Flying Leap

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who want to lose their life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:25

After the torrential floods in Pakistan last year, the famished and thirsty refugees nearly overwhelmed the first aid helicopters to arrive. Hang enough hungry bodies on the landing gear or the basket for carrying litter patients, and you could probably pull it right out of the sky.

One of my favorite collections of music is by Canadian poet/sing/songwriter/social conscience Bruce Cockburn. On one of his songs from many years ago, he is taking the International Monetary Fund to task for lending money to nations as a stop-gap measure, not enough to turn things around without massive outside planning and management, but keeping them on the hook for the debt:

"IMF, dirty MF, takes everything it can get; always making sure that there's one thing left: keep them on the hook with insupportable debt..."

Mild. Cockburn's harshest words are in the song "And They Call it Democracy". I won't print 'em here. Go look 'em up. Take a listen. Cockburn says we don't give a "flying leap" about the people in misery. Except he dosen't call it a flying leap. Another word with four letters.

And think about how our country has partnered with the most bloodthirsty tyrants in the past to forward our "national interest" and "national security" and "economic growth" (aka cheap oil). These include Manuel Noeiga, the Shah of Iran, Pervez Musharraf and Saddam Hussein, among others.

This past weekend they were supposed to dedicate the memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm glad we were forced to wait. Maybe give us some time to think about what he stood for, what he was able to think, and what he had the guts and the divine call to say out loud: We don't really give a flying leap about the people in misery.

And we think we have democracy.....

And we think the church we see around us isn't part of the scam...

Only if WE keep it from being so. Only if WE drag it, kicking and screaming in another direction.

More on the Matthew passage in the next post.

There are some new developments in that cross Jesus calls us to take up as we follow.

Blessed Are The Poor. In spirit, that is.

John 12:1-13.

Technically, Judas had it right. Three hundred denarii, or about a year's worth of wages for a laborer, would have done a lot more good if spread around to the poor of Bethany or Jerusalem, or wherever.

Instead, Mary the sister of Lazarus dumps a whole year's pay on Jesus' feet. Where'd she get that kind of money to begin with? Why wasn't her heart in a better place, we ask?

Well, perhaps it wasn't in too bad a place.

After all, Jesus had just a few days earlier given back the life of her brother Lazarus. To think that she, sister Martha and Lazarus gave a dinner in Jesus' honor is no stretch at all. Hello! I'd do that if somebody had just brought me painlessly through a root canal!

Jesus seems to be insensitive to the needs of the poor. "You always have the poor with you. You do not always have me." Before we go the wrong direction with this, we should remember where Jesus spent his time and with whom. Jesus found the kingdom of God most alive and most operative among the poor, precisely where good news was most needed.

But He didn't consider poverty to be a blessed state. He considered having one's heart in the right place to be a blessed state--which had everything to do with how one saw and responded to poverty, the need for grace, the need for healing, the need for hope.

Judas, a chronic embezzler according to John, did not have his heart in those places. But he almost succeeds in pulling the cloak of legitimacy over his argument.

Jesus points to Mary as the counterexample. Mary understood what was at stake. She understood the difference between what's expensive and what's truly valuable.

Jesus is about to go to Jerusalem for the final confrontation in his life. There he will give what's very costly to obtain what's very valuable: his life so that we might have life.

One year's pay would have done some good in and around Bethany. And that would have been the end of it. A world changed for generations by the love of Christ does a world and an eternity of good. If we worship the wrong things, that doesn't happen.

Jesus was arrested and tried and convicted by people who couldn't see what was truly valuable. He was accused not for doing evil things but for doing good things that went outside the thinking of the leaders of his day. May He always continue to do so.

And may the witness of Mary endure forever. Thanks be to God.

Roger

Curiosity

Strange word to have in a president's inaugural address, isn't it? Curiosity...

In Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War, Robert S. McNamara stares straight into the camera. MacNamara, who was Secretary of Defense for a number of critical years during the Vietnam War, talks about nearly coming to blows with the former Defense Minister of North Vietnam. Decades after the war these two old men were at a dinner. The Defense Minister asked McNamara why the U.S. had fought his people so hard for so long. McNamara replied, "Our hope was to keep them from falling under the domination of Communist China. Why did your people fight Americans so hard?" The Defense Minister was incredulous. "My people had been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years. We were fighting for national unification of North and South Vietnam. First we had to drive out the French colonizers. Then America tried to colonize us. You forced us to seek help from our Chinese enemies."

How could we not have understood this? Did we so misunderstand our enemy? Were we so uncurious?

I'm curious. The U.S. invaded Iraq after 9/11. It became the major front in the war on terrorism. "We have to fight them there so that we don't have to fight them here," we said. Only problem is that nearly all the 9/11 plotters and attackers came from Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. Ooops!

Funny. I've heard many people, many Christian people espcecially, agonize over why anyone would attack the U.S. And how could anyone strap explosives onto a person? How could anyone become a homicide bomber, even killing his own people? Why are all those Muslims so backward and bloodthirsty?

Since the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 when Americans were held hostage for 444 days, our attention has been focused on Muslim militants and extremists. And especially since 9/11. Over the years I've heard many of my fellow citizens talk about what we need to do to them. Nuclear weapons are frequently mentioned.

Many people know that Jean and I lived in a Muslim country for over 2-1/2 years. Hundreds actually, in workplaces and churches. Not one--family members included-- not a single one has ever asked, "You've lived there. What makes these people so crazy? Why do they act this way?"

Have we so little curiosity? Or do we think we already know the answer, or that the answer doesn't really matter? Were our minds made up before they were ever made?

Far too much history lies behind the events of recent years to go into it here. But consider this, how could 20th-century Germans do what they did? These are my own people by blood. They were educated, literate people, nearly all Christians, either Protestant or Catholic. They were a sophisticated people who had contributed so much to science, mathematics, physics, anthropology, art, architecture, literature, chemistry, metallurgy, manufacturing, optics, medicine, music, poetry, philosophy and theology. What made them do it? What made them even capable?

What made white Anglo-Saxon Christians in our own country capable of putting on hoods and hanging people in cold blood, or burning down Christian churches, or tying people to trucks and dragging them to death, sicking dogs on them or blasting them with fire hoses? What about Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears?

Have we forgotten the Inquisition, the Thirty Years' War, Sarajevo, Srbrenica? And long before terrorism ever became synonymous with Islamic militants in the Western mind, it was synonymous with Protestant Christians and Catholic Christians in Northern Ireland, 99% of whom were surely baptized. But not converted.

My answers? Poverty. Fear. Ignorance. For sure, ignorance. Feeling threatened by anyone or anything. And using religion as a tool instead of being humbled and reformed by it. That's all I can figure out.

Is that happening anywhere in the world today? Could it happen here? Again? De we even have enough curiosity to ask? What blood-curdling risks do we take when we have no curiosity?

Shalom,

Pastor Roger