R U the 1 We've Been Waiting 4?

Now when Jesus had finished instructing his disciples, he went on from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities.

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus asnwered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me." Matthew 11:1-6

Advent is quite a ride. Last week we see John at the Jordan warning people that God's chosen anointed ("Messiah" in Hebrew, "Christ" in Greek) was upon them. Messiah would shake up the world, gather the grain into the bin and set the waste products (unprepared, unrepentant people???) on fire.

Messiah's winnowing fork is the equivalent of being run through a combine. Or a hay baler. Any farmer who has ever run either of these machines has at one time or another seen the unfortunate snake, rabbit or pheasant go through the machine. As a kid, I don't know how many rats and mice I saw hop into the feeder and go through the corn sheller.... Never saw any recognizable pieces come out with the corn, the husks or the cobs.

John is expecting action, unmistakable action. No person on earth can confuse fire with no fire. One burns. The other doesn't. And people know they'd better pay attention to John. He looks, dresses, eats and sounds like Elijah. And they know when Elijah shows up again it will be to inaugurate something like the Day of Yahweh. God gonna DO somethin' big!

So when John gets tossed into the slammer for having called murderous, immoral Herod on his behavior and liftestyle, he expects Jesus, the one whom he, John, had personally "anointed" with water there in the Jordan, to at last begin the campaign. "Let the conflagration begin! Nuke 'em, Big Guy!"

In a first century jail you don't get a cell with bunk, toilet and three squares. If you don't starve, it's only because your friends come to feed you--and bribe the corrupt guards every step of the way to do so. You're lucky if even crumbs get through.

But John has friends and followers. They come. John wants to know, "What's going on with Jesus? Has the revolution begun yet? Anything on fire?" They don't have anything like that to report, so John gets to the point. "Go ask Jesus himself. Are you the one, or are you going to turn out to be just like every other self-appointed false Messiah before?"

"I preached fire back there at the Jordan, Jesus. I was sure I had it right. I expected to see a clear/hold/build plan in place in the first weeks of your campaign. I expected to see a strategy to kick the Romans out of Judea by Passover and clear out of Galilee by Succoth next hear. I expected to see the heathen pagans and idolaters burning at the stake and the direct rule of Yahweh from center court of the temple. I expected fire, but so far I ain't even seein' any smoke."

"Are you the one, Jesus.....

or ain't you?????"

Jesus tells John's friends to report back what they hear and see. It's the same fulfillment of Isaiah 29:18-19, 35:5-6, 61:1 that got Jesus into such trouble in his hometown synagogue (Luke 4:18-19). They were about to kill him... Yep.

What upsets us so about a Messiah of grace and mercy as opposed to a Messiah of war? Why is it that Jesus inherits the titles Messiah/Christ and, in the words of Isaiah 9:6, "Prince of Peace"? Not Prince of War, Generalissimo Jesus.

Is it true that we believe so strongly in our ability to save and perfect ourselves that we would rather die, would rather kill, would rather go to war, would rather burn up the world and all of creation rather than see someone else get a break?

As my professor of Old Testament studies said once, "Our primal fear is that someone who doesn't deserve it will beat the system and get into heaven anyway."

We ought to ponder that statement a long while, especially in Advent, especially with John's questions echoing in our ears. Especially with Jesus' answer.......

Advent blessings,

Roger.

Swept Away...

...things will be just as they were when Noah lived. People were eating, drinking, and getting married right up to the day that the flood came and Noah went into the big boat. They didn't know anything was happening until the flood came and swept them all away. That is how it will be when the Son of Man appears. Two men will be in the same field, but only one will be taken. The other will be left. Two women will be together grinding grain, but only one will be taken. The other will be left. (Matthew 24:37-41 CEV)

Swept away... If you've ever let your eyes stray to the covers of the romance novels on sale in the grocery store, the cover art says it all.

Studly man with Greek god hair and physique to die for (either no shirt on or already unbuttoned to the waist) is holding woman in his arms with her clothing shredded like that of the eyesore women's costumes of Dancing With The Stars. She's swooning in his arms.

She's being "swept away".

Yeah, right. Until the divorce lawyers get involved.

**********************************

One minute the two guys were standing on top of this peak on the east edge of the Wallowas in NE Oregon, their hang gliding chute on the ground. The next minute, their wing was aloft on the breeze and they were flying. Swept away.

Their world changed instantly, you better know!

We've often heard this passage, the first gospel text we read in the season of Advent, as a prediction or description of the end of the world. At least, talk about "End Times" to people and they'll always, always, always come up with end-of-the-world scenarios of tribulation, calamity, and blood up to the bridles of the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

That solo understanding of biblical End Times is flat out "corpus abuse" of the text. No, the man in the field who was taken, the woman grinding who was taken, were not raptured out of the evil world into heaven while the ones who were left suffered horribly.

No, the ones TAKEN were overcome by life. Their lives were completely thrown off track when life changed, when the world changed. They weren't prepared.

The ones who were left were prepared. They stayed on the job, continued to serve and get the work done in radically altered conditions.

The Noah reference informs us if we are ready to shove rapturous misinterpretations out of our minds and actually hear what Jesus has to say.

Noah and family weren't swept away. The others were. Noah and family lived in, on, with and through the worst natural disaster imaginable--and they saved God's living creatures along with them.

How? The big boat didn't fall out of the sky. They didn't pick it up at 75% off on Black Friday. It wasn't imported from China. Didn't steal it on e-Bay. They spent years building it.

They were preparing and so became prepared to serve when the whole world changed.

We live in the times between our Lord's first appearance and earthly life and our waiting and expectation of the next. We are not living daily looking for the end of the world but its New Beginning. Actually, we are already living its new beginning.

In the best of times and the worst of times, we are on the job and prepared to serve because we are prepared with Jesus' durable word that outlasts earth and sky.

And happy landings, all you hang gliders out there!

Blessed Advent!

Roger

Tea Party?

Tuesdsay evening, President Obama gave a speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He outlined a plan to deploy an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. He outlined his strategy for the way ahead.

Afghanistan is a hard place, an impossible place. Central government is a foreign idea. Ethnic divides are deeper and more numerous than in Iraq. The vast majority of the population cannot read or write. Other than opium production, the most constant part of the economy is corruption and graft by the few who have any means at all. It is and has been the only clear and viable path out of poverty for a select few who could grab or extort a piece of the action. It has been that way for generations. It is mountainous. It is, for the most part, logistically more remote than Antarctica. The recently "re-elected" president, Hamid Karzai, has been almost completely ineffective at governing outside of the capital, Kabul. He won another term in a clearly fraudulent election. And he is our best hope for leadership. Actually our only choice.

That's not a very good best hope.

Tuesday evening, I sat in a room with a dozen young Americans. Half aren't even married yet. Only one couple has small children. I'm not sure if any have a sense of the first Gulf War, how we got there, related issues, etc. There doesn't seem to be much concern over this one. I'm not sure any of my community members heard the President's remarks or contemplated the implications. We didn't pray about it. We pray about a variety of things, but war almost never comes up. Most people under 40 don't receive a newspaper these days. (Many people I know over 40 have also stopped taking the paper. They're tired of the news. Not sure what that says about their ability to be full and informed participants in this so-called democracy.)

I admit, I'm older and lived through 16 years of Vietnam. I know what it cost and what it did to people. With compulsory military service, I was already engaged in concerns about that war as a young high schooler. My church wasn't, though. They didn't give my generation much much to go on. We were on our own. OK, that was then.

Now, 30K more troops will cost at least $1 million apiece to deploy for a year. The President called for this "surge" to last 18 months, or more.

So that's somewhere between 30 and 45 billion dollars of additional spending. If there are 300 million Americans, that's $100-$150 of additional short-term spending for every breathing one of us. But since only about 1/3 of Americans actually pay taxes, the surge may actually amount to about $300-$450 apiece for those of us who do. And since we already have 68K troops in Afghanistan and already spend about $90 billion or more a year there, the effort is actually asking these young taxpayers, some of whom are still accumulating student loan debt, to pony up about $1200-$1500 a year. Extra. Just for the Afghan war. Except that they aren't really paying, just going deeper into debt. Without a wimper. Or, seemingly, any knowledge.

The President said that when he took office, the U.S. had already spent about one trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost all of that has been borrowed. Care to tally the interest payments on that? Interest payments don't build schools, sustainable energy or provide any health care. They don't make our country safer or create jobs. They go to China, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Tuesday evening, we didn't pass the offering plate. Nobody wrote any checks or offered to put their share on their credit or debit cards. But the money is not waiting for their assent in order to be spent. It has been, is being, and will be spent.

Nearly all of it will be borrowed--which means that it comes with more added costs of interest payments.

I positively cannot figure out America today. On the one hand, we keep telling ourselves that the wars on terror are absolutely essential to the safety and security of our country. On the other hand, we tell ourselves that the cost can be paid for by borrowing (so that it won't cost us any money or "hurt the economy") and paid for by shedding the blood of volunteers who apparently want to spill their blood because they have nothing better to do with their lives. Apparently. That way, it won't actually cost us any personal or moral anguish. Or any commitment for success. Or any accountability for the outcome.

Only one percent of the population serves in the military or has family in the military.

For the rest of the population in whose name and with whose acquiescence all of this has been a-gathering, these wars and their costs and what they divert us from doing here at home might as well be like the opening line of the original Star Wars movie back in the 1970's: a long time ago in a galaxy far away.

Almost as soon as President Obama and the current Congress took office, groups of people gathered around the country to protest what they pereceived to be out-of-control government spending. Taking a theme from the Amercian colonial "Boston Tea Party", they called their gatherings Tea Parties.

Where were they in the years leading up to 2009? Having our nation's most expensive wars with no military draft was just fine then. Bailing out Wall Street was just fine then. Doubling the national debt was just fine then. Depending on China for everything was just fine then.

Or maybe they simply awakened slowly. Very slowly. Rip van Winkle slowly. Maybe.

Better late than never, I guess. I want the Tea Party folks to come back in force. I may actually join them. And I want them to be as honest as they want their political opponents to be. I want their sons and daughters to enlist or be drafted. I don't want 30,000 new troops in Afghanistan by next summer. I want 300,000 or 600,000. I want every last square meter of the country under control and reconstruction; and I want every Afghan under the age of 60 in school by September 1. And I want the border with Pakistan either permanently sealed or permanently eliminated; i.e., make the entire mountainous region either part of Pakistan or part of Afghanistan.

I want this paid for up front and as we go with taxes and war bonds. No more borrowing. I don't want it done in 18 months. I want it done in eight. I want it done either this way, whole hog, or I want it done today: finished, outta there! Why do it any other way?

And I want the Americans under 40 who will inherit this whole mess to get involved up to their hip waders every step of the way. I'm nearly 63. If I live to be my Dad's age, I have only 16 years to go. I'll be gone before you know it.

I have the tea. Ready to party?

Blessed Advent!

Roger

Christmas According to Mark

When Jean and I lived in Turkey, we would occasionally visit Istanbul. I remember walking past the Consulate of the Soviet Union several times. It had a heavy steel gate around it. At the gate was a guard shack and a room about the size of this garage. A bronze plaque near the entrance to the room proclaimed Zal Ozhidaniya ("Hall of Waiting").

I often joked, "Yeah, I'll bet there's ozhidaniye going on in there alright. Hour after hour after hour. . . Waiting is something modern folks don't do well, especially with the advent of online shopping, a 24-hour news cycle and instant messaging.

OK, a few days back I asked people to read the Christmas story in the Gospel According to Mark. By now, everybody must think, "Well, he must have meant Matthew, not Mark. There is no Christmas story in Mark."

Exactly my point.

But there is really a Christmas story in Mark. It just looks different. Consider this. In Mark, there is :

1. No genealogy.

2. No annunciation to Mary.

3. No magnificat.

4. No angel Gabriel telling Joseph to take Mary (with child) as his wife.

5. No stable and manger.

6. No shepherds abiding in the fields.

7. No Magi from the East. So that means no star seen in the East. No gifts.

8. No slaughter of the innocents by Herod.

9. No flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.

10. No presentation in the temple and Nunc Dimittis by Simeon.

11. No boy Jesus at the age of 12 staying behind in the temple in deep discussions of the Torah while his parents walked a whole day's journey.

12. No water turned into wine in Cana of Galilee.

None of the above. But here's what Mark does have in the first 15 verses:

1. Mark says it's a good news story and that Jesus is Messiah and Son of God.

2. There's a prophetic reference, actually from Malachi, not Isaiah.

3. John the baptizer is preaching a baptism of repentance.

4. John is wearing the attire of a true prophet like Elijah. (In the Passover seder ritual, a door is left open so that if Elijah returns he can enter the house; the return of Elijah will signal the arrival of Messiah and a new messianic age. If Elijah's here, so is the age.)

5. Jesus is baptized by John and the Spirit descends to identify him.

6. Jesus is immediately tempted in the wilderness w/o food and water--just like Elijah.

7. John is arrested.

8. Jesus takes up the prophetic mantle and returns to Galilee calling people to repentance and to believe in the good news that the kingdom of God has come near.

The kingdom of God is Mark's Christmas. The kingdom of God is what Jesus proclaimed. It was the hallmark of his ministry. Today it seems like a present that we have never unwrapped.

What are we waiting for?

I hear people on radio and TV talking about "the Christmas season". They universally refer to the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas when they talk about the Christmas season. But wait, doesn't the season of Christmas begin after Christmas?

What do we have before Christmas? We have Advent, a time of waiting, a time of preparing, a time of living in the kingdom of God. Followers of Christ in the time of Mark referred to their core beliefs and the life they led them to lead as "The Way".

Maybe we should wait to celebrate Christmas until we have actually experienced Advent. Maybe we should wait to celebrate Christmas or even speak the word until we have lived Advent, until we have figured out what The Way and the kingdom of God are.

Mark's gospel has no traditional birth narrative. But it does have Easter. It does have the kingdom of God. Should we have any trouble figuring out the implications of relative importance from that?

Happy journeying on The Way! Awesome Advent to you and yours! It won't be Christmas until we figure out what the kingdom of God is--another 34 days or as long as it takes in the Zal Ozhidaniya.

Shalom,

Roger

24/7 Conspiracy

Hello, PDX!

New readers, welcome! We've been exploring the Kingdom of God (KoG). To get some perspective on where we are now you'll have to backtrack to previous posts. The 10/14 post asked a few questions related to war and peace issues. Before we remake Jesus in the image and colors of our own battle flags it's always wise to ask hard questions. And, hey, if the church doesn't have anything to say on war/peace issues if wouldn't seem to have credibility on many other life issues either. So here's another one to consider: how we live in God's creation.

For the past year my wife and I have been hanging around a lot with the Imago Dei Community in Portland. This is an amazing (and growing!!!) band of Christ followers who seem to be turning most definitions and abstractions of church upside-down. Amen to that! Last year, Imago Dei and four other faith communities started the Advent Conspiracy. The idea is to buy no commerically made Christmas gifts but to instead give relational gifts (as in doing something with someone) and perhaps small, home-made gifts to friends and loved ones. The money saved by not buying gadgets is instead offered to make the world a seriously different and better place. Such as? A new well to provide clean water for a community, an alpaca to provide a family with income for 20 years, help for needy families and schools in SE Portland. Good stuff that says, "God's gift to the world changes everything."

This year, over 1,000 churches have joined Advent Conspiracy. The "mustard seed" is already growing into a huge shrub. Next year, it will be an incredible tree!

Last Sunday we got to watch video clips of people who have no clean water and who rummage through an awful dump in Guatemala to make a living. Flies, barefoot children, vultures and piles of putrid stuff as far as the eye could see. That's the "before" picture. With help from Advent Conspiracy 2006, a couple of pastors were able to purchase land away from the dump, put in a new well. People have fresh, clean water for the first time in their lives. The day of the well dedication was a picnic and BBQ. Lots of water fights. Showers and shampoo. Wet T-shirts, Slip 'n Slide, kiddie pools. Smiling faces all around. The start of a new life. That's the "after" picture.

All week I've thought about the dump and what must be in the groundwater under it. Some people have been relocated, but others will take their places. How long will the well water last? Will the polluted water in the ground under the dump eventually reach the well? What then?

The dump. Among other things beyond description, the dim video showed one ubiquitious human creation: plastic, plastic, plastic. Poly bags and broken plastic stuff everywhere. Multiply this picture globally. Start with your own trash. How are you adding to the pile? How long can we keep this up?

The Waste Management trucks that serve our area have an interesting placard on both sides. It states, "Our landfills provide over 17,000 acres of wildlife habitat." Gee, what do you suppose those 17K acres were before they were landfills? What's in the groundwater under them? What's going to be there in 100 years? 200 years? Will the water wells dug by last year's Advent Conspiracy soon be used up or polluted like the land under that Guatemalan dump which also was wildlife habitat and human habitat. Once. Now it's inhuman habitat.

How can we give ourselves a way of life that respects and cherishes God's creation as if it really were God's? As if we really thought so? Seems we need a 24/7 conspiracy.

Where to start? How about with a way of life that doesn't use plastic bags, plastic packaging and plastic water bottles? We could do this. Actually we could. Question is, will we? If not now, when? Why not?

The kingdom of God could help. Think alternative contrast society. Think Christmas 365. Talk about it with friends and family. Think 24/7 conspiracy. It could catch on. 24/7.

Blessings!

Pastor Roger