Current Events: A Reflection on Ferguson

“…those who love violence, the Lord’s soul hates…”  Proverbs 11:5

It is so very troubling when violence erupted in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown.  It is troubling when any city experiences riots to the point where the National Guard needs to be called in. 

But perhaps it is more troubling when violence does not break out.  Wait, what?

Violence does not break out over the tens of thousands of people killed by guns, drugs, beatings, murder and intimidation, by preventable means.  Violence does not break out when death occurs along racial or gender or economic lines.  Only one case in how many will spark some kind of reaction, violent or otherwise.

And we are not talking about cop violence, teen on teen violence, violence in the commitment of a felony, domestic violence, or any one bit of the violent spectrum.  So many will die and, except for family and friends, and maybe a sound bite, it will pass unnoticed.

I don’t know if violence has hardened us or broken us down or simply led us to wall off our emotions to any reaction.  We are apathetic and helpless.  It is ‘the cost of doing business’ in life today.  Even in Ferguson, the issue is racial, not violent.  White cop kills black kid.  Did it turn violent from the shooting itself, but from the aftermath?

For hours, the body was visible on the street.  It shook that community’s apathy and helplessness.  It released pent up frustration and anger.  And if we don’t find another way to release that energy, we will have nothing to deal with but violence.

 

Lord, help us to find another way to deal with the cruelty and inhumanity of the sinful world in which we live.  Amen.

 

Thoughts for a New Year

Is there a fine line between hoping you’ll never be called upon to use the skills you’ve learned and hoping to practice those skills to the fullest?  Time, money, and effort are put into the preparation of firefighters to serve as a First Response to whatever might happen.  Agreements are forged between communities to support one another.  Layers of support from the county, the state, and the federal governments stand behind the local firehouse.

On any given day, there might be the ‘big one’, the crisis that calls for ‘all hands on deck’.  It might be accident, it might be deliberate, it might be terrorist in origin.  When driving through the City of Perth Amboy, one can see homes and businesses or one can see worst case scenarios. 

As a chaplain, I pray to God that it won’t happen, and I pray to God to protect those responding when it does happen.  As a minister, I pray to God for any and all who are affected by the crisis. 

But maybe it is not about the skills.  Those are important, they keep firefighters alive.  But maybe the challenge is not about using the skills or not.  Maybe the challenge is about testing oneself.  How will I respond when the crisis comes?  Will I rise to the occasion, drop to my training, break completely? 

Is that the challenge of 2015, not wishing for a fire, crisis, or disaster, but looking for the opportunity to test yourself, to press your limits, to overcome the greatest difficulties and emerge victorious?  Then, for 2015, I pray to God that every man will have the spirit, the courage, and the skill to be the master of their vocation.

Bethlehem

It only took a couple of hours.  The roads were surprisingly empty of travelers.  It is late in the season for the census, most people have already arrived.  Bethlehem is something of a tourist town, being where David was born.  Perhaps like the Heartbreak Hotel across from Graceland, the home of another King, there were rooms to be had.

Usually.

But today, the inns are full.  And even if there were “No Vacancy” signs posted in bright neon, Joseph would still have gone door to door.  It wasn’t for him, he’d sleep on the ground.  It was for Mary.  Her time had come, to put it biblically, ‘after the way of women’.  Maybe her water broke, maybe she was in labor.

But they were in a strange city with no friends, no family, no connections to help them out.  They were at the mercy of strangers, strangers with inns already filled up.  One of those innkeepers took pity.   Maybe his wife saw Mary’s condition.  Maybe she cried out in pain from the donkey as Joseph tried desperately to negotiate some place to stay…any place to stay…  This kept up, maybe past midnight.

Until…  It was around back.  It was the stable.  Room for the donkey and room for them.  Maybe they were charged double, maybe the innkeeper sent for the midwife, the bible doesn’t say.  We do know that Mary was able to lay down, that while she was in labor, preparing to give birth…

And “in that region, there were in those fields, shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night.  Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them…”

Merry Christmas.

One Day To Bethlehem

You can practically see it from Jerusalem, practically roll down the hill in a wagon to get to Bethlehem.  Not that Joseph would want his VERY pregnant wife rolling in a wagon.  But, having come from Galilee, they were from a different province of Herod the Great’s kingdom.  Likely taxes were due, more registrations, more paper work, more red tape.  The world is on the move and the land of Israel is then, as today, a place of high security.

For Mary and Joseph, it probably amounted to a whole lot of waiting.  When it came to collecting money in general, taxes to fees to tolls, the Romans had the system built for efficiency.  And they were at the city that David built.  They were the parents of David’s heir, promised by God to take up the power of his forefather.

They were probably very quiet while under those walls.  It was well-known how paranoid Herod was, how many relatives who might have been threats to his reign that he had executed.  When the magi would come from the east to lay gifts at the feet of their son, would Mary and Joseph remember back to this day, when they were well within the grasp of Herod, if he’d only known, before they made their escape to Egypt?

Sometime on the date that we call in the modern calendar, Dec. 24, they gained their permission to go.  Once more upon the donkey, maybe their purse lighter due to some extra payments to get things moving, and they are on their way, finally.

Two Days to Bethlehem

Jericho would have been a layover on the way to Jerusalem, a security check point.  Jerusalem was the capital, full of intrigue, hotbed of headaches for the Roman overlords.  How much more so with people on the move to respond to this census?  Jerusalem is the gateway to Bethlehem.

The reason they came down the Jordan Valley was due to the hills and valleys that marked the lands between the Jezreel Valley and Jerusalem.  But Jerusalem sits at the northern edge of a long ridge that runs south through the land of Judah into the wilderness beyond.  It is where you crossed over to get to the coastal highways that led on to Egypt and Africa. 

Now it is uphill, with a pregnant wife, forced onto the donkey as the climb would be too taxing, stomp, stomp, stomp.  They were probably part of a convoy now, a group of travelers vetted by the authorities and cleared to head up the ridge. 

They would have seen the City rising up before them for almost the entire trip.  It is about seventeen miles, approximately the distance from exits 10 to 8 on the NJ Turnpike.  The temple is up at Jerusalem, built on top of the ridge to be seen from afar.  In the entire bible, it always talks about going up to Jerusalem, because that was the only way there.

Seventeen miles, uphill, in a crowd, just trying to get there, just trying to arrive.  Once at Jerusalem, it is about 5 miles south to Bethlehem, a couple of hours walk.  You could do it all in one day, in normal times.  But these times were not normal.

Three Days to Bethlehem

They have arrived in Jericho.  It is the southern end of their trip along the Jordan River.  Only a little further south is the Dead Sea.  It is a place where nothing will grow, where the water is poisonous to drink.  That is the place where God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, while saving Lot and his two daughters from destruction.

The couple will pass the night in Jericho.  There are inns inside and outside the walls of the city and they will find a place to stay.  It is a traveler’s city, for travelers coming and going from Jerusalem, for travelers going into the lands beyond the Jordan, to the east. 

So much history exists in this place.  This is where God knocked down the walls to allow his people, under Joshua, to come into the Promised Land.  Here is where Rahab, the prostitute, and her family were saved from the destruction of the city because she hid Joshua’s spies.  She, a Canaanite woman, would be the great-great grandmother of King David and ancestor to the baby Mary carried.  

How big a deal would that be for us?  To be in Jericho, to know what bible stories took place there?  For Mary and Joseph, it is the history of the land, passed through at least once a year.  It’s like the Statue of Liberty for us, such a wondrous sign of what it means to be an American, but how many of us have actually been there?

For them, it’s a rest stop.  They will be waiting to join up with other pilgrims making the climb to Jerusalem and beyond.

Four Days to Bethlehem

The longest stretch of the trip is along the Jordan Valley, south from Jezreel to the city of Jericho.  It will take about two days, maybe a little longer.  The good thing is it’s a pretty safe road, patrolled by Romans and by local troops.  It is also a familiar road, the main transit route between Galilee and Jerusalem.  Mary likely traveled this way when she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth, as recorded in Luke 1.

The big difference is that this is a one way trip.  Everything familiar has been left behind.  Every pace along the way is another step Joseph is taking to a place where he does not know how he will provide for his wife and child.  The bible says there was no room in the inn, which means that they had no relatives, no host family, no connection to this new place.

Mary is following her husband, every pace of the donkey feeling like she’s getting picked up and dropped and, when she can’t stand the beast, every waddling step a reminder that there is nothing lined up for them at the other end of the trip. 

This is not what one would call a honeymoon.  There may well have been no conversation going on, just Joseph’s stony silence, feeling the weight and measure of his failure as a husband in not being able to provide for his wife.  Maybe she started the trip trying to draw him out, trying to talk like newlyweds should.  But how long before you take the stony stare and deafening silence personally?  Did she add guilt to the burden of her pregnancy?  Was the trip ever going to end?

 

Five Days to Bethlehem

They would have been departing from Jezreel today.  Yesterday, Mary and Joseph would have made the journey from Nazareth to Jezreel, from their obscure little village in the outer Jezreel Valley inland to the capital. That is where they would the cash out their lives.

They are on their way to Bethlehem, by order of the Emperor.  Everything they had in Nazareth was essentially illegal, because they were in the wrong place.  You live where your ancestors come from, unless you are privileged, which Mary and Joseph were not.  It is the way of Empire. 

So his business, their home, just set up, all is gone, converted to currency to take them to the ‘old country’.  Unless they already owned a donkey, probably not in a carpenter’s business, they would have picked up one in Jezreel.  It was a necessity.  In addition to whatever worldly possessions they carried, it would carry Mary-very pregnant.

Well into her third trimester, probably somewhere past week thirty six, eighty miles was far too far.  As the crow flies, the distance is about half that, but the highways did not run straight north-south.  They couldn’t.  The country south of the Jezreel Valley was all hills and valleys, as far as Jerusalem. 

More than one army had gotten lost in those badlands.  No, for the couple, it was traveling east to Jezreel and the Jordan Valley, then south, almost to the Dead Sea.  From there, they would climb the ridge on which Jerusalem sat, but south, where they would arrive at Bethlehem.

From Jezreel, they could expect the journey to take about four days.  They should arrive around about December 25 according to the modern calendar.   

Healing at Christmas

“Goodwill to all humanity…”

We’ve done a lot to promote healing in this holiday season.  We’ve brought joy and smiles to members of our church community who can’t come to church with Christmas caroling.  We held a healing service focused around the four prophetic titles of Jesus in Isaiah 9.  Our children will tell the story this Sunday in our Pageant.

And I had my moment tonight during our Cookies, Cocoa, and Crafts party.  I had a fussy youngling on my shoulder, alternately relaxing and crooning tears at the world.  I baptized him not so very long ago.  I was starting to get him to relax (or so my ego would like to believe) when dad came along to take him home.

It has been years since I had a young one on my shoulder, trying to help them (and me) find the gift of sleep.  It was simply a matter of being there, being present, holding them, going through whatever they were going through until they went to sleep.  I had to trust in God that sleep would come, because I doubted.

But the reason it works is because God fulfills my belief, I must simply be there till it happens.  This is the healing power at Christmas.  Mary and Joseph each received visits from God that Jesus would be someone wonderful.  As parents, they had to endure for thirty years until Jesus began his ministry.

Believe that whoever is injured in spirit can heal as surely as a broken arm can be mended, believe God will bring such power as He did at Christmas, and you will see the healing take place.

Setting aside the “Job”

Ecclesiastes 3: 2b “…and a time to pluck up what is planted…”

For First Responders

You put down roots in this Job.  For some, twenty five years out, for others it comes far sooner, due to injury or illness.  Some wait for whatever Social Security mandates as the time to go.  The nature of the Job is ultimately debilitating, by chemicals and toxic substances; by interactions with people who were devastated, injured, maimed, killed.  Are you haunted by the one you couldn’t help?

There is the trouble from ‘your side’, budget, public perception, and “management”.  One day you are the hero, the next day someone steps up with their boot to your neck.

You do not ‘quit’ the Job.  Because it is not a “job”.  When helping others, it is a vocation, and the closer to the line of death that you help them from, the deeper that vocation burrows into your heart.  And when you open your heart, you leave yourself vulnerable.  It lets you care mightily and it leaves you to get hurt mightily.

When the time comes, pluck up what you planted.  The Job will always be a part of you.  Enjoy the relief of being off THAT clock.  Grief the loss of this life-saving work.  Decide right now that you are going to move on.  Find the people to help you make the transition. 

Because there is a new place waiting for you to put down roots once again.

Canceling “The Interview”

Proverbs 26: 12a “Do you see persons wise in their own eyes?”

They should have let it be.

They believe they were “successful”.  After hacking into Sony Studios and threatening the lives of movie goers, the terrorist-hackers have gotten “The Interview” pulled before release.  It has been shelved, “permanently”.

Do they not know who they are dealing with?

In light of Pearl Harbor Day not long passed, do they not realize how dangerous it is to poke a sleeping bear?  I am not saying that we are headed to war, but retribution will be swift and humorous.

Despite what he has done, Bill Cosby epitomized what will come next.  He read a letter on a television special from a Representative to the Dental Industry, protesting how he makes fun of dentists.  He read the letter solemnly, with dignity, before pulling out all the stops, the lesson being: “Lighten up.”

The sleeping bear of the American Entertainment-Industrial Complex has been awaked!!  In the land where Jon Stewart is the most popular ‘news anchor’ since Walter Cronkite, where all the worst excesses of consumerism come out of Hollywood, do they truly believe there will be no response?

They should have let it lie, endured it, let it get panned at Cannes, ignored at the Academy Awards.  When Randy Moore released “Escape From Tomorrow”, filmed surreptitiously at the Disney theme parks, Disney did not react or retaliate.  When Al Franken wrote “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot”, Rush Limbaugh ignored its existence.  Each had its  time and we moved on.  Had either target reacted, we would see the true definition of something ‘going viral’.

They should have let it be.

One Thing I Love About Christmas Is the Music…

            Christmas music can be divided into three broad categories.  One is faith-based, two come out of the popular culture.  In church, we sing Christmas Carols, they are the music of our worship services for the Season of Advent and Christmas.

            In the popular culture, Christmas music falls into two broad categories.  There are the “Santa tunes” and the “Experiential tunes”.  The Santa tunes run from the obvious, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, to Christmas specials including “Frosty the Snowman”, where Santa makes an appearance. 

            The Experiential tunes fall into two groups.  The first group of songs celebrates the Meteorological experience of the Season, “White Christmas” or “Let It Snow”.  The second group of songs celebrates an experience of Personal Transformation brought about by the Season.  My personal favorite in this group is the song about Snoopy and the Red Baron, when, at Christmas, the Red Baron chooses not to shoot down Snoopy, but wishes him a Merry Christmas.

            The thing about Christmas music is that there is very little of it that does not make me happy during this Season-except when it gets played early, pre-Thanksgiving.  I do not think there is any popular Christmas song that I do not like-although I do have my favorite versions.   Most others versions, I do not care for.  

            What is the place of the ‘cultural’ Christmas songs in the life of a Christian?  I believe they should be enjoyed, we should let them make us feel good.  Because they point to a reality bigger than themselves.  The joy of the snow, the transformation that happens within us, even the celebration of Santa Claus, these songs make us aspire to goodness beyond ourselves. 

            These songs find their root in the Christmas Carols, which in turn are rooted in the message of the birth of Jesus.  At Christmas, when the magic of faith is working, the world is a little better, the weather is a little more invigorating,  people are a little nicer.

            Are they all believers?  No.  But the faith of the Season, the joy of the birth of the Christ child, is enough to change everything it touches for the better.

 

Merry Christmas!