The Space Between

O God, Creator of heaven and earth:  Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

This day 1980 years ago (i.e. 2013 - 33) was a quiet day in Jerusalem.  After three years of challenge, change and upset most all believed the matter settled.  Jesus had been put to death.

It had been an exciting week.  The preceding Sunday, crowds in town for the Passover celebration had been treated to huge demonstrations of support and love for the teacher called Jesus.  The intervening week had been punctuated with a near riot at the temple, plotting in the councils of the leaders, the usual controversial teaching, manifestations of the supernatural reported both by Jesus' followers as well as more that were reported in at least one contemporary history of the day.  You didn't need network news to get you worked up about all that was going on. 

All that had ended suddenly yesterday with the whisper, "It is finished."  In that moment, things had for a bit, taken a bad turn.  The sky turned black and there was extreme thunder and lightning.  Some people (possibly shaken by the severe weather) reported people long dead showing up and talking about the death that had just happened on Golgotha.  Even in the context of all that had happened the previous week, that had to be weird.  Someone had even vandalized the temple, tearing a particularly heavy temple curtain multiple stories high in half.

Today was a pretty quiet day.  There were a few followers of Jesus here and there, obviously shaken, running from their own shadows and rethinking their career choices.  Most people concerned themselves with their usual Passover Sabbath observations.  Jesus' followers would not even go to his tomb out of respect for the Sabbath.  In any case, the body would keep until Sunday.

In what would later come to be seen as perhaps the single greatest miscalculation in the history of mankind, the current Roman Governor Pilate, ordered the tomb sealed with an official seal and a platoon of troops guard the body.  This was a response to rumors that Jesus' followers would try to steal his body and make people think he'd risen from the dead.  Of course later the guards went running around telling everyone that they fell asleep and when they work up the body was gone.  Odd that was the best they could come up with since that particular story carried the death penalty.

I think there were other guards there too by the way.  They however were actually in the tomb, with the body.  There's a kind of picture of the guards I'm talking about.  It looks like this:

In this picture, the guards are  waiting to do the job of guarding Jesus' body.  This is an approximation of the Ark of the Covenant.  Inside is a sort of scrap book of the intersection between God and his nation Israel.  For one thousand years, most people who knew about this box thought the angels were representations of guards guarding the stuff in the box.  Actually, they were a picture of waiting.  They were waiting for the completion, the filling of the space between.  Notice, they wait on the outside where we all live...but their mission is somehow accomplished on the inside of the tomb, away from all eyes.  Inside...outside...interesting.

Technically, these aren't angels at all.  Whatever the resemblance, these aren't anything like TV angels.  These are terrible and terrifying creatures, here rendered beautifully and simply.  Suffice to say, you don't want to be on the wrong side of whatever they've been sent to do. 

At some point in time before time, I think there was a combination of great sadness, wild anger and infinite determination on the face of God when he commanded these beings, explaining their mission.  In that thoroughly intimidating conversation there was something like this:  "And no one...no one...no one touches or even approaches my son's body.  No one but me."

On the next day of course, everything would change.  The resurrected Jesus would start appearing to a few people, then a few more and eventually to thousands.  His followers who had scattered like a flock of birds from a pack of running dogs stopped running away.  Instead, they followed him to messy deaths, forever putting to death the lie that they carried on as they did for wealth and power.  As a result they spread the life of his truth in a way that changed eternity.  (They were always part of the design exactly like the cherubim...but that's another story.)

Tomorrow's coming but on this day we remember the moment between then and now.  On this day we remember the day the cherubim had been waiting for; the moment the space between was finally, forever and completely closed.   This day is the day of the Father with his Son.

Each of us will watch and live out our own space between.  This is completely true whether we follow Christ diligently, hold him at arm's length or are utterly oblivious to him.  For those that follow Christ, we will slowly and surely come to see the space between filled with something quite complete, beautiful and resurrected that is completely us, completely other and completely new.  Hallelujah.  Tomorrow is almost here.

You Might Have Invented Your Own God If...

I heard a quote yesterday.  I view it as a theological type of "You're probably a Redneck if." 

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  (from Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott; on page 22 of Bird by Bird she attributes this quote to “my priest friend Tom”)

I think this is a wonderful idea...as far as it goes.  However, since there's an underlying thread in my life that pulsates with the idea that "nothing exceeds like excess," I think this idea can be taken in a whole bunch of other directions with equal or even greater relevance.

Here are some candidates:

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image if you imagine that your aspirations for yourself are the same as His aspirations for you.  The corollary:  He's got a lot more in mind for you than your imagination will entertain, or even allow.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image if you imagine that everything that feels right (and maybe confortableto you is actually right.  The corollary:  Everyone is welcome as they are but everyone will be invited and even mightily challenged to change.  You shouldn't look for core theology to change so that you will feel more comfortable. 

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image if your righteous indignation carries with it an unnatural degree of logical justification.  The corollary:  The core concepts of Christianity are the core concepts of Christianity and neither benefit nor mutate based on new translation or interpretation.

Honestly, the potential in this construct is probably endless.  The thing I find sad in this is that all such attempts to cast God into something he isn't will be limited by our respective, individual brokenness...and we have enough of that without playing it back to ourselves dressed in a warped image of God. 

I think the confusion often surfaces here that God's peace is not at all the same thing as peaceful circumstance.  In this life there's no guarantee of "And they all lived happily ever after."  Instead, the promise is more along the lines of "And they all lived abundantly, lovingly and eternally."

I hope this makes you uncomfortable.  It makes me uncomfortable.  But that's OK because the invitation in discomfort is the realization that peace isn't a function of circumstance.  It's a function of Christ's redemption and the unique and beautiful wonder you were spoken to be. 

Advent, What's the Point?

When I was a child, the Christ in Christmas was pretty hard to miss.  We attended a denominational church and I went to a Protestant parochial school so pretty much all I had to do was wake up in the morning to be greeted from all sides by "the reason for the season."

We attended a midnight Christmas Eve service regularly.  I remember that I once burned my fingers on the hot wax that dripped from the candle.  We'd go home afterward and because it was now officially Christmas, I was allowed to open one present that had to be approved my mom. 

Sometime in elementary school, I had to write a report about where Santa Claus came from.  Looking back now and given my Christian school context, that hits me as a brilliant assignment.  I was then and to some extent remain puzzled about how the giving of gifts to those we love became the central focus of Christmas.  I suspect it was Charles Dickens that ratified the idea for us moderns but it had clearly been in play for centuries before. 

The explanation given to me at school and home was that we give gifts to each other because of the gift God gave us of his son.  I remember that connection hitting me as odd and even jarring.  What possible connection was there between my Screaming Meemee rifle/grenade launcher and the 2nd chapter of Luke?  What was the point?

The point was hinted at in the traditional, seasonal entertainment of the day.  Movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Miracle on 34th Street" pointed in the direction of transcendence with a quivering finger.  It was as if they were more than just a little afraid to embrace the idea that a loving and just God might be more than just a deus ex machina plot device.  Even the much older story of "A Christmas Carol" was oblique on the ultimate point.  Still however, these stories recognized something that provided a hope for people in hurt and need.  Hope and faith were somehow understood to be necessary even if their correct target was lost.

I've minimized the name of Christ in the preceding with a bit of hope that you,the reader, who I now address directly in the occasional style of Dickens, will have experienced a bit of the jangling that happens in me when I watch and read these stories of incomplete completion.  The fact that George Bailey comes to recognize his value through revelation is...wonderful.  Not meaning to be a Grinch but I think there's more to redemption than the restoration that happens to George.  Come Monday, George Bailey will still have Potter and Uncle Billy to deal with.  George has discovered that people surely love him.  I hope though that doesn't represent anything like the sum of George's value.  If it does, then all depends on George always being nice and doing the right thing.  Not even Jimmy Stewart can pull that off.

This year I'm experiencing Advent in a form most similar to what I remember in my childhood.  I've been attending morning prayer at an Anglican church as part of the fabric of Christmas observance.  The season of Advent and it's core cause have supplanted morning news in my life.  Tonight I will attend a service that contains only hymn singing and bible reading.  I will attend Christmas Eve prayers tomorrow, anticipating a bit what the Book of Common Prayer, penned about 350 years ago has to say about that day.  Much so far has been aimed in the direction of preparing myself through submission, confession and reflection for the observance of the Epiphany.  This preparation is perhaps the primary point of the Advent season. 

No "naughty and nice" lists have appeared and reindeer are conspicuous by their absence. This I find wildly refreshing.  I also find it an invitation to smile a bit sadly as I respond to greetings of "Happy Holidays" with "Merry Christmas."  At least I'm able to offer the Merry Christmas response these days without first clenching my teeth.

After a half century of life, I find less and less time for the pale substitutes that have invaded our culture, masquerading themselves as "the Christmas Spirit."  They all fall short and leave me wanting for the reality of the one who gave everything imaginable each of us, yea verily, every one.

My prayer for myself this Advent is that I can be an overflowing vessel of the love of Christ and a witness to the reality of the presence of Christ in the lives of those with whom I am present.  And one other thing, I hope desperately as those of us who know Christ shop, watch TV and get over tired with Christmas observances that we start to feel like something very very important might be missing.  I pray that because our lives are the living Advent invitation to those who we meet.  When we are present in Christ and in the season, it is Merry Christmas.  When we are absent to our calling, it is only a well lit, tinsel covered happy holiday.  

Santa Claus the Easter Bunny and Social Justice

Generally, the idea of Santa Claus is said to have had its origin in the life and work of St. Nicholas.  St. Nick it seems did a good many things but none of them had anything to do with reindeer, presents and chimneys.  As I write this, it is the feast day of St. Nicholas.  Probably as a result, I've heard the following factoid regarding St. Nick about a half dozen times in the last couple of days:  "He slapped Arius."  I think Arius probably deserved it (you can Google it and discover why).  In any case though, that clearly doesn't have anything to do with him being kind to Rudolph on Christmas Eve. 

As a society, we've removed a lot of the reason and much of the heart and depth of Christmas.  We've made it about shopping, presents, the "right" gift and of course Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  The Christians among us (me for example) still observe the holiday as the observed birthday of Christ and perhaps even celebrate Advent.  There is an ongoing, much ballyhooed "culture war" that involves whether we as a society will continue to remember the reason we celebrate Christmas or whether we will find the observance (now more than 2000 years old) so offensive that we must avoid mentioning the word Christmas because it contains the religious word Christ.  Although I hate to admit it, this is likely a case where if you have to have the debate, you've already lost the point.

This only applies to the public forum of course.  What we do personally we are free to hold. This is true even when holding to that which is unpopular costs us and even costs us dearly. 

The clearer vision of what's going on with St. Nick and Christmas is found in the Easter Bunny.  In this case, the Christian church deliberately co-opted a long standing pagan tradition.  The problem with the Easter Bunny as opposed to St. Nick is that the "co-opting" had nothing discernible to do with the death and resurrection of Christ.  Thus, once the reason for the holiday is forgotten as a matter of societal practice, the Easter Bunny continues without even an echo of its intent to reinforce the life and work of Christ. Even the faint echo of the original cause is lost, to society at least.

I've saved the most egregious example of this kind of distortion of purpose and intent for last.  The greatest heathen in the pantheon of linguistic blasphemy is this:  social justice.

Note that Christianity survived approximately 1,807 years without benefit of that phrase but somehow during that time, managed to far surpass anything the concept could hope to express.  It was cooked up by the Jesuits sometime around 1840.  During the years before we were all saved by the shiny new word, missionaries carrying the truth and love of Christ, healing and economic aid and every manner of good and sacrifice (sometimes unto death) were sent out.  It was (and always has been - even absent special new words) a holistic Gospel that encompassed both the physical and spiritual well being; exactly as it was when Christ taught and lived it. And even as it still most often is now in the post social justice revelation era in which we find ourselves.

I've known a Jesuit or two and I suspect that if those boys had kept the phrase to themselves, we'd all still be OK.  By OK, I mean we'd have a common understanding of what the goal of a social mission is...And we'd have that sort of clarity of mission because we'd recognize the love of Christ in those that sent us, those that traveled with as and those we eventually served. 

Of course, this being a broken world, there have been many failures and abuses in the carrying forward of Christ's mission, regardless of the language used to describe it.  However, any complete tally of virtue vs. trespass in this regard will result in only one conclusion.  Namely, Christians have been stumbling along in their brokenness for 2000 years trying to live out the love and and care of their namesake.  In that time, God has worked miracles large and small to bring the love of Christ to all mankind in both physical and spiritual realities.  

It's not enough to address physical need but not embrace the broken in your best imitation of Christ's love.  Both are necessary.  Mother Teresa said this:  “Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.”  On that path lies the point.  Social justice is a legal and moral concept.  It is fine as such.  However, person to person, man to God and God to man it ignores the fundamental reason for any virtue of service.  Namely, it ignores the healing, love and wonder of Jesus Christ.  It ignores the reality and hope of redemption and completion implicit in the gift.  The thing is, that kind of giving has to include an element of the self of the giver. 

When I raise this point, I usually get a few different things played back to me:  "Well it's just a word and we all know what it means."  Actually we don't.  It's been co-opted by everyone from Protestants to the Libertarians to the Green Party and virtually every other assembly of humanity that might ever have interest in helping someone else.  

Another playback is:  "It's just good to do something regardless of the reason."  The problem here is that where the presence of man is, there also is his heart.  When the heart of man is involved you don't just do something.  You do it for a reason.  In the kingdom of God, the heart of the individual always trumps the shadows dancing in front of us.

When I told my wife what I was going to write about today she said something to the effect of, "Oh, that's very efficient.  You'll make everyone mad all at once and then you can just have one big apology for everyone."  I have to say, that right there is a wise woman. You don't need to be afraid if you run into me when you're on a social justice mission or errand though.  I don't correct grammar or spelling either any more unless asked and then I try to let it be a gentle thing.

Still though, my aspiration for this Christmas and Easter and always is that the great body of Christ can carry forward the present reality of his love and Spirit.  My prayer is that we can communicate the reality that man doesn't live just by bread, but by the breath, will and love of the God that spoke us.   I pray that I can carry that message in the warp and woof of my soul and my deepest inner being.  And finally I pray that the love and nature of Christ so consumes me that its presence in me is unmistakable, even for those closest to me. 

A Really Really Big Tent

Technically, very technically, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179) is not a saint.  While she hasn't been formally canonized she has been beatified and made a doctor of the church.  I'm told that that amounts to being a saint but isn't quite there.  She does have her own feast day though so that pretty much validates it for me.  She wrote music, had visions and advised high church leadership among a bunch of other stuff.  One source called her a polymath.  That's a great word that I hope you have fun looking up. 

I once saw Johnathan Edwards described as a better Calvinist than Calvin, or at least  a better reasoned one.  He wrote a number of blistering sermons but two of my favorites of his are, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and "On the Future and Just Punishment of the Wicked."  I'll bet he had some great jokes to open his sermons so he could draw everyone in.  I might be wrong be wrong about that though.  He was a leading figure in The First Great Awakening in the United States.  One contemporary said that he delivered his sermons to the bell rope at the back of his church down the center aisle from his pulpit.  The contemporary said that after church, people often expected to see the bell rope charred and smoking from the intensity of his delivery.

Blaise Pascal in his early years was a curious combination of Stephen Hawking and Mick Jagger.  One day, he encountered God and everything changed instantly and profoundly.  It was such a huge thing for him that he wrote it down in a couple places.  One of them was discovered to have been sewn inside his coat after he died.  He died young, probably because he spent his money and health taking care of the desperately ill in Paris.

Joel Osteen has great hair, a TV show a smile that is hard to loathe (I know, I've tried) and is often criticized for not being complete in his delivery of the biblical message.  He also has one of the biggest protestant churches in the known universe and seems to love God.

Robert Schuller built the Crystal Cathedral, the "Hour of Power" TV show and apparently a bunch of fairly unhealthy relationships.  He's suing his old church right now for something like 5 million dollars.  Of course, he's also had Henry Nouwen to the Crystal Cathedral, supported foreign missions and admits from time to time that he doesn't completely "get" God.

Mother Theresa was pretty much the gold standard of Christian reality in the 20th century.  One of he quotes that I really like is to the effect of:  "Killing a child because it is unwanted is a peculiar form of poverty."  She confessed at one point to going a year, while living in poverty, caring for orphans and mentoring her staff, without being sure whether God actually existed.

I could go on like this for a very long time.  I remember just enough of this stuff to be able to Google it endlessly.  (Anybody want to hear the dirt between John Wesley and Zinzendorf?)  However, this sort of bone jarring jerking to and fro from person to personage has a point other than winning a Red Bull off of one of your buddies after a particularly vicious church basketball game.  The point is that the body of Christ covers a lot more ground than can be covered in one person, one church, one generation or even one millennium.  The body of Christ because of the love and grace of Christ is about the biggest tent ever conceived.  How big is it?  Damn big.

Apparently it's a lot bigger than our memories or our tastes.  I hear people complain about Osteen; I hear people dis Edwards; I hear people dis all Catholics that ever lived.  Confession:  I used to hear myself doing some of this sort of dis'sing from time to time.

I've pretty much stopped listening to this stuff and my great aspiration is to stop talking, thinking or fretting about it.  Jesus, who invented all those people mentioned up there, is in charge of them.  Not me.  If you know the story of the Prodigal Son, look at it this way:  Do you like the idea of being the older brother?  I've discovered you have to shut up to avoid the possibility and even that doesn't help sometimes.

Occasionally, I'll decide that someone isn't the best influence on me.  These days when that possibility presents itself I just stop listening to them.  Recently and happily, I've discovered that my mouth isn't involved in listening.  I don't have to run my cake hole to have an opinion or to move on with my life.  Amazing.  Who would have thought?

If you want to blame someone for all these broken people calling themselves Christians or Christian leaders, you better blame Jesus.  He made them.  I have to say though, I've tried that (although I didn't realize for years that I was actually blaming him when I'd whine about "those people").  From my experience, I'd have to say this is a singularly unsatisfactory approach to the problem.

Jesus' tent is humongous.  It's also not at all subject to the rules and theology we think it should be.  I'm pretty convinced there's an inside and an outside but apart from a few who are very close to me, I wouldn't hazard any guesses as to who's standing where.  It's hard to come up with language that describes the size of Christ's grace and love and his ability to include absolutely everyone in it who wants to be included.  I think the best I can do is this:  It's so big, it hurts.

The Many Kinds of Faith

Singer/songwriter John Hyatt said once that if he had a nickel for every time someone played his song, "Have a Little Faith in Me" at a wedding, he'd stop working.  Even though he doesn't get a $.05 royalty for wedding performance, I'll still bet he's doing OK.

We can have faith in all kinds of people and things.  We have faith in loved ones, team mates, people at work and/or their performance and in the 21st century we are encouraged to even have faith in products and brand names.  Faith seems to be crawling around everywhere.

A lot of what we call faith if held up to the light is really hope.  We hope our iWhatever does what it's supposed to, looks really cool and is universally loved and revered, perhaps in the hope that we will participate in the love and reverence a bit ourselves. 

Hope is good.  However, hope is not the same thing as faith.

There's a place in the bible that describes faith as "the substance of things hoped for."  Many many books, chapters and sermons have been written about this passage.  Putting all that aside for the moment, one thing that is incontrovertible from this construct is that "faith" is considered to be somewhat more substantial than hope.  As an example, we might hope for Christmas presents but we have faith that Christ is the reason we celebrate Christmas.

Faith and hope can get real confused.  We usually hope for good outcomes in situations we face, particularly challenging situations.  That's natural and fine.  Sometimes people tell us to have "faith" that everything will come out OK.  That's fine too but it does raise the question as to what "OK" means, or maybe what it actually is.  The potential confusion here is pretty easy to see if you imagine a child being told that the way to get good things is to "have faith" that he'll receive them.  Back when I was a kid, that would likely result in me having faith that I'd get my 2nd hot fudge sundae.  Apparently my mom had more sense than I had faith because I never got sundae number two. 

We Christians use the word faith about every which way it can be used and then throw in a few just to make sure everything is covered.  That's generally fine but it can result in some disappointment or confusion when events don't unfold in a way that's consistent with our hope.  And that's usually because we have confused faith with hope.

Sometimes faith gets confused with expectation.  Faith and expectation are pretty easy to differentiate as well.  We have the expectation that the sun will come up tomorrow.  We don't exercise faith for that.

There's a good example of faith at work in the concept of marriage.  When we marry, we assume that our spouses will be faithful.  In effect, we have faith in their faithfulness.  That points to another word though that is more closely aligned with faith than the alternatives we've looked at so far.  That word is confidence.

Confidence in the good of people (i.e. the faithfulness of a spouse) is akin to faith.  Having confidence that someone will "do the right thing" is parallel to having faith in them.  Confidence and faith both represent investments of heart.

When we talk about having faith in God, it's not so much that we have "faith" that he'll do this or that.  Maybe we expect him to do a particular thing but maybe he has something else in mind.  Maybe we'd like him to do something now but later seems better to him.

That's actually when we have to have faith.  The title here is ironic because in all the universe there's really only one kind of faith, at least as it applies to God.  Faith is this:  Knowing, expecting, hoping, committing and living life in a way that's consistent with the idea that God is who he says he is.  In addition, there is exactly one commentary on this doctrine that's appropriate.  Namely, God is good.  (The idea that God is good is really contained in the idea that God is who he says he is but sometimes it helps to throw in that second bit.)

Most of our pain that's of the self-inflicted kind, most of our railing at situations or other people derive from the idea that God isn't really and completely who he says he is.  I talked briefly to a woman the other night who thought that bankers were evil and should be punished.  I saw kind of problem with this, not because it's impossible that bankers could ever do anything wrong, but rather because this woman apparently felt a lot of angst about the "unfairness" of the things "they" had done.  What was hidden just below the surface of her anger was, "How can this be?  This will not stand!  This is not fair AND everyone should think so."  That's fine but God says that redressing such wrongs is his job. 

Laws are there to prevent systematic victimization and certainly they must be followed and upheld but self-righteous vengeance is a poor substitute for justice.  When we indulge in that kind of thinking (as I too often do), we de facto deny the idea that God is who he says he is and all the cascading truths like, he'll take care of the spiritual injustice of it.  In the moment we take up the cudgel, we deny that God really is our champion.

I'm gradually getting better with the idea that God is who he says he is.  It takes a long time and we have to learn to except a fact about ourselves someplace in this process.  Namely, we are who he spoke us to be.  The truth of that is a story that each of us shares with God...because he is who he says he is.

This 'n That

Some of this (and that) are things I've written about before.  Some of (this and) that are new things.  Don't look for relatedness or coherence.  I seldom do.

Forgiveness

The fake forgiveness ceremony:  

"HEY! You stepped on my foot!"

"Oh! I'm sorry." 

"That's all right. I forgive you."

Fake forgiveness is like a dance with 2 to n people.  All the dancers have to agree to move in time to the same music and then actually take the energy to move.  If any of the dancers happen to step on any feet during the forgiveness ceremony, everyone has to start over. 

Real forgiveness:

Jesus, while hanging on the cross allowing himself to be the victim of all mankind said, "Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing."  He not only forgave us himself, he even argued a bit on our behalf.  No one danced.

Real forgiveness is unilateral and exists without a response from anyone else.  Real forgiveness is born in love (see below). 

Anger

Being angry isn't a sin.  It's what you do when your angry that potentially turns it into sin.  In any case though, I don't think anger is ever fun or even pleasant.  As someone once said, "Anger is like a headache.  It's not wrong to have one but why would you want one?"

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is nearly always confusing for nearly everyone.  Sacrifice gets confused with giving up food, sex, smoking, time, health, vigor, money, someone you love and almost anything you can think of.  All it ever really is, is "giving up," as in surrendering.  You can't surrender without actually surrendering something but the nature of the something usually matters little.  Here are some phrases that indicate the initiation of surrender:

"I don't need this anymore."

"I still REALLY feel like I need this but I'll just leave it here."

"I REALLY like doing                       but I think I'll just sacrifice it."

Sacrifice is an act of will, often ongoing.  Sometimes circumstances almost force it (i.e. having kids).  However, sacrifice can never be forced.  It is always a matter of will, a matter of choice.

Sometimes, maybe even often, depending on the nature of the sacrifice the sacrifice winds up not really feeling like sacrifice at all.  

Having an opinion

Morality is important.  Living according to it is important.  Having an opinion is not.

Expressing an opinion

Much less important than actually having an opinion.  Standing for morality though is important.  That's not because it's my opinion though.


Life and Death

Both are very real and exist for everyone reading this.  Those of us who believe in Christ believe there's a reason and reality associated with both.  Most of us aren't quite clear on the reason though because we haven't read or maybe yet understood the book of Job.  Many of us who follow Christ seem to get confused about death too. 

My wife likens the death of a loved one who dies in Christ to them being given a ticket to Hawaii with unlimited food, snorkeling and other fun things and even some serious lanai lounging.  The only kickers are that there isn't any cell service there and since they're going be very busy lanai lounging and doing fun things, you won't be able to talk to them until you get your ticket and can go there too.   Yes, it's sad missing someone you still love.  But they're OK.  In fact, they're a lot better than just OK.  They're getting really tan with no possibility of skin cancer, eating everything they want without getting fat and having great fun.  How sad can you really be for either them or you?

Fear

Fear usually starts out as being very helpful.  It can even help us to not go to Hawaii too soon.  However, over time things fear turns into things we try to avoid because they're unpleasant and even painful.  It can get so bad that we avoid everything, even parts of ourselves.  Fear is fine for hot stoves, the bulls in Pamplona, the face of Half Dome, race car driving and any numbers of other activities.  It's not so good for relationships and it has no place in the context of love.  If you have fear in a relationship, it should probably be sacrificed.  After the sacrifice, you might want to think about taking up something in it's place...maybe intention and purpose.

If you have fear about life and death, you should know that if you follow Christ you're going to Hawaii.  In fact, you're on your way right now.

Love

Love goes on forever.  It's the reason those who follow Christ don't die (sacrifice is in there too but it all starts with love - true sacrifice is always a kind of love).  Since we weren't designed for the brokenness in the place we live, our love often gets disappointed.  That can turn into fear if we're not careful.  If we let it though, the perfect love of Christ will pretty much toss our fear under the nearest bus. 

Sometimes we have to sacrifice something in the name of love.  That's OK though because the love we get in return for the sacrifice completes life and transcends death.  It's hard to imagine how you can accept that much love though if you're not able to sacrifice all of the hurts that have been done to you and give up your right (well - your right in your opinion anyway) to get even.  Well in point of fact, it's not just hard to imagine, it's impossible.

I hope none of this makes you angry but if it does I hope you forgive me.  I won't ask for forgiveness because you owe it to yourself and nothing to me and that's not just my opinion.  That's forgiveness...and love.  Most of all it's love.