The Ezra Factor
I've been co-teaching an apologetics adult Sunday school class and this week, to introduce the problem of evil, I shared with the students the idea of "augmented reality," something I wrote about in my webzine this month. I brought up the idea that this latest IT innovation would be most useful for finding out what any given individual is really all about.
Even thought I totally understand them, the responses I got did surprise me. Those responses were, "I don't think I'd want to know that much about someone else!" Again, I do get why they said that, but inside I thought, "No you don't. You don't really want that -- the not knowing. I believe you do want to know. Everything you do is about trusting someone else is going to do a certain thing, and we all live our lives deciding to do whatever it is we do based in large part on what other people have decided to do and have stayed true to doing."
Of course I didn't think all of that at that time -- I went ahead with the Sunday school lesson. But I'd been thinking about it since, and I'm sharing the breadth of that thought with you now. I love my Sunday school students. We actually have a vibrantly engaging interaction for an hour-and-a-half each Sunday. This past lesson was particularly edifying for all of us.
But I still see the Catholicist yuck that emanates from the souls of those with whom I interact.
Yes, sentiments like "I don't want to know too much about someone else" is one of the more innocuous ones. But I thought about my webzine elaboration on the fact that we fabricate our selves for others all the time and that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and then I thought, we just as much like the fabrication about others more than we like the truth. Wow. How veritable is the pleasure one derives from "Keep lying to me about you. I'm happier that way."
I can't help but think about some of the financial gyrations that happened last week. Bankers met to work out capital requirements per Basel accord specifications and all I could see was a bunch of suits bumbling around trying to get someone to tell them what's what with the value assessments millions are expecting them to have down and they just don't. In order to keep the markets from being spooked, the Fed had to shout "No no no! We are not, repeat, not scaling back our dropping-money-in-your-laps program [otherwise known as quantitative easing] so stop your sniveling!" It is funny that the entities that always respond to value extraction machinations are markets, not individual flesh-and-blood people.
The lie feels so good.
Never mind finding the Real Value Assessment in Christ and His shed blood for you and the things you do to wreck your life and the lives of others. Never mind actually wanting to understand that, to know Him -- to just simply live the richest, deepest, most rapturous life ever. Nah, won't do it? Yeah, I understand. Gotta make sure the law and Caesar are there to keep the fabrications from killing you, the very same fabrications you need in place to disguise you own rottenness because you won't let Christ take them out for you -- the rottenness, the fabrications, the pretense, the horror of all that...
All that refuse is kept nicely packaged and maintained by a World System with expert operatives already assigned the task of keeping it all that way for those who need that work done for them.
I've been reading the book of Ezra in my devotional time, and I am blown away by how much that book lays out the case for the ungrafted church. Really, in some ways, I could just write "Read Ezra" on the home page of my webzine and that'd just about say it all.
I was taken by the way Ezra refused to make a formal request of a military escort when returning to Jerusalem after the exile, but the government of Darius the Persian king had to have made sure the Israelites arrived safely anyway. Yes, God was the one who made that happen, and yes, Ezra and the people merely trusted God to see them through.
This was in light of the fact that the Israelites were still doing horrendously idolatrous things. And that's just it. They were intermarrying -- which itself wasn't as big a deal as the fact that by doing so they were contaminating the purity of their worship of God and their relationship with God.
As I think about this, I think about the profound irony of what Darius, an agent of Cain doing the duties of the authority here frequently called "Caesar" must've been thinking. "Nkay. Here I am making sure these people resume their worship of God, going all out to see their temple is built and they are safe and all that, and then they go off being unfaithful to Him. Sheez, what's a king got to do to provide law enforcement and protection for people when they go off and do that? Well, hey, guess they'll continue to need the law and I'll have a job. Can't be all bad."
What blew me away just this morning was reading Ezra's prayer and supplication over this situation, and in it was a statement about being in Egypt but seeing God's faithfulness still. That just killed me. It is simply because I look around at "Christianity" and see floundering, hapless people -- just like it was in pre-Moses Egypt. I hurt tremendously because of that. We could be ungrafted from the World and living out the beauty and wonder and glory of the Kingdom, but we wallow around stomping on mud and straw.
I feel the despair too... Except that, like Ezra, I can pray. I can be here in Egypt and yet humbly pray for God to move -- and then wait. The Israelites in Egypt waited for 400 years, the exiles for 70 -- and I'm sure that seemed like a long time... it was a long time!
But whatever the case I can pray. And then talk with those with whom I can talk. That's cool.
Even thought I totally understand them, the responses I got did surprise me. Those responses were, "I don't think I'd want to know that much about someone else!" Again, I do get why they said that, but inside I thought, "No you don't. You don't really want that -- the not knowing. I believe you do want to know. Everything you do is about trusting someone else is going to do a certain thing, and we all live our lives deciding to do whatever it is we do based in large part on what other people have decided to do and have stayed true to doing."
Of course I didn't think all of that at that time -- I went ahead with the Sunday school lesson. But I'd been thinking about it since, and I'm sharing the breadth of that thought with you now. I love my Sunday school students. We actually have a vibrantly engaging interaction for an hour-and-a-half each Sunday. This past lesson was particularly edifying for all of us.
But I still see the Catholicist yuck that emanates from the souls of those with whom I interact.
Yes, sentiments like "I don't want to know too much about someone else" is one of the more innocuous ones. But I thought about my webzine elaboration on the fact that we fabricate our selves for others all the time and that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and then I thought, we just as much like the fabrication about others more than we like the truth. Wow. How veritable is the pleasure one derives from "Keep lying to me about you. I'm happier that way."
I can't help but think about some of the financial gyrations that happened last week. Bankers met to work out capital requirements per Basel accord specifications and all I could see was a bunch of suits bumbling around trying to get someone to tell them what's what with the value assessments millions are expecting them to have down and they just don't. In order to keep the markets from being spooked, the Fed had to shout "No no no! We are not, repeat, not scaling back our dropping-money-in-your-laps program [otherwise known as quantitative easing] so stop your sniveling!" It is funny that the entities that always respond to value extraction machinations are markets, not individual flesh-and-blood people.
The lie feels so good.
Never mind finding the Real Value Assessment in Christ and His shed blood for you and the things you do to wreck your life and the lives of others. Never mind actually wanting to understand that, to know Him -- to just simply live the richest, deepest, most rapturous life ever. Nah, won't do it? Yeah, I understand. Gotta make sure the law and Caesar are there to keep the fabrications from killing you, the very same fabrications you need in place to disguise you own rottenness because you won't let Christ take them out for you -- the rottenness, the fabrications, the pretense, the horror of all that...
All that refuse is kept nicely packaged and maintained by a World System with expert operatives already assigned the task of keeping it all that way for those who need that work done for them.
I've been reading the book of Ezra in my devotional time, and I am blown away by how much that book lays out the case for the ungrafted church. Really, in some ways, I could just write "Read Ezra" on the home page of my webzine and that'd just about say it all.
I was taken by the way Ezra refused to make a formal request of a military escort when returning to Jerusalem after the exile, but the government of Darius the Persian king had to have made sure the Israelites arrived safely anyway. Yes, God was the one who made that happen, and yes, Ezra and the people merely trusted God to see them through.
This was in light of the fact that the Israelites were still doing horrendously idolatrous things. And that's just it. They were intermarrying -- which itself wasn't as big a deal as the fact that by doing so they were contaminating the purity of their worship of God and their relationship with God.
As I think about this, I think about the profound irony of what Darius, an agent of Cain doing the duties of the authority here frequently called "Caesar" must've been thinking. "Nkay. Here I am making sure these people resume their worship of God, going all out to see their temple is built and they are safe and all that, and then they go off being unfaithful to Him. Sheez, what's a king got to do to provide law enforcement and protection for people when they go off and do that? Well, hey, guess they'll continue to need the law and I'll have a job. Can't be all bad."
What blew me away just this morning was reading Ezra's prayer and supplication over this situation, and in it was a statement about being in Egypt but seeing God's faithfulness still. That just killed me. It is simply because I look around at "Christianity" and see floundering, hapless people -- just like it was in pre-Moses Egypt. I hurt tremendously because of that. We could be ungrafted from the World and living out the beauty and wonder and glory of the Kingdom, but we wallow around stomping on mud and straw.
I feel the despair too... Except that, like Ezra, I can pray. I can be here in Egypt and yet humbly pray for God to move -- and then wait. The Israelites in Egypt waited for 400 years, the exiles for 70 -- and I'm sure that seemed like a long time... it was a long time!
But whatever the case I can pray. And then talk with those with whom I can talk. That's cool.
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