In Sickness and in Health

I have been sick for a couple of days and to be honest I am a terrible sick person. I don't like to take medicine to treat symptoms, I don't understand why we don't treat the illness instead of the symptom. If they would put me in a hotel room with popsicles, Coca-Cola and some chicken noodle soup, turn on the TV to ESPN or old movies and leave me alone until I am well it would be best for everyone concerned.

Sickness wasn't part of the plan either. The thing we call the fall in Genesis 3 brought all this mess into play. The only thing good about being sick is that I spend more time praying than I normally do, most of it repetition for relief, but sometimes in there I can do a little bit of reflection. It generally takes me half a day to say, "OK, I am flat out and not going anywhere or doing anything so what do You want to talk about?"

Every time this happens (which is rarely) I am reminded how much time I spend being busy instead of being available, to God, to my family, to my parish... I realize that first day back when I try and do too much that those days spent apart from busy-ness are truly important and that into that time God has spoken and blessed me. Hearing his voice and responding to it rather than all the other voices that speak to us is critical. (see Genesis 3.17)

Fortunate Son

What God said was that if they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would "surely die." What He didn't say was they would die from eating of that fruit or in that moment they would die. They had to fulfill their original design and purpose, procreating and beginning the work of filling the earth with more of their kind. For that reason, the animal(s) had to die for clothing. Innocence was lost and death became a reality to be dealt with in the earth.

It says something profound that God still was counting on the "human experiment" that the next step after sin wasn't to put the first two to death and really do a do-over with another pair. It would have been the simplest thing to do but we were made in His own image, which He is reluctant to destroy, we weren't made for destruction. Grace is the concept on which all human life rests from that moment forward.

I know in my own life I chose to follow my own path for a very long time in spite of knowing what God had planned. I had come to the belief that there was no way back to that path and still wake up each day thankful that I have a place in His kingdom at all, much less leading a church, I don't deserve it and God's grace is always amazing.

Do-overs

That is more or less what Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3, you have to have a do-over. We call that being born again. For Nicodemus it meant that what was done to him 8 days after his birth wasn't good enough, he needed to be "born from above." In our tradition we baptize infants, but we baptize them into the household of faith, not into faith itself. Essentially their birth brings them into one family and in baptism we as the faith community adopt the child into our family and pledge to make sure that the child receives all the instruction we can give her. Our goal is to raise the child in the faith once delivered.

I wish that when we baptize infants they were good to go as far as salvation and eternal life are concerned, but I know the truth is that sin will have to be dealt with in their lives just like in mine, and if they don't turn to Jesus as the solution for that sin then I could pour buckets of water on them and it won't be enough.

We can't live in denial over sin. I wonder if Adam ever completely owned his sin? In Genesis 3 he deflected blame to "the woman you gave me." I hate that he says that because it is too often the way I think about my own life. I can make some excuses and I can envision scenarios where I could live a perfect life, completely devoted to God. Trouble is that I know that the reality is I am what I am and that's all that I am, just like Popeye. I need the do-over of rebirth from above if I am ever going to make any progress.

Better back in the day

Isn't that really the message of the first couple of chapters of the Book? If it is truly God's story then don't we have to read it from God's perspective? If we do, then we can see this as His looking back at the beginning of creation and saying I took a mess and made it something wonderful, something I was proud of, and then I created some people in my own image who were supposed to love it and care for it and do the work of filling all the empty space with others like themselves who would make the whole thing hum.

We could read the first sentence in the Bible as "In the beginning I made everything perfect." Everything was at it should be, the atmosphere cooperated and did what I told it to do, the seas obeyed me and retreated to their boundaries, the mountains rose up, the creatures did what they were told, the earth brought forth what I wanted and then I created something truly wonderful and gave it a couple of commands, be fruitful and multiply and stay away from one tree and as soon as the opportunity arose, they disobeyed me and nothing has been as good since that day.

I wish sometimes I could have a conversation with God and just ask the question, "When you created me, what did you want me to be?" I think He would say I was asking the wrong question, the question is who did I want you to be. I tend to think in wrong categories that way. God is more interested in who we are than what we are and He is always ready to work with us on that. I want to go back to the beginning and become who He hoped I would be, is that possible? Can we get a do-over?

Genesis

I have been studying the book of Genesis with a group of guys for the last 2+ years and it has shaped my faith and the way I read the rest of the Bible in some amazing ways. There are certain aspects of that book that have truly captivated my imagination. That book has much to say about the way things are on a macro level. It tells us why things aren't as we think they should be right in the very beginning of the book.

The first two chapters tell us that when it was created there was a way things were supposed to be, a world where the big concepts we all believe in are valid. We can wrestle with why truth, honesty, fairness and all the rest of those big ideas we have in common aren't realities in our world but at the end of the day, we have to come back to the problem of why, when we have a shared set of values these aren't the way of the world.

I can only come at this from the perspective of a believer, I believe God created all that is and all that was and that His judgment was, at the completion of His work, very good, that is, as it should be. There was nothing remotely random about creation and the notions we have about the way things should be were built into the system at the start. We are the problem in the system. There is much talk today about human based corruption of the system around the issue of global warming or climate change or whatever the preferred term du jour may be, but the truth is that all the problems in the world come down to a human problem called sin, which has degraded all life on the planet including our own.

The good news is that God has a solution for the problem, a solution planned from the beginning, but it requires eventually a new creation, one we can't spoil.

The Wisdom of Jesus

What wisdom does it take to get yourself a death sentence? It seems a ridiculous proposition but it actually required a great deal of wisdom. Everyone else had a plan for Jesus and it required great wisdom to follow God's plan instead. Sometimes it required Him to confront and confuse and other times it required Him to withdraw. Sometimes it required Him to do miraculous signs and other times to refuse to do the same thing.

In all this, the wisdom was in doing what His Father commanded rather than what people wanted or commanded. Can we learn anything from that? We have become obsessed with availability in our times, we have no time for solitude and reflection. Our lives are so busy listening to demands of others that we have no time to listen to God speaking to us. I am perhaps more guilty of this than anyone I know. The tyranny of the urgent with mobile phones and email seems to rule my life and I spend less time in prayer and study than I should.

In Mark's Gospel, in the first chapter, Jesus sets the tone for this life. After an all-night healing session he arose early in the morning and went to a desolate place to be alone in prayer. Many times in the Gospels Jesus does this either alone or with the three disciples closest to Him, Peter and James and John. It is important for us to have those times when we get away from all the noise and demands for our time and attention and be alone with the Lord in a desolate place if we will live as wise people rather than as puppets.

Can wisdom be possessed?

I like books, I buy them all the time, but it never occurs to me to go to a library and check one out. I would have to give it back and then if I liked it I would just buy it anyway, so what's the use? If anyone could become wise or possess great wisdom simply by reading books that contain wisdom, I would be a wise man indeed, but I'm not. Why is that?

I don't think wisdom can be possessed in the same way that I own books and it is far easier to write wise things and to think wise things than it is to live with wisdom. Wisdom comes from abiding in the Lord, it comes from doing what Paul says, to pray without ceasing, the way of abiding. He is the source of wisdom and I can't truly possess it. It is like the electric supply to my house, I get to enjoy its benefits so long as I am connected to it but if not, I am in the dark.

As the circumstances of my life change, my need for wisdom changes. New challenges come up all the time with job, family and relationships and I find that I can't always go back to what I have done before or some concept I have learned or read. Repeating "serenity now" doesn't work for example. (See Seinfeld)

I see Jesus living wisely and it is primarily because He didn't reduce people or situations to formulas, "Here is a blind man, this is what you do." He treated every situation as unique and was always able to answer wisely when confronted. I know He was God but there are certain things He laid down to become man and in that He knew better than we ever seem to know that if He was going to be man He better stay plugged into the source of wisdom if He was going to get safely to His destiny, the cross. Strange destination and it seems even stranger to think it required wisdom to get there, but think about the alternative destinations proposed for him by others and what was accomplished at the cross and you will see what I mean.