Gideon was an interesting dude

Gieon was a pretty interesting dude.  Judges described the ways that he seemed to really test God before he was ready to take up a position as judge/leader of Israel.  Once he took the job he assembled an army.  Once he assembled the army, God basically said “No, Gideon.  I don’t think thats gonna work.  Your army is so big that if you win, people could say that it was you and not me, that is responsible for your victory.”

And so God and Gideon work together to whittle down his army to just 300 people.  The final cut into Gideon’s army is based on how people drink from a river.  The people who “lap up the water like dogs” are the people who make it in.  The people who cup the water in their hands and bring it up to their faces are sent home.

Gideons army of 300 defeats thousands.  He becomes a leader who uses his sword and his wits, not afraid to fight but willing to engage in diplomacy.    Overall, he seems to have it together.

At the end of his career, though, he acts unwilling to lead Israel.  He asks his soldiers to each contribute an earing from the spoils they gathered, he melts these down, and forms an ephod.  Wierdly, an ephod seems to be a tool, garment, or bag (depending on which scholar you ask.)  What’s not controversial is that ephods were used by priests, so they are not bad by themselves.  Scripture notes that people began worshipping the ephod, though, as an act of idolatry.  Yet again, though, the final opinion of Gideon flip-flops in scripture, as the next generation is criticized for not honoring Gideon’s family.

I love that scripture is filled with all these flawed and broken people.  Yet, even by scriptual standards, Gideon is all over the map.  He tests God early on, but soon follows God in some pretty trying circumstances.  He leads well for a while but steps down to begin a life of idolatry, and then, people are criticized for not giving his family the honor they deserve.

I’m thinking about the end of his life, this morning.   I’m thinking about how he had this tremendous victory for God.  I’m thinking how he just asked for a small thing from each of his men.  I’m thinking about how he formed that Gold in the shape of the traipsing of faith, but how it was still ultimately wrong.

How often do I– do we– experience a great victory for God, and then go looking for glory from the people around us in small ways (like asking for an earing).  How often do we use this glory to do something with the traipsing of faith, just as Gideon formed it into an ephod?  How often do worship these things that we’ve formed, giving the illusion that we’re holy when we’re actually idol worshippers?

Israel and me

After Israel was founded, they went through this period described in Judges.  During this time, Israel goes through this whole cycle about 6 times: they mess up, they are taken over, they cry out to God, a judge is called by God to lead them into peace, they do good for a while, but eventually they mess up and the whole thing starts again.

I find it quite ridiculous, that they go through this so many times.   Until I look at my own life.  And realize I’ve gone through this much more than six times.

I discovered today that I never really paid attention to how long Israel spent opressed in comparison to how long they enjoyed peace and good leadership.  I always assumed it must have been little tiny durations of joy punctuating these long periods of despair.

But that’s not right.

With one exception, the period of peace and prosperity were always longer than the periods of darkness.  Early on, the difference was much more pronounced; eight years of being opressed followed by 80 years of self-rule.  There are a few periods that we don’t get a number expressed in years for.  Interestingly, several times the number 40 pops up, which has quite a lot of biblical significance.  On the whole, 111 years are described as ones which God is not protecting the Is Israelites; for 316 years he does.

This cycle stops during the last couple chapters in the bible.  This is where the refrain begins, “In those days, Israel had no king.  And the people did as they wished.”  For my money, some of the most horrible, heart-breaking occurences in the whole bible occur in these chapters.  (I posted some responses to Pastor Marty’s sermon series on these chapters.  Both my responses and his sermons had the title “The Worst Story Ever Told)

If the back-and-forth cycle of Israel is relevant to my life, certainly these observations are, too:  God will not operate on a tit-for-tat basis but will always “err” on the side of genorousity, kindness, and love.  As I continue to need direction in a certain direction, though, this excess of love will slowly decrease, eventually ending in a time of quite significant darkness.

This is all somewhere between scary and comforting.

They told me

They told me it was my soul that they held in their hands. It was in a glass vial and corked at the top. It was somewhere between a liquid and a solid. Milky colored, and blemished.

They told me that a soul that was pure and true was unblemished and it would shine, and shine, and shine. They told me that even my eyes were unfit to behold purity. But they told me that they could make me fit. First my eyes so that I might behold goodness. And then my soul itself so that I might become goodness.

They told me that mine could be different than it wa.

They told me that they only could if I worked for it, untiringly.

They told me that they only could if I wanted it more than anything.

They told me that I was an initiate, and I wanted to be, and I was.

They told me that it would begin in the books and it did. That first class had so many rows of students. And the entire wall was nothing but windows. We sat their, pouring dutifully over the ancient leather-clad tomes. Each little identical desk had a corked vial on it. Inside each vial a substance between a liquid and a solid. Each one a bit different in color, yet all of them bruised, blemished, and unpure. The weakest of us fell away. The classes got smaller. The windows in our classrooms grew smaller. And I learned. I learned all that their was to know in that book when I sat in a room alone with the teacher where the window was smaller than my palm and so far above my head.

They told me that the blemish was beginning to fade.

They told me my soul was growing brighter.

They told me I should believe them. And I did.

They told me that The Time of Contemplation came when the books were mastered. And it did. I was brought to a room stripped bare. There were no windows. And I was given the vial, and they left me. They must have fed me because I would have starved otherwise. It was a long time.

They told me to study the vial carefully when they finally let me out. Words sounded so strange. My brain had to work hard at understanig them. Faces looked strange. It had been so long.

They told me to study the vial carefully when they finally let me out. And I did. I told them what they wanted me to say. I told them the truth that I saw. I told them that the blemish was fading. I told them that my soul in the little glass vial was beginning to shine even brighter.

They told me it was now the time of letting go. It was not hard. I had grown so far away from the life I had once known. I left them all behind. I sent them letters that said goodbye. It was not hard. I wrote in brief sentences. I expressed no emotion to them. It was time to leave them behind. It was not hard. I burned my possesions and foresook the life I’d had.

They told me that this was not all enough.

They told me that I had reached a plateau.

They told me that they could do no more for me.

They told me that it was me, now, only me. That I must want it.

They told me that I must want it more, and more and more.

They told me that my wanting must becoming a need. And my need must become more than a need.

They told me that I must be willing to do anything. That I must be willing to trade anything. That I must be willing to sell anything, sacrifice anything, give up anything.

They told me that I must not fear recieving pain. The students were told to inflict it on me. Every day I walked into that room. And I suffered at their hands.

They told me that I could have a lighter soul, a whiter soul, that though I had come so far, I had seen nothing yet.

They told me these things. And I believed them. So I wanted it. It became a need. And more than a need. I was willing to do anything. I did everything: sold everything, sacrrificed everything, gave up everything.

They told me that those terrible things I did in the name of purifying and sanctifying, they told me it would be worth it. They told me I would shine and shine and shine, that the world itself would fall away before the luminosity of what I was becoming and I believed them.

They told me that I must not fear inflicting pain. They brought in the younger students for me to inflict it upon. Every day I walked into that room. And they suffered at my hands.

They told me that this journey was almost over. They told me that it was all nearly complete. And it was.

On the last day a man came into the small cell I’d occupied for so very long. He bore the ceromonial markings that the order gives to those who have begun their training. And yet his robes were not official ones. He swept the room. I had never seen him before. I decided that he must be a failed student of the place: a man who’d been on the journey long enough to renounce everything, yet never reached the promised rewards at the end.

And yet his smile said something else entirely.

When his hip bumped my desk the vial began to teeter. My soul, within the vial, it was the brightest thing that I had ever seen. But it was not as bright as it could be, or it should be.

My hands reached out for it, and his hands did to. They met and cancelled each other out on the way to stopping the thing. It toppled off the desk. It shattered on the floor with a terrible musicality. My soul, it floated away.

“No.” I said. “no.”

He acted as though he hadn’t heard me. And he spoke in the sort-of tone you might use to convey a family secret for bakking good muffins. “Can I tell you something?” He began, and with out waiting for an answer he said, “You have been living a lie. The contents of the vial is smoke and mirrors, nothing more. The soul is not a thing that you can distill and pour into a glass. It is not some best part of you waiting to emerge. It is the accumulation of all that you have done, all that you have believed, all that you have filled yourself up with. It can not be purified by running from life. It can not be sanctified through cruelty. By dispensing with that thing, your soul has been set free. And so the only question now is, ‘What will you do now?’”

And many years from that time, I found myself sweeping rooms and bearing the marks of the initiate, like that man. I found myself not unhappy that I did not wear the official robes. I had found that the man, a whole life time ago had been right. He had been right about what the soul is, and he had been right about the only question, “What will you do now?”

Only God

In the book, “Axioms” by Bill Hybels, he spends a few pages talking about this concept: only God.  Hybels spends most of these pages sharing some pretty amazing stories about the work that he’s watched God do.

Three different things came together to help me kind of get this in my own life.

First off, I’ve been doing my over intellectualization thing, pondering it and chewing over it.  And the thing that occurs to me is that that when we’re looking at big, God-sized things, there’s a few things that somebody might say.

Even if it’s a thing only God is capeable of, they might say, “I can do it.”  This is wrong, in two ways.  It’s wrong as a matter of fact and wrong morally.  It’s an act of idolatry, a replay of the fall at the Garden of Eden.

The second option we have is to say, “God could do it.”  This is to recognize that God is active in our lives, but not required.

Only by putting the two words together, “Only God could do it” Do we recognize that God is not only present, but is in fact required.

As I was chewing over all this, I was reading Judges, Chapter 5.  I wasn’t seeking out a story that explained this principle.  I’ve been taking the wacky bible-reading strategy of starting at the beginning and finishing at the end.  That was where I was today.

The story of Gideon, it’s so very perfect for this idea.  Gideon is called by God to throw off the people who had been opressing Isreal.  He rallies this giant army.  And God says,”Naah, that’s too big.” So Gideon sends off a bunch of people.  And God says again, “Nope, still too big.  Send down everybody to the river and watch them drink.”

Most of them used their hands to drink the river water.  Three hundred of them just bent down and lapped it up with their tongues.

Can you picture that?  Somebody down with their head in the water, dog-like?  Not exactly the behavior perscribed by Miss Manners.

God says, “Those are my people.”  I love that God doesn’t go after the cream of the crop, the hoity-toity, the rule followers.  He goes after the people who just dunk their heads in the water and slurp it up.

Their are only three hundred slurpers.  And this is how God narrows the playing field down.  He sends the slurpers into battle for him.  And they rout the invaders.

The connection here is that God says, “I want to be such a small army that nobody can doubt that it was me behind it all.”

In effect, God says, “It’s not enough that you say ‘God did that’  I want you to say ‘Only God could have done that.’”

And so as a balanced this truth of scripture in brain with the passage of scripture I read, it occured to me that this was an ‘Only God’ moment, on a tiny scale.  Only God could have orchestrated the timing of my contemplating Bill Hybels with my reading of Judges chapter 5.

But on a larger scale, I was feeling pretty challenged this morning.  Disapointments bordering on attacks are coming in on a variety of sides.  I’m happy to say that I responded to this by going to scripture.  In the name of transparency, I’ll confess that’s not usually how I respond to challenges.

But it occured to me that when those water-lappers looked around at each other, and saw that just three hundred of them were going up and against an army, they might have felt some ways I felt this morning, on a much grander scale.  It’s a small comfort, but undeniable.  Perhaps one of the things I can think, as all these challenges move in on me, is that God is setting me up for a rescue as he so often has.  At the end of it, He wants me to declare, “Only God could have gotten me out of that.”

Profits and prophets

The recent health care speech and debate has turned our attention to the idea of a profit motive.    Despite scare-mongering to the contrary, the plan on the table does not socialize medical care.  But President Obama makes no bones about the idea that the profit motive in this case needs to be kept in check.

I think he’s right.  And I think that’s these special ways that this plays out for Christians.

Many people believe that the more unregulated the profit motive is, the more efficient we, as a society become.  Self interest, they say, is the only trait we can really expect from people.  We end up saying if a person behaves in their own self interest this is a morally good thing for them to do.

But are we prepared to deal with the fall out when we apply this logic to providers of health care?  Some of the following are theoretic problems.  Some are actual, every-day, real world problems.  But all of them are examples of health care providers acting to maximize profits:

* Whenever it is cheaper to let a person die than treat a person, it is in the best interest of the provider to allow the person to die, if treatment will be more expensive than the premiums that the person will pay for the rest of their life.

* Whenever amputation is cheaper than rehabilitation or treating an ailment, we should expect the provider to amputate, provided that the amputation won’t interfere with the patient’s ability to pay premiums.

* The cheapest treatment will be preferred.  Even if this treatment is painful, inefficient, carries side effects, etc, this is the one that a rational health care provider will go with.

Their is a public relations aspect to all this.  It can be argued that companies might be willing to lose some profit because the negative PR will cost them more.  And sometimes this helps.  But the PR thing, it’s just another expense.  It’s just a further piece for the executives to figure into the equation.  Somewhere, right now, there is a guy in a suit.  And he is saying “If we do X, we will save Y dollars.   However, the negative PR will cost us an extra ___ dollars.  Which decision leads to a larger profit?  Is there a way we can spend a few dollars to undo that negative PR?”

I’m not meaning to demonize the executives.  They are between a rock and a hard place.  The problem is with the system itself.

For Christians, there is a further complication in all this.

If it’s true that self-interested decisions are the only reliable motivations, then this is a result of man’s fall.  Are we really foolish enough to want to court this?  Are we arrogant enough to think we can harness this?  Do we realize that this really is a deal with The Devil himself, in quite a literal way?

In so many things we are faced with a very difficult balancing act.  On the one side, we must accept that the world is a certain way.  On the other side, we should try to hope, work, and fight for a world that is better.  On the whole, an economy which is capitalistically oriented is a wise recognition of the way that a world is.  But to suggest that industries such as health care ought to be driven by capitalism is to go to far in this direction.

A smile and a hello

There’s this family that’s just incredibly precious to me.    I would be willing to sacrifice as much for their two daughters as I would for my own kids.  Unfortunately, we don’t spend as much time with them as we used to, and their youngest was a little to young remember when we were always around.  In her own wierd way, she’s kind of a shy little thing, and so there’s this interesting dynamic between her and me.

I was coming out of a meeting in church and I think I startled her a bit.  Her dad had gone out through a different door and was working away elsewhere.  And so I saw her, and I was all happy to see her, but she was startled, perhaps by my enthusiasm.  And she just kind-of ran away.

I wasn’t hurt exactly.  It was more like, “I’m just happy to see you, you don’t need to get all bashful and stuff.  A simple smile and hello is all I want.”

I had this little sense, then, that maybe God feels this way sometimes.  He does all kinds of things and has all sorts of roles in our lives.  We can feel afraid of his majesty, inadequate before his rightousness, impotent before his power.  And the truth is, all these are appropriate reactions.

But do we feel love by his Love?  Do we recognize that we don’t need to run away, that sometimes he’s just happy for us to be in his presence?  That a smile and a hello don’t make all things right, but they, too, are appropriate reactions to standing before the maker of the universe?

(In a way, I suppose, it’s different, because we’re always in God’s presence.  But sometimes we feel it more.  And He knows when we do.  If my friend’s daughter had not noticed me at first, I would not have had the same reaction, until she did see that I was standing there.  I think it probably works that way with God, too.  When he knows that we’re aware of his presence, that’s when, sometimes, what he wants is a smile and a hello.)

Judges and judgement

I think the picture that most of us get, when we picture “judges” is of an old guy, in a robe, who holds himself above and aloof what is going on.  Most of us gave something like fear, or at least caution, about this image.  We get images about how we are the subject of judgement.

This is quite different than what the bible means by judges.  For example, in the book of judges, we’re told that the Israelis cried out to God.  God raised them up a deliverer, and the Spirit of the Lord came on this guy.   Scripture goes on to say that he became Israeli’s judge and went to war with Israeli’s conquerer.

What would it do to our images of God, if this book had been called “Warrior Dudes” instead of “Judges”?  I know, that term doesn’t sound all that biblical.  And I’m not wanting to be irreverant.  Nor do I  want to soft peddle the issue.  Certianly the judges would be called to turn their attentions on their own people when their own people were acting against God’s will.

The thing I’m thinking about though, is that judgement is necessary and required.   And not just for the well-being of the judged.  As parents, we couldn’t protect our kids from bullies and older brothers if we didn’t judge the bullies and older brothers.  As citizens, we can’t protect people from harassment or discrimination if we’re not willing to judge the harassers and disciminators.

There’s probably all sorts of interesting things about enlightenment views on reasoning and the modern era in the idea that a judge ought to be removed from what he is judging.  Given that we’re fallible humans it’s probably a good idea to seperate things out and remove the judge from the other parts of the process.

But God’s judges, those are dudes with swords.  They wield them to protect those who can’t protect themselves.  That’s a pretty cool thing.

A house made on the sand is great… during the low tide.

Some of the best people in my life are people who see potentials within myself that I did not know were there.  Recently somebody made an offer to me that I never would have considered before.  It involved taking on something of a new roll in my life.

The possibility that I might be able to do it had an interesting effect.  It lead to me acting more like I was capeable of this role.  There’s psychology to back this all up: A study was done many years ago in an elementary school class.  They took the most troubled kids and doctored their records.  The teachers thought that the most poorly-behaved students were the cream of the crop.  What they found was that the students conformed to the teachers’ expectations: the formely challenged students actually became the cream of the crop.

After noticing what a positive change the event had in me, I was bopping about my life mostly reflecting that this is a positive thing.

But then I read this account of someone talking about how they did not want their identity wrapped up in anything other than Christ.  They were headed to a new job, and they did not want this to impact who they were.

And I thought, “Yeah, that’s about right.”  If we allow ourselves to be brought up by the good events, then we are that tied into the challenging things.  If I say, “Wow, this really great thing, it’s a direct result of me, me, me.”  Then when something lousy happens I have to similarly assert that this too is all about me, me, me.

Building a house on the sand is fun when the weather is nice.

So now, I find myself wondering, what’s the wisest way to navigate this tension?

Something else worth checking out.

Wrecked For the Ordinary is this really amazing source for information on how to follow Jesus.   They published something of mine this week.  You ought to check them out here.

7k: If you’ve never clicked a link from here now is the time to start

One of my oldest and dearest friends is named Jeff Garvin.  Jeff sings for the unbelievable band 7k.  Click here for the band’s site.  You can listen to several of the band’s song and order their  C.D.’s, which will remind you anew that the idiots they play on the radio must have pictures of the record execs in compromising positions.  Their is no excuse for a world where Jason Mraz gets air play and 7k do not.

I want you to check them out because they are just so good.   If you put Live, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Bare Naked Ladies (at their least annoying) on three different buses, crash them together, and then made a super group out of the crash survivors, it would sound a bit like 7k.

I want you to check them out because he is a good friend and I’d like to give him some exposure.  (If every person who reads this post clicks the link and checks them out, why, I’ve exposed a grand total of nearly 3 people to the band!)

And I want you to like them because I’ve known Jeff since he was like 12.  I have some very embarassing stories to share, but they are only really funny if you can see what a cool rock star dude he is now.  The best part of this?  He’s got equal dirt to dish on me.  However, I’m a Christian, balding, nearly middle aged Special Education Teacher.  Nobody expects me to be cool.  So when he tells stories about what a geek I am, it’s kind-of like, “No duh.”