Call on me

I'm going through Patrick Morley's The Man in the Mirror with some friends. I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but it's a great survey of issues that men face: purpose, priorities, relationships, etc. At one point I seem to remember his advising (I couldn't find it just now though) against putting oneself in a risky position so that God would "have to" bail you out.

In other words, don't take useless risks. This way of thinking appeals to me. I mean, to me risk is just a four-letter word.

But as a counterpoint to that, we were sitting in church some months back, and heard someone describe her efforts to establish a transition home for kids turning 18 and rotating out of foster care, or something like this. She had felt God leading her in this direction and ended up in a situation, where, well, God "had to" bail her out. (Which he did, by moving some generous donor -- an individual or a foundation -- to give a huge gift, so the ministry could stay afloat and its founder would herself remain solvent.) This is not the sort of risk I would take on myself, but I had to admire this woman's guts.

Today's reading from the psalms includes this verse:

...and call upon me in the day of trouble.

I shall rescue you
and you will honor me.

from Psalm 50.15

This doesn't tell us to live a life of folly and imprudent risk, but it provides a counterpoint for people like me, who tend to think no risk too worthy to avoid. It reminds me that life is not a game where the object is to avoid problems and arrive safely at... the day I die.

Rather, it's to be passionately engaged with the Lord, to know and follow him every day. And sometimes I guess that means to be willing to grow, which means to change. And it may mean not trying quite so hard to avoid the "day of trouble", which will come to each one of us, inevitably, anyway.

The prospect of the righteous

We met "Sonia" a few years ago at a youth camp for children of refugees, where we were serving together. Besides helping refugee kids, Sonia raises money for charity, and recently has taken on guardianship of a 7-year-old girl. This child had never been to school before moving in with Sonia, and had not learned the alphabet or the other things that first-grade kids usually learn in this country. Instead she spent hours locked up in the apartment while her mother threw her life away on drugs and bad men.

I was thinking about Sonia when I read this morning's selection from Proverbs:

The prospect of the righteous is joy,

but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing.

Proverbs 10.28

Sonia was recently diagnosed with cancer; she may not live to see 50.

This does not seem fair to me: one woman throws her life away, another has it taken from her. Yet "the prospect of the righteous is joy"?

On one hand, I don't get it. On the other hand, when I think about the rotten mother -- sorry, but she is a rotten mother -- who locked her kid up and did drugs and had sex with bad men, surely this bad mother's hopes will come to nothing unless something changes.

And Sonia's prospect of joy? Any joy will be tempered with the knowledge of a looming catastrophe, because although there are palliatives, there is no cure. Yeah, I know that we're all dying, and any of us could die any minute (all it takes is one stray truck), but Sonia has a weight that most of us don't have to carry.

May Sonia find joy in the coming days. May the rotten mother come to herself and not discard the rest of her life. And may you and I rejoice in every blessing. Sometimes we have to look for it, but the prospect of the righteous truly is joy.

(minor corrections 3/11)

I don't understand that so I'll ridicule it

There's a tradition, going back some centuries, which says that mind is not matter. The brain is matter but the mind (or the psyche) is not. Recently, people like Pinker and the Churchlands (recently profiled in the New Yorker) have objected vehemently to this, insisting that the mind is nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. They don't like the idea that something without a material component (a soul or a nonphysical "mind" or something) could have effects on the physical world, and so they say that whatever isn't matter can't exist. Lewis pointed out the folly of this over a half century ago:

If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions (or, we would say today, electro-chemical reactions between neurons), what reason have we to trust it?

Evil and God,
from The Spectator
vol. CLXVI (7 February 1941),
reprinted in God in the Dock
(Eerdmans, 1970), p.21

Materialistic psychologists and philosophers are not, of course, making a brand new error. They are making the same error committed by the Sadducees in Mark 12. Today's New Testament reading tells of an encounter Jesus had with them. They came to him "with a question," Mark tells us:

¹⁹"Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. ²⁰Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. ²¹The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third.... ²³At the resurrection, whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"

from Mark 12.19-23

Now did the Sadducees start off hating the idea of a resurrection, and go looking for paradoxes? Or did they wonder about some of these things and end up rejecting the idea of a resurrection afterwards?

I'll tell you: I don't know. But they were mistaken, as Jesus explains:

²⁴Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? ²⁵When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ²⁶Now about the dead rising — have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? ²⁷He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken!"

Perhaps I shouldn't enjoy this so much, but he really lets them have it here. He chides them for not knowing the Scriptures -- something I'm sure they prided themselves on. Then in particular, "have you not read...?" Ouch! Every Jewish boy reads that passage and probably recites it.

These Sadducees had read that but evidently had forgotten it, and forgotten the implication that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must have still been alive at that time, because God wouldn't identify himself as the God of dead people. Hence there must be a resurrection.

The Sadducees didn't understand how the resurrection worked, so they rejected it and forgot (as Jesus pointed out) what they had read in the Bible. In a similar way, these psychologists and philosophers, and maybe some neuroscientists too, don't understand how a nonphysical mind could influence a physical world -- so they reject the idea. But none of them can answer Lewis's rhetorical question -- a question old enough to be drawing Social Security -- and thus make the same mistake as the Sadducees.

And what about me? Do I reject things just because I don't understand how they could be? May God help us to be open to the truth, even if we don't quite understand it all, or understand how something could be. May he protect us from the error of the Sadducees.

Give Caesar what's Caesar's

Today's New Testament reading has some people trying to trap Jesus in his words. They ask him whether it's OK to pay the hated tax or not. You see, if he says, "Yes, pay it," they'll cast him as a Roman collaborateur, but if he says, "Don't," then they'll have the Romans arrest him. He sees through their hypocricy, though, and asks them for a coin. (Someone has pointed out that even for this illustration he had to borrow a coin.)

¹⁶They brought the coin, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?"

"Caesar's," they replied.

¹⁷Then Jesus said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."

And they were amazed at him.

Mark 12.16-17

What does that mean? OK, this just came to me now: What is Caesar's? Taxes. Obedience to the law.

What's God's? Everything else? Of course, but in particular, what's that verse say? "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." So my heart, soul, mind, and strength are God's, and I should give him that. H'm...

We had a friend over for dinner the other night, and he told us of his experience investing in stocks. Now not everyone is like this, but when he related his experience, I knew that I was! You buy some shares of stock XYZ at, say, $40, using an online broker. E*Trade, Ameritrade, one of those.

A few hours or a few minutes later, you check the price. Whoa! Up a whole point! You feel smart. Or it's down, and you feel dumb, or sad, or unlucky. The next day, if you haven't sold it already, you check it a few times (or a few dozen times) more. When it's up, you're happy; when it's down, you're sad. You think about it, you worry about it, OK, maybe you pray about it.

But part of your heart has gone into the market, into the price of that stock.

Some people can invest and forget it; we put some money into a few stocks and had the experience that our friend did. Last year we got out of that and turned over management to a financial advisor. Since it's now tax time, I looked over the data for "Schedule D" and you know what? We actually "made" a little money. One stock made $3000 and two others lost $1000 apiece, something like that. It was not worth the time and energy invested.

I'm glad we're out of it. So that's one distraction eliminated, or at least reduced. Not a sure cure to total devotion to God, but it removed a pot-hole in the road.

So we don't watch the market nearly so closely, and our hearts are at peace, less tied up in the financial pages, and, we hope, more fully His.

Be still

One of the things that is hard for me to do is to just sit still and meditate. I like to have something to read, a puzzle or problem to work on, or something to watch or listen to. Or something to write with. So here's something I need to read:

¹God is our refuge and strength
A very present help in time of trouble.
²Therefore we will not fear,
Though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
...
¹⁰"Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth."

Psalm 46.1-2,10

I think there is a connection between God's command to "Be still and know that I..." and the psalmist's words that "we will not fear."

The temptation for me is to think I can do things to keep the world under control. This is apparently not a particularly new conceit; it's been around for at least a few thousand years.

Now it is true that we can do things to change the world, or the parts of the world under our influence. We can bring blessings to those around us. We can make life miserable for others. And we have seen a few times too many that high school kids can get access to firearms and end the lives of dozens of their classmates. So we can and do have an impact on the world, and much of the time that is how God chooses to bless the world -- that is, by using people like you and me in others' lives.

But the world isn't under our control -- at least not much of it is, and nothing that's ultimately meaningful. And for me to remember that, it's good to sit still once in a while. Not reading or writing or watching, not working on a puzzle or problem. Not sleeping. But listening and waiting. I think I'll go do that right now.

Pray for me?

Carrot and stick? Try 2 pots of gold and 5 sticks

There's more than one place in the Old Testament where God sets up conditions: If you listen and obey, I'll bless you like this, but if you refuse and rebel, these other things will happen instead. A carrot and a stick.

In this morning's reading, Leviticus 26 offers a variant on this in no fewer than seven clauses, or stanzas if you will:

1. ³If you follow my decrees and are careful to obey my commands, ⁴I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit. ... (lots of other good stuff)

   ¹⁴But if you will not listen to me and carry out all these commands, ¹⁵and if you reject my decrees and abhor my laws and fail to carry out all my commands and so violate my covenant, ¹⁶then I will do this to you: I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and drain away your life. ... (other bad stuff)
   
   

   ¹⁸If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over. ... (more bad stuff)
   
   

   ²¹If you remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me, I will multiply your afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve. ... (more bad stuff)
   
   

   ²³If in spite of these things you do not accept my correction but continue to be hostile toward me, ²⁴I myself will be hostile toward you and will afflict you for your sins seven times over. ... (more bad stuff)
   
   

   ²⁷If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, ... ³³I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. ... ³⁹Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their fathers' sins they will waste away.

2. ⁴⁰But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers — their treachery against me and their hostility toward me, ... ⁴²I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.

Isn't that interesting? The first and the last (7^th) clauses promise lots of good stuff, and clauses 2-6 talk about the bad things that will happen "if" they rebel, disobey, etc.

I put "if" in quotes because he clearly knows that they will, and at each stage he'll try to get their attention but they'll still refuse, and so on, until they are exiled. He tells them all this in advance, so they can avoid all the bad stuff.

I often think about the messy situation all over the world -- corruption in government, abuse of people's trust, exploitation, violence, poverty, oppression, and rampant disregard for the truth -- and I think, "If I were king..." Which it's a good thing I'm not, because I don't have mercy and patience like God has. I don't think I'd ever come up with the two pots of gold and the five sticks in between; I'd probably have the carrot, followed shortly by cataclysmic global thermonuclear destruction. (Oh, waitaminute; he tried the water-based version of that back in Genesis 6, and it didn't work.)

But on second thought, what would I tell my children? How patient would I be with them if they refused and rebelled? I would weep and mourn, probably, and hope that we could get to clause 7 without having to go through all the others.

Thank heaven for a merciful God; this messed-up world (including me) certainly needs mercy and grace and patience.

Denying yourself for a whole year!

So the Lord told the Israelites to take a sabbatical year:

For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops. But in the seventh year the land is to have a sabbath of rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest.

Leviticus 25.3-5

I seem to remember hearing that the Israelites never ever obeyed this.

But the thing that occurred to me this time around was: what would it have been like to the average Israelite? I mean, all the time they normally would have spent pruning, sowing, weeding, harvesting, and all that other stuff -- what were they going to do instead?

"I'm off to the fields, then... Ah, no-I'm-not."

Maybe they'd head down to the Side Track Tap. If they were in Minnesota in the winter they might go ice fishing. But good grief, for agricultural people to not spend time sowing, pruning, or harvesting...

And how would it be for all these guys in Software Valley, the ones who feel they were Born To Code? Or those guys in Minnesota in a snowless winter, shoveling snow in their sleep.

And if that weren't bad enough, after 49 years, they were supposed to take two years off. Well, from my understanding they never did that, either.

But what would that be like? I think taking a whole year off with none of the usual work would be, well, a life-changing experience. What would that be like? Well, I don't know, but if a lot of us did it, I'm going to say that retirement wouldn't be as traumatic as it is for many.

And I don't know what it will be like for me, assuming that I make it that far. Maybe if I took a year off first, retirement would be less traumatic for me too. But will I do it? I sure don't know. And if I did it, what would I do in it? Don't know that either.