Reason Breeds Insanity

Yes, you read that correctly. My dad went to work yesterday! What a nutcase?! I suppose he is doing okay. The doctors told him he could go back when he felt like it. Apparently, he felt like it. He only went for half a day, and I haven’t talked to him to see how it went.

Deuteronomy 30: 15-20
Interestingly, this pericope is set in the middle of a longer one about cursing and blessing. They are two sides of the same coin. How could we know what blessing is without cursing, and how could we understand the pain of a curse without first experiencing the joy of a blessing? In verse 15, the Lord says: “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.” Again, two sides of the same coin. In verse 19, again, the Lord says: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.” I think the interesting thing about these dual entities is that each one contains a piece of the other. A slippery slope exists between life and death, prosperity and destruction. Everyday that we live, we are one step closer to death, and if we believe what the Bible says, it is in death that we truly experience life. This passage is an interesting look at freewill, too: “now choose life.” Choose to live in blessing, prosperity, and life, because it is only when our hearts turn away from God and we worship other gods that we will be destroyed. We have to make a conscious choice to put money, fame, power, food, possessions above God, and that, when our focus is removed from our creator, is when we experience the opposite force of curse, death, destruction. As I look back, I wonder how many times I’ve chosen to worship something other than the Lord. I wonder how frequently I see only the curse side of the coin and forget to turn it over and look for the blessing. Am I making an effort to live in the land of my fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Am I choosing life?

Luke 9: 22-25
Isn’t this the same question the writer asks in Deuteronomy? What good is it for me to throw away my life in vain search of other things, when I am given my fathers’ land? Luke writes: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?” This quote is part of the response that Jesus gives to Peter after asking, “Who do the crowds think I am? Who do you think I am?” Peter (if I were a disciple I would be Peter, boisterous, racous, mostly annoying to the other discisples) has it figured out: “[You are] the christ of God.” Because Peter recognizes that Jesus is the Christ, his whole world changes. Immediately, he is admonished and told exactly what it means to understand that Jesus is the Christ. To understand that Jesus is the Christ is to pick up a whole new set of values, to pick up a cross, to pick up a new life. To understand that Jesus is the Christ is to live out our understanding in such a way that other people begin to understand it as well. Jesus says: “Whoever loses his life for me, will save it.” How am I losing my life? Have I even considered what that means? What does it look like to lose your life? By losing my life am I living in the Kingdom? Is this how God makes [Their] appeal through us?

Note: Whenever it is necessary to refer to God with a pronoun I prefer to use [Their]- simply because I do not believe that God is a man, and I like to remember that God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hence [Their}.

My church gave out these little books of Lent Readings, so I thought I would pass them along. I also thought that since it is easier for me to process with a keyboard in front of me, oh the years of conditioning, that maybe if I wrote my thoughts, I’d feel Lent-y.

Joel 2:12-18 “Rend Your Heart”
What does it mean to rend your heart? Anyway you look at the word “rend” it is not pretty. It literally means to pull apart violently; to destroy by tearing in two. So much for the neat variety of Christianity. “Rend your heart and not your garments…” says Joel. What good does it do to tear apart perfectly good clothes, when it is our hearts that betray us. Is Joel saying that the traditional methods of mourning no longer apply because they are superficial and really the problem is much deeper, much more internal? Our hearts are the object of our reflection–they are to be rent on account of their great tresspass? The lines right before this passage say, “The day of the Lord is great; it is dreadful. Who can endure it?” After Joel encourages the people to repent and gather in consecrated assembly and to rend their hearts, he writes “Then the Lord will be jealous for his land and take pity on his people.” It kind of reminds me of Psalm 51 in which David writes: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2 “Christ’s Ambassadors”
I have never liked the language of Paul. I wish he just would have said what he wanted to say. I want him to make it plain. He never does. Perhaps, the reason I can never understand him is that he is always setting forth this complicated systematic theology. However, this passage seems plain to me. Because Jesus loves us, we are to love others. God, Paul says, makes his appeal through us. It is through this simple act that people see God. We are Christ’s ambassadors. “Now is the day of salvation” for us and for those we love. I happen to think that much of our salvation is wrapped up in how well we share ourselves with others. I think the point of the Kingdom on earth is simple; God’s love saves us only when our love saves others: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Notice that Jesus doesn’t pray forgive us our debts whether or not we forgive our debtors, but as we forgive (see Matthew 6:14-15, you’ll already be there in a minute anyway). I think the same goes with love. Get love, give love, get love. We are the reconcilers using love and grace to share salvation.

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 “Giving and Fasting”
Hide. Sort of makes fundraising weird, huh?

Kind of odd to listen to Smackwater Jack sung by Carole King while reading the bible?!

Lent starts tomorrow. I wonder if Jesus would understand if I told him that I’m just not feeling it this year. What a lame thing to tell a guy who was slaughtered on a cross, but I’m not feeling it. I’m not feeling the giving up of anything. I am not feeling the new evangelical pacifier of adding something “holy” to my already mundane spiritual life–well, it’s not mundane but it is stuffed with “holy” things. Interestingly, part of being holy is being set apart. Once you pack your life so full of holy things are any of them really holy anymore? They certainly aren’t set apart in the way things that are holy should be set apart.

I am not feeling going to church for the next six weeks thinking about one of the most heinous acts of violence ever perpetrated. You know, I can’t even call it one of the worst acts of violence, because from where I sit right now there are many more serious acts of violence than one man dying on a cross. Millions of people are trafficked in slavery every year, children die everyday because of AIDS or hunger, people huddle together under bridges for warmth, and I worry about not feeling the giving up of chocolate, alcohol, or extraneous pleasures. What would I do if I were one of the many, many people who never had any of those luxuries to begin with? How would I honor Jesus during Lent if I had nothing to start with? Perhaps that is my area of contemplation during Lent, how would I show Jesus I get it, if I had nothing to begin with? Do I even know what it means to be without, to fast, to renounce myself? Is that what it is about? Is that how we are supposed to identify with Jesus’ final days?

I feel so fortunate but also burdened by the “stuff” around me. Is it bad to want nice things when I could travel to the south side of HC and find people living in trailers with no floors? Is it enough to think about this discrepency or is the point of Lent realizing that I need to do something about it? I have spent most seasons of Lent thinking about my relationship with God, which I think is valuable, but have I ever really thought about where my relationship with God is moving me? Where did Jesus’ love of God move him? I think that is the point–it moved him to death. Am I willing to be moved to death?

Spirituality is something I have struggled with all of my life, but I feel like struggle is healthy. Questioning is healthy. Raising my fist and shouting is healthy. I think today I feel like raising a fist. So there, God…I’m not feeling like Lent!

“Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”

One summer when I was about five or six years old, we visited my grandma’s house in Michigan. She lived on a small lake that was situated about ten miles inside the Michigan state line. My great aunt lived there, as well, about three houses down the shore. Everyday to go from one house to the other, we would count the three houses we passed because they were all white and seemed the same to a small child. We only swam at my great aunt Aglaia’s house because her husband had built a long peer and dumped sand on the ice for several winters until there was a beautiful beach in front of their home. Everyone who lived on “our” side of the lake swam at “Keck’s Beach.”

One particular day stands out in my mind—I will never forget it. We were ready to go swimming, all wrapped up in big fluffy towels and donning last years faded swimming lesson suits. No matter what color a swimming suit begins, they all end up a brown-blue that only over-chlorinated public pools can produce. My two or three year-old brother’s suit was stretched out to the point that he had to wear a belt duct-taped to the waistband to keep from losing his trunks as he jumped repeatedly from the dock into the clear cool lake water. My suit was probably indecently thin, as well as being indecently baggy with my tiny child-breasts poking out above the neckline and my little butt showing as the back of Wonder-Woman star-clad bottoms hung loosely, the crotch dangling just above my fleshy little knees.

My brother and I, we must have been six and three, were racing toward the lake clutching our towels and trying to keep from tripping over our flip-flops that were purchased too-big so we could wear them again the next summer. My brother was wearing his Floaties pushed up by his shoulders, because he couldn’t yet swim and was a little scared of the water though no one knew the level of his terror because of his tenacity in jumping off the dock. Instead of waiting until we got to the lake to put them on, he wore them on the short walk to the beach because he, like a miniscule steam engine with a one-track mind, ran full throttle all the way past the end of the pier splashing unabashedly into the water. Suddenly, as we ran, I felt an icy-hot sensation just behind the place where the strap of my flip-flop thonged the big toe and second toe of my right foot. There was something stuck between the sole of my foot and the spongy plastic of the shoe. I reached down with my left hand and whatever it was flew up into my face causing me to emit screams of terror.

As I screamed, I lost my balance and fell forward into a patch of clover. The ground came alive as what seemed like hundreds, probably ten, bees swarmed up from the flowers from which they were feeding. They buzzed and hummed adding to the already chaotic scene. What I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that I am extremely allergic to bee stings. My foot swelled to about twice its size, as well as my ankle and leg growing to mammoth proportions. They were instantly fevered and I couldn’t breath very well. Luckily, only one bee had actually stung me, so I avoided a trip to the hospital. My fun day ended with me groggily drugged up on Benadryl—if only I could find something legal that would do to me now what Benadryl did to me then. For six hours I sat in the warm sun by the lake in a plastic woven lawn chair, dazed with my baking-soda-coated-foot elevated, watching all the other kids play the games I had made up. Maybe bees are Wonder Woman’s Kryptonite? Did they have bees on Thymiscera?