Does This Shirt Make Me Look Illegal?

    "Aren't you worried someone will think you're a terrorist?"
    I laughed uncomfortably, as did my wife and the others in our group. I had been speaking at a church and was being introduced to a member of the congregation. He was commenting on my beard and the fact that it made me look "Muslim". He wasn't a bad guy, from what I could tell. He could very well have been making one of those foot-in-mouth statements that I've made a hundred times and regretted all the way home. Admittedly, it came off a more than a little racist, but I was willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt; something the state of Arizona has recently become less than willing to do.
    I know from columns in the press and conversations with friends that I am not the only one disturbed by Arizona's Immigration Bill SB1070. But I can't help but throw my two cents worth in. The fact is that it will be next to impossible to keep this from turning into racial profiling and worse. It is simply too likely that a man who ought to be at home with his kids will, instead, be sitting in a jail cell, simply because he forgot to carry his papers.
    I don't doubt that the majority of Arizona police officers are decent folks, just looking to do their jobs. But now a bill exists that allows those with less than stellar motives to harass someone under the pretext of "reasonable suspicion". There's little chance that this bill will make things better and too great a chance that it will make things worse.
    Bishop Tutu puts it this way:
    ...when you strip a man or a woman of their basic human rights, you strip them of their dignity in the eyes of their family and their community, and even in their own eyes. An immigrant who is charged with the crime of trespassing for simply being in a community without his papers on him is being told he is committing a crime by simply being. He or she feels degraded and feels they are of less worth than others of a different color skin. These are the seeds of resentment, hostilities and in extreme cases, conflict.
    We need to be more than frustrated or concerned with this turn of events, we need to be vocal and adamant. We need to write who we need to write and boycott what need's to be boycotted. This bill is unacceptable. Approaching a stranger who looks or speaks differently with a presumption of guilt is no way to build trust or to build community. It breeds a suspicion and fear that too easily translates into anger, hate, and even violence. Sometimes all we need to diffuse a bad situation is to take a deep breath. This bill makes that breath more difficult to take and, for that reason alone, t's a bill that needs revoking.

A New Command

"A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." -Jesus

    Jesus gives them a new command. Love one another. Now, the command to “love one another” isn’t new, it dates back to Leviticus and the command to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” What makes this command new is that Jesus tells his disciples to love “as I have loved you.” The command that Jesus gives is that we must love as he loves, we are being called to be like him.

    This is no easy task. Most days, it seems like the most impossible task there is. And yet, it is Christ’s new command. Love as Christ loves.

    Christ loves by giving his whole life. God loved the world so much, that he sent his son. Sent him into danger, into vulnerability, into the riskiness of human skin. Sent him to show us a new way of life. Sent him to show us what love looks like. That love looks like healing. That love looks like forgiveness. That love looks like someone who will listen. That love looks like someone who will speak the truth. That love risks being hurt. That loves takes up a cross. You cannot make your number one priority both loving others and protecting yourself. Jesus is our ultimate example in this. How much we are willing to give of ourselves marks how much we are willing to love. Our purpose, as Christians, is love. 

What We Cannot Do

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good." We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way--centred on money or pleasure or ambition--and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 168)

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of--throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 174)

Life In Christ

    Our lives are destined to become like the life of Jesus...Not only did Jesus come to free us from the bonds of sin and death, he also came to lead us into the intimacy of his divine life...We tend to emphasize the distance between Jesus and ourselves. We see Jesus as the all-knowing and all-powerful Son of God who is unreachable for us sinful, broken human beings. But in thinking this way, we forget that Jesus came to give us his own life...He became like us so that we might become like him. (MTN, pg. 50-55)

    But there is more. Becoming like the heavenly Father is not just one important aspect of Jesus' teaching, it is the very heart of his message. The radical quality of Jesus' words and the seeming impossibility of his demands are quite obvious when heard as part of a general call to become and to be true sons and daughters of God.
    As long as we belong to this world, we will remain subject to its competitive ways and expect to be rewarded for all the good we do. But when we belong to God, who loves us without conditions, we can live as He does. The great conversion called for by Jesus is to move from belonging to this world to belonging to God. (RPS, pg. 117)

            -Henri Nouwen

Earth Day

"When a tree is nothing but a potential chair, it ceases to tell us much about growth..." -Henri Nouwen

Kingdom and Country: Jesus, Caesar, and Uncle Sam

    "Teacher, we know that you speak and teach what is right, and that you do not show partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"
    He saw through their duplicity and said to them, "Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?"
    "Caesar's," they replied.
    He said to them, "Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."  -Luke 20:21-25


    So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  -Genesis 1:27

    "Whose picture is on that coin? It's Caesar. If he's got his image on it, let him have it. But whose image is stamped on you and on me? ...If God has put the stamp of His image on each of us, then everything that we are belongs to God...We can't pledge our allegiance to this nation state or any other nation state, but we pledge our allegiance to God and to God's Kingdom...maybe the church ought to make April 15th a day for pledging our allegiance to the Kingdom and for saying that our money and our homes and our food and our coats on our backs and everything that we have belongs to the Kingdom...money's just something people make, but God makes people and people are what matter." -Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Values and Treasures

"Whatever a man is busy with, that is what he values." -David Mitchell

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." -Jesus

Easter Sunday: Holy Week (Day 7)

    The message [of Easter] is that new creation has begun, and you are called to belong to it and to make it happen in the world - whether by campaigning for making poverty history, for peace and justice in the Middle East, for a new start for refugees and asylum-seekers, or for a fresh vision for where we should be going...in our schools and hospitals and cities and villages. Take the scriptures in one hand and the power of God in the other, take a deep breath of the air of new creation which blows through the world on Easter Day, and find what you can do to make new creation happen. The powers of death and hell will be cross with you for doing so, and you'll face battles on the way. Go back again and again to the fact of Easter...God's new creation will win the day, and you must be a part of it. That is why the Easter message is a message of love, the love which believes the resurrection itself, the love which reaches up to God in gratitude and out to the world in generosity.

    -N.T. Wright

Holy Saturday: Holy Week (Day 6)

    If you asked people out in the street, or even perhaps in the church, which is the most frequently repeated commandment in the Bible, the answers you'd get would probably be in the range of 'Don't misbehave', 'Don't tell lies', 'Always say your prayers', and perhaps 'Love God and your neighbor'.
    But all of them would be wrong. Far and away the most frequent commandment in the Bible is what the angels say to the women [at Christ's tomb], and what Jesus then repeats: 'Don't be afraid'. Yes, something has happened. Yes, the world is never going to be the same again. Yes, your life is about to be turned upside down and inside out. Yes, God is going to be with you and demand new things of you. But don't be afraid. It's going to be all right. Easter proves it.

    -N.T. Wright

Good Friday: Holy Week (Day 5)

    ...we who now stand at the foot of the cross have to face the most searching questions, the questions we avoid like the plague because we, too, find it desperately uncomfortable to look at the face of God's Image, the man, the king, and see the perfect likeness of the maker and redeemer of the world. We are so stuck in the systems of Caesar -his swords, his coins, his gambling soldiers- that we too have a hard time recognizing truth of any kind, let alone speaking up for it. We are so anxious to protect the philosophies upon which our modern world is built that we will do anything to declare that we have no king but Caesar, that when push comes to shove religion is just a private thing which musn't affect the public sphere, even when Jesus is reminding Caesar's representative that he only has power because God has given it to him. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why the church is in such pain at the moment, caught between 'what is truth?' on the one hand and 'no king but Caesar' on the other.
    ...We come to Good Friday like beggars to a banquet, starved of love and suddenly finding more than we can cope with. And if it is true that that love must transform our whole lives, our public life, our grasp on truth on the one hand, our dealings with Caesar on the other, this can only be if we are first grasped and transformed by that same love at the very deepest level of our own personalities. We are invited to stand with Mary and John at the foot of the cross, at the point where heaven and earth meet, so that the love from heaven can embrace us, creatures of earth that we are; so that the light of heaven can heal the darkness within us and within the world; so that, by the power of the creator God and in accordance with the scriptures, we can ourselves become part of the new creation which for the moment, for the still, sad sabbath rest, lies waiting, buried, within the womb of the old.

    -N.T. Wright

Maundy Thursday: Holy Week (Day 4)

    ...of course among those who had their feet washed was Judas. That's the vulnerability of love, its openness to betrayal. But with that openness and danger goes something you don't get any other way. When Judas goes out into the dark, Jesus speaks of two things and two things only: glory and love. Now is the son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you...these two things, glory and love, are not two but one. Like heaven and earth, they are joined forever in the Servant, the son of man, the wounded, betrayed but victorious Jesus, completing the scriptures, alive with the vulnerable power of God, made known to us in the breaking of the bread.

    -N.T. Wright