First sign a girl is joining the family:

The lint in the dryer's lint filter is bright pink. Strange.

Pentecost 5: Hangin On

E heard an unusual amount of bells ringing at the church this morning. I wondered if it was their way of marking life in the Spirit after Pentecost Sunday and Monday.

It's not always as victorious as those bells make it sound. Sometimes it resembles the title the liturgical year gives it: "ordinary time."

Because sometimes the Holy Spirit gives that extraordinary courage, audacity, assurance, confidence, boldness to achieve wonderful things. Other times he's the one thing that just keeps us hanging on. Looks and feels ordinary I guess, but somewhere in there I wonder if it isn't just as extraordinary, just as worthy of ringing the bells.

Another strange dream...

The other strange dream I didn't know I have involving Icelandic musicians coming true...Sigur Ros on the Simpsons...?!?

Dream Team

The music of Julianna Barwick has been good enough for me to be an intrigued at-a-distance fan, but obscure enough for me to never purchase any of her music. But recording a new album in Iceland produced by Sigur Ros with the help of Mum and Amiina? This sounds like it could be a dream I didn't know I had come true.

Imaginative Empathy

I taught 5th graders about empathy once. I don't know if they would have understood this video, but I probably would have shown it to them anyway.

Portraits of My Father

taken by his daughter-in-law:

taken by his grandson:

The Question of Acts 3 and 4

Which is more astonishingly miraculous:

A man who's been paralysed for more than forty years suddenly running and leaping through the streets

or

Simple, ordinary, uneducated men asking for more chances to boldly speak the Word of God, despite threats and intimidation tactics from the most powerful men in society

?

A Barrel of Crabs

Speaking of the human condition prone to bare minimums,

I was just reminded of my wacky high school Physics teacher, who often endearingly offered a word of reproach in likening us teenagers to a barrel of crabs at the seafood market on the harbor port. He described it with much more animation than I can remember and articulate today, but there we are, a bunch of crabs, crawling all over one another in the bottom of the barrel, mostly miserable and yet content to bide our time in awaiting our impending doom, and as soon as one slowly crawls towards the top of the pack, reaching desperately toward the light of the day, the others grab him and drag him back in, never allowing anyone to escape the monotonous claustrophic prison.

I'm not sure the speech ever motivated us average physics students to actually do our homework, but I guess that's exactly the point.

Google tells me this metaphor didn't originate with my physics teacher, and that it's an image based on competition and jealousy more than anything. Which makes it only worse: we compete for bare minimums.

(God bless high school physics teachers everywhere, teachers of any age, of any subject, doing their best to combat the human condition day in and day out...)

The Good Samartan 6: Loopholes and Bare Minimums

In my mind, the entire parable hangs on one phrase. And not just the parable, but the entire human existence.

Verse 29: But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus had already responded and more or less concluded the conversation. But the lawyer continues. And so it's this question and the heart asking it that prompts the entire story in the first place. The man is not looking to love his God and love is neighbor with all that he has like the answer he had just given. He is looking only to justify himself. He is rule-abiding, and in so doing he is self-serving. And it's out of this inward-looking spirit that he asks the question.

"And just who exactly is my neighbor?"

He needs a more precise rule. He wants to know the requirements so that he can do it and cross it off his list; he wants to justify his action. ("Where am I obligated?") But he also wants to know the definition of neighbor so that he can get away with his excuses; he wants to justify his inaction. ("Where am I off the hook?") Like any average human, he's looking for the bare minimum to meet the requirement. Like any good lawyer, he's looking for loopholes that allow him to neglect the law whenever it suits him best. He's ignoring the spirit of the law, searching only for the letter.

We've heard this question before. We've seen this spirit before.

We heard it from the very beginning, with Cain asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

And we heard it even from the mouths of Jesus' disciples. Though I think the spirit was probably a bit different, it wasn't far away, with Peter asking, "How often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?"

This is the enslaved, stingy, selfish, tight-fisted, lazy human heart. We prefer to justify ourselves in the easiest, least-costly way possible. And that's why we want precise definitions: so that we can find the closest neighbor, "love" them, cross it off our list, call it a day, go on living for ourselves, and fall asleep feeling a little more assured.

That's where Jesus is pointing: to this loophole-searching, bare-minimum-obliging, self-justifying, independent human spirit. And he's going to show us the opposite end of the spectrum.

petit rappel

In case you had forgotten, May seems like a good time of year to remind yourself just how good Arcade Fire is. The two boys dancing in the backseat, asking for it to be turned on and turned up, seem to agree.

The Good Samaritan 5: Finding the Moral

And here is where we get lazy.

We've asked ourselves some good, challenging questions, all of which need to be asked, all of which God wants us to ask. We've wrestled with our desires, our motivations. We've gotten to the heart. But what's the point? What's the answer? What is Jesus really getting at?

What's the moral of the story?

We've seen our selfish excuses. We've seen the surprising, extraordinary, generous, compassionate of the Samaritan. We admire his act, and we can all agree we are to be like him, and not the like the Priest and Levite who choose not to help.

What's your point, Jesus? It seems obvious: "Go and do likewise" are his concluding words. Further, to make the connection with his introduction, he is saying, "Go and do likewise and you will live, you will inherit eternal life."

We rush to conclude and miss something, far too often without even realizing it. We heap on the guilt in looking at our excuses, we show the selfishness of the human heart, but in the end the only answer given is, "Go and do." In other words, "Try harder." Or worse, "Go be a better person." We've equated the point of the story with the moral of the story, as if Jesus were not much different than Aesop.

We address the heart, the interior problem, with action, exterior solutions. We try to fix character, the essence of who we are, with behavior, the mere overflow. A house is crumbling from a termite infestation, and we try to save it with new wallpaper and different curtains.

Even worse: we condemn the Priest and Levite for observing their religious rules and regulations, but we take their law (Don't touch half-dead people) and replace it with another (Help more, serve more, care more). It may be a more noble law in our minds, but it's a law just the same. Without even realizing it, we've replaced one rule for another and the burden of self-salvation tragically remains.

We are stuck with a cold religion of moral codes, working our way to be better people, and we hear it in the conclusions of sermons and Sunday school lessons everywhere: It was the Samaritan who acted according to the law, who pleased God. So you see, it's not just about knowing the law, it's about doing it. We need to serve more! We must be generous like the Samaritan!

It's not that those conclusions are untrue, it's that they are not the conclusions. They don't address the real problem. They drastically miss where Jesus was pointing. We think he's telling us to hire an interior decorator when he's actually telling us to call the exterminator.

And so we return to the problem with which we started: What is the only necessary thing?

gross.

What makes little boys so instinctively gross?

This morning the kid approached me with a giant, proud grin. "Papaaa," he sang, "I got somethin for yoooou!"

He handed me a used Lightning McQueen band-aid, freshly pulled from his skin. "Here! It's for you! You can keep it!"

I relunctantly thanked him. But he must have known what was going through my mind.

"Don't throw it away! You can hang it on your wall!"

The Good Samaritan 4: A Heart Problem

It's easy enough to throw stones at the Priest and Levite. It's easy enough to throw the stones at anyone, as long as it's not ourselves. But this isn't just a parable about religious leaders that turn out to be hypocrites. This is, in part, a story about people who make all sorts of excuses to permit their navel-gazing.

The lawyer asking the questions has the right answers. "You've answered correctly," Jesus says. But Jesus' story seems to imply right answers aren't enough. It's the action that counts. Good theology is only as good as the fruit it produces.

Jesus is an amazing storyteller. It only takes four characters, a simple turn of events and their simple responses to show the human condition in all its devastating selfishness. Yes, we see religiosity, but we all see our own long list of excuses, religious or not. We are all prone to this indifference. This indifference is the egocentrism that is the human heart.

To say "I don't have time" or "What can I do?" or "This could be dangerous" is one thing, fancy and acceptable ways of coldly saying, "I don't want to" or "I don't care." But religious excuses--dressing it up as a matter of God's law or our calling or a theological bullet point--are even worse, because instead of accepting the responsibility ourselves, we push it off on God to say, "God doesn't want me to" or "God doesn't care." Playing the God Card has never been uglier.

Jesus calls us to examine these excuses, both the human ones and the theological ones. What does God really ask of us? What does he really want from us?

"Those guys could be crazy." What does he say about safety and self-protection?

"You can't help everyone. Besides, we're called to serve those within the church, our brothers and sisters." What does he say about who he wants us to serve?

"You can't be too nice. People will take advantage of you, use you." What about avoiding "being used" or "taken advantage of"?

"Helping people like that just enables their behavior. How are they going to learn?" What does he say about enabling?  What does he say about our role in teaching others responsibility or the "value of hard work"?

Surely all he says is more nuanced than that, not nearly as black-and-white as my questions are insinuating. Still, Jesus is showing us God's generous heart, a heart that extends loving rescue and care without hesitation, without excuses. As I've said, it's one thing to own up to our human heart and say, "I don't care," but it's another thing entirely to cast the blame on God and say, "God doesn't care." If we're going to make him the scapegoat, we better be sure we know what he says before we make him the basis of our excuse. In this parable Jesus is already pointing us to his character, and the more we answer those questions, the fewer excuses we'll have.

The more we know this God, his character, his will, the more we'll see that if we don't want to extend help, it's not God who is to blame, it's ourselves. It's that selfish impulse remaining inside of us that frankly does not care about others. It's not primarily a head problem. We may know the right answers, but our actions give us away. It's a heart problem.

And that's exactly where Jesus is pointing.