God Got The Man He Wanted

Manna wasn't bread. 

It was "What on earth?" (A creative rendering of "Ma na?", "ma" being "what?" and "na" being, to this day in modern Hebrew, a particle reinforcing the previous word). 

It was unprecedented ("which your fathers never knew").

God gave it so they'd learn they didn't exist thanks to bread. (Which is why it wasn't bread; that was the whole point. God didn't, after all, give them bread from heaven so they'd learn they didn't need bread. Which would make no sense.) 

But, instead, they lived by everything issuing from God's mouth (the word "word" isn't even there in the Hebrew; just "...but by what issues from the mouth of God"). 

The obvious metaphorical image is that the manna, the "What is this?", that came down from heaven, came as it were from the mouth of God. It didn't really, of course (though in an ultimate sense everything has issued from the Word in God's "mouth"), but the image is clearly suggested by the language. It's a bit of a play on words, poetic and vivid in the Hebrew.

All of this reminder about the manna in the desert is in the context of God's command, on the eve of entry into the Promised Land, to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart...." 

Moses practically begs the people, "Listen, Israel!", as if he's saying "Pleeeeez! Do this!", knowing that...they won't. 

God calls for "khesed" from the people. 

Hebrew "khesed" is an untranslatable word. 

("Untranslatable word" doesn't mean "a word that you can't translate in some way, in specific contexts"--there are no such words in any language; you can always convey what it means, with a phrase, or with various words in various contexts and connotations. But "untranslatable word" means "a single word with a range of connotations that no single word in the second language encompasses"; so we don't have one word in English, or in Russian, that does what khesed does in Hebrew. Like, for instance, there's no single word in Russian that can cover all the meanings English "hang" does: hang up, hang a killer, hang out with friends, hang from the edge, hang in there, hang on, hang loose....) 

But what the broad concept khesed conveys is, in a phrase (which is generally what you have to do with untranslatable words), "total and unwavering commitment to do absolutely everything for the good of the one loved." That's the conceptual nugget in the Hebrew mind that gets sounded when he utters "khesed". If you asked him what "khesed" meant, of course, he'd simply say "Khesed means khesed!" Just like we'd say "Hang means hang!" 

God requires this khesed, and also emet (truth, not dry factuality but inter-personal truth as in "true to his convictions" or "Romeo remained true to Juliet") from Israel. 

"Khesed v' emet" are a well-known duo in the Hebrew scriptures ( v' means "and".) They rarely appear without each other. It would be like Laurel without Hardy, George without Gracie, Brick without a-Brack. Together they sum up the summit of the divine-human ideal. It doesn't get any better. 

Nearly all translations water it down, because we are stuck having to make an "X and X" phrase to mirror khesed v' emet. But since there's no single word, really, that conveys the full force of "khesed" or for that matter of "emet," any translation is doomed to water down the sense, the implication, of the phrase. Love and faithfulness, mercy and truth, they're serviceable translations but not of course really it. Any simple "X and X" equivalent you try to finagle in English is doomed to obscure nearly as much as it illuminates. 

"How about mercy and truth? So like, forgiving people who wrong me, and...um, telling the truth?" 

Well, er...no, though that all goes into it inevitably, but...no. 

"Love and faithfulness? So we should love God and be faithful to Him?" 

Well, no--er, I mean YES, of course! But, while that's probably a better handling of khesed v' emet, it's still not quite it. 

There is, after all, a real Hebrew word for "love" and if the author had merely wanted to say "love" he'd have used it, but he used khesed instead, so it's still something, well...other. And "faithfulness" does indeed express the inter-personal nuance of emet better than "truth", yet even criminals can be "faithful" to each other without their faithfulness being rooted in what's universally the good, faithful, life-giving TRUTH. So their faithfulness to each other turns out to be not emet but something pernicious and ultimately self-serving. 

"Then how about 'commitment and loyalty'?" 

Also pretty good, but...dry, no passion, too abstract. Plus, couldn't you see "loyalty" in khesed just as much as in emet? And "commitment" in emet as much as in khesed? So aren't we blurring the two terms into each other? 

You see the difficulties. 

The khesed v' emet concept was so fundamental and theologically central to the whole divine revelation that the NT writers couldn't possibly just leave it in the OT. They had to demonstrate how it came into its fullness, like everything else in God's revelation, in Christ. 

And in Greek yet!

And what Greek phrase did they use to translate khesed v' emet? 

Or to cut to the chase, how did their Greek phrase finally come through to us in English? 

Grace and truth. 

As in "For God gave the law through Moses, but grace and truth came about through Jesus Christ" (which is the sense of the Greek in John 1:17). 

There is something intrinsically wrong in what seems to be people's customary take on John 1:17. We assume it to mean, in a neat, unthreatening symmetrical way, that on the one hand God gave us the law, through Moses, but on the other hand He gave us grace and truth, through Jesus. "Grace" being "unmerited favor", essentially a synonym here for "salvation", and "truth" being...well, let's say the Gospel, the true message that the grace comes through. 

I'd say that's how most Christians sum up the verse, wouldn't you? 

And it's so wrong. 

John's assertion is actually explosively asymmetrical, and the more you reflect on it the more astounding it gets. 

First of all, the "giving" only shows up once in the statement: God gave the law. There's no "giving", not even of a superior kind, on the other side of the assertion, because there's no symmetry. 

In the second part, "grace and truth" happened, came about, arose--the sense of the Greek verb is flexible, but in general it indicates something that wasn't there before being there--through Jesus Christ. 

So while Moses is merely a channel, Jesus Christ is the one actually materializing grace and truth, realizing it in Himself, as part of Himself, the essence of Who He is. 

Secondly, the "law" is an object, something God could, indeed, "give" via Moses. The giving of the law, by the way, was itself an act of khesed, properly understood (which points out how incorrectly limited our theological perception of "grace" is, because we have simplistically reduced it to some kind of "thing" that is the opposite of "law" and that God somehow uses to save us). 

But (and here's comes the main event) while the giving of the thing called the law was (like everything God does) an act of khesed, what the whole law aims at was still screamingly absent. I.e., the Man of Khesed v' Emet, who incarnates to the final degree, inside and out, the total love of Deuteronomy 6:4. (The phrase khesed v emet itself isn't in Deut. 6:4 but it's a continual theme in the Hebrew scriptures that Deut. 6:4 is inseparable from.) 

In John 1:17, John is telling us that Jesus became that. The Man of Khesed. In Him it happened. 

In Jesus, for the first time ever, Man rendered God absolute "grace and truth." A Man enfleshed Deuteronomy 6:4. 

That's the part that turns our usual orthodox New Testament thinking on its head. 

"Wait, Man can't give God grace! Grace is unmerited favor that saves us! So it's impossible in every way for humans to give God grace!"

Which is an objection that says positively nothing about the the text and everything about the warping of the term through our narrow "orthodox evangelical NT" mental filters. 

Saying that "grace is unmerited favor" is the same as saying "to drink means to imbibe alcohol" because that's what people mean when they say, "Oh...Frank. Yes, well, you know...he drinks." It may be what "drink" conveys in that sentence, but "drink" itself does not mean "imbibe alcohol." By the same token, "grace" in the full biblical sense will certainly manifest "unmerited favor" and it is certainly the divine "mode" (dreadfully weak word but it will have to do) in which He saves us. But "grace" itself cannot be reduced to those things simply because those things spring from it.

It is an outcome of our artificial pigeon-holing of the concept into comfortably predictable "New Testament" categories, our effective parodying of the term/concept, just as we parody "drinking" if we conclude it only means tippling booze, that we arrive at the biblically preposterous conviction that "grace" is a "thing" that only God can, as it were, hand to Man. 

Wrong. 

Man certainly can give/show God "grace/khesed". God demands it again and again in the Old Testament. That we show khesed to Him and to each other. Together with (it's a package deal) unwavering faithfulness (emet). 

The apostle John certainly knew this. He knew Hebrew. And he knew Jesus.

So when John describes Jesus as the one in whom this quality , this kind of life (not a "thing") manifested itself in full, he is saying something light-years beyond a simple, "First God gave us this, then He gave us that." 

He is pointing to Jesus as a Mount Everest that makes the magnificent thing God did through Moses look like a speed bump by comparison. Or if you prefer to liken the giving of the Law to Everest, then we must liken the materialization of khesed v emet in Jesus to the entire universe. John is unveiling the audacious asymmetry, with no apologies, of God's worlds-shattering deed in Christ. 

Finally, in Jesus, God got the Man He wanted. The khesed v emet were channeled, before all else, from the Son to the Father. God incarnate enfleshed the perfection of Deut. 6:4. 

Only because Jesus was the "God-gracing" Man that Adam was created to be was He concomitantly the Lamb, with khesed so infinitely overflowing that it swallowed up everybody else who was willing to jump in and go wherever it took them. (Which is a different sort of way to formulate, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life....")

Which is what the "For" is there for. As in..."For of His fullness have we all received, and khesed upon khesed..." Of course, John has to use a Greek word there, kharis, to convey what he's thinking. What was in Him was an overflowing bounty of human-divine perfection--in love's uttermost consecration--that it flooded us all. 

It is terribly significant that this assertion comes before the more "famous" and evangelistically handy one about God giving the law through Moses but grace and truth...etc. If you hear John's text as some dry theological lecture, you miss the whole spirit of it disastrously. It is bubbling with spontaneity and excitement. And if you take it as a dry theological exposition you cannot possibly "feel' why the sentences are in the order they are. 

I'll offer an analogy to argue my case. 

Consider this account: Henry is a very kind and generous man. One day in the city he noticed his next door neighbor's children on a street corner crying. He went up and asked what was wrong. They told him they had lost their phone and money. Henry immediately gave them a hundred dollars and let them borrow his phone for the rest of the day. 

When the children got home later they said: 

"We're home! We're fine!" 

(Parents think: "What? Why wouldn't you be?") 

"We had a phone and all the money we needed!"

("Well, of course you did, because we gave them to you!") 

"Because Henry gave us his phone and money!"

("What? What on earth do you mean?") 

"Because we lost ours!"

("What?") 

"But it was all right because Henry saw us and helped us!"

("Thank God!") 

"Henry is such a nice man!" 

("He sure is! We owe him a dinner!") 

"Oh, and you owe Henry a hundred dollars." 

("WHAT?!") 

And in the children's spontaneous telling, the entire presupposition of the tale, i.e., that Henry is a nice, generous man, without which none of the rest would have happened, gets told last, or nearly last. 

Which is, of course, even if the children weren't conscious of it, a very clever way of grabbing somebody's attention, i.e., by rattling off the outcomes before you've explicated the causes. Professional public speakers do the same. "Out of the mouth of babes...." 

What John is saying in 1:14-18 is, in a dry (though considering the magnificent content it can never really be dry), logical, linear fashion, the following: 

1. Only God the Son is privy to the inner glory of the Father, but the Son has made the Father known to us by becoming flesh, human, and living among us, so that we could actually see this Father-Son glory (if limitedly). 
2. Unlike the mere giving of the law, the Son materialized the Law's vision. That is, the Son overflowed with human-divine perfection, the summit of holy, unblemished, fierce love for God and Man. 
3. This is what John the Baptist was talking about when he said the one coming after him was greater (to say the least!). 
4. And the miraculous bottom line is that we've been engulfed, swept up, practically as collateral beneficiaries, in this uncontainable explosion of khesed, love, perfection, fulfillment. 

But John, in an appealingly youthful...or very clever...kind of spontaneity, says this almost entirely backwards, in reverse, so that the whole picture's logical premise is at the end, verse 18. You can follow the thread rather neatly if you start there and go backwards. 

Which is the way children breathlessly tell you something they're excited about, forcing you to extract the logical precedents from them with a series of "Why?"s. 

On the other hand, John, being very much a Jew, doesn't tell his tale simply backwards. There is clearly an element of what literary types call "inclusio", where the same thought "book-ends" a passage, showing up at the beginning and the end. And when you stop to think about it, isn't John in 1:18  saying intrinsically the same thing, in different words, that he does in 1:1? And 1:18 is obviously the end of the theological prologue before John starts the detailed narrative. So that could be taken as an inclusio. 

There is also the possibility of something more than inclusio going on here. Though I'm not going to investigate it further here, there could be a chiasm going on, maybe multiple chiasms interwoven. A "chiasm" is when the writer repeats much the same thought first and last, then the next thought second and second-to-last, the next thought third and third from last, etc. Until you get a kind of A-B-C-D-E-D-C-B-A conceptual structure in the text. This way of story-telling was deeply ingrained in Hebrew culture, perhaps for all I know throughout ancient Near Eastern cultures. 

To sum up, then, I'll say it again: God got the Man He wanted, FINALLY. ("This is My Son, in Whom I am well pleased.") And for that one thing alone, everything is now completely different. God's joy was fulfilled, and in precisely Him Who fulfilled it we are home, safe, restored. God never did anything like that before. It was unprecedented, like manna, unimaginable, direct from "the mouth of God"--the Word, the Bread of Life.  

(Imagine therefore Jesus' pain when the people alluded to the manna, wrongly calling it "bread" by the way, which warped the whole meaning of it, in an attempt to coerce Jesus into performing miracles for their entertainment. They got the whole point 180 degrees backwards.)

That, I'm convinced, is the "vision" of John 1:17 and, of course, the entire Gospel and New Testament. God got the Man He wanted. It happened. Finally. 

This is a radically different vision, one inexpressibly transcending the wooden, barren symmetry supposed by many Christians in the hollow, theologically eviscerating interpretation that "First God gave us the Law, but then He gave us salvation and the Gospel because the Law couldn't save us. He did the first through Moses and the second through Jesus." I hope you can hear, given the case I have laid out above, how hollow that rings. 

Visitors from the Past

The reality of time's passing hits you with a stunning sort of UN-reality when out of the blue you realize, "Wait. I was twelve.......FIFTY YEARS ago."  
And you think, no, I must be counting wrong, that couldn't be ME who was twelve FIFTY years ago. Wasn't it twenty? Thirty at the outside? 
But a quick recount (and no hanging chads) only confirms what you're sure just can't be. It WAS fifty. 
Hello. 
Maybe it's so stunning because there are ways that being twelve seems more like "just yesterday" than being forty does. Yes, forty really does seem more distant and shadowy to me than twelve does. Twelve feels like five minutes ago. Forty, by comparison, strikes me as something vaguely signalling from a remote galaxy. 
Perhaps, neurologically speaking, it's because at twelve you are still living a child's timeless existence, in a world you perceive as a constant, where nothing will ever change. (Yet you are also perceiving it with a capacity for interpretation that has just take a quantum leap of development, on the cusp of adolescence, so the impressions are all the more vivid yet.) Because you take it as "fixed" it gets correspondingly "fixed" (with all the stark impressions and sensations of childhood) in your mind as the Constant, the Way Things Are. Paradoxically, that's what it therefore remains in there, in the archives of your brain, even when it has already long been Not The Way Things Are. 
When you're forty you know better, of course. And because you know better, the circumstances of your forty-year-old world aren't neurologically impressed as a self-evidently permanent cognitive fixture. 
So what was "fixed" is more readily available to your cognitive Rolodex--right there at your fingertips, as it were--than what was registered as ephemeral even as it transpired.  
Weirdly, then, the way you saw it when it happened created what it was to be and remain as a part of you forever. By registering a moment of your life as the Constant, you effectively MADE it that cognitively. By registering another moment as the Ephemeral, that's what you made THAT in your memory. And as such they more or less stick. Even though there wasn't a scrap of difference between them spatio-temporally. The same laws of physics applied to both moments, after all. But not the same laws of mind. 
Which, for some reason, brings me back to the original thought: can it really be FIFTY YEARS? But, then again, why shouldn't it be? If "twelve" seems like five minutes ago, then...what do the fifty years mean? Why not sixty or seventy? Such criteria can't push "twelve" further back, if you follow me. 
Why, when you stop to think about it, should the sense of fifty years passing be more cognitively real than the five minutes ago that being twelve seems? 
Both are real. 
Yes, I think we need both, and neither one cancels the other. Both are real parts of who and what we are, the cognitive reality of our humanness.
It strikes me now that one reason for this cognitive independence, or call it warping if you like, of time, is that we actually NEED an inner archive of (pardon this violence to the English language) us's. A catalogue of me's, as it were. In your case, a catalogue of you's. And for the archive to be maintained in "fresh" condition, fifty years ago HAS to "seem" like five minutes ago. It's a function of the archive. 
The reason we need the archive is, each "you" that you were at various places in life perceived, registered, processed, interpreted and came to certain convictions about the whole complex called Life with all its feelings, faces, needs, desires, fears, knowns and unknowns, etc. 
Let's call that complex the WLI (What Life Is). 
Your inner life is a catalogue of WLIs. They are naturally interlinked and flow into each other, yet at the same time a sequence of distinct units is easily discerned. Just as with history (this IS history, after all). You might not easily tell from two photographs which was taken in 2019 and which in 2011, but you have no problem telling the difference between family photos from 2019, 1990, 1970 and 1950. 
And while, yes, we do grow and learn MORE, perpetually modifying our WLI theory along the way as we SHOULD, we also misinterpret, make mistakes, forget or betray things that count, stuff feelings and flee from unresolved, seemingly hopeless trails, frustrated beginnings, etc. 
I think the inner archive of "me's" is there to cross-check with. Grow though we might, learn more though we might, expand in grasp and outlook and wisdom though we might, there is ALWAYS the possibility, even likelihood, that some other "you" back there in the archive, at a discernibly, qualitatively different WLI...knew something that you don't. 
Why don't you know it? 
Well, there's any number of reasons, but let's just say you forgot.
And that's what the 12-year-old you is still there for. Or the 25-year-old you. Or the 40-year-old you. Their sensations, impressions, insights and WLI deductions represent whole real worlds. They represent, in part, the unfathomable multi-verse that you are. 
They are there, at times leaping out of the archives, because they have things to remind you about. Important things you forgot. 
But sometimes they show up for a different reason: because THEY'RE still waiting and hoping to get answers. From you. Important answers they still need. 
I suspect the reason some of them appear vividly on the cognitive screen while others are vague and shadowy is, the ones you're still pretty much the same as (like "me at 40") are in no particular need of making their presence known, either for your sake or theirs, if you follow me. If you could get on the horn and check in with them, they'd say, "Doing just fine. Don't call me, I'll call you." 
The ones who leap out of the archives onto cognitive center stage, though, whether they hail from a 50-year-old WLI or a 5-year-old one (it all depends on what's transpired in between), those are the ones with an urgent message, or need. Either way, their arrival is good, because they wouldn't show up if the moment weren't fortuitous. They only show up because you're ready. Whether you knew it or not. That's their first job, in fact: to announce that you're ready. 
All of this is one reason I find it unbearably distasteful to hear anyone "diss" their earlier self: "Oh, I was just a naive, ridiculous, oblivious dolt back then, without a clue in the world what really counted or what I existed for." 
No, life is never like that. That's never the totality of what anyone is. 
You may have been naive (who isn't?), at times ridiculous, clueless about most things (again, who isn't?), but...no, don't kill anyone in the archives. It's murder. The WLI you're most inclined to purge from the record is the one hammering on the archive doors to get out, now, and...meet you, finally. To give and take what must be given and taken. 
"Love your neighbor as yourself." 
You can't murder the WLIs in your inner archives yet love your neighbor. You might tolerate your neighbor, barely, but, no, not love. 

The "Ugly American"





A looooong rant. If you haven't got the time, scroll on. 😊 But the more intrepid, or foolhardy, among you may glean some meaningful tidbit out of it....

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The "Ugly American"

Two stories. 

On one of the anniversaries of 9/11, at Ground Zero, a crowd of Americans was approaching the memorial, all of them carrying large bouquets of flowers to place at the site. One of them noticed an Asian woman likewise approaching the site, but she had a single rose in her hand. This particular American found that offensive. He approached her and began to berate her for the meagerness of her expression of sympathy, calling it an insult to the United States and all the innocents who perished on 9/11. The woman, who was in fact a tourist and knew almost no English, and who had seen in her single rose an expression of simple, humble sympathy, was confused and mortified as other people began to stare, and the American only went on yelling at her louder and louder. 

How does that make you feel about Americans? 

Actually...it  didn't happen. I made it up. Here, the second story, is what really happened. 

(Note: this story is NO reflection on the Armenian people. I love my "Armenian" life and the many people who are dear to me there. But in Armenia like everywhere, as the old saying goes, "it takes all kinds"....)

I was in Armenia on their Remembrance Day, when thousands and thousands of Armenians stream to the Genocide Memorial, bouquets in hand to lay at the site in honor of the million or more souls who perished under the Turkish genocide. I'd been invited to go along with my students that day. Classes were cancelled after lunch for the event. I was fairly in the blue as to what was going on and the picture came into focus only gradually as we were approaching the site. it was a blazing hot day, which wilts me to the point of disorientation, and I was enveloped by a sea of thousands, which is precisely the environment I avoid as if my life depended on it, so I was doubly out of sorts. And it took hours to reach the memorial, so make that triply. As I realized what this was all about, and noticed everybody with flowers, and I had none, I asked one of my students to hand me a flower from his bouquet, which he did. Suddenly some man, not part of my immediate company, noticed me with my one flower and started yelling at me. He yelled in Russian (I'm plainly, at a mere glance, not an Armenian, so his default conclusion was "Russian"), so I understood everything. He berated me for insulting his country, and "Would you bring just one flower to your loved one's funeral?" ("I might," I thought.)  I argued something back to him, though I don't remember precisely what. I think, in essence, I told him he was being very rude to a foreigner who was sincerely trying to show sympathy. Thankfully my kind students intervened and shooed the belligerent fellow away. 

Now let's say that, instead of starting with my made-up story about the ugly American yelling at the poor well-meaning Asian lady, I had kicked this off with "A Story," about "An American" (you don't know who), who went to Armenia and, on their great day of public mourning when everybody brings a bouquet to the memorial, this boorish, ugly American sauntered up to the site with a single, pathetic, peremptory, drooping rose. And then asked, "How does that make you feel about Americans?" 

Your answer would likely have been the same as it was to my made-up story about the nasty American mortifying the Asian lady at the 9/11 memorial: "Boy, Americans are just the worst, aren't they...."

In other words, for the "ugly American", whether he's the yell-ER or the yell-EE, it's a lose-lose proposition. He's just "the worst."  If he's yelling at a foreigner in America, he's a boorish imperialist dolt, and if he's getting yelled at AS the foreigner elsewhere, it's because he's a boorish, imperialist dolt. 

Either way he's the ugly American, and "don't it just go to show ya...." (Which, if I understand correctly, would be what they call "bias confirmation.") 

In all cases the default conclusion is, he's the guilty party. Not because it's based in objective reality but because the Ugly American is central to a polemical-demagogic myth at the core of a calculated political philosophy. That myth has been so popularized and "orthodox-ized" by entrenched, invested, power-wielders that to question it is to call the Maelstrom down upon your head. 

In my case, the reality is that I was "the Asian lady", but the only way you (or, if not you, then many) could possibly have heard, or heard out, my story without a presumption of my ugliness was to hear it disguised, a parable, with me as the Asian lady accosted by an American at the World Trade Center. Then, you were full of unfiltered, unguarded ("Am I rooting for the politically correct person?") sympathy. 

How dreadfully rare it is that we're not guarded. 

The Myth has hard-wired us NOT to sympathize with the American. The Myth has predisposed us, in fact, to view the world through a grossly warped, fantastical lens. 

Anybody with even a modicum of international, cross-cultural experience, unless he/she is so viscerally devoted to the Myth as to have attained consummate myopia, knows very well that Americans haven't anything remotely like a monopoly on xenophobia, ethnocentrism or insularity. People are, in fact, the same everywhere. They are conditioned and adapted to their social, cultural, psychological and physical environments with their particular assumptions and rules and in those environments they scramble to...survive. At least that. At the outside, maybe to be happy. They cope, they navigate, they "stuff it" when they have to, and on rare occasions they cautiously buck a local norm. (And there's always things about their own cultures they hate.) 

But mostly they want to give their children a good life. That's a universal. Probably THE universal. 

And 99% of humanity has no time to be ethnologists. So they aren't. 

And even when they and their neighbors speak two or three languages, it's not that they are endowed with a naturally superior humanitarian sophistication. It's because those two or three languages are, taken together, "the local language" and you can't FUNCTION in that neighborhood without them. 

(How tiresome the snooty aspersions get, about the benighted state of American "Anglos" who only know one language "unlike the REST of the world"...though I have done a fair amount of travel in my time and have yet to bump into this monolithic-polyglottic "rest of the world." Odd, considering how vast it's purported to be.) 

No. In point of fact, everybody does what they must to survive and not, in most cases, considerably more than that.  "Survive" encompasses physical and, conditions permitting, psychological and emotional needs (love, intellect, aesthetics, sport, etc.). Under lavish circumstances, "survive" includes a lot of what one would like to think one needs but, existentially speaking, doesn't.  Under catastrophic circumstances, everything but the scramble for physical survival is jettisoned. 

Another story. Or parable, if you like. 

Imagine: it's eve-of-Hitlerian Germany, say around 1929, 1930. The monstrosity hasn't fully bloomed yet, but its budding is unmistakable. Among the society's leading classes and élite, in industry, the arts, education, science, medicine, commerce, the word is out: "Jews are the enemy. Don't ask why, they're just the enemy. If you have to ask why, then you're the enemy, too. Toe the line or be cast out along with them." 

And imagine some grand cultural event in a massive hall in Berlin, with hundreds of the ruling class, the beautiful people, in attendance. Maybe the Monster is there, too, not that it matters to the story. And some honored figure, say a great violinist, is eagerly urged by the audience: "Speech! Speech!" He steps up to the microphone, takes a breath and utters: "I want to say that in my experience I have found the Jewish people to be no different than any of us, indeed I have found them to be noble and honorable people of good will." 

Knees are jerking, breath is arrested, armrests gripped, eyes bulging and pulses racing, horror has seized the  hall. That is NOT Beautiful People Speak. The Official Line that a political-philosophical monolith banks on for conceptual coherence--its "glue"--has been slandered, because someone dared to say something...well, true. Even on the merest level of his personal experience it's true. But that doesn't matter. True or not, it's heresy. It's a slander against the Line, the Speak, therefore...hateful. When the Maelstrom comes down on the violinist's head, it will have nothing to do with truth. It will be the Urge to Power sweeping him out into oblivion along with everything else it has marked for elimination. 

It strikes me that, albeit it on a thankfully lower scale and intensity (so far), this same Urge to Power has, today, in our present sociocultural conflict, marked out for elimination every utterance, and utter-ER, that runs athwart the Elite Line, the Official Narrative, the Polemical Myth, The Speak. The concentration camps aren't up and running...yet...but you'll be screeched and hollered off college campuses, banished from social media, exiled from public forums, news and entertainment industries, slandered and smeared with the most vile filth (I offer Alan Dershowitz and Jordan Peterson as recent objects of such frenzied rabidity), by the masters and guardians of the sociocultural plantation whose portfolios and bank accounts depend on the Myth's ascendancy. Truth hasn't the least to do with it.  

It sure does seem very...mmm...1930s-Germany-ish.

"We're the beautiful, the serene, until you violate our Speak." 

Among many other truths, the particular one I'm addressing here, i.e., that the "Ugly American" vs. a world of intrinsically superior and more HUMAN human beings is a myth and a fraud, is one guaranteed to set off the jerking knees and racing pulses. It violates the Speak. The hardwired response is "Eliminate!" 

In this Snark-Adoring Age, when infantile mockery is bizarrely exalted as substance, argument, weight and wit (likely because fewer and fewer people are capable of coming up with better, hence the mass scurry to the dreggy bottom), I easily anticipate a sneering attempt (probably not here among Facebook friends, but you know how it would go elsewhere) to dismiss everything I've said with a nasal: "Awww, your widdle Amewican feewings are hurt because people tell you just how bad you are--boo, hoo, hoo...." (I feel ridiculous writing that, but you have to admit it IS the caliber of "argument" that turns online comment threads into such fetid swamps.) 

Which of course is no argument or position but a mindless FLIGHT from argument, from thought itself. A knee-jerk, vacuous attempt to stifle and kill dialogue (the polar opposite of classic liberalism) and, thus, keep on perpetuating the Myth in pursuit of political domination. 

(It's ALL about power and the illusory self-authentication it tantalizingly dangles in front of you. Which is why "empowered" is the Holy Grail of our day.)

No, it's not hurt feelings. It's a Declaration of Independence (something Americans historically have a yen for). It's all the same to me what others think. But what I think--!  Ah hah, THAT is my own, sovereign territory and responsibility, just as what you think is yours. So my point is that, in my humble opinion, each and every one of us has an absolute right to dismiss, reject and conclusively refuse to buy into, or bear on our shoulders, the Myth. It's a lie that shouldn't color our world, predispose our reactions, prejudice our choices, skew our relationships or inhibit our self-expression, no matter how many sneering snarkers, propelled by core maladjustments and a projection of their inadequacies, try to intimidate and...SHAPE us. 

To ruthlessly reject their "shaping" is something quantum-ly transcendent to hurt feelings. Their snark is a pathetic attempt to keep you from knowing the difference. But, you do. 

Declarations of Independence first lay out what the independence is to be FROM (as Mr. Jefferson eloquently detailed), then they announce, in so many words, "No, not swallowing it anymore." (I'm not sure Jefferson put it exactly like that, but that was the gist.) 

"Declaration of Independence" is just one side of this conceptual coin. The other side is this: as a Christian, my priority here isn't to defend America; it's to reject a lie. And to help others shuck false burdens and specious guilt imposed by a barren worldview and political philosophy. God knows, we all have enough real guilt to handle in life, we don't need others getting in our heads to indoctrinate us what we're honor-bound to feel miserable about in the service of their ephemeral political-philosophical fiefdoms. 

Forget THAT. Really!

We Americans aren't the worst people in the world, nor is America the guiltiest country in history. (And the hall went silent in horror.) 

Even if, to speculate fantastically, America WERE the guiltiest country in history--somewhere, some time, we may suppose there is a winner in that competition--it still wouldn't make YOU "the worst." (And the Beautiful People clutched their pearls and gnashed their teeth.) 

No, everybody around the globe is pretty bad, actually. "All have sinned and fallen short...." (And a stampede for the exits ensued.) 

As Christians, with a breathtakingly short span to live out on terra firma, our debt is a spiritual one. It's not the suffocating, intentionally IMPOSSIBLE debt to make up for what "we," as defined by self-seeking plantation-masters of one stripe or another, have "done" to others by dint of our being ___________ (fill in the blank...as you know they will!). 

Instead, our debt is the supreme, yet POSSIBLE one. It's paid off with every act of grace and love in Christ's Name. We keep on "paying it off," not to extinguish it but for the joy of it. It's not the debt of our guilt but the debt of Love. 

Neither of the two debts can ever be paid off, but the one is a bondage while the other is freedom. The one is a fraud and the other is the Way, the Truth and the Life. 

The debts the world's plantation-masters want to lay on your shoulders are scams, and they never MEAN for you to pay them off--they mean for you to take them on, psychologically, emotionally, socially, as permanent stigmas, because their whole show depends on it. 

The happy news is, you are free in Christ to respond, with respect: "Phthphthpppp!" 

Our real debt as Christians is defined by the word "Christian", not by the word "American." This is what we have in common with His Church all around the world. The resources available to us may well determine our fitting responses ("To whom much is given..."), but it remains true all the same that our spiritual debts, our opportunities to "do good to all men," are first and last Christian ones, not "American" ones. 

As for our guilt, it has been nailed to the Cross in Him. And life is simply too short to expiate any other kind in the sanctuary of our own spirits. It's a sacrifice God Himself hasn't asked of us, truly a fool's errand. And we weren't called to be fools. 

"I Am With You Always", an Easter season sermon, 2020

"I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS"

(Read Matthew 28:18-20)

The simple thing I want to do in this sermon is to ask two questions about the Lord's promise to be with us always.  They are: 

1. In what sense?

2. What guarantees the fulfillment of this promise?

Let's start with the second question. Why? Because as soon as w've understand what guarantees that the promise is fulfilled, it will automatically become clear in what sense the promise is being fulfilled. 

So, what guarantees the promise? 

I'll answer with three words: life, love, and might. 

The LIFE of the Risen Christ guarantees that He is with us: He lives! Nothing can limit Him now. 

John 5:21--  For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.

John 5:26-- For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.

Conquering death itself, God's Son is now, for those who've entrusted themselves to Him, the continual, inexhaustible source of life. "I am with you always"--yes, for He's always alive, and will eternally remain the incarnation of that Life that has given us new birth by God's love. 

And that, it just so happens, is the second component of the answer to my question: what guarantees this promise? The first part was Life; the second is Love. 

God is love. "For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." "I am with you always." Yes, because He loves us, created us, redeemed us, gave us a second birth into His kingdom, and why? Out of love--pure, divine, original, all-preceding, holy, eternal love. It's God's love that draws us to repentance and then keeps us in covenant with Him. 

Philippians 1:6-- Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

In that love, precisely, that in the unfathomable depth of timeless eternity abounds between the Father and Son. In that very love the Risen Son is working to present us to His Father for the joy of His beloved Father. 

I think the apostle Paul, in the Spirit of Christ, deeply partook of this desire, and expressed this feeling when he wrote: 

Colossians 1:28-29-- He is the one we proclaim, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ.  To this end I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me.

Ephesians 5:27-- And to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

"I am with you always", says the Lord. He declared it in the might of conquering Life, in the might of unquenchable Love. The Lord said these words in Might. That's the third component of the guarantee.

God keeps, maintains, realizes His promise because He is God Almighty. "Who then can be saved?", the disciples asked Jesus one day in bewilderment. And the Lord answered, "With man it is impossible, but with God everything is possible." 

And mark well that the Lord, at the very moment He pronounced those words, already knew with fearsome lucidity what would be demanded of Him so that His Father could consummate, for us, this with-God-possible impossible.... 

Possible, but not easy. Possible, but not without cost. Possible, but demanding the Lamb of God's very last drop of love, might and love. 

And we? We're the recipients of this gift, the gift confirmed by Christ's resurrection, the resurrection by which, in the words of the apostle Peter, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to magnificent mercy, gave us new birth." 

His unconquerable Life, His unquenchable Love, and His indomitable might guarantee and comprise the force and power of these majestic words: "To me is given all authority in heaven and on earth...and, behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." 

All that remains here is to answer the first question that I asked: in what sense is Christ with us? In other words, what does this promise mean in our daily life? Well, in one word: MUCH! So much that I can't possibly sum it all up in one, or even a thousand sermons. But particularly during this time of quarantine, a time of isolation, maybe loneliness and melancholy, an anxious time full of concern for those near and dear to us, and not only, at such a time the Promise of Christ--that is, the personal word of assurance to us from the Risen, Returning King of kings Jesus--means that our isolation is filled with His presence, and not only His presence but His appointment, providence and fruitfulness. 

The prophet Isaiah summoned the nation of his day: "Seek the Lord while He may be found; call upon Him while He is near." 

Who then, in Isaiah's day, could have imagined the unfathomable way in which God would make Himself Immanuel, God-with-us, always near, faithfully keeping His people, in the face of the Only-Begotten Son Jesus Christ? 

We, however, don't have to "imagine" but abide--abide in the power of His promise, ceaselessly trusting ourselves to Him with that same confidence that rings in the words of the apostle: "I know Him Whom I have believed, and I am confident that He is able to keep that which I have entrusted to Him against that day." 

Our God lives! Christ is risen! 

GOSSIP

(This brief reflection on the nature of gossip, and "why not", was delivered online, during Covid-19 quarantine, at an evening service for youth conducted by my church. It was composed and delivered in Russian. This is a translation from my notes, which doesn't of course match perfectly what I may have said, including spontaneous digressions, at the service. But on the whole it's what I conveyed.) 

When they asked me to talk about gossip this evening, I almost joked, "For or against?" 

Well, of course, "against."

Yet, in point of fact, why "against"? 

It isn't murder, adultery, stealing, it isn't even lying....

"After all I'm telling the truth! Well...probably. Well, okay, there's a commandment against false witness, but if I'm 100% sure about everything I'm passing on, then what's to stop me?"

But what if the gossip is about you? 

"Ah well, that's a different story." 

No, it's not a different story. It's the very same story. But we'll come to this later. 

I told another friend that I'd be talking on this subject today, about how gossip is bad, and my friend, joking, said, "But if it's interesting?" 

Well, yeah, uh--duhhh. 

That's the whole point of the matter. It's easier than easy to reject gossip when it's not interesting. It tempts precisely because you want to find out--there's something delectable in it. 

The Irish writer and satirist Oscar Wilde said, "I can resist anything except temptation." 

I think you catch the meaning of that humor. 

"I can reject all gossip, except the interesting kind." 

Similar humor. 

And though we chuckle at it, the humor itself exposes just what sort of trap this temptation conceals. 

Why is gossip tempting? How does it entice us? .

Maybe you'll find it interesting that the English word [remember, reader, that I preached this in Russian!] for "gossip" is "gossip." And the origin of this word says a lot about the notion itself. 

The first part of the word "gossip" derives from the same ancient root from which we get the Russian word "Gospod'." [Gospod' is the Russian for "Lord."]

"Gos-" connotes mutual relationship, between a host and guest. Both [English] "host" and "guest" derive from this root, since they represent the two sides of the same relationship. 

And the second part of the English word is -sip, which derives from the same ancient root as the Russian words sebe [self], svoi [one's own], sobstvenniy [proper, one's very own]. The English word "siblings" comes from this same root; it means one's own brothers and sisters. 

So "gossip", according to the English term, is an attempt to assert power and superiority, via exposé--yet secret exposé ("strictly between us!")--over those whom I consider for some reason not entirely worthy of my full respect, or, let's say, love. I want to own them, like property. 

And this impulse, this pull, this tug, emerges from our own sense of inadequacy, insecurity, failing of some sort, a certain vulnerability and fear. We fear that others will control, possess, us, and to fend this off we attempt to take control of them first, and with what? 

With a surreptitious exchange of information, news, intelligence, as if through our  knowing everything about them they have been reduced to pieces on our chessboard. 

You could sum up that impulse like this: "Do to the other before he can do it to you." 

But what principle asserted by the Lord does that contradict? 

Matthew 7:12: "And so, whatever you want others to do to you, you do the same to them, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." 

Allow me, in the present context, to lightly paraphrase this principle: 

"Concerning gossip, do to all people what you would do to your closest friend." 

Now, right there in your head, imagine the one person in your life about whom you know, 100%, unconditionally, you would never, with anyone, under any circumstances, gossip; no matter WHAT you knew about this beloved friend, you would rather DIE than say to somebody else about them, "You know what I heard about...?" Even to think about doing so horrifies your soul. So, yes, go ahead, picture that person. Hold that image right there on movie screen of your mind. Do you see them? Okay, now ask yourself this question: 

"WHY would I never gossip about him, about her?" 

Go ahead, ask. And now, answer.... 

You answered? Good. Now, ask yourself another question: 

"Why then would I gossip about anybody else?" 

....

"Concerning gossip, do to all people what you would to your most precious friend."

A high standard? 

Well, what kind of standard are we called to by Christ if not to a high one? 

I said that the pull of this temptation derives from our inner insufficiency. We feel vulnerable, helpless, insignificant, maybe ignored and neglected, and gossip affords us an illusory sensation of power. However much I possess information about others, that much do I own them. Knowledge is power, and power is security. 

That's the essence of the temptation and its trap. It's an utter lie. 

It's not power, it's not even "knowledge" in the positive, fruitful sense, and it isn't remotely security. On the contrary, it's the degeneration of love and defilement of truth. 

And we all know this, because there is always somebody in our life whom we would never hurt with gossip, otherwise we would feel like the most despicable traitor in the world and couldn't live with ourselves. 

We all understand this. 

Which raises the question: How much are we called by God  to cherish, not one, not two, but all our brothers and sisters in Christ?" 

Answer the question for yourselves. 

Every temptation appeals to some need in us that, in fact, is not a sinful need. But sin is the fulfillment of that need by means that contradict and reject God's love, holiness and truth. 

God knows us. He knows our deepest, most crying needs, worries, and feelings of inadequacy and insignificance, and He offers to meet those needs through the wholeness of love, in purity of conscience, and in fully authentic relationships between all God's children. 

Turn to Him for the answer to your needs. His answer will always rest in love.