If you eat at your hotel dining room while in Reno or Las Vegas, you can't help being in the middle of a casino. Every Nevada hotel has restaurants intermingled with first floor casinos, making it unnecessary for guests to ever leave the premises.

So it was that while finishing a cup of coffee at the Lodge Buffet I got to eavesdrop on the casual dinner conversations of a man and a woman. The two were discussing their mutual love of playing one-armed bandits slot machines. They praised the slots for being relatively inexpensive. They spoke of how relaxing the casino was to the point of hypnotizing. They liked that they could put their minds in neutral and "play," since gambling required no great intellectual ability (or athletic agility) on the part of the "player."

Both parties whole-heartedly agreed that slot machines were one of the best ways life offered to pass the time. "The only other thing that comes close," one of the restive gamblers observed as he eyed the machines, "is golf." But since golf does involve a bit of exercise, these two counter-potatoes ultimately concluded that you still couldn't beat playing the slots for passing the time.

Ever notice how the words we use to describe time the hours, the days, the years that make up our life are often the same words we use to describe money?

Time is spent. Time is saved. Time is frittered away.

We never have enough time.

Time is precious.

The hour after suffering a serious injury is the golden hour for receiving life-saving treatment. Although some sour-faced bean-counters may insist that time IS money, we have only to look at our growing children, at our aging parents, at ourselves in the mirror, to know that time is a commodity we can never bank.

Will someone PLEASE answer this question for me?

Why is it that we multi-task, inter-face, text-message, and call-forward in order to save time . . . only then to take that saved time and invest in meaningless, empty, self-absorbed ways of passing time?

Why is it that passing time is the same thing as wasting time?

Our wasted nights and weekends become a waste of life, a waste of spirit, a waste of redemption.

Today's gospel text describes a scene from the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. His reputation for preaching a word of power, authority, and miraculous healing abilities had followed him to Capernaum, bringing great crowds to hear him.

One group of four companions carrying a fifth who is paralyzed, don't waste any time. When they find their access to Jesus blocked by the crowd, the litter-bearers take decisive action. They hoist their friend on the roof and rip a hole through it in order to ease the paralyzed man into the middle of the house. All the while he's still on his mat.

Although Jesus praises the faith-in-action that brought the paralyzed man to him, his discerning eye sees more than the wasted body of the man lying on the litter-bed. The text never says what sins the man before him needed to have forgiven. But it's evident that Jesus perceives a spiritual wasted-ness along with this man's physical infirmity.

It's because Jesus dares to declare a word of forgiveness that the scribes, the representatives of the religious establishment in the room, consider his words blasphemy. Blasphemy was seen as an intentional insult to God and a degradation of God's divine majesty and authority. Jesus' pronouncement of forgiveness calls attention to his own authority as the Son of Man, linking his power to heal the paralyzed man's body with his ability to forgive the man's sins and so heal his spirit as well. The paralyzing power of sin, of spiritual wasted-ness, was the true blasphemy in that crowded room. And once it was healed by Jesus, the onlookers responded appropriately by performing the opposite of blasphemy. They glorified God (verse 12).

The cries of blasphemy, accompanied by yet more violence and bloodshed, have circled the world in these past weeks. Because of our electronic connectedness and global flatness (ala Thomas Friedman), this drama that began in Europe and the Middle East is being played out in our world's crowded living room.

It's not bad to be reminded that there's such a thing as blasphemy. Blasphemy is an intentional insulting of God, a degradation of the divine name, for the sake of our own amusement. The problem is we have missed the truly blasphemous behavior we have encouraged and emulated.

The ultimate blasphemy we commit everyday is found in the minutes and hours we live in spiritual wasted-ness. A curdled spirit and a soured soul are the greatest blasphemies we breathe out into this world. When we look for ways to pass the time, when we look forward to a weekend of getting wasted, when we put our spiritual lives in the waste basket, we insult and degrade that divine spark, that breath of God, that breathed life into the human being God created.

It's blasphemy to turn the church into nothing more than a comfortable building, instead of Christ's body. It's blasphemy to use faith as an excuse for hate. It's blasphemy to depict the image of God as the spray of blood on a bombed out mosque wall. It's blasphemy to call for the death and destruction of life. It's blasphemy to create an atmosphere of fear and terror. It's blasphemy to take away the innocence of childhood with lullabies of hatred and violence. It's blasphemy to read God's word but not to live God's word. It's blasphemy to pass the time and not redeem the time.