivate contact with our friends and family, and we try to keep strangers away, but we have succeeded in doing the opposite. Recently, Facebook added new restrictions aimed at protecting the privacy of underage members, due to the fact that the website had become an easy place for creepy people to troll for 14 year old girls in short shorts. But this kind of regulation only works if the 14 year old girl in question wants her page to be private, otherwise she just puts her age down as 18 years old. My page is certainly not a popular one, yet I have had almost 4,000 views registered. I can only imagine how many hits her website has received. At that same time, I watch that same 14 year old girl walk around at church on Wednesday night with her head buried in her cell phone, text messaging people who are her BFFs, who are sometimes in the same room. Meanwhile, modern suburbia dictates that we barely know our neighbors, never let our children run around unsupervised, and move across the state from our parents, grandparents, and college roommates.

How will God narrate our society in the 21st century? A nation of strangers, whose reputations and character are common knowledge, walled off from each other by technology that had promised to bring us closer together.