Just a different perspective

Mark Vernon noted yesterday the different view of nature inherent in Shintoism, the widely practiced religion in Japan.

In Christianity, we view ourselves as the center of the creation. By our greed, we interpret the Genesis call to “dominion” over the creation as license to use it to our own ends, rather than a command to serve it as fellow creatures. And so, when the powerful forces inherent in nature show forth, we are angered, offended, cheated.

In Shintoism nature is known to be more powerful than humanity and is honored as such. Earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes and storms, are reminders that we are put here as part of a thing and not the whole of the thing itself.

A very different attitude. One that would change much.

It would not prevent such tragedies. It would do little to decrease the suffering they cause. But it would change us to be reminded in this moment of history, as in all those past and those yet to come, that we are not the Masters of this Universe but merely its servants, as we are servants of the One who created it all.

Power, the waves seem to say, is much more than your mortal brains may comprehend. Your place here calls for humility and grace, in the ways you treat the Lord’s creation and each other.

May we work together with and pray for those who suffer in this time in full awareness that it is only by the grace of God that our places are not reversed. Let us look with meekness toward the waves that are yet to rise.

Day of Ashes

Recently, Brigham Young University dismissed the best player from their basketball team over an Honor Code Violation and almost assuredly doomed their hopes for tournament glory. While many (many!) commentators could not grasp the harshness of that culture’s rules, they begrudgingly handed over their admiration of the school’s and players’ integrity in handling the situation.

They knew the rules and they kept the rules. Who knew it could be done?

Even more recently, it is brought to light that a football coach at a major college program actually knew in advance that a number of his players, including his star quarterback, had violated NCAA rules and were almost assuredly ineligible to play. His first instinct was to keep it quiet lest it endanger his team’s chances for glory.

He knew the rules and avoided the consequence. Now, that we can understand.

And so we come again to our annual celebration of Ash Wednesday, the world-wide Christian day of penance, where we smudge our countenance with a sign of grief and sorrow, a public admittance that we are sorry about who we are and what we have done, that we regret a world not as it should be. It is a day about guilt and penalty, about rules and codes and our relationship therein, our integrity, or more more likely, our lack of it.

Which is far from enough.

This inscription on our forehead, this shadow cast over the sign of our baptism, is a mark of truth. It is not enough to feel bad about being bad, it is not enough to fear consequence, it is not enough to merely know the rules, as if that was our invitation to sculpt them, twist them, bypass them. Guilt is not the theme of the day – honesty is. Not a little honesty, not an after-the-fact-well-I-guess-you-caught-me-now responsibility, but blunt, frank, open confession. You know, humility.

We are not good. We are not right. That is our confession on Ash Wednesday. We pray for a better world, a world of righteousness and justice and peace. And we know that it can only come one way. Not from us.

Ash Wednesday is our prayer that God would finally be the Lord of us and of this world because we have done such a poor job of it by ourselves.

Ashes are a symbol of grief, of sorrow, of loss. Ash Wednesday is a day of death, of the death of our will and our power and our seeking after glory so that God may finally become our God. It is only when we forego the future of our own creation that God’s future will become ours.

And so we trace again the cross upon our forehead and condemn ourselves and the world of our making and ask this one prayer, that God would take up the ashes of our lives and our world and renew them one more time. That he would fill the emptiness with new Grace and new Spirit and new Hope.

That he would bring us from this winter to the Easter waiting up ahead.

Look – I see a faint ray of dawn, a green shoot of resurrection!

Against the Law

Sometimes you should be careful about putting amateurs in charge of important things.

I imagine that this is how God feels about human beings trying to make law. The great Divine Law-giver, the shaper of righteousness and the definer of right and wrong, must shed considerable heavenly tears observing worldly legislative bodies writing what we call laws, trying to do what we consider good, all the while blaspheming the very nature and purpose of the Holy Law itself and denying the grace that gives it life.

What happens when men write laws? (And I use the sexist term deliberately – maybe there would be less trouble if there were more female heads and hearts in the process!) We strive to ban people’s right to band together for their common good, we embrace injustice and drive out those who are different from us, we encourage murder in the name of preserving life.

I’ve been told that it’s ok to heave hundreds of thousands of people into unemployment for the sake of the ideal of reducing deficits. Whatever it takes lest we overtax our wealth! And what kind of legislation is this?

This is not what God intends as law.

But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” Matthew 12:7-8

It is a sign of our brokenness that we lift ideals above people, that we are cold-hearted and indifferent to the needs of the poor, that our principles, philosophies and political positions are worshipped at the price of violence and the suffering of many.

This is not how God teaches us righteousness. The Law of God is not abstract, not an arbitrary pronouncement, not an altar on which goodness and kindness are sacrificed over some other-worldly code. No, the law of God is the path of healing and wholeness, the definition of community and love of neighbor, the promotion of what is best and the vision of good will for all. God’s law does not condemn the other, it cares for aliens and orphans and widows. God’s law does not justify violence but turns other cheeks. God’s law does not protect wealth or power over people, but protects the oppressed and judges those who oppress them.

God gives law that we might know life. How abominable that we use the law to take life away.

How faithless we are to the God who gives law.

You see, the divine law-giver is also the God of the Christ, the one who defines what is right and wrong and showers mercy on both. He does not merely write laws, he creates and renews persons; he does not save himself, he saves us. In all things, his Word reflects his Grace, and by that Grace he moves his Kingdom forward with hope and purpose.

And he invites us to do the same, that we might know, even in a small way, the same.

We just have to learn now how really to make law.