Weblog

Thursday, 17 September 2009

  • Beset with Weakness

    Flipping through the pages of the Bible, I often find myself in a particular few books.

    Psalms and Job are the two most frequented portions of the Old Testament, consequently two of the most thumb-worn places in my Bible. The pages of the prophets, too, sustain a decent bit of traffic.

    Most recently, however, I've landed in the epistles of the New Testament, those of Paul and of others.

    Tonight, Hebrews was the natural place to turn, as I've been meditating on many of the themes and particular implications of those themes for quite some time.

    Not having a particular place to go, my eyes automatically landed on a passage where Christ is described as our high priest.

    You're probably familiar with Chapter 4, verses 14-16, which read "Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

    Less familiar, except to those who often read Hebrews (and I've rarely heard this passage discussed, probably because it's not as good a sound byte), are the first three verses of chapter 5.

    "For every high priest chosen from among men is appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness. Because of this he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the people."

    It's possible to consider this a contrast between Christ and a human high priest, particularly given the statement that "he is obligated to offer sacrifice for his own sins just as he does for those of the people."

    However, taken in context, this is a comparison, rather than a contrast, and it appears that statement is merely an explanation of the earthly high priest's functions and duties, rather than a particular point of difference.

    What catches my attention is the sentence preceding, which says "He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness."

    There are two ways to interpret that, the first being in the human sense. In the human sense, of course, weakness is physical, spiritual and emotional. Weakness is also the realization that we have all sinned, and fall short of God's glory (Romans 3:23). In that sense, the following passage certainly applies to human high priests, who are obligated to offer sacrifices for their own sins, because they're in the same situation as their people.

    However, that weakness which besets us, I think, pales in comparison to that weakness which beset Christ.

    Of course, He remained sinless, as his nature as the Son of God dictated He should, and would - therefore, even in His weakness He was stronger than any of us can hope to be.

    But the differential between His and our weaknesses is so great it's inconceivable.

    Philippians 2:6-8 help in explaining how Christ "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

    If that's not weakness, I don't know what is. He did not descend into the snare of sin as we do. Recall Hebrews 5:15, which states Christ was "tempted as we are, yet without sin."

    But given the extraordinary magnitude of His sacrifice, it's astounding that He did not once succumb to any element of that weakness He took upon Himself up until the point of death.

    Matthew 4, which I won't recount here, tells the story of Satan's completely unsuccessful attempts to capitalize on that overwhelming weakness Christ laid on Himself.

    And it's because of all of this that I come to the center of my reflection, actually as I'm writing this.

    Christ can "deal gently with the ignorant and wayward," because he knows where we've been. He's been there, and had the opportunity to do that.

    He knows what it's like to be in the face of overwhelming temptation to do something that seems like it would taste so sweet. We're tempted to cheat on taxes, look at that picture, grumble against that co-worker, even push that speed limit a bit too far.

    Yeah, big deal.

    Christ was tempted, after having fasted for 40 days, to turn stones into bread.

    Think your weakness or addiction is something overwhelming? Trying starving nearly to the point of death, and having the opportunity to feed yourself, through means that you know aren't God's way of doing things.

    That's the weakness Christ has been through.

    From glorified, ruling heaven with His Father, to taking the form of a weak, humble human being that succumbed to things like hunger, thirst, even death.

    That's weakness.

    And that's why He can deal gently with us, the ignorant and wayward. He's been there. He doesn't condemn those who have understood His mission and accepted His forgiveness.

    He knows that we, like Paul describes in Romans 7, still struggle between pleasing the flesh and the spirit.

    But after describing the all-too-familiar struggle, Paul says, to begin Romans 8, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

    "He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness."

Thursday, 06 August 2009

  • Dear Mrs. MacKenzie

    ** The following is a ficitonal letter - an amalgamation of stories I've heard and my own experience as a Sunday School teacher **

    Dear Mrs. MacKenzie,

    I'm sorry you've had such a tough week.

    Considering that your distress came at the hands of my daughter Grace, I felt I should get in touch with you personally, and at least apologize for her.

    Grace has always been one of those children who speaks the truth without thinking about it, and for her, Sunday School is one of those places where, in her five-year-old mind, the truth should be spoken even if it can't be spoken anywhere else.

    Whether that's her going into specific medical conditions of certain of my family members or friends, or mentioning other quite private details ... you get the idea.

    Her mother and I are working with her on this, and trying to teach her that there are appropriate times to keep some things to herself, but she's the epitome of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

    That said, I know most parents don't pick up their children from Sunday School expecting to have to confront one of those harsh-reality situations - particularly when we're four months away from even thinking about Santa Claus-related issues.

    I hope you realize that I'm not the kind of person who preps my daughter every day by saying "Now, Gracie, if anyone mentions Santa Claus, make sure you walk up to them and say 'He's not real. He's just a game mommies and daddies play with their kids.'"

    However, I do believe in telling the truth to my children, even if it means the possibility of creating some awkward "the emperor has no clothes" moments.

    I heard from the poor Sunday School teacher that my child and yours got into a verbal altercation, and that Gracie and Teddy had to sit in time-out. Now, I must admit, I chuckled a bit when I realized that her punishment had nothing to do with not paying attention or running over a classmate - and I was prepared to say her punishment was deserved.

    However, after hearing of your remarks to the teacher (that nearly put her in tears), I don't believe either child deserved a punishment at all.

    Hearing from the teacher that you stormed off with Teddy in tow, muttering that my wife and I somehow intentionally stifle our daughter's imagination riled me even a bit more than your assertion that she needs to exercise more control in her classroom.

    Gracie has quite an imagination - she plays fairies, pirates, princesses - you name it, she plays it.

    But that's the point. She plays it - she doesn't live it. She knows where fantasy ends and reality begins. She has her special toys, or a blanket, or some prop. When she picks it up, she gets lost in her little world, but when she puts it down, she knows we're back to the here and now, and her playmates go bye bye until next time.

    Believe it or not, she plays Santa Claus, too. She loves the idea of a big, happy fat guy stuffing himself down a chimney to give presents to good boys and girls. But she also knows it's not real - and knows that many people go so overboard as to introduce into their kids' reality a person that doesn't exist.

    I won't forget when I first told her about Santa Claus, two years ago. Her blue eyes went wide and she said "Daddy, why do mommies and daddies do that? Why do they lie to us kids?"

    I didn't have an answer.

    And after incidents like this, I can't help but continue to question the practice of convincing a child that this amalgamation of history and imagination exists - in reality, in the flesh.

    Days like Sunday just reinforce in my mind that the way Santa Claus is "played" today is completely overboard and serves more to create and invite confrontation than it does to foster imagination.

    Some children, faced with the hard truth, simply refuse to believe it, as I'm told Teddy initially did Sunday. He outright denied the truth because he had been convinced by someone he trusted that the truth was, in fact, a lie.

    Now, I'm not here to criticize your parenting style - I'm a big fan of Teddy, and I think he'll grow into a wonderful young man.

    But though I can apologize for the hurt feelings, I can't apologize for my daughter's actions. She saw someone believing a blatant lie over the truth, and she tried to fix it.

    I know Gracie meant no harm to you, and she only wanted to help Teddy realize what she already knew. Santa Claus is a fun thing to play, but he just isn't real.

    I appreciate your taking the time to read this, and I hope Teddy's emotional scars won't last long.

    Signed: Grace's dad

    P.S. - I promise to have a long talk tonight with Grace about not exposing the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

  • Thoughts from seat 18A

    It’s amazing the things you can learn on a 2-hour flight to Chicago.

    1) I love the window seat in an airplane. Doesn’t everybody?

    2) Looking down through a sea of blue sky into a very blue Mississippi River, one could mistake the wispy cirrus clouds for waves rolling toward the shore.
    **How is it even possible to see that, and think it all just … well, happened … and was caused by … nothing? I just don’t get it.**

    3) The Chicago skyline is awesome! I mean that literally – awe inspiring. A testament to intelligence and art.
    **Again, I wonder, how could that intelligence have come about randomly? If I don’t have the intelligence to make myself more intelligent in the first place … it just seems an absurdity to me that, again, this came about by chance.**

    4) Really weird phrases can give us a perspective on completely unrelated matters.
    **One of the flight attendants said something to the fact of “surrender your trash,” and that got me to thinking: it’s easy to surrender our trash. If we don’t want to hold onto it anymore, it’s easy, in a moment of passion, or after a long decision to give up what we don’t want. It’s much harder to surrender the things we want to hold onto. Habits, lifestyles, thoughts, areas of our lives that we think we have control of. Surrender your trash, yes. But surrender your treasures, too.**

    5) It really freaks me out when the plane starts slowing down with a whole lot of descent to go yet.
    **I don’t know this guy at the controls. I’ve never seen him before, I have no idea what he wrote his master’s thesis on. I don’t know how long he’s been flying planes or if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. On top of that, I don’t have a clue what the guts of a plane look like, and I’m trusting this guy who I know nothing about to control this colossus, and bring me safely into Chicago, without destroying that awesome skyline I mentioned.**
    **Shouldn’t it be easier to trust a God whom I know has been in control for … oh, forever? And I’ve read His dissertation, and then some.**

    6) O’Hare International Airport is huge, but Denver’s airport is prettier.

    7) O’Hare doesn’t have free internet access (or my compy’s a dunce), so this might not get posted for a week, when I get back home (proven correct by the fact that I'm just now posting this more than a week after I wrote it).

Sunday, 19 July 2009

  • G** D*** It!

    Christians have it wrong on cursing.

    Matter of fact, the whole world has it wrong on cursing, in my opinion.

    Oh, shoot, I think you thought for a moment there I was going to advocate dirty language. Far from it.

    I abhor cursing, "cussing," crude language, probably more so than most people. Rather, I just want to say that as Christians, we've adopted the world's standards as to what the "dirtiest" of words are, and we're far too tolerant of words that are much more damaging - or should I say damning ...

    Allow my to classify: I work in a news room, so I'm surrounded by cursing all day long, and I know the heirarchy of curse words.

    1) The worst of the worst:
    These are generally the "F-word" and its variants. I won't detail here, but you can fill in the blanks.

    2) Anatomical slang:
    No, I'm not talking about "butt" here. These are the words that describe usually sexual parts of the human anatomy. With one notable exception (that would be classified above, with the "worst," due to its seriously misogynistic connotation).

    3) Derogatory names:
    A**, SOB, B***h, you get the picture. And increasingly words from the second category are making their way into this one, as they become "more acceptable." Words like d**k, for example.

    4) Excretory products:
    S***, P**s, are generally the two most tossed around in the human waste by-product category, unless you want to count cr@p, as well, though that's not generally considered a "cuss" word.

    5) The "mild" curses:
    You know, the ones you can slip in once or twice in a G-rated movie, and you can load up on them and still secure a PG. Generally included in this category are words damn and hell, along with variants of the d-word, usually flippantly referring to a deity or Deity.

    Take it in perspective.

    The f-word and its variants - flippant reference to a sexual act, usually in a very negative connotation.
    Body parts are body parts - certain words used for them are flippant, coarse and crude by cultural standards.
    The excretory system's products are the epitome of "dirty" words, yet some of the most thrown around. Seriously, who wants to think about that kind of ... stuff?
    Derogatory names are also very common, yet they're not as frowned upon as the f-word. I now hear ladies throwing around B***h, like I hear some groups of black people throwing around N****er or "n*gga."

    But my point here is that, at least for Christians, the most tolerated curse words should be the least tolerated.

    The words that get you easing into a habit of cursing should, in fact, be the most offensive words to those who claim to revere God.

    Flippantly throwing around phrases that ... what? Condemn someone or something to hell? The place of eternal torment? Do you believe that's a real place?

    If so, why use it as a by-word, effectively demonstrating that you don't care about the soul of the person you're chewing out - or demonstrating your stupidity by condemning a desk to hell after you stubbed your toe on it at the office?

    I contend that if a Christian is going to curse (a practice which I heartily discourage), it would be less offensive just to shout F*** than to take the name of the Lord in vain, even pairing it with a curse word that demonstrates a lack of compassion and a lack of reverence for God's nature, who reserved condemnation to hell for those who have rejected His gift of salvation - not for stupid office desks.

    Anyone have thoughts on this issue?

Wednesday, 15 July 2009

  • How to Boil a Frog

    1) You get a pot of water so cold it's like a frog magnet

    Frogs have been known to be attracted to things like a morally-grounded revolution, things like fighting taxation without representation, Boston Tea Parties ... if you want a lot of frogs dying to jump into your pot, get on a moral soapbox and do something about the causes for which you claim to fight.

    2) Let the frogs get used to it

    Don't change the course of action for a while. Let the frogs in the pot get to love the atmosphere and the sense of security they have living in a place that really cares about them. The real trick to this step - convince yourself that you really care for the frogs, and what you're doing would be in their best interests.

    3) If things get too comfy too quickly, stir it up again with a little disturbance that stirs up the righteous indignation, and maybe plants seeds of division

    Civil wars have been known to do this quite well. There's major division, and it's even better if both sides can convince themselves that they're in the moral right. After the conflict's "resolution," even if the frogs start to get along better, there will still be a bit of mistrust, and the frogs will convince themselves that diametrically opposed philosophies can, in fact, both be right. This is key.

    4) Move the pot to the stove

    The frogs will probably notice that the water is stirred up a little bit, but if there's no change in the temperature, it's no biggie. Besides, it's bad if you stay in the same place forever, right? Get the workings of a major political machine going. Don't change what happens, but change how the movers and shakers do their things. Introduce pet projects (even good, beneficial things) and put them as tag-alongs to the more significant decisions that need to be made.

    5) Turn the burner on, but don't make it warm

    If you do this right, the frogs won't even notice. The water won't get warm for a long time, and when it does, it will be such a slight increase, the frogs might even find it pleasant. Let your major machine start taking away "liberties" that nobody cares about anyway - convince them that the government has their backs, and this is for their good - they'll love the government and sing its praises.

    6) Turn the burner up slowly, incrementally

    Again, if done right, the frogs will never know what hit 'em. If, perchance, you turn the heat up too quickly and the little froggy stockbrokers make ripples in the market that turn into a froggy-depression, then quick, turn the temperature down and shake it up again - a World War is a great cause to get involved in, especially if you come to the aid of slightly-helpless countries across the frog-pond.

    7) After that shakeup, turn the heat up a little bit more

    Make sure you convince the froggies that heat is good for them - remember, you can have diametrically opposed philosophies that are both right, remember? Convince some of the froggies that taking away particular freedoms is a good thing. Government bailouts are an exceptional way to do this. "Big brother froggy has your back," tell them. Also, get both sides of the froggies willing to give up freedoms. Patriot Acts are good for some of the other froggies, in the interests of national security.

    8) Turn the heat to max

    If you've done your job until now, the froggies won't even notice that they're about to be cooked, because they're pretty much cooked already. However, if your last twist of the knob is too big of an increment, prepare for a nearly-boiled frog revolt. Boiled frogs have been known to stage military coups, French Revolutions, even American Revolutions.

    If you're fortunate enough to find yourself in a position of leadership with one of these revolutionary groups, you may start again at step one, and better luck this time.

merely_a_christian

  • Visit merely_a_christian's Xanga Site
    • Member Since: 6/13/2009

Weblog Archives

Don't worry - your calendar is here… to see it in action just click "Save" above and refresh the page.

About Me

[no info]

Blogrings

[no blogrings]

Photostrip

[no photos]

Pulse