The eCrozier

 Daily prayers and religious reading and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.  – C.S. Lewis

 C.S. Lewis, like with most of his observations about God and human nature, was right.

We do “have to be continually reminded of what we believe,” because we human beings are not nearly as clever or smart as we would hope. So, it is necessary for us to have the daily reinforcement of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels, what the Church proclaims to be true in the Creeds, and the common prayer of the saints on earth and in heaven. Without such regular reintegration of the faith, we may not forget entirely who we are in Christ, but we may get distracted or even deceived (see John 10).

Those who wish to influence us and other members of the public are counting on our vulnerability to distraction and deception. For example, in April, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona said: “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.” But a fact check of the services of Planned Parenthood determined that only 3% of their services are abortion related. Later his staff issued this clarification: The senator’s remark “was not intended to be a factual statement but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions.” If it “was not intended to be a factual statement,” then why did he say it? I share Senator Kyl’s revulsion for abortion, but facts cannot be made up. Mark Twain famously said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Senator Kyl is by no means alone in this and it is almost unfair to single him out because this is becoming commonplace. Public figures of all persuasions are doing this, but, of course, that does not make it right just because so many are. Visit the Pulitzer Prize winning organization, Politifact, and you can see that Senator Kyl is in good, or bad, company, as the case may be. Many people seem to have adopted Stephen Colbert’s satirical standard of truth, which he calls “truthiness.” He defines this as “something that sounds true to me so it must be.”

It seems a new post-modern paradigm has arrived that proclaims truth as: (1) Whatever someone says passionately enough; and, (2) Whatever enough people want to believe. For example, just because some people don’t want to believe that human activity is contributing significantly to climate change and that this is disastrous for the earth, does not mean it is not true. The overwhelming scientific evidence says it is true.

Truth, however, cannot be so mutable and pliable that it can be changed or bended to our will and desires. Truth exists beyond our biases and prejudices. The danger imbedded in our present cultural ethos around truth is that because many are playing so fast and loose with the truth, people will just come to accept such practice as normative. “Everyone does it,” will become a common justification. But where will such a stance toward truth leave us as a people?

+Scott

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mt 22:21)

As Jesus holds the coin, he asks the Pharisees and Herodians about what the coin represents. In our English translation Jesus asks: “whose head is this, and whose title?” But the Greek word translated here as “head” is eikon, which literally means “image.” “Whose image is that on the coin?” And Jesus implies another question: “what power is represented by that image?” They all knew it represented the power of the Emperor and his Empire. The coin imaged the Emperor and the power of Rome stood behind it. That gave the coin its currency. The same is true today. Nations issuing money stand behind their money and give it currency. Jesus is using this interaction to teach his listeners about the nature of images and their power over our lives.

We also find the word “image” in the Genesis creation story where God creates humanity in the “image of God.” This then takes what Jesus says to a higher level. Jesus is saying: “The Emperor may have temporal, earthly power; power enough to cause his image to be imprinted on coins. But you’re imprinted with an eternal image: The image of God. The Emperor’s power is finite, but God’s power is infinite. You belong to God.”

This truth is clearly expressed when someone dies and we celebrate the resurrection. In our burial liturgy we begin with a passage from Romans: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s possession” (14:7-8).

Western culture has inculcated in us the idea that we belong to no one but ourselves; that as William Ernest Henley wrote: “It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” This ethos has pushed God further away from the center of our being. It has corrupted and tarnished the image of God indelibly imprinted on our souls. As our image of ourselves has become bloated with our own glory, the image of God imprinted on humanity has become expendable and ignorable. We have created our own god; a god that tolerates our desires and greed; a god who baptizes our thirst for violence; a god, in the end, created in our own image. But it’s not the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

When we humans create a god, it’s always a puny god who doesn’t require much from us. This sort of puny god only demands that we say “thank you” occasionally while throwing a few bucks in the offering plate. This puny god doesn’t require us to make any sacrifices that would upset our lifestyles or call into question our ravenous appetites. But because this god is so puny, it can only love us in superficial, sentimental ways. This isn’t a god who would go to the cross for our sins. This is a god that can’t love us through the grave to eternal life. Only the God who created us in his image and who more wonderfully redeemed us in Jesus Christ has the power to do that.

+Scott

Whether we enjoy it or not, most of us are surrounded by technological and economic abundance. Our culture has many ways to stimulate our appetites for the goods and services made available to those who can afford them. And it’s not just that we have an appetite for all this abundance, we feel it’s our right to have it. Those who want lower taxes still demand high quality education, services, and amenities in their communities They just don’t want it to come out of their paychecks. They claim the right to all that supports their needs and desires, but they often are blind to the needs of others.

In such a world, it’s only a small step from claims to certain rights to the violent rhetoric of some current political groups, who claim, with some logic, that in our materialistic society only the language of violence (see recent calls for “2^nd Amendment solutions” to our problems) speaks loud enough to demand the attention of others. The vineyard tenants of Jesus’ parable (Matthew 21:33ff) are not all that remote from us; their acts of violence against the owner’s servants and son are simply extreme examples of a motto that weaves its way through our society:  “What’s mine?”

The judgment proclaimed in the parable is easy for us to apply to someone else.  We can say that their claims are too extreme, illogical, or greedy, while our claims are legitimate, reasonable, and just. We ask only our due while they demand too much. It’s easy to see where such colliding claims lead. They lead to mutual destruction in some form or another. When our political system becomes besieged by such colliding claims, as it is now, it breaks down, as does our environment, overwhelmed with pollutants.

The Gospel of Jesus is a stark alternative to this cycle of claim and counterclaim. This doesn’t mean we all begin equally in life or that there’s no need for social change to end the extremes of wealth and poverty. It means that we’re freed from the blind claim of unreasonable rights. We’re freed from this desire because God’s grace is all we truly need. If we see God as the source of all that we have and all that we are, then we will see others as neighbors to be loved rather than as enemies to be overcome; as people loved by God and not as competitors for more things. God’s love and grace in our lives is the necessary pre-condition for our ability to see the world with eyes that don’t demand “our rights” and “our way” at the expense of others (see 1 Corinthians 13:4-5).

The abundance that surrounds us isn’t the abundance of things that we use to fill the void in our hearts. What actually surrounds us is the abundance of God’s love that heals our hearts and makes us whole. This love from God enables us to see the world with a clearer vision and less grasping hands. As God’s people, however, we often want to claim the vineyard as our own. But that just indicates how broken we are by our own sin. Still, God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken grain to make bread, crushed grapes to make wine, broken bread and poured wine to make us whole. When our hearts are broken, we come to know our true need. Jesus says, “This is my Body broken for you and my Blood shed for you.”

+Scott

Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, discovered through her research a widening gap in the ratio between boys and girls in East and South Asia. It seems greater access to technology has allowed parents in that part of the world to abort daughters in the womb and keep sons. In those cultures, boys are more highly valued than girls. Over time, this has made it more difficult for men to find wives. Hvistendahl estimates there are 160 million missing women in East and South Asia due to this practice over the years.

This has led to social unrest in many places. The crime rate has also increased in those areas with skewed male-to-female sex ratio, since unmarried men, the data shows, are responsible for more violent crime than married men. Similar sex selection is also happening to a lesser extent in the U.S. due to the growing popularity of in vitro fertilization, which allows parents to choose their child’s sex. Hvistendahl sees a “shift toward consumer eugenics” where parents try to determine prenatally how their child is going to turn out. Those parental choices are now having grave and growing unintended consequences for the world.

This is yet another example of how a greater capacity to have more choices available to us does not necessarily improve our lives or the world. In fact, such choice can have serious unintended consequences as we see in East and South Asia. To be flip, my life is not any better because there are fifty different breakfast cereals from which to choose in the grocery aisle rather than only three. But that vast choice gives me the illusion of greater power and control over my life. The illusion tells me I am the master of all I survey because I have the power to choose from all these cereal options.

There is a powerful scene in the magnificent film, “The Hurt Locker”, where an Iraqi War veteran returns home and accompanies his wife and baby to the grocery store. His wife asks him to go to the cereal aisle to choose a box. He gets there, stares at the choices, and freezes. Not a word is spoken. The camera slowly draws back as he is paralyzed by the choices. Soon he re-enlists in the army to go back to the war because the choices there are so simple and binary: life or death.

I have two sons and a daughter. My daughter (the youngest) graduates from High School tomorrow. I cannot fathom the cultural pressure found elsewhere (and to some extent, here) that would lead parents to abort a child, especially if the rationale is for sex selection. My daughter amazes and astounds me (and yes, occasionally confounds me as well). I want her to have the freedom to choose her way in life. But as she will discover (hopefully sooner rather than later), freedom of choice is culturally conditioned and such choice, while important to human rights, is also a double-edged sword often with unintended consequences. And freedom of choice is not to be confused with the freedom described by St Paul. Christian freedom, as described by St Paul, is the freedom to choose to follow Jesus, come what may, cost what it will. It is the freedom to choose to be a servant; to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus.

+Scott