Receiving Mercy... Not Losing Heart: A Servant's Blog

"Fear Not, God Intruding!"

2010-12-08T06:29:00.003-05:00

Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name;
You are mine.
When you pass through the waters I will be with you
And when you pass through the rivers,
They will not sleep over you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned;
The flames will not set you ablaze.
For I am the Lord, your God,
The holy one of Israel, your Savior.
Isaiah 43: 1b-3a

We imagine life as a process of becoming our own person taking pride in our self-sufficiency. Isaiah depicts our conceit in an apocryphal carpenter

Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares
his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms
himself and says, “Ah I am warm; I see the fire.” From the
rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships.
He prays to it and says, “Save me; you are my god.” (Isaiah 44:16)

Fending off destruction or just diminution, enjoying plenty, we arrogate determination of worship’s object..

“…From the
rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships.
He prays to it and says, ‘Save me; you are my god.’” (Isaiah 44:16)

We quaver when God intrudes into our existence because He exceeds our control and that implies the possibility of our destruction. His presence confronts us with it. Nothing we know nor anything we have done bequeaths assurance about the outcome of His intrusion. He is not bound by us and only bound to be Himself.

“…he who created you…
He who formed you…” (Isaiah 43: 1a)

“the Lord your God,
The Holy one of Jacobs’s progeny, your Savior.” (Isaiah 43:3)

Isaiah admonishes us to relinquish our fears because God claims us as His creation.

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.” (Isaiah 43:1b)

“Fear not,” sounds good. Warm fire, well cooked game, and now, on top of contentment, fearlessness about what lies beyond the pale of the fire and the fullness of the belly. I can keep on, “keepin’ on.”

But Isaiah does not confirm a conceit. God’s redemption frees us from fear. We have “deemed” ourselves self-sufficient; God, has “deemed” us as His. The wood for our fire, our fire, the meat roasted on it--- all that meets our needs and satisfies our wants, God has “deemed” His provision.

Our self-sufficiency is relinquished with our fear, but contentedly sitting by the fire, it’s inconsequential. So, Isaiah, makes it acute: when we face overwhelming physical threats, God provides the same sort of contentment we feel when warm and well fed.

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And when you pass through the rivers,
They will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire you will not be burned;
The flames will not set you ablaze.” (Isaiah 43:2)

We are saved from the very disasters we most fear as intractable to our ameliorative efforts when God is with us. Isaiah dismisses fear because with God, the disasters are there but the destruction is not.

“…when you pass through the rivers,
They will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire you will not be burned” (Isaiah 43:2)

Thanksgiving Prayer, Thursday, November 25, 2010

2010-11-25T06:39:00.007-05:00

Praise the LORD!
For it is good to sing praises to our God;
For it is pleasant, and praise is beautiful.

² The LORD builds up Jerusalem;
He gathers together the outcasts of Israel.
³ He heals the brokenhearted
And binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147: 1-3

We now pray in thanks to You, Lord, because we know it is a good thing to do. This holiday which we celebrate was established for it. Who can deny that goodness and plenty in this land exceed what would be measured out to us if we received only what we deserved? You do not leave our lives to be defined by the foolishness, greed, malevolence, poverty and unfounded discrimination that mark our everyday conduct. Instead You awaken us to compassion by Your mercy on us, to truth by Your faithfulness, to love by Your gifts, to joy by Your presence and to Your coming kingdom by healing.

You have made it pleasant now today to think about how much we have. We are not rich, each of us, in the same things; we are differently endowed by You. But who now lets himself or herself get stuck in comparing what they have to what others have, when we can rejoice that what we have comes from You, the Eternal Creator and always faithful Provider? Who wants to need stuff when, here, today, You offer us the joy that what we have is but a tiny portion of all that You want to give us? Who wants to be gloomy considering today, for now, what he or she might lose, when we can be made glad that the Providential God of the Universe is looking out for our happiness and well being.

We thank-you that Deb zealously threw herself into being the hands and the cook of these immediate gifts of your bounty for us. We thank you that she worked hard and for days to create this dinner for us, and we ask that Your appreciation will magnify ours and that she will be happy to have done this and restored to the new days’ tasks tomorrow.

We thank-you that you have gathered us who have never celebrated Thanksgiving together to do so today because we know all the claptrap about unchanging traditions of celebrations and traditions with too much specificity serve to divide us and make us compete leaving people more disappointed and frustrated than Thankful. If nothing else, we here, today, are trying hard to live out the lives You have laid before us and we are grateful that you have preserved us with good gifts beyond what we could make for ourselves or demand as our just rewards.

In the Know ???????

2010-09-07T17:17:00.003-04:00

For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. 9 Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead, 10 who delivered us from so great a death, and does[a] deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliver us, 2nd Corinthians 1:8-10

Wouldn’t most of us have to admit that there are books in the Bible about which we do not know anything? Aren’t there sections of the Bible with which we are unfamiliar? I mean, doesn’t a title like “the Minor Prophets” come right to mind? Wouldn’t we have to admit that we couldn’t be sure if some ancient sounding name were or were not the author of a Book included there?

Come right down to it, isn’t it true that 63 books are a lot of books to remember when most of what is written talks about people and places that aren’t ever mentioned anywhere else- even in any of all the history you had to take in school? I mean, maybe if you study the Bible, you become a better person, but nothing written there changes anything that is going to happen, right? If it did, then people who wanted to know stuff would read it, not just people who want to be good, right?

To be real honest, which we know we are supposed to be, many of us who are Christians think these very thoughts. We know that we share these thoughts with people who make no claim to being Christian. Sure it makes us uncomfortable. Mainly it makes us uncomfortable around pastors, Sunday school teachers, and people that carry around Bibles on the week days in backpacks, briefcases and pocketbooks. Knowing stuff about the Bible is like remembering the code to the combination lock you used in 8^th grade gym class when you are a senior in high school. Some kids do, but you don’t want to go their parties or even have to give them a ride home when your practice ends same time as their club meeting.

Many of you reading this are saying, “Well all that is true, but I know that Corinthians is a book in the Bible, and I know it was written by Paul. It’s read at weddings and funerals Corinthians says really quoted stuff: what’s most important is faith, hope and love-and love is most important of all; or, we know some things now, but when we die and go to heaven we come directly before God everything will make sense. It’s good stuff to hear when you’re hookin’ up with someone for life, or when someone you know just died.

The rest of it is like Paul talking to the people in his day and times. He’s going over stuff with them that leads him to say those famous quotations. It’s a letter and it starts out like letters in those days and ends like letters in those days. It’s how people talked to people not right there in front of them before there was such a thing as texting. How people talked to people before texting?”

Exactly! I like that. Paul was in like NOW mode, “Wazz up? Chillin with my homies?”

The pastors, Sunday school teachers and people carrying Bibles on the weekdays may need Paul to have said, “The greatest of these is Love,” or, “though now we see in part, then we shall see face to face,” but Paul didn’t need to get into history like he needed a good Blackberry. Stuff had happened and more stuff that everyone expected should have happened didn’t happen and he suddenly saw why it didn’t. So he was hot to tell the people he thought were most affected.

Generally, when we hang onto something from the Bible we do it because something that mattered has happened and we want to know if, here, now, talk about God makes any difference. The short answer is that it doesn’t. Talking about God doesn’t make a difference-at least not for the good. Instead, Paul texts about himself and what has happened to him: “Supposed to be with You, NOT. Really weird stuff went down. So whacked out we are like hanging on to God for our lives.” God makes the stuff that matters happen. Paul found it out over and over again. He knew it like a fist in his face: SO HE TEXTED HIS FRIENDS.

Forget all that cranking about God creating the world or working in history. Who is history? It’s like remembering the combination to your eighth grade combination lock in your senior year of high school. What is going on now is what makes anyone talk about God. You talk about God when you can’t help it. He does stuff that matters and you tell people because the stuff matters - not because God did it. Because the stuff matters to you - not to pastors, Sunday School teachers and people who carry Bibles around on the weekdays in backpacks, briefcases and pocketbooks. Ditto, Paul.

I am going to bet you two things. The first big bet: God makes stuff happen in your life.

The second big bet: He does it for reasons really only you can tell us about.

People can guess. And surely they do. Pastors, Sunday school teachers and people who carry Bibles around on the week days in backpacks, briefcases and pocketbooks are real eager to tell you why God does stuff in your life. Maybe they really can ask God or maybe they suggest reasons to you that seem to explain everything. But, if we out here in TV-land are going to know anything about what God does in your life, you gotta tell us. Like, tweet us! “Yo homies, talking real smack ‘bout how this day supposed to go down & the wacked out way it did go down. Can’t all be on me, so listen up!”

So what if I am wrong, and I lose my bet? I lose my credibility with you. You will turn me off like a water faucet. If I win my bet, you are matching stories about God with Paul, and you are the one telling people about stuff that God has done which actually matters that has happened to people we can know and ask questions. Not dead old timers with goofy names.

In Our Times of Trouble

2010-07-12T02:44:00.006-04:00

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you.
2 Corinthians 4: 7-12

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of Comfort, God of Mercy:
We come together seeking You in prayer now because we are confronted by difficult, challenging and heartbreaking things and we want your help. In the lives of our friends and our family members and ourselves, we want the goodness which we believe is the stuff of your imminent and coming kingdom to prevail. We also want your comfort, solace and assurance.

We do not ask You to remove what exists by Your permission; for as Paul has written in the first letter to the Corinthians “… we know in part and we prophesy in part.” (1 Corinthians 13:9). We remember that You “…answered Job out of the whirlwind and said…’Would you indeed annul My judgment? Would You condemn me that you may be justified?'” (Job 40:6-8) So we resist the temptation to point out to you what we believe you must want and refuse to claim authority to command You to do it.

We ask that You make our hearts tender toward the people we know who are troubled, who are dying physically, and who are sick-perhaps unto death-spiritually. We ask that You do not let us put aside their troubles tomorrow or the next day, nor let their trouble overwhelm our energy to remain engaged with them and struggle with them. We ask that You do not let them defeat our confidence, overwhelm our joy or take away our rest in You.

We know that while Your Spirit has brought us face to face with these situations and invited us into to them to bear with our acquaintances and family members their pain, (as Paul wrote in Galatians 6:2 “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”), Your ultimate goal is their restoration and perfection with us. As the writer of Hebrews said, “And all these people of faith, having obtained a good testimony through faith, DID NOT receive the promise, God having something better for us that they should not be made perfect apart from us.” (Hebrews 11:39-40).

Enable us to suffer with them, bear with them, and endure with them that Your grace is, and will be ever more, palpable and that we might have with them joy in their eventual restoration.

We acknowledge that we and our words of faith are not their salvation, deliverance or comfort: You are. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth, “For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves (phew) we are your bond servants for Jesus’ sake.” 2nd Corinthians 4: 5

We know that these things that trouble us did not just happen to us and those that we love, but that You have sent us to live in them, “always carrying around in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in them…” 2nd Corinthians 4:10-12.

Oh, Padre de Nuestro Senor Jesu Christo, free and embolden us to “… lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us looking unto Jesus, the author AND finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross, despising the shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12: 1b-2)

The Joy of the Lord

2010-03-30T05:22:00.003-04:00

Nehemiah said, "Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength."

Nehemiah 8:9-11

Asked, most of us would likely admit that we would like to live lives characterized by the joy of the Lord. I would guess that at various times in our lives many of us have experienced a surpassing exhilaration that seemed to release us from all the weight of disappointment, humiliation, inadequacy and insignificance. When we think about the joy of the Lord, we may recall this experience. For others of you the joy of the Lord may be much less an emotional phenomena; you may recall moments when a personal assurance that God controls everything and has used that to love us and make us His children overwhelmed and supplanted every grievance, complaint and irritation as well as every legacy of victimization, failure and indifference.

Whatever else it may mean to us, the joy of the Lord probably means to us happiness and freedom or release. Paul liked the word “liberty.” However, I suspect that most of us regret that the joy of the Lord seems so transient. Our lives have “highs” and “lows;” the latter tend to out number the former; and, believers tend to see this as the inescapable consequence of original sin, our sinful nature and our sinful decisions. These irreducibly mar our earthly existence, and the Good News is that Christ died to save us from this marred existence by opening to us a life after death free from sin. In other words, the joy of the Lord will be a permanent condition of eternal life commencing after death.

I have not written all this as a preface to suggesting that with a different understanding the joy of the Lord will be more accessible. Rather I want to share that recently as I was praying, over several days, God just kept putting the phrase, the joy of the Lord, on my heart, in my ears, and even in a vision of the written words. Furthermore, He pointed out to me that if I believe that His joy is a desirable but inherently unsustainable state, I will not seriously pray for it. But He affirmed that it is His desire that we should pray for His Joy, that we should have it, and that it is not He limiting the joy of the Lord to our life after death.

Narrative Issues: What is The Story within the Story

2010-02-10T15:25:00.003-05:00

But Jesus said, “Somebody touched Me, for I perceived power going out from Me.” Now when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before Him, she declared to Him in the presence of all the people the reason she had touched Him and how she was healed immediately.
And He said to her, “Daughter, be of good cheer; your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

(Luke 8:46-48)

The story of the woman with the issue of blood (Luke 8:43-48) interrupts the narrative of Jesus going to Jairus’s house to miraculously raise his daughter from the dead (Luke 8: 41-42, 49-56). Luke’s tale depicts a crowd thronging Jesus treated to the spectacle of the ruler of the synagogue, named Jairus, prostrating himself before Jesus and beseeching Him to come his mortally ill daughter’s bedside to heal her. It stops abruptly with Jesus halting on the way to attend to the woman with the issue of blood. As Jesus finishes speaking with her, people from the synagogue ruler’s house arrive announcing the girl has died.

Must the story of this never named woman, impoverished by persistently seeking a cure for her hemorrhage simply reduce to a narrative foil for the story of a more awesome miracle Jesus performs on behalf of the ruler of the synagogue? Perhaps it functions as more. Luke describes how the woman with an issue of blood worked her way through the throng around Jesus, unnoticed, to touch the hem of his robe. He immediately felt healing power flow out of Him and turning to the crowd asked, “Who touched Me?” The woman with an issue of blood owns up and Jesus says her faith has made her well.

So Luke interjects the story of the woman with an issue of blood into the over-arching Jairus narrative to modestly demonstrate the power of faith the woman’s faith presaging the subsequently even more impressive demonstration of Jesus’s healing power. Now, the reader knows why Jairus should do what Jesus says, “Only believe and she will be made well.” (Luke 8:50) Raising the dead certainly trumps curing a hemorrhage, but it all springs from the same root. The message to the reader is plain: You “just gotta believe” and Jesus can meet your need, too.

Doesn’t it seem just silly that while assenting to go to the sick bed of Jairus’s daughter in time to heal her, Jesus would not only stop and demand to know who touched Him, but that he would then dally listening to the respondent’s whole story? Did He want to make sure she had a pure motive for “touching” Him before continuing on his way? Did he want to be certain before He left her that she was not seeking a cure on the cheap, trying to avoid paying the doctors’ fees? Was he going to “take back” the healing if she didn’t have a good story-before it was too late? “Five-mile” rule (e.g., If you walk five miles after a healing, you can’t take it back)?

Or, is the real story that nothing was more important to Jesus than the healing of this woman whop never gave up hope of a cure even though the pursuit of that hope impoverished her? Is the narrative that, thronged as He was by the crowd, pressed as He was to help the local big shot, ruler of the synagogue, nothing was more important to Jesus than this anonymous woman and her humiliating plight? Could this be a tale of how nothing was more important to the incarnate God than to recognize the woman with an issue of blood at that moment when God- power passed from Him to her?

Is this a narrative that illustrates what Jesus meant by his gospel? Did Luke show us the Good News with a story of how Jesus stopped the crowd thronging Him to see Him do His magic for the ruler of the synagogue so that the God-son could announce that the woman with an issue of blood-a “God-creation” invisible to the crowd, separated from community with them by impurity and humiliation-was made well? Did Luke find compelling that what had brought her to this juncture was her persevering hope – a God-belief, faith?

When Jesus said, “Who touched me?” and this woman with an unceasing flow of contaminating blood replied, “I,” Jesus named her “Daughter” –of my loins and seed. It doesn’t presage the story of crowd’s favorite, the entitled and befuddled Jairus. Jairus serves as a backdrop to the story of the woman with an issue of blood. Her narrative presages the story of the criminal who being crucified with Jesus said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” (Luke 23:42)

“Jesus answered him, ‘I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.’" (Luke 23:43)

Only Believe

2010-02-09T09:13:00.002-05:00

While He was still speaking, someone came from the ruler of the synagogue’s house, saying to him, “Your daughter is dead. Do not trouble the Teacher.” But when Jesus heard it, He answered him, saying, “Do not be afraid; only believe, and she will be made well.” When He came into the house, He permitted no one to go in except Peter, James, and John, and the father and mother of the girl. Now all wept and mourned for her; but He said, “Do not weep; she is not dead, but sleeping.” And they ridiculed Him, knowing that she was dead. But He put them all outside, took her by the hand and called, saying, “Little girl, arise.” Then her spirit returned, and she arose immediately. And He commanded that she be given something to eat. And her parents were astonished, but He charged them to tell no one what had happened.
Luke 8: 49-51

Luke says that Jesus was enroute to Jairus’s House to cure his daughter when He received word she had died. Jesus replies, “Do not be afraid, only believe and she will be well again,” (Luke 8:50). What was it that Jairus was not to fear? We, who have little familiarity with death and would likely think it was “spooky” resonate with Jesus admonition. But Jairus would not. Death was commonplace in 1st century Palestine.

What problem or question would “only believe” be the answer for? “Don’t be afraid she is dead. Only believe she is still alive?” That’s a problem for believers. If she is still alive then Jesus didn’t raise her from the dead. If she isn’t alive, Jesus is counseling Jairus to pretend that his daughter is alive? What does that help? How is that the gospel? Pretend and it shall be true!

Was Jesus telling Jairus don’t worry about the fact that because the healing of his daughter was not a typical “bedside, hands-on-the-head, prayers up to YAHWEH in the nick of time” healing it wouldn’t work? But why then say, “Only believe!” Why not say, “Who, me, worry?” Or “Watch this!” Or, “Shows you how much you earthlings know!”

Did Jesus need Jairus’s belief to work his miracle? People in Jesus’s village didn’t believe he was Messiah, and the gospel says he couldn’t do much in the way of miracles there. But Luke doesn’t tell us whether Jairus actually believed or not. It would be an appalling error in logical thought for the Scripture lesson to work throughour inference that because the little girl was healed Jairus did believe.

Did the healing consist in the spirits return to the little girl so that she sat up and needed nourishment? Was it the little girl to whom Jesus was really offering healing, or Jairus? Was the fear that Jesus admonished Jairus to abjure, the fear that all he had been and accumulated meant nothing? Was the fear that Jesus wanted Jairus to overcome the fear that if his daughter’s death was not final and irreversible then the real power to truly heal lay outside all his expectations and faith?

Was Jesus saying to Jairus, “Don’t worry about the little girl! I got that covered, bro; but what I do is going to rock your world; it’s outside your expectations; it’s going to make you doubt everything you have known, believed, practiced, achieved and acquired as a ruler of the synagogue. But stay with me, man. All you gotta do here is BELIEVE.

Believe what? Jesus is not a theologian and the Bible is not a theological text. When I can manage to trust Jesus like Jairus,I can say with the evangelist Paul, “I know whom I have believed.” I can say with Job,“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,But now my eye sees You." (Job 42:5)

At It Again, God!

2010-02-05T14:01:00.002-05:00

Getting into work this morning late and consumed with frustration after keeping an onerous personal appointment I muttered: “Why should I have to do this, take time off from work, be late and fall behind in my schedule? Nothing’s gained it!” Then, without warning, God, You answered my prayer.

I had prayed repeatedly that You would help make me available as Your listener to staff at work taking the opportunity to drop in to my office and “socialize” for a few minutes between seeing clients. However, nothing changed. “Never” continued the right time to drop in on me.

For instance, one therapist, Andrea, customarily appears without warning, waits until I look up, locks eyes and asks, “So what do you know?” I find it aggravating never knowing what to respond. No matter what I say, Andrea twists it to an instance of You acting beneficently.

Monday, when she dropped in I looked up slowly, locked eyes, leaned back and rolled my eyes at her. Andrea responded immediately by relating a self deprecating story. Years ago two teenaged neighbor boys demonstrated their irritation with her for greeting them every day, by asking “How much you have grown?” They rolled their eyes at her.

Even after praying I treated more than Andrea badly. Today, running late who else would I meet? Of course, Andrea! But, today, Your imparted grace deflated my impatience. I turned to her giving every indication that I was interested to hear what she would say, and asked her how she was doing.

She mentioned her last treatment session, a difficult one. But Andrea shared her reaction to it from the perspective of a prayer partner’s response to the financial destitution and physical immobility the prayer partner suffers because of her Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Andrea noted that in our material economy, the prayer partner is a “loser.” In Your economy, she told me her prayer partner performs an essential service: intercessory prayer. Andrea illustrated the importance of this to me by commenting that Mother Theresa once confided she had an intercessor whose prayers supported all her service.

The prayer partner appeared to possess no gift for intercessory prayer prior to her illness. Yet, Andrea related, how in the course of her prayer partner’s illness, repeatedly her prayer partner found herself surrendering the hopes which had formed the expectations that had guided how she lived her life until only You remained as her sole hope. She had come to expect a profound joy in accepting where You placed her, doing what You made specially for her to do there.

You answered my prayer surpassingly. This morning You allowed me to serve as Your ears. The voice I heard –whatever benefit its speaker took from my listening – You used it to invite me to redeem the hopes that form my expectations for the hope of You alone.

Waiting in the Crowd

2010-02-04T08:42:00.002-05:00

So it was, when Jesus returned, that the multitude welcomed Him, for they were all waiting for Him.(Luke 8:40 NKJ)

The gospel writer Luke reports (Luke 8:40) that the multitude was waiting for Jesus when He returned from his trip across the Sea of Galilee to the Gadarenes. All the years that I have heard this story, I have delighted in picturing myself in that crowd: excited, expectant, and (anachronistically) privileged to be there, in 1st Century Galilee, when Jesus walked the earth.

I know that I know that I know that I know that my redeemer lives. What dissolves the separation of 2,000 and ten years of accumulated evangelism and schism, interpretation and magesterium, missions and miracles, and the rise and fall of “who-do’s;” what spans the divide of two centuries and a decade of prayer and practice is a simple, intuitive yearning to have been standing on the edge of the lake putting aside all else to wait for one thing each day---the Master’s return.

Whose Wife Will She Be?

2009-10-23T09:28:00.003-04:00

"Teacher," they said, "Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?"
Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.
Matthew 22:24-30

In Arthur Koestler’s book, Darkness at Noon, Comrade Rubashov suffers incarceration by his former colleague Ivano in the course of losing his leadership role in the communist party. Ivanov maintains that if they allow Rubashov to “think through” his situation, Rubashov will confess to whatever they choose to accuse him of. Both men recognize Rubashov’s innocence, but Ivanov foresees that if Rubashov agrees to make his life coherent, he will excise from his claims to justification anything inconsistent with showing himself totally devoted to the goals he has espoused. If he made his life's objective the triumph of the party, he will exclude from his being anything that goes against the party - even his wish to continue living. Ivanov anticipates that Rubashov will not even want to make a claim for continuing his life, let alone fight for it.

It is our anomalies, dysfunctions, impulsiveness and inconsistencies that implicate the most human and, therefore, the most incarnational aspects of our existence. We ALL live because we are indwellt by the living God-without His breath, we do not breathe. However, we conduct life in the gap between our behaviors and our ideals. Unless one's ideals are very circumspect and rigid that gap does not narrow with age, experience, conversion, sanctification, moral training, ethical behavior, self help gurus, awakenings, self-realization, etc. In fact, the gap between behavior and ideals widens-gets worse- with aspiration and love. The higher you aspire, the more you love, the more certain you will be found a hypocrite-you can only avoid it by narrowness and fixety.

In fact, we can never even give a coherent account of ourselves: our accounts always rend and contradict; we can never manage even the most superficial facts, so we always allow, if not, intend incoherence and contradiction. Coherence, then, requires us to eradicate our contradictions and inconsistencies. The impetus for coherence elevates to pre-eminence in the human condition the violent dilemna: cut off what is incoherent or be cutoff. As actors in the public domains of politics, church and schools, as counselors, mentors, parents, teachers, spouses in the private domains of psychology, prayer, marital and familial relations, when we acquiesce in the demand for coherence we re-establish the violent dilemna as an imaginaire: to cut off what is in one that defies coherence or to suffer punishment and exclusion unto abandonment, death, exile or torment. The one incoherent can not continue unchecked.

The Communist Party referred to the violent end of the incoherent as physical liquidation. The incoherent became "gone." We, too, have our quaint terms like "excommunicated," "divorced,"
"emancipated," "ineligible," "unfortunate," "chose not to come along," "Republicans in Name Only" and the like. We invent them at a rate unanticipated even by the likes of George Orwell, and hang them throughout the blogosphere.

Conservatives will assert that the problem for Koestler’s characters is that they have devoted themselves to the Communist party. The objective for which they are called to give account is irretrievably flawed. But, in fact, it is the totality of a claim like “coherence,” of “giving a consistent account of oneself” that is flawed.

My God, My God, Why have You Forsaken Me

2009-10-06T08:52:00.002-04:00

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear;
And in the night season, and am not silent.
Psalm 22:1

David composed it; Jesus uttered it, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

I don’t know if we read those words with them – Jesus and David. They are two of the greatest actors on the stage of faith. To achieve great things, they underwent great testing, great trials. We cut them some slack. Of course they felt abandoned by God.

I am poured out like water,
And all My bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It has melted within Me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And My tongue clings to My jaws;
You have brought Me to the dust of death.
Psalm 22:14-15

But we know they were not abandoned by God. We read to the 21st verse:

You have answered Me.

And then the beautiful messianic 24th verse:

For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted;
Nor has He hidden His face from Him;
But when He cried to Him, He heard.

And so David and Jesus not only established a redeemed people historically, they serve as a model for us. When you feel tested persevere; God doesn’t abandon you.

Your tests and your trials, my tests and my trials may not appear as rigorous or momentous as those David and Jesus underwent. So all the more reason for us to persevere, AND she who is faithful in little things will be entrusted with great things, eventually. Perception, as many of us who are born again like to reiterate, is not reality. To feel abandoned is not to be abandoned.

Yesterday I participated in family therapy at the group home where my youngest son is currently residing. The “session” proved to be a “good one.” We made lots of progress.
I know if my wife and I go faithfully every time, and open ourselves, and share what we are trying to do, and listen to our son’s pain and his fears and his aspirations, he will be able eventually to come home and live with us like his brothers and sisters: or not.

You see, I don’t know if I can actually touch him as a father, let alone live with him as a father. I don’t know if the pain and the violence of his life before we adopted him is penetrable. He is getting older, he has erected defenses. He has learned to live apart from the pain. He is crafty, he is vigilant, he is attentive to what he imagines he will like and he is utterly obtuse about anything that approaches the dark regions of his pain.

I can tell him all damn day about the beauty of the future state of wellness which is available on the other side of the river of healing. I can explain that all he has to do is put his hand in mine and we’ll cross it together. I can point to his brothers and sisters living happily on that other side of the river called wellness. But I can not make him well. And, he can not make himself well. So we will invite healers into our lives and we will apply their techniques and go through their prescriptions. But

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear;
And in the night season, and am not silent.

Psalm 22:1

Is it true that if I just persevere that my son gets well? Is it true that if he doesn’t, I have not worked hard enough, believed hard enough? Are my parenting skills suspect? The comforters say, “Oh, no, Michael, you have four other beautiful children! If you had this one from the start, you wouldn’t be here in this mess, now.” So, then, I should not have adopted my youngest son? Or did we take a chance (everyone says it was a very “noble” chance) and it just didn’t work out?

So what does that mean for my youngest son? What does it just didn’t work out mean? Does he ever graduate high school? Does he learn enough to earn enough to get a place of his own? Does he ever achieve the stability to have a friend, a significant other? Does he see his children grow? Does he cheer for the flesh of his flesh at an Odyssey of the Mind competition or at a Little League game?

Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?

Is this just a perception problem I have? God really hasn’t gone away. This is a trial and a test. It will make me stronger if I persevere? It will give me character? Do you think that was what God told His Son, “You needed character?”

No, of course not! We needed a sacrifice of blood propitiation for our sins, Christ’s crucifixion achieved that, and Philippians tells us that Christ volunteered for the task. On the cross Christ took on the sin of the world and a Holy God could not be consubstantial with that sin? In less theological terms, God couldn’t take on the sin and remain holy so His son bore it alone.
God, do you hear my groaning? I am not up to anything big, like saving the world from eternal perdition because of its sin, so does my groaning, matter, count? I am sure I screwed things up with my youngest son. I am sure that whatever he brought in the way of pain and hurt, I didn’t love him enough. I don’t even love myself, how could I love him…enough to overcome the hurts. It’s probably why I adopted him, to try to be better than I am, and now it isn’t working at all.

My God, My God. There is like now way out of this. I literally do not know which way to turn when I go to pray. I have no idea what to say except, I know this is my fault. I know that you love me and have delivered me from eternal damnation, so right about now, would be fine with me to die - before I screw up something else, something more. I know I can look forward to heaven, but it doesn’t mean a thing about today and tomorrow and the day after. What about Christmas, God? What about my son on that day? When I still can’t reach, I still can’t mend, I still can’t heal? He is my kid afterall?

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear;
And in the night season, and am not silent.
Psalm 22:1

I am poured out like water,
And all My bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It has melted within Me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And My tongue clings to My jaws;
You have brought Me to the dust of death.
Psalm 22:14-15

Is it just me, God? Just me doesn’t get the stuff about walking by faith and not by sight. Just me who can’t make a good day out of having been saved 47 years ago?

Behold He is in Your Hands

2009-10-02T08:02:00.002-04:00

“And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life.”

Job 2:6

There are verses in the Bible that I just don’t like. For instance, I don’t much like anything about John 6:53:

“Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

In fact there is a whole run of verses there in the sixth chapter of John that I never run to open the Bible to read. I also find 1 Samuel 18:27 gratuitously cruel and vulgar:

“therefore David arose and went, he and his men, and killed two hundred men of the Philistines. And David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full count to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him Michal his daughter as a wife.”

And while I can make some sense in context out of Jesus’ words in the sixth chapter of John, the idea of David killing at least 200 men, then uncovering their genitals, grabbing their penises and excising their foreskins, and delivering those foreskins to Saul to obtain his daughter Michal in marriage is irretrievably arbitrary and gross.

However, I do not like reading Job 2:6,

“And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life,”

because I am afraid of what it might mean which I know it can’t mean which means I have no idea what it means which shouldn’t happen. Between Paul telling Timothy that all scripture is useful and the author of the Peter’s Epistle enjoining everyone to a readiness to give account of one’s hope, I don’t feel I can just overlook this verse. Of course it’s the temptation.

Does the Bible actually say that GOD PUT JOB INTO SATAN's HANDS? Does this mean that if a bunch of bad stuff starts to happen to me that maybe GOD PUT ME INTO SATAN'S HANDS? If this verse doesn't mean what it says, because it would be too terrible, than why does a divinely inspired verse say what it says? If you want to say it can't happen to me, although it did happen to Job, why not? Am I better than Job? Reread Chapter 1. I don't think so.

But I am making a mountain out of a molehill, right? I should just go back to the story: stay away from the words, right? I mean that we all know Job is about a guy who was tempted to deny God when the devil snatches away the gifts of God, and despite the temptation and the bad counsel of his friends and wife, Job did not succumb to the temptation. For this faithfulness God gave Job even more gifts than He had given him first time around, right? So what it really useful and what I should be ready to share with anyone who asks is that they should be indefatigbly faithful and God will really bless them, right?

If you act like Job, you will be reconciled and made whole and happy in your marraige and with all your kids; your spouse or child will be healed from cancer and live with you for...well, a long time; none of your beloved will steal from their employer of kill somebody while driving drunk or texting; you won't be the parent or sibling of a traumatically brain injured, permanently disabled or pervasively developmentally delayed person, right. You certainly won't have to declare bankruptcy, or sell your house and move into another school district just as your child is eligible for the varsity sport for which she has worked her whole short life, right.

Now to the point of why Job 2:6 is written at all. Not only does God not hurt us, as the author of the Epistle of James later says in the 13 th verse of the First chapter :

"God doesn’t tempt humans.Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone."

God wants to bless us, not trick us into losing our reward. He wants to give us stuff. He is like a doting parent: He wants to give us huge slices of birthday cake, but He doesn’t want dessert to spoil our appetites for health dinners. So sometimes, God makes us go through lots of bad stuff before we get the goodies.

Weeping may endure for a night, But joy comes in the morning.
Psalm 30:5

Consequently, God didn’t do bad stuff to Job, Satan did.

So more to the point of my troublesome verse, Job 2:6:

“And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life,”

it’s simply a narrative device, by which the narrator of the story moves the bad stuff that happens to Job from being the responsibility of God to being the responsibility of Satan, right? And, so the other useful thing to remember as the ready answer to tell people is that if the bad stuff that happens to them isn't their own fault, it's Satan's fault. Right?

Where Your Glory Dwells

2009-10-01T06:10:00.002-04:00

LORD, I have loved the habitation of Your house,
And the place where Your glory dwells.

Psalm 26: 8

Traditional cinematic representations of English Kings influence how many of us think about Biblical kings, especially King David. We may make “obvious” corrections to the picture such as substituting a more probable cloth robe (however lustrous) for Rex Harrison’s pantaloons, leggings and a crushed velvet jacket with exaggerated shoulder pads. We, in our minds, see David as comfortably at leisure, always in a fortress or castle near his throne and his queen. And it is to this guy that I ascribed the poetry of the Book of Psalms for a long time.

So we imagine that one fine morning David stands up, descends the steps to his throne, and, grapes in one hand, queen’s hand in the other, he ambles over to the terrace and looks out on the temple (which, of course, wasn’t constructed yet-being built by his son, Solomon) and feels as grandly about his God and his faith as we have felt on occasion driving to church on a beautiful spring morning. His feelings, course through him so powerfully, in fact, that David takes up his pen and scribbles out theses lines:

“Lord I have loved the habitation of Your house,
And the place where Your glory dwells.”

For many of us, somewhere sits a church that stirs in us feelings sympathetic to those expressed here-. They are aroused by its quiet beauty, by our allied sense of the enduring nature of God’s goodness. Whatever fears, anxieties, suffering and tribulation we experience or fear, the glory of our faith is that we know “joy comes in the morning.” That glory dwells in the church “in our mind’s eye,” even as it once did in the house of David’s God. We will quickly assent to the universality of God, by which we generally mean that the fact that His glory fills the church in my mind’s eye doesn’t prevent His glory from filling the one in your’s, too.

But David was not a 16th century English monarch, nor anything like one. For the first 22 years of his adult life or so, he was a rebel on the run living outside of the cities and towns where Saul could count on someone to detain him until Saul could arrive and kill him. During this time he organized a party of rough men who engaged in the kind of warfare that had little strategic value and lots of plunder. Nowadays we would call them brigands. He rode with Israel’s enemies, the Philistines, and only stopped when the Philistine princes wouldn’t let him ride with them into war against the Israelites. After David had ascended the throne one of his own sons staged a very effective revolt against David and he was once again on the run, battling great odds to recapture his throne. David spent little time on terraced balconies overlooking the “Holy City,” and what time he did, he would have seen a tent serving as God’s house.

But we know that God considered David so much a man after his own heart that He promises, and - in Jesus - delivers on the promise, that David’s progeny shall rule God’s people forever. His son, Solomon will build God a glorious temple. So where is “the habitation of ‘Your house’ that David has loved, and where is the place that God’s glory dwells? Can it be anywhere other than in God’s people. When David was riding with his rough men, living as a brigand, did he want spoils and plunder, or did he want to fulfill God’s anointing of him, David, as the king of Israel? Did David crave lording it over the Israelites, or did Nathan’s tale of the haughty man who slew the poor man’s lamb convict David because he had a heart for his people and for the wealth of their poverty? Was the glory of God in the tent or the tabernacle, or was it in the gathered presence of the whole nation before the tabernacle-God’s people at worship?

It makes a difference because a couple of days ago, Derrion Albert, a 16 year old high school honors student, was brutally beaten to death as he walked to the bus after school between two battling factions of teens; because last Wednesday 14 year old Chloe Lindsay, in the peak of health, contracted the H1N1 flu and died Sunday, as had Tiara Mosley in June in Wisconsin; because Sunday Dayshaan Ballew died of injuries suffered when a car driven by a 17 year old girl in the Evanston section of Cincinnati jumped the curb and hit Dayshaan and his cousin before driving off. It makes a difference because if the glory of God is in a temple or a church, these people died in its shadow, the promise of their faith deferred to a later time, their relatives’ grief a presently unrelieved anguish.

It makes a difference because if the habitation and glory of God is in his people than this glory makes the sadness and loss a wisdom that teaches our hearts how to rightly number their days. If the habitation and glory of God is in his people than we need to become reconciled to and at peace with the gang members, the doctors, the driver, her boyfriend: we need to forgo the persistence of our anger, we need to forgive, reconcile and bold claim “Lord I have loved the habitation of Your house and the place where Your glory dwells.”

The Lectionary for Sunday, September 20, 2009

2009-09-26T19:47:00.002-04:00

“Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers;
The snare is broken, and we have escaped.”
Psalm 124:7

Have salt in yourselves and peace with one another.
Mark 9:50

This week’s Revised Common Lectionary supplies us with almost catechistical readings from the “Hebrew” bible (Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22), the Psalms (Psalm 124), the Epistles (James 5:13-20) and the Gospels (Mark 9:38-50). The words of these texts seem to incorporate the most reassuring verity of our faith: God answers the petitions of His people by providing for their welfare. To paraphrase the frequently televised commercial of one major insurance company, “We are in good hands.”

Our reading in Esther instances God’s provision for the safety of his people against a specific threat of physical annihilation. Psalms renders this a universal condition to all for whom God is on their side. The reading from Epistle to James discusses how to live in that provision so that it is heightened. And the first part of the Gospel reading of Mark would appear to make people for whom God is on their side numerous and likely to remain so. However, the second and larger part of the reading in Mark seems to digress.

Jesus’ disciples have informed Him that they forbade a man from performing miracles in Jesus’ name because the man does not “follow us.” Jesus rebukes them: “Whoever is not against us,” he says, “is for us.” He then expands upon the concept: “Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink in My name will by no means lose his reward.” Most of us who hear these words find this reassuring. We know, for sure, that we are not against Jesus.
Furthermore, we find ourselves reasonably certain that somewhere, sometime, on some occasion, we have seen someone in need and acted responsively for no other reason than we believe that in the perfect rightness of things that need should not be left unaddressed and if it presents to us we must be the agents of redress.

But Jesus then spins conversationally on a dime and takes up the issue of what will cost one “his reward.” Better, Jesus says, that one have a millstone be hung around one’s neck and be flung into the sea than that one cause to “stumble” a child (such as Jesus has been holding on his knee since the previous discussion between Jesus and His disciples about which disciple shall be the greatest - Mark9:33-37). This is far from reassuring. “Woe to the Sunday school teacher who has taught pre-Millennial Dispensation!” Perhaps it is the other way around, “Woe to the Sunday School teacher who has taught “Post-Millennial Dispensation.” Is the correct answer to the question, “What must I do to be saved” really, “Believe with your heart and confess with your tongue?” Did I remember to add that one has to be baptized?

However, this is not the full extent of the change in tone and temper. Jesus takes three reps on how it is better to excise a body part and live maimed than to retain the body part and go “to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.” He concludes with the least reassuring line of the whole passage promising that everyone will be seasoned with fire. Every sacrifice, he continues, will be seasoned with salt, but if the salt has lost its flavor how will it season the sacrifice. So He concludes, have salt in yourselves and live in peace with one another.

Like I said in the first sentence, this week’s lectionary provides us with almost catechistical readings---almost. Perhaps, it’s really only the last eight verses that constitute a problem. And that’s really not so problematic, right? The bit about causing a child to stumble, like hacking off one’s limbs, like everyone being seasoned with fire, are surely dramatic turns of phrase that try to illuminate more pedestrian but otherwise very important truths. You know, if God is going to answer his people’s petition with divine provision for their welfare, then it follows he will want them, so provided for, to avoid sin and be the salt of the earth. Makes sense, right? You just need to keep things in proportion and avoid being taken in by hyperbole, right? There is nothing new here, really, right?

There are two ways to read the Lectionary selections in Esther for this week. One is that the selections are the essential words of the text illuminating the lesson to be gotten for the week. The other is that these words are high points of the story which evoke for our consideration the whole story. I am inclined to the latter point of view in the case of these readings. Esther is wholly a narrative, not a mix of narrative and reflections on meaning.
Almost any text is incomprehensible apart from remembering where it occurs in the story and thinking about the meaning of the story.

Certainly the story describes how God provided for the physical safety of his people when they were threatened with physical annihilation. But the Book of Esther, and our selections for the week reflect this, does not conclude with the death of Haman, it does not end with the edict drafted by Mordecai and Esther that in effect nullifies Haman’s edict, it does not end with the deliverance of God’s people or their safety from annihilation. Our readings end with the creation of the holiday of Purim which celebrates what Esther and Mordecai were able to accomplish: a day of rest for the Jewish people from their enemies.

A day of rest implies preceding days of exertion and days following of exertion. Six days God devotes to creation and one day to rest, and at the conclusion of each, He proclaims them good. Psalm 124 calls us to remember that we have been successful in our exertions and that success is because the Lord has been on our side. Absent that we would have succumbed to one or another disaster. On the face of it, it is both a modest and humiliating claim: All God has been able to achieve for His people is deliverance from one or another disaster; what His people continually contend with is their extinction. I would suggest that we need to consider what is at stake in this continual contention with extinction. The Psalmist sums it up this way in the seventh verse:

“Our soul has escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers;
The snare is broken, and we have escaped.”

“Our soul” has escaped and as the possessors of their souls, God’s people are free. Both the Book of Esther and the Psalm speak of God and His people. A concept of God’s people that would be accessible to either the Jews of Esther’s time or the Psalmist’s time is inaccessible to us. I am not going to try to create that accessibility, but assert rather that our concept of a community, perhaps, a beloved community, with all its ambiguity and uncertainty is sufficiently analogous and accessible for us to understand that the provision of a day of rest and a free soul are provisions made to the community of believers, God’s gathered folk.

The passage in James discusses how to live such that God’s provision is deepened that its hallmark, grace, as Paul puts it become widespread. The individual responds to the individual’s emotions with prayer and scripture, but the individual calls on the beloved community to respond to the individual’s imminent or actual separation from the community with gathering the elders, prayer and confession, which confession renders the prayer, the prayer of a righteous man and effective. Elijah participated in both the human and the divine community having the heart of God for turning humankind to God (i.e., away from sin and forgetting) and for the material welfare of His creation (i.e. to give food as He did manna in the wilderness, but having not power apart from God so exercising it through prayer.

As God’s only begotten Son, Jesus shares these twin concerns as birthrights as Matthew and Luke would have it and as preexistent plenipotentiary as John and Mark (albeit in very different narrative styles) would have it. The passage in Mark shows Jesus as defining those who are for Him, as everyone who is not against Him. Opposition is Satanic, opposition accuses; Jesus includes, Jesus is including even those whose only mustered response to the presentation of God is the moral equivalent of giving a disciple a cup of water because he is of Jesus, of the anointed one. Jesus actually bears this out with the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus is not self consciously transgressing boundaries; in Him there are no boundaries, although some will choose to accuse Him of precisely that.

It is then when “knocks down” those waiting to receive Jesus, the child on His knee being an example par excellence of one wanting to receive Jesus, that it would be better that one had never lived. One’s life is fracturing the community- it is giving a personal presence and place to Satan, to accusation. But Jesus goes on to say, not that body parts lead one to sin, but that accommodating oneself to sin qua “causing one of these to stumble,” out of necessity fractures and the polity of God’s people and imperils them in this world. That is to choose the hell where the fire is never quenched, where there is never a day of rest, where the end is not open and unknown, but fixed and certain.

Who Rules and Reigns? What Kingdom?

2009-09-25T11:57:00.003-04:00

From there He arose and went to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And He entered a house and wanted no one to know it, but He could not be hidden. 25 For a woman whose young daughter had an unclean spirit heard about Him, and she came and fell at His feet. 26 The woman was a Greek, a Syro-Phoenician by birth, and she kept asking Him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27 But Jesus said to her, “Let the children be filled first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”
28 And she answered and said to Him, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs under the table eat from the children’s crumbs.”
29 Then He said to her, “For this saying go your way; the demon has gone out of your daughter.”
30 And when she had come to her house, she found the demon gone out, and her daughter lying on the bed.
Mark 7:24-35

For a long time I thought the New Testament of the Bible recorded specific historical incidents in the life of Jesus and his disciples which the writers of the New Testament witnessed or heard about from witnesses which over time have given rise to the doctrines of our faith. So, for instance, the practice or rite or sacrament of baptism emerges from specific recorded incidents in the New Testament.

John “the Baptist” baptizes (Mark1:4), Jesus is baptized (Matthew 3:13), His disciples baptize and His ministry of Baptism eclipses John’s ministry of Baptism (John 3:22; John 4:1-3), and at the ascension Jesus gives the great command, “And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen. (Matthew 28:18-20). Acts records baptisms and specifically identifies Peter’s, Philip’s and Paul’s acts of baptism. Subsequently, Paul discusses baptism and its meaning, as a practice and teaching, and as do the writers of the book of Hebrews and First Peter. In fact, the writer of Hebrews identifies it as such a basic, elementary doctrine that mature believers should not have to keep dwelling on it.

A similar account could be made of the teaching and practice, rite or sacrament of Last Supper or Communion. Jesus and his disciples are recorded as doing it, Jesus ordains it as a thing for believers or followers to do and Paul discusses it as an established practice. As one reads the New Testament in this way, the event recorded in the gospel passage cited above, Mark 7:24-35, seems to lay the foundation for teaching Christianity as a new religion to which all are invited and not simply a reformation of Judaism intended for the children of Abraham. There is, of course, Jesus’ admonition to His disciples at His ascension as recorded in the first chapter of the book of Acts, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." (Acts 1:8) In the Tenth chapter of Acts, Peter is sent to preach and ultimately baptizes the centurion of the Italian regiment, Cornelius. Clearly Cornelius is not Jewish and Peter is required to give an account of his actions to the other disciples. And finally, we have Paul’s mission to the “gentiles” or “uncircumcised.” Paul discusses this ministry and announces that in His crucifixion Christ has dissolved the distinction between Jew and gentile in their opportunity for salvation. (Ephesians 11:2-19)

Alternatively, in the current time, people like to emphasize the passage cited above as one of the incidents which illustrates how Jesus crosses the boundaries that divide us rather than as how He distinguishes His ministry from yet another attempt at Jewish reformation like the Essenes of Pharisees . To this end they make the passage from Mark cited above a piece with the story in the fourth chapter of John known as Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. In the latter account, Jesus violates both the taboo against an unrelated man addressing an unrelated woman alone and the taboo against Jews addressing Samaritans. The gospels are full of him transgressing purity taboos by addressing, touching and allowing himself to be touched by the unclean. Finally, there is the touching and beautiful story in Matthew 26 of the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet with costly oil and wipes them with her hair while He is resting in the House of Simon the leper.

One of the problems with this view is that Jesus comes off as incredibly harsh and grudging in the passage from Mark. He has traveled to “vicinity of Tyre” and entered a household there where he hoped to remain anonymous or to keep his presence a secret. But inevitably, it seems, as Jesus frequently does, he fails to foresee that it will get out that he is there. Mark tells us that as soon as it gets around that Jesus has come to that household, a woman whose daughter is possessed shows up at the household. It seems impossible as one reads verses 27 onward not to perceive Jesus as if he is a crotchety man, full of pique and aggravation, who says essentially, “If you must, you must. Fine, your daughter is healed. Now get out of here.”

Great start to the religion of universal salvation! Peter, Philip and Paul all come across to us as much more enlightened and gracious and giving than our Lord. Is it really, an artifact of Jesus being both human and God, that He, the Son of God (who stills the waters of the sea of Galilee and grants the Roman centurion not only healing for his son but accolades for his faith) is bound by a partisan Semitic world view that holds Gentiles outside the pale of God’s gifts? Can we actually believe that Jesus is unaware that Abraham has been proclaimed the father of salvation for the whole world? Maybe Paul’s Semitic education was better than Jesus’ but certainly not Peter’s.

Or is Jesus response to the Syro-Phoenician woman an artifact of his humanity. He is just tuckered out and grumpy that his respite has been disturbed. The Syro-Phoenician woman caught Jesus in a human, not divine moment. Consubstantiation (the fancy word for Jesus being both man and God) means he alternated moments of humanity and divinity. For obvious reason the gospel writers wrote down more of the divine, but when they are convenient or necessary they could be counted on to give us the human moments, too. However, when Mark records Jesus going off with His disciples to the mountain to afford them rest and see a multitude of people (who guessed correctly where He would retreat to), Jesus ungrudgingly gets up and teaches them and then puts the disciples to work feeding them.
It is very hard to maintain a coherent position about what is recorded that doesn’t run counter to either the notion of God through Christ extending the gospel to all peoples or Jesus modeling God’s universal love by breaking down socially constructed boundaries. That is, unless one understands mark 7: 24-35 a little differently than as a recorded incident which gives rise to a doctrine or some doctrines. Suppose Mark 7: 24-35 is an iteration of an ongoing question that Jesus is posing.

The gospel of Mark opens strangely, if directly. In 14 short verse Isaiah and John the Baptist are described as preparatory prophetic voices, Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, John is arrested and put in prison and Jesus begins his ministry of preaching by declaring that the kingdom of God is at hand and that the proper response is to believe the good news. The kingdom of God is at hand. The rule and reign of Yahweh is proximate, imminent, about to break forth unmistakably, and you want to believe because believing puts you inside the kingdom and disbelief puts you outside and in opposition to the almighty God. So the question is, “What do you believe?” or, “Who rules?”

In the sixth chapter of Mark, the village of Nazareth rejects Jesus as anything besides the village carpenter’s son; Herod beheads John the Baptist to reward his step daughter’s dancing, and having sent the disciples out in pairs, Jesus attempts to take them into the mountains for a rest but winds up teaching and then feeding the five thousand. The gospel writer john records much more about the interchange after everyone gets back from the remote mountain, and he records Jesus as saying that the people who witnessed the miracle of His feeding the five thousand only wanted to catch up with him again because they got a free satisfying meal. He says if to them if you wanted Me, you would want to eat my flesh and drink my blood, at which many leave.

The fun isn’t over though because in the meantime religious types from Jerusalem have turned up and staying with Mark’s account but moving to chapter 7, we have them telling Jesus, he can’t be much of an authority because his disciples don’t even follow the purity laws. Jesus replies that they have made all the law including purity laws self serving devices for acquiring material wealth and social position. He ices the cake by saying that nothing that goes into a person makes the person impure because the impurity is excreted, but that what people put out from their heart pollutes the world in the form of evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. Over and over we hear the questions “Who rules?” And, “What kind of kingdom are you living in?”

When Jesus retreats to Tyre, the questions don’t go away, precisely because God is not a Semitic creation worried only about and for Jewish people. The Good News is for everyone. The good news is that God’s kingdom is at hand and that the proper response is to believe. So essentially Jesus says to the Syro-Phoenician woman, in vein very similar to John’s record of His response to the people of the Five Thousand which He fed on the mountain when He meets up with them in Capernaum, “What are you seeking, a free lunch or the kingdom of God.?”

It is a question that Jesus is asking me today: in my Bible study, in my prayers, in my work, in my conversations, in my exchange with the bank teller, and the post office clerks, and the retail sales people and the receptionists, as I listen to the news on television --- “Do you want a freebie---insight, answer, to get to the head of the line, special treatment? Or, do you want to meet Me in your response to my other children as you meet and interact with them? Who rules and reigns?” What kingdom?”

And I don’t know about you, but in my life, it isn’t Jesus whose really the harsh an caustic one in the conversation. I lack all the grace and belief of that Syro-Phoenician woman. I argue with Jesus all the time, contemptuously dismissing His message. I almost always take the position that I would be right on board if I was a single guy walking around some desert villages in the first century with 12 of my closest friends and an entourage that included well heeled ladies who paid the bills. I almost always say in my heart, “Get real Jesus! I have five kids and a job. I have to get stuff done. I have to pick one kid at 4:00 pm here and I have to get dinner on the table and the car fixed and the garage door replaced. So what are you bugging me about how I talked or behaved with a bank teller who was rambling on with the guy in front of me about this weekend’s weather. What do you mean? ’Who rule and reigns?’ When I get through all this raising kids and retirement and DIE, then you are going to rule and reign.”

Did you hear what I said, what I say in my heart every day, “When I am dead, Jesus, then You are going to rule and reign.

In fact, I am counting on it: it’s why I got baptized, read the Bible everyday, give what I can when I can and try to find time to pray.

When I am dead, Jesus, and done this rat race, I am all yours.”

Who Do You Say That I Am?

2009-09-23T15:14:00.001-04:00

Now Jesus and His disciples went out to the towns of Caesarea Philippi; and on the road He asked His disciples, saying to them, “Who do men say that I am?” So they answered, “John the Baptist; but some say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered and said to Him, “You are the Christ.” Then He strictly warned them that they should tell no one about Him.
Mark 8: 27-30

I don’t know about your situation, but I have never had a job that required me to do much walking over any distance to get to the next worksite. When I started my working life I was hired by Boston University to work on their “Main” campus in Employee Relations. BU’s campus was strung along the banks of the Charles River for several miles in the Back Bay section of Boston. So from time to time, I would have to visit an employee’s worksite or a supervisor’s department, and it might take me all of twenty minutes round trip to get there and back. When I came to Cincinnati as the administrator of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, I found I could also consume a good twenty minutes going to the morgue in the hospital basement and then the Flow Cytometry Lab in the Goodman Lab building and then back to my office in the Medical Science Building.

Over the span of my working life, the organizations I labored in became progressively more complex and were less and less organized as contiguous departments and more and more often participants in geographically dispersed partnerships, joint ventures and collaborations. I spent many a day jumping in and out of my car, negotiating local streets with a cell phone in my ear and work papers in the seat next to me (a very unsafe practice I don’t recommend and deeply regret). I sometimes took the unused moment to reprioritize my day’s activities, integrating the needs and info from the calls my secretary took into the already overstuffed agenda for the day. But I never needed to take a long walk from one point of activity to the next, and I hardly ever traveled with a friend.

However, now, having been blessed by the Lord through my wife’s prodigious efforts to have largely left those fast paced environments, I remember as a young boy being very active in an active Boy Scout troop. My troop, Troop 5, of Plainfield, New Jersey, was not much into boys earning Merit Badges and earning promotions to Star, or Life or Eagle Scout: we were very much into camping in the “wilds” and hiking long distances, preferably steeply uphill, long distances. We camped in the winter snows and dog days of august, canoed in June and July and the rest of the year we hiked. The buses departed from the church parking lot at 4:30 a.m. and we were on the trail by 7:00 am. It was nothing to hike 20 miles in a day, up the biggest hills you can find in the eastern states of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Our scout master and assistant scout masters loved the outdoors, and they enjoyed the camping, canoeing and hiking as much or more than any of us scouts. As a consequence, they never spent much time making sure we walked in a group, or kept together, or kept up the pace. As a twelve year old - once that bus deposited you at the foot of the trail- you had a lot of leeway. And, if you learn to walk 30 miles in a day, you learn discretion. For instance, you quickly learn never to walk with the kid who brings more non-essentials in his pack than he can carry, nor the kid who empties his canteen by 10:00 a.m. You become wary of jokers and pranksters because what might be funny for a moment in a classroom on Monday may be tiresome by the 13th mile on Saturday.

I found a couple of companions among all the other scouts who were quite self-sufficient, very congenial, and walked at a comfortable pace. We would talk about all sorts of things on those hikes. Being young boys, lots of our talk turned on sports. Was Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris the better home run hitter? Was Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale better at throwing strikes? There was the very specific and therefore unending question like, “Could Juan Marichal and Willie Mays beat Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle?” (This was long before inter-league play, so unless their respective teams made it into the World Series, this would always be hypothetical). There were the hopelessly general and open ended questions like, “Did the pitcher, who threw pitches, or the catcher, who signaled what pitch to throw, really control the pitches actually thrown?” “Could one ever actually get to first base faster by sliding than just overrunning the base?” We whiled away the hours in utter happiness-even acknowledging without rancor the rare bird, moth or insect inevitably pointed out by the nerd who had no interest in our sports chatter, nor of where stood the argument he was interrupting, and giving one of the whiners who had emptied his canteen early, a sip.

It is this latter “Scouting” experience that I think carries me into the experience of Jesus and his disciples, setting out from Bethsaida on a more than 20 mile hike for the cities around Caesarea Philippi, which the gospel writer Mark describes in the four compact verses (27-30) of the eighth chapter. This walk upon which Jesus poses the now famous question, “But who do you say that I am?” is a very different affair from the equally epochal event six days later when Jesus awakes Peter, James and John early in the morning and takes them up the mountain where He, transfigured, appears talking with Moses and Elijah. The latter event is “special” from the “get go,” the former, not so much. The former is mundane, informal and very intimate: it is a bunch of guys walking together over a long distance without much specific to accomplish except make the journey. Witty repartee, “one ups-man-ship,” boasting or “braggadiccio,” won’t wear well over the course of a six to seven hour walk together.

The disciples, like young teens, were not much focused on the future, near term or longer. Twice in the gospels the disciples have averred to Jesus that they have given up everything to follow Him. They have no where to go or to “go back to.” They are, at best, expecting to go to Jerusalem for the next Passover, and except for troubling statements Jesus makes about the Son of Man dying, they are expecting this new ministry to perform pretty well on the great stage of Jerusalem at Passover against the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, magicians, cultists from the Diaspora and the rebellious sicarri. It is in this of necessity affable, time-killing conversational milieu that Jesus, almost casually, interjects his first question, “Who do men say that I am?” And the answer his disciples make is in a very similar vein, casual and detached. “Well, you know, Jesus… just sort of what you would expect, John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets…whatever.”

Now the disciples have actually said quite a mouthful: this is big. The disciples have just allowed that the everyday “Joe” of first century Palestine is willing to believe that some major figure of their national faith is back from the dead and walking around in the person of Jesus. What people don’t have to put themselves out to believe, what they don’t have to work hard at to conclude, what leaves them undisturbed to keep on doing just what they were doing before this guy came along is to take it as true that one of the colossal figures of their history is up out of the grave and parading around as the son of an old local village carpenter and his young wife. In other and more modern words, “Hey Jesus, what they are really saying is ‘No biggie, but get a load of this! Whew, those Romans better watch their step; one of these days they’re gonna go too far and old Yahweh is gonna let that Jesus due to a regiment of Pilates palace guards what Elijah did to the prophets of Baal. Could get interesting!’ ”

But Jesus doesn’t pursue this patently incoherent response to his ministry. He is not a Semitic Socrates. The contradictions of the mass of humanity are not his concern, nor what he wants to focus the disciples’ attention upon. Instead, Jesus, casually asks a second question, “Well, then guys, who do you say that I am?” I just know the pace of the walk just slowed way down. The hikers are bunching up. People’s gazes are being drawn to Jesus’ face. It feels like things are getting a little serious a long way from the destination. The rampant question among the disciples is really, “How did we get here all of a sudden?” But Jesus’ question burns right through, “Well guys, who do you say that I am?”

Of course, it’s Peter that answers. He can’t stand the stoppage, the pause, the silence. “Don’t you guys get it?” he is saying to himself. “Can’t you see?” This is the real deal; this isn’t Elijah with a triple portion, this isn’t some guy telling us to build a wall with one hand and wield a sword with the other or to divorce our goyisha wives. This is GOD, or at least his ANOINTED ONE! We win, guys! Better than Gamaliel, we chose God to follow! Common admit it: this is GREAT!” It helps if you have seen Disney’s animated film, Aladdin, and can hear the voice of Robin Williams, who impersonated the Genie, saying these words, or Danny Divito from Disney’s Hercules.

Mark records Peter’s answer as, “You are the Christ.” The term “the Christ” is a translation of the Greek for “the anointed.” Jesus admonishes Peter not tell anyone about Him. The recognition, after all is said and done, that Jesus is the anointed one can not be given one by an insider, it must, after all, come out of one’s own experience of seeing and hearing. One has to encounter Christ, the anointed one, and answer to Him His question, “But who do you say that I am?” And we do encounter Christ, you know. He has already told us that the answer to the question about when did we see Him and when did we react to Him in the way that is held up at judgment is when we saw and reacted to plights of these the least of our brethren.

I do not think that the least of our brethren is a code word for “the worthy poor,” or “the deserving poor.” I do not think that Jesus said that we saw Him and reacted to Him in a way that determines whether we are judged into everlasting life or everlasting hell when we saw and reacted to the plight of good, well meaning people who suffered misfortune; after all one of Jesus’ greatest acts of compassion is reserved for a woman who was caught in the act of adultery. Jesus walks with us as we journey, often quite unconsciously of what we are really doing, to the cities around Caesarea Philippi, and along the way, in the intimacy of us doing our daily activities, He asks, “But who do you say that I am?”

As we listen to the endless mendacity of humans on the televised news each evening and in mounting anger exclaim our hope for the harshest punishment of the malefactors, Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” As we listen to the gossip of our neighbors’ or co workers’ venal foolishness and conclude in our hearts as we hear what calamity befell them as a consequence that they got what they deserved, Jesus ask us, “But who do you say that I am?” As we book our vacations and plan our time for recreation and family where we can get away from it all, Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” As we extend the work day to get one more thing done for the boss, as we root for the loss of the other side at our sons’ or daughters’ scholastic competition, as our elected officials inform us they’ve changed the government’s spending and it has this or that impact, Jesus asks the next question, “But who do you say that I am?”

Choosing to Give a Cup of Water

2009-09-22T14:13:00.002-04:00

For whoever gives you a cup of water to drink in My name, because you belong to Christ, assuredly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.

Mark 9:41

But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.

Mark 9:42-43

Most of us remember scripture, if at all, in one of two ways: first, as stories like The Nativity, or The Wedding at Cana, of The Last Supper, etc.; and, secondly as Bible verses - snippets of scriptural text - such as Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth,” or John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life,” or Mark 9:41, “For whoever gives you a cup of water to drink in My name, because you belong to Christ, assuredly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.”

What we fail to recall are the sharp contrasts that Spirit has inspired Biblical writers to draw. Those contrasts call on us to to more than read Scripture as we do a novel, the sports pages, or a magazine: they call on to read with an urgency to decide---what is meant? what is right? what is my reaction?

For instance, we certainly remember aright when we remember that God created the heavens and the waters, but many of us believers would be far more humble if we remembered equally well that the announcement of creation’s author is paired in Genesis 1:2 with the expression of a prior coterminous subsistence of God and chaos, “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

I am equally liable when quoting John 3:16 - usually to affirm some sinner’s need for God’s grace- to forget that Jesus spoke these words to a putatively sincerely religious seeker, Nicodemus, just after having told him that over and against his apparent incredulity, he must be born again. When Nicodemus professes not to understand, Jesus inquires how Nicodemus can hold himself out as a Hebrew teacher, if he can’t make sense of this—i.e., Jesus avers that however incongruous this concept of being “reborn” is with the Jewish drive for purification, it is in the corpus of Hebrew scripture. However he goes on to contrast the “minor” difficulty of that with the major difficulty that the long awaited Son of Man must be lifted up---to die, and that as a criminal or outcast, furthermore asserting that this is the prefigured meaning of Moses lifting up the serpent.

In other words, Jesus is not, in John 3:16, espousing an especially pithy compact formulation of the ultimate truth of his redemptive ministry as much as he is plainly telling Nicodemus that over and over Nicodemus’s interpretation of scripture is not what's concordant with God’s prophetic voice. Jesus goes on to tell the putatively sincere religious seeker who has sought Jesus out at night that the real sin is that men (such as him) have chosen to love this darkness of not understanding rather than the light. The nice, all inclusive, non judgemental Jesus (after all, the passage, in part, reads "for God so loved the world that He gave His only Son...) is telling Nicodemus to get off the dime, and that to persist in not understanding, now that he has come to Jesus, is to embrace the darkness---to do the opposite of what he is all about.

Jesus’ kindly and assuring words in Mark 9:41 are also preceded by an encounter. This is one in which the disciples forbid a man from healing in the name of Jesus because the man is not one of the disciples. Jesus rebukes His disciples, telling that if the man heals in the name of Jesus, he can’t later testify against them with any credibility. Then just to make sure the disciples don't miss the point, Jesus makes the large claim that whoever isn’t against them, is, in fact, for them. He drives the point home by giving his disciples the example that even one who merely give one of them a cup of water ---even if someone does as little as this, he, or she, will not lose their reward. Notice that Jesus does not say they belong to Him if, once they give their cup of water, they forswear their gossiping, or stealing office supplies, or cheating on their taxes or spouses or relinquish their homosexual partners or vote for pro-life candidates.

However extreme this may sound so far, Jesus doesn't leave His disciples to shrug their shoulders, but he moves the disciples into Nicodemus's position with this sharp contrast that emerges from verses 42-43. As easy as it is to be numbered on His side-as minimal as the requirements prove to be--- it would be better not to have existed than to cause one of "these"(the children who have received him and one of who is in Jesus's embrace on his knee while He speaks) to stumble. What is this: easy in, easy out? Teach one doctrinally incoorect precept; perhaps, still not get that parable about the seeds and suddenly one is in a position where it was better that one wasn't born?

It is easy to belong---belonging should include everyone, but those of us who belong should want more than anything for Christ to be the reality of that membership. Now the term, “ Christ,” means anointed, so what is it for the belonging ones to want the anointing more than anything else. Well Jesus has addressed that in the immediately previous verses of the ninth chapter of Mark. The anointed one is one who must be killed, and having been really dead (i.e., three days) is raised up by God, and is then the servant of all (Mark 9:35).

Mark 9:41 is a very radical and demanding claim: Jesus is including in his reward even those who have done as little as give a disciple a cup of water because the disciple is of Jesus, and our job—it would be better for us not to have existed than not to do it---is to serve them all even to death- till the coldness of the earth seize us in its grip even until the God in whom we have believed raises us up. Paul may or may not in the famous passage in Corinthians (1 Corinthians 5:10) give you permission not to dine with a fellow “believer” who continues in an unregenerate life, but Jesus admonishes you to serve even them even unto death.

That death that is our assurance of resurrection. That death becomes our choice--not to be saved, that is a gift of grace---and it is our choice over doctrinal correctness, over anyother and everyother sign of standing and preferment: the most baptized new believers, the biggest Sunday School class, tithing of pre tax income rather than after tax income, most Facebook friends, best Twitter rankings, most trips to African villages or central American slums. Everyone who can make the slightest acknowledgement of God's annointed being present is on Jesus' side, it is our sole concern to serve them all (i.e., without exception).

May Your Day, Be A Shay Day

2009-05-29T15:02:00.003-04:00

Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’

Matthew 25:44-46

This post is a copy of an email that I received from my eldest daughter. I have not edited it in any way. It is, as it is intended to be, touching and thought provoking. It is worth the read. Like the Kingdom of God, it will make you decide.

From: michelle dixon [mailto:redsoxfanmish@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 4:05 PM
To: Michael Dixon
Subject: FW: Nice Story...

> >
> > Two Choices
> >
> > What would you do? ... you make the choice. Don't look for a punch
> > line, there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you
> > have
> > made
> > the same choice?
> >
> >
> >
> > At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves children with
> > learning
> > disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech
> > that would
> > never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school
> > and its
> > dedicated staff, he offered a question:
> >
> >
> >
> > 'When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature
> > does,is
> > done with perfection.
> >
> >
> >
> > Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot
> > understand things as other children do.
> >
> >
> >
> > Where is the natural order of things in my son?'
> >
> >
> >
> > The audience was stilled by the query.
> >
> >
> >
> > The father continued. 'I believe that when a child like Shay, who was
> > mentally and physically disabled comes into the world, an
> > opportunity
> > to
> > realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way
> > other
> > people treat that child.'
> >
> >
> >
> > Then he told the following story:
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were
> > playing
> > baseball. Shay asked, 'Do you think they'll let me play?' I knew
> > that
> > most of
> > the boys would=2
> > 0not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a
> > father I
> > also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give
> > him a much
> > needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by
> > others in
> > spite of his handicaps.
> >
> >
> >
> > I approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting
> > much) if
> > Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, 'We're
> > losing
> > by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be
> > on our
> > team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.'
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put
> > on a
> > team shirt.. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my
> > heart..
> > The boys saw my joy at my son being accepted.
> >
> >
> >
> > In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs
> > but
> > was
> > still behind by three.
> >
> >
> >
> > In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in
> > the
> > right
> > field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic
> > just to be
> > in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as I waved to
> > him from
> > the stands.
> >
> >
> >
> > In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again.
> >
> >
> >
> > Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning ru
> > n
> > was on
> > base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.
> >
> >
> >
> > At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to
> > win the
> > game?
> >
> >
> >
> > Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was
> > all but
> > impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat
> > properly, much
> > less connect with the ball.
> >
> >
> >
> > However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the
> > pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside
> > for this
> > moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in
> > softly
> > so Shay
> > could at least make contact.
> >
> >
> >
> > The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed.
> >
> >
> >
> > The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly
> > towards
> > Shay.
> >
> >
> >
> > As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground
> > ball right
> > back to the pitcher.
> >
> >
> >
> > The game would now be over..
> >
> >
> >
> > The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown
> > the ball
> > to the first baseman.
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the
> > game.
> >
> >
> >
> > Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's
> > head, out
> > of reach of all team mates.
> >
> >
> >
> > Everyone from the stands and both te
> > ams started yelling, 'Shay, run
> > to first!
> >
> >
> >
> > Run to first!'
> >
> >
> >
> > Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to
> > first
> > base.
> >
> >
> >
> > He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.
> >
> >
> >
> > Everyone yelled, 'Run to second, run to second!'
> >
> >
> >
> > Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and
> > struggling to make it to the base.
> >
> >
> >
> > By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had
> > the ball.
> > the smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be
> > the
> > hero
> > for his team..
> >
> >
> >
> > He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman for the tag, but
> > he
> > understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw
> > the ball
> > high and far over the third baseman's head.
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him
> > circled
> > the bases toward home.
> >
> >
> >
> > All were screaming, 'Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay'
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help
> > him by
> > turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, 'Run to
> > third!
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay, run to third!'
> >
> >
> >
> > As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators,
> > were on
> > their feet screaming, 'Shay, run home! Run
> > home!'
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero
> > who hit
> > the grand slam and won the game for his team
> >
> >
> >
> > 'That day', said the father softly with tears now rolling down his
> > face, 'the
> > boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity
> > into this
> > world'.
> >
> >
> >
> > Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having
> > never
> > forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and
> > seeing
> > his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!
> > AND NOW A LITTLE FOOT NOTE TO THIS STORY:
> >
> >
> >
> > We all send thousands of jokes through the e-mail without a second
> > thought,when but it
> > comes to sending messages about life choices, people hesitate.
> >
> >
> >
> > The crude, vulgar, and often obscene pass freely through cyberspace,
> > but
> > public discussion about decency is too often suppressed in our
> > schools and
> > workplaces.
> >
> >
> >
> > If you're thinking about forwarding this message, chances are that
> > you're
> > probably sorting out the people in your address book who aren't the
> > 'appropriate' ones to receive this type of message Well, the person
> > who sent
> > you this believes that we all can make a difference.
> >
> >
> >
> > We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help
> > realize the
> > 'natural o
> > rder of things.'
> >
> >
> >
> > So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us
> > with a
> > choice:
> >
> >
> >
> > Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we
> > pass up
> > those
> > opportunities and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?
> >
> >
> >
> > A wise man once said every society is judged by how it treats it's
> > least
> > fortunate amongst them.
> >
> >
> >
> > You now have two choices:
> >
> >
> >
> > 1. Delete
> >
> >
> >
> > 2. Forward
> >
> >
> >
> > May your day, be a Shay Day.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ______________________________________________________________________

Communities, Commutes and Geese

2009-05-06T08:45:00.002-04:00

But whoever has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him.
I John 3:17

But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 19:14

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
Matthew 18: 21-22

When I was in the last years of full time undergraduate study at Boston University, my friends Vickie and Steven and I were blessed with the friendship of a woman much more advanced than us in years and wisdom. Her name was Anita Mischler, and almost unbelievably, BU hired her to work in the University’s Division of Student Life with groups of students like Vickie and Steve and I. She and Steve were Jewish and Vickie and I were Christians.

Our relationship centered around building and sustaining communities of undergraduate students living “on campus” in 15 story dormitories. In our sophomore year, we created “Middle Earth” a new kind of student community in dorm number 3 on West Campus, the fifteen floor skyscraper abutting the athletic complex. “Middle Earth” was so successful, that the University made a template of what we did and offered variations of this kind of communities to many more students the next year.

As frequently as our conversation examined the sociological premises of what we were doing, it turned to the theological underpinnings. Anita always insisted that our problems, in ethics as much as in the stewardship of the earth (before the “Green Movement,” there was Schumacher and the “Small is beautiful” movement), sprang from mistranslation of the Hebrew scripture that has YHWH telling man to go and subdue the earth. She thought that rendering way too hegemonic, and preferred to understand that YHWH had instructed humans more to “till the earth,” or “to cultivate the earth.”

Anita died many years ago---maybe the first person I knew (besides an aging relative) who died of cancer. Vickie and Steve are very successful attorneys practicing in a large city, each married to someone else and living in the suburbs. I am happily married with five children and reside in Cincinnati, where I work for my wife as a financial manager and for my kids as a chauffeur. I am on call to fewer passengers every year (and on the hook for more auto insurance) as one after another, they get their licenses. Cincinnati is essentially now a city of suburbs.

Another of the great things about my current job (besides my boss), working for the Cincinnati Occupational Therapy Foundation, Inc.(or, COTF, or, simply,"the Foundation"), is that I work about 3 miles away from my home. My commute is about 10 minutes including three traffic lights. I meander out of our subdivision, turn right onto a fairly busy Kenwood Road, turn left at the first light onto a bigger, wider, busier Glendale-Milford Road, and then right at the first light onto Reed Hartman Highway. At the first light on Reed Hartman Highway, I turn onto the two lane access road that runs parallel to Reed Hartman Highway. Maybe a quarter mile down the access road, Carver Drive, I turn into the parking lot of the Foundation and park for free by the far side door and walk inside.

When I started working for COTF this commute was unimaginably easy. The subdivision’s roads are wide streets with lined with tree shaded sidewalks. Traffic in the morning consists of children walking to the local elementary school with maybe another car or a school bus sharing the road with me. The maximum posted speed is 25 miles per hour; most drivers don’t exceed it by much at all.

Similarly, the last leg of the commute is Carver Drive, an access road that winds away from Reed Hartman toward the office complex in wide gracefully sweeping curves. Its speed limit is also 25 miles per hour. Last June, when my son Jonathan was first learning to drive, we started in the parking lot outside the offices of the Foundation. As soon, as I knew Jonathan could steer and brake, we started entering and exited the parking lot from the access road. We had it all to ourselves, and when someone else came along, they slowed, stayed back and let us finish our maneuver before pulling past. Sometimes they waved.

Running between Carver Drive and the Highway is a modest drainage canal. All the offices along the first part of Carver Drive are single story buildings nestled in shrubbery under trees. The canal serves as the private swimming preserve of a flock of geese which returns to the Foundation’s campus each spring to mate, and nest and raise goslings. Frequently, they cross the access road trekking to their swimming hole from their nest in the morning, and returning back in the late afternoon.

Geese, one parent at the head of a line of goslings and one parent at the rear, wait patiently for a break in traffic to herd their young ones across the road. Reciprocally, drivers coming up to a family of geese crossing the road stop at a distance and wait patiently till they have finished crossing. If you are not used to sharing space with geese, you come to learn that they do not hurry for anyone under any circumstances. You also learn that the parents are fiercely protective of their young.

Recently developers built and opened an office complex further down the access road that houses one of the nation’s mega-bank’s IT groups, and one of those fast growing, for-profit colleges in towering structures that sit surrounded by asphalt parking lots. At rush hour a steady stream of cars now whiz down the access road. Frequently, they move faster on the access road than they do on the Reed Hartman Highway running roughly parallel to the access road. These speeders pull right up to the bumper of the car in front of them. If the car in front of them is going the speed limit, after they ride the bumper of the car in front, they move out to the left as if they were going to pass before dropping back into the lane, and then repeat the sequence, pulling out as if they were going to pass and dropping back in behind. Sometimes they honk their horn, sometimes they flip you off.

The other morning, as I drove down the access road and navigated the first sweeping curve, I had to swerve sharply to avoid a dead goose in the middle of the road. It’s the first dead goose, I have ever seen lying in the road. It was a full grown, adult goose, and I couldn’t tell if it had been at the head of a line, at the rear of a line or all by itself. It would be grossly unwarranted and unfair to assume that an IT staffer, a college faculty member or student ran over the goose. But it made me think of how easy it is to get caught up in the things of this world, and how, going fast, subduing the earth, it is easy to shut up one’s heart---even if it is just till one gets to work. However, God’s creation may not depend so much upon getting to work; it may require being present in the moment—it may require that one not shut up one’s heart.

"Under-whelmed"

2009-05-05T09:48:00.002-04:00

Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father living in me, who is doing His work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and He is in Me; or, at least, believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.
John 14: 10-13

The other day my son, Jonathan, and I made our first college visit. I thought it might provide a welcome and acceptable break in the high school routine. We are blessed to live in a state with many colleges and universities. My wife organized a list of schools that met many of Jonathan’s requirements. We picked one from it with which she subsequently arranged for us to take a tour of the campus and attend an admissions department Question and Answer session afterward.

The weather was beautiful that morning as we embarked on our 2-3 hour trek to the northeast. The drive proved more amiable than I ever could have imagined. The traffic was easily navigated and the countryside, picturesque. The last bit of our journey coursed through rolling farmlands. We arrived a little early, and so motored first around the campus and then the little town in which the campus was situated. Then we parked and strolled down the main path till we arrived at a stately building that the business like sign declared was the Admissions Department.

At 10 minutes past ten o’clock in the morning a very cheerfully punctual young lady, nicely, if casually turned out, gathered a foursome of students and parents, and gave us an hour’s tour of the campus with a flowing and enthusiastic description of the colleges many virtues. She extolled its strong programs (happily I thought, one of which was of interest to Jonathan), she praised the faculty’s accessibility, she regaled us with tales of the various traditions of the college as we passed the steps or quad or path on which they transpired at the appointed time of the year.

We noticed faculty teaching classes out of doors. We passed lots of congenial students walking on their way from one place to another who were only too happy to give our tour guide a wave or “hello,” and flash us a smile or, simply, a very cheerful countenance. There were theatres, auditoriums, laboratories, a new recreation and sports facility with its own “smoothie bar,” a cafeteria that looked more like a spa dining room than the cafeterias I remember and dorms that looked a lot like dorms I remember from when I went to school.

When we finished the tour, an admissions counselor made time for an impromptu interview with us, received the business card of the admissions counselor in whose territory my son’s high school fell and being advised by her not to attend the Q&A (which she was facilitating), we left. One could not have orchestrated a more totally convivial first visit to a college. Nor could have one wanted a more hospitable epitome of the small liberal arts college in a bucolic rural setting. I who many years ago attended a large urban university that was ranked number 1 in the “Underground Guide to Colleges” because it was the furthest thing I could imagine from the small town in which I grew up, wondered if, given what I know now, I would not have given this kind of school much more serious consideration.

As I turned full of soupy warm feelings to my son Jonathan, I could read as plain as day that he was ready to leave. No, he didn’t want to eat in the cafeteria as suggested. He thought it was quite a silly idea that he would learn anything about life on campus from a student’s point of view munching a sandwich near matriculated students. He didn’t want to go to the bookstore or the library. He didn’t want to go to the coffee shop in town where everyone went to sip coffee and hangout. So, this being a low key, “let’s –learn-to-visit-a-campus” affair, I backed the car out of its spot and headed home.

After a while, past some cows, following some back and forth about what we saw, I asked Jonathan how he liked the school. He told me it was nice enough but that basically he was “under-whelmed.” When I asked him, “Why,” he replied me that while he recognized all the college’s virtues, the faculty did not seem to be doing anything…anything special.

I realized that I had not, in fact, seen the customary stapled sheets of faculty journal article reprints hanging from the bulletin boards. There being no graduate school at this college, there were no announcements of dissertation defenses. No sign ups for clinical trials.

I remembered that when Jonathan asked what kind of writers the writing program produced---journalists and editors, scriptwriters and playwrights, or poets and novelists, the answer was a very diffuse, “All kinds. Lots of our writing students are really interested in the sciences and major in chemistry or physics,” she added.

I recalled that when Jonathan asked about faculty projects we were told the faculty mainly taught, but that they were very accessible and open to students ideas an, of course, eager to help. The literary journal published under the college’s names had fellowships that undergraduates could apply to fill.

As the conversation faded and my son reassumed the role of sleeping adolescent and I resumed the role of driving father, I thought how much the modern American church was like this college: hospitable & amiable; often, but not necessarily, pretty to a fault; happy to teach---mainly, but not exclusively, things from the Bible or the mission filed; steeped in traditions that the ushers and greeters are eager to describe enthusiastically to the uninitiated (i.e., how we take communion, when we have church suppers & picnics, what we do for Advent, for Lent, for Christmas and Easter; how Sunday school is organized and when the children sing in “big church’” how we have a CD for the Sunday after New Year’s eve so you can worship at home with your family, etc.).

But what does the faculty do? (Please note, I do not equate faculty here with the paid pastorate.) What are their special concerns? Into what have they dug deeply? What are their passions? What are they likely to try and enlist me in? While there are lots of answers my son, Jonathan, won’t like; I can tell you for sure, he won’t be sticking around the church where the faculty has nothing that he can see they are involved in. He and lots of his peers will move from one church to another when the faculties’ interests change and go a different direction, but they will never come a second time where there are no interests and no directions. The beauty, the traditions, the appealing smorgasbord, the cheerful countenances…”I am under-whelmed, Dad. The faculty doesn’t seem to be doing anything.”

The Heart that Won't Shut Up

2009-05-04T12:14:00.003-04:00

"But whoever has this world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?" I John 3:17

This immediately past Saturday, my wife took the car out to do some errands. While she was going from one place to the next, the Honda Odyssey she was driving was rear ended by another car. She was bumped. It wasn't a glass shattering, metal ripping accident. It was a thump. When she got out to survey the damage she noticed that the driver was as young as our oldest son, who just received his license about 5 months ago. His running into her was "just an accident." She also noticed that the damage was modest enough that she didn't absolutely, postively need to get it fixed to keep on driving, let alone a tow.

So she didn't file a claim with our insurance company, or a police report, or seek to make the young man or his family pay. We didn't have a family conference about this. She told me after the fact. She didn't stop to pray about it. The accident happened and my wife decided, as she always does, not to shut up her heart. It is a way of life with her. If you walk through life with her, you will see it happen all the time.

There are numerous objections you can post to this. You can ask for instance, why as a parent she shouldn't make sure his parents know about this. You can say indiginantly, that you would want to know. You can also ask if we have acted strongly enough to make the young man aware of his responsibilities. You can object that if he thinks he can get away with this, what else will he think he can get away with? You can... and you can...

Or you can see life as a discipline of keeping your heart open to where you are and who is there with you and what you might bless them with. You can trust God, as my wife does, to take what you offer as a blessing and use it as an instrument of His grace. You can trust God so much that you don't need to see a miracle of healing unwrinkle the dent in your fender. You can trust God so much that the additional damage you spot later doesn't make you change your mind, wish you did different.

You can trust God to be present in that moment when you stand there with that young man because you are not ashamed to believe God brought you two together in that moment, you are not ashamed to believe that the trivial and commonplace occurences of life are there by God's design, and so, of course, He is in them, too. The only question then becomes a very personal one, "Is He there in your heart, or has it been shut up?"

The Schools

2009-04-23T15:07:00.003-04:00

For this purpose the Son of Man was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil.

1 John 3:8b

For more than 15 years Tita Evertsz has stood for Jesus in La Limonada against the spiritual darkness. A little over nine years ago, she founded a school in La Limonada, La Escuelita-Limon. Since gangs restrict the movement of people from one side of the ghetto to the other, Tita founded a second school, La Escuelita-Mandarina. Both schools are organized into morning and afternoon sessions, and children attend one or the other session. Some families in la Limonada manage to find the financial resources to send their children to the Guatemalan public schools, which are also organized into "split sessions." Some of these parents still want their children in Limon or Mandarina for the session that their children do not attend the public schools because they are such a positive alternative to having their sons and daughters roaming the streets.

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called children of God.

1 John 3:1

Classrooms are organized by age groups. In Limon, for instance, the 3rd floor houses teenagers in one classroom and preadolescents in another, while the 4 - 6 year olds are in a classroom on the 1rst floor. The second floor has a classroom for children 7-8 years old, a room for a counselor to meet individaully with children, and a place for staff to do administrative work. Miranda is similarly organized.

It has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him.

1John 3:2b

A team of approximately 13 women and 4 men works as teachers, counselors and alimentation staff. They are largely defined by their willingness to raise up our Savior Jesus Christ by serving the children of Limon and Mandarina and their families. Tita spoke candidly of the pressure to use every resource available to her to add children to the enrollment because society at large in La Limonada would otherwise feed the children to Satan. So the counselors and teachers were eager to meet with Deb, and present kids, their issues, what the staff was trying to do and what they were experiencing. Deb has had many years of experience in poor, urban school settings, and working in the homes of students with them and their families. It was a time of sharing, learning one from another. Along with the home visits and time in the classroom it helped prepare for Friday morning.

The Homes in La Limonada

2009-04-22T11:52:00.005-04:00

During their stay in La Limonada, Deb and Michael accompanied Tita Evertsz on home visits. Home visits were an entourage including not only the three of us, but also one or more teachers, Leah Craver from Lemonade International, and Bethany who was visiting La Limonada that week from the U.S. The stroll to each home was marked by the customary exchanges of greeting---"Buenos Tardes! Buenos Tardes!"--- and pauses to hug a passerby, to clasp a hand, to listen to a story, to exchange news.

At the first home, Tita spoke lovingly and firmly with a mother about the need for her son to attend the Escuelita (school) and shared with the mother eyewitness accounts of her son roaming the streets. We prayed with this mother and her son.

At another home, we carried foodstuffs to a family in a tiny and remote corner of the ghetto where an unrelated man slept outside the front door in the street. The mother in this family struggles with cancer, her prognosis is not good. She, her father and her children welcomed us in to her home. After she and Tita discussed the course of her illness and her family's affairs, Deb led us in prayer.

We visited Chato, a strong young man recovering from a gunshot wounds. His large abdominal surgical incision was covered only with a white towel. Periodically, he lifted it to swat at the flies. This young man was the head of the household, although he wasn't the biological father of most of the children. He spoke with Tita of the difficulty of leaving the gang life, as well as his sense that Jesus was knocking on the door of his heart. We prayed for him also.

Tita openly and unashamedly lays her hopes, burdens and cares, as well of those of anyone around her at the feet of Jesus. Home visits were not about the resolution one can bring to desperate situations; they are about the resolution to step into people's desperate situations with them and the Lord Jesus Christ because Jesus has promised us that wherever two or three are gathered in His name, there He is also.

Tita also stresses just how much the people that we meet in la Limonada teach us, how much we benefit from our time with them, how much they and their lives bring us back to the Lord in obedience to Him, in prayer to Him, in hope for His word and His work.

Community: If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; from now on you know Him and have seen Him.

2009-04-21T09:29:00.006-04:00

"Hear me when I call, Oh God of my righteousness!

You have relieved me in my distress,

Have mercy on me and hear my prayer!"

Psalm 4:1

Now home to more than 60,000 people, La Limonada is what used to be simply a natural ravine between Zona 1 and Zona 5 of Guatemala City. Guatemalans fleeing the civil war ravaging thier mountain villages settled La Limonada starting in the late 50's. They escaped regions of intense and deadly conflict and sought refuge in this unwanted space in the city where they could improvise shelter. Now La Limonada is overpopulated and ravaged by severe poverty, rampant glue sniffing and alcoholism that disables the men, gang violence that kills many of the young men, pervasive sexual abuse of the girls---often leading to very young mothers with unwanted pregnancies---and the overwhelming hopelessness that the devil uses to feed this degradation of God's Children.

"How long, O you sons of men,

will you turn my glory to shame?

How long will you love worthlessness and

seek falsehood?"

Psalm 4:2

For more than 15 years, Tita Evertsz has stood up for Jesus in this community against this darkness. The Holy Spirit has drawn to her a team of four men and 13 women who minister to more than 250 children ages 3 to 15 through two schools: La Escuealita-Limon and La Escuealita Mandarina.

"But know that the Lord has set apart for Himself him and her who are godly."

Psalm 4:3

The schools provide meals, education and mentoring five days a week. And it is all free! Parents are simply required to attend meetings on parenting which are held once per month.

Be angry and do not sin.

Meditate with your heart on your bed and be still.

Offer the sacrafices of righteousness

And put your trust in the Lord.

Psalm 4:4-5

Providing meals means ensuring that each of the children attending school not only gets a hot meal for the day (sometimes thier only meal), but it also means that they get a vitamin and brush their teeth. Providing education means not only giving basic school lessons that prepare the children for formal Guatemalan schooling, but also Bible lessons and education about their bodioes and God's purpose for their bodies to help the children learn how to protect themselves from sexual abuse and how to avoid becoming pregnant before they are adults and married.

There are many who say,

"Who will show us any good?"

Lord, lift up the light of your countenance upon us.

You have put gladness in my heart.

More than in the season that their grain and wine increased.

I will both lie down in peace and sleep.

For you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.

Psalm 4: 6-8

Guatemala City – Our First Visit

2009-03-04T10:14:00.000-05:00

In the wee small hours of Tuesday morning, February 17, Deb and I left the comforts of Cincinnati, Ohio, and flew to Guatemala City for the first time in either of our lives. “We journeyed to La Limonada, a slum of 60,000 built on the steep inclines on either side of a ravine created by an earthquake in Zone Five of Guatemala City,” We wanted to meet with Tita Evertsz and her team, see the schools they had founded and were operating, and, ultimately, to visit with the more than two hundred children who are served by Tita, her team and through their mission partners like Lemonade International,” Deb explained.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect. We weren’t sure what we’d find. We weren’t exactly clear why we were even going. What did we know? How would we deal with the language barrier?

Note: Deb speaks a very little Spanish. Michael even bungled the Spanish for saying that he could not understand what he was being told. Deb pointed out that he was repeatedly telling one very puzzled youngster that the youngster, not Michael, did not understand what the youngster was saying.

But after 2 and ½ days with the children in their classrooms, making home visits, talking with Tita, meeting with the school social worker and psychologist, Deb spoke for a little over two hours Friday morning to a meeting of the teachers. She talked a lot about sensory integration in an introductory way and the role it plays in a child’s development. It was an opportunity to see and think about the children as individuals and the relationship of sensory processing to their individual development. Certainly the poverty of La Limonada and its related social challenges are implicated, but for a brief time the conversation was not about the children as victims, but about the different ways children grow and how teachers could recognize and incorporate that into managing their classrooms and educating their charges.
There is a lot more to tell. So stay tuned