fat rams

 The Old Testament reading from Sunday talked about the fat and lean sheep. And justice between them. Justice is a concept that runs through the scriptures a lot, and this passage is no exception. Wanting and desiring justice between the lean and fat rams, and looking to elevate the lean, while pushing the fat aside. 

This is the same concept that runs right through the Magnificat, which is a constant thing that I see posted. Look: Here's the picture from twitter!

This image shows up all the time: Mary representing the overturn of the existing order. Cast down the mighty, send the rich away. Yeah! Tax the wealthy, raise up the weak and the suffering. Bring justice to this world, and have the wealth of the wealthy consume them.

But here's the thing - I've mentioned this on this blog before, but the only real wisdom to be found in the prequel trilogy from Star Wars is when Qui Gon Jinn, in a miraculous escape through the planet core says the line "There's always a bigger fish."

The way we think about how justice should be meted out by the Lord God is that the rich should be sent empty away, and the rich, by the by, are people who happen to be richer than us. And that's the issue right there, isn't it? Everyone I've ever seen posting that image of Mary recommending that the rich be sent empty away, are all posting that image from North America, and usually from the United States of America. Before I discuss any further, I'm aware that there is horrendous poverty and misery in North America, and that wealth is disproportionate, and so on, but I want you to consider that the wealth gap that we talk about between the 1% and the rest of us, all that does is to get us in the mindset that the wealthy are those who are above us, and they would say that the wealthy are those above them, etc. In the end, it turns Elon Musk and Bill Gates into the Hitlers of wealth. As Hitler is to morals, Elon Musk is to wealth. I may be lazy, rude, have no respect for authority; I may drive over people and beat up my kids, but Hitler's the bad guy, because he's worse than me. I may have stocks, bonds, savings, 2 cars, a garage to put them in, so much food that I throw it away or use it for decor, but Elon Musk is rich. Therefore, he should be cast down from his throne. Mine is just ducky, though.

It's an imperfect measurement, but in Canada, where I live, the GDP per capita is $57, 812, which is 24th in the world. The US of A is in tenth spot at $76, 027. Burundi is clocking in at a cool $856. Per person. There, 1 in 10 children die before the age of 5, and life expectancy is 60.1 years. A full 5 years before you're planning on taking that cruise you've been talking about, if you lived in Burundi, you'd likely be dead, and the only cruise you'd be taking is over the river Styx. 

So, if you want God to cast the mighty down from their thrones, where should he start, and why shouldn't it be with you? There will always be some excuse, why the rich are actually over there somewhere, but if you can say that there's a bigger fish, then so can the fish that are bigger than you. Ultimately, it comes down, as it always does, to grace. For these are words that should make the human heart tremble. If we truly recognize that we are wealthy, which we are, and we are fat while others are lean, then we have to expect a righteous God to smite the wealthy including us. Why wouldn't he?   

And this is the core problem of the Christian moral state: When we read the scriptures, when it talks about how there is good or evil, right or wrong, we are always always tempted to view ourselves positively. That's an issue that is part of not only the Christian perspective, but the global one. When we view media, we identify, typically, with the hero, not the villain. We view ourselves as the main character almost every time. And in the stories that we watch, we view what the heroes do as valid, because they're the heroes. They can kill, maim, torture, despoil, whatever, as long as they come out on top at the end. Because they're the good guys. Bad guys are known by the fact that they stand in opposition to the hero, good guys are known by how they assist the hero. That's pretty much that.

And we view ourselves in that light as well. Good guys are good because they're good to us, bad guys are bad because they oppose us. A referee is good when his calls go in the direction of our team, a referee is bad when his calls go against our team. A cop is good when he pulls over speeders in your neighborhood, and a cop is bad when he pulls you over when you speed in your neighborhood. God is a good God when he lifts you up, and he's a bad God when he humbles you. This is all pretty much standard theology for standard Christians. 

But if you want God to enact justice against the fat rams, who thrust with side and shoulder, then you're asking God to enact justice against you. And this is supposed to be a great leveling, ensuring that we are committed to the notion that we are people who don't live externally to the moral system, but are in and part of it. If God is just, which He is, then he is going to seek justice on this earth. And it is profoundly unrealistic to expect God to start everywhere else instead of with us. Rather, his justice is for the world, and if he seeks justice then he can, and should, start with the injustice that we exhibit. Which we clearly do. 

So what to do? Gosh, you know, it's like we're a people of grace. When it talks about seeking the lost sheep, seeking the lost coin, and whatnot, it's talking about us. You're not the sheep in the fold, you're not the coin in the purse, you're the lost and wandering you know. It really does us no good for us to focus on massaging out the sins that we don't have. What on earth do you think that Jesus is all about? He's all about forgiveness of sins. If you look through the Bible and don't see yourself in any of the sins, then you won't see yourself in any of the grace either. But if you look through there, and you see yourself as the fat ram who actually has been shoving the lean sheep aside, then you'll really start looking for that savior. Because you'll need him. 

And that savior has promised to search for you like the shepherd looking for the lost sheep, or the woman looking for the lost coin. Far from casting you into the outer darkness, he seeks you out. You, who are fat and happy, who have clearly thrust the poor aside, who don't think about the root or consequence of your largesse, he seeks you out. The verses that we read on Sunday are to remind you that you need to be found, and honestly to stop running.

Time for hate

 There are some passages in the scriptures that we, as clergy, are supposed to explain away. For example, when Jesus says 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,' we're supposed to say that he didn't really mean it. 

For some reason, we bring forward to the listening public the idea that Jesus just wanted to fill in pages, and wasn't actually saying things that, you know, needed to be said. But that prompts the question as to why Jesus would bother saying these things if he doesn't mean them. We would have to come up with some kind of scenario in which Jesus really wanted to get this information across to you, but didn't actually mean any of it. 

But what if he did?

There is a new movement afoot of Biblical literalism that says that there needs to be a lot more focus on the words of Jesus Christ where he tells you how to love and care for your neighbor, and that he meant all those things literally, and I can get behind that. What I can't get behind, though, is the idea that in addition to all those very true sayings, Jesus said a bunch of stuff that was obviously said simply for exaggeration, and is not meant to be taken seriously. And he's not going to tell you which is which.

People may say that context, or culture of the time or what have you will tell you what parts of the words of Jesus are supposed to be taken seriously and which aren't but I've never been a big fan of Jesus as some kind of cosmic trickster, who just won't tell you which parts of his word is truth, and which is a trap. Instead, I take the Bonhoeffer approach, which is the route of expensive grace. 

By the way we argue, we distance ourselves fundamentally from a biblical hearer of Jesus’ word.

If Jesus said: leave everything else behind and follow me, leave your profession, your family, your people, and your father’s house, then the biblical hearer knew that the only answer to this call is simple obedience, because the promise of community with Jesus is given to this obedience.

But we would say: Jesus’ call is to be taken “absolutely seriously,” but true obedience to it consists of my staying in my profession and in my family and serving him there, in true inner freedom.

Thus, Jesus would call: come out!—but we would understand that he actually meant: stay in!—of course, as one who has inwardly come out.

Or Jesus would say, do not worry; but we would understand: of course we should worry and work for our families and ourselves. Anything else would be irresponsible. But inwardly we should be free of such worry.

Jesus would say: if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. But we would understand: it is precisely in fighting, in striking back, that genuine fraternal love grows large.

Jesus would say: strive first for the kingdom of God. We would understand: of course, we should first strive for all sorts of other things. How else should we survive? What he really meant was that final inner willingness to invest everything for the kingdom of God.

Everywhere it is the same—the deliberate avoidance of simple, literal obedience.

How is such a reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this game? That it is so vulnerable to the scorn of the world?

Anywhere else in the world where commands are given, the situation is clear. A father says to his child: go to bed! The child knows exactly what to do.

But a child drilled in pseudotheology would have to argue thus:

Father says go to bed. He means you are tired; he does not want me to be tired. But I can also overcome my tiredness by going to play. So, although father says go to bed, what he really means is go play.

With this kind of argumentation, a child with its father or a citizen with the authorities would run into an unmistakable response, namely, punishment. The situation is supposed to be different only with respect to Jesus’ command. In that case simple obedience is supposed to be wrong, or even to constitute disobedience.

This is a long quote, but it gets to the point of how we approach the word of Jesus Christ. Of course he said to do certain things that require simple obedience, but we sure don't do it, do we? But when we disobey God, it's not as though we just say 'we don't want to do that,' but rather 'that's not what Jesus could possibly have meant.' and this part about hating your family, and yourself, that's on that list too. Sure, Jesus couldn't possibly have meant that. He meant to love your family more than you love him!

But that's where we get into trouble. For I have seen innumerable people have principles, even Biblical principles, and break them down based on how things are going in their families. They may have a view about Biblical morality, sexuality, church attendance, what have you, and then when push comes to shove, and their children, spouse, whatever disagrees and lives in accordance with that disagreement, all of a sudden, Jesus didn't really mean that. He meant the opposite. Conveniently. 

You have to have these principles as non-negotiables, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. These are things that are required for you and for me, and we don't get to quit on them when things in the real world disagree. In fact, we must be in the business of conforming ourselves to God, rather than conforming God's word to ourselves. Literally anyone can do that, you know. Anyone on earth can shrug, and say that God's word needs to fit them. But the truth of the matter is that we need to fold before the word of God. The expensive grace of Bonhoeffer says that when we disobey, or find fault with God's word, it's going to be a matter of us knowing why it is that we are doing wrong, and then realizing exactly why it was that Christ had to shed his blood.

Does this mean that you have to go out and be actively rude and difficult to your family? Of course not. But think about yourself only for a second. You know that frequently, over the course of your life, you want to do things, think things, say things that God emphatically rejects and you know that you shouldn't. When you go to church on a Sunday, and you confess your sins, you confess that you have sinned in thought, word and deed, by what you have done, and by what you have left undone. When it comes to you, you can typically work out that when you sin, you need to bring those sins to God to be forgiven, which he does. If you can work that out about yourself, you can work that out about those around you as well. Realize that the things your friends and family do are the same, really.

And when we talk about cheap grace, we have to remember that every time we look at the scriptures and say 'God couldn't possibly have meant that,' what he is showing you is what he is prepared to do for you, because you are not prepared to do it for yourself. When he says that you have to hate your father and mother and wife and children and even your own life in service of the Gospel, Jesus spends the rest of the New Testament living all that out. But he doesn't live all that on behalf of God. He lives that all out, he keeps what we would have thought he couldn't possibly mean, for you.

kingdom come

 Hooray! The book of Ecclesiastes!

That's one of those books that even Non-Christians will grudgingly say 'yeah, that one's okay.' It doesn't hurt that the Byrds wrote a banger of a song with the text of Ecclesiastes as the lyrics.  It's one of those books that it's always good for people to discover, and to rediscover. To find it again as though for the first time. 

And Here in the book of Ecclesiastes, it presents you with some weight from the preacher. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. Yes it is. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of men to be busy with. All is vanity and a striving after wind.

This gets to a pretty significant problem with the modern world, which casually and deliberately dropped meaning out of the conversation. That is, at a certain point we all agreed that being religious was like wearing chainmail, in that people didn't really do it anymore, and that led to a pretty interesting conclusion. If there's no God, and no paradise, and nothing around at all, then what's the deal with any of it? Why bother with anything?

And the thought was that we would be perfectly fine finding meaning within ourselves, etc etc, but in reality, that didn't really take off to the extent that it was supposed to. Atheist meeting houses that were built on the broken backs of churches posited a world where people would gather, sing Monty Python songs, and hear humanist messages about greatness and meaning, but it didn't catch on. Instead, a horrible, creeping, numbing apathy came in where people realized, as the preacher does in Ecclesiastes, that it's all chasing after the wind, you know. 

That's a pretty big problem - you're not catching that wind, it's not going to happen. So you're left with the horrible, terrifying reality that meaning has left the building, and it's not going to be recoverable.

Nietzsche fumbled through the death of God hypothesis, and unlike a lot of modern thinkers on the subject, worked out fairly rapidly that if the Christian basis for a worldview evaporated, then the Christian morals, ethics and nature of the worldview could not be retained. That is, you can't toss God out, and keep the rest intact. It all goes. He was concerned overall that if we abandoned God, as we seem to have done in the Enlightenment, then we would end up in crippling nihilism. Sure, there was the possibility that people would rise to being supermen, but the far greater concern was that we would find ourselves adrift permanently on uncharted seas that went nowhere.  And folks, you are here.

 

 

Now, something that is extremely important to learn is that you, as a human, are by and large standing on the shoulders of giants. A lot of people have done a lot of discovering to find a lot of things out that you yourself don't have to learn. The book of Ecclesiastes has worked this out for you, you know. It has gone to a lot of effort to parse through that very problem that meaningless has crept into everything, then  asks the very important question of where to find meaning after that.

 

For it is a great truth that when you drop the essential core view out, then everything else topples along with it. And you're going to be left with the disaster that is what remains, which is the trappings and nothing else. But I want you to think about the core teaching of the Christian faith - forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. I want you to think about how if you give someone a cup of water in the name of Christ that you've done something. The world you live in was carved out by generations and generations of people who lived lives quietly filled with deep meaning - where they had worked out that because God lives, everything that they do matters, and everything they do is of cosmic importance. Sure, the James Webb space telescope may show glimpses of far off dead galaxies from thousands of years ago, but your simple acts of grace and charity, of love and care, matter so much more because of the impact of what happens when you do them. If you are polite, kind, generous, and gracious to those around you, you are being kind and gracious to people who are going to last forever. For eternity. And that means that you're not chasing after the wind, or looking for meaning by running in a circle. you can find meaning right around you right now.

Teach us to pray

 There's been a lot of conversation these days about pronouns, names, and that kind of thing, and essentially what it boils down to is a desire for people to be spoken to the way they would like to be spoken to. That's simple enough, and that carries over not only for the people you see here on earth, but also to God himself, as well. At this point in the scriptures, in our Gospel reading, the disciples ask Jesus a pretty important question: You're God, we've been talking to you for a while now, but seeing as how we have you here in person, how would you like to be spoken to? What would you like to hear from us?

The response from the Lord Christ is to give the Lord's Prayer - the best known prayer in all of Christianity. The one that is engraved, tattooed, on posters and art all over the place. And for good reason, because when Jesus was asked how we should pray, that's what he gave to us. 

But like with everything else that we have in the scriptures, this isn't something that God gives us because it's good for him. After all, he's God. He doesn't need anything from you. And it also isn't something that he gives us because he'll refuse to listen to us unless it's in exactly those words. Quite the opposite, and you can feel free to speak to God in all kinds of words, as people do all the way through the Bible. So if it's not for those reasons, then why are we doing the Lord's prayer at all?

Let's rethink it. Maybe you're not praying that prayer to guarantee that God will hear you, and you're not praying it to get something specific out of him, so why that prayer? Because God knows that we need something from it instead of him needing something. In other words, prayer isn't just for you to get things out of God. This isn't letters from Santa territory in which you're trying very hard to get things from God. This is you communicating with the divine, and like with all mentions from scripture, the communications go both ways. 

For you see, the holy scriptures of God are his word for you. And when you pray from the Lord's prayer, you're speaking scripture aloud. You're hearing the word of God as you say it. And that's important, you know. In the Lord's prayer, you're communicating that God is the creator of the universe, the maker of all that there is. He knit you together in your mother's womb, formed and fashioned you and all other things. The waterfalls, the stable earth, the great salt sea around the waves' tempestuous shocks. All that. 

This is the force that you approach. This is the force that you approach with your petty concerns - the magnificence of the creation of the universe and all that is in it. The force that shattered the Egyptians, cast them into darkness and wrecked their chariots in the sea. The force that confounded the tower of Babel's builders, and scattered them over the face of the earth. The same God who flooded the earth to expel its wickedness, and drowned the surface of the water under the firmament.  

That's who you're talking to. And this is a dynamic power. I use the word dynamic as a word that shares its root with dynamite, dynamo, and so on. The root word is power, truly and genuinely. Dynamite is the substance of stored, explosive power. A dynamo is an electrical generator that makes everything that you use work. And God is Dynamic in that same way. Awesomely powerful, which is something that we are tempted to forget. When you're writing a letter to Santa, you're not thinking too much about Him being an awesomely powerful presence in time. You're thinking about how he can give you gifts if you've been good. But he's not the creator of the universe. He's a guy at the north pole that gives you things. 

If you're approaching God as a person that you just makes demands to, you'll be tempted to forget all that he does. You'll just think that he's a source for you to get things. A genie of sorts. But we base our interactions with God, based on the Lord's prayer, on God the way he actually is. Yes, he's approachable, but that's what makes it all the more majestic and wonderful. That is, if you're genuinely communicating with the author of creation, and the fact that you can come to him calmly, politely, almost intimately, and ask for your daily bread is quite the thing.

In fact, we will go one further, and state happily that what you're doing is talking to the creator of the universe in a colloquial way, which is why you need to be reminded of who he is before you start stripping this away into things that are unimportant or silly. Yes you're colloquial, yes, you're intimate, but you need to remember what the forces are that you're invoking.

This is similar in many ways to how things work in a marriage, for the great enemy of marriage is contempt and complacency. That is, you struggled and strove to enter into a relationship, worked as hard as you could to win someone over, put in effort and time, and then you end up in a world where you take that person for granted all the time. They no longer seem special because you're too familiar with them. That's why it's advocated that you take your spouse out on dates, etc, because you need to place them once again in a world where you are actually eager to see them, and want to impress them. You're genuinely supposed to be in a space where you are reminding yourself of what a prize your spouse is, and always has been. And nobody wants you to think about this after they're gone only. You can do it now. 

In that same way, part of what you do in the Lord's prayer is to approach God but in a spirit of deep reverence and awe, partially because of how blessed and fortunate you are to have something this magnificent so close to you. These are things you're going to be tempted to forget if you only make demands and issue decrees. But if you know what it is that you're talking to, things take on a bit more gravity. 

Don't "busy-shame" me

 I was listening to a sermon about Mary and Martha the other day, and as sermons sometimes do, the preacher wanted to look at things from a new angle. That is, said preacher wanted to get to grips with the notion of 'busy-shaming.' According to her, Jesus really shouldn't be busy-shaming Martha, who legitimately had a lot to do, and whose work should be appreciated.  And that's half right. 

Something you need to work out is that scripture interprets scripture. This is a method of interpretation that has to work in order for the entire scripture to mean anything. I'll explain what I mean.

There's a pretty dumb movie out there called 'Re-Animator.' It's based on a story by HP Lovecraft called 'Herbert West, Reanimator,' which is all about a man who discovers how to bring people back from the dead. Sort of. There are problems, difficulties, and eventual zombies. The movie follows the same sort of plot, just modernized for the 1980s. And that's fine so far, given that you're watching a dumb horror movie, and you have to acknowledge that, in the movie's logic, people can be reanimated. You're not going to enjoy the film if you're always saying 'wait a minute, people don't get reanimated, that don't make no sense.' Sure, but once you've accepted that people can come back to life, as zombies, then you're settled in for the movie to tell its story.

When the first movie ends, the main character, Herbert West, is dragged to his death by the entrails of his former boss (it's complicated). By the start of the second movie, he's just strolling around, helping out with making more of a stable reagent to re-animate more corpses. This is a film series in which people can be brought back from the dead, and the return of a dead character could be addressed, but it isn't. To paraphrase, Re-Animator interprets Bride of Re-Animator. And if there are big holes in the story, holes so large you could walk a camel through it, then you're not going to be satisfied.

Scripture interprets scripture. That way the story makes sense. If you're going to give Jesus a hard time for 'busy-shaming' Martha, then you're going to have to show your notes as to why that's in line with the rest of scripture. That is, in the scriptures, do you see busy-shaming or do you not, and is pushing for rest to listen to the word of God in line with what God would want, or away from it?

In Exodus 31:15, God makes a declaration that the Sabbath is to be observed, and that if anyone does any kind of work on the Sabbath, that person is to be put to death. And lest you think that it's exaggeration or hyperbole, in the book of Numbers (the most boringest one), a man is stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Rest, in the scriptures, isn't a matter of an option, where God says 'hey, if you feel like it, you can take a break.' 

Instead, from the way I read it, rest is required. On pain of death. You can try to gather sticks, holmes, but you may very well end up dead because of it. 

But the reason for the Sabbath needs to be explained. That is, yes rest, but why? Why rest? What's the reason for the resting? Just to take-a-break? The whole point of resting was not just to do nothing, but to do something without all the distractions that are a perpetual problem . Think of the story in which there was a party that people were invited to, and they all came up with excuses: 'Oh, I can't come, I have to look at some cattle.' 'Oh, I can't come, I have a wife.' 'Oh, I can't come, I bought some land and have to see it.' Sure sure. The idea is that you're always going to have busy things trying to creep in. Always.

It hits its zenith where you find Martha, with the Lord and God of the universe in her home, and she can't take the time to listen to his word. She has a lot to do. which she does. I'm not going to tell you that her work was pointless, valueless or silly. On the contrary, she was fulfilling her vocation as host, homeowner, sister, friend, all those sorts of things. And she was doing her best, but something that has to be acknowledged is that she's not going to be done. There's never going to be a moment where she is all finished, through, and can finally sit down and listen to Christ.

There's a short story by Ray Bradbury called 'the fruit at the bottom of the bowl,' in which there is a murder right at the beginning of the story. A killing where the killer plans on getting away. But the killer knows that he is going to leave fingerprints, so he's going to have to make sure that he wipes them all off, lest he be caught. He starts by wiping his fingerprints off of the obvious things - murder weapon, surfaces, that kind of thing. But then he remembers all the things that he's touched over the course of his relationship with the murder victim, and so he has to polish all of those too, to make the fingerprints go away. By the time the police show up, they arrest him handily, as he's up in the attic scrubbing all the old civil war coins that have been up there, untouched, for decades. 

You're never done cleaning, you know, until you say you are. In the world of the Sabbath, which is not enforced by death anymore, you're never done your buying and selling and consuming and purchasing until you decide you are. Then you're done. Martha is working hard, and getting lots done, but she was never going to be finished until she declared that she would be. Jesus isn't telling you not to do anything, not at all. He's quite keen to let us all know that we are to serve, to do good works, to do what needs to be done, that kind of thing. But he's also keen to tell us to rest. Not just for the sake of rest, though, but to hear the word of God, learn it, and respond appropriately. 

In Mary and Martha, you see a microcosm of that - The word of God is being preached by God himself, and at a certain point, you have to decide that you're done with the work that will never finish, and it's time to listen and to learn. To be ministered to, and to be refreshed. Because Mary isn't doing nothing, you know. She's doing what she's supposed to do. Six days you shall do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath, set aside for rest, and set aside for you to listen and to learn from the Lord God himself. The fruit at the bottom of the bowl will never be clean, the work will never be done, until you say it is. And at that point, you're set to listen, to receive the sacraments, and to be restored. That's also what God wants you to do, and that's why he gave you that extra time to begin with.

Where'd all the good people go?

 I started the sermon on Sunday talking about the big question, and then the smaller question behind the big question.

The big question is the one that asks 'Why do bad things happen to good people?' That question is used so frequently that it's become a bit trite. The question, ever hanging at the border of any theological question, is the one that asks 'if God is so good, then why do  bad things happen to such good people?' Why indeed?

But there's a smaller question that is at the fringes of that question, that I would like to pose to you now: If there are so many good people around, then why do bad things happen? If we are living in a world of bad things happening constantly, famine, war, pestilence, mayhem, cruelty, injustice, there where did all the good people go? Essentially, the prevalence of 'good people' comes down to a matter of self reporting, and that's a problem overall. That is, self-reporting is almost always a major problem to contend with because of how inaccurate it is, and nowhere is that more prominent than in the assessment of who the good people and bad people are.  Because we all know who the bad people are, right?

Okay yes, those are bad guys. But they're cartoonishly bad guys. These are people (with the exception of Mussolini) who unabashedly do bad things just to be bad. And that's not the real world, not really. Most human beings who live on planet earth don't do bad things just to be bad. That's an offshoot of good impulses and motives, taken too far, or in the wrong way. I think this video explains things pretty well vis-a-vis the Emperor.

Unlike human beings with real motivation, he's evil and he loves it. But that's in fantasyland, and not the real world. Sadly, though, we sort of expect things to work like that, expecting that you'd find real human beings whose motivations it would be to be just pure evil. They'd be bad for the sake of being bad, and would have no motivation beyond that. 

But that's not how humanity works, you know. Nobody does bad things just for the sake of them being bad, or wicked on purpose. Those consequences are made of cruelty and wickedness, but they are consequences. We truly have to get ourselves out of the mindset that self reported is sufficient for arriving at a good people vs bad people equation.

And that's what makes the parable of the Good Samaritan so interesting. That is, at the start of the parable, the man on a journey gets beaten and robbed by robbers. That's always kind of assumed, but I want you to consider very carefully the nature of a robbing like that - namely that the robbers have to rob someone. In the story, the Priest, the Levite, the Samaritan always take centre stage, and nobody really considers the robbers as participants in the story. They're like a force of nature, like zombies or something, you know? And as that kind of thing, even though we question the motivations of the priest and the levite, somehow, we never really consider the motivations of the robbers. But we should.

The thing is, the robbers are not like an earthquake, or a fire, or a tsunami, they're people, but more than that, they're people who assume that they're good people. They would, in fact, self identify as being good people, nice to people who like them, generous to their friends, gave their mother flowers, that kind of thing. But in the story, we think of them not even as bad people, but as bad elements. That is, they are the bad thing in the story that kicks off the plot. No agency, no nothing, just bad things that happen to a good person. And that's what I really want you to think about. 

When we say 'why do bad things happen to good people?' a lot (though not all) of the 'bad things' that happen to 'good people' are actually wrought by human beings, who almost universally consider themselves to be the heroes of their own stories, and view themselves as good people. So the secondary question that came about at the start of this blog post can be answered:

If there are so many good people, why do bad things still happen? Because the bad things are perpetrated by good people.

There. And that's the moral conundrum explained, and it requires Christian morality to improve. I'll put it like this - In the Christian conception of morality, there's a lot of discussion about how we are all bad news. In sin were we conceived, none is righteous, no not one, that kind of thing. And the breakdown between what we want and what we are has its locus in the reality that all the people, including those who do bad things, think of themselves as being good people. And that's the end of it. Once you work that out, then everything falls into place quite happily. Everything makes sense completely. Bad things happen to people because people do things to other people, and continue to think of themselves as being good.

So what do we do about it? Well, quite simply, we deal with the Biblical truths of the matter: Bad things happen to people because people do bad things to one another, and we are part of that exchange, through and through. We have sinned in thought, word and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. You'd think that that would lead to us thinking of ourselves as being bad people, and being despoiled by the world, etc, but that's simply not the case. Rather, it gets to the heart of the human condition, which is that we want to think that we are good people. We want to believe that we do good things, and are noble and truthful. Justified, in a word. So we have two choices when faced with the misery around us:

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us

But if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just, will forgive us our sins, and will cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

One of those paths leads to you ignoring the problem in you, but seeing it in everyone else, driving you to misery and despair. The other lets you look in the mirror, and be justified not because you've done good, but because you've been forgiven. And that's the way the world actually is. 

Pigs

Not too long ago, I was at a convention. I went to the big convention for Lutheran Church Canada in the beautiful metropolis of Edmonton, and while we were there, we had a luncheon sponsored by tourism: Israel. Tourism Israel sponsored the lunch, where we got to sit, enjoy some food, and appreciate the possibility of travel to Israel. No problem there so far.

The video presentation had the nice man going through the Kidron valley, and pointing out all the spaces in the valley that would have had the feet of our Lord walking through it. The nice man pointed out how special it was that he was able to stand in the exact same places where Jesus had been standing as well. And that was neat to see. Israel. The land of the Bible, a space called the 'holy land.' The space on planet earth where the Lord Jesus Christ, God himself, had walked, talked and spent time. 

Now, that brings up a cultural matter, because in our reading that we had from this Sunday, it was a matter of quite personal interest in the demon, Legion. Legion is the Demon, or collection of demons, tormenting the man from the Bible reading today. Now, Jesus our Lord was walking, talking, eating drinking, and so on, in that area of the world. 

What it that area of the world? It's Israel. In 1523, Luther wrote a book, a chapbook, called 'that Jesus Christ was born a Jew.' In this essay, Luther argues not only that Jesus Christ was born a Jew, obvious from the title, but that it was wildly important that he was. This is something about which we all tend to agree, that the Jewish nature of Christ was fundamentally important, and not just a strange footnote. It is crucial that Jesus was born a Jew, in order that the rest of the story may work and function. Without that, the story fails. 

What do I mean by that? I mean, quite simply, that the world that Jesus Christ inhabited was specifically set aside by God himself to bring that about. Israel was particular, and set apart from its neighbors. There are lots of, well, let's call them quirks, in the Bible, Old and New Testaments, designed to show that the people of Israel were set apart, and peculiar. Unlike their neighbors, Israel had commands from God to be set apart, and set apart in specific ways. Food, dress, gathering, rest, all these things were there to keep Israel set apart from their neighbors.

Good thing too, given the volume of takeovers that Israel had to undergo. It seemed in the Old Testament like everyone wanted a piece of Israel, and why not? Israel was at the crossroads of the world, and it seemed as though empires moved through there all the time. Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, everyone cruised all the way through, and everyone took a bite. But it's not as though any of those empires cared about Israel, Israel was just there. It was land, resources, people, that could be gobbled up and turned into part of the empire. The goal was to make Israel completely indistinguishable from the rest of the empire. Again, to specify, these empires didn't have some sort of vendetta against Israel - they had a vendetta against things that weren't in the empire existing.

But Israel proved itself to be shockingly immune to being folded in. Not that Israel didn't get conquered, they did. All the time. But the conquest was where a foreign power would show up, take over, run the government, export the people, but find that when their empire fell, Israel would still be there as though nothing happened. Like, you can destroy the temple, knock it down and burn it, but if the people are still there, then when your empire falls, they're just going to put the temple right back up again as soon as you're not looking. This worked because the people of Israel were set apart from everyone else wherever they went. It didn't matter if there was an occupying power, if Israel were in exile or a disapora, or if they'd been left alone completely, there were certain things that they just stuck to. No matter where they were, they'd worship only one God, not work on Saturday, and not eat pork or shellfish. 

Finally we get to the point, which is that the people of Israel would have no use for pigs. Pigs are interesting when it comes to farm animals - sheep are wool and meat, goats are milk and meat, cows are milk and meat, chickens are eggs and meat, horses are workers and, if you're desperate, meat. Pigs are meat. That's it. There's no reason to have pigs unless you're going to eat them. There's a reason that people bring pigs on long voyages - which is that the pigs turn garbage into food. Like magic. Israel would have no use for pigs, but Rome would. And Rome was a hungry empire. 

When Jesus confronts legion, you're looking at a scene where things are falling apart. Demons present and empires about. We don't really think about this as part of the equation, but the people of Israel are rotted within and plagued without. Have you ever noticed how often Demons show up in the New Testament? Have you ever noticed how frequently you see or encounter the presence of Demons in the New Testament? Jesus has to engage in battle with demons very frequently indeed, and does so in a wide number of environments. And this is where things get interesting, at least for me.

There are a lot of ministers preaching about Jesus standing up to empire. They preach about how Jesus stood up to the powers that be, doing battle with the Roman government of his day. The idea is that Jesus was put to death for standing up to imperial forces, powers and state apparatus, which is funny given how little of the scripture Jesus spends tangling with government powers. Almost none, in fact. But he certainly does mix it up with demons, on the regular.

So here we are, in a moment in time, where Jesus is standing in Roman occupied territory, but with a demon occupied person, and which do you think his attention is towards? Towards the man who is occupied by demons. That's the major concern for our Lord. And whether you're anti-imperial or not, you need to understand something, which is that you're not going to kill the empire that occupies your territory, until you kill the demon that occupies your soul. The implication that Christ was only concerned about political matters external to the human is bizarre, given how much time and effort he put into dealing with the internal spiritual matter of the human. He can drown the pigs of empire, as proven here, he can smite the powers that be if he wants to. But apparently, he doesn't want to. What he sets out to do is to banish the demons of this world, and to cast them out, and cast them away. 

And what does that teach us? It teaches us something crucial, which is that Christ was concerned with destroying the demons within, and that had definite consequences for the empires of the world. Jesus didn't go out to destroy the empire, to lay waste to them in war or upheaval. Instead, he worked on them the way he works on all of us - by slaying the demons within. It took a shockingly short amount of time for the Roman Empire, the kings of the world, to become a Christian empire. Within 300 years, the people of the empire were Christian people, unbelievably quick for an empire that had crucified Christ, now his greatest supporters. 

Demons and pigs, folks. Demons and pigs. Which of those is Jesus more concerned about? If you can change the empire, the pigs won't matter. But if you can't change the people, then it won't matter how much you put down the empire. It'll come back in some form or another. But if you can change the people, if you can get that done, then you'll end up with an empire transformed because the people are transformed.