O Mortal You!

As we grow older, we gradually realize that our bodies do not heal as quickly from injury, recover from exercise as rapidly, or return to health after an illness. Like looking in the mirror every day, you don't notice yourself aging until you hold a picture from your youth next to your face. This is the stealth by which age and infirmity creeps up on us all.

One day we are too young and the next we are too old. One day we are sitting in a high chair wearing a bib and being fed strained vegetables by our mother, and the next we are sitting in an a geriatric chair wearing a bib and being fed strained vegetables by our nurses aid. One day we are gazing through bright eyes at the wonders of the world and  trying to pronounce the name of all the new things we love, and the next day we are gazing through darkening eyes and wondering at all the unfamiliar faces of our children and trying to recall their names.

It should give us pause to ask, why do we invest so much time and energy into trying to build wealth and surrounding ourselves with the tokens of success which will all soon be left behind when we step across our mortal threshold? All the while overlooking the most important treasure that we can attain and offer, love. Love for others and love for God sums up the Prophets and the Law. "God is Love", declares the  very essence of the Divinity.

How many hours a week do we dedicate to experiencing a deeper relationship of love with friends, family, God, or even total strangers? I bet you know how many hours you worked last week, but you can't recall the last time you considered loving more.

Relationships are messy, entail risk, and have uncertainties that scare us from investing or accepting Love. We will readily invest our life savings, most of our waking life, and mortgage our children's futures in a futile quest to stockpile more of the stuff we can never take with us. These are transient things; our bodies, this earth, all Creation like the lilies of the field are here today and tossed into the fire tomorrow. Even the very fabric from which all material things are woven, the atom, will fall apart in due time. Yet, these are the very things we believe to be important, pressing, and fulfilling.

We take much for granted, such as our next breath until the moment you can't have it. Then, you would trade everything you thought so important for a single lung full of blessed air. In this inevitable moment, you will understand what truly matters and it won't be your car, your house, your bank account, or your equity portfolio. It won't be your neatly manicured lawn, your seniority, your pension plan, or your villa by the lake.

No, as your life flickers with the dwindling supply of oxygen in your blood stream, you will know regret, but it won't be regret for the things thing you have done, but rather regret for the things you should have done or would do if you only had a few more breaths of sweet, sweet air. If you could gulp just the tiniest pant, you could tell the people you Love how much you Love them. You would spend it all to tell them how important they have been in making this temporary world you share a better, more beautiful place. In this final mortal moment as your throat seizes shut and your chest burns hollow, you will recognize the ones you should have Loved, but didn't because you were busy chasing illusions of wealth and specters of power. In the rapidly growing darkness, as you feel your body being shucked away, you will plead with the Maker; “I will Love everyone and appreciate everything, if I could have but one more breath of air.” He will abstain from action and in that moment you will die.

Someday, not long from now, you will be right here. For one millionth of a second you will understand the futility of the word "mine", you will surrender everything to the overwhelming power of death and you will pass through the great equalizer of all mankind. 

But occasionally, after that moment when life fades to black and we confront our powerlessness, impotence, and frailty, a precious few of us get that one blessed breath reprieve. Then, another and suddenly we feel the heavy weight of our body. We feel the hard labor of breathing again. The gift of this life may not always seem so wonderful if we return to a pain ridden, decrepit body (which all of them are) but the lesson we bring back with us is what really matters.

We may soon neglect how important our next breath may be, but we will not forget what is important, what has true intrinsic value, and what matters in this mortal life and beyond before that darkness comes for us again.

The Form vs. The Function

The God Behind the Curtain

In the Garden of Eden man and woman walked with God. There was no need for religion, instead we enjoyed a genuine trust relationship with our Creator which was as close as a child walking hand in hand with their parent.

But that closeness was shattered by sin. I am sure you can recall a time in your childhood when you did something wrong of which you were so ashamed that the last thing you wanted was to be close to mom or dad?

So, just like any child who has deeply wounded their parent by violating their trust we try to distract mom or dad with innocuous and irrelevant chatter to fill the void we created.

   "Look at the birds daddy."

   "I know my ABC's"

   "Where's mama?"

What ever it takes to aliviate those deafening silences where once had been laughter. It's bargaining for the restoration of the relationship we poisoned. Yet, notice that as children we never really address the root issue. We never say,

"Hey dad, about me stealing my friends silver dollar and burying it in the back yard,  I am really sorry. It was wrong of me, and blaming the dog was ridiculous as well. You taught me better and I let you down. Will you forgive me?"

No, we're going to every length to avoid the consequences of our culpability, our guilt for failing to be good, the cost of our sin.

That was exactly how all of humanity has responded in our feble attempts to get right with God. We will pay the tithe, fill the pew, bake the cookies for the missionaries in whatever that place is called, and make our kids do everything our parents did to keep God, our Father, distracted from those very few times, and such minor things they were at that, that we screwed up. Surely, we could cajole, negotiate, or "cute" our way back to good, couldn't we?

Well, yes and no. We can be restored to our trust relationship with God but it has little to do with our fumbling, inadequate, infantile efforts, far less than we are lead to believe.

We say, "I quit drinking, chasing after the women who were left when drinks stopped being served, and then lying to her about how much I cared for her "company" in the morning. All of this I did when I became a Christian." But in truth, God was doing those works within us because we were letting Him be in charge of our lives. Picture a three year old who has just had her shoes tied by her father and immediately turns to her mother and says,

    "Look mama, I tied my shoesez."

The parents know that their beautiful little peanut had little tangible input in the shoe tying process, besides staying still long enough for dada to do it, which is no small amount of effort for any three year old.

This is how God works for and with us. He is ever mindful of our weaknesses, our lack of understanding, and our general desire to "be good", but we just don't know how. So, rather than letting dada tie our shoes, we are trying glue, staples, and maybe an occasional clump of schnauzer poop that we found on our morning walk which mama became inexplicably so worked up about, after all it did seem to be holding the laces together for a bit. In a word, God knows what we are about as smart as a salad bar, but we have a lot of potential, and that's why God loves us.

That's a really tough issue with most of us, to be acceptable to God, let alone loveable to Him. But we forget that we were Created by Him. So if we are unacceptable to our Creator, then God would be a poor craftsman.

Our God is perfect. We are merely incomplete, works in progress. When He is finished he will pull back the curtain and reveal His work.

The Man who tore the Curtain

In Memoriam of Scott Martin

Our Part

The Beauty of Conspiracy

During the Nuremberg trials, top Nazi officials were tried for crimes against humanity. It was the first time that charges such as these were ever leveled against the leaders of a defeated enemy. It was also the first time that there was a semblance of a "world court" to hold anyone accountable for acts of conspiracy relating to the violation of human rights. This should be considered a victory for the entire human race.

These despots and their underlings had the audacity to claim that they were simply "following orders", or that they tried to tell "them", the others, that they were doing the wrong things. Yet, at no time did any one of these conspirators say, "I am them". Instead they chose to hide behind the "beauty of conspiracy", the lack of personal accountability for your own actions.

Somehow when we act in a group, a gang, or a mob, our own actions can appear to be justified. We do things that we, as individuals, would never consider let alone act upon. Once the mob begins to chant "Crucify him! Crucify him!" it ssuddenly seems not only acceptable but necessary. We want to be on the side of the mob. 

Do you remember the scene in Frankenstein, when the townsfolk were marching through the streets on their way to Castle Frankenstein to kill the monster with torches and pitchforks in hand? It didn't start out with a group of concerned people whom after careful deliberation came to a consensus, then took reasonable actions to ensure that their families were safe. No, it started out with a few individuals acting out of fear and spreading that fear until the gentle farmfolk of the community were whipped up into a bloodthirsty mob chanting, "Kill, Kill, Kill the monster!"

This was much the same mentality at work among the Nazis, and that very same mob mentality spread to an entire nation. The vestiges of these murderers still linger with us today. Some people idolize the perpetrators of these crimes, still clinging to the idiocy of racial purity. In the eyes of God all men, all women, are equal, but we look through human eyes. We see difference, we see "other", and we see with the myopia of the last 10,000 years of civilization that here is "us" and over there is "them". Madness, madness, all of it.

We are them. They are us.

The conspiracy that grew around Jesus did not come from a public outcry. It was nurtured in dark rooms filled with an influential few. Those who felt they had something to lose, and they did. They had everything to lose; respect, power, influence, and money Ah, yes money. As Paul would write many years later,

“But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” – 1 Tim 6:9-11

Indeed, they were positive that their acts of "self-preservation" were justified by their concern for the Temple, their people, and their traditions. None of these would be spared. Not a one. Within a generation the Temple was razed to the ground by the Romans. The people lived on, but were scattered to the farthest reaches of the known world, and would never inhabit a unified nation again until 1948. All that remains of the second Temple to this day is the Wailing Wall.

Jews still flock to this ruin in search of the God who seemed to have abandon them. But, the Jews remain the chosen people of God. They always have been and always will be. 

We might look at their history and say, “How could they be favored by God? Look at what happened to them through the Holocaust, the Roman occupation, the Babylonian exile, the Diaspora, and today they are surrounded on all sides by enemies chanting, "Kill, Kill, Kill the monster!" except it comes out as, “Death to Israel!”

They say revolutions eat their own children, but it seems that conspiracy consumes it young, as well. That’s what ends up on the menu when man starts acting out of fear, ignorance, and greed. The Jews couldn't recognize the very God who had lead them out of bondage, fed them in the desert, lead them into the Promised Land, and told them He was coming. No, their God had been replaced long ago by vain ritual, an “all powerful” Caesar, and the Beauty of Conspiracy. Everybody bow down and pray to the idols of man.

A devout Jew praying at the Wailing Wall

There he is today, the beloved of God, the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshiping by a wall, a wall, built by the hands of men. Sure, he isn't praying to the wall itself, but he still can’t recall that God does not reside in buildings of stone or timber. Split the timber and He is there, crush the stone and He is there. He is everywhere, cutting through the stench of a 2,000 year old conspiracy that still hangs in the air. The Temple is gone, but God has not abandoned His people. He does not break promises, not a single one. Paul reassures him, them, and all of us, in the epistle to the Romans;

"In view of all this, what can we say? If God is for us, who can be against us?  Certainly not God, who did not even keep back his own Son, but offered him for us all! He gave us his Son—will he not also freely give us all things?  Who will accuse God's chosen people? God himself declares them not guilty!  Who, then, will condemn them? Not Christ Jesus, who died, or rather, who was raised to life and is at the right side of God, pleading with him for us!  Who, then, can separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble do it, or hardship or persecution or hunger or poverty or danger or death?"  – Romans 8:31-35

We are them. They are us.

Now, that is a Beautiful Conspiracy! Amen. Praise God!

We will all go up together.

Not a single seed will be lost!

Amen.