Let me tell you about Deb...

Vancouver hosts some really interesting individuals. The average day in the Friendship Centre bears witness to this. Inside, we have some of the loveliest people in the world; outside, some of the strangest. One of the sights I have been most curious about occurs on Wednesdays. If I am vigilant, at some point in the day, I may see a slight woman walk toward the SkyTrain station with a longsword strapped to her back. It's the sort of little thing I live for. This is really interesting, because people in BC tend to frown on the idea of owning guns, so a lady with a three-foot-long edged weapon is, well, ironic? Confusing? Counterintuitive?

I've been planning to talk to her for some time, because, hello, sword. Sword = awesome. You can imagine my sheer delight, then, when I noticed her standing at Waterfront Station tonight with a rapier on her back (two swords! Twice as awesome!). She was very friendly. She's been learning the sword for over two years now, and she owns two longswords, a side sword, and a very nice rapier. She's working on her blue ribbon and will test to qualify next month. By day she works with alzheimer's patients; by night, she duels. Her name is Deb.

Why am I telling you this, you ask? Well, as we got on the SkyTrain tonight to head home, three ladies were sitting in the adjacent seats, and one muttered to the others, "This is going to be interesting..." and glanced meaningfully, pointedly at Deb, as if the mere presence of the sword certified her as a nutcase and probable nuisance. I'll be straight up with you; it made me very angry. My suspicion is that Deb's life and friends are probably significantly, qualitatively more interesting than that lady's life and friends. Deb minds her own business, and I didn't hear her denigrate anyone over the course of our forty-five minute conversation. Deb was perfectly pleasant, sincere, kind, and interesting--and yet, in that lady's eyes, she was weighed, numbered, and found wanting, just because of the sword.

I have two thoughts: the nature of my own judging heart, and the problem of responding to human judgment. I definitely judge people. I often actively try not to, but that doesn't mean I succeed. A lot of the time, I don't really know what to do with people, and I let the fact that I am uncomfortable stand as an excuse not to engage them. It's not good, and it's not Christlike. I need grace as I travel around this crazy, diverse city. I need grace and love to reach out to people who are not like me in many ways. I need grace.

My second thought is probably going to be a little meandering (it's after midnight). The lady on the SkyTrain judged Deb and found her wanting just because she was carrying a sword. Something that wasn't even a part of her served to define her in the other woman's eyes within seconds. The lady knows nothing about her. Nothing. This hits me pretty hard, because the Lord's been doing some stuff lately in surfacing areas where I've let the judgment of others dictate who I think I am or should be. If you've had a few significant conversations with me, you've probably heard me mention the movie Mean Girls. It's probably my favorite source of illustrations, second to the Bible. If that doesn't make sense, I probably can't explain it to you; you just had to be there. I'm not exactly sure how Tina Fey got hold of so many details out of my life for her movie, but, when I saw it in the theater with my mom, there were times when I cried while everyone else laughed (though I laughed louder than the rest of the theater when Regina George got hit by that bus). It just resonated so much with me--the cruelty of one's peers. I was weighed, measured, and found wanting many times in middle school and high school, in school and in church. People saw me, made snap judgments, started rumors, and made catty little comments (and some not so catty or little, but shouted from cars as I rollerbladed in my neighborhood). I felt hounded. Worse, I wondered if those things were true, and I weighed and found myself wanting too. Here's the deal: it's like the Bible says--man looks at the outside, but God looks at the heart. I was basing my view of myself on the opinions of people who were absolutely ignorant and unqualified to have opinions in the first place. Think about that. It's like making assumptions about gravity based on the scribblings of a two-year-old. It doesn't make sense in any other arena of life. It's like evaluating the relative dollar worth of something based on whether the dog will pee on it. I mean, really? I've spent years of my life valuing myself based on the casual words of callous and cruel teenagers who have no right or authority to make significant pronouncements about anyone's relative worth, and I am just starting to see the absurdity of that. Only God knows who I really am; may I listen ever harder to His voice. May His opinion reign in me. And in you, too. You are precious, valuable, accepted in the beloved, forgiven, justified, complete in Christ, the apple of His eye. One day you and I will shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father.

Praises

• I'm going to be able to take a trip to Ottawa in February for a prayer conference. The Lord opened the door for this trip up so clearly and beautifully and provided for it. I am terribly excited.
• I have already gotten to witness to several people in my first two weeks back. I have had a couple of situations in which the Lord has given me a lot of freedom to speak out.
• I was very sad in the days leading up to coming back to Canada, but the day I left, the Lord gave me such incredible peace, and as the plane approached the city, He gave me such a yearning toward this place. It is good to be back. I miss my Memphis people, but it is good and right for me to be here now.
  

Prayer requests

• Please continue to pray for my landlord. Pray for wisdom for me to witness to her, and pray that she would hear with understanding, accept, and obey. Pray that she would be like the good soil in Matthew 13.
• Please continue to pray for divine appointments. Pray for boldness for me to step out and speak the truth. Pray that the Lord will help me to speak the truth uncompromisingly, and that His love will shine out even as I do.
• Please pray for opportunities to start ladies' Bible studies. I am not naturally skilled at gathering people. Pray for the faith just to try it.
  

You who are still reading, thank you very much for sitting through this. I covet your prayers.
-Jennifer

The Day the Earth Stood Still

I am happy that Keanu Reeves finally got a role that allowed for his acting skills.

On a more serious note, I didn't post anything yesterday, did I? Drat. I've been trying to be good about that. I have, for the past, I don't know, two years or so, not been much for writing in general. Maybe grad school does that. But I'm trying again, though really, in this particular context, it's odd to write to the Internet (Is anyone out there there there there?), because my general feeling is that the less the Internet knows about me, the better. Eh.

Watched The Day the Earth Stood Still with the parents. Thoroughly annoyed with the whole we-are-destroying-the-earth thing, humans-are-the-enemy. It comes out of this evolutionary background, and what kills me is that people use that stuff to moralize when it is really based on a worldview that sees ultimately reality as fundamentally arbitrary, therefore amoral--therefore, why do you care? Why be all guilt-centered and self-righteous about something that's basically arbitrary in the end? Be consistent with your worldview. Stop hijacking the Judeo-Christian ethic of taking care of the earth; it doesn't fit your evolutionary viewpoint. If there's nothing out there--even if there are aliens out there, but no moral creator--it does not matter. If there is a Creator who is moral, we have to answer to Him, and we had darn well better shape up, but not because of politics or movies or guilty consciences, but because we answer to the Holy One.

Monuments

It's funny what we build monuments to. Steven and I trekked across the south last week, from San Diego to Memphis (Travels with Charlie, only Steven's not a poodle), and we ended up in New Mexico, passing White Sands missile testing range and the site of the Trinity testing. There was a historical marker and, apparently, a monument. Roswell, NM, is full of monuments... to aliens. Naturally I took pictures.

But it is funny what we build monuments to. Painted rocks get their own monuments, battles get monuments, roads get monuments. Blogs are people's personal monuments (I speak with full understanding of this irony). Everything in people clamors, Remember me.

Me, I'm a bit iconoclastic (also ironic, because artist) and morbid, and I look at these things and wonder: what will we do when the things we have striven to remember pass away? Grass withers, flowers fade, stone crumbles, glass shatters, metal rusts. The world is decaying--what is worth remembering?

A lot of this is due to rather recent faults in my memory. These are not blank spaces but areas of mental laziness. I am astounded that, under the correct conditions, I can remember entire songs I haven't heard in ten or twelve years, but I cannot for the life of me remember day-to-day Bible insights, loved ones' birthdays (save for my immediate family and one or two very dear friends), basic cooking steps.

I need more mental monuments. What will hold me up when the other foundations crumble?

I watched The Passion of the Christ last Sunday night with my church. It was one of those things that I wasn't particularly keen to do, precisely because I had heard so much about the movie from so many different people (a reason I have still neglected to see Titanic or to read the last Harry Potter novel). I didn't enjoy it, which I expected, partially because it was so Mary-centric and contained so many unhistorical (i. e. not included in the Bible) scenes and lines; and partially because it was just so unpleasant--not unlike Apocalypto or Braveheart with their relentless violence (makes sense--same director). When I allowed myself to enter the movie emotionally--as opposed to watching it critically--I found myself choked and in tears at the thought that that was Jesus, Him who died in my place. It was kind of incredible to see the relentless, senseless cruelty and shame that He endured, the wretched treatment He underwent at the hands of people who did not in any way grasp that the hands they brutalized had knit them together in their mothers' wombs. I wanted to shout for joy at the sight of those perfect holes in those perfect hands as He left the tomb, risen. Those holes looked like windows through which to see the world.

Part of me keeps forgetting that today is Good Friday--I am not really a special-day person, but I feel like I should be. But today is the day when God died, in an utterly real way--He was cut off from Himself by our sin, under the penalty of His own wrath for us (a wrath that He knew intimately and still took up intentionally). Today is an anniversary of the day when the Son felt the pain of alienation from the Father, when He suffered what must have been for Him an eternity of wrath.

One of the things we learned in Systematic Theology (or rather, not learned, but put into words something we had grasped intuitively but not solidified intellectually) was the analogic communication of God. He is so much greater and higher than we are, that He has to communicate things about Himself by analogy, so that we can understand Him at all--and His greatest analogy was His descent to earth as a human, so that we could know Him as dearly as ourselves. It seems to me that His earthly punishment and pain--so awful and abhorrent--were analogous to what was going on inside Him as His pure soul became sin for us. I don't think we'll ever fully understand that.

Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us, that we should be called the sons of God....

I can't wait for Sunday. All the delight is in the resurrection.

Original date of writing, 1/15/08; finishing now.

A while back, I was reading something, and it basically said that we were given bodies to keep us humble. This makes a great deal of sense to me, because no matter how finely tuned an instrument the body is, it's still capable of going entirely haywire with little or no provocation. I say this because, in the past four or five days, I've managed to get bronchitis. I've also discovered the joys of NoTuss cough syrup, which proves that narcotics are the true opiate of the masses (ba-dum-tshing). Seriously, it's kind of brilliant. I am avoiding it forever after I get better.

On to serious things, though. Because I'm sick, I've been put on home rest for forty-eight hours. This means no work, no school, no discipleship (which makes me really sad, because I hate missing it), no juvie, no nothing. Which means time. Most of the time I don't get to sit and think about what I'm reading when I read my Bible. Typically I read it in the morning, which means that really have to struggle just to keep awake. But it's the only time of day I could possibly do it, because my nights are crazy. Anyway, sometimes I get stuff out of my reading, and sometimes I don't, but I'm basically just trying to be faithful. But yesterday I was able to take some time and just enjoy it.

I've been trying recently to understand God better as a Person. I think that a lot of people have this idea that there are heavily distinct personalities within the Trinity--that God the Father is kind of stern and smite-y, that God the Son is happy and loving and compassionate, and that God the Holy Spirit doesn't have much of a personality at all. But Jesus said that all the Law and the Prophets were about Him, which means that, when we see the personality of God in the Old Testament, we are seeing the personality of Jesus, and that when we see the personality of Jesus in the New Testament, we are seeing the personality of God (though we can't grasp all of it, obvs.). I learned in Systemat the other day that God's communication with us has at least three distinct characteristics: it is anthropic, analogous, and personal. This means that He communicates in a way that man can understand, in man's languages, using man's culture and context to make Himself understood. He also communicates by way of analogy, giving us pictures that help us to understand things for which our world has no equal (holiness and spirit, for example, we can only define by negatives--not sinful, not bodily, etc.). He also communicates personally. In the Old Testament He spoke to His people (Ex. 20), and that freaked them out so much that they ran away and asked Him to speak through Moses. He spoke through prophets, and the whole Old Testament has to do with God's communication with man. Then the height of His communication came in His actually coming to earth as a person, living with people, loving them, making some of them really mad, dying, and coming back to commission them. Then the New Testament is the story of His doing this, and what that means for the Old Testament and for us. We talked about this for a while in Systemat, and I pretty much loved it, because I really enjoy getting that kind of thing out and thinking about it.

But back to my original point: I've been trying to think through what I read in terms of God's personality--what He's like, who He is, how He does stuff. Hebrews 1 says, "In many times and in many ways, for a long time God was speaking to the fathers by way of the prophets, [but] on the last of these days He spoke to us by way of a Son, whom He made heir of all, through whom also He made the ages; who being the out-radiance of glory and the character/reproduction/representation of his reality, bringing/holding all things by the word of His power, being made a purification of sins sat down at the right hand of the Majesty/Greatness in high places." Three interesting words here: apaugasma, character, and hupostasis. The first, which means out-radiance, is like light--it's all you can see with your eye of His light, as of the sun's being so bright that, if you look at it, all you can see is the shine. You cannot see the true shape or nature of the flaming ball of gas; you can only behold its out-radiance. The second, literally the word "character" in Greek, stands for the reproduction or representation of something, as of a signet ring which, pressed into hot wax, leaves its character behind--this is its stamp or impression. The third designates essence, substance, reality, or realization. Jesus is God's out-radiance--all we can see of Him for the glory that shines out. He is the character of God--the stamp of God's essence, substance, and reality. It stands to reason that Jesus' story can thus be interpreted as the story of who God is at His most accessible.

In view of that, I got to read Matthew 14 yesterday as part of my quiet time, and I saw some things I hadn't seen before.
(10/23/08)1. Jesus never got to rest for sorrow. In Matthew 14, His cousin dies--the guy who had been filled with His Spirit since birth, who had jumped in the womb when he sensed the approach of the just-conceived Jesus, who had lived in the wilderness and waited to announce His coming, who had baptized Him, who had gone to prison for upholding His standards and had sought Him out when doubting in prison. As nearly as I can tell, Jesus was in His home country, likely in or near Nazareth, where he had just been rejected by the people who knew Him growing up, when he heard that John had died. The Scriptures say that He took a boat to a lonely place, by Himself, and when He arrived, He got out of the boat only to see a crowd of 5000 men, all waiting for Him, all wanting something from Him. In his time of sorrow, He could not escape the crowd.
2. Jesus never responded out of self-pity or selfishness. From my entry for Jan. 14: When He sees the great crowd, He's moved by a visceral compassion to heal them--even in His grief, He makes Himself the perfect servant. This is the night He fed the 5000--the end of a very hard day, and His disciples come to Him saying, this place is deserted, and it's already late. Send the crowds into the surrounding regions so they can buy food. But Jesus said, they have no need to depart; you give them something to eat. So they took the 5 loaves and 2 fish, and Jesus spent time breaking bread and fish for 5000 men, plus women and children, until there was enough and to spare. This is the untiring love of our Lord."
3. Jesus always took time for people. Sometimes He retired with His disciples to spend time with them, but as far as I can tell, the only time He's alone in the Bible is when He's in the desert and when He gets by Himself to pray. So much of the rest of His time, He's in marketplaces, talking with crowds and healing everyone brought to Him, or traveling and preaching, healing and touching. Or He's being confronted by Pharisees, taking time to answer them in front of people. But Jesus took a lot of time for people. I think about what I know of my friends' lives in other countries (non-developed countries, that is), and about how much time it takes to get everything done. I remember that Mom used to stand in lines for hours in Zimbabwe, just to pick up a package. Jesus came on purpose in a world like that. Everything in Jesus' life took time, and yet He was always patient with people.

I know a lot of people struggle with concepts of God and the idea that He was a God of wrath in the Old Testament and a God of love in the New, but I don't see it. What I do see is that He never tolerated anything that brought His people in bondage, that He hated man's inhumanity to man, and that He judged wickedness. We see that in Jesus. He said the Father had committed all judgment into His hand, and He upbraided the Pharisees, called them hypocrites, sons of Satan, sons of hell, a brood of liars; He called Peter Satan when Peter tried to deter Him from the cross; He whipped the money changers out of the temple (taking time to braid the whip), and He yelled at the men selling doves (I think He singled them out because they were taking advantage of the people who had to buy doves--the poor; also His parents, see Luke 2). Love motivated His wrath each time: He loved the Pharisees and those they taught, and thus chastised the Pharisees (and the chastisement of God is always an invitation to repent) and warned His disciples not to be like them; He had to endure the cross for our sakes, and thus chastised Peter; He loved the poor and was outraged that His Father's house, which should have been a place of prayer, was a place in which those who should have been leading in the worship of God were taking advantage of even the least of His worshipers.

Same in the Old Testament. It wasn't that God didn't love the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Hivites, etc.; He did love them. In Abraham's day He gave them a big, obvious sign to repent--fire falling in a valley, destroying a major trade concourse. Sodom and Gomorrah could be seen from miles around, could definitely be seen from all of the mountains and hills in the vicinity, and the message was clear--there is a God who does not tolerate wickedness. God gave the nations in that area four hundred years to fulfill their wickedness, but they also had a warning to repent. The king of Sodom had already had the testimonies of Abraham and Melchizedek. Also, every nation remembered the Flood and knew there was a God who judged evil--when Abimelech took Sarah for a wife, God confronted him and said, "You are a dead man," and he feared God and repented. Abraham had assumed that there was no fear of God in the people around him, but this was not so. By four hundred years later, though, everyone in that area made a practice of sexual immorality of all kinds, of following idols, and of sacrificing their children to idols. In the face of an obvious rebuke from God, they dug their heels in and, as Jeremiah said, went backward and not forward. Their time for repentance ran out; allowing them to live among the children of Israel would only result in the Israelites' becoming like them--a thing that they struggled with throughout their history as they encountered other nations and their gods. When the children of Israel approached Jericho, the city trembled; they had heard forty years earlier of the dividing of the Red Sea and the death of Pharaoh's army, yet only one woman heard this and acted in faith, and was thus saved. The rest refused to repent and act in faith toward God. See Nineveh: Jonah was angry that God wanted to give the Ninevites a chance to repent, because he knew not the wrath of God, but the extent of His mercy.

Significantly, the signal word of Deuteronomy, Moses' big sermon that related the Law a second time, is "love"--God's love for man, and the necessity to love God and love one's neighbor.

Betrayed by God's Own

I don't do creative writing. Really. I do essays, book reviews, boring stuff. So I'm frustrated, because I can't get into this how I want.

I missed my quiet time this morning because I've used my time poorly this week and have had a hard time getting to bed and consequently a hard time getting up, so I just got around to reading my Bible about five-ten minutes ago. Today is the story of David and Uriah. Most of the time it's called David and Bathsheba, but I don't think that's where it's at.

David had a lot of intriguing relationships with the men around him. He served Saul faithfully, felt the sting of Saul's betrayal multiple times, and yet still loved him and mourned his death. He served the Philistine king (though he lied to him a lot) in such a way that the king counted him one of his most trusted servants. His relationship with Saul's son Jonathan was closer than blood; Jonathan loved him enough to give up his kingdom for him and go behind his own dad's back. He mourned Ishbosheth and took revenge on those who killed him, even though Ishbosheth had tried to kill him and take his kingdom away. He mourned Abner, who had killed Asahel, and even cursed Joab and Abishai for killing him. Several tales exist about his mighty men and how they served him, and of the way men risked their lives for him. What, then, about Uriah?

The story's pretty easy. David nearly dies in battle, so his men tell him not to go out in the battle any more. Instead of continuing to command the armies on the field, though, David retreats to his castle and stays there, leaving Joab to conduct all the business of war. Then, the text tells us, in the spring, when kings go out to war, David stays in Jerusalem, and one day, when he gets out of bed in the evening, he walks out on the rooftop, where he wouldn't be if he were doing what he should have been doing, and watches a woman bathe. He doesn't do the honorable thing and call a warning to Bathsheba that there's a man high up enough to see her, so she can cover herself. Neither does he cease looking at her. He stares long enough to figure out that she's beautiful (in my book, Bathsheba takes way too much flack as a supposed hussy. I think the Bible lays the blame pretty squarely on David). Then it gets interesting.

Uriah is a Hittite--a member of a group of people known best for being able warriors. He's not a Jew; in fact, he's a member of a group that the Jews were supposed to eradicate back in the day in the book of Joshua. Who could judge him if he considered that he had a score to settle? Despite that, Uriah has turned away from his own people to follow the enemy king. He serves him with all his heart, as one of David's prized Thirty. In the spring, when David neglects the battle, Uriah follows Joab out to the front and fights the Ammonites to uphold David's kingdom. Little does he know that God's anointed remains at home, getting his wife pregnant. Neither does he appear to suspect anything when David sends a messenger into the thick of things to find Joab and to request that one of the best soldiers leave the battle to report on it--a thing the messenger could have done. He obeys his king, comes back to Jerusalem, reports to the king, and goes home with a present. Then he returns to sleep at the castle gate--his reasoning: Joab, the king's army, and the ark of God rest on the battlefield; why should I take my pleasure. This is surely a rebuke to a king who wakes up in the evening. Then the king asks him to stay another night and gets him drunk. He sleeps with the king's servants anyway. I think Uriah's a man of unusual steel and tremendous character. Finally, the king, exasperated because Uriah acts so honorably, sends him back to the front with a lettre de cachet, and Joab obeys him and has Uriah killed--all so the king can cover his sins.

It's just amazing to me; here's a man of God, chosen by God as a shepherd to His people, and he's killing sheep. David knew a lot about loyalty, as seen from all of his other relationships to this point. I dunno. This is an incredible story to me. Uriah respects and obeys God and respects and obeys his king. He does exactly what he's supposed to do and goes exactly where he's supposed to go, and God's man turns on him and betrays him. What is the answer to Christians who mirror this kind of thing? How do you deal with it when God's people sell you to the wolves? My only real answer here is that, though the ark was on the front lines, God was still present in Jerusalem, and God remembers everything. At the end of the day, the Judge of all the earth still does rightly.

Outside the Camp

There are days when I don't like being white. Granted, as I say this, I know that if I heard anyone else say it, somewhere in the back of my mind I'd be thinking, yeah, hard life, ya schmuck, but I've been feeling it recently. A week or so ago I was at Juvie, and this lady's son had been arrested as part of some school crackdown as a result of a YouTube video, of all things, and she was mad as a hatter, and she kept telling me about how they always make school violence into a gang thing when it involves black kids, and I really didn't know what to say. Now frankly I think there's some basis for that in Memphis, but still, the stereotyping made me feel terrible for her. Then tonight I was talking with one of the security guards at Juvie, and he was telling me and this other lady about how one of the ladies coming to visit her son was highly suspicious of the fact that young white girls were coming to the jail to talk to their kids, since we look like kids ourselves. The guard stood up for us, but it was still one of those things--like, why does it always have to be about race? Welcome to Memphis.

I went to the Java Cabana for the first time in probably two years because I needed to get a second witness, and on my way in I ran into this guy Larry who gave me a daffodil and told me he needed $4 to get to the Memphis Union Mission, which puts homeless people up. All I had was $3, but I gave it to him in the name of Jesus and sat down with him and told him about the best thing that ever happened to me--that I had given my life to Christ--and then prayed with him that God would give him a job. The whole time these scene kids kept walking past us to go to the open mic night, and they'd look at me like it was utterly bizarre that I should be talking to him. I ended up walking in--thought I'd get some coffee or something for the road, but they don't take cards, only cash and checks--and they were crammed in, all wearing black and jeans, with tricolored hair and that crazy Flock of Seagulls thing going on, and it seemed so utterly bizarre to me that people who probably see themselves as socially conscious could come in and sit around and pay three dollars for coffee but totally ignore the homeless man at the window.

I'm not mad at them. They probably don't know any different. But what makes me mad is that we do so little with so much. I hear all of this stuff about our economic situation and how we're doomed to go down the pipes, and I think we really deserve it at last, because we've had pride, fullness of food and abundance of idleness, and we have not strengthened the hand of the poor and needy, and we've been haughty and committed abomination before God, and it's really only a matter of time before He takes us away. I'm not talking about America here; I'm talking about God's people. We have so much; what are we doing with it?

This guy David Platt spoke at Bellevue last August, and what he basically did was to go through the Old Testament and trace the sacrifices and stuff, and then he preached out of Hebrews 13:10-14. He said some things that have really gotten me thinking, especially in the last month or so since I've been reading Leviticus and Numbers. He made this point--you know what, I'm just going to go ahead and type the verses out, and then I'll relate his point.

Hebrews 13:10-14
We have an altar from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.

Platt had investigated this phrase "outside the camp" and found that it had to do with lots of things. For instance, the ashes of the sacrifices were carried outside the camp. The flesh, skin, and offal of sin offerings were burned outside the camp; bulls for the priests' sins and for the unintentional sins of the people were burned outside the camp. Lepers were sent outside the camp. People to be stoned were taken outside the camp before the Israelites killed them. Anyone who was unclean was to stay outside the camp until evening, when he could wash. Platt's point was that we have been called with Jesus to go outside the camp. Jesus was crucified outside the camp, and our two options are to retreat or to risk everything with Him. And our response has been to retreat. We've been self-centered--"in the nurseries of our churches drinking spiritual milk." His question: "Will we die in our religion or will we die in our devotion?"

Platt offered this challenge to Christians, because what happened in Leviticus and Numbers could so easily happen to us. God sent them to do something, and they disobeyed, and they died in the wilderness. They kept throwing all this stuff up to Moses, like, "All of us are holy--each one of us. Why should you get all the facetime?" But they weren't. They were manifestly not holy. These people had already consigned themselves to forty years of dying in the wilderness, and then they started talking about being the Lord's people and being holy. They weren't. They were already disqualified from service; they had obeyed too late, and in the absence of obedience they opted to seek their own rights. Have we done that, as a people? Have we sunk down into an idea of our own holiness and chosenness and in fact forsaken mere obedience to God? This is my fear. How long will we have to wander in the wilderness until our children see the light?

Breaking Through

Thoughts (and pardon the lack of clear organization):
1. God is a gentleman. I say this with no irony. He allows us dignity, and I don't really understand that. He wakes me morning by morning (I couldn't very well open my eyes without His enabling, obvsly.), but there are days when I ask Him to wake me when He wants me, and He does so, gently. It's a better awakening than on other days--no real struggle, only immediate wakefulness. Body and mind don't always come out of sleep exactly together, but I awake with a sense of profound peace. What amazes me is that He has always waited for me to ask Him, and left me to sleep on days when I did not. He is not forceful; He is gentle. He waits for the invitation. This is one of many demonstrations of His meekness.

2. God is a suitor. There are times I really don't get why He does what He does. Okay, I never get why He does what He does, but there are times when things are particularly boggling. Christmas was one of those times. I had been given certain expectations of what Christmas presents I might be receiving from certain relatives, and when the time came to receive said presents, I found something entirely different in my hands--a jewelry set worth nearly $3k, with a mondo ring made of white gold, diamonds, and three carats of--i think it's called--citrine. Now I know that there are those who would immediately fall to the floor in a heap of gratitude at such a present, but I just looked at it in shock as said relative explained what it all was. I cried all the way home. To be perfectly honest, I had hoped for cash, as it would take off some of the weight of the year's coming expenses, and I couldn't see any good whatsoever in some pieces of metal and stone. I probably sound like a bit of a brat here, but given my expectations (which I should stop having altogether, I think) and my penchant for the practical over the pretty, the sight of what I saw as wasted money was a blow to the solar plexus.
But here's what happened when I got home. I have been working on something bloggable for quite a while now, and I had a bit on Ephesians that I wanted to get out (that's a bit later), so I was rolling around in my journal, and my entry for that morning included Hebrews 13:5 (NIV), "Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have, because God has said, 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.'" My response: "Wow, was Hebrews 13:5 ever a word for me--wish I had remembered it earlier. Went to ____'s house today, and he gave me a very unexpected gift. Was hoping for and expecting some money or a laptop. It was a highly unwelcome gift, because it seemed to meet no need. Not so. It was meeting a Hebrews 13:5 need, and I love it." God was seeking me out, preparing me to trust Him, and providing a physical reminder of His ever-presence (and His faithfulness as a provider), and to boot He gave me some very pretty jewels to wear. He seeks me when I am too blind to see Him, too concentrated on this world to hear Him call, "Come away with Me." What a suitor.

3. The Bible is a really emotional book. Seriously, we Americans are tremendously uncomfortable with emotion, but the Bible so definitely comes from a hot culture. The sheer amount of emotion that people expressed in Acts is pretty incredible, and I love how Paul and the churches loved each other: Acts 21:1 "After we had torn ourselves away from them, we put out to sea..." The elders from Ephesus travel to visit Paul as he heads toward Jerusalem, and they realize they will never see his face again on this side of life, so they spend time together, crying and praying and encouraging each other, and they have to tear themselves away to leave. Acts 21:13 "When we heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, 'Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.'" What beautiful words. They wept, and Paul's heart broke. These were people who really loved each other and expressed it. And Paul himself was a really emotional guy. So many of the guys I see at school seem to adhere really strongly to an intellectual approach to everything, to the neglect of emotion, and I'm pretty sure that's wrong. Your brain can only take you so far when people are hurting around you.

4. One of my approaches to Bible study, especially in the epistles, is to turn things around and look at them from the opposite angle (it's not deconstruction, but it borrows a bit of the concept). Ephesians 4, thusly: (1-3) I am commanded to live a life worthy of my calling, the characteristics of which are complete humility and gentleness, patience, bearing with other people on the basis of love, and making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. The anti-characteristics: any pride; abuse of any power, whether of words, authority, physical strength, psychological manipulation, etc.; impatience; not dealing with people on the basis of love; not keeping the unity of the Spirit by actually fomenting discord (and this could be through words), or not keeping the unity of the Spirit by being lax and passive where unity is concerned.
(4-6) The foundation of this life: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. We as believers have so much in common. Think of it: who else can possibly claim all of this? I don't know of any other grouping of people that can lay claim to so many areas of deep commonality. This ought to tie us together.
(11ff) Apostles , prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers have the responsibility to serve, to build the body up in unity in the faith and knowledge of the Son of God, and to become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. (Side note: the day we went over this in NT, one of the guys asked if this was simultaneous or a sequence; the main result of the ensuing discussion was that I put on my inner iTunes and listened to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" for the next twenty-five minutes. As I see it, none of that really deserves debate since 1. we can all read Greek, and each of us ought to be able to figure that out to his individual satisfaction, and 2. beginning to do any part of this will keep us too busy for debate and will also produce the other things anyway.) The basis of our unity is the faith and knowledge of the Son of God. This is the means by which we join the body and by which the body stays together, as Tozer said:

Someone may fear that we are magnifying private religion out of all proportion, that the 'us' of the New Testament is being displaced by a selfish 'I.' Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers meeting together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they would possibly be were they to become 'unity' conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship. Social religion is perfected when private religion is purified. The body becomes stronger as its members become healthier. The whole church of God gains when the members that compose it begin to seek a better and a higher life (The Pursuit of God 90).

(4:29) Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. This doesn't seem to say that unwholesome talk won't be there, but rather that we can't let it out when it occurs to us. Words do so much. In Africa, if you tell someone he's likely to die within a certain period of time, it's pretty much a guarantee that he will waste away and die. Words have power. They can destroy, or they can truly build, and our words ought to build.
Things that grieve the Spirit: bitterness, rage, anger, brawling, slander, every form of malice. What we ought to have--the opposite of the above: kindness, compassion, and forgiveness on the basis of Christ.
(5:1) "Begin therefore to mime God, like beloved children." Children imitate their parents. They take on their attitudes toward others, their assumptions, everything. We are to imitate God as His deeply loved kids.
(5:10) "And find out what pleases the Lord" (NIV)--literally, "testing (as if by fire) what is truly pleasing to the Lord." In my family this has a particular relevance, on at least two levels. One: four years ago we had our physical lives tested by fire, and very little of what we had came out of the fire unscathed. One or two pieces of furniture survived, but they are very much a picture of the person who builds with wood, hay, and straw in I Cor. 3, and comes through the flames but still reeks of smoke. One begins to see, at least temporarily, how little a hold things ought to have. Two: Steven and I are total firebabies. He's worse than me--singed all his hair off multiple times growing up, burned up a 50 kg bag of mealie meal when he was about four--but he and I have joined in multiple fire experiments together. We have learned that we can soak a tennis ball in rubbing alcohol, set it alight, and play with it with no ill effects. We've learned that firestarting liquids make excellent "ink" on concrete, and that under the right conditions, flames can be invisible but very much physically present. And why do we do this? Some, like Steven's teacher who sent him for talks with the school guidance counselor after he wrote about some of his fire-related experiences as a child, assume a certain amount of crazy. The mere fact is that we just like to burn things. It's fun to see what will make it through a flame and how. I think we should approach the testing of the things that please God in this way. We ought to enjoy looking for what pleases the Father, I think. There ought to be something of fun about it, rather than the stereotypical Baptist drudgery of do-nots. We should try things and just see if they please Him, and participate in the grand experiment--to get out there and actually put things in the fire to begin with, to see what comes out on the other side. He made us to glorify Him and to enjoy Him forever; it stands to reason that it ought to be enjoyable. Also, God has made it possible for us to know what makes Him smile--it's sort of scandalous that the Almighty should be so open. We ought to take advantage of that. We'd be really ungrateful not to.

America, return to Christ!

So this is the Statue of Liberation through Christ that stands outside the World Overcomers' church on Kirby and Winchester. On any given Sunday afternoon, protesters stand at the corners of the property with sign declaiming against graven images and the money racket of the church. I've heard that the statue cost about $60,000. It's about thirty feet tall.

Can I just say that I feel a deep, abiding affection for it? I think it's really great. Every time I pass it on the way to church, it makes me smile.

Here's why: I don't know too much about the Overcomers' theology, but I do know that they care about and reach out to Memphis, and that they have an international outlook. They could be much worse. As a church, they are extremely visible, and they have a lot of passion, which I admire and wish Baptists would emulate.

But the reason I really think this is a piece of genius is that it's as offensive as it is. On the front, in large caps, it says, "AMERICA, RETURN TO CHRIST." In its left hand are the Ten Commandments, and in its right hand a cross. On its crown rests the word "JEHOVAH." And here's what I love about it. The Overcomers have totally shanghaied an Enlightenment symbol and changed it to draw attention to Christ. And they've done it in an in-your-face way in a part of Memphis that is rapidly going downhill, and they're totally unashamed of Christ. Look at the symbol: she's not just liberty leading the masses. Her crown and splendor come from God, and she's not heading forward under the golden glow of Enlightenment thought; the cross is her torch. Knowledge is not her shield and treasure; she carries the words of God. Why wouldn't I like it? It's a big, bold way of telling America as a whole, and Memphis specifically, to get right with God.

I keep thinking about this Gandhi quote :"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ" (Thanks, Ashley). How often do I look like I have Christ? Just walking around or driving down the street, am I proclaiming Him? I hope so. I'd like to hope I have guts like the Overcomers, but I just don't know.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre...

Sometimes things fall apart, and sometimes they come together.

Tonight I watched a movie called Water, about an eight-year-old Hindu widow who was sent to a widows' home. Considered to have shared in her husband's death, and therefore half-dead, she would be unclean for the rest of her life--even after ritual purification, her touch would defile others. I've been reading Things as They Are, about Amy Carmichael's work in India in the early 1900s, and she discusses widows' lives in detail. A man in Water tells a widow that widows have three options: suttee, or burning with their husbands (the movie is set in 1938); denial of all earthly desire; or marriage to the husband's younger brother, providing the family agrees. A widow lives under a curse. She failed to keep her husband alive, and therefore must live apart and beg--or whore--for her food. She lives in bondage, always hoping that she will have enough faith in her god to be released at the end, and possibly to be reborn as a man, if she is a woman of high caste.

I thought about that, and then I thought about the Brahmin in the movie who said that Brahmins get to sleep with any women they choose, and they bless the women by sleeping with them. You see, they are holy by birth. And then I thought about what I've been learning in Old Testament: every religion has holy men who are inherently better than others, and untouchable in some unfathomable way. Every religion has people set apart, sacrosanct by their own efforts or by some accident of birth. Every religion, that is, but Christianity.

In the Old Testament, we can see that the priest, and even the High Priest, has to make an offering for himself before he can offer for the people. Before the Day of Atonement, the High Priest must spend seven days in purification, under intense questioning, a time so stressful that the priest and his questioners tremble and cry. On that day the priest must lay his hands on the head of a bull, confess his sins, and then slaughter the bull for his sins. He must be covered by the blood, just like the people for whom he is about to make the atonement sacrifice. "There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good and sinneth not."

Take it into the New Testament: We have a great High Priest who does not need to make atoning sacrifices for Himself, because He is perfect, both priest and sacrifice. He is atonement in the flesh. He is the bridge between law and grace, between justice and wrath, and mercy. His priesthood is greater by far than Aaron's, and He by His blood sanctifies each of us, making us "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that [we] may proclaim the praises of Him who called [us] out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people, but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy" (I Pet. 2:9-10). There is no special, holy caste among us. Think of it: all through the Old Testament, with whom does God's heart dwell? The poor, the helpless, and the widow. What was Jesus' purpose in coming here? He said, "The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD" (Luke 4:18-19; Is. 61:1-2). Jesus' heart was with the broken down, destroyed, and oppressed. He loved and had mercy on those whom the world saw as vile and utterly to be rejected. And who was Jesus? "He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded by our transgressions, He was bruised by our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken. And they made His grave with the wicked--but with the rich at His death, because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth. Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief..." (Is. 53:3-10a).

I think often we forget to what great extent He identified with us. Jesus, a rabbi, holy by custom and nature, YHWH in the flesh, became sin for us. He became the thing He most hated, for us. What do you think killed Him? I have heard it said that He died of a broken heart when God, who has purer eyes than to look on sin, turned His face away from His Son and broke a fellowship more intimate than any we have ever known. It cuts to the heart, friends.

But think about what He did in His life. The woman with the issue of blood touched Him, and He became ritually unclean, according to the Levitical laws. He not only touched lepers; He clasped them to Himself. Jesus, many times in His every day life, became ritually unclean to touch those despised of men. Jesus intentionally turned the supposed holy order on its ear. He, the only Holy One, willingly touched unclean people. He played with children--stopped in the middle of a sermon, in fact, to include children in the kingdom of God. Jesus' heart was always with the helpless. Look at John 2:13-17. "Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. And He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers doing business. When He had made a whip of cords, He drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen, and poured out the changers' money and overturned the tables. And He said to those who sold doves, 'Take these things away! Do not make My Father's house a house of merchandise!' Then His disciples remembered that it was written, 'Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up.'" Who did Jesus single out especially when he drove the people from the temple? Those who sold doves. And who would have bought doves? The poor. In the Old Testament system of graduated sacrifices, the poor were allowed to bring birds to sacrifice for their sins if they could not afford sheep. It's one of the neatest pictures of God's mercy. He makes repentance possible for all. But what was happening in the temple was a racket. Not only was the outermost court--into which, I believe, Gentiles could enter--filled with the noise of buying and selling instead of worship, and with the litter and excrement of animals instead of clean people and clean sacrifices, but the people had come up with a system to abuse God's standards. Because of the Levitical standards for a spotless sacrifice, there had long been a system of Levite guards at the front of the Temple, who would examine the animals for their acceptability as sacrifices. At the time of Jesus, the guards would routinely declare suitable animals unsuitable, and offer to let the worshiper trade his animal for a temple animal, for a reasonable sum. Further, they insisted that all money be presented in the form of temple coin, which money changers would change at an inflated rate. So the priests were profaning the court that the Gentiles could enter, subtly declaring that God didn't care about them, and they were also taking massive advantage of worshipers, especially the poor. Is it any wonder that Jesus, furious, took the time to braid a whip together so He could beat people out of His temple? But the part I love best is that He singled out those who took advantage of the poor for a special rebuke. His heart was with the poor.

What does this have to do with Water? Jesus loves widows. Jesus loves the poor, the disadvantaged, the unclean, and those hated by society. Jesus loves the rejects. Do you realize, in a world of gods that did not respond to the cries of the poor, our God led the way for them to come to Him? Even more, He came and found them! Oh, to understand the neverending compassion of my God. I think if I did, if I saw His glory like that, I would die. It is too great for me.

What does this mean in your life and in mine? We come proclaiming liberty to the captives, healing to the brokenhearted, and sight to the blind. We come able to touch those the world sees as untouchable, not a people, and defiled. In Water, a man told a widow not to let her shadow touch a bride, because it would defile her. Listen: Paul walked with God, and God so touched his life that even the touch of his shadow would bring healing. We have a share in that. We have love that the world cannot understand. We--and I do not condescend here; I speak the truth--have access to the love of God, and no one else has that. According to I John, we are the only people who have access to love at all, because the world can offer parodies of love, but it can never make the real thing.

At the end of the movie, a Brahmin widow delivered the young girl into the hands of Gandhi's followers, in the hope that they would be her deliverance. What struck me about this scene was that people from all over her village thronged a railway station to hear Gandhi speak for five minutes, jostling each other, not caring about defilement because they were drawn to Gandhi. It broke my heart. Gandhi told them that he had stopped thinking of God--and though it is capitalized I do not mean my God--as Truth, and had discovered that Truth was God, and the search for truth would bring liberation. I ached, because here were hundreds and hundreds of people flocking to see a false prophet, preaching lies that sounded near enough to the Truth to convince, and what they received was only a sick parody of the real thing. Gandhi reached out and blessed little children, but he was only a man. People followed him to the death, and he was only a man.

Friends, we do not serve a parody. We serve God, a very God, who is good and who does good, the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, who has loved us with an everlasting love. I am as guilty as anyone of this, but why are we not beating down doors to tell people about Him, about Life? We have Someone to offer; the world has only a farce. What are we doing with this great blessing? Why have they still not heard?