A New Look, A New Listen

"My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." - John 14:3-6

Atheism: The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason what so ever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense. - Unknown

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God." - C.S. Lewis / Mere Christianity

Like it or not Jesus does throw down the gauntlet. It took me a long time to accept this. I tried to wiggle my way around it, ignore it or simply rationalize it away. But I've begun this blog with that quote from James because, well, there is no wiggle room, you can't ignore it and - though faith can be rational - it is not the foundation of true belief.

Atheists - and I know a few - rail against Jesus because of what his followers have done (the crusades, abortion clinic protests, etc.). But that is unfair and only confuses the issue. Jesus came. He loved. At no point did he say "Go kill Muslims!" or "Go and corner that fourteen year old pregnant girl and mock her shame." Quite the contrary. He wept over unkindness, preached that a Samaritan (the despised people of the Jews) could be kinder than a Rabbi and knelt down to draw a line in the sand to protect a woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. And while we're on the topic? At no point, ever, did he walk up to someone and say "Believe in me or you're going to hell." I know too many people deeply scarred by a Christian who lobbed the "hell grenade" at them. It's sad. Jesus preached over and over again that we are not to judge, harm or condemn our fellow man. Judgement is up to God. He did, however, state clearly that he was the way to the Father. Again. That gauntlet. But guess what? Even that he does amidst parables, pleading and praying. For me. For you. For everyone.

The C.S. Lewis quote is one of my favorites and it carries us to the decision point of believing or not believing in Christ. In dismisses outright the notion that he was just a great teacher, life coach or wise prophet by using - oddly enough - Jesus' own words against him. Christ says "I am the Son of God." and "I am the way, the truth and the life." He doesn't say "I am one of many who can lead you through this life and on to the next." He doesn't say "Buy my speech on parchment paper, on sale by one of the apostles after the service." He wasn't up for debate and he wasn't for sale. What he did say, in many ways, over and over again?  "Listen to me."

agit8

"Sing to the Lord a new song..." Psalm 96:1

One of the greater joys of life is in discovering a context to it all. We often view things from one perspective or another, never realizing that, more often than not, few things are that simple. We need only breach a conversation about how to solve a "simple" problem like bringing water or the malaria vaccine to Africa before we realize, very shortly, that we've walked smack dab into a quagmire of political rivalries, tribal resentments and government mismanagement of resources. It shouldn't be that hard but, in truth, it's just not that easy. Hundreds of thousands will die of thirst and the want of a simple vaccine that, as Bono has pointed out, costs less than $1.00 per person to provide.

It's easy to be defeatist, to throw our hands up to God, to feel shame at bearing witness to the fact that, by all appearances, a human life is not even worth a SINGLE dollar. It's only when one steps back to ascertain the real culprit here - evil, as it lives and grows in the hearts and minds of men - that the battle becomes apparent. Over seventy years ago it was a monster sweeping across Europe with reckless abandon, killing at will, burning people in ovens and flush with a desire for power. Our greatest mistake then as a quiet nation was our very silence and, by the time we acted, it was almost too late.

But now we are not a tiny nation. We are the richest, strongest nation in the world. The enemy is not one man but an insidious wall of apathy. This doesn't mean we can wave the wand (or the stick) of democracy and force tribes with centuries old bitterness between them to come together, or power-wash their governments clean of corruption. We must remember the old adage about a trickle of water, how over time it will wear smooth the roughest of rocks, one drop at a time.

Don't let the enemy tell you that one tiny voice, your voice, is all for naught. It's for God, who is big enough to take the accumulated efforts and the tiniest gestures and turn them into a wave of love. Please visit the one.org website and join the agit8 campaign. They don't want your money. They want your voice. Extreme poverty in the world has already been cut in half and it's possible that it can be completely eradicated by 2030 if enough of us push the governments of the world hard enough.

Right now 100 artists are performing their favorite protest songs as part of the agit8 campaign. Why don't you join them, add your voice and sing along?