Jesus is much kinder than I am

It amazes me how often Jesus didn’t get annoyed with people. It’s easy not to hate people and to take their abuse calmly, but it’s not easy to keep from getting annoyed and frustrated at small things. Always following Him around—He hears His cousin has been murdered, and He goes to try to be alone, and they can’t give Him space for grief or prayer. But He didn’t get annoyed—He had compassion on them. Because that was why He was there. He didn’t let his own wants or even needs come before His mission, as we so easily do.
Mark 6.31-34a “Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, ‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’ So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”
That would have made me so angry! It annoys me just to think of it. Here they all were, just done from a hard, thrilling ministry, needing food, rest, debriefing, and time alone with Jesus, and these people wouldn’t leave them alone. They saw that Jesus was trying to be alone, and they purposefully thwarted Him. As an introvert, it highly annoys me that He didn’t get to be alone, that His disciples lost out on having Him to themselves, and it frustrates me that they didn’t get to relax after all their hard work. Had I been one of the disciples, I would have been extremely angry in a selfish way, because having been promised food and rest and a visit with Jesus, their plans were dashed by all these selfish people. I can see myself turning into one of the Sons of Thunder and calling down fire on them or else going away and sulking.
But Jesus—He had compassion on the people because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. His true purpose wasn’t to fulfill His personality and needs but to help and love the people He had come to save. He didn’t see them as a lot of selfish, sensationalist ghouls but as helpless people weighed down by sin and despair who recognized something in Him and knew they wanted it. So “he began teaching them many things,” and fed them, and then sent them home. So everyone got what they needed.

The Perfect Political Leader

Psalm 101 is a psalm of David the king. Not just a man wandering around talking about how he will live before God, but a king, a judge, a sort of policeman talking about how he will lead his people. And what a contrast he is to the majority of rulers! He says, “I will be careful to lead a blameless life,” “I will walk in my house with blameless eyes” (though he did fail at that once), “I will have nothing to do with evil.” All this he says as a man who knows he is a king by God’s kindness. Then as a leader looking out for his people, he says, “My eyes will be on the faithful in the land,” “he whose walk is blameless will minister to me,” “no one who practices deceit will dwell in my house…stand in my presence,” “I will put to silence all the wicked in the land…” Unlike so many rulers, he refuses to listen to lies, to have false counselors, to tolerate evil. A truly good king. How often does that happen?
Someday…someday—I think I can’t wait for Christ’s kingship. No more Sadaams and Hitlers and Stalins, no more Manassehs and Sauls and Athalias, no more Henry VIIIs and Richard Is and Caligulas. No more quarrelling over the Supreme Court or killing each other over the Constitution or pointing fingers of blame in natural disasters. No more leaders who can’t keep their hands to themselves or can be blackmailed or bribed. No more having to watch the news and worry about the way the country is being run. Perfect wisdom will guide decisions, perfect justice will deal with evil and with pain, perfect love will look out for the weak and needy. I wish it were now. Soon… “I call all times Soon.”

Anthropology and Ethnocentrism

I've discovered that just about everything has something to do with everything else. So anthropology, which I'm taking a class in, can teach me something about my own spiritual condition. Here is a journal entry I wrote about something I learned about myself in reading my anthropology textbook:

I recently read a cultural anthropology article assigned for Missions Anthropology that made me laugh so hard I sobbed over it. It told the story of the bizarre body ritual practices among the Nacirema, how they have shrine rooms for certain bodily practices, daily ritual ablutions in a holy found, how witch doctors give them papers with magic writings which they exchange for holy substances they think will give health and which they keep in a charm box in the holy shrine, about pathological mouth-rituals without which they believe their mouths will decay, about the sadism demonstrated by holy-mouth-men who make holes in their teeth, about the masochistic urges which lead men to lacerate their faces and women to bake their heads in ovens, about temples sick people go to presided over by vestal maidens in ritual garb and thaumaturges who strip them naked and make them lie on hard beds for days and weeks, though only if they can make large gifts to the custodian of the temple, about the hatred of the people for their bodies and the lengths they go to to try to change them, about ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ritual feasts to make thin people fat, and the earnest desire to have an ideal form outside the range of human variation, and on occasion, when some women have achieved a stage of pleasing distortion, they let people look at them for a fee. The extent to which they are focused on the body is, apparently, bizarre among cultural standards.
So I was reading along complacently, quite prepared to be astonished and shocked by this peculiar people group, with that sort of superior distaste one can easily get when reading about a culture that seems primitive and superstitious, though I didn’t exactly get why the writer didn’t seem to approve of a few of these practices which seemed quite sensible. I mean, these Nacirema have devised a method of ridding themselves of demons and curses by sitting and talking with a witch-doctor about their pasts. Surely that sounds like what we do with psychiatrists and so on. They’re really quite clever.
Then as I got to the end and read about sexual practices being quite hidden and taboo and how they often try to prevent conception with certain magical practices and how many don’t nurse their infants, it suddenly all fell into place. Already beginning to laugh, I went back and looked at the title: “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” Nacirema. It’s American backward. Then I read the whole article over, convulsed in the most complete laughter I have experienced in a long time. Bathrooms, showers, doctors, prescriptions, dentists, perms, shaving, hospitals, nurses, supermodels, contraceptives. Of course I should have caught it at the beginning, when they talked about the great hero Notgnishaw who threw a piece of wampum across a river (crossing the Potomac) and cut down a cherry tree to reveal the Spirit of Truth. But I was so caught up in my cultural arrogance, studying the silly, superstitious ways of this culture that I completely missed it. And I think when I laughed so hard I cried that some of the tears were actually tears, for the clear realization of the absurdity and sadness of my culture that’s so obsessed with body image and doesn’t even realize it.
Ultimately, I think this is a very humbling article. It reveals the arrogance with which one can approach the study of other cultures. It also slyly pointed out the attitude with which many of these articles can be written, because the whole thing as very patronizing about the backward Nacirema. I know all about ethnocentrism and despise it when I see it, but I’ve never before seen it so thoroughly in myself. I think I’ve never before truly understood ethnocentrism and whatever its opposite is. You can theoretically accept the neutrality of culture or the good aspects of another culture or the bad aspects of your own without letting go of the insidious assumption that your own worldview is still best. It’s a very humbling thing to suddenly be given a view of your own culture in exactly the same way you view some other cultures. It’s an unusual and rare experience to be allowed to see it in so outside a way, like suddenly being able to step outside your body and look at it as you’ve never truly seen it before. It’s kind of a gift, really.

Joan of Arcadia and suffering

I was watching an old “Joan of Arcadia” episode, and there was one scene with one guy I really identified with. The main character’s mother was trying to deal with her son having become a paraplegic, and enough time had passed that she had gone from emotional shock to trying to work through all the emotional and spiritual aspects of this change in their lives. A priest in a parking lot had one of those red Salvation Army buckets and was collecting for the poor. She dropped some change in and walked away, then stopped, came back, and began to demand all kinds of answers. Since he had the collar on, he obviously had a handle on the whole God-thing. So she assaulted him with all these questions that the greatest theologians haven’t been able to adequately answer. “If God is a father, why doesn’t He make everything better like fathers are supposed to do? Explain to me the whole suffering thing.” And so on. And that poor young man under the onslaught of all these impossible questions completely lost his brain. He was supposed to have all the answers because he was a priest, and he’d probably even written neat theological essays in seminary on the very subject, but in the suddenness of what had to seem like an attack, his head probably emptied of all those excellent words, and he could only stare dumbly at her and stammer weakly that he’d pray for her.
I completely identified with the poor man, as a seminary student myself who will likely be asked to answer these questions. I would lose all my clever answers, too. It’s one thing, like C.S. Lewis, to know many things intellectually and another to go through it yourself and have your assumptions tested.
I would hope that, given the opportunity to get over my temporary brainlessness, I would be able to convey something of meaning across. Even if it was only the difficult-to-accept truth that at times God is incomprehensible. He does not conform Himself to our specifications. I would like to be able to reassure the person that despite how unsatisfactory that sounds, He truly is good and loving and desires to bring peace even when He doesn’t change the situation. It’s interesting how often our demands for answers are demands for God to be what we want Him to be. We say, a loving God should fix all the world’s problems. But since He is God and He is loving and He hasn’t fixed all the world’s problems, then probably a loving God shouldn’t fix all the world’s problems. A good father shouldn’t give his child everything she wants, despite her unhappiness at not getting it. If our loving God doesn’t do what we want, does it mean we finite, small-minded, created beings are right and the infinite, omniscient, all-powerful Creator is wrong? I don’t think so.
Now the trick is to actually remember and understand this stuff when I’m slapped across the head with something catastrophic. Like C.S. Lewis.

“It’s a perfect system, Joan.” The “God” character says that all the time on “Joan of Arcadia.” I like it a lot. It points out the rather obvious but always confusing, seeming contradiction in life. God’s created a perfect system, but the world is royally messed up. The world is royally messed up…how can it be a perfect system? That’s the beauty of it: His system continues to work despite the world. There is no Plan B—His system works well whether in a perfect world or in a messed-up one. We just have often lost the ability to see the goodness and perfection because we're blinded by the evil and pain.

How to be acceptable to a completely holy God

We sang a song in church that goes: “We cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lamb!’” in church, and I thought of all the different words that describe holy. My first thought was Other. Then Above. Beyond. And Good. Perfect. Pure. And Just. Ruler. Absolute. I love this conception of God’s holiness being beyond just His goodness. When we think of being made holy, we think of being made good. But His holiness is His otherness, His beyondness. That state of Him being Him and us being us; the fact that He is so far beyond us and His very being describes what goodness is—that is what I think of as holiness. Good is that which is in accord with His being, and that is why being made holy is being made good. This is something I don’t think about often enough. How far beyond religiosity and works that description of holiness and goodness is! How easy it is to fall into the thought that our holiness is in what we do, not that what we do reflects our holiness.

John 6.28, 29: “They asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’” They expected a difficult, Pharisaical answer, not doubt, and what Jesus answered was so very simple. Believe in Him. People always think they have to do something. Even Christians. Even me. Certainly the people He was speaking to did. Educated by Pharisees as to what they had to do to be acceptable to God, and He said merely, “Believe in the one he has sent.” OK, maybe not so easy for a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu and so on. But the difficulty is not in getting to Him but in getting away from their culture. The point is that our primary work, act of worship, whatever, is believing in and loving Him.

A beginning is a very delicate time

I have long thought I would never have a blog. Who wants to make their journal public? And yet I'm always writing things in my journal I wish I could tell others about and start a dialogue on. If no one finds them interesting enough to engage with, that's alright. I'm happy to talk to myself.
So, I sit down in the morning with my freshly-ground coffee, made strong in a French press and poured into a delicate teacup with half-and-half and turbinado sugar, and I read a portion of the Greek New Testament. Well, let me be honest: I have the English open along with it and read them side-by-side because I'm not yet fluent enough in Greek to read it alone without much trial and tribulation with the translation. On occasion I do the same with the Hebrew Old Testament. Frequently what I read triggers thoughts and ideas, and since I can't think without wanting to write, I write my thoughts out in my journal as a conversation with God. Sometimes this takes the form of an analysis of a Greek word or Greek phrasing, which I love. Sometimes it brings up a memory of a theological or historical point I've recently learned in school or my own reading. Sometimes what I read makes me think of a situation I've been in recently or read about in the news or a psychology book I've read. Sometimes these things apply to me quite intimately; sometimes they're just about life in general. However they come about, they always teach me something about who God is and how He works. I love that.