Practice Resurrection

The Suffering and Glory of the Servant (Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12)

13 See, my servant will act wisely;

he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.

14 Just as there were many who were appalled at him—

his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man

and his form marred beyond human likeness—

15 so will he sprinkle many nations,

and kings will shut their mouths because of him.

For what they were not told, they will see,

and what they have not heard, they will understand.

1 Who has believed our message

and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.

Like one from whom men hide their faces

he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities

and carried our sorrows,

yet we considered him stricken by God,

smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,

he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,

and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

each of us has turned to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,

yet he did not open his mouth;

he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,

so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

And who can speak of his descendants?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

for the transgression of my people he was stricken.

9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence,

nor was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,

and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering,

he will see his offspring and prolong his days,

and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

11 After the suffering of his soul,

he will see the light of life and be satisfied;

by knowledge of him my righteous servant will justify many,

and he will bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,

and he will divide the spoils with the strong,

because he poured out his life unto death,

and was numbered with the transgressors.

For he bore the sin of many,

and made intercession for the transgressors.

Looking Out - Brandi Carlile

I went out looking for the answers
And never left my town
I'm no good at understanding
But I'm good at standing ground

And when I asked a corner preacher
I couldn't hear him for my youth
Some people get religion
Some people get the truth

I never get the truth
I never get the truth

I know the darkness pulls on you
But it's just a point of view
When you're outside looking in
You belong to someone

And when you feel like giving in
Or the coming of the end
Like your heart could break in two
Someone loves you

I laid this suitcase on my chest
So I could feel somebody's weight
And I laid you to rest
Just to feel the give and take

I got a new interpretation
And it's a better point of view
While you were looking for a landslide
I was looking out for you
Someone's looking out for you

I know the darkness pulls on you
But it's just a point of view
When you're outside looking in
You belong to someone

And when you feel like giving in
Or the coming of the end
Like your heart could break in two
Someone loves you

I am afraid of crossing lines
I am afraid of flying blind
Afraid of inquiring minds
Afraid of being left behind

I close my eyes, I think of you
I take a step, I think of you
I catch my breath, I think of you
I cannot rest, I think of you

My one and only wrecking ball
And you're crashing through my walls
When you're outside looking in
You belong to someone

And when you feel like giving in
Or the coming of the end
Like your heart could break in two
Someone loves you



~ Happy Easter, Indeed. ~

(photos taken by me via my iphone)

Open Up Your Fists

Daisy, give yourself away

Look up at the rain

The beautiful display

Of power and surrender

Giving us today

When she gives herself away

Rain, another rainy day

It comes up from the ocean

To give herself away

She comes down easy

On rich and debt the same

When she gives herself away

Let it go

Daisy let it go

Open up your fists

This fallen world

Doesn't hold your interest

Doesn't hold your soul

Daisy let it go

Pain, give yourself a name

Call yourself contrition

Avarice or blame

Giving isn't easy

And neither is the rain

When she gives herself away

Daisy, why another day

Why another sunrise

Who will take the blame

For all redemptive motion

And every rainy day

When he gives himself away

Let it go...

Cowboys and Indians: Thoughts on War

War & Education, Good Guys vs. Bad Guys, & the Myth of Redemptive Violence in 3 Parts:

Part 1. "Political Awakenings: An Unpublished Howard Zinn Inerview"

from The Nation (Feb. 8, 2010)

Harry Kreisler: Before you were in college, you were working on the docks and you were involved in a demonstration at Times Square, and the police attacked. That is an example of a kind of event that changed your thinking, and that's an argument that you make in a lot of your history, that people can be changed by things that happen to them and act accordingly.

Howard Zinn: That's right. Sometimes it's one very vivid experience. Of course, it's never just one vivid experience, but it's that one experience coming on top of a kind of only semiconscious understanding that's been developed, and then it becomes crystallized by an event. I think that's what happened to me at the age of seventeen, when I was hit by a policeman and knocked unconscious. I woke up and said, my God, this is America, where, yes, there are bad guys and there are good guys, but the government is neutral. And when I saw that, no, the police are not neutral, the government is not neutral, that was a radical insight.

HK: Your involvement in the antiwar movement was informed, in part, by your experience as a soldier. In one of the last bombing missions of the war, you were a bombardier on a plane that was responsible for one of the first uses of napalm, on an innocent French village called Royan. Tell us about that experience and what you learned from it, and how it affected your activism in the antiwar movement and your view of war in general.

HZ: I enlisted in the Air Force. I volunteered. I was an enthusiastic bombardier. To me it was very simple: it was a war against fascism. They were the bad guys; we were the good guys. One of the things I learned from that experience was that when you start off with them being the bad guys and you being the good guys, once you've made that one decision, you don't have to think anymore, if you're in the military. From that point on, anything goes. From that point on, you're capable of anything, even atrocities. Because you've made a decision a long time ago that you're on the right side. You don't keep questioning, questioning, questioning. You're not Yossarian, who questions.


And so, I was an enthusiastic bombardier, as I say. The war was over, presumably--a few weeks from the end. Everybody knew the war was about to end in Europe. We didn't think we were flying missions anymore. No reason to fly. We were all through France, into Germany. The Russians and Americans had met on the Elbe. It was just a matter of a few weeks. And then we were awakened in the wee hours of the morning and told we were going on a mission. The so-called intelligence people, who brief us before we go into a plane, tell us we are going to bomb this tiny town on the Atlantic coast of France called Royan, near Bordeaux, and we are doing it because there are several thousand German soldiers there. They are not doing anything. They are not bothering anyone. They are waiting for the war to end. They've just been bypassed. And we are going to bomb them.

What's interesting to me later, in thinking about it, is that it didn't occur to me to stand up in the briefing room and say, "What are we doing? Why are we doing this? The war is almost over, there is no need." It didn't occur to me. To this day, I understand how atrocities are committed. How the military mind works. You are taught to just mechanically go through the procedures that you have been taught, you see. So, we went over Royan, and they told us in the briefing that we were going to drop a different kind of bomb this time. Instead of the usual demolition bombs, we are going to drop thirty hundred-pound canisters of what they called jellied gasoline, which was napalm. It was the first use of napalm in the European war. We went over. We destroyed the German troops and also destroyed the French town of Royan. "Friendly fire." That's what bombing does.

To this day, when I hear the leaders of the country say, "Well, this is precision bombing and we are being very careful, and we are only bombing military"--that's nonsense. No matter how sophisticated the bombing technology, there is no way you can avoid killing nonmilitary people when you drop bombs. It wasn't until after the war that I looked back on that. In fact, it wasn't until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that I looked back on that. Because after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which at first I had welcomed like everybody at that time did--"Oh yes, the war is going to be over"--then I read John Hershey's bookHiroshima, and for the first time the human consequences of dropping the bomb were brought home to me in a way I hadn't thought of. When you are dropping bombs from 30,000 feet you don't hear screams. You don't see blood.

I suddenly saw what the bomb in Hiroshima did. I began to rethink the whole question of a "good war." I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a good war. They may start off with good intentions, at least on the part of the people who fight in them. Generally not on the part of the people who make the decision; I doubt they have good intentions. But there may be good intentions on the part of the GIs who believe, yes, we are doing this for a good cause. But those good intentions are quickly corrupted. The good guys become the bad guys. So I became convinced that war is not a solution, fundamentally, for any serious problem. It may seem like a solution, like a quick fix, a drug. You get rid of this dictator, that dictator, as we did Hitler, Mussolini. But you don't solve fundamental problems. In the meantime, you've killed tens of millions of people.

...continue reading the rest of the interview HERE


Part 2. "No Exit" by Andrew Bacevich

from The American Conservative (Feb. 1, 2010)


America has an impressive record of starting wars but a dismal one of ending them well...



What are we to make of this record? For Krauthammer, Boot, and Barnes, the lessons are clear: dial up the rhetoric, increase military spending, send in more troops, and give the generals a free hand. The important thing, writes William Kristol in his own assessment of Obama’s Afghanistan decision, is to have a commander in chief who embraces “the use of military force as a key instrument of national power.” If we just keep trying, one of these times things will surely turn out all right.


An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.

To consider the long bloody chronicle of modern history, big wars and small ones alike, is to affirm the validity of these conclusions. Bellicose ideologues will pretend otherwise. Such are the vagaries of American politics that within the Beltway the views expressed by these ideologues—few of whom have experienced war—will continue to be treated as worthy of consideration. One sees the hand of God at work: the Lord obviously has an acute appreciation for irony.


...continue reading the rest of the article HERE



Part 3. "Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence" by Walter Wink

essay hosted by Ekklesia (2007) - full publication in The Powers That Be (1999)


The belief that violence “saves” is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook, then, is the religious character of violence. It demands from its devotees an absolute obedience- unto-death.


This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today...

When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis; one forswears the villain’s ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression. Salvation is found through identification with the hero.



The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known...


...continue reading the full essay HERE

images from Global Issues: "World Military Spending"


P.S.(a) An effective little ad:

Merry Christmas

The Word Became Flesh
John 1:1-18

1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, [1] and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to his own, [2] and his own people [3] did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) 16 And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, [4] who is at the Father's side, [5] he has made him known.

11 years later, Hate Crimes Bill Passes

This blog post contains an excerpt from something I posted back in March. I'm reposting it because there is cause to celebrate today. 11 years after his death, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Bill that was fought so hard for has been approved by Congress and today signed by the president and sealed in law.

I cannot overstate the importance of this moment. This is the first time ANY federal equality measure protecting LGBT rights has become law. The very first time.

However, in stating this there cannot only be celebration but an effort to talk about why this was necessary in the first place. For example on NPR even, people are asking questions about why you need additional laws for already illegal crimes.

Example: "We have laws already that protect everyone. Is murdering someone who is a black gay women worse than murdering a white man? If people want to be treated equal then the laws should be equal."

Questions like these at first seem logical when you think of sin (or wrongdoing if you like) as purely individual. However, sin isn't just an action that is personal, but it can also be systemic. This systemic injustice is at the heart of what makes a hate crime so dangerous. So here we go...

from my blog on March, 11 2009:



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/23oxnard.html

Larry (Lawrence King), 15, had said publicly that he was gay, classmates said, enduring harassment from a group of schoolmates, including the 14-year-old boy, Brandon, charged in his death. Larry asked Brandon to be his valentine and the following day the 14-yr-old came to school and shot Larry in the head.

“God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex,” the Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church told the crowd as he stood in front of a large photograph of the victim. “Larry was a masterpiece.”

'Why we can't wait'

Your vote this year has the power to save lives and will affect millions of homosexual people in this country. This is why the Matthew Shepard Act matters, and why a position against it as a Christian is not just debatable but unconscionable...

Hate crimes differ from conventional crime because they are not directed simply at an individual, but are meant to cause fear and intimidation in an entire group or class of people.
All violent crimes are reprehensible, but hate crimes require additional emphasis in the justice system because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. A violent hate crime is intended to "send a message" that an individual and "their kind" will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable and unprotected. Our justice system should then be able to "send a message" right back that there are not "less than human" unprotected members of society.

The Supreme Court ruled that, "bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest." And stated that, "When the core of a person's identity is attacked, the degradation and dehumanization is especially severe, and additional emotional and physiological problems are likely to result. Society then, in turn, can suffer from the disempowerment of a group of people."

If that all seems too heady, here's the more practical component. Hate crime legislation gives federal authorities greater ability to engage in crime investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue, and allow courts to consider and present motive in cases in which it previously went unheard. It supports appeals from cases dismissed due to local bias or foul-play. There are countless cases of crimes against individuals dismissed or lessened due to bias. Take the Jena 6 story right now. Without hate crime legislation, it is often harder for victims to have recourse when justice isn't served. This is not only sensible but completely necessary and it should undoubtedly apply to sexual orientation considering that 20% of hate crimes apply to it.

The church is moving forward in many of the arenas in which it has exercised poor judgment. The Catholic church recently unveiled its list of "social" sins declaring that the individual not only sins against him/herself but also systemically against portions of society in a globalized world. Even the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention recently stated that on Global Warming that if it didn't change its stance that it would be disregarded as "uncaring, reckless, and ill-informed johnny-come-lately's just as it had during segregation and slavery and that the poor would be the first to suffer. But despite all of this understanding of implication, nearly everyone, even progressive Christian ethics groups like Sojourners are steering clear of "the gay issue" in America. Why? Why can Christian America love anyone except for their gay neighbor (or mexican one for that matter). Why do Christians in America so hate gays? Christians have to step up on this even if they don't agree with homosexuals. The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, demands care for the "other," and declares the ramifications for those who don't. Regardless of an individual's views on the issues, the church has to be out front on human rights abuses. Are murder, violence and abuse ever acceptable toward anyone? Even more fundamental: Is Love Conditional? These shouldn't be questions the church is allowing to go unanswered. You can't play neutral on this one and come out clean.

"I join the oppressors of those I choose to ignore,
and that's not just murder,
it's suicide."

- derek webb

Further thoughts:

MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" : http://www.mlkonline.net/jail.html

a must see film on the issue: http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org

Oh it's healing bang, bang, bang

I like the sweet life
and the silence
But it's the storm that I believe in


A little late for Easter, but I had intended to post a reflection. So I picked two holy sonnets of sorts. The above from The Cardigans and below from John Donne.


"Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

- [ "Holy Sonnet XIV"]

The Evangelical Collapse... quickly come

"The Coming Evangelical Collapse"
An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

By Michael Spencer
from the March 10, 2009 Christian Science Monitor

Excerpt:

...the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close. Why is this going to happen?

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to "do good" is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

Great article and I agree almost entirely, (especially with his list 1-7) but with a few exceptions. The largest being this:

The ascendancy of Charismatic-Pentecostal-influenced worship around the world can be a major positive for the evangelical movement if reformation can reach those churches and if it is joined with the calling, training, and mentoring of leaders. If American churches come under more of the influence of the movement of the Holy Spirit in Africa and Asia, this will be a good thing.

This movement is primarily devoid of the very things the author says Evangelicals problematically lack in #2

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

...so I don't see how the author thinks that movement will sustain or be a "good thing." It is growing in poverty-ridden areas because it often preaches a false gospel of self-improvement, holiness and works-based righteousness benefits and wealth according to "faith". So it preys on the praying poor, but it is NOT Christianity, in fact it's the antithesis. In my line of work we've seen vibrant growth in healthy faith in Africa that eclipses some of the best the Western church has produced, but we've also seen growth in bastardized faith with a false gospel and most of it has come from these very Charismaniacal circles.

The Christian "church" as a whole is bigger than it's ever been and the center of Christianity is no longer Europe, nor the U.S., but South America, Africa, & Asia. People talked the "death" of the church many many times before and they will continue to do so. The author is primarily correct about his evaluations of the Western church and the resurgence of Orthodoxy. Orthodox faith (not Eastern Orthodox, but Biblical based traditional faith) is growing slowly, especially in Europe and centers of education rather than declining as popular opinion suggests.

What is true and troubling is that as the American "Evangelical" church declines, which it is, it will not die out but rather become more troublesome and hard-lined. Like a dog in a corner (literally, because as the author suggests correctly, these groups will retreat further and further into their subcultures) it will lash out and become more hateful and destructive and entrench itself further into its culture wars of irrelevance and continue to serve as fodder and a red herring for critics of Christianity.

Finally, I do also agree with the author that this is all mostly GOOD news for the Church. True Christianity has stood strongest and most in line with its own teachings when it acts as counterculture and in opposition to the lies and destruction of its particular place in time (the irony is that now it needs most to be those things to its own adherents!). The Church was most successful when it stood against the Hellenists and the Romans and offered its alternative even in the face of persecution. It was then most successful again when it stood against its own co-option with the State and the abuses of the Catholic heads during the Reformation. It will be so again if it will stand against is new idols and false leaders and actually teach the Gospel instead of social conservatism, prosperity theology, and numerous other distractions (at best) and murderous lies (at worst).

The author says, "The integrity of the church as a countercultural movement with a message of "empire subversion" will increasingly replace a message of cultural and political entitlement." Let's hope so, because that will not be the legacy of our parents, but maybe it can be ours.