This is a word that has become all too familiar to us in the past century.

In China, “Chairman” Mao Zedong oversaw the deaths of 58 million people in a span of 31 years. Stalin’s USSR saw 20 million people dead under his regime. More recently, in the past twenty years in Rwanda, Somalia, and Darfur, there have been 1.75 million people systematically murdered. One million of those people alone were murdered in 1994 in Rwanda. And of course, the Holocaust stands as the most emblematic destruction of a people, with at least 5.7 million murdered Jews in an eight-year span.

Why do I bring up such an unwelcome topic? Simple. It is going on right in front of our faces.

But just so we don’t lose sight of the reality that should be smacking us in the face constantly, there was a man convicted today of out-and-out murdering three infants and one mother of a partially murdered infant.

The case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell has been relegated to the back pages in favor of more important stories, like the Kardashians’ current weight and O.J. Simpson’s request for a re-trial. Maybe for good reason. The details of the case are beyond imagination. Since 1979, he has been practicing what we refer to as “abortion.” In the past the term would have been “infancide”. It has been practiced since at least biblical times, when unwanted babies (i.e. girls) were simply discarded and left for dead. The early church was noted for saving these children from certain death.

In the future I hope that this process will be called for what it is: genocide.

Because the most horrifying aspect of this case is the fact that Dr. Gosnell destroyed exponentially more human life that followed the letter of the law than those with which he could ever be prosecuted. This is not a philosophical point.

What would you say if you heard about a man who personally ended the life of 16,000 children? And what if the vast majority of those people happened- just so happened- to be African-American? That is the rest of the story, after all.

You would call that genocide.

The Christian life calls us to see more than what is presented in front of us by our neighbors and friends around us. We are called to see the story beyond what is currently legal, status quo, acceptable, or politically correct. We are a prophetic people.

When we see an ethnic cleansing, we call it an ethnic cleansing. When we see murder, we call it murder, regardless of the current location of the life that is taken. In the womb, out of the womb, we need nobody to tell us that a person is a person, whether they can take care of themselves or not. And the more helpless one is, the more we are responsible to help.

I pray that Kermit Gosnell’s conviction is a wake-up call. I pray that the church, instead of vilifying him (which would be too easy), would lead the way in telling the truth about life. I pray that you and I would have the courage to stand up and be counted in a time when the truth needs to be spoken.

And I pray that we have the courage to act.

Overall, I do much more complaining than I do singing of steadfast love. I am so accustomed to common, everyday grace like a roof over my head, a strong, hot cup of coffee, and a wife who loves me that it takes an act of God to shake me back into joy. Seems like that’s a fairly widespread condition amongst us. We assume grace. We assume our next breath, and when it comes we are no more thankful for it than our last. Sometimes it takes a good shake to bring us back to our senses. 

And that’s just what I was given the other day. 

Coming home from a week of rest with family and friends, Peggy and I were twelve and a half hours into our thirteen hour trip back to Seattle and we were not too far from the sun rising on a new day as we approached home. The radio was cranked and we were singing along as we began to taste the finish line and our comfortable bed. Nothing could stop us so close to home. Nothing, I suppose, except for what happened next. 

As we turned the corner approaching Tacoma in our rental car, we noticed some debris in our lane. No matter though, it would have been too late to swerve, and what looked to be at worst a piece of a shredded semi-truck tire in the road posed no apparent threat to our own tires. But alas. We could feel a rumbling beneath us that belied my initial assessment. Whatever we were running over was not going as quietly into the night as I would have expected. And so I began to slow down to see if a change of speed would cause the intruding obstacle to leave us in peace. No such luck. 

In fact, as we looked outside to see if we could identify the debris, what we saw were sparks. I remembered Bruce Springstein’s words, “You can’t start a fire without a spark.” If it just takes a spark to light a fire (that and maybe some, I don’t know, oil, gasoline, etc.), then we were in dangerous proximity to our rental car ending up in similar condition to this one.

Still having no idea what was causing this impending disaster, we pulled the car over to the median (scoff at that decision if you will, but it seemed like a better idea than crossing three lanes of traffic with a ticking time bomb!). 

When I assessed the damage, I could not believe my eyes. We were leaking gas like there was no tomorrow. The seemingly benign debris turned out to be a fence post bent on destruction. It had rattled around under the car and found a home in, of all places, our gas tank! In other words, the fence post had simultaneously caused us not only to dump all of our gas, but as it scraped the pavement, it was also creating sparks. 

As unlikely as it seemed that a stray piece of wrought iron would cause such mayhem, it has to be a thousand times more unlikely that the combination of sparks and leaking gasoline did not join forces. 

Over the past few days, I have been reflecting on what it means to be in the hands of a faithful God. In his sovereignty, if he had decided to let nature take it’s course, what could we have said? He is good. His plan for the world, and for us, would still be good. 

And yet, in this case, I cannot come up with a reason for our continued life other than the sheer grace of God.  

So I will sing of the steadfast love of the Lord today. 

And by his grace, I will sing forever. 

And let’s face it, there have been enough online voices screaming at the top of their lungs to more than make up for my recent absence. 

But I did want to throw in my two cents’ worth on what I have been noticing lately, even if it has been obvious to everybody else. 

The world is a dangerous place. 

If you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, the rocks, I am sure have been crying out to you, too. The Boston Marathon Bombing ten days ago, apparently a plan set in motion and executed by a couple of brothers, left three dead and 260 wounded. And today word has come out that their next target was Times’ Square. Why did they do this? Who were they working on behalf of (assuming they could not have pulled this off on their own)? These are questions we may never have answered. But what we do know is that the world is a place inhabited by folks who have no qualms over destroying life. 

And that’s not to mention the explosion in West, Texas a week ago that killed 14 people, including 11 firemen. Shuffled to the back pages of our newspapers was the earthquake in China, killing 189 people, just a few days ago. The world is a dangerous place. 

The world is a beautiful place.

As I write, the sun is shining through the windows in one of the rainiest cities in the country. Baseball games are still being played on fresh-cut grass. Children are learning to ride bicycles. I’m sure that the South is full of the yellow wash of pollen that invades every year, announcing the coming of Spring and the nearness of Summer. 

What is more amazing to me than the violence of a few is the peacefulness of the many. That we are not all choosing destruction is a testament that we are not forgotten. Somehow there is more than just a glimmer of hope in our world. The God we belong to has not forgotten us. The world is a beautiful place. 

How we hold these truths together will say much about us. How do we face the reality of a broken and yet beautiful world? This is our call as people of the kingdom of God. This is what it means to be boldly and wholeheartedly devoted to reality. 

How will you hold these truths?

It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren’t really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. 

-John Steinbeck

It is completely out of fashion these days to take Jesus seriously on what he says to us. Sure, there may be some exceptions, like the one about doing to others as they would have them do to us. There seems to be universal acceptance that the so-called Golden Rule is a fine standard with which to measure our lives.

But when Jesus begins to lay out, with precision, what he means about being a child of the kingdom of God, well there are other things that seem more important.

For the most part, the most famous chapter about the kingdom of God (Matthew 13) is meant to be encouraging. The kingdom of God, after all, is like a man who finds a treasure, sells all he has, and becomes infinitely richer! But this is also a seriously troubling section of Scripture. The kingdom of God, after all, according to Jesus, is a place with clear boundaries. There are sure enough sons of God, and as the following story points out, sons of the devil himself. A quick note: there are no free agents.

And so Jesus tells a story about a farmer. He liked to tell stories of farmers. This farmer went out into his field and planted wheat. But in the middle of the night, whilst the good farmer took his rest, his enemy snuck in and sowed thistles. As the days went by, the crop began to bloom, and low and behold, the field was half covered in thistles. His farmhands reported back to him, with the obvious question, Should we uproot the thistles? They were, after all, taking up valuable rain, soil, sun, and space from the good wheat. And I am not much of a farmer, but his answer is at least a bit surprising. No, he says, let them grow together, and at harvest time, we will uproot them. Otherwise, we may uproot the good with the bad. Only when we harvest, he says, will we bind and burn the thistle.

On the surface, the story is mildly entertaining at best. I couldn’t say for sure, but I am almost positive that Jonny Depp would turn down a chance to play the farmer in the movie version. But as Jesus explains the parable, the subject matter becomes a matter of life and death.

The wheat, he explains, represents his people. The enemy is the devil. The thistle are the sons of the devil. The decision has been made. Everybody grows together. We all get the benefit of sun, rain, cool days, nourishing earth beneath us, and interconnected roots. But there is a coming day, Jesus says, when this age will end.

And it is at this point that we are tempted to depart with Jesus. Good teacher? Sure. Good fella? Absolutely. God incarnate? Maybe. Lord? …I’ll get back to you on that one.

Two words stick out. The first is clarity. The second is finality.

It is impossible to miss the point to Jesus’ story. There are children of God and children of the devil. For now, we grow together, with not much more than our appearance to distinguish us from one another. And we all know how reliable appearances are. But once it is all said and done, Jesus himself will send his angels to separate the wheat from the weeds. The sons of God are headed to shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. The sons of the devil, of darkness, are headed for the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth. 

And this is a story of finality. Say what you will about the redemption of the lost after death, be it via purgatory or love winning, this is a story about the end.

Which brings us back to John Steinbeck’s account of a sermon he heard traveling through a small town in Vermont. Of the God he encountered in the preacher’s “fire and brimstone” sermon, he wrote:

this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity…I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

Do you hear Jesus caring enough about you to warn you? Do you hear him caring enough about you to call you to repentance? Do you hear him caring about those around you to warn them of the seriousness, the clarity, the finality of the kingdom of God?

Let the one with ears hear.

Imagine you are invited to a speech by Bill Gates on the great usefulness of his incredible world of techological advances. You are marking off the days on your calendar leading up to the grand day. Imagine the questions you may have for him. “What,” you wonder, “had he thought of when he started out? Did he envision such a rapid advancement, from a computer large enough to fill a room, to one small enough to be lost in a purse?” “What,” you may wonder, “was his secret to success?” The anticipation builds as the day nears.

Finally the day arrives. You make yourself comfortable and perch at the edge of your seat. And as the pioneer of personal computting takes the stage, you are first struck by his . . . well, his unstriking presence. You may well have passed by this guy just the other day on the street.

Yet as he begins to speak, it hits you that this guy has changed the very way you view the world. You move even closer to the edge of your seat. And you hear him. Sort of.

You strain your ears to listen, only to find that the discourse was being delivered in binary code! “001 110 0101011″ he says, and a faint chuckle spreads through the crowd.

How are you feeling now? Amused, possibly. Annoyed, more likely.

But there are some people in the crowd who are getting their proverbial money’s worth and then some. Those silly computer programmers, who never seem to catch onto anything happening in the world, are having their day. And they are loving it.

And this is a bit like Jesus’ choice to abandon speaking directly to his crowd, in favor of parables. As he himself says, “those who have will be given more, and those who have nothing will have even that taken away from them.” The purpose of parables, according to Jesus, is to speak to “those with ears”.

In other words, the point in preaching the message of his kingdom inside of stories is to weed out those who are about figuring him out- about pinning him down. He preaches to the choir because his choir, a bunch of misfit fishermen, in this case, are the only ones genuinely interested in knowing what his kingdom is like.

And to us, who follow after the original hearers, Jesus offers an Interpreter. We have come to know him as the Holy Spirit. He opens our ears, enlightens our eyes, he awakes our hearts to what Jesus is saying to us.

And so the question becomes less “Why are Jesus’ words so easy to miss”, and more “How can I get on the inside of all of this?”

If that is our question, then the kingdom of God is nearer to us than we might have thought. All we have to do is ask.

To tell a secret, I have also grown to love the advertisements in between innings.

Tbe best radio spots are the type that drug companies and car dealerships love to throw out there. “New car/drug x is guaranteed to chaange your life, to make your friends jealous, and to put hair back on your head!” And just when I reach for the phone, another voice breaks in. With the swiftness of an auctioneer, the voice says something to the effect of, “This product may cause further hair loss/libido decline/black marks on your credit.” Aha, the fine print.

This is the same tactic we use in the church, all too often. “Come down and follow Jesus. Your problems will be solved.” But then the old familiar switcharoo. “Also, if you could help out with the nursery/tithe/tell your buddies about Jesus, that’d be super.”

And in stark contrast to our PR campaign, Jesus begins his (maybe second) most famous section of teaching with a story about the way things are. For real. And his frankness is always refreshing, provided you are willing to sit with him when he says dangerous things.

So Matthew 13 begins with a story about a farmer who spreads seed a bit haphazardly. He tosses some seed on the concrete, some on the rocks, and some on the topsoil. It doesn’t take a farmer to guess what happens next. The concrete seed is DOA. The rocks choke out the seed and crush the sad little roots soon enough. And the topsoil seed grows into a fruitful harvest.

When Jesus explains his story, we are left hanging. The seed is the story of the kingdom, the concrete and rocky ground are the pictures of those who don’t quite make it all the way to the harvest. The topsoil represents those who would hear and understand his kingdom story.

And we would expect next a lesson on what it takes to be so cultivated as to hear and understand Jesus. But this is not a moral lesson. This is a disclaimer.

This is tantamount to the announcer proclaiming right before the first pitch “We are glad you joined us for today’s broadcast. Just wanted to let you know that only a third of you will give a rip about this game. For the rest of you, sorry but you’re just gonna be lost.”

There is no switcharoo in the kingdom of God. No clever hook that needs to be qualified. Jesus begins the consversation with the hardest part. The fact is that the majority will not hear and understand. The majority will, at best, believe when it easy.

And do you know what is remarkable? He keeps right on teaching. He lets everybody in the first two camps hang around. And his message is unchanged. The door is not shut to anybody. Yet.

Can you live with a King who draws lines in the sand like this? And can you deal with Jesus when he goes right on teaching, listening to, and loving people he knows damn well will never hear him?

In my mind’s eye- the one developed through all these years of listening to baseball, I can see Jesus take a deeply human breath before he goes on.

And I am getting to the point where I realize I am reading according to my mood. It is the same thing I do with music. A couple of years ago, my friend Jim and I decided that we would tell the other when he was listening to too much Radiohead. It turns out that the lyrics, although brilliant, are severely depressing. The same goes for books. Peggy can usually tell if I am reading too much Steinbeck because I get really quiet and start making speeches about the plight of the common worker. But that is really the beauty of the arts. Our choices not only reflect our moods, but there is a way in which our moods are created by them.

Anyway, this is what I was thinking when I sat down to read the bible this morning. I remember when I was in college and I came across the book of Ecclesiastes. Before I read it, I had been thinking about what life meant, and there was even a book about how our lives had purpose to them that I had read. But Ecclesiastes struck me because it is written by a guy who believes God has purpose to everything, but then again, maybe he does not. I remember being struck with just how honest the writers of the bible were. I needed that. I needed to be assured that I was not the only one who experienced dissonance between what I believed and what I…well…what I believed.

This is the long way around introducing a short study I want to do on Matthew 13. This is a collection of short stories that Jesus told about kingdom life. They are stories about heaven, yet they are stories of earth. And I am glad Jesus told them in such a way that they had rooting in real life. There is no disconnection for Jesus, when it comes to heaven and earth. At least not like the disconnection in my own view of heaven and earth.

The story of Jesus is the story of heaven and earth in the activity of coalescence. And so is our story. The coalescence of heaven with earth. The coalescence of earth with heaven.

And here the kingdom of God meets in commonality with marriage. The two become one, yet grow in their own identities. Here the kingdom of God is like music. The units of time, of space, of sharps and flats form a harmony. And here the kingdom of God is like a truly good book. The tension is so palpable it feels like you can reach out and touch it with your finger.

What comes to your mind when you think about the kingdom of God?

I discovered I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light….My memories were distorted by twenty-five intervening years.

Not too long ago, my wife gave me a book by John Steinbeck called ‘Travels With Charley’. This is Steinbeck’s journal of a cross-country trip he took in 1960, when he was in his late fifties. Charley, who would be the supporting actor, had anyone decided to make it into a movie, is a full-sized french poodle.Their quest, together was to answer a very simple question that he had been playing with for years, and wanted to investigate before he died. The question? What is an average American?

Five years before Steinbeck’s work came out, Jack Kerouac published his most famous work ‘On the Road’. A story, again, that features a cross-country travel, through the heart of America. His book has a different feel to it. Within the first few pages, his main character utters these famous lines:

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

I wonder which of these starting places reflects where you are at today? Are you more interested in what is normal, average, in some way predictable? Or have you grown tired of the ‘commonplace’?

Just curious, which starting place do you connect with at first glance?

Why?

In other words, Benedict XVI, who has now seen his last day as Holy Father for the world’s 1.8 billion Catholics, may well be the first surprise papal retiree in the history of the world. Now that is something.

It has been 8 years since the white smoke from the Vatican chimney signaled the selection of Joseph Ratzinger, a German cardinal for leadership of the church. And, to be honest, I haven’t made much of a habit of tuning in when he has something to say. I am a protestant, and as a protestant, I have been born into a tradition of tuning out the pope for the past five hundred years. When I catch him on a headline, provided it is not in competition with a baseball score, my eyes pass over his words.

I think that the first time his words stuck with me were from just yesterday.

The Lord gave us days of sun and of light breeze, days in which the fishing was good. There were also moments when there were stormy waters and headwinds . . . as if God was sleeping . . .

These past eight years have been about as light and breezy as a morning spent slowly headed into the Bermuda Triangle. The sexual scandals perpetuated by priests has, in the past decade gone from what at first seemed like a few isolated events to an avalanche of tragedy. The Catholic priesthood has been sufficiently scandalized, up to the point of the pope himself catching scrutiny for his delayed response. Much can and should be said about the matter of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church- and elsewhere.

Being the voice of God for a generation is a tall task in any time, but for Benedict XVI, I cannot imagine the call of standing up to the challenges he faced.

And as I read of his time in the storm, I am reminded of my own. The 85-year-old pontiff is at the end of his journey, and I, if God wills, am at the beginning of mine. And already, when the waters have been a little rough, I wonder if I can take any more. I wonder if my arms are up to the challenge of stabilizing the ship. I wonder if I will have the words to call out to those nearby to help me in my time of need. At this end of my journey, I wonder if I have what it takes. At his end, he can look back on his failures with repentance and his successes with gratitude.

But what if it seems God, as Benedict XVI has felt, is sleeping? I picture Peter and the others, lost at sea, all hands on deck. And Jesus is on his cushion. Asleep. The one with the power to speak and calm the sea. And he sleeps. How do you not feel abandoned? How do you fight your fight when the God, who “neither slumbers, nor sleeps” is taking a nap?

I hope that Joseph Ratzinger, at 85, knows more about this working and walking in faith than I do. I hope he has picked up the type of wisdom that is gained in suffering. In waiting. In the midst of the storm.

And I hope that I am learning it, too.

For ranking purposes, 4 thumbs is Braveheart good, and 0 thumbs is Encino Man bad.

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

The guy from The Office and the girl from Pirates of the Carribean hang out and fall in love a few days before a meteorite hits the earth. Thankfully, they showed a bit more emotion than the Russian guy this last week. And they fell in love. Which is sweet. Until the world ends in a ball of fire. I think George Orwell wrote this one for his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. I hear he was a charmer, after all.

1 1/2 thumbs up.

HALF NELSON

Ryan Gosling proves that he can be likeable in any role- except as a crack-smoking teacher. I would highly recommend this one to you if you: a) like depressing movies. Or b) if you are considering smoking crack. I would not, however, recommend this movie to somebody who watches movies to be: a) entertained, or b) inspired.

2 thumbs only because it is a really well-acted movie all the way around.

THE GIANT MECHANICAL MAN

Pam, from The Office, plays a lost thirty-something girl who meets a likewise meandering guy who spends his days shoveling elephant manure and his nights standing on stilts as, you guessed it, the aforementioned giant mechanical man. For reasons that are perhaps impossible to put down on paper, this movie is a story about the isolation of the modern world and the courage it takes to trust another.

3 1/2 missing out on a 4 because I already called Braveheart a 4. Compared to any movie other than Braveheart, however, maybe it gets all 4 thumbs. Who can say?

So a quick recap: End of the world=bad. Teachers smoking crack=depressing. Giant mechanical men=heartwarming themes of humanity.