Setup and payoff

Let's talk about my favourite kind of films just for a second.

Horror movies.

Yes, I know I know, these sinful things, but I like them for a few reasons. First of all, they're the only genre of movie that discusses the supernatural with any degree of seriousness. There can be demons, necromancy, devil worship, possession, witches, sorcerers, and all these things are treated with utmost seriousness. Secondly, they are the movie genre that treats violence with its necessary impact. Aside from the saw movies, if there's violence happening onscreen, unlike in action movies, you feel bad, scared, like you would if there was actual violence happening in front of you. 

But with all these supernatural issues, you have to set up how to deal with them. In an action movie, the solution to the problem seems to be 'use gun on man', but horror movies set up other expectations. You have to use a silver bullet on the werewolf, a wooden stake on a vampire, shoot zombies in the head, that kind of thing. If you feed a mogwai after midnight, it turns into a gremlin. This is all simple enough, and unlike in an action movie, you need some setup before the payoff. It would be strange if the setup was that vampires had to be hit with a wooden stake through the heart, then the end of the movie just had you stabbing them to death. It would be unusual if you set up that a silver bullet had to be used on a werewolf, but at the end of the movie you just ran it over with a car. And not even a rolls royce silver ghost, either.

The setup is what makes the payoff work. The payoff doesn't work in a vacuum. Unless you know that the vampire has to be killed with a wooden stake, it won't make any sense to just not shoot him, you know? And in the scriptures, you have a very very long setup. Thousands of years, in fact. In the Old Testament, there was a lot of prophecy about what it would be when the messiah arrived on the scene. And this setup, as I say, was thousands of years in the making. For thousands of years, the people of Israel would have been hearing and reading these words. The words about the messiah would have been clear and things that the Hebrews would have been expecting to see for a long long time. In fact, that's why the Christ was sent to Israel at all - because of the setup. 

You see, we happen to have access to the whole story already, the finished book. And we, in the church, don't tend to read through the Bible chronologically. So that means that we end up in a world where we don't give a lot of time to the setup and payoff, though we really should. The reason we should be taking this seriously is that the Old Testament spends a lot of time, and spills a lot of ink, on the topic of God. Who he is, and what he does. What his attributes are, and what falls within his purview. The Old Testament is crammed full of stories about God's activity, showing what is his responsibility, and demonstrating clearly the things that only he can do. 

And that's the setup, right? Say what you will about the Disciples, but they were not blindly credulous, you know. The Life of Brian bit doesn't hold water, when you consider that the people of that time followed leaders, sure, followed after strong men, followed the advice and guidance of prophets, but didn't consider them as gods. That really did set them apart from the rest of the world at the time. All sorts of people all over the world would elevate their leaders, prophets, kings and generals to being gods. Really only Israel didn't. Israel had a situation where they had a setup - only God can create, only God can forgive, only God can have power over the seas, over life and death, and then Jesus shows all those things. 

Setup and payoff, right? And the setup of the virgin giving birth to a child, and calling him Immanuel, is shown in Christ. It's not about predictions and prophecy so much as it is about spending hundreds of years telling a particular people who God is, and what he is like, then when God steps into the world, he does those things. He shows himself to be God, and if you know the setup, unmistakably so.

Vampire - Wooden stake

Zombie - destroy brain

Werewolf- silver bullet

God - Power over life and death, creation and salvation.

If the setup and payoff are there, then you don't have to believe it, but you at least have to see that the story is consistent.

cut it down

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, especially in early Advent. As GK Chesterton put it, the accusation is almost always that Jesus had a simple religion of peace and love, and that the church corrupted it over time to be something hurtful and judgmental. When in reality, the opposite is the truth.  The church endeavors to be as forgiving and welcoming and tolerant of almost everything as possible, meanwhile it hides and conceals any time that Jesus may be slightly wrathful. The church conceals or downplays the anger in the Temple and the whips and shouting. The church doesn't dwell on the wrath directed at the "brood of vipers". So much easier to just discuss the nice parts of Scripture, where Jesus has the little children come to him, etc.

But Christ is wild and untamed, and refuses to be boxed in by us, and the God of the scriptures is being discussed in no uncertain terms by John the Baptist in the Gospel reading for today. Here we are in the Gospel, and John is being approached by a generous number of people who are repenting, and being baptized. All good so far. But there are some from the Pharisees and Sadducees who are coming to see the baptism as well. And that's when John lays into them.

You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come? So starts John's address to the people who have come to witness the baptism, and we immediately take notice. For John, the wild man of the wilderness, demands attention. True, you could look at him in his locust-eating, Camel-hair wearing way, and dismiss him as a madman, but he doesn't talk like a madman. He talks like one who is obsessed. 

So let's talk about 'geek culture' for a moment. Yes, it's a bit more mainstream than it used to be, but I still think it works. So geek culture works like this, that the individual geeks or geekettes would be single-minded about their hobby, be it video games, art films, whatever, and would be so obsessed that they would abjure any grooming or niceties. That's about it. And when it comes to John, he is single-minded in his purpose to the point that the message of Jesus Christ is all he's interested in. He doesn't have time for niceties, greetings, politeness, nothing like that. He's really really into the Gospel, to the point where everything else seems like nothing. He's not going to put himself together, go through the rigmarole  of greetings, small talk, being presentable, nothing like that. He's going hard on the kingdom.

And boy is he ever. Man, We have a church, bills and all that here at the church. I can't go off like John goes off, and truly, when he goes off, he goes so hard that he goes to jail and gets killed. Every once in a while you see someone with nothing to lose, and John is one of those guys. Locusts, wild honey, and spitting straight truth. He fires at the crowds and holds nothing back whatsoever - Christ's winnowing fork is in his hands, he will gather the wheat into his barn but he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Unquenchable fire? That's a lot. It's a lot to take in as people who assume that the concept of hell is rather out of date now, and that we don't have to worry about it. Well, apparently we do, because John certainly talks about it in.....glowing terms (glowing like an ember). 

The question that goes before the Christian, then, is to ask if John is right. Is John accurate in this, or is he wrong? It's almost always dangerous to put yourself in the position of assuming that you know far far better than John does. Oh sure, the Elijah who is to come, the greatest on earth, the one who was such a big deal that people assumed that Jesus was the second coming of him, you know better than that guy? Realistically, the story of the Bible works very well when it is allowed to speak for itself, far less well when we speak over it. If you're going to interrupt John and tell him, and by extension God, that there is no fire, no damnation, no wrath, none of that, then you have to make the rest of the story make sense. You have to understand that John feels as though the arrival of Christ is a big deal. When he points to Jesus and say 'behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,' there's a reason why it's a big deal. If all that stuff about the axe being at the root of the trees, the wrath to come, unquenchable fire, if that's all wrong and stupid, then why is it a big deal that Jesus is born? Why is it such a big deal that John would point to him and say 'behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?" Why is Christmas a big deal if we're not getting something very very important?

For any of you who are frightened and troubled by the words of John, ponder this: You can dismiss him out of hand as a crazy person, someone who is just a nutcase. But he sure doesn't sound like it. He sounds deadly serious, and is very convincing even now. You can talk over him, but the rest of scripture seems to agree, and you do too, if you're honest with yourself.

Or you can listen to him. When he says of Christ 'he must increase, and I must decrease,' that's exactly what happens. The increase of Christ is that he is the lamb of God. Enough to take those warnings from John and swallow them up in victory.

Corporate and personal

 There's a board game that I got for my birthday the year before last, called Nemesis. You don't have to know too much about it, save that it is one of those secret role games. At the start of the game, everyone appears as though they're on the same team, but as the game develops, people may or may not stay on that team. You are dealt two objective cards at the start of the game, and when you discover your first alien, you have to ditch one of those two objectives, and keep the other, thereby deciding which of those objectives is going to be how you win.

The objectives are divided into two categories: Personal and corporate. One of those will be a thing that you have to do for your own personal wellbeing, and the other is what you do for the bigger picture; for the team, for the company, for whatever. 

Now, I bring this up to you because of the interesting apocalypse that Jesus brings up in the Gospel reading - he moves from talking to the daughters of Jerusalem, to talking to the thieves on the cross. And that move is a move from a corporate apocalypse to a personal one. That corporate apocalypse is the apocalypse where everything ends. The sky rolls back like a scroll, the sun is like sackcloth, and the moon as blood. Dogs and cats living together in peace and harmony, mass hysteria. That's the one that you think of when you think of apocalypse, right? How Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead. Everything finishes and wraps up, and it's all over. That's the corporate apocalypse, because it hits everyone, all at once, and nobody is spared.

Of course, there is a personal apocalypse too, you know. And the reading that we had from Sunday is jarring that way - the two thieves on the cross are not exactly all that concerned at that moment about the corporate apocalypse. It's not a big deal for you to work through exactly when the end of all things is going to roll around, if you're going to be dead in a few hours anyway. That is, unless the entire apocalypse is going to happen in the next 90 minutes, it's not going to matter too much. Jesus essentially gets two requests from the two men. The one says to him 'if you're the son of God, take yourself off this cross, and take us down with you.' Now, that's a request to get off the cross, yes, but to step back into the world that is leading you back to the same place. By stepping back into the world, you're not avoiding the personal apocalypse forever; you're delaying it for a while. There's a zero percent chance that stepping down off that cross grants you immortality permanently. But, that fear of the personal apocalypse is enough to drive you off that cross, and back into the world. In other words, you're not ready to die, but honestly, when will you be?

What's the right time for you, in your opinion. What's the right time for you to wrap it all up, to say 'yes, I'm good now. That's enough time. It's enough time with my family and friends, I've seen all I want to see, I think I'm good now.' Sadly, the one thief wanted to delay the personal apocalypse, but of course, even if you do, the corporate one is coming for you.

But what the other thief is asking for is a removal from the system altogether. He's well aware that escaping the apocalypse on the cross is not an escape forever, but just a delay. The fun is going to find you eventually anyway. There's no long term escape, nothing permanent while you're still in the system. Instead, he asked Jesus to remember him, when He comes into His kingdom. That request is one to not just get you off the cross for a few years, but to get you out of the problem permanently, eternally. 

I'm going to go back to this scene from the movie Tremors. The cast are in a bad state, and are going to have to get out of it by throwing a bomb the way they want to run. But they only have one more bomb, enough to get them to the rocks that they were sitting on, but not enough to get them to safety. The conversation between them was that even if they could get back to the rocks, they'd die of thirst in three days. You're going to have to come up with a better solution than that.

Ultimately, if you're looking to avoid the apocalypse completely, not just delay it for a while, you're going to look to not just get back to the rocks, but to make the problem to away altogether by killing the graboids. If you're looking to avoid being lost eternally, you're going to look towards Jesus bringing you into his kingdom, where rust and rot don't corrupt or destroy. Where the scarcity of this life is not something that can eat in. Where the apocalypse won't despoil nor ruin. If you're going to escape, you're going to have to escape completely.

Reform

 Back in the 1990s, there was a political party in this great nation of ours called the Reform Party, brought to you by Preston Manning. Of course, I didn't understand much about politics back then, still don't to be honest, but I was aware of it as a political force. That party long ago merged with other right of centre parties, but it still seems like it's around, like a movement in your peripheral vision. Gone when you look straight at it, but almost visible in the background.

Reform for us in the church, though, always brings up Reformation, which is the festival that defines us as Lutheran Christians. For Luther did not seek or want to bring about a new faith, a new religion or anything like that, he sought to reform what was already there. And in reforming it, it was an effort to save and rescue what was good, and to abandon what had gone bad. And you know, you can get a lot more done that way than by pretending that everything is all good all the time.

For if you pretend that something is all good and needs no help, then you're going to find out very rapidly that the rot is going to spread. Unchecked problems lead to more problems, you know, and the more unchecked the problems are, the more of a problem they're going to be. Rot is rarely confined, you know. Decay does not understand limits. Once rot and heresy and false teaching begin to appear, they don't tend to leave on their own accord. Pretending that there are no problems to be addressed leads to the rot spreading and growing, and a reformation requires an admission that things are not the way they should be. 

A long long time ago, in web 1.0, there was a website that I went to called dieoff. It is long since gone now, partially because its prediction of the end of the world by 2010 did not manifest in the slightest. But the quote that the website presented was this one from Thomas Hardy 

We have to be prepared to look at the worst if we are to go towards the better. And in the case of Dr. Luther, it was an examination of the worst, to look fully at the rot that had gotten in in order to come out on the other side better. What was the worst? The church had lurched into non-Biblical teaching. And that church had to be reformed, not eliminated or forgotten. What was bad had to be removed, in order that what was good could be retained. And this process of reformation is a bigger picture of what happens in the individual Christian. For we, for the most part, do not live our lives strictly according to Biblical teaching, though we should. We do not do only what the Bible requires nor suggests. Instead, we frequently go against the word of God. We do what pleases us. As Christians, we should live according to the principles of scripture, but elect not to. And every week, we traipse back to the sanctuary of God's house, and make a simple demand - as the church was reformed, so too ought we to be. We have had a look at the worst, our scheming, gossip, unclean living and so on. We have had a deep glimpse at the rot, and you know what, we don't like it. That's why we come to church and say to God fully and clearly 'yeah, I did some things I don't like and am not proud of.' And that's when God, the real one, forgives those sins, strips them away, and leaves you behind.

Back in the days of dieoff, I was actually frightened by the concept of forgiveness of sins. Really. What I was frightened about was the notion that Jesus would actually take my sins away, as far as the east was from the west, and that I would get Ookpiked. In case you don't know, from Dennis Lee's book 'Alligator Pie,' there was a poem about the Ookpik, and it goes thusly.

Ookpik

An Ookpik is nothing but hair.
If you shave him, he isn't there.

He's never locked in the zoo.
He lives in a warm igloo.

He can whistle and dance on the walls.
He can dance on Niagra Falls.

He has nothing at all on his mind.
If you scratch him, he wags his behind.

He dances from morning to night.
Then he blinks. that turns out the light.

That concept of there being nothing left once the shaving was done was how I thought about my sin. If Jesus can take it away, and he does, then what's left? Is there anything left at all? And when Luther and his contemporaries looked at the church at the time, a similar thought must have occurred to them - if we remove all the rot and disaster, what's left? What's left indeed. But they did, and when they did, they discovered that there is still beauty, truth, joy and wonder left. What was there from the first place, brought out from underneath all the rot and decay, and presented as it should have been from the beginning.

You too, if you are to be reformed, once all the rot is gone, the sin and shame, is there anything left? You bet there is. And what's left is you, the You that God shed his blood to redeem. 

Wrestling with God

 Jacob was alone, then he wrestled with God until morning.

This is the reading that we had from Sunday, and it's one of the most important ones for the modern context. That is, Jacob, whilst he is alone, must wrestle with God by himself. For a long time. 

In reality, we don't wrestle with God as much or as often as we ought to, precisely because we fear what would happen if we did. Jacob ends up changed after he is done, renamed by God, yes, but certainly change and different by the time it is over. He is not himself anymore, or not what he used to be. He is given a new identity, a new role, and a new image of himself, and his interactions with his brother change as of that moment. But we don't wrestle with God, and consequently, things don't go overly well for us. 

I'll explain what I mean. Picture math. 

Looking at that makes my head hurt. But math is a complicated thing, to be sure, but it comes down to small constituent parts very easily. And all math is built up off of simple concepts: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Those things add up and are used to make more and more difficult concepts, so that, by the time you have increased in complexity enough, you can do compound interest, land the space shuttle, whatever you need to do, because the math gets more and more complicated, but still requires those constituent parts.

Now, if you would have said as a grade schooler 'yes, I know multiplication, division, addition and subtraction, and now I don't have to know anything else,' like you'd be wrong, obviously, but you'd be wrong in a very particular way. Because eventually, you would come up against a problem that your four bits of math couldn't solve, and you'd have two choices - to buckle down and learn how fractions work, or to insist that math just can't explain this, because it doesn't fit with the math you learned as a child.

People learn about the Lord as children, in Sunday School. They learn about him, and the ten commandments, the Lord's prayer, that kind of thing. And it's not as though the God that you talk to as an adult is different in any material way from the God you talked to as a child, but you had to learn about him differently then as to now. Not because he was different, but because you were. The God of the Bible is infinitely more complex than you learned about as a child because you weren't up for the challenge, and your problems were much much smaller then. The mistake that gets made is that if you stop learning about God and wrestling with him, then you'll come to the came conclusion that people can get to with math.

What I learned about as a child doesn't cover this, therefore it doesn't work.

That's not true. It didn't stop working, you did. Math gets more and more complex to solve more and more complex problems. If you're counting to 12, you can get that done in a sesame street song, but if you're flying to mars, you're not gonna fit that into simple mnemonic lyrics. If all you know is how to count to ten, or whatever, you're not making it to mars anytime soon. If all you know is the lyrics to 'Jesus loves me,' it's all technically true, of course, but then grappling with the enormity of why bad things happen to people you like, or if your pets go to heaven or whatever, aren't covered in those lyrics. 

So you gotta wrestle. In the same way as Jacob, when all is calm and still, you have to wrestle with God until morning. It's a heck of a process, and one that must be done if you're going to get anywhere. Otherwise, nothing changes, especially you. You won't learn or grow, or be changed at all, because it'll be just you again, as usual. But if you wrestle with God, if you have problems, concerns, difficulties, and so on, you may find that wrestling with God answers a few of those questions. Maybe all of them. Maybe you need to grow, and the only way to do so is through conflict, at the end of which you're not yourself. You're something better.

Thanks

 Ten Lepers. 9 leave, one returns to give thanks.

This is a story you know by now, so I don't have to hyper-explain it, but there is a peculiar turn of phrase that occurs in the English language printed text. A long time ago, I used to teach elementary school kids about Greek mythology, and in doing so, we talked about Owls as a symbol for Athena, being the goddess of wisdom as she was. And I would ask the kids why it was they thought that the owl was a symbol for wisdom, and they would invariably say 'Because owls ask a lot of questions.' You know, Whoo whooo? 

It's a cute idea, but one that doesn't scan, given that 'Who' doesn't mean 'who' in ancient Greek. Words and expressions don't carry one to one from one language to another. So when I talk about this turn of phrase, I'm well aware that it doesn't mean in Greek what it means in English. 

Ten Lepers, having to stand a distance away from Jesus even when they're begging for healing, and they call out 'Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.' And Jesus has mercy on them, and tells them to show themselves to the priests. As they go, they are cleansed. The one who comes back does so to give thanks, which he does. Then the text tells us 'Now he was a Samaritan.'

Now he's a Samaritan. Okay, so what was he before? The answer: A leper. Because being a leper is all you are, and all you can be. You're not a carpenter or a father, a wife or seamstress. You're not a patron of the arts, a lawyer, a patrician or a plebe. You're a leper. And lepers are grouped with lepers, for obvious reasons - lepers make more lepers, so the only people they can freely associate with are other lepers. And that's what you get. Remember social distancing, which is a trick that we used recently to try to curb infection rates of COVID-19, and realize that this tactic has been in use for thousands of years. Lepers make more lepers - the only way to keep that down is to have as little contact as possible with lepers. So you put them with each other. 

But when they went away and were healed, and as they were healed, the identity of leper was removed. The identity through which everyone else saw and perceived them, that was gone, replaced by who they were apart from their disease and diagnosis. When the one leper returns, the text says 'Now he was a samaritan.' Now. Yes, now. He wasn't before, he is now. What was he before? A leper. And that identity was so strong that it overruled everything else. More than being a man or woman, slave or free, Jew or Samaritan. And those are strong identities, because, as we know from the story of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well: "Jews have no dealings with Samaritans." Unless they're both lepers. Then they're equal in their diagnosis - equally bad. 

But the healing is a great moment in which the identity of sin is no longer considered by the Lord. That is, in the same way as people are all the same in their leprosy, they are viewed the same by Christ as well. He doesn't heal the Jews but abandon the Samaritan - he sees people afflicted and heals them equally. And this is a clear distillation of the idea that there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, all are one in Christ Jesus. Seeing that played out shows us that there are people who are equally afflicted, and equally in need of aid. And if you extrapolate that, we are all equally sinners, identified with that far more than we are our nationality or ethnicity. And we are all in need of a salvation that we can't get ourselves. And if being a leper is too esoteric for you, then I'd like to point out that we are all going to be equally dead someday, and that all skeletons tend to look pretty much alike. 

The Lord Jesus is the one who sees through all the petty differences that we erect for ourselves, and identifies our needs first and foremost. He sees the fact that we are desperately lost, that we are devastated in our sinfulness, and cannot free ourselves. On our own, all of us are just hurtling towards death anyway. So he sees the need, and meets it. And in that moment, we go from being equally damned, to equally redeemed. Just as in the grave there is no Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male or female, so too are those differences gone in paradise. All are one in Christ Jesus. 

Pay attention to yourselves

 I think what I enjoyed the most from the reading from Sunday was the little line in there where Jesus says "pay attention to yourselves." Yeah, about that. About that.

When Jesus says things about having to forgive, about not leading these little ones into sin, he says in there, in the sandwich of words 'pay attention to yourselves.' And truly, as Christians, it's a matter for us to consider - that is, how much of our focus on sin is focus on sin outside ourselves? The answer? A lot. But that's the human condition. 

It's normal to think of ourselves as being the baseline, the neutral, the base, and everything else is a variant around us. And when we think about sin, we think about the sin of other people as sin. That's what makes the world fall apart. That's what causes degradation and collapse. When other people do bad things, that's what sin is. But sin is like breath, as I'm fond of saying. That is, it's much much easier to detect someone else's bad breath than your own. And it's much much   easier to detect someone else's sin than your own. After all, how often has someone offered you a breath mint, or a life saver or gum or something, and you just sort of stared at them. What could they possibly mean by that?

They mean you stink. And believe it or not, your sin is perfectly on display to everyone you know....except you. All the people around you, they know that you have a terrible temper, that you're mean with money, that you're a gossip or a fraud, they know you talk about yourself far too much, that you don't bother thinking too much about anyone else's needs, and so on. They all know these things, even though you don't see them as being integral parts of yourself. 

But when Jesus makes a caution, and says that if you lead little ones into temptation, it would be better for you to have a millstone tied around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea, he follows it up by saying 'pay attention to yourselves.' And that's a line that you really shouldn't skip over. For in reality, there's likely a lot of time that you spend thinking about the sins of others, what they should or should not be doing, how badly they've gone off course, why they should smarten up, that kind of thing, but Jesus doesn't tell you about that, does he? He says 'pay attention to yourself.' For if we are to be serious, and to assume that Jesus is being serious too, he means what he says. When he says that it is dangerous business to tempt others into sin, that we should be as concerned about that as we are about the sins that we easily identify in others. If we believe that sin is bad, as we do, then we run head on into the reality that we have, whether glibly or deliberately, convinced others to sin who would not have done so otherwise. We took people who were wavering on the fence, not sure if they wanted to go down a path or not, and talked them into going all the way. Sure, they were thinking of dishing out the new hot gossip, or telling you something that they should have taken to their graves, or whatever, and you and I persuaded them to do what they should not have done. In that moment, the conversation could have gone either way - they could easily have been talked out of sinning, but we became enablers, and talked them into it. We did so because it suited us to do so, and like it or not, that sin becomes our problem. Pay attention to yourselves indeed - this is something that we have fallen into on multiple occasions. 

So, if Jesus is truthful, if it matters that we lead others into temptation, then what is to be done here? And if Jesus is truthful that if someone sins against you and repents, over and over again, then you must forgive them, does this apply to us? Pay attention to yourselves, once again.

For in reality, we all know that this is true, do we not? Have we not cursed those who have led us into sin and temptation? Do we not think that they truly ought not have done that? Have we not desperately pleaded with divine providence to smite those who refuse to forgive us for our actions? We believe sincerely that people really, truly, genuinely should have to forgive us when we have gone far wrong. It comes down to the idea that even when we do not deserve to be forgiven, we still should be, because we're us. And that's typically where we can tell that something is true, you know? Like when we believe that other people should do it. And here we are, at the intersection of truth and effort, where we understand that the way we believe that other people should behave is not always the way we want to behave.

We can smell their breath. But they can smell ours.

Pay attention to yourselves, then. Understand that these are words spoken not to people who have long since become dust, but are words spoken to you, too. And that's the issue that we are all going to have to deal with - the things we know people should do are not things that we do, and once we acknowledge that, then we're going to have to deal with the fact that Jesus is pointing out to us our need for a breath mint. Which he provides.

Why be a Christian at all? It comes down to forgiveness of sins, you know. And the forgiveness of sins that we're looking for is the forgiveness of sins that comes through the blood of Jesus. And that is the only way you can ever get or find some solace in the midst of the gap between how you feel people should behave, and how you behave. The greatness of the faith that we have is it's not about telling you to be better. Jesus doesn't show up and tell you to get better breath, you know. Instead, he shows up and says to you 'you need a breath mint. You stink. But I'm going to provide you with one' and then does. The whole work of redemption, of salvation, is simply that. There are ways people should behave, and when you pay attention to yourself, you find that you have not done it, and Christ is the one who makes you whole through the cross.

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.