Amazing

I am not really convinced that it is something new. Garrison Keilor once suggested that people have an amazing ability to ignore what they do not want to see. I am suspect he is very accurate with that comment. What has brought it to my awareness is the resumption of the debate between Conservatives and Liberals.

Here we have just had one of the largest and most difficult crisis in the financial systems of this country and there is lots of talk about how to fix the problems. On the one side I hear from the Conservative side that we need to leave it to private enterprise. "Government Control is Socialism. Government has never been able to run anything well. Do you want your finances run like Amtrak or the Post Office?" We need to get government out of it. The same argument is made about the auto industry. The government is trying to take over the auto industry and run the whole show. We need to leave it to private business. So the argument goes.

But the facts seem to me to be that it is private business which got us into this mess. Wasn't it private banks, real estate brokers, and all manner of creative unregulated financial people who created this mess? Wasn't it the Board of Directors of these auto industries who managed their companies into problems?

The facts just never seem to make any difference in the debates. The Liberals never acknowledge the facts against their arguments either. There seems to me to be enough facts that the more programs you develop to help those in poverty the more people we have in poverty. And we have been funding major social programs for ages and the numbers never decline. Every N.C. governor has wanted to be the Education Governor and the improvement never seems to match the investments.

I do not have any solutions to all these problems but I suspect that we might make a lot more progress on the issues if both sides would allow the facts to affect their theory. I do not see the facts that say Tax Cuts produce jobs. We just finished eight years of Bush cuts and somehow we ended up with a major economic collapse. The facts seem to suggest that it will be a lot harder to close Guantanamo than the liberals thought.

It is an amazing thing to me how we can continue to hold to our pet theories and ignore the facts that ought to make us consider that we need to somehow adapt or change or modify what we want.

The Resistance to Grace

I think it is what got him killed. All this talk about grace, about forgiveness, about the amazing equality of God's love for all people. I think that is what got Jesus killed. As I was taught "grace" is defined as "an unmerited goodness." We have a lot of conversations about "what happens when bad things happen to good people" but I seldom hear conversations about grace which is "when good things happen to bad people."

As human beings in our culture we just have a horrible time with the idea that we are sinners. The evidence continues to come in that evil can be found in every home and in each person, but we just keep right on believing that we are nice, good people. Naturally, if we are good people, we deserve good things. So the whole concept of there being something good given to us that we do not deserve does not register. How many ads on t.v. and radio have you heard that says you need to get the "vacation" you "deserve," or that you get the body you deserve, or that you need the kind of legal defense that you are entitled to? I hear them all the time.

The corollary to our notion that we are good, nice, worthy people who deserve what we have is that there are a lot of others who are not like us. They are unworthy. They are the evil ones. They deserve to be punished. They deserve to be restricted and controlled. Thus to be told that they are going to be given the same gifts of acceptance and forgiveness seems to be an outrageous statement. How dare someone put "them" in the same group with "us." And the demand that we are supposed to want in our ethics for them the same gifts of forgiveness, acceptance, and love is just too absurd.

The gift of grace to us is not needed and offensive because it insinuates that we are not worthy of it. We want we what deserve. The gift of grace to others is so offensive because how dare God give to them what he is giving to us. It is no wonder that the preaching of grace and God's love and forgiveness never seems to attract a very large or sustained crowd. Yet it is the sweet sweet blessing to all who come to some profound crisis in life and see themselves as they really are. "O wretched man, that I am, who can deliver me from the power of darkness?" and there is a word that grace has already been offered to those who are ready to receive it.

Always from too many perspectives

There are lots of reasons why we are not the ones who get to judge how things are going. There are lots of reasons why the direction and the quality of things is not in our power to decide. Those are the same reasons why God suggested we should not be the ones to eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. We may now know what they are but we can not say which is which.

We cannot say and are not the ones to make the judgements because we don't know the end yet. In a discussion not long ago some one remarked about a museum finally reopening an exhibit of marble ruins. "You better see them quickly because they are still falling apart. The "best wisdom for restitution at the time" turned out to be absolutely horrible and they are decaying rapidly." Our best now maybe turn out later to be our worst. What is bad now may ended up being the best thing for us. We have not seen it all yet so it is hard to know how to judge a story till we see how it ends.

We are invited to "glorify God and enjoy Her forever" and leave the judging to God because we don't know the whole story yet. Because we have real trouble keeping in proper relationship the big picture and the little pictures. Do I judge life on the basis of my own experiences. Do I celebrate and rave about the goodness of life because my first grandson has been born healthy and well? Do I look at my life and say with arrogance "God is Good. All the Time." Are the judgments about good and evil to be made from my small perspective? What I have seen and lived has been good.

But the little picture of others is not nearly as wonderful and blessed as mine has been. But then again, is it my mistake to make that judgment? I do not know how they see their own lives. But I do know that others have commented on their personal pictures and have cursed the darkness.

Those are but pieces of the picture that must be included for there is a big picture of world history, of hunger in Africa, wars in the Middle East, airplane crashes, and a host of other major concerns. Those apparent negatives would have to be matched by major positives, efforts to cure AIDS, the elimination of polio, the rise in health conditions in various countries. There have been major positives that have to be considered.

How do you decide who is good and who is evil? How do you say that you life is a blessing or a curse? When do you make the judgment? How do you weigh all of the events. In the end, it seems all I can do is just bear witness as to what has happened in my own life. The world God has created has made available to me a good and blessed life, and I am grateful to a merciful God.