Ode to the disappearing vegetarian

Dearest vegetarian

I admire your enthusiasm

no foul fowl, no bad beef, or dumb duck, or ludicrous lamb

no head cheese and No ham

really no ham – really?

“take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them”

imagine a world in which meat is not eaten

imagine that meat is for the rebels the cretin

imagine all the people living life that way

some might say that you’re a dreamer

but you’re not the only one

imagine if everyone

didn’t eat meat

who would be the dreamer when everyone dreams the same dream

it’s easy if you try

Dear vegetarian,

please don’t win this war on flesh

what a shame to lose the honour of your rebellion

and have it given over to those who might fight for the right to eat meat

and then my glorious resistance friend

you’d meet your vegetarian end…

 

So here is the question that bears asking after a stupid little tongue in cheek ditty like this…”When is resistance meaningful?”

Does God owe us anything?

Let me set this up…

First, it would seem according to conventional Christian (evangelical at least) logic that God does not owe us a darn thing since after all it was we humans who sinned and in so doing abdicated our right to expect anything from God. There is also this prevailing notion of the intrinsic nature of the creator/created relationship that suggests the superior unfathomable essence of the creator and the resulting inferior position of the created as feebly inadequate and incompetent to make demands. It seems illogical on the one hand to consider placing any expectations on God from our position of relative ineptitude. There is another even darker question that lurks under the surface here. How are we to make any expectations known to God let alone demand them from him without being able to enact some tangible justice for his failure to meet said expectations? In other words are we to assume power over God in the event of his unfaithfulness to these expectations which are owed to us?

Then, if we should speak of owing or the idea of debt we should remind ourselves that these concepts mean that an agreement has been struck between two parties upon which each party is obliged to honour the term set out therein. The key concept here is the agreement. If God owes us something it can only be that he and we have agreed that there are some terms that God is obliged to fulfill. Of course this naturally turns our attention to the covenant agreements which have been written in the scriptures. The former covenant seems to have been eclipsed by the latest one which loosely paraphrased suggests that God is obliged to provide humanity with eternal life in heaven provided we accept His demonstration of forgiveness of our own inability to meet our side of the covenant – which is sinless life. This at least is the conventional perspective. In Sum: God owes us nothing since we have failed to meet our side of the agreement yet he is willing to forgive that debt if we accept his sacrificial act of debt payment. Now heaven and eternal life are a gift we receive unmerited not an expectation we can demand to have honoured.

Now consider that…

None of us asked to exist. We did not begin our lives aware of our obligation to God so it is hardly possible to propose that we agreed to these covenant parameters. Since we are not party to this covenant the agreement would seem to stand null and void. Thus God does not owe us eternal life and we don’t owe him sinless living (if we are following the standard conventions of the Christian teaching). Both parties are off the hook. But perhaps not so quickly. God is still creator and we the unwilling created. He brings us into a world where we will encounter all these unmet desires and unfilled longings that he has designed this life to bear. He makes us alive to the goodness in life. A friend told me recently, “we are incorrigible hopers.” Merely creating us might not make God beholding to us but certainly placing us in the vibrant contradiction (love in the face of hate, hope in the face of despair, joy in the face of grief, and strength in the face of pain) that is our lives must make him responsible in some way.

Right?

Which brings me to other questions like: Is God meeting his obligations currently? Is there more we should expect? How does this expectation idea keep from becoming just another silly way for me to usurp God’s authority? I mean are the health, wealth and prosperity guys right all along?Please say it is not so...

hope

Ryan posted a good quote here which got me to think a little more about how ironic things are.

We live in an immediate culture. Everything is now. It's almost like a currency. We trade money, time, prestige, power for extraordinary experiential reality of the moment (waiting in line for tickets to Led Zeppelin). This has some obvious dysfunction inherent. With no regard for the future, the only that is important is the now. And right now is only important to give us memories of the most amazing experiences that we can call up in the future. So the future is only useful as a tool for the remembering the past.

Follow me?

So the only thing that should matter is the quality of life as I perceive it right now. Now we are in a pickle because the past is always better than the future and so the present continues to decrease in quality. The only thing we can do is try and rev our engines harder in order to see if we can get close to how good the past was. Sucks!

Enter the concept of hope. Tricky little concept. Too much hope placed too far away in the future can cause you to become distanced from your life right now. (e.g. some fundamental views of heaven) And if you are alienated from your life right now then it really is worth very much. Kinda like working at McDonalds just so that you get to have a life after midnight when you get off shift. You hate working at McDonalds so you really don't care about it – it's a job. Christians with this kind of approach are irresponsible with their own lives and they really could care less about what happens to the earth or the people in the earth.

But hope that is placed too near in the future seems irrational. I mean most of us are pessimistic enough to think that the poverty, AIDS, war problem in Africa won't change appreciably in the next month or even year. It seems we take two steps forward and three steps back. So a person who goes around with that kind of hope is either a super rich activist who can afford to be hopeful or pretty much out-to-lunch.

But what if we change the way we look at hope. Instead of it being a goal or destination, what if it was more like a lifestyle a mode of living and actively looked for opportunities for redemption and restoration. What is hope is not so much a possession that we desperately hang onto but more like a tool that we use to bring about the purposes of the Creator in the world…

Just do it...

some thoughts from Gil's summer ramblings
"For a while I thought that maybe I was missing something. Maybe God did things for and said things to other people in more direct ways. Maybe there was some defect in my practice of the Christian faith that accounted for this gap, some lack of faith or fundamental misunderstanding of how the whole thing was supposed to work. But gradually it became obvious that we were all in the same boat, interpreting (for the most part) ambiguous events and circumstances in light of our faith that God was, in fact, active and present within them."
What is interesting about this is that the degree to which we seem to attribute circumstances to God's action is directly proportional to our need to both absolve our own (human) responsibility for the action and our need to favorably reinforce our belief in God. Pretty self serving - I guess. It may be that the distorted view of God that we and others have may stem from this flaw...

suffering: reprise

understanding suffering
why is there suffering - That's what we want to know right?
suffering is not just a few bad things happening to us - even if they pile up in a row.
suffering is a deep hole of pain or difficulty that seems to have no exit strategy. Really I have not suffered much at all in my life. And I don't even have to compare my life to anyone else to deduce that. Recently God has put a few people into my path who have or are suffering.
And I have been challenged to consider how I view suffering.
My starting point is with some of the thoughts that I put down in this article about sacrifice. From there let me expand a little...
I think suffering is a vehicle for beauty. We tend to consider suffering as horrible and hideous - unbearable. So why are people in the misery of Africa smiling? How can the person dying of cancer find the resources to encourage other people? Are they simply so much more ignorant of how good life could be that they find pleasure in the simplest of improvements over their former condition? In part perhaps. But I wonder if they are not living in an understanding of beauty in suffering. They see a way to transcend the horror of their lives and choose to redeem their plight with deep acts of kindness and compassion. I doubt they live with an overinflated idea of hope - I think they see life for what it is and understand that comfort is far less desirable than love.
When people suffer toward beauty they need not compromise on justice or truth. In fact, the power of courage to live redemptively inside our suffering may well be the catalyst to true justice - not just a self=vindication that we so often pursue.
And I am not suggesting that we deny the passions and gifts that God has placed in our lives. That we should, in effect, chase after suffering as a holier state of spiritual condition.
I think we all can recognize places in our lives where we have or are suffering even if we admit that we don't suffer like some do. Suffering is not optional. It may be within our power to prevent strokes, cancer, job loss, death, depression, poverty, or addiction. But in suffering there are always things that are out of our control - inevitabilities that can sucker punch our best intentions.
Learning to suffer toward beauty takes a supernatural determination. I am grateful for the places where I have gotten to see that modeled for me in the last few weeks and months.
Here's an update: just check Ryan's blog and discovered his excellent thoughts on the same topic...

A friend of mine recently had a stroke – it knocked out his speech!
I did not anticipate how hard it would be to visit him in the hospital. There were times during that brief conversation that I felt completely frozen and completely out of control with my emotions.
Every Friday afternoon we usually meet at the local elementary school. He gets off work early to pick up his daughter and I wait around after teaching a Bible class to pick up my youngest boy. We always banter back and forth. Most recently he bugs me about how I could get away with almost anything in my youth ministry here. “After all,” he says, “what are they gonna do fire you!”
But these are days when despair follows pain very easily for me.
It is hard to visualize the long difficult road that lies ahead for him as he tries to retrain his mind and body to make words again. And then to live with the haunting fear of another stroke - hope slinks to the furthest corner underneath the bed in his room. He’s resilient – he fights!
Prayer feels so hollow.
Asking God to heal him makes me feel like an old time medicine peddler handing our miracles in little bottles. And saying that makes me feel like a faithless floozy.
What other prayer is there?
Every other prayer seems to ‘give up’.
Give him strength Lord.
Do you hear that tiny corner where hopelessness has gained a grasp?
Perhaps there is no meaning to struggle, but what does God mean to us in the pain?

“I was stabbed by Satan on the day that I was born. I was promised lovin’ but instead I was torn. My heart bled fear, my eyes shed tears.” –K’naan

Listen to the song here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2kwOP9h4-M