Where I’ve Come in my Football Journey (eCrozier #231)

On September 12, 2014, in culture, by bishopbenhase

Gentlemen, this is an oblong spheroid made of pigskin. It’s called a football.
– allegedly the first words Coach Knute Rockne said to his players at Notre Dame

I’ve had a lifetime relationship with football. Mine was a football coach’s family. One of my earliest memories is sitting next to my father in our living room watching game film and helping him grade his player’s performance from last week’s game and then breaking down film trying to figure out how to defeat next week’s opponent. I can’t remember a fall Friday night of my childhood that did not involve football. I played the game myself from grade school through college.

Being around and playing the game of football has taught me good things: how to win humbly and lose graciously (sportsmanship) and how to work with others toward a common goal (teamwork). It also allowed me through the sweat and struggle and sometimes ice and mud to have the sheer joy of playing a game I loved. Nothing brought out more primal joy in me than a clean, hard hit on the opposing team’s running back, especially when he was actually carrying the football.

I’m now, however, reassessing my love of football. I remain thankful for what I learned from the game and for the fun playing it, but it no longer has that primal joy for me. Maybe it’s my age and the creaky knees and back issues that X-rays show are a result of playing. I was concussed twice. Back then, you just got your “bell rung” and you went back in the game. But now, we know more about the long-term corrosive effects on players, particularly those who played longer and at a much higher level than I ever did.

And maybe it’s also the commercialization of the sport even down to youth leagues where apparel companies bid for dominance. It’s become a business to many. If schools, leagues, associations, and sponsors get rich off the player’s skills, then how can anyone deny them financial compensation? After all, it’s a business where everyone else makes money except those who play the game. It’s downright un-American to deny someone payment for their toil, especially if that someone, because of what they do, may need their orthopedist on speed dial for the rest of their lives.

But I think the real reason my primal joy of football is leaving me is that I’m just not as violent as I once was. Or maybe I’m still so inclined, but since I’m not as physically capable of it anymore, I don’t get the joy out of it I once did. While players might not intend to permanently hurt an opposing player, they do want to hurt them enough so the opposition will give ground and allow their team to win. And I don’t know whether football players are more violent off the field than everyone else. Recent and persistent news reports, though, should give us all concern about football’s repetitive violent collisions and its derivative impact on players’ neural and emotional health.

I don’t offer this eCrozier in my teaching role as a bishop. It’s adiaphora. If you still love football, then good for you. It’s merely where I’ve come to in my football journey.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Michael Brown, My Son, & Racial Privilege (eCrozier #228)

On August 22, 2014, in culture, racism, by bishopbenhase

Recently I was talking with a young woman when a man about my age joined our conversation. When he learned the young woman was a 21 year-old college student, he said: “Ah, to be free, white, and 21!” I cringed. The young woman was probably too young to know of that saying. I wasn’t. It was the declaration of privilege by which I came of age. It meant that if you were those three things, then nothing could stop you. You had it made. You had all the privilege one needed in America.

Now the man who said this was well-educated, clearly a professional, and should’ve been aware of the import of his words. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, just assuming he was trying nervously to break the ice of our conversation. Words, however, have power. By repeating a saying of our common, racist past, he was unwittingly (I hope he was) perpetuating the sinful assumptions of one race’s privilege over another. It seems our racist past isn’t past. It’s still playing in our brain’s recording studio, occasionally spilling out when the mute button isn’t functioning right.

When he left I had to explain to the young woman the context and background of that old saying. She looked at me as if I were an anthropologist explaining the odd cultural practices of an obscure tribe from a distant land. And maybe that’s a good metaphor. My white tribe in this culture has assumed our privileges without realizing them. When my two sons were teenagers, I never had to talk to them about how to appease the police when walking down the street or driving a car. It never would’ve occurred to me then to think that I might have to do so. Not so with black fathers.

My oldest son got arrested for “stealing” two donuts from a grocery store when he was 18 years old. He’d gone to the store with his best friend, Jose, to shop for our family. While in the store, they did as we had done when they were children. They got two donuts out of the display case and ate them, intending to pay for the consumed donuts when they checked out, as we did when they were youngsters. They bought our groceries with our debit card, but forgot to pay for the two donuts. Security guards detained them as they left the store and the police arrived within minutes. My son, God love him, got a little mouthy and testy with the police claiming it was clearly his mistake: He simply forgot about the two donuts. After all, he’d just bought over $90 in groceries, so he’d pay for the two donuts now. The store manager would have none of it. The police arrested them. If his friend hadn’t looked like a “Jose,” my hunch is his white privilege would’ve been enough. They never would’ve been monitored as potential thieves while they walked the aisles of the grocery store that day.

And that brings us to Michael Brown’s horrific death in Missouri, which has dominated the recent news. The box of cigars he carried could’ve been two donuts. And maybe Michael Brown got a little mouthy and testy with the police officer? Or maybe he didn’t? But six bullets later he was dead in the street. Six bullets! Count each pull of the trigger. My son just celebrated his 27th birthday. I wonder if Michael Brown had been “free, white, and 21,” would he still be alive today? Our racial history says that’s highly likely.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

The Widow Atwater, Karma, and the Gospel of Jesus (eCrozier #227)

On June 27, 2014, in culture, gospel, politics, by bishopbenhase

Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ – Matthew 26:52

The above quote from Jesus might seem to confirm what adherents to a different religious tradition call karma. As I understand it, karma implies that if you engage in a certain behavior, then that same behavior will come back upon you, or maybe stated more simply: “what goes around, comes around.” Jesus puts it in a more complete way in Luke 6:37-38: ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you…for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.’

Such a “measure,” some say, was recently given back. According to a report this week in the Charleston, SC City Paper: “The day before the June 24 Republican primary runoff, S.C. superintendent of education candidate Sally Atwater is facing a lawsuit that claims she assaulted a special needs student in her elementary school classroom. The lawsuit was filed in a Colleton County court on June 19, nine days after Atwater took a close second in the Republican primary and five days before she faces Molly Spearman in a runoff. In a written statement, Atwater campaign spokesman Luke Byars called the lawsuit ‘baseless and frivolous’ and ‘one of the lowest political hit jobs I have witnessed in 25 years of South Carolina politics’.”

You may know that Ms. Atwater is the widow of the late Lee Atwater, who as a political operative engaged in even meaner “political hit jobs.” To his eternal credit, as he was dying of cancer, he lamented his vicious behavior and sought forgiveness. Now, his widow seems to have been on the receiving end of an “Atwater-type” political attack. If so, it appears to have worked as Ms. Atwater did lose the election. So now some people are exercising their usual, gleeful schadenfreude claiming Ms. Atwater got “karmic payback” for her late husband’s onerous behavior. Other people are saying: “when you live by the sword of political hit jobs, then you’ll die by them as well.” You see, they’re even quoting Jesus to back up their version of wisdom to live by.

But that “wisdom” assumes Jesus was endorsing such outcomes as good things. He wasn’t. He was merely observing how the world works when we don’t live by the Godly virtues of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. Jesus says that when we judge and condemn others, when we don’t forgive, we set lose a pattern of behavior that’ll always come back upon us. But, Jesus says, when we put away our sword of condemnation, when we don’t place ourselves on His judgment seat, when we incarnate forgiveness in our lives, then we set loose a different spiritual pattern in the world, a pattern that abounds in grace and infects with mercy, which we’ll receive back in full measure beginning now and forever. That’s the Gospel truth and not mere karma.

+Scott

The eCrozier will be on holiday for six weeks or so in the hot, humid jungles of Mozambique. The eCrozier will resume sometime in August.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

“Choosy Moms Choose Jesus” (eCrozier #221)

On May 16, 2014, in culture, grace, by bishopbenhase

Late last Sunday evening as I was driving home, I came across the above message on a church sign somewhere in southeast Georgia. It was dark and late and I wasn’t sure what I had read, so I stopped my car, turned around, and went back to be sure. Yep. Now, my hunch is that the person who came up with this message, however unaware, was using an old marketing strategy: Be timely and draw on the comfortably familiar to promote your message. It was, after all, Mother’s Day and the message related emotionally to a successful ad campaign for a peanut butter brand a few years back. Those two ingredients make the message work. Except. It’s horrible theology.

The idea that you or I or anybody else chooses Jesus is arrogant and gives us way more credit than we deserve. Such a claim presumes that a person has done her market research. She has tested all the other possible saviors or lords or gods out there, weighed their strengths and weaknesses in providing the value she desired for her and her family, and then she chose Jesus, because, of course, she only wants the very best for herself and her family. Jesus then becomes the choice she makes to maximize her return as the choosy consumer of salvation that she is. Like I said, arrogance.

Jesus says in John 15:16 that we didn’t choose him, he chose us. It’s arrogant for us to surmise anything else. As a disciple, I did none of the market research described above. I didn’t survey the salvation-market landscape and then conclude Jesus was the highest value alternative among the choices. What actually occurred was quite different. Jesus worked his way past my pride, my arrogance, my presumption that I knew best about my life, and met me in the truthfulness of my pathetic, sinful weakness. His grace on the cross gave me something I had no power in myself to give myself, namely, forgiveness of my sins. I didn’t choose God’s forgiveness. God forgave me in spite of myself.

Martin Luther, the great western reformer of the Christian faith, told the story of a man he heard going around bragging that he had chosen to accept Jesus as his personal savior. Luther purportedly went up to the man and said: “If I gave you a bag of gold coins, would you go around telling everyone how smart and clever you were to accept such a gift? Of course, you wouldn’t. You would just be grateful. You didn’t deserve the gift of the gold coins. All you did was accept it. So, stop with the bragging.”

Now, you may think I’m making more of a church sign than I ought. That’s fair enough. The person who came up with that sign’s message, I presume, only desired to be clever for the sake of our faith. Yet, I think such a sign manifests a larger cultural distortion of the Christian faith that syncretizes Christianity with modern capitalist presumptions about human behavior. It reflects the commodification of Christianity as just another transactional choice we make. But the Christian faith isn’t my own construction. In ways I may never fully understand, God in Jesus has laid hold of my life and has compelled me into a story I had no hand in writing. Any other claim is clearly arrogant.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Dr.King and the Silence of Race (eCrozier #215)

On April 4, 2014, in culture, MLK, racism, by bishopbenhase

My German ancestors were carpenters and brick masons. They arrived in the Over the Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati in 1872. By the time my grandfather was born in 1898, German was no longer spoken in the family home. They were thoroughly Americanized. My grandfather worked on the line for General Motors assembling cars.

One of my earliest memories of him was on August 28, 1963, when I was six years old. My parents had dropped me off at my grandfather’s house while they ran a few errands. I spent the day with him. I remember him giving me a booklet to read. I recall vividly sitting on the back stoop of his house and looking at the wild pictures in the booklet: men dressed in white sheets, burning crosses, and the like. My folks pulled into the driveway and saw what was in my hands. My father and grandfather exchanged loud, angry words and I was placed in the car’s back seat and we drove off. The whole incident was never talked about in my family.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned that my grandfather was a member of the Klan and that day, August 28, 1963 was the day of the March on Washington when Dr. King delivered one of the most important speeches in our nation’s history. I share this with you because my story is no different than millions of other white people. This is part of our cultural DNA. It’s America’s original sin passed on to each generation.

Years ago I was working as a consultant with a large parish. I asked the parish leaders to take a roll of newsprint and stretch it horizontally across the wall of the parish hall. On one end I wrote the date of the parish’s founding in the 18th Century and on the other end I put the word “today.” I then asked them to fill in their history. Many knew details of what happened centuries ago. They even listed a Revolutionary War hero buried in their parish cemetery. When they finished, I noticed there was a decade gap in the 1960s. Many in the room were members of the parish then. Why was it, I asked, that they had no history to record about that time? There was stone silence.

During a break, an older member took me aside and said in a hushed tone: “That was when Father [Name] was rector. He was an alcoholic. We don’t like to talk about that time in our history. It was unpleasant for everyone. We’d just as soon forget it.” I felt like sending them all en masse to an AL-ANON meeting. They were in total denial and in co-dependent silence about how that period in their history had continued to adversely affect their common life even to the present day.

America is like a large alcoholic family when it comes to race. We’re complicit with one another in our silence, or when we do talk, we talk past one another and don’t listen. To preserve the family peace, we just don’t talk about it when it begins to hurt, or when it hits a little too close to home. 46 years ago today Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. was martyred because he insisted America face this peculiar and particular original sin in our national life. As Mark Twain famously said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” We, as a people, are still a work in progress with a lot of unfinished work left to do.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

The Branch Davidians, Coercion, and our Evangelistic Witness (eCrozier #214)

On March 28, 2014, in culture, Evangelistic Witness, gospel, grace, Uncategorized, by bishopbenhase

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a significant piece in a recent New Yorker called Sacred and Profane: How Not To Negotiate with Believers. In it he describes how U.S. government negotiators totally botched ending the armed standoff with the Branch Davidian group nearly 21 years ago in Waco, Texas. You may remember that the Branch Davidians are an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, one that’s even more apocalyptic and millennialist in their theology than the parent church. The standoff ended in tragedy with over 70 people, including 25 children, consumed in a fire caused when 400 canisters of CS gas shot into the compound came into contact with oil lanterns.

I don’t wish debate the U.S. government’s actions or whether they were right to have laid siege to the Mt Carmel compound. That’s for another time. What I find most interesting here is how one group, in this case the FBI, can so completely misunderstand another group like the Branch Davidians. The FBI assumed they were dealing with a typical hostage negotiation, such as when a robber holds hostages in a failed bank heist. So, “we’ll send in some food if you let four of the hostages go,” was the script for how the FBI approached this case. But they were dealing with people who had strong religious beliefs. The Branch Davidians held convictions that made complete sense to them, but they could only be understood as rational within the context of their theology. The FBI had a different rationality and they profoundly and tragically misinterpreted the deep beliefs the Branch Davidians held.

The U.S. government has made similar repeated failures throughout recent history, especially in its dealings with Muslim religion and culture. U.S. government rationality assumes that all grievances, threats, or concerns are based solely on social, political, or economic desires and therefore can be negotiated. But people who hold deep religious beliefs won’t negotiate them away no matter what “deal” they’re offered.

As we enter even further into a post-Christian, polyreligious culture, we followers of Jesus would do well to learn this. This doesn’t mean that all religious beliefs are equally true. Everyone can have her/his own religious beliefs, but not everyone can have her/his own truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. We should never shrink back from that faith conviction. And yet, how we stand with that conviction in the midst of wildly different religious beliefs matters. It matters, and this may come as a surprise to some people, for how effective we will be in our evangelistic witness to other people.

We’ll never convince those who have different religious beliefs about the truth of our witness through the barrel of a gun, the coercion of political power, or by majority legislation mandating or forbidding certain behavior. Those won’t lead people to change their religious convictions. The Crusades of the Middle Ages, the Puritan’s coercive laws in early America, and the more recent efforts in some jurisdictions to ban Sharia Law all failed to change the target population’s beliefs. The truth we bear and are also called to share can only be conveyed through sacrificial love, grace, and mercy. After all, that’s how Jesus embodied eternal truth, so it ought to be how we do it as well.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

“Good guys” are good guys until they aren’t (eCrozier #210)

On February 28, 2014, in anthropology, culture, by bishopbenhase

Gun free zones that are created by well-meaning laws are gun-free to the good guys only. The bad part of our society does not care. – A Georgia State Representative

The thought behind the above statement exhibits a binary anthropology. Anthropology is simply the study of human beings and our behavior. Being clear on our anthropology is a necessary first step so we can have theological clarity. A “high” anthropology would assume that people are always good. A “low” anthropology would assume just the opposite: that people are always bad. The above quote is binary, separating people into two camps: the good guys who are always good and the bad guys who are always bad.

Of course, as the Church, we should learn our anthropology from Jesus, who knows us from the inside out (John 2:25) and who forgave those who crucified him because they were ignorant of what they were doing (Luke 23:34). In his parables, Jesus also commends our human capacity for virtuous behavior (e.g., The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, etc.). So, Jesus has a nuanced anthropology. On one hand, he calls us to live by the divine virtues of the Sermon on the Mount. On the other hand, he recognizes how quickly we all are to cast the first stone (John 8), show contempt for another person (Luke 18), or leave the one we love to face death alone (John 18).

Jesus teaches us that we’re all mixed bags, capable of great courage one minute and complete cowardice the next. Humanity, at least as the Bible shows us, can’t be neatly bifurcated into good guys and bad guys, human sin being what human sin is. Every biblical figure, except Jesus, proves this truth. Good guys are only good guys until they aren’t. All people “fall,” biblically speaking, into that category many times during their lives. It does us no good to adopt a “mythic anthropology” gleaned from TV shows, movies, and other media where good guys can do no wrong and bad guys are always bad. From the perspective of the Bible then, sensible laws would attend themselves to the anthropology of Jesus, recognizing the need to account for our mixed bag nature.

Almost all of the mass shootings at schools and houses of worship over the last 20 years or so have been perpetrated by people who didn’t have criminal records and who obtained their guns legally. In other words, they were good guys until they weren’t. Our laws pertaining to where people can carry guns should recognize both the right for people to own guns as well as the right people have not to be killed by them. Preventing the presence of guns from public places like schools and houses of worship acknowledges the truth of a nuanced anthropology, the kind the Bible teaches us.

We would all do well to adopt such a nuanced anthropology because it would keep us clear-headed and honest about what we can expect from ourselves and our fellow sinners. Laws alone can’t solve the “original” problem of human sin. Or, as James Madison put it from another angle: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Laws, however, can sometimes deter what some might call a “good guy” from doing a bad thing. All good guys are only good guys until they aren’t.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Special Valentine’s Day Edition (eCrozier #208)

On February 14, 2014, in culture, love, by bishopbenhase

We use the word “love” to describe our relationship to many things – everything from ice cream to a car to another human being. But can we really love a thing? Does love require another living being as the subject of our love? These are the questions that Spike Jonze explores in his recent movie, Her, where a man falls in love with a Siri-like computer intelligence. There’s a pathetic quality to this where the filmgoer has to wonder whether the character is at all capable of having a loving, human relationship, or can he only love that which is programmed to cater to his proclivities, whims, and desires?

Love has often been defined as something we fall into. Once cupid’s arrow gets us, we’re goners. And since love is something we fall into, we assume that there’s nothing we can do about it. After all, the image of falling is an image of being out of control. There’s some truth in this. Love isn’t simply a matter of rational will that can be reduced to a rational choice. Love is full of emotion with wildly dancing neurons in our subconscious. In order for it to be powerful and true, love has to have an irrational quality to it. Few would actually choose to love if it were reduced to only a rational choice. But if love is going to last, it has to be more than the falling variety, because if love is only something we fall into, then we just as easily can fall out of love. No effort needed. All we have to do is fall. Lasting love is holistic. It requires our emotions and passions, but it also necessitates our intellects and wills.

The way our culture has come to define love shortchanges the Gospel definition embodied by Jesus, the kind that can’t be summed up by a cute verse on a Hallmark card or incarnated in a box of chocolates. Jesus shows us that while love does involve our passions, it also has to be an act of will on our part. We must decide that come what may, cost what it will, we’re going to love the other. When we reduce love to only our sentiments and feelings, then it will only be superficial and fleeting. Such fleeting superficiality does often generate passion, but it can never generate lasting love.

Love becomes the kind of love embodied by Jesus only when it’s put it into action. As long as we accept the cultural definition of love that limits it to falling, then we won’t see any reason to make love tangible in the sharing and sacrificial way Jesus has shown us. So much of human love is wrapped up in our misguided need for dominating power and total control as well as our selfish desire for complete affection and undivided attention. Of course, love can be much more healthy and whole than that, and thus truer to the heart of Christ, but so often it isn’t, sin being what sin is with our messy humanity.

In looking at Jesus for a definition of love, we must be careful not to put our own definition of love on his lips or try to define love apart from Jesus’ cross; for it’s the cross that defines love for Christians. Jesus says: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34b). He doesn’t say: “Do as I say, not as I do,” rather he completes the circle by saying that we are to love as he loves us. That leads St Paul to say: “Love does not insist on its own way…It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13)

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

New Year’s Resolutions and God’s Medicine for Sinful Saints (eCrozier #202)

On January 3, 2014, in Community, culture, gospel, grace, by bishopbenhase

I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions because I’ve never been able to keep any of those ones I’ve made. All they do is make me feel bad when I fail once again to do what I said I was going to do or what I think I should be doing. This begins a downward spiral that leads me to reach the conclusion that I’m a pretty sorry human being if I can’t even keep one, small resolution. About all these failed resolutions do for me is to prove the Gospel truth that I’m a sinner with inconsistent resolve. Not a news flash. No need for film at 11 p.m. I guess I could resolve never to make another New Year’s resolution, but then that would be a resolution and I’d probably not keep that one either.

Our lack of resolve (I assume you share it to some extent) is just one sign of our sinful human nature. And you and I live in a time where any sin gets amplified by the every present media, social and otherwise, as if human sin were somehow breaking news. Whether it be Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty whose ignorant remarks about women and race have been written about ad nauseam or New Hampshire state Representative David Campbell who recently plowed down a group of ducks that he said didn’t move out of the way fast enough in front of his BMW, our response seems to be to fly into a morally superior outrage and utter something to the effect of “how dare he!”

This isn’t to suggest that we should support either Mr. Robertson’s or Mr. Campbell’s remarks or actions, but it’s to suggest that maybe we should check out the beam in our own eye a bit more often, especially if we’re going to base our outrage on our Christian faith. You see, central to the Christian faith is the Good News of Jesus, and not the good behavior of Christians. The Good News is while we remain sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). But so much of Christianity today is less about that Good News and more about how Christians, especially prominent public ones, should be living blameless lives.

I think this is one of the reasons some people would just as soon stay home on Sundays and not join the Church for worship. Why would anyone want to come to a place of worship where they have no expectation of receiving Good News? They may suspect that if they do come for worship, then they’ll be judged because their lives don’t measure up. This is akin to the cartoon of Charlie Brown preparing to kick the football only to have Lucy yank it away at the last second. Grace is dangled for them like the football in front of Charlie Brown, but as they approach it, it’s swiftly removed by an insistence on moral performance. The Church then becomes less a community where sinners receive mercy and more a community where those gathered can pharisaicly thank God that they’re not like other people who clearly must be worse sinners than they are (see Luke 18:11).

Yes, the Church is, as the old saying goes, both a hospital for sinners and an academy for saints. But sinful saints are made only through the medicine of God’s grace and never through the performance evaluation of one another. In Jesus’ cross, we sinners are given the “balm” in Gilead, not the “bomb” of Gilead. If you’re going to make a New Year’s resolution, resolve to ask for God’s help in being quicker to show mercy, but slower to pronounce judgment on those who don’t measure up to your performance standard.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Not The Way It’s Supposed To Be: Seven Children Killed Each Day (eCrozier #195)

On October 25, 2013, in culture, sin, by bishopbenhase

After yet another school shooting at Sparks Middle School in Nevada, if it hasn’t become painfully clear to us by now, it should: We have an epidemic of gun violence in this country that’s worse than in all other democratic nations combined. Seven children die every day in this country from gun violence. Meanwhile, we haven’t taken any direct action to stop this epidemic. If seven children were dying each day from a deadly virus, we’d be pouring all our energy and effort into finding a cure. But yet somehow we’ve resigned ourselves and passively accepted these dead children as how our common life is supposed to be. News flash: This isn’t how God intends for us to live!

Life is supposed to be different than this and we’ve all contributed to making our common life incongruent with God’s desire. It matters not how small or great our part has been. Let me list some examples of what I mean: People aren’t supposed to throw trash out of car windows. Middle schoolers aren’t supposed to hand out birthday party invitations in a way designed to let the uninvited know they’ve not been invited. Sewanee students aren’t supposed to resent Southwestern North Dakota State A & M students for becoming Phi Beta Kappas when they didn’t. Married persons aren’t supposed to cheat on their spouses regardless of their current level of self-esteem. Politicians aren’t supposed to lie to us just because they know that’s what we want to hear. Industrial waste isn’t supposed to be dumped into the Savannah River. And children aren’t supposed to be killed by gun violence.

Life is supposed to be different than it is. But do we really believe that? I just offered a list of how life is supposed to be different than it is, but upon reading the items listed, I imagine some folks just said: “well, that’s just the way it is. Besides some things you listed aren’t really all that bad.” I agree that some items I listed are worse than others, but that’s not the point. The point is this: We’ve become desensitized to the reality that every one of these things I listed is a real sin against God, because each in its own way demeans, vandalizes, perverts, pollutes, or corrupts God’s desire for God’s creatures.

Jesus on the Cross is The Word from God that we humans have blown it; that we’ve messed up our lives and this earth sufficiently enough that we need a Savior to bail us out. Before the cross we humans could pretend that things weren’t all that bad. A few nips here, a few tucks there, and presto, just like with plastic surgery, everything would look good as new. The cross, however, lets us know that from God’s perspective we sinners just can’t fix ourselves. And, of course, to accept what I’ve written up until now, one has to first accept that there’s a God who knows how life is supposed to be.

If anyone is surprised or alarmed by my writing so particularly about sin and how life is supposed to be, then it’s only because we live in a time when so many people have forgotten that God can actually be outraged by our sin. But even so, we shouldn’t lose heart for I’ve written nothing but good news: Jesus shows us that how our lives are now isn’t how God desires us to live. God help us if we think that seven children dying every day from gun violence is actually what God desires. Now let’s do something about it.

+Scott

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

« Previous Entries Next Entries »
Go To Top »