An original spin on original sin.

I baptized a baby on Sunday.


She was a nice baby, too.  Scarlett was her name.  She was very sweet, smiled, didn't fuss about too badly, and the whole experience was lovely.

I baptized a baby on the tenth, as well.  His name was Linken, and he was perfectly charming as well. A nice kid.

Neither of them asked to be baptized, neither of them were able to speak for themselves, and neither will remember it.

So what the heck was I playing at?

You see, there's a question rolling around with infant baptism: what the heck are we doing baptizing people to forgive their sins, when they're about eight months old?  What possible sins have they committed in that time?

It's not just that they haven't had the time to commit sins, eight months is a while, to be sure, and I could find all sorts of sins to commit in that time, but it's that in those first months, you as a human being, are actually incapable of getting up to any antics.  Luke, my youngest son, is five months old, and all he can do is roll over, smile, laugh, eat, and void his warranty.  That's it.  And I wouldn't describe any of those things as overly sinful.  Bruce, our eldest son, now he's a different story.  This blog is not anywhere near long enough to catalogue all the stuff he does / can do, as he's three years old, and incredibly capable.  But with the capacity to do more right, comes the capability to do more wrong.  He can give us sweet cuddles, or he can give me a kick in the shins.  He can tell us that he loves us, or he can lie to our faces.  With any increase in capability, comes an increase in the ability to use this stuff for good, or for evil.  Now, our opinion on the sinfulness of babies is akin to our opinion on our own sinfulness, and it is how we view ourselves so favourably.

The saying goes that if you want to seem slimmer, your best bet is to hang out with people a lot heavier than you.  And if you want to seem moral, your best bet is to make a comparative with people who are less morally upright than yourself.  Simple enough.  The first comparison, obviously, is Hitler.  We all know that Hitler was a bad dude, and that he did a great number of things that were completely inexcusable, and horrifically evil.  He also had the ability to do these things.  He, and other dictators like him, tend to be corrupt.  They tend to be evil.  They tend to be catastrophic disasters, even though they may very well have entered into office with the best of intentions.

The other saying, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, is extremely true, not because there is anything inherently corrupting about power.  It's what it does to you as a person.  All of a sudden, the normal rules melt away, and you now have to run the nation on your own honor system.  It's different in a country like Canada, in which there are various checks and balances to power, which makes sense, because we want to avoid giving some madman the right to run the nation into the ground. But a great many countries don't work like that, and folks who take power in Haiti, or in Banoi, or whatever, usually end up causing no end of trouble, because when the rules are gone, and the police work for you, and you make the rules from now on, what do you do, and whose interest do you act in?

Usually, it ends up being your own.  Most of us are nice enough folks, because we don't have the ability to re-write the laws to suit us.  Most of us would assume that if we did take power, we'd pursue causes of justice and righteousness, and make the world a better place.  And so did every other dictator, like ever.  Nobody runs for office based on a policy of cronyism and corruption, of murder of people they don't like, of stacking bodies up like cordwood.  But it happens.  When the rules are gone, and replaced by your rules, they may not end up being as just as you might think they would be.

But for a moment, forget about that.  You're never going to be in that situation.  Odds are, you won't even be elected to municipal alderman, much less dictator of a banana republic.  Think then, for a moment, about how you feel about those people who live around you, and the other drivers on the road, and you'll know that you would make a whole bunch of things illegal.  Things that pretty much benefit you.  It's like that conundrum on the game show Survivor, in which a contestant wins a car, and they can decide to either keep the car, or by giving it up, give a car to every other contestant.  Of course, each contestant who isn't in the position knows exactly what they'd do, and that is to share it with everyone else.  Of course.  But it's easy to make these decisions if you can't do anything about it either way.

And that's where babies are.  They can't really be good or bad.  They can be annoying, they can be smiley, they can be sweet.  But if you know anything about children, you know that as soon as they work out how to lie, how to disobey, how to deceive, how to be basically dreadful, they probably will. Yes, they'll be likely to do nice things too, but they'll do a whole bunch of junk that you won't like.  And that propensity only increases, that as they grow in years, and in ability. They can do more, good or ill.

That's what we are like too.  We think of ourselves as being basically good, and so does everyone else. But if that was the case, if we were all as good as though we were, then things like the Vancouver riots and looting wouldn't happen.  And the riots are a very good example to use, because those are ordinary people who all of a sudden had the rules melt away.  You reach critical mass, and you realize that the police can't / won't stop you.  So what do you do?  Most of those folks were presumably regular people, who thought of themselves as okay people, pretty good.  But when the rules vanish, what do they turn into?

The argument is that they get caught up in the moment, which I'll believe, but why is there that inclination to turn to violence and looting when others are doing likewise?  Why do the ostensibly normal folks not just leave when the riot starts?  Why do they get caught up in it?  Well, it's that same inclination that children have, that we all have.  It's easy for us, sitting at home in Regina or wherever, to cluck our thick tongues and suggest oh so very delicately that we would NEVER do such a thing, but if someone smashed a Sears window open and you know nobody was going to stop you from doing anything you wanted, and the police were just going to stand there and watch, what would you do?

Mac should be arrested for bringing his guns to this riot.

What would you do?

Your original sin is the part of you that is corrupt.  In comics, it's the devil that sits on your shoulder.  It's the voice in the back of your head, heck, in the front of your head, that tells you to run in and take what isn't yours.  That tells you to lie to protect yourself.  That tells you to cut in line ahead of someone who isn't paying attention, that tells you 'finders keepers' when you find something that you could easily return.  That's your sinful nature, and that's original sin.  Do children have it, yes they do.  And you will find that as they grow, they likely need to be taught how to be good.  They probably don't need to be taught to be bad.  And like with any addiction, with any crushing personality flaw, the first issue is recognizing that it exists.  If you ignore it forever, if you say to yourself that there is no such thing as a corruption of yourself, and that you're a pretty great human being always, if you pretend the devil on your shoulder just isn't there, it's not as though he shuts up.  You just hear his words without seeing him.  If you confront these flaws, if you deal with them, if you grapple with them for what they are, then you realize that when you're faced with a shattered window, and the possibility of free jeans, that nagging voice that tells you to take them is wrong.  It's part of you, but it's the part of you that's broken.  When we ask for forgiveness of sins, especially for babies who don't have sins of commission, we're asking for God to heal broken hearts and spirits, and to draw us to himself even though we are broken and corrupt.  And he does.

He died not just for what you do, but for who you are, your flaws and corruptions, the parts of you that you hate, he died for all of that.  For what you do, and for the part of you that makes you likely to riot, or to be a jerk.  That's original sin, and that's what Christ died for.

PJ.

A thousandfold

Hi folks.

If I'm right, this time next week, this humble blog will have a thousand views. I'm  surprised at who reads this thing, actually - different from whom I'd expected!

In the spirit of milestones, here are some fun facts about readership:

Best fake reader: trollface.ru. Russian rage trollface comics. no jokes.
Best real reader: You. Reading this right now. You're awesome.
Most popular post: Star wars. By far.
Least popular post: Andrew and cold sores. Strangely, people not jumping all over that one.
Best google search leading here: "Dennis Chupik".
Worst google search leading here: "helmet with crest" or maybe "angry black wolf"

I'd say the biggest spike in readership came on the day that I published the post about Dennis Chupik and Atheists for Jesus.  That post, perhaps more than any other, got people reading right away.  And there's a pretty good reason for that.  What we're getting into is something that I view as being akin to the console wars that were going on when I was growing up.  For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's like this - You begged and pleaded with your parents to buy you a video game console.  They eventually caved, and bought one.  But they weren't going to buy two.  You had to pick one, and stick with it.  Now, that means that you made the call for the Nintendo Entertainment System over the Sega Genesis.  Well and good.  But what that also meant was that you'd backed a horse.  And you needed to convince yourself that the horse you backed is the absolute best.  God forbid that you make the wrong choice in the console race.  And that's where, to a large extent, the current fanboyism comes from.  It's not about the consoles, never was.  It's about our desperate desire to be right, to have made the right call, to have backed the right horse, because God forbid we be mistaken, and have to admit that we were wrong.

Is this possible?

Most religious / anti-religious texts are like this too.  They don't go out of their way to convert, they do their best to solidify.  When I read through "The God Delusion," I was struck by the way the writing assumed the idea that God was made up was a given.  It certainly made no effort to try to convince me of that fact, or to try to offer up a whole bunch of compelling arguments for the lack of existence of God or whatever.  It was mainly just trying to solidify a position that I didn't hold, which might be partially why I didn't find it to be overly compelling.  Same thing with God is not Great, or the End of Faith.

Okay, great.  So I didn't find the books by atheists for atheists to be overly convincing, mainly because I don't fit into their target market.  But it takes some reminding to those of us who are in the Christian camp to recall that Not everyone is a Christian.  We do a lot of talking in what I call 'Churchineese,' that is, using words like 'justified' or 'sanctified' or 'righteous,' and we forget that people who are outside the church don't necessarily use that kind of language.  Or at least in the same way.  Those of us who are churchgoers tend to react to people who aren't churchgoers with one main reaction 'You DON'T go to CHURCH?'

But we need to remember that our position is more than just telling other Christians how great Christianity is.  Hooray.  In order for this to work long term, you need to do something very important, something you may never have done in your whole life ever.

You need to wrestle with what you believe.

It's like a console war in which you have to back a side, but then sit down and look at what you've chosen.  You have to work with it, to find out WHY you believe what you believe.  In the Bible, it takes the form of Genesis 32:

²⁴ Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him 

until daybreak. ²⁵ When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, 

he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of Jacob’s thigh 

was dislocated while he wrestled with him. ²⁶ Then he said, 

“Let me go, for the dawn is breaking.” 

But he said, “ I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 

²⁷ So he said to him, “What is your name?” 

And he said, “Jacob.” ²⁸  

He said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but^[a]Israel; 

for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.” 

²⁹ Then Jacob asked him and said, “Please tell me your name.” 

But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” 

And he blessed him there. ³⁰ So Jacob named the place ^[b]Peniel, for he said,

 “ I have seen God face to face, yet my ^[c]life has been preserved.” 

³¹ Now the sun rose upon him just as he crossed over

Penuel, and he was limping on his thigh. 

³² Therefore, to this day the sons of Israel do not eat 

the sinew of the hip which is on the socket of the thigh, 

because he touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the hip.

How often do we as people wrestle with our positions?  It's usually a matter of hearing what you want to hear, and being confirmed and supported in that.  The books we read, the media we subscribe to, our podcasts, our radio stations, our polemics, they mostly all back up what we already think is true and right.  The greater task is to grab what you believe, and say "Why."  Wrestle with God.  If you do it right, it should change you, as it did Jacob.  If you don't grapple with what you believe every once in a while, if you don't challenge yourself on what you believe, you may find that you fall into the same routine as the rest of the world - reading and paying attention to stuff that tells you that you're terrific, and that's all.  Gotta move past that.  Know what you believe in, and then you can better communicate it to others, who may never have heard about it, or may be tired of it, bored of it, may not believe in it at all.  See it from their point of view.  Wrestle with it.  

PJ.

The inevitable boredom of bread

I mentioned on Sunday that one of my favorite smells in the entire world is fresh baked bread.  It's awesome. It's so awesome that I own two breadmakers, for the express purpose of baking bread, for the express purpose of being able to smell it when it's baking.  It's amazing, and is probably the greatest scent of all time.  Yes, even better than puppy breath.

Now, there's something fairly unique about scents.  After a while, you stop being able to smell them.  As I said on Sunday, the way your senses work is that they require essentially constant stimulation to keep on working.  Here's a fun experiment you can do at home, whilst you read this blog.  Take the index finger of your right hand, and place it on the back of your left hand.  Okay.  Remove said finger.  Now take the index finger of your right hand, and move it back and forth between your knuckles and your wrist. What you should have noticed, if your body works properly, is that you will have felt the finger resting on the back of your hand only for a fraction of a second, then your body sort of forgets about it.  The but if you get constant stimulus, then you feel it a whole lot more.

That constant stimulus is what we crave as people.  It's so true, I can't even overstate it.  We need something happening all the time.  These days, we've all got fantastical computers working in our pockets, a million channels, twitter, blogs, youtube, and a hundred thousand distractions.  All the time. And it never stops.  Now, this isn't a bad thing, but we crave this novelty to the point where the novelty is all that counts. The entire advertising industry is dedicated to telling you why you should be dissatisfied with your life.  Your life as it is, says the advertising industry, is simply no life at all.  If you only owned this one product, subscribed to this one service, used this one thing, then, THEN you'd have a life.  You'd smile and laugh and eat chicken with your family around the dinner table.

Fine.  Except it's not true.  And you know it's not true. And you know it's not true based on personal experience.  You know that the last tablet or phone or tv or car or whatever that you purchased didn't actually change your life completely the way it promised to .  Instead, your life turned into your life, plus a tablet.  Or a tv, or a moustache, or whatever.

Point being, this constant stimulus that we're looking for, it fails to genuinely satisfy.  Even though you think it will.  You're as convinced as I am that the novelty of a thing equals its superiority.  But the joke's on us, because the novelty of a thing is actually to its detriment.  Because the things that change your life are the things that aren't new or novel.

Now, you know this to be true.  The new, the novel, it has a way of exciting your senses, of making you feel alive.  It has a way of making your heart beat a little bit faster, precisely because it is new. But once you take it home, make it your own, it won't do that anymore.  I can promise you that.  We expect it to, though.  We expect to make this new thing part of our lives, and expect it to give us those familiar heart palpitations always.  And then it stubbornly refuses to. It becomes old, it becomes outdated, or worst of all, it becomes familiar. Now, I've been around churches long enough to know that people do the same thing there. They go to the church that give them the thrill, the promise of excitement, the novelty.  Or even more so, people follow the faith that gave them that novelty, that promise of new and exciting things.  But there's a fatal flaw built into all of this - you're still you, even with the novelty.

You know what changes you, what brings long term happiness - your relationships, your talents, your desires, your loves.  These things bring and breed happiness.  Your novelty doesn't.  It makes your heart go pitty pat, but doesn't change you at all.  The stuff that changes you long term is the stuff that makes you who you are.  And as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another, according to proverbs 27:17.  The brief flash in the pan romances, the affairs, the dalliances with this and that, doesn't do much for you.  It's in the daily practice, the daily observances, the daily relationships, the daily involvement, that's what changes you.  That's what makes the difference between just you with a new ipod, versus you as a changed person.

This holds doubly and triply true for church.  You may feel as though your faith has gotten cold.  There's no excitement anymore, there's no thrill, nothing new.  You and God have gotten into a bit of a routine, and it's business as usual.  Ho hum.  You may be tempted to find that new thing, because the smell of fresh baked bread can't even be detected anymore.  Well, just because you've gotten tired of it, doesn't mean it's not there, or that it doesn't do what it promises to do anymore.  The children of Israel in the desert were fed with manna, which they loved at first because it kept them alive, but got a little tired of after a short while, because it was dull.  Jesus posited himself as the living bread from heaven, which sounded great, until people started getting sick of the same old thing.

People like us.

Ask yourself when you got tired of the whole God thing.  The whole God thing that started with such promise, and then turned into routine, and emptiness.  Ask yourself when it was that you stopped being able to smell the fresh baked bread in your own house because it got to be too familiar.  Ask yourself when dinner became a grind, and you wanted some novel food.  Ask yourself when your relationship with your spouse stopped being fireworks and lavender, and became notes on the fridge to pick up milk.  This happens.  This happens all the time.  The real skill and expertise is not in chasing the thrill, because that'll disappear with a new partner / food / tablet computer eventually too. The real skill and expertise is finding ways to continue to be thrilled and excited by what you have, rather than what you don't.  It's a monumental task, because it requires you to throw off the weight of the entire advertising industry, and stand alone, saying "this isn't something new or novel.  This is my spouse / God / church / and what matters in not finding a new thing to disappoint me, but to work with what I have, and to let it change me."  It's not the easiest thing in the world, but easy is flitting around from flower to flower.  It's not easy, precisely because it's worth doing.

PJ

WWJD

It's the bracelet that folks were wearing for a while, maybe they still are.  WWJD?  What would Jesus do?  The idea is similar to the rings that the Mormons wear, the 'choose the right.' one.  And the bracelet with WWJD was quite popular when I was in high school.  A bunch of folks were rocking it out.  And the question that you're supposed to ask yourself before you undertake any type of decision is, what would Jesus do in this situation?  Any time you're about to do a thing, you think to yourself, 'is this what Jesus would do?'  If yes, then do it.  If not, then steer clear.

That's good right?  A sensible way of approaching the world around you.  It should be simple enough, that you should only do the stuff that Jesus would do.  Easy decision to make, right?

Okay, sure.  You know this.  And honestly, it shouldn't be too hard to work out what Jesus would do.  There's a man who has been blind from birth that you happen to run into on your way home from work.  WWJD? Probably miraculously heal him.  You're out and about, maybe having a bit of a stroll, and ten guys affected with horrible disfiguring illnesses call out. WWJD?  Make them all better.

Okay, I'm being a bit facetious, because those are all things you can't do, even if you wanted to.  Even if you really had in mind to go out and heal everyone with miraculous powers, there's another problem locked deeply under the surface. Anyone rocking the WWJD bracelet, anyone rocking the CTR ring, anyone telling themselves that your Christian faith is a matter of choosing the right things, being a good person, being a fine apstanding citizen, has forgotten something.  You can weigh your decisions all day, feeling as though you just can't do what Jesus does, so therefore what's the use in trying, but Jesus has something to say to us all.  Those of us, at least, who are of the position or ability to read this on a computer (or tablet, or smartphone, or whatever), really have to keep bearing one particular Biblical story in mind, one we'd rather forget.  You can find it in Luke 18.

¹⁸ A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

¹⁹ “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. ²⁰ You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’^[a]”

²¹ “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

²² When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

²³ When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. ²⁴ Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! ²⁵ Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

²⁶ Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

²⁷ Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

Well, this doesn't seem too hard at all!

Luke's Gospel talks specifically about someone who is rich, and who thinks that he keeps all the commandments.  Someone who asks, like a child who feels as though he has done his homework, what he should do now.  What is there possibly left to do?  And Jesus tells him to go and sell what he has and give it to the poor, and to go follow him.  Yay Jesus!  Stick it to the rich guys.  The rich guys like, um.......

you.

You want to run down the list of WWJD, this is one of those times where you don't have to ask what Jesus would do, or what he would have you do.  He's pretty obvious about it.  If you were a rich girl, what would Jesus have you do? Well, probably sell everything you have, and give it all to the poor.  It's a good think you're not wealthy, right?  It's a good thing that this only applies to the Gates family, and the Getty family, the British Royals, and the Zuckerbergs of the world.

Oh dear.

In thinking that the words of Jesus Christ only convict those whom we would see as being super rich, we forget quite easily how rich we are.  Oh sure, it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, so thank goodness we're not rich!  But we are.  That whole time spent thinking about the 1% during the occupy movement failed to realize that we are the 1%.  Well, that's not a scientific measurement of GDP or anything, but there are very few people globally who live as well as we do.  Canada has no wars, no major calamities, high standard of living, government supplied health care, welfare, and libraries that will rent DVDs to you.  We have clean streets, very little crime, and we're not ruled over by cartels or militias.  We elect our leaders, and the vast majority of us have disposable income that is honestly more than the entire incomes of an awful lot of people all over the world.  If Jesus is talking to rich people, saying they should sell their belongings, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him, that applies to us, too.

But there's another part to WWJD.  Because there's something that Jesus would never EVER do, but that you should.  Nay, that you need to do.  And when you ask yourself what would Jesus do, it will never include this particular item. But this should be part of your daily life: repentance.  The rich young ruler who comes up to Jesus asks him what HE has to do to inherit eternal life.  Jesus tells him about the commandments, and the ruler says that he's kept all those commandments since he was a child.  Of course.  But when pressed into something else, something that gets to the core of who he is, and most importantly something he'd rather not do, he leaves angry.  If this guy can't make it, someone wealthy, well thought of, someone who at least believes that he's kept the commandments all his life, if HE can't get into the kingdom of God, then what hope is there for anyone else either?

Perhaps it's not WWJD, but WDJD....what did Jesus do?  He laid down his life for your sins, yours and mine.  And in doing so, he took away our need to be as perfect as him to get to him.  You weren't going to do that anyway, he knows that.  Were you going to be perfect?  Highly doubtful.  He took the sins of everyone, rich and poor, and took them upon himself, giving his perfection to us.  Yes, it's impossible for us to earn our way to heaven, but with God all things are possible.  The one thing that leaps out to me through all of the Bible is that God doesn't just sit back and wait for folks to choose the right thing, to be like him, in order to give them the time of day.  He seeks them out. He finds them where they are.  You, you horrible, profligate sinner, you're the one that he comes to find.  He loves you too much to wait for you to be perfect.  He love you enough to make you perfect, by forgiving you of everything, commission, omission, both.  In this is real love, not that we loved him, but that he loved us, and gave himself up for us.

PJ.

La Jeunesse

As you've worked out by now, Kari, Bruce, Luke and I were not around on Sunday.  Yes, we were sneaking and peeking. Since Pastor Bryan was in town to baptize his granddaughter (plus bonus Macknack), we took off to check out the cathedral, and town surrounding it, in Gravelbourg.  If you've never been, you might want to consider it.  It's one of those things that honestly isn't that far away, but if you're anything like us, you've driven past it ten hundred times, and thought to yourself a couple of times 'huh, a touch of Europe on the prairies.  We should go there someday.'  And then you never do.  Well, we made up our minds to check it out, and check it out we did.  And it was quite the thing to behold.

Before I talk at all about the cathedral, though, I'd like to talk about the town.  The town is not kidding. That isn't to say that nobody in the town has a sense of humour, not at all.  It's just to say that there's a marked difference between somewhere like Gravelbourg, and somewhere like Calgary.  Our other trip this summer was down to Calgary to see the Calgary Stampede (the greatest outdoor show on earth), and in Calgary, they are kidding.  For a week every year, the entire city pretends to be a bunch of cowpokes, buckaroos, and hayseeds.  Everyone wears jeans, everyone wears plaid shirts, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats.  And then, as soon as the week's over, all that stuff goes back into mothballs, waiting for the next year to roll around, and Calgarians get back into their uniforms:  Golf shirts and khakis.  Along with black socks and sandals.

But in Gravelbourg, they're not kidding.  It's not just that they're advertised as being french, and they all pretend to be french for a week during "Gravel Days" or whatever.  Nope, they're not messing around with the idea.  You go into stores, and everyone can speak perfect english.  But they also would much rather speak perfect french.  And they're very happy if you speak french to them.

Now, how did that happen?  How on earth did this island of French culture and language survive in the midst of this prairie ocean? Well, I've got my theories, and I think that if you're tempted to check it out, check it out soon, because there's no guarantee that it'll be around for forever.

The Cathedral.  Oh my.  It's immense.  It's colossal.  And it's spectacular.  And it's in the middle of nowhere.  It was built and the town around it, complete with convent and schools, according to the vision of Pere Gravel, the priest of the town.  The guy whose vision set it up.  It seems so strange to me to even have the thing there in the first place.  It's the sort of building that belongs in a much bigger centre, right?  Why put a cathedral in the middle of nowhere?

Well, Pere Gravel had a dream, a vision.  He saw not a town, he saw a community.  We feel as though a cathedral with that level of magnificence belongs in a larger centre because we know what we know about churches: That on an average week, about ten percent of Christians will be in church on Sunday morning.  And it'll pretty much be the same ten percent.  And so we figure that to support a cathedral, you have to have an awful lot of people around to make a go of it.

But imagine, if you will, a community in which it's a small centre, with a much bigger commitment.  Imagine, if you will, a community in which the people are bound together by their faith, and it touches their lives.  I get the feeling that there's a reason why Gravelbourg has hung together as well as it has, despite being French in the middle of english Canada.  Because they were knit together with purpose and vision.  And this highlights the problem that they're encountering, which is the problem encountering communities, and churches, all over this great nation of ours.

La Jeunesse.

Or, in english, the young people.  A number of times, in the town of Gravelbourg, people told us that the cathedral is great, the town is wonderful, but the young folks of today just aren't into it.  They don't show up for church, and they can't wait to leave Gravelbourg.  The cathedral, as great and wonderful as it is, is incredibly fragile, as fragile as any of the vacant churches that dot the prairies, and there are a lot of them.  Every small town, every community had a church, and for the most part, they're boarded up and vacant.  And that's the fate that awaits the cathedral in Gravelbourg as well, if not immediately, then sometime soon.  And when the cathedral folds, I get the feeling that the rest of the town will as well.  All churches everywhere pretty much are having a problem with 'la jeunesse,' and the small towns are a bellweather for what will be happening in the future with bigger centres.  We, as of now, in mainline churches, inherit Christians who move into the big cities.  But what do we do with the young folks?  Without them, the churches in small towns become boarded up, and crumble to dust.  We get smug in bigger centres, thinking that it's a small town problem, but guess what. It isn't.  Churches close every day, all day, for one prime reason:  The church in question finds out that it is realistically only one generation away from losing everything.

The big churches, the mainline churches, the small churches, the country churches, it's all the same thing.  You're only one generation away from losing it all.  The unbroken legacy of faith that has stretched back to the time of Christ and his apostles, the faith that survived the massive persecutions of the roman empire, the faith that spread past the borders of the middle east, that withstood the caliphate onslaught at the battle of Tours, the faith that survived the relentless attempts from every side to quash and destroy it, that faith has found it's greatest foe.  Apathy.

You and I have a profound responsibility.  As churches close, as they empty, we have a chance to fight this last and greatest foe.  We have a chance to confront apathy, and shake the world out of its sloth, out of its complacency, before it's too late.  We have a chance to say to the masses who make up our church population on paper, yet who are far too busy to ever show up, we have a chance to say to them
"This still matters.  This is still important.  This faith of yours still has life and strength and power and authority.  It's not a relic trapped in the past, it still has something really important to say to you here and now.  It talks about the human condition, about life and death, good and evil, failure and redemption, everlasting glory and the secret desires of the human heart.  Those things haven't changed as long as there have been people, but we assume that they have.  But here we are, living in the same world, with the same problems.  Take the yoke of Christ upon you, and learn from him, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light."

You may not believe me, but either way, head into see the church in Gravelbourg before it's a museum.  Head in to see it alive and full of life and music.  See the murals whilst the vaulted ceilings fill with words as old as civilization.  And if you think it won't happen, take a look at the churches in europe that have become condominiums, or the churches in Quebec that have become the same.  Or the churches in small town saskatchewan that have become museums as well, this is happening right in our own backyards, because we're living in the last believing generation.

But we always have been.  Remember that we are, forget your thought about how the church will always be there, and treat the church, your church, as something worth saving.

PJ.

Victimless crimes

In my sermon on Sunday, I spent quite a bit of time talking about the idea that the real problem in the world is you, the individual sinner.

Sorry, let me back up a bit.  You, as the individual sinner, probably aren't the biggest problem in the world.  In the same way as you, average joe polluter, aren't the biggest polluter in the world.  If you think about the immensity of the world, and how much carbon dioxide people toss up into the atmosphere, you may think that your piddling amount of carbon is really not that impressive or that big of a deal.

But the issue is not how much do other people pollute, the issue is what can you do about it?  You can spend your whole life worrying about how much other people pollute and waiting for them to fix it, or you can do something about the only polluter you can fix.  And that would be you.

It's the same with sin.  We spend a lot of time worrying about what the biggest problem in the world is today.  And for many of us, it's something that other people do.  Internet pornography, or rude kids, or the wars oveseas, or extremism, or rampant avarice, or the jazz music.

But the problem is, and always has been, that the Christian faith doesn't lend itself well to that kind of approach.  It's not as straightforward as all that.  The thing about the Christian belief is it's not an instruction manual for what everyone else is doing wrong.  That would be easy, and fun, but it wouldn't be Christianity.  But that's pretty much how we as Christians approach it.   We treat the Bible, God, everything about the whole thing, as a big long list that tells everyone else what they're doing wrong.  But there's a significant snag with that.  That's how everyone else approaches it too.  And if everyone on earth seriously believed that the problem with everything was everyone else, well, we'd be at a bit of an impasse.  And are you ready for the horrible truth of it?

We are.

If you wonder why the world is in such a rummy spot, well, this is sort of why.  Because everyone, deep down, believes that the real problem is the speck in the eyes of others.  And if something is ever going to change, then it's up to someone else, usually everyone else, to fix that.  Well, Jesus talks a bit about that, talks about it in terms of, as you may have guessed, specks and logs.  

3“Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4“Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? 5“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5, NASB.

Yes.  We hear this, but how rarely do we apply this to not just us, but what is wrong with the world today in general.  Yes, there are some thing we shouldn't do, and some things that we know are trouble, but let's give ourselves some pause for thought.  There's a real good chance you think of sin the way I do.  You think of sin as something you do that hurts someone else.  It's sort of like sports penalties:  You're way more likely to get a penalty, or a more severe penalty, if someone gets hurt.  If there's blood.  And this thinking spills over into any sort of discussion of sin at all:  As long as nobody gets hurt, as long as nobody bleeds or cries, it's okay.  It's a victimless crime.

And so all the stuff we do that is dishonest, or cruel, the stuff we do that is petty, that is vindictive, those thoughts, those emotions, those words we have that are spiteful or wrathful, as long as nobody gets hurt, then there's no problem, right? The real problem with the world is out there somewhere, because we're not really doing anything wrong.

But here's something to think about:  If you can't find a victim in your crimes, then guess what: You're looking in the wrong place.  It reminds me of a very nerdy episode of a very nerdy show:  Doctor Who - Snakedance.

(A ceremonial helmet with a crest of five faces is on a display stand.)
AMBRIL: Now take this, for example. It dates from the middle Sumaran era and unusually is mentioned quite specifically in the Legend. Oh, there can be no doubt. The reference is to the Six Faces of Delusion. Now count. One, two, three, four, five. You will observe there are five faces, not six as the Legend would have it. Now, my point is this. I do find it quite extraordinarily difficult to take seriously a Legend that cannot even count accurately. Of course, artistically speaking, it's an entirely different matter. The piece is exquisite. An undoubted masterpiece.
DOCTOR: What is it?
AMBRIL: Hmm? Headdress.
DOCTOR: Try it on.
AMBRIL: What?
DOCTOR: Try it on.
AMBRIL: Certainly not. Whatever for?
DOCTOR: Please. I want to show you something, then I'll go and leave you in peace.
AMBRIL: Very well.
(Ambril puts on the headdress.)
AMBRIL: Well?
DOCTOR: Now, count the faces again.
AMBRIL: Do as he says.
CHELA: One, two, three, four, five.
DOCTOR: And one makes six. The sixth Face of Delusion is the wearer's own. That was probably the idea, don't you think?
AMBRIL: Get out! Go on, get out!

We spend a lot of time looking for victims that we hurt with our sin, and sometimes, most of the times, that victim is us.  What we find is that in every way, in every decision we make, we enter more and more into the process of changing ourselves.  Your sin begins as something you do that you know you shouldn't.  It ends by becoming a part of you, which is what makes it so hard to repent of.  After a while, you feel like you are being called upon to repent of being yourself.  You have been changed by your sin so much, you were so much of the victim, that you never noticed that you were changing from being you to becoming your sin.

But there is good news, of course.  You may ask what is left after your sin has been taken away.  You may ask what remains once your sin has been dropped off and your goodness can shine through. Well, what remains is the real you.  The you that was always good, the you that God died for. More you than you can be right now, so clouded and turned by your sin that you are. God came to earth to make you perfect.  To forgive you of your sins, even and especially the ones that are hard to repent of.  Because you commit them against yourself.

PJ.

Calm as a hindu cow.

Would you like to know what my first experience was with Christian art?  sure you would.  Well, I'm sure it's not my first experience, but it's my most enduring one. The one that's hardest to shake.  The black and white line drawings from the pages of the Good News Bible.

Yup, this type.  The Good News Bible was the second Bible I ever owned, after the Bible that I got for my baptism, which was too good to use.  If you want to see that one, go to my post about the King James Bible. But I went to my mother as a boy, and decided that I wanted my own Bible that was not just a New Testament, and one that I could use.  It's in my office now.  All green.  With these same line drawings in it.  It cost $5.50 back in the eighties.  Now part of the reason that these line drawings stuck with me so vividly was from a day in Sunday school, where we had a race to see who could find the ten commandments in the Scriptures first.  I won, not because I knew chapter and verse, or even book for that matter, but because I knew what the picture looked like.  A mountain with people around it, and a lot of squiggles.

These things have a way of sticking with you, and I'm sure that many of you who grew up with the Good News will be familiar with these line drawings.  And they're good line drawings.  They serve their purpose well.  But they tend to do that thing that church art does, which is to suck the actual life out of the people in the Scriptures.  It turns them into 'Bible people.'  And yes, that is different from regular people.

To use a line from the wildly popular and wildly subversive film and book 'fight club,' the folks in the Bible, whether being tortured or killed, whether meting out God's wrath or being accursed, are all as calm as Hindu cows.  That line is all about another set of line drawings, in this case, the ones in the airline safety manual, in which no matter what kind of aerial disaster people are engaged, they're all perfectly serene as they put on their life jackets, put on their oxygen masks before they assist someone else, or jump on that slide to get out of the plane.  Nobody is screaming, nobody is panicking, nobody is shoving anyone else out of the way.  Perfectly calm, perfectly serene.  And that's the treatment that John the Baptist gets in ecclesiastical art.  I could maybe picture you showing Jesus as calm and serene, but probably not John the Baptist.  People thought of him in his time as a wildman, and his statements bear witness to that.  Listen to him for a second:

"You snakes," he said [to those who had come to be 

baptized, "Who told you that you  could escape from 

the punishment God is about to send?  Do these things that will show 

that you have turned from your sins.  And don't

start saying among yourselves that Abraham is your ancestor.

I tell you that God can take these stones and make descendants

for Abraham.  The axe is ready to cut down the trees at the

roots.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut

down and thrown into the fire."

                                 Luke 3:7-9 (Good News)

He was neither calm nor placid.  His hair shirt and mouth full of locusts aside, he had a lot of harsh things to say.  And if you thought the average man didn't care for that, then holy cow, wait until you hear how those in power took it.  You see, back in the time of Jesus, the rich and powerful were expecting to get a free pass as much as the rich and powerful do now.  It's a thing that has never changed.  Anyone with any amount of wealth or authority expects to be let off pretty easy, and that the basic rules and laws of society don't apply to them.  You see it happen constantly, where the rich and powerful feel as though the laws that govern you plebs are beneath them.  Something they could take or leave.  And Herod was no different.  He'd gotten into a situation with Herod, and some nasty double dealing that went on between Herod and his new wife.  Let me tell you all about it.

For Herod had earlier ordered John's arrest, and he had him chained

and put in prison.  He had done this because of Herodias,

 his brother Philip's wife.  

For some time, John the Baptist had told Herod

"It isn't right for you to be married to Herodias."

Herod wanted to kill him, but he was afraid

of the Jewish people, because they considered John to be a prophet.

                                    Matthew 14:3-5 (Good News)

John was there, speaking the truth to power.  This particular incident, in which he pointed out that perhaps Herod would do best not to be married to his brother's wife, got John some Jail time.  And lest we chortle up our sleeves, and think 'oh good, Herod got what he deserved, someone should have told him to knock it off," what do you think John the Baptist would say if he was hanging around at your place?  The only reason his conversation with Herod got him in so much trouble was that it was Herod who had the power to arrest him!  The other people that John was talking to, that he had sometimes unsolicited advice for, those people may not have cared for his advice, but they couldn't do much about it.  Herod could.  And Herod did.  But everyone else, the rest of the gang that John referred to as a brood of vipers, or snakes, they had to hang out and listen to John rail against them.  We all think of John as a pretty great guy, but of course, how much would we feel he was if he was hanging around us, berating us for our luxury, or our sloth, or our comforts, or our cool faith.  He would be livid.  Probably not standing there just waving and saying hi.

In fact, there was only one person that John looked at, and said that he was doing fine.  The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.  Jesus Christ.  The one whose sandals John was not worthy to untie.  That's what it takes to get noticed by John.  Perfection itself.  

In the majority of ecclesiastical art, John is calm.  Serene.  Peaceful and meditative.

"What did you expect to see?" Jesus asked, "A blade of grass bending in the wind?

What did you go out to see?  A man dressed in fancy clothes?  People

like that live in palaces!

Tell me, what did you go out to see? A prophet?  Yes indeed,

but you saw much more than a prophet."

Matthew 11:7-9 (Good News)       

What do you expect to see in John the Baptist?  A blade of grass bending in the wind?  Probably.  A man dressed in fancy clothes?  Likely.  A holy man who will judge others that you don't like harshly, but who will tell you that you're doing great?  Probably.  But if you think any of these things, you don't know John.  He's the forerunner of Christ, Elijah who is to come.  He's full of passion and vigor and fury and power.  He says things dangerous enough for you to want to kill him over.  He's a camel-hair wearing, locust eating wildman.  And he speaks the truth.  

And he was probably never as calm as a hindu cow.  

But listen to his words.  Though he will point out your failings, which he will, with alarming accuracy, he will also point out Christ.  The Lamb of God, who must increase while John must decrease.  My prayer is that you would not get only half of John's message.  Listen to it all.  His condemnation, and his gesture to salvation.  

I sure wish there was a Lutheran term for that.

PJ.