Being truly human

I just read an interesting and depressing and thought-provoking post by Don Miller: http://donmilleris.com/2008/12/23/lucy-and-me/. He features his very cute puppy Lucy. Most of my comment on his blog, I've reposted here, since it involves the sort of musing I try to foster here. Might be good to read his post first.

What a phenomenal (ly depressing) post! I think you’re getting at something we all need to reflect on. I was having similar thoughts when my company reduced our paychecks to 32 hours and said with a wink, “Now, don’t work more than 32 hours!” I work for two different publishing departments. You think I would want to only work 32 hours? My life would be hell!

So I’m trying to find the human balance between über-diligence (where I snap at people around me that I don’t have time to talk) and slackitude. NT Wright said it well: We’re not computers made of meat. Where is the balance, particularly when you feel you’ve reattached enough participles for the day? Our ancestors lived hard lives, but they knew when they were done plowing their plot or sowing or harvesting. Our informational work never ends.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

That's all I've got to say.

Shift your love limit

I've been getting a lot of spoofing spam in my work e-mail recently. It comes from "System Administrator," and it says, "Undeliverable." I'm really not sure the point of such spam. No links to click; nothing. Is this just one of those "ha, ha, I got all the e-mail addressees in that Christian non-profit to think they sent a spam e-mail!" ploys?

The subject line of my supposed e-mail that was handed back to me was "Shift your love limit." I know most people will think this has some kinky undertones. (Maybe overtones?) No! As the unintended sender of such spam, I insist that it is CHRISTIAN EVANGELISTIC spam!

Think about it. Perhaps in your religious subculture (should you choose to accept it) you've noticed that Christians generally pity non-Christians because the latter just can't love as well. Well, that's right. That's why I'm now bombarding all non-Christians with the admonishment to shift their love limit! If they'll just ask Jesus into their heart, they'll suddenly be radically changed, and they'll be able to love like crazy!

Now that I'm thinking about it, my next unintended e-mail campaign won't be so idealistic. I'm going to peg it to realism. Coming to an inbox near you: "Shift your judge limit"!

Dimensionality

Welcome to the dream log. If it hadn't been for a number of different circumstances, you wouldn't be reading this right now, and you'd be just fine with that.

So I was dreaming along, and I got to a point of country roads, traversing them, feeling alive, crush. That last part, if you didn't experience it with me, had to do with emotion, and probably most aptly put, a breakup. But what I noticed was that I could control my dream a bit. The girl I liked . . . I could control her circumstances just enough to make sure she didn't get together with that loser, but I couldn't quite seal the deal for me. Then I started realizing that this silliness had to do with being able to toggle reality. Once I realized that said loser stopped being a problem in my life, I realized I had power. Pretty quickly, things started blinking out of existence.

Believe it or not, my first inclination was to realize that this had some form of utopian potential. I couldn't wait to tell my wife. So I had to make sure to get to the point where I could let her in on the secret (without waking her up, of course, because that would shatter the awesomeness).

So I noticed that I could toggle reality. Somehow a certain item had a +/- value, and it was my utter whim to decide whether it ever existed or not. I quickly grasped that if I dispensed with one thing, that terminated its possibility forever. So I thought, sure, get rid of evil. We might want to hang on to history, because that seems valuable. More to the point, let's keep awareness around. Self-awareness was always good. Then people about whom I got an up or down vote started showing up. The would-be-suitor of the girl I liked? Gone. (Not that it mattered, since I'm evidently married and want to share this new utopia with my wife.)

I began to feel like God in some way, except I think it had that perverse calvinistic quality about it. I was the decider. I wanted to make sure I didn't decide something that I wanted out of existence. My actual awareness-lacking conclusion was that I needed to delete "sick @$$ $#!t" from our world. (I think that was the quote in my dream.) But on my theological journey of late, I think I've had to become more "open"; open to the fact that God is making the creation as we go along, as well as having created it at one point.

When one tries to exercise determinism, there are so many gives and takes. I had this fast scene in my dream where I had to protect certain ideas so they didn't cease to exist. If I got rid of people (the source of all of my problems, it seems), I would cease to exist. If I got rid of a certain type of person, things would be pretty peaceful . . . maybe. If I got rid of history or memory, then generations of awareness of how we can do better would be gone. When I get to this point in dreams, it's when I realize I need to get up and check my blood sugar. You are the unfortunate recipient of a hypoglycemic midnight rant.

But the one other thing that came to mind was that God does exist in an infinitely dimensional place, where he seems to be able to influence choice in a way that transcends our ability. And having gone through this nightmare of deciding what gets to exist or not, I think I'm happy to take the choices given to me and make them. I'll leave the big ones up to God, perhaps for the first time. But the fact that so much that I would dispense with continues to exist points me toward the idea that maybe God isn't a control freak like I am. Maybe he really does want us to work for good in his creation.

[Sorry if this doesn't make sense. As my blood sugar stabilizes, much of this train of thought has lost the brilliance it had when I experienced it.]

The socialites

Last night, Susan and I went to Sam's to stock up on important things like peanut butter before our membership expires. We were trolling for samples when we passed a wonderful looking orange lemon cream cheese cake. There was a woman standing nearby, and I said, "Hey, you wanna split this?" She laughed and noted how good Sam's cakes were. She related how in the past couple of weeks, her husband had a birthday. She made a great meal, gave him birthday sex, (!?—do people talk about this in public? to strangers?) but he was pouty because he didn't get a cake. That was evidently the only thing that makes a birthday. She got a cheap, but yummy, decadent cake from Sam's, and everything was cool.

Another couple had walked by and been part of the conversation about splitting the cake. We saw them later and the man said, "So, do you want to split the cake?" We said yes, and he asked the bakery if they would do the splitting for us. They wouldn't, but they gave us an extra container to do the splitting ourselves. After the other guy paid (and I ponied up the eight bucks), we went to the snack bar to see if they could give us a splitting implement. I thought we were going to be stuck with plastic knives, but they gave us a pizza platter! So the guy split the cake with it, and used the platter to move our four-pound half-cake to our container. There was a guy nearby with his kids shaking his head, marveling at us. I think he was jealous because we had beat the consumerist system.

There was another beneficiary: The woman at the snack bar had wanted to try one of those cakes, but didn't want to buy a whole one. She got to sample the residue from the pizza platter!

Kinda crazy splitting a cake with total strangers. Thanks, Troy and Dana!

Cab fire brings death for cutie near arcade

Perhaps you remember the mashup phenomenon, like, what, two years ago? Where has that gone? That was pretty fun while it lasted. One of the principles of mashup titling seemed to be the "versus" convention. So ignore the mashed title of the post and see that I really meant to say "Death Cab for Cutie vs. Arcade Fire." Only in this case, it has nothing to do with a mashup and everything to do with classic high school literature comparison and contrast!

The songs in question are Death Cab's "Where Soul Meets Body" and Arcade Fire's "My Body Is a Cage." The latter features a line that my co-workers and I see as an incredibly succinct articulation of a gnostic worldview: "My body is a cage that keep me from dancing with the one I love, but my mind holds the key."

Tears came to my eyes as I was driving through western Kansas last Wednesday, not because of boredom, but because I was listening to "Where Soul Meets Body." It contains the most beautiful articulation in semi-pop music of a Christian worldview of embodiment: "I want to live where soul meets body" followed by a number of lines and ideas about living in a fully embodied way with a view toward the transcendent.

I doubt either artist lives or thinks in a way that fully embodies the worldview that their song articulates. But it's fascinating to see these worldviews expressed in music. I want to clarify that hedonism is a more approximate opposite of gnosticism than the Christian worldview. Hedonism focuses on physical gratification without regard for transcendent reality, while gnosticism works for the perfection of the spiritual through eschewing the physical. Christianity is a balance between the two: A full engagement of the physical world, seeking to bring it into submission to the Creator while longing for the Creator to bring heaven back to Earth where all will dwell in unity once again. But what we have today is the attempt to bring peace and concord to body and soul by fully engaging both. "Where Soul Meets Body" provides a beautiful picture of this idea.

It seems to me that it's pretty easy to get this soul and body thing wrong. Most Christians I've know through my life are more gnostic than anything else. There are a few "pagan" gnostics out there, a whole bunch of "pagan" hedonists, and very few Christian hedonists (unless they're titling a book to sell). It's quite interesting to me that a presumably "pagan" musician would come up with this Christian worldview balanced between gnosticism and hedonism.

Is the desire to live "where soul meets body" a natural enough idea that one could come to it without a strong understanding of the Bible and the Christian worldview? Or was Death Cab merely being poetic? Any other options?

Morality infusion

I heard on the radio this morning that French president Sarkhozy is proposing a reformation of the capitalist market system. The key part of the reformation mentioned on the radio was that Sarkhozy wants to infuse morality into the system. The host (in)judiciously juxtaposed Sarkhozy's call with President Bush by saying they were butting heads. Does this mean President Bush opposes morality in the economy? I've tried to be fair to Bush, as hard as that is sometimes. But the next quote was, "President Bush says that the capitalist system has worked fine for sixty years. So why change it?" So maybe he does oppose morality in capitalism.

I can't say French capitalism is the best thing in the world. But I have my suspicions. I hope the meetings of the G20 nations, whether they bring about socialist capitalism or not, do bring morality back to the table. And shame on the American conservatives for lambasting those godless other people for insisting on keeping morality.

Undermining the parties

I've had thoughts swirling furiously about through my head today.

The first was the realization that I find it really hard to talk to my hardline conservative acquaintances, mainly because I'm not defending a pole. I'm trying to defend a middle ground, and one friend told me I sounded like I was a [political] conservative at heart talking liberal. No, I refuse to go for that. But the realization that it's hard to defend a center rather than an edge is very helpful. My next step will be processing the fact that I probably don't need to be doing any defending of this so-called center.

My next realization was that John McCain is closer to the center than Barack Obama. The thing that will make it very hard for me to vote for McCain is that he seems more prone to foolish military interventions. I think Obama is smart enough, once he gets out of this political season, to do sensible things with the military in Iraq. We know a pull out will take a while. But all my military friends are saying that the Iraqis are pushing hard to make us unnecessary. It's working. Let's help them along and get out of there. So I hope Obama will give the military the resources they need to "get the job done." The only thing more irresponsible than President Bush dragging us in there and racking up a cool $Trillion tab would be to drop everything and run, leaving people ill-prepared to deal with the new vacuum. We would never be forgiven. (And yes, I did say they were people. They all are. Let's not forget that either.) I realize this will take many more billions of dollars, but we need to pay for the sins of our war-mongering leaders by helping to create some sort of peace.

Succeeding that thinking was my absolute desperation for November 5. We need to stop getting mailings talking about non-issues and spinning things. We need programming to get back to its normal vapid self. (I rarely watch TV, but I'm still sick of all the ads.) As I thought about Wednesday morning, I realized that if McCain wins, 90% of my workplace will have drained looks of relief on their faces and will be muttering "Praise the Lord!" all day (week, month). I began to parse that. What does God have to do with any of this. President Bush has been preaching Democracy for seven years. The god(dess) Democracy will take care of her own. If Obama is elected, Democracy has been vindicated. If McCain wins, it's another self-vindication for Democracy. If we bring the God of the Bible into it, the paeans of praise for a McCain win will betray a severe idolatry. People respond that way because they fear Obama and the Democrats. McCain in the White House will allow them to be complacent for another four years. They won't have to trust God, because their status quo will continue. And that is the severest form of idolatry. It is so insidious.

And then I realized that I plan to go to our church's Outlook Forum on Monday night. This is the group that is looking to do ministries strictly outside the church, for no direct benefit of the members, other than to move them beyond fear and complacency. Oh. That would be good. So this is my thought. No matter who wins the next day, we can make the core of both platforms irrelevant. The church needs to make abortion unnecessary by helping teen, low-income and professional moms who are unprepared for a birth either take care of their own child or by offering to adopt. The church needs to canvass poor neighborhoods offering to disburden people (thanks to Rob Bell for telling this story in Velvet Elvis). That undermines the Democratic social programs. They become unnecessary. Then we let the Holy Spirit get hold of wealthy/rich hearts so that they can give away enough money to the church to fund these initiatives and avoid the taxes that the Democrats will supposedly levy. The Republicans would no longer have anything to shout/whine about. An unprecedented era of peace would flow over America. (Whoa. Let's not get carried away.)

The problem with this is that it reveals the true greed, or perhaps insecurity, at the heart of the conservative. I think it also reveals the humanitarian, but very naive, heart of the liberal. The idea of the church taking back its responsibility from the government is not a new one. But I think the idea of undermining the polar parties by taking away their talking points is. I'm really excited about the idea of reducing taxes across the board, or at least initially giving tax credits to those who take part in reducing the government's burden. Plus, governments don't mentor people. People mentor people. Put it terms of discipleship, and you've got the church's mandate. Now if we could just overcome our fear and laziness.

It is the distant future . . .

There's outrage swirling in a very small portion of America, namely the portion that thinks James Dobson is still relevant but disagrees with him. His organization, Focus on the Family (which does a lot of wonderful things, and would be fine if they didn't talk about culture or politics or Bible translations), released a letter from a "2012 Christian" bemoaning life after Obama. As the fifth element of journalistic integrity, I have chosen not to read either the letter or even Jim Wallis's response to it before I respond. The very idea of a letter from the distant future gives me my own wonderful idea.

I'm going to write a letter as a 2008 Christian to all the chumps in 2000 (the year the robots sang the song "The Humans Are Dead"). Because I'm generous, I'll even address the letter to the chumps in 2004. (Chagrined confession: Generous epistolator=double chump.)

Dear Voter in, you pick, 2000 or 2004,

It's 2008, and we mercifully have an opportunity to try to salvage America. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of people here who want to continue destroying it. Does this greeting shock and appall you? Good. But let me explain.

There was a terrible attack on New York City in late summer 2001. Turns out some peevish Muslims hate us, and they changed the New York skyline forever. They killed 3,000 people in the process. I hate hate like that, and there probably wasn't a whole lot that could have been done to prevent it. I do know that President Clinton and the guy you're going to elect both ignored a quite a bit of intelligence that pointed toward the attack. But don't worry . . . your new President will respond appropriately. He'll invade Afghanistan to root out the terrorists who fostered this attack. The leaders won't have been captured by 2008, but whatever. The President will try to establish democracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that will be somewhat questionable. It will be a pretty good effort, though.

The President will then follow faulty intelligence (this isn't irony juxtaposing this with the thing about the Muslims earlier; I'm serious) and invade Iraq. Saddam Hussein is developing nuclear weapons and harboring "terrorists." The awesome thing is, "terrorists" will come in and wreak havoc in Iraq after we invade and eventually capture Hussein and watch the "court" pop his head off (by hanging, not by a technical "beheading").

You might want to savor your civil liberties. There will be a significant trend to undermine established legal procedures for intel gathering in the interest of "national security." This includes eavesdropping on phone calls without warrants, monitoring internet traffic with impunity, and having access to library records.

Your new President will look into the souls of Vladimir Putin and Angela Merckel and discern that they are good people. I will hear a dude on the bus a few days ago saying that Putin will eat the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate alive if he's elected. Is that why your future President thinks Putin is a good man?

Your future President will pour something to the tune of a trillion dollars of your money into wars that, while they may make life better for some people, were entered into under faulty premises, particularly in virulent contravention of just war practices.

Under the President's watch, the national deficit will balloon to something like $7 trillion. (I'm just going from memory here. It's not like I'm the quintessence of journalistic integrity or anything. Sad thing is, I'm doing a lot better than most of the future media.) It might be worth noting that your President's party is symbolized by an elephant, just to give perspective on the whole spending thingy. What's that legend about elephants? Do they have really good memories or really bad memories? Either way, it's startling how little your future elephants will remember or pay attention to history. Also, if it happens that elephants legendarily have good memories, it doesn't matter if I can't remember that; I'm turning into more of a donkey every day.

There's a lot of water under the bridge. I don't remember if you've seen the Dow hit 10,000 yet or not. As shocking as that would have seemed to people just a few years ago, it happens. In fact, it'll get up to 14,000. But don't worry; all our future money is in the pooper now that the Dow has crashed to 8,500 or so. Yeah, the whole market system has crashed pretty well. And you have elephants who are scrambling to save the economy (read: rich people's backsides) by using government funds to buy stock in banks. Sound socialist? That's funny! There will be a campaign on right now, and the elephants are clamoring that the donkey candidate is going to bring socialism to America. They already did. A bunch of people are playing supposed laissez faire capitalism on a Monopoly board with my real money, and it's not working. It never will. So they resort to even more intervention in the markets, claiming that capitalism is the answer. Huh. Anyway, if there's any way to get rid of this two party system, take the opportunity. The party polarity really sucks here. Both sides are awful.

I'm gonna do a favor for you. I'm gonna tell you now that there will be a Republican running in 2008 who seems somewhat centrist. He's going to distance himself from your future two-term President because of all the awful stuff I've just told you and his abysmal approval rating. Yet all the same people who convinced me to vote for your future President twice are now clamoring for this guy. I don't know if I can trust them anymore. Christians bought into this future two-termer, because he prays and is a Republican who opposes abortion. Not a thing has been done about abortion other than create an economy that makes having a family pretty dicey. Go ahead and think through whether you should vote for him. Oh, by the way, depending on how you define a "valid" "ballot," he may will have never been elected in the first place.

Sincerely,

Your Radical Centrist Friend Who Is Voting Democrat for President for the First Time

************

For you FotC fans out there (not to be confused with FotF), it's time for the binary solo: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one; zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one; zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one, one; zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, one, one, one, one!

Trickle-down economics

I've been thinking about said Reaganomics lately, since one of my conservative friends has been asking me about such things. Rather than doing substantive research about why it doesn't work (because I don't have time), I've been using my idle time on my bike to come up with lame, pithy sayings denigrating trickle-down economics. I take full responsibility for them.

"The only thing trickling down in trickle-down economics is urine down the leg of the conservative fat cats laughing so hard at how stupid America is that they can't control their spigots."

After a more biblical fashion (though piss is very KJV):
"Why would anything having to do with economic justice be good or sufficient if it trickled down when Amos says, 'Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!'?"

My apologies. I'm concerned that no matter what, extra money ends up in the hands of corporations. Competition may drive prices down at some points, and less tax may allow that a bit more. But there's plenty that a company can do to help us realize that we need their product, and that we are desperate to pay way more than it should be worth for it. Marketing cancels out the good effects of trickling.

I'm not sure why, but Starbucks sounds really good right now!

Pusillanomie

A liability of mine is that I play with words in my head all the time. Thus merged pusillanimous and anomie, a word which now means a purposelessness and lack of direction brought on by lack of courage. Or perhaps it could mean a lack of courage brought on by aimlessness.

This relates tangentially to a thought I had yesterday. What is it about our entertainment in the decade before a giant market collapse? In the twenties, the markets we hot, and people were cocky and hedonistic. This was the early heyday of slapstick comedy and vaudeville. These forms of comedy were brought on by roaring boredom. For sure, the poor were left mostly out, but I'm talking about the pleasure class here, the ones with plenty of money to burn.

The last five to ten years have shown the same type of boredom. Let's see my day consists of taking obscene risks in the market, eating way too much and taking it for granted, watching p0rn/having sex with a stranger, and then watching ordinary people do stupid things on TV. I think that's an accurate picture of life in the twenties and in the last ten years. To a large degree the forms of entertainment carry on after the collapse, but it's a form of forgetfulness therapy rather then boredom therapy. People now need something to assuage their acute pain rather than their dull pain.

I admit, I smile and chuckle at Wipeout or I Survived a Japanese Game Show. There's something inherently funny to me about that kind of slapstick. But the sheer preponderance of these shows (throw in Survivor and all other reality TV as well) belies a sickness in our culture. We can't need that much "funny."

This is where pusillanomie comes in. People haven't been courageous enough to take appropriate risks, such as engaging in relationships, finding their calling, and loving and serving others. Instead, they do the bored thing. They take giant risks with money and while away their time hoping for something better. Only nothing better is coming. They have to take a courageous and purposeful step to kick the anomic ennui.

Why don't your ride your bike, mister?

Today was a strenuous commuting day. I woke up a bit late. I was hustling to make the bus on time, and I got caught in a gutter area. There was a lot of sand collected from storm runoff, and for all I know, from sanding last winter. I started to swerve a lot, and I finally decided to attempt a stop by putting my foot down. That sent me for a pretty good tumble. My chain fell off, but my heart wasn't free. I had to put that puppy back on and keep moving. I knew I was a bit behind schedule, so I pushed pretty hard. A little more than a quarter mile from the stop, I saw the bus turning to wind its way around to the stop. I pushed even harder. I had to stand up to pedal as hard as I could up the hill. With about 50 yards to go, the bus pulled up to the stop. I finished the course by riding in the bus's lane, so that he wouldn't leave. Turns out he wouldn't have left for about two minutes. And I was beat.

I got to work and had a pretty good day. I left with a good amount of time to make it to the bus stop. However, my rear tire was flat. I had 13 minutes to make it about a mile. No time to change/repair the flat. So I started walking briskly. I kept watch on the time, and I realized a little less than half way there that I would need to run. So I ran pushing my bike and carrying my 20-some pound backpack. I stopped to walk a couple of times, but I knew where the bus was in relation to the stop (having seen it go by). So I had to push hard. Again, the bus pulled into the stop when I was about 50 yards away. Thankfully, the driver paused for me. I don't recall being quite so worn out. Today's treks to the bus stop were two of the four hardest I've ever had. And they happened on the same day. Ugh.

Like a good neighbor

I'm calling with a question about an account we have with State Farm. On the recording before any bidness happens, I hear, "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. This call may be monitored or recorded."

If investing is a highway . . .

I'm gonna park it like it's ho-o-ot.

On Saturday, I had some time in the car, so I listened to the radio. When I listen to the radio, I only listen to our local NPR affiliate, KRCC. It so happened that This American Life was on. They were helpfully parsing the economic crisis. (Anyone want to second my observation that the word "crisis" comes from the Greek word meaning "judgment, under judgment"?) You can listen here.

My travel took me on the highway, shortly after I heard how these investment firms engaged in frenzied "credit default swaps" with hedging and not regulating. Then I started to get that sick, disappointed feeling as I watched drivers around me whip into the right lane to get ahead, then whip back into the left lane when they realized that no cars were in the right lane for a reason. And it clicked. I had had that feeling moments before as I listened to the description of people whipping into the other lane to gain a few bucks, then whipping back when they realized it wasn't going to work out, then gunning it when they had a few yards, then cutting somebody off, all to get a little bit ahead.

I myself engage in a bit of lane changing, depending on my mood. But I don't think I ever get manic about it. Once I realize what I'm doing, I ground myself to the right lane for a bit, if for no other reason than to give up more than the little bit of ground I gained with less than sane driving.

I don't recommend that in financial markets, but it turns out that we've lost 20% of our initial investment anyway. To stay in? To not stay in? I kind of want to buoy the markets with our paltry investment, by not pulling it out. It's in there for the long term anyway, so why pull it out? Maybe the markets will recover. Maybe we'll make our "killing" someday.

Now there's exactly the problem. On another vehicular foray this weekend, I listened to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Clay Jenkinson represents Jefferson with some very strong language about those shystery, gambling followers of Alexander Hamilton. Never worked an honest day in their life. They're gambling, merely trying to create false demand to rip off the honest people who fall into the economic wrangling at the wrong time.

I've been conflicted about stock markets and mutual funds for a while, but these reflective times have cemented a desire for me to be more agrarian, keep a little money in CDs or some such non-gambling instrument to keep pace with inflation. The more I see, the more I realize that getting ahead involves either frugality or luck. Frugality's a sure thing that steals from no one. Luck is . . . well, luck, and it means that someone else is unlucky. The money that's rotting away in mutual funds right now was gained by frugality, and it's now being lost by a certain inverse of luck. I don't feel bitter about it; I saw it coming. I do wonder if it's time to cut losses and pull out, or if we should just leave it in. I imagine we'll leave it in and hope for a modest return over the next couple of decades.

This big mess does make me want to pull the car off at the next exit and take a bike or a horse or travel by foot. Some good ol' honest conveyance.

Evangelical gospel

I was just talking to a co-worker about the previous blog post and how sad I get when people talk about the great news of going to heaven when they die—forever. It's good news that we're in God's presence after we die, sure. But if we look forward to the resurrection, and live anticipatorally today, the good news that Jesus preached makes sense: captives are set free, the poor are fed and the oppressed are liberated. All creation will be liberated from sin permanently at the resurrection.

When I hear "Christians" damning the creation to fire as if it is a bad thing, they haven't read enough. And I mean they ignored the next sentence. What people know as 2 Peter 3:10–12 says: "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat." It's an awesome and fearsome thing to read those sentences. But we evidently get lost in the awe, because we completely ignore the next sentence: "But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells." Can it be more clear? This righteousness that Peter is referring to is the good news: liberation and plenty for all. Hebrew righteousness has everything to do with equality and justice and almost nothing to do with the Roman idea of the gavel falling condemning a prisoner to a sentence.

Of late, I've taken to calling what Evangelicals preach the "evangelical gospel." I have felt that it defines things well enough, and distances the Scripture from that heresy sufficiently. But I just realized that if you translate the roots of "evangelical gospel," you get "good newsical good news." That's an injustice at the very least, since it gives too much credence to the "goodness" of that news. At other times I speak of "kakangelion," the opposite of "euangelion." Maybe I need to stick with that.

Respectfully shocked and a little creeped out

My wife's soul mother (alma mater for those of you keeping score at home) had an alumni dinner in our town tonight, so we went and had an amazing meal for a relatively small price. I had the country fried steak which was fabulous. Given the onset of chubease (the word that just made itself up for how easily I put on weight), I limited myself to one half slab of said steak. The awesome thing was, they gave each of us two slabs. I see at least two more meals in my future, which is very exciting.

Since it was an alumni and fundraising dinner, we got to hear their advancement (development/fundraising) pitch. Now this is the thing. This is a small-to-medium-sized Midwestern Bible college. For those who know, this means pretty fundamentalist. My family was involved in this school in various ways over the years, so I spent time on campus. I was raised in such a way that I believed the party line straight and narrow. I drank deeply of this milieu. Interestingly, I went to Moody Bible Institute, a school that was probably a bit liberal for the tastes of many of the more conservative Bible college folk. (They spoke respectfully of Moody tonight.)

After leaving Chicago, I fell off the wagon. I stopped versejacking. I stopped believing in strict literality (particularly of little nibbles of Bible-y bits). I started believing in—not merely acknowledging the existence of, but actually practicing—the idea of context. Perhaps most importantly, I started believing the Bible when it says that the current heavens and earth will be recreated into a new heavens and new earth. (Note that these are the primordial Greek gods—Ouranos and Gaia—though they would be ouranoi and ge, plural and singular in the NT rather than both singular.)

It blew my mind and simultaneously made me cringe when I heard one of the representatives talking about a personal evangelism incident from the past summer. The man and his wife are building a house. The man was talking with the guy who excavated their lot. The excavator commented that he had an absolutely beautiful lot. The man said, "You know what? This is all going to go away [maybe he said burn, I don't remember]. But there is going to be one thing left. Do you know what it is?" The excavator looked at him and said, "You got me. The sky?" (Interjectory comment from narrator: "You're not too far off, buddy!") "No. You and me. The question is where you will be when everything else is gone."

Eventually, the excavator became a Christian (I have a really hard time typing that word in this instance), and the man's son, who led excavator to the faith, promptly gave him a Ryrie Study Bible. Double cringe. Let's be sure to teach Newbie to never read the Bible in a way that he can understand it!

The subtext of the entire evening was, "We teach students to live with a biblical worldview. We don't compromise our doctrine. It's so important that they have this foundation. We teach the fundamentals. That world out there is a poisonous place." (I guess I won't argue with that last assertion.) I'm not sure who they were trying to convince. All the people there were alumni or family. Why keep harping? Do more alumni dollars come in for each assurance?

Another sad moment was after they had asserted in the new "Marketing Video" (different name, guys?) that they welcome students with open arms and everyone is family. A prospective student asked what the turnaway rate was for applicants. They only turn applicants away if their GPA is too low (which they can actively remediate in community college, and be welcomed immediately) or if their doctrine doesn't measure up. So . . . you mean you're not actually welcoming. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to show love or Jesus or something to these aberrant students to help them come to the truth? No? They might poison the student body? Seriously.

All of this actually brought me back to the poisonous atmosphere of my roots. I still struggle with being RIGHT, even though my beliefs have swung round to what I believe to be biblical beliefs. The major heritage of that upbringing I still struggle with is the fact that I assume I am right, and everyone else is wrong. I say that I believe I need to hear voices other than my own, or else I will perish in my own myopic stubbornness. But practically, I still insist that I am right.

I have to say, I had a very enjoyable time talking to several people at the table. They are dear and fun folks, that I would love to spend more time with. They have fun stories and insights. But I couldn't believe the shock of being dunked back in my old thoughts and two and a half hours later being pulled right back out. It reminds me of how far I've come, but also how far I have to go.

He means the opposite of what he said

I've tried to follow the lead of a friend and mentor and not engage in Bush-bashing (even though he, unfortunately, seems to think more highly of the President than I think is merited—but then again, my friend reads far more than I do). (Enough caveats?) In fact, as you may have noticed, I guess I'm turning anti-bashing, period.

One comment from President Bush's speech to the UN today bears critique. (Okay, I know a lot of his comments from that speech bear critique, but only one energized me enough to tap out a critique.) I quote the President: "As the 21st century unfolds, some may be tempted to assume that the threat has receded. This would be comforting. It would be wrong. The terrorists believe time is on their side, so they've made waiting out civilized nations part of their strategy. We must not allow them to succeed."

In my study of history, I've seen that it's usually the people who are right who win out in the long run. Ruinous regimes usually fall, even if it takes 400 years. It's the decent commoner who forebears a dozen generations of decent commoners who eventually wins. The totalitarian overlords are the ones who assert that their life matters more than anything else, that they need to make a legacy, that they need to protect and control everything. The dictator is interested in NOW. The commoner knows that life will grind on as it has for thousands of years, and only faithful plodding will show that time is on their side.

Another caveat: I'm not siding with terrorists. I merely think that using the "time on their side" phrase called President Bush's rhetoric into question. He should have realized that that example never benefits the more powerful side. To critique the "terrorist": Time is on their side, given their communal understanding of life and the idea of one person's sacrifice benefitting the whole. However, they are using the controlling weapon of the powerful totalitarian: death. They have undermined their own cause by resorting to death and violence. There is another class still, the decent commoners of above, who will outlast those who engage in random killing. Time is on the side of the average Muslim. The masses will soon completely tire of death and fear tactics. (See American parallel.)

People want to live decent lives. I want to live a decent life. Is time on my side? Will I outlive our government's fear-mongering and idiotic self-interested bailouts? On that note, sure, people will suffer if our economy collapses. I hope that the steps being taken are merely to parachute the economy back to a reasonable plateau. But the lessons being taught to greedy corporate apprentices is that money is all that matters, and yet it is free to the greedy. Please tell me that time is on my side. I want to live a decent, common life that outlives the current greedy, deathy culture. Just before another greedy, deathy regime steps in to take its place.

Transcending static v. dynamic

I'm in a meeting talking about using books to drive people to websites. I have some old school sensibilities that make me rebel against that.

We started discussing how Facebook creates a whole layer of meaning beyond print books. One person noted that they can read others' bookshelves and see their notes on their books. It has some interesting parallels to book clubs, with more to offer, and yet less. You can't have an embodied banter about a book, but at the same time, people are newly enabled to interact in a totally different way.

Traditional print vehicles are static. It's hard to update a book more than once a year. When you are participating in a book club, it's dynamic. You react to one another's thoughts in real time. If you note your thoughts on a book on a Facebook bookshelf, you supply static info. It stays hanging out there for anyone to interact with. Oddly enough, this becomes a new dynamism. The profile viewer interacts, and the poster can refine their thoughts. Yet there is always the static element. It's strange to me how web apps have been helping change our concepts of static and dynamic. They are now tightly fused, whereas the old style were much more opposites.

Sleep inversion

I had an interesting experience yesterday. We got up around ten to get ready to go see my niece play softball. (They won. The game was interminably long, but they got the W. And Kayleigh played well.) We got home around 4:30 and took a nap. Susan woke up at some point, but I stayed asleep. I rolled out of bed around ten. I did some things around the house and went back to bed around eleven.

It's pretty poetic to take a five hour nap, then get up for an hour, then go back to sleep for nine hours. This hasn't happened in a while. I wrapped up my Ethics class on Wednesday the 17th, and it has been great to be able to decompress. The tally goes 2800 pages, 40 hours of lecture, four papers and two tests in 13 weeks (while working full time). I read about 1300 of those pages in the last three weeks. So it's quite satisfying to invert my sleep schedule to try to "catch up" a bit. My next quarter starts in about two weeks, so I'd better do everything I want before that starts up again.

9/11

I am grieved at the loss of life. Any life. So on this anniversary of 9/11, I think of the families that were broken up by the active hatred of certain groups. But I also pray for our nation, that we would love our enemies. I pray that our hearts would be formed more by the heart of Jesus than by vindictiveness (or even some sense of justice).

Let's note that this is the seventh anniversary. Might it be possible to follow the spirit of the First Testament and forgive the debt that we feel "those people" have to us? There will never be productivity in being fueled by a "never forget!" mentality. We should learn our lessons and remember those for sure. But that part of an event that causes us to hate or be bitter . . . let's hold that so loosely as to forget it.

Personally, I am so patriotic to the vision of America as a "city on a hill" that I saw almost instantly the grievance "those people" had against us. I recognized the inhumanity of what they did to us, but I also saw the ongoing inhumanity we have shown to them. (Don't get me started.) That made it easier for me to forgive, in that "it didn't really directly affect me" sort of way. (That's what I mean by "city on a hill." We are willing to take the high road in every case, except that this is a fantasy at this point.) Even if one of my family members had been murdered on 9/11, I would still say, "Right grievance, wrong method." Death is always the wrong method. But systematic oppression, in this case through supporting one side then another without a second thought on a couple of occasions—with disastrous consequences for them—is a grievance that must be addressed. They just did it in a terrible way.

Now this is the key point: Even if they didn't have a legitimate grievance, we would still be called to forgive them if they attacked us out of the blue with no possible reason. Instead, we have two ongoing wars related to 9/11. Some would say that there are 50 million people that have been liberated from systematic oppression under Hussein. I don't buy it. We used death to "liberate" them. That's never a liberation. Granted, people are better off without Hussein as their leader. He was a brutal, terrorist dictator. He deserved to be retired. I'm just not sure that there was any moral basis for us to invade and further destroy an already decimated country. We could quibble about details all day, for there is supporting evidence on both sides. I choose to look at the evidence and say, "We should not have resorted to war for this cause." Again, only tangentially related to 9/11, but our wars were a response to that impetus. I think the world sees our wars as directly related to 9/11.

It's time for a seven-year jubilee. Let's forgive the debt of hatred. Let's find a way to love and serve our enemies.

"No Spin Zone"

"Hi, this is Bill O'Reilly. Welcome to the No Spin Zone, where we've been caught in a death spiral for so long we don't realize we're spinning out of control."

If only he had the courage or self-awareness to say that.

Okay, this is ridiculous. (concerning economic politics)

I don't know why I'm on such a roll today. But I've got all these ideas bursting messily forth from my head.

I've thought a lot in the past about discipleship and finances. What happens when everyone starts making sense in relation to their finances? Our economy as we know it collapses. This, specifically, is the consumeristic laissez-faire capitalist economy. The American economy is laissez-faire in relation to individuals and classes of people, but it's not close to being laissez-faire relative to business. Two posts ago, I mention my ethics professor and his view of governmental involvement in Western European economies. He says there should be free markets with programs or protections for people. This has helped their economies be more robust, and has generally brought equality to the masses. On the other hand, America continues to widen the gap between the 1 percent that contribute to political campaigns and the masses. Also, the greed of the rich has brought disastrous consequences in our current housing crisis by duping poorer people into getting over their heads in unsound mortgages. Our advertising culture of dissatisfaction made those who took the bad mortgages believe that they deserved the best of everything through consumer credit and also the biggest (im)possible house through mortgage credit. Now our economy is in the dump. Thanks, guys.

If we discipled all Americans to be more frugal, these things would stop happening. The plutarchs would see their balance sheets start to tip toward the negative. Now, there are two kinds of frugality. One is personally oriented and the other is politically oriented. I used to be not frugal. When I got married, my wife helped me become that way, and I'm glad she did. This is personal frugality. My wife was frugal because she wanted her low income to be sufficient to provide her needs and keep her out of debt. But I've developed a political frugality in parallel with my personal frugality. This is where I say that the polis (city, society) needs to become frugal through personal frugality. If everyone started thinking this way, it would bring itself into the political sphere as it's defined today. We would begin electing people that would go the other way from what Alexis de Tocqueville said, in effect, "Democracy is doomed when people discover they can vote themselves the purse" (eg, earmarks, porkbarrelling, whatever). We need to flip-flop our economic priorities: hands-on with individuals through programs that teach them industry and frugality while we support their efforts to get out of debt and on their feet, and laissez-faire with business, where we let market forces actually determine what farmers do and what mortgage companies fail. If we keep propping up bad business practices (and war) with hundreds of billions of dollars, the country will spiral further into debt, and politicians will continue to say, "Sorry, there's no money to keep human beings from living like animals." But if we get our priorities straight, we can all live humanly, where no one, rich or poor has to idolize money. I know, I know. People who are filthy rich might lose money, and poor people might actually begin to become functioning members of society. Tragedy.

One more thing: (the media again)

I'm reading the book "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" by Ron Sider. There's a paragraph I just read that runs along my rantlines of late, and it gives me an idea.

"Centralized wealth equals concentrated power. And that—as the conservative critics of communism rightly used to point out—is dangerous. It is not surprising that the relatively small numbers of wealthy people who control the largest corporations, which in turn own the media [did he just say "own the media"?], also have vast political power. In the U.S., most of the private money for political campaigns comes from the richest 1 percent of the people. Not surprisingly, most politicians care more about the self-interest of their wealthy donors than about justice for the poor. Democracy is threatened and the poor suffer" (144).

So here's the idea that I don't think my wife would support (given that I would become completely unavailable). I'm going to go door to door around the country and sit down with everyone who will talk. (It's important to introduce myself in a way that they will actually talk to me.) We'll talk about their life and economic state and what they wish were better. We'll talk about the system that's in place (see Sider's assessment above). Then we'll talk about weaning ourselves off the media. We'll talk about genuine community conversation where we can get information from people we trust (where will they get it? not sure about that yet), rather than self-interested oligarchical plutocrats. The media empires will fall because the advertisers will see that it's not worth their money. We will get back to the day of candidates actually having to work, using more literal, but probably still figurative, stumps for their speeches. This will lead to a more actual democracy, rather than the joke that we have in America (or should I jibe the anti-democracy by saying "'Merica"?).

I am so darn idealistic, but I like to think that I have idea(l)s worth putting into practice, and ones that can be put into practice. My ethics professor wrote in his book "Just Peacemaking" (yeah, it's as great as it sounds) that we need to rid ourselves of our cancerous pessimism. We can actually do something about poverty. Yes, Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, but that doesn't mean we don't do great work to mitigate the disaster that is their life. We need to start having human concern for changing the world for the sake of the world, not our own. When can we start?

Economic justice

A friend posted a link to a blog talking about the One Issue for Evangelicals: abortion. http://livelydust.blogspot.com/2008/09/plea-to-pro-life-voters.html

This sparked a conversation with my like-minded co-workers, and led to some rantalicious bloviation. Note: The class I refer to is Christian Ethics at Fuller Seminary. We join my conversation/monologue about abortion already in progress.

What would happen if Christians went about the country trying to change hearts through the Holy Spirit's power and their martyring (or witness as the case may be—our sacrificing ourselves in love so that it feels like we're being martyred)? At that point, maybe there would be a chance of outlawing abortion. But in the interim, the average evangelical will continue supporting the systemic injustice that causes abortion in the first place. I think if we had 30 years of Democrats who were serious about making a difference with their programs (fully funded with money not being dumped down the offense/war drain), poverty and abortion and Bristol Palin's situation would generally cease. Thank God Sarah Palin opposes this sort of remedy.

Last lesson and this one in my ethics class address exactly these issues. Glen Stassen, my professor, is an unbelievably clear-headed thinker. I also read an essay last night entitled "The Prolife Credibility Gap" by John Perkins' son, Spencer. And I quote: "As for answering the question, 'Where do black Christians stand on abortion?' it looks to me as if we are on the same side of a moral issue. But if, from where you stand, you insist the battle is against abortion, while we believe the battle is against injustice, our strategies must remain different. We believe your plans for an all-out -war on abortion will prove to be short-sighted. When and if you win the abortion battle, the war will be over for you and you will be able to return home [to the suburbs]. Then we will be left to undertake the reconstruction. Therefore, our strategy must continue to be the fight against injustice—a war with many battlefronts. Where abortion will rank in our battle plan will depend on the strength of the relationship we can establish in the future and on how much your burdens and concerns, because of that relationship, can become ours."

My first comment is, "Damn." My second is that I think he's exactly right. Let's eliminate injustice, and let's go with the people who already believe there is injustice: the Democrats. We should lobby them to take more reasonable governing approaches and more sustainable program practices so that there may come a day when we won't need the programs. Maybe the only program we'll need at that point is nursing care for old, white Republicans because the cursed, unjust economic system they've constructed for themselves has finally collapsed under the weight of its moral turpitude.

Btw, my professor notes that after the wall fell, the East Germans were absolutely flabbergasted at how much money America was swimming in (Texas ten feet deep in quarters anyone?), and how many people were completely shut out from a just and sustainable economic life. They set up a capitalistic/market system where mothers got two years off with 80% pay after the birth of their first child, and 18 months off with same pay after the birth of their second child. They actually had plans in place to prevent teen pregnancy, infant mortality, abortions and poverty in general. But the red scare makes us (meaning them, the Republicans) say that that smacks of communism to be avoided at all costs. There are so many other statistics and anecdotes that support the idea of a market economy with significant governmental intervention not only bringing economic justice to all, but actually sustaining economies more robust than 'Merica's. But that's all just liberal lunacy. Now what am I going to do with my next raise? Oh wait, our economy is too volatile for our company to afford that.

Wasilla

This is the "second-largest city in Alaska" that Karl Rove spoke about: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid271557392?bctid=1772099431.

Palindrome: Sarah Palin runs for VP

[Alternate title: Capitalism brought us 24-hour news networks]

A co-worker forwarded this brilliant bit of journalism today: http://ccinsider.comedycentral.com/cc_insider/2008/09/jon-stewart-ann.html. Now the really sad thing is, I consider what Jon Stewart does to be journalism. I can't say the same thing for the "journalists" that he features. The gist of the clip is different conservative pundits saying something like, "Sarah Palin has great experience. She's been a governor [would that be governess? that sounds like something from one of those Jane Austen novels], and she was mayor of, like, the second largest city in Alaska." Stewart rejoins, "Let's see . . . she was mayor of a town of . . . 9,000 people!" He then plays a clip of the same person (Karl Rove) from a few weeks ago saying, "If Obama picks Tim Cain, that would be totally politically pandering. His only experience is as governor, lieutenant governor and as mayor of Richmond. That's the 102nd largest city in the country! There are only 200,000 people in that town! It's smaller than Chula Vista, California and Aurora, Coloraduh [actual pronunciation]!" Seriously. The rest of the clips were of very similar partisan asininity from a variety of conservative pundits.

[solidifying centrist position]

I need to make clear that I know both sides do this. I hate the activity and results of both sides. All my Christian bits are straining to keep me from hating the actual people. But this sort of stuff is destroying our country. The average American picks one or two pundits on whose every word they can hang. They go around spouting all kinds of crazy, because they haven't managed to listen to anyone giving a balanced perspective. And why are we destroying America this way? It sells. Sponsors know they can get their ad impressions on cable news networks. They keep sponsoring this schlock where the anchors and pundits are trying to come up with something original to say to gain viewership, only they don't actually do much real research; they only make ad hominem attacks in a whiny, strained voice for as long as the camera is on them. (This is not unlike how I would sound if I were speaking instead of writing this.) So the Glorious Capitalism has brought this upon us. Makes me very angry.

Back to Ms. Palin again. The liberals are trying everything they can to get dirt on McCain and Palin. The conservatives are doing everything they can to defend against these attacks, forgetting in their fervor that they used the exact same rhetoric against the Democrats a few weeks ago. And the fact that the VP candidate is a woman only makes it worse. I've never heard so much sexism (in a reverse sort of way). They keep reaching to make sure that everyone lays off Ms. Palin. "She's such a helpless little girl! Stop attacking her!" From the liberal side, they say things like, "She's such a helpless little girl! Destroy her!"

But then you hear what Palin says after a stupid question at a press conference. "Judge me on the job I do. It doesn't matter if I'm a woman; I'm still held to a high standard." This is exactly right. Can we stop making personal attacks and digging up dirt? We can ask things like, "Is he capable of being a good leader if his underage daughter goes out and gets smashed?" (That was so 2003.) "Is she capable of being a good leader when her teen daughter is pregnant and she has an infant with disabilities?" These are fair questions. But the tone of offense and defense between the parties makes reasonable assessment impossible. "Is it a good idea to have a freshman senator taking over the presidency?" I happen to know that Obama has some crazy cred, such as being top of his law class at Harvard, president of Harvard Law Review, a constitutional law professor for twelve years (refreshing after years of constitutional disregard), state senator for seven years, chair of foreign relations subcommittee, etc. I don't know the cred about the others, but they have theirs too. (Runner up Miss Alaska . . . ) But we still have to ask smart questions and listen for intelligent answers.

Frankly, I think either ticket would be quite capable of governing the country well. I may not agree with all the policies of one or the other, but then again, I don't remember getting my DNA extracted so they could make my clone president. We must get back to intelligent dialogue. It's unfortunately absent, first in the media, and by extension in the campaigns and politics in general.

Dress code

Ooh, it's been a while. I've been obsessively reading ethics for my second summer class. It's really interesting and engaging, the professor is great, but man, it's burdensome. I might have bit off more than I can chew, given my job and everything else.

I think I've ranted about dress codes in this blog before, but my wife's new situation provided a bunch of clarity for me. She's observing high school math classes, soon to be student teaching, subsequently doing an internship. Her ethic going in was to always dress up and show the kids that you're an authority figure. I think that's all the more helpful since she's now in one of the toughest high schools in our town.

That idea—dressing up to send a signal of authority to kids—resonated a lot with my habilimentary theories. The substance of my usual rant is very utilitarian: Dress me up comfortably so I can do my best work. Different places I have worked have been very deontological. (This ethics class isn't going to waste.) They say we should dress professionally, firstly because we all know it's right, but then a little bit teleological/utilitarian in that we will work professionally if we dress that way. (Actually, they say the latter first, but you can see in their eyes that the fact that they're having this conversation with you hurts them because you're so dense as to not realize that dressing "professionally" is a moral good.)

One thing I gained from my wife's experience is that what we wear is even more pretentious than I realized. Unfortunately, the other thing I gained is an even more condescending picture of the clothing legalists. I see them as having the mentality or moral development of high schoolers or younger. You mean I can make you think I'm professional just by wearing different clothes? Unbelievable! And these are the people with the biggest salaries! If I'm willing to play the game, I can get rich, too! Too bad I'm such an idealist.

My wife introduced me to a theory that the big people world is nothing more than a bunch of junior highers with all the petty rivalries and immaturity. I bought into that theory, and then I saw this quote from Tom Brokaw from a graduation speech at Skidmore College: "You've been told during your high school years and your college years that you are now about to enter the real world, and you've been wondering what it's like. Let me tell you that the real world is not college. The real world is not high school. The real world, it turns out, is much more like junior high. You are going to encounter, for the rest of your life, the same petty jealousies, the same irrational juvenile behavior, the same uncertainty that you encountered during your adolescent years. That is your burden. We all share it with you. We wish you well."

Turns out that one more aspect of our world fits perfectly into the theory: You can deceive simple minded people into thinking you have authority simply by what you wear. Doesn't matter if they're in high school or in your workplace.

Bus as community

So it's been a while. I have a book to read and a paper to write for one class. I have 1300 pages to read, 19 hours of lecture to listen to, and two tests to take for the second class. In five weeks. That's why I haven't been posting.

I just had to at this moment. Firstly, I actually have internet on this city bus. Sweet!

My driver just missed two consecutive turns, which means she had to find places big enough to "turn this 53' bus around!" (That's in quotes as homage to a friend and former co-worker who always said things like "Turn this bus around!" or "Back up the bus!" He used to say, "Back the truck up!" till his 3-year-old daughter misshouted "truck" in that phrase in the store when she was trying to call attention to some tasty treat.) There are at least seven passengers on the bus, and everybody was trying to be helpful. It really did take a community to get the bus going in the right direction. Thankfully, one knowledgeable woman went to the front to help. We're on our way now.

The other side of community that my wife told me about a month or so ago is the fact that on the downtown buses, people really get to know each other. It's truly amazing.

One instance of bus community I was happy to not be a part of was yesterday morning. The regular driver takes off Tuesdays, and that's the day I work from home. My two compatriots told me this morning that I should be glad I wasn't there. Why? My bike would have been demolished. The bus broadsided a car. Yowza! Thankfully, no one was hurt, but my bike sure would have been as it is perched on the front of the bus.

Coming to the station!

A difference

Today, I noticed a significant improvement in my bike riding. I made it all the way up Bridle Pass (a medium difficulty street climb) in 21st gear (the hard one). When I started riding in earnest about six weeks ago, I had to ride up in 8th. I feel like I have nothing left to accomplish. Or maybe it's that I have no energy left to accomplish anything. I guess if I built a wee bit more endurance, I could challenge for the polka dot jersey on the Tour.

Resurrection and new creation

I have a friend/mentor who has his PhD in theology who cautions me that, while Moltmann says some things that are gold, there is a panentheist lurking in his core. I haven't really found that yet . . . Also, he says that Moltmann is not embraced in many denominations other than UCC. That would make sense if he's a panentheist, but I haven't seen any of that in the first half of "The Crucified God."

Speaking of, I read a quote in there that I must share. It almost brought tears to my eyes, and it's given me new hope and focus in life. Now that I've ruined the quote by placing on it ginormously (Ha! I said it!) high expectations, here goes:

"The dispute over the resurrection of Jesus is concerned with the question of righteousness in history. Does it belong to the nomos which finally gives each man his deserts, or does it belong to the law of grace as it was manifest by Jesus and in the resurrection of the crucified Christ? The message of the new righteousness which eschatological faith brings into the world says that in fact the executioners will not finally triumph over their victims. It also says that in the end the victims will not triumph over their executioners. The one will triumph who first died for the victims and then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes what is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is neither oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God" (178).

I particularly love his exposition on how the "old" "righteousness" led to victims saying, "It's about time I'm vindicated. Kill the executioner!" In the new creation, it's all about creativity in love figuring out how to serve one another. (See previous posts about my radical pacifism.) We all come to the Savior with equal amounts of nothing to offer. Even if I get murdered, I don't stand before Jesus saying, "Hey, look, free pass? I was murdered." No, we all rely on the same magnanimous grace.

The idea that oppression disappears in the new creation also sparked a thought. Perhaps because Jesus willingly gave himself to all humanity, he ruled out the possibility of his being oppressed. If that's the case, we get to stand up for justice for the oppressed, all the while offering ourselves to all with no regard for our rights. Oppression disappears. This sort of activity alternately confuses and pisses off the oppressor. If we are martyred for witnessing to Christ, we get our life back at the resurrection.

The terrorist label

I'm riding the bus right now, and each time I look up to chew on a tidbit from Moltmann, I see headlines on a newspaper opposite me that remind me of "culture wars." Not of Christians despising non, but of the people we call terrorists against the people we call allies (or self).

One example is the debate raging over prisoner exchanges between Israel and anybody not Israel. Obviously, that war has had a long history. Look back to when the Philistines sent raiding parties into Israel to steal food with impunity. Anybody recognize the etymological link? Now Israel has the upper hand, and they can oppress the Palestinians with impunity. Power legitimates the use of power (speaking from fallen logic). The only thing the oppressed can do to "dialogue" is to carry out what those in power call terrorist acts.

Every people group has carried out terrorist acts at some point. The inhabitants of Ziklag probably wished that David wasn't so darn faithful to YHWH that he wouldn't take over Saul's throne already. David and his 400 men were assigned Ziklag by the Philistine king Achish when they fled from Saul, and they made it their base of operations to do what? Carry out raids. Against the Amalekites among others. When David and his men were preparing to help Achish fight against Israel, the Amalekites sacked Ziklag. Tit for tat.

Do you think the British thought, "Cute protest!" when they heard about the Boston Tea incident? That was no Party to them. That was a clever moniker the eventual victorious historians came up with. Our nation's forebears were terrorists to their oppressors.

Indian raiding parties were terrorists to Custer.

The Melchiorites were terrorists to all the major churches at the time: Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed.

The common thread through all these stories is the self. When we fixate on self, on differentiating our selves from others, and on assimilating and solidifying affinity groups, it's much easier to affix labels to others. When we flatten others to a single dimension in order to attach the easy peel-and-stick label, we dehumanize them. Shallow categories are so much easier than knowing, loving and serving the other. If it stopped at mental dehumanization, that would be simply dishonoring to the Creator. But it moves so easily to the next level: fear and hatred. Once those elements are involved, fear causes us to instill fear in others, particularly if we are a fearful leader. This rhetoric whips us into a patriotic frenzy to kill all the terrorists. We placate ourselves by saying that we need to do it to ensure our safety and "way of life."

Hold on just a second. We're the only ones with a way of life? What is it that the terrorists are so vehemently defending? They fear us and the way we are destroying their way of life. It's so easy to recruit other terrorists by fear-mongering. But clearly, even if the terrorists are trying to defend their way of life of oppressing those near them (and potentially, eventually, us), we must not answer by oppressing them. One day soon, the shoe will be on the other foot, and we'll have to resort to terror (merely in the "we're now on bottom" sense; the stuff we do to them is already classified in their hearts as terrorizing) to defend our way of life.

We can claim that we have the law on our side, and surely we do. The "law" in the biblical sense is an instrument of death to show that whatever fix we come up with is totally inadequate. As long as we continue to claim having the law on our side, we will use death to enforce it. God's work in the world was to bring the law to its logical end in having Jesus executed as a blasphemer according to the current interpretation of Torah, with death and sin pouring out its worst on him. At the vindication of the resurrection, Jesus showed that death had no hold on him. Why do we insist on using a tremendously destructive method that is eventually doomed to utter destruction to make the world tick? Christians must stop supporting death. We've been delivered from that. Even if death stalks us and consumes us, do we not trust the Creator and reCreator to give us our life back in the new creation?

I don't have a martyr complex. I don't want to die. But if it comes to me killing in order to defend my "way of life," I have suddenly chosen the way of death. I refuse to submit to the clutches of death and sin over my heart to defend my body from death. I will trust Jesus to either defend me and keep me around, or I will trust him to resurrect me to a new life in the age to come when I will serve him fully and completely.

I digress. There is no chance that the label "terrorist" is productive. We are all subject to the terrors of death and sin. While there are people who indeed embody terror to the point of being abjectly nonhuman (current example: janjaweed in Darfur), we don't need to categorize them. They still bear the horribly disfigured image of God, and you can bet that God wants to redeem that. (Nazi prison guards, anyone? Have you heard the stories of them seeking forgiveness? Powerful stuff. God works wonders.) Far be it from me to tell God that his work will not be sufficient in a person's life, and therefore I can end it. He has his own timetable and means of accomplishing his work of life and of terminating life. (Those last two words are theologically difficult for me, but I'm too lazy to express them differently. Perhaps Nabal's awful decisions culminated in a natural implosion of his body and spirit, because God withdrew his hand. That may be a better view than active termination.)

I redigress. Let's impose personal bans on labels such as "terrorist," because those will only perpetuate fear. By reverse construction of the biblical sentence, I contend that fear casts out love. If Jesus has called us to love, and "perfect love casts out fear," let's take that path. We will cease to feel terrorized, because we trust in Jesus, and we can go boldly forth to love the world.

Working the soil

It's only 11 am, and I'm going to go ahead and mark today as a crazy day, perhaps even sublimely ridiculous. I got up early to ride three and a half miles with my wife to Chick-fil-A for free breakfast burrito day. Yummy. She caught her bus right outside the restaurant. I proceeded to ride my bike up a hill we have avoided to this point, and I found out why. A true she-dog.

I landed at Starbucks to continue reading Moltmann. I'm disappointed at how little I got read. Some of that was due to my imminent distractability. When I was sitting outside, the drive-thru box drove me crazy. There were two times when no one was at the box over about two hours. Otherwise a constant stream of cars and Deb proclaiming a fabulous day at Starbucks. Maybe gas prices aren't affecting our spending habits that much after all.) When I sat inside, the loud music and the sometimes overly animated people were detrimental. I still made progress for which I am thankful.

When I was done, I asked if they had any spent coffee grounds. The woman handed me a small, but very heavy bag. I asked for another bag to split the grounds, noting that I was riding a bike. That elicited some raised eyebrows and a "Good luck." I split the bags, enjoying the quite pleasant chocolate aroma coming from what consisted mostly of spent espresso pucks. I doubled each bag in on itself and tied the top in a knot. I hung each bag on a handlebar and deliberately set out for home, always conscientious of tearing bags. I made it the two miles home quite nicely.

Arriving home, I had to see exactly how much coffee I had. I guessed 24 pounds. I had 36! This is where the working of the (soon-to-be) soil began. I dumped a bunch of grounds into our compost container, and began mixing everything together. We had some really rich compost going already, but it was very dense and matted together. Hopefully the grounds will not only enrich the nascent soil, but will break it up into much loamier material.

Nwo on to a prdocutvie afetronon! Gosh, it hard to type with your fingers crossed!

The world is a wishing well

Over the five weeks that I've been riding my bike everywhere I possibly can, I've picked up over thirty pennies. I have ridden past a few more for safety or laziness.

One day I commented to my wife, "I'm not complaining, but wouldn't it be nice to find a quarter?" The next day, we were riding together and she shouted back to me, "There's a quarter!" I stopped and picked it up. Naturally, I said, "I'm not complaining, but it would be really nice to find a five dollar bill."

A couple of observations. Coinage gets really chewed up on the pavement. Also, what's with the predominance of pennies on the ground? I think I found a dime once in addition to the quarter, but that's still about 94% pennies.

Has inflation made Ben Franklin irrelevant? I'm not talking about "benjamins"; those still seem to be quite relevant. What happened to "a penny saved is a penny earned"?

Since I want to foolishly believe that our culture is more frugal and intelligent than it is, I've developed a theory: Kids are dreaming big these days. There aren't enough fountains or wishing wells around, so they've decided, "The world is my wishing well." (Not that kids these days know what that is.)

Seriously, I don't think adults are just dumping pennies out the window. (Twice I found bunches of ten pennies in intersections.) I'm pretty sure parents give kids in car seats some pennies to play with. On moderate summer days, the windows are open. What's a kid gonna do? What comes naturally: Chuck pennies out the window.

Courage and controversy

I was at the mall with my wife today, and I saw a t-shirt that said something to the effect of "Courage is the most important trait of a warrior."

Here comes the controversy: I beg to differ. But you probably knew that already. While it doesn't make a pithy t-shirt quote, in my view, the most important trait in a warrior is that he (or she, perhaps) knows the value of humanity. A true warrior will have a humanizing vision. A true warrior doesn't see the enemy as objects, but as fellow subjects (not subjected to something, but as subjective beings). A true warrior feels so deeply what he is fighting for that it's worth defending at all costs. A true warrior knows what's worth killing for.

The only reason to feel something deeply enough to kill is because it is deeply rooted in one's humanity.  Therefore, killing is undertaken with extreme gravity. Killing takes away someone else's (potential for) humanity, which quite possibly destroys one's own humanity. That's why I put things in terms of what's worth killing for, and not what's worth dying for or worth fighting for. The latter two can be undertaken within oneself with minimal impact on others. But when it comes to taking lives, that is a grave matter.

I should also note that humans have a long history of fighting and killing. For most of our existence, we've been killing for clan groups, hunting territory, water rights, etc. Now we're killing for nations, for resources, for oil. Not much has changed. But for a modern soldier, it's very hard to be the described warrior. I don't discredit a soldier's courage, commitment or sacrifice. They often go willingly to defend their country, fully knowing the consequences. But when a soldier is called to defend an idea, like America or freedom, it's a tough calling. I don't think there's the gravity of humanity in most of the national wars. I see the gravity of humanity in the genocides of Darfur and Rwanda. I see the gravity of humanity in the Husseins torturing and killing athletes for whatever reason. But I don't see the gravity of humanity in preemptively invading with now-known faulty intelligence. I'm sure President Bush agonized over the decision to invade. But the results have been difficult. I've heard from soldiers that have fought in Iraq that we are helping a lot. I've also heard that we're wasting our time and lives on both sides.

I pray that our soldiers are making a positive, human difference. I pray that they can be true warriors.

Food for thought (perhaps literally)

I'm reading The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann for my SysTheo class, and I read a particularly thought-inspiring (partial) paragraph.

"The cultic division between the religious and the profane is potentially abolished in faith in the Christ who was profaned by crucifixion. Thus the eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with 'sinners and publicans', must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the 'highways and hedges' of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination. The Christian church can re-introduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within and those who are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the church of the crucified Christ" (44).

He takes my eucharistic conviction a step further, to a place I had wondered about, but hadn't dared go. The step before this, which is where I am currently, is that the Lord's Table was always meant to be a potluck, not some solemn religious ceremony where trays are passed with wafers and grape juice. Even the Anglican (and others') model of going up to a rail, while better, doesn't get to the idea of table fellowship.

Compared to Moltmann, my eucharistic model was the Last Supper, where it seems to be an intimate group of Jesus' followers. On the other hand, God's point through the sacrificial system was to dine with his beloved humans estranged as they were. What's to say that the Lord's Table isn't meant to be block parties? Some will object that Communion is a sacred celebration. "Can't have the riffraff defile the Lord's Table." By that standard, I don't think Jesus did a sacred thing his entire life. Conversely, as Rob Bell stated in the title of his speaking tour two years ago, "everything is spiritual." Perhaps the first step is figuring out Jesus' view of sacred v. profane. Then a rethinking of the eucharist. Anybody up for that?

How about non-Christians at the Eucharist?

Universalism revisited

In a couple of previous posts, I queried whether God's grace might be so overpowering as to redeem the entire creation—Hitlers, Stalins and Amins included. In a Systematic Theology lecture I listened to today, I found a rather illuminating outline point in the notes. "God's love is universal, Christ's act is universal, and the atonement is universal, but some resist this love. That is the mystery of sin and evil."

I still won't discount the pleasant thought of God redeeming everyone, but this helped me to make sense of that austere nagging in the back of my mind, saying, "There's no way everybody gets in." (Not that nagging in my broken mind is the source of truth or anything.) It seems to me that God isn't stopping anybody from "getting in." Perhaps it's our hardness of heart rejecting God.

That opens a whole new can of worms about how free we really are. The professor of this course said early on that "the Bible has no place for free will." He laughed a bit and said, "Maybe I'll have the TA explain that to you later." He sounded dead serious, but I have a really (really) hard time believing that.

No mysteries will be solved at this hour, I'm sure. I've got a bit more reading to do, then off to bed!

Patriotism Sunday

I mentioned in my previous post about American religion, that some of the key features are self, capitalism and inclusivity. (I should note that that inclusivity only includes the currently fashionable groups to include. Terrorists are definitely out.) One other hallmark of American religion is flags!

I forgot how sick I get when I go into a church on the Sunday proximal to the fourth of July. The flags everywhere, the "praise to America" hymns, etc. I passed by a church on Saturday that had the sermon title on the marquee: "Happy birthday America/Independent of tyranny/Dependent upon God." I can only assume by the title that the tyrants are the British? Those feelings that the early Americans felt were presumably very different from how the Native Americans or the slaves or the Iraqis felt (feel).

I do have to grant the possibility that there was a bait and switch in there, much the same as at my church. Perhaps they were going to sing "happy birthday, America" (happy two hundred thirty-second birthda-ay), then talk about how the power of sin and death were broken through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and how we're all dependent on God to break free from that. But I kinda doubt it.

We walked in a bit late to my church, and they were mid-Introit. "God Bless America." I think I crawled out of my skin and ran back to the car. But somehow my corpse stayed. I'm thankful we weren't there for the "Organ Praise" which was "The National Anthem." There were two giant American flags hanging on either side of the sanctuary. (What does "sanctuary" mean again?)

But a mysterious thing began to happen. (I should have known something was up when I saw a bunch of foreign flags around the sanctuary.) We started singing songs that talk about God ruling over his creation. About how we're brothers and sisters with people around the world. About bearing each other's burdens. Singing the wonderful verses of American hymns that pertained to not America. (From "My Country, 'Tis of Thee": Not for this land alone,/ But be God's mercies shown from shore to shore;/ And may the nations see that men should brothers be,/ And form one family the wide world o'er.) Then the sermon title: "One World, Under God"! The pastor was preaching to the choir to me, but I think it might have been a significant message for many in the congregation.

I'll include the full text of the closing hymn, "O God of Every Nation":
O God of every nation,
Of every race and land,
Redeem your whole creation
With your almighty hand;
Where hate and fear divide us,
And bitter threats are hurled,
In love and mercy guide us,
And heal our strife-torn world.

Keep bright in us the vision
Of days when war shall cease,
When hatred and division
Give way to love and peace,
Till dawns the morning glorious
When truth and justice reign,
And Christ shall rule victorious
O'er all the world's domain.


Amen, amen and amen! I still get gander bumps when I think of the implications of this song. Please don't misunderstand me. I don't hate America. I enjoy the "freedom," convenience and relative sloth. I really do. But I feel like the real America believes the preceding hymn, that we should serve the world around us. I don't believe America is the kingdom of God or the church. However, it appears that most Americans believe that America is God's country (or for the secularists, that luck has shone so greatly on us that we're entitled to grind our boot on the rest of the world's neck). Yet we behave in the world exactly the way God detests. This is why the words of the prophet Amos apply so strongly to America, particularly these:
"Seek good, not evil,
that you may live.
Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you,
just as you say he is.
Hate evil, love good;
maintain justice in the courts.
Perhaps the LORD God Almighty will have mercy
on the remnant of Joseph" (TNIV).
We aren't the remnant of Joseph, but God will be with us if we seek good, not evil. And by "with us," I don't mean that we will win military victories. Because more than likely we wouldn't be fighting.

God bless the world.

The only way

This post is pretty important to me in that it has consumed my thoughts a quite a bit of late. However, I'm listening to Weezer's Red Album for the first time, and it's pretty catchy at the moment. I don't have the discipline to quit one or the other of these two activities, so who knows how this post'll turn out.

I read recently (regretfully, I can't recall where) that a Barna-esque poll found that 67% of Evangelicals don't think that Jesus is the only way to heaven, including President Bush. (Not that I look to politicians to be theologians, or even Christians, but that fact was part of the point of the article.) For all I know, Bush could have been giving homage to the most important religion to a president, that is, America. The hallmarks of this religion include vague references to God, but always affirming self, capitalism and inclusivity.

I've posted some wonderings about universalism of late. I'm coming more to the conclusion that universalism is an open question, but that any salvation is definitely only through Jesus. Usually when someone affirms Jesus is the only way, that indicates they are extremely conservative, say-the-prayer-or-else type of folk. But in my christology studies, I'm seeing the broad effectiveness of Jesus's life, sacrifice and resurrection. I'm also seeing anew the Father's extravagant grace (which is a significant understatement). It would be scandalous for a person to be as open and gracious as God is, let alone for a deity. For the righteousness, justice and holiness that are ascribed to (and surely true of) God, he sure behaves irresponsibly. I have a feeling that non-Christians don't know of this, and Christians aren't willing to tell. We've reverse engineered the image of God onto himself from our own twisted reflection of him.

What if God really wanted to redeem everyone (including the rightly infamous Hitlers, Stalins and Amins)? If we attribute infinite power, glory, grace, etc. to God, wouldn't that be his prerogative? Particularly if we engage the big story of the Bible, we will begin to see how insane God's graciousness appears. If we continue with our systematic denuding the Bible of its message by picking sentences that we think fit our picture of God the best, we will continue to create our god in our own image.

We've made up a lot of stuff about how the righteous people before the time of Jesus were looking forward to him as the means of their salvation. That's mostly a crock. They trusted in the Creator God, firstly, and if they were privy to the revelation, they trusted in the Covenant God. But there were people who got that people are meant to love and serve one another. I would say that this is a result of revelation as well. Regardless, God will be faithful to his faithful, whether they name Jesus or not. This idea stops short of universalism, but it's still good to muse about. If, in fact, people who haven't heard of Jesus are "in," what does that mean for missions? Shouldn't this fact just make us lazy? No, I would contend that the more understanding we have, the better off we are; the less understanding, the less we are able to live as fully human.

TF Torrance posits in his book/lecture series "The Mediation of Christ" that Jesus reveals God to humanity and reconciles humanity to God (and God to humanity). These twin functions of revelation and reconciliation are held together in Jesus as the nexus of deity and humanity. Jesus bore all our struggles as the new Adam, meaning all the temptation that fallen humanity has given in to over the generations, he bore in himself. As the new creation, Jesus has emptied temptation and sin and death of its power. But he is also God who is showing his creation how to live. If God chose to have all the horrors done to Jesus, and his response to them, be sufficient to show humanity in its entirety how to live in the new, restored creation, I guess I'd be content with that.

All that to say, Jesus is the only way of reconciliation to God. Whether that means only the people who say some pagan incantation (sinner's prayer) get to heaven forever when they die, or whether that means that God is hopelessly enamored with every one of the people he has created, even though we continually, actively attempt to destroy his creation, and that he wants to restore his creation and his humans so that they can dwell forever in the new creation serving him, I'm not really sure. I would lean my inklings toward the latter in that false dichotomy.

Dobson v. Obama: The cage match

I guess the cage match is more of a foil that I always fantasize about. And in this case, it runs directly counter to what I'm talking about. Perhaps you heard in the news that James Dobson, erstwhile president, but still very actively in control of Focus on the Family, condemned Barack Obama's twisting of Scripture. In one of the greatest cases of "does he realize his mouth is talking without him thinking (again)?", Dr. Dobson said, "He's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology." I'm not terribly careful about saying that about other people, but when I say it, at least I realize that I'm exactly as subject to that judgment as the person I'm talking about.

The distortion in question has to do with Obama's statement that "said Leviticus suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination. Obama also cited Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, 'a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application' " (from Yahoo! News). I love that Obama is probably the first presidential candidate in history that has noted that Jesus wouldn't christen (as it were) our Defense Department. I don't know how Obama handles the other passages hermeneutically (I haven't taken the time to chase that down yet), but this is the first time in my memory someone so public has called into question the infallible doctrine of American self-preservation.

I'm reading God So Loved the World: A Christology for Disciples by Jonathan R. Wilson. He puts in book form many of the things I have suspected for a while, related to whether the church/humanity gets to kill each other to get our own way. To wit, "Jesus Christ overcomes the world in his death by refusing the lies of the world and remaining obedient to the Father. When he was facing death, Jesus could have followed the way of the world and used his power to destroy his enemies; he could have played by the rules of the world's system of justice to avoid a guilty verdict. But he remained faithful to God, giving up his life in the world for life in the kingdom" (p 180). It's worth noting that Wilson is an anti-dualist; his use of "world" here isn't about "earth," but about the anti-kingdom world system. Another delightful little phrase from Wilson: "Christ's followers are misfits. But that is a blessing, because to be fit for the world is to be fit for death" (p 167).

Why is it that "Christian" "leaders" are so often pro-militarism? Why do they snuggle up in so many other ways to the world's rules? It's as if they say, "In order to expand my influence, I need to say things that will feel agreeable to my public." I'm not sure Dr. Dobson actively says that, but it sure seems like it. He gets in people's faces about raising their kids, but they flock to him. Why doesn't he get in people's faces about how killing people in the interest of or the defense of a nation plays exactly by the rules of the creation-destroying world system? Because he doesn't want to lose his audience? Because he doesn't understand his Bible? Because "he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology"? I'm just askin's all.

Prayer

Yes, today's topic is prayer, but first an awful pun that indicates my relationship to my classes. (They're going well, by the way, but I have to keep motivated.) The words "diligence" and "dilly-dally" popped into my head simultaneously. Thus, my struggle is determining whether I will practice diligence or dilly-dallygence. Since I'm typing on my blog right now instead of listening to a lecture, you know what's winning.

For the SysTheo class, I'm reading a book by the professor, Ray S. Anderson, called "Judas and Jesus." There's a great quote about prayer on page 51 that I've been chewing on for a couple of days: "Prayer is not a means of removing the unknown and unpredictable elements in life, but rather a way of including the unknown and unpredictable factors in the outworking of the grace of God in our lives."

The ground of evil

My head is swimming with a few thoughts from my SysTheo lectures. (I never dreamed I would say that, disliking my previous Systematics experience so much.)

One incidental idea dealing with the topic is the fact that when Adam and Eve sinned, they didn't become sinners; they died. While "sinner" is a theological category with some merit, given that the word is used in the Scriptures, I'm wondering if it has become a useless word. The fundamentalist leanings of our society created a backlash against the word, and now it is in such disfavor among the culture we are trying to reach that I think we should drop it. I would characterize its use as nitpecking. Nitpicking would be a bit more genteel and productive, even though it's annoying. The church has tended to behave like a woodpecker on the heads of so many unsuspecting "sinners." If we addressed sin and evil at its root, it would be immensely more helpful (and threatening, too, because then our own sinful hearts would be revealed). Maybe in a generation or two "sinner" can become a useful word again.

The major thought from the class that struck me is that the reason Israel has had such a rough go of it throughout history is because she is in intimate relationship with the holy Creator God. (There's a side point where they suffer vicariously for the rest of humanity, which is fascinating, but not the point here.) If Israel had been left to herself, she would have gone on like the other nations, moderately evil, but appearing mostly good. However, God came near, and as he placed covenant demands on her, they kept trying to throw off the yoke. "Leave us alone! Weren't we better off back in Egypt anyway?" The amazing part of all this is, God still relentlessly pursued Israel. She kept trying to get away, but God rode the spiral all the way down with her. Only at her death did resurrection become an option.

The reason this rocked my world is I see this pattern in my own life. I always wondered why despite being married to my wonderful wife, my eyes still wander/wonder after other women. I think this is exactly the reason. Before I was covenanted with God and Susan, I was moderately evil, but appearing mostly good. There was no real reason to be concerned about appreciating an attractive woman (physical or otherwise). Wasn't that, after all, the way I knew who I wanted to ask on a date? But now in the holiness of our marriage, my heart is being revealed as deceitful and beyond cure. (Is this a surprise? I think Jeremiah called it. I've just never been willing to admit it.) This is the beauty of marriage, fallen though we are, that God uses it to sanctify us. Paul had that odd note in 1 Corinthians that the unbelieving spouse is sanctified through the believing spouse. For those who let it happen, marriage will reveal their wickedness and drive them to the Creator for reconciliation.