Recasting the problem

October 28, 2011 under theology

One of the difficulties of reconciling the goodness of the Christian God (the God that Jesus Christ believed in; the Jewish God; I AM WHO I AM) with the badness of the world we live in is that it’s easy to misunderstand the badness.

If we don’t understand the problem, we will be baffled by the solution. It will seem no solution at all, and we will be left feeling angry and disillusioned about God. We won’t be able to see him as good.

A striking example of this is the healing ministry of Jesus. It seems to be a simple encounter between badness and goodness. There is a bad (illness and disease) and there is a good (God incarnate) and the good overcomes the bad. Hooray for the Kingdom of Heaven at hand!

Except this simple, straightforward, intuitive understanding falls apart as soon as we examine it. The good doesn’t eradicate the bad! Jesus doesn’t heal everyone, he doesn’t even try! This understanding just needs one question thrown at it to fall completely apart.

“If God loves my mother/father/brother/sister/uncle, why doesn’t he heal them?”

This indictment is even more damning in the church today; if God incarnate couldn’t wipe out illness, what hope do we have?

Part of the tremendous challenge of the Christian faith is that it grounds all badness in a single badness: we are sinners; we are not faithful to God. Indeed, we need to understand all badness and tragedy in the light of sin. Why are illness and disease among us? Why poverty, war and famine? Why isolation and desolation?

In understanding badness we need to start at sin and faithlessness, at separation from God, and work our way down. Why?

Because God’s solution is to provide redemption, spiritual life and transformation. It is from these that goodness is manifested in our physical world.

Jesus’ healings came in the arrival of the Kingdom of God. This is the power flowing forth; this is the arrival of the Spirit of God. He has burst through the door; he is here. The door he comes through is confession and repentance.

When we see that the glorious Power of God came bursting through to earth and yet all were not healed, what do we say?

Well, we say that the power of badness itself is broken; that salvation is on offer to all; that a holy transforming power is at work which will make us comforters where we have been ostracizers, brothers and sisters where we have been strangers, caregivers where we have been oppressors. We ask him to wash away our meanness and disdain, our smallness and our fear.

Illness and disease are not the badness that oppress us.

This sounds such a monstrous thing to say. But it does not minimize suffering; rather it emphasizes good.

We look at the goodness of God at its source: righteousness and holiness. We see how these come to us through confession and repentance, we see how these flow out – from God, to us, to all. Christ’s healing was a sign of this, it was a wonder to make people look and see: Righteousness and Holiness are flowing out, through Christ, through God’s anointed one!

The depth of human pain we experience and the great landscape of human suffering on display in every newspaper remind us how important it is that we constantly meditate on God’s goodness, as he has revealed it.

If we don’t get goodness into our hearts, we will never get it into our hands.

Just as from our faithlessness and separation from God comes our worldly groaning, from his redemption and salvation comes our worldly transformation and our empowerment through his Spirit.

When we pray to God and ask him to “make us better”, he always does. But he means a little something different by it.

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A world with Angels

October 24, 2011 under personalinthepubliceye, poetry

I live in a world with angels
God rides the bus with me
But if I put my head down
And turn my music up
Maybe I won’t have to think about it
Maybe I won’t hear him speak
And maybe I can still feel in control.

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In The Gutter

October 20, 2011 under inthenews

“It’s time to turn Momma’s picture to the wall, and get down in the gutter where politics belongs: negative campaigning works,” the Republican strategist said.

Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

It goes without saying that I find his idea of where politics ‘belongs’ to be abhorrent; in particular, it is bolstered by a shoddy and deceptive definition of ‘works’.

I wonder if we can turn God’s picture to the wall?

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May You Be

October 14, 2011 under poetry, theology

May you be the one whom God has made you to be.
May you be none other than You.
Not rejected or despised
Perfect in the Father’s eyes
Unspoilt and Unashamed

May you give into his hands
All that stands
Between your self and You
Let him take you and make You
Break you to shape You
And love you for You.

Amen

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Crazy Obsessive Poetry – Christmas Socks

October 13, 2011 under poetry

This morning it is Christmas
I am trying to put on my socks
They are ordinary grey work socks with a red stripe on top
I wear them on Wednesdays
And on Wednesdays they are Wednesday socks

But this morning it is Christmas
So they are Christmas socks
They are my Christmas socks
And I need to get out of bed and put them on

Maybe I don’t want to
Maybe I don’t feel like it
Maybe I have no hope
That they will bring me close to anything I love

If I can’t put on socks I am nothing
Everybody can put on socks
So if these socks don’t get put on I have big problems
I won’t even be able to run over the border to Mexico and hide from my life
Because I don’t have socks on

These socks tell me I don’t have a hope
These socks tell me I don’t have a future
These socks tell me I am a useless nothing
Because they are bigger than I am

If you can’t even put on socks you can’t live
You can’t do well at your job
You can’t talk to normal people
Because nobody loves someone who is too useless to put on socks
Nobody even thinks about socks
Nobody writes poetry about socks

God, I hate Christmas
And I hate these Christmas socks
They are making a mockery of me
They are taunting me, trying to defeat me
These diabolical Christmas socks

Maybe we’re all crazy
I don’t know.
Maybe other people’s socks talk to them
I don’t know.
But on Christmas we remember a man who deals with stupid things like socks
His name is Jesus

Maybe for Christmas he’ll give me socks of the Spirit to put on
Compassionate socks that keep my feet warm
God socks that don’t lie to me
That make me stronger and not weaker

Maybe he’ll give me Christmas socks.

This one is crying for hymnal lyrics

September 28, 2011 under curios

… call this an apology for the previous video :-P

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Let Us Pray

September 26, 2011 under curios

On the off chance you’ve not seen this already:

We need to be aware of what shapes public conception of our religion. Even when it hurts.

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Forgotten

September 23, 2011 under inthenews, theology

Meredith Kercher has been “completely forgotten” in the four years since she was murdered on a study year abroad in Italy, her grieving sister has said.

“There’s not much of Meredith in the media. There aren’t photos of her in the media. The focus has completely moved away from Meredith to Amanda and Raffaele.

I do feel sorry for Stephanie Kercher. Largely because her sister was murdered, but also because she seems to have been sold a false hope through her genuine desire that her sister be remembered.

It’s a sad truth that relationship is not built through media stories. Reading media stories is a past-time high on emotion… but very low on mutual sacrifice. By the time we are finished a well told story, we feel close to the people in it! In reality? We are a long way distant.

Meredith is not forgotten because Meredith was never known; Amanda Knox is not really known either, but we are distracted by the picture of a young, pretty murderess, especially when the murder was attached to a love triangle and to kinky sex.

While the desire for fame has always been around, the emergence of the internet has made it seem plausible that you might, in fact, get yours. Ordinary people are elevated to the status of global icons. But the game has changed only slightly; the convenience of human attention has grown enormously, but the overall market for it is just as limited and a thousand times more competitive. It’s a familiar false hope, but one armed with a new and alluring hook.

The reason I hate the diabolical nature of false hopes is that they offer no mercy. They have no concept of giving time and space to the grieving.

I wonder who knows Meredith most deeply of all and who has the greatest capacity to remember her?

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Religion Vs. Science; Obsession

September 16, 2011 under theology

Those of you who read this blog know that I can’t get off this science/religion wagon.

I think what really fuels it is that I read techie blogs when I want to procrastinate something else. :-D

One of the major issues that gnaws at me is that there is a great gulf between the mindsets and attitudes of a Christian and of your average tech guy. The size of the gap never gets discussed, I think because the tech worldview is pervasive in Christian circles. We’ve managed to avoid the gulf by leaving our own worldview and by jumping over to the far side :-(

I made that little face a frownie instead of a smilie because it’s sad; the ultimate result of this is confusion. It’s a tough confusion to resolve and it is only by going back across the gulf to a Christian worldview that we can resolve it.

I’ll give just one tiny example of the gulf and how it appears in subtle ways. This is fairly common; I’ll be reading an innocuous article on a tech site and some small thing will stab me and I will writhe in pain. Something like (from linked article):

What’s an egregious troll? Any troll that personally attacks someone else in our community. If you’re not bright enough to criticize ideas without personally criticizing individuals, we’re not interested in having you around.

Now here we have a perfectly agreeable statement, no? ArsTechnica wants to get tough on trolls (probably not a bad thing). If you read tech forums for any length of time, you will probably run into many, many similar comments. But there is a troll hiding under this particular comment bridge, and it will eat us up if we don’t call it out.

The troll is the idea (the assumption) that what saves you from criticizing people (rather than ideas) is being bright. If we could all just be smarter or brighter that would solve our problem. If that doesn’t work, we just have to draw our technical circle tighter to exclude the less smart people so that we, the smart people, can get something done.

Christians have been chewing on the idea of “loving the sinner, hating the sin” for a long, long time. A Christian view of this is that it is not chiefly an issue of intelligence but one of compassion. “If you are not compassionate enough to criticize ideas without personally criticizing individuals…”

At times I think I’m just being pedantic and nitpicky and making mountains out of all available mole-hills, but then I consider the greater world of statements like this, and I reassure myself that I’m not crazy.

The computing corners of the Internet are a rampant meritocracy, where intelligence is an idol and self improvement is the path to salvation. You have to hack your life to save it; just visit lifehacker!

Glitz and Glamour

September 14, 2011 under curios

What do you do to show your love for an edgy street artist?

That’s easy, you give him an art expo!

But what do you do if you suspect that his art is actually as illegal as sin and that he stole the billboards he defaced for the display?

That’s just as easy, you cancel his art expo!

Edgy is all fun and games until you, as an artist, realize that too many eyeballs means you will be caught and prosecuted. It’s all fun and games until you, as a patron of the arts, realize that there are some things you can’t sustainably sponsor. Of course, there are some who say that the illegality *is* the art, and that to deface an officially sanctioned and provisioned billboard is devoid of irony and misses the entire point.

There is a loser in this story; it is the idea that all expressions are valuable and that all expressions deserve to be elevated to the highest platform.

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