Lipstick on a Pig "The Diseased Pig"

The diseased pig that was once decorated for presentation is finally seen wallowing in its own filth.

Animals living and wallowing in their own filth become an invitation for disease. And when disease goes untreated, it eventually infects everything and everyone around it.

Now there is a full-blown disease moving through the Body, and the institution no longer appears interested in curing it. It appears more interested in managing it, containing it, rebranding it, and keeping the performance going. It’s a spectacle of decay.

But disease always reveals itself eventually. It spreads through the Body. It alters behavior. It weakens discernment. It normalizes dysfunction. What once shocked people slowly becomes tolerated, then defended, then reproduced.

Horridly, that infection begins to show itself everywhere in the pews. In the money. In the robes, the collars, the music, the choir. In the ego, jealousy, and bitterness.  In the sexual confusion. The constant discord, rage, envy, addiction, manipulation, spiritual emptiness, and the growing inability to distinguish holiness from performance.

Rottenly, the most revealing symptom of the infection is found in the questions themselves: Are you on my side? Are you loyal to me? Are you for me? Can I count on your blind loyalty? Since when did holiness require choosing sides? The stench from the pig pen is so foul, yet to the infected, the aroma smells like lavender.

The Diseased Pig kissed another pig, and before you know it, the infection spread through the entire pen until they were all dancing together at the altar of Baal.