In America, as the Republicans, suffused with the fear-laden rhetoric of Donald Trump, begin to leave Cleveland today, as the Democrats, wrestling with the negative opinions many Americans have of Hillary Clinton, commence filing into a convention hall in Philadelphia next week and, overseas, as Turkish prime minster Recep Erdogan continues his crackdown on dissent and two human rights groups issue a report indicating that, in the Ukraine, government and rebels are equally complicit in administering torture to their opponents, we wonder about wisdom.
     Although social convention holds wisdom to be extraordinary perception or insight (and it certainly is these), much of religion sees it in an additional light.  Religion seem wisdom as order, the order the gods have set into the world, the order that undergirds and enables all things, the order about which Isaac Newton was thinking when he asserted that a divine force lay at the root of the universe, the order to which Albert Einstein loosely referred when he insisted that, "God does not play dice with the universe," the order on which modern science relies to establish the rationality of the cosmos, the order without which this world and the universe in which it moves could not exist.
     This order is not one of law or regulation.  It is an order of intelligence and moral sensibility, an order around which we can plan and structure our lives, a divinely fathomed order in which we can find purpose and meaning.  It's an order to which Jesus referred in his parable of the wise and foolish person at the close of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7).  It is the wise person, Jesus said, who builds her house on the rock, for she will be safe in storm and challenge.  And it is the foolish person, he added, who builds her house on the sand, the sand which, like the sand on every beach on the planet, is constantly shifting and moving, subject to every upheaval and vagary that comes along.
     It is to this order to which we turn in times of fear and distress, it is this order to which we turn to avoid falling prey to rhetoric and irrationality.  This order may not halt all of the violence, it may not stop all of the pain.  It may not prevent the world from turmoil and unraveling.  This order is a moral haven, a moral refuge.  It helps us to see purpose, it helps us to see reason; it enables us to see beyond the shifting sands of history, space, and time.
     This order is what Jesus had in mind when he told us to build our lives on the rock.  It's the order of the unfathomable yet, in Jesus, entirely visible and real, love and wisdom of God.  In a world of seeming "unreason," it is the most profound reason of all.
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, this time for a mountain sojourn.  I'll talk when I return.  Thanks for reading!

     Earlier this week (the day I did not blog), I visited, as I try to do once or twice a year, as he is rather far away, a friend of mine, Ralph by name, who is prison.  He has been there for eleven years; he has another ten years to serve.  An otherwise thoroughly decent and upstanding man, Ralph one night drank more than he should have and caused an accident.  Unfortunately, the car with which his car collided had a defective fuel system, causing the car to catch fire on impact.  Two children died.
     It's a horrific situation, tragic for all parties concerned.  (The children's family eventually sued the car manufacturer over its faulty fuel tank design and won a settlement of several million dollars.)  No one can bring those children back, no one can undo what happened.  It's irreversible.
     Ralph believes in God, he believes in Jesus.  He has repented for what he did, and sought forgiveness from the victims' family (which they eventually granted).  Being a Christian does not make one immune to wrongdoing, and it certainly does not prevent one from saying or believing the wrong thing.
     So why bother?  The larger point is that our very humanness screams for the existence of God.  We condemn Ralph's action because we are moral beings, yet we could not be moral beings if we are products of an impersonal universe.  Emergent properties notwithstanding, chemicals cannot produce morality.  Shapelessness cannot produce a moral sense.
     Not to say that God somehow "magically" made us moral, but to say that until we are able to prove that impersonal matter produces morality, which is unlikely, we are well advised to look at the universe as the work of morality and intelligence (something even some of my atheist friends acknowledge), and not quantum blips and virtual particles.
     Ralph repents because we are moral beings, and we forgive him because we are moral beings.  In an impersonal universe, however, none of us has reason (and what is this in a groundless cosmos?) to do either one.
     Pray for the family, pray for Ralph.  Pray for the moral universe.

     “One hundred years from now, it will not matter how big my house was or what kind of bank account I had.  What will matter is that I made a difference in the life of a child.”
     It's a quote which, in various iterations, many of us have seen.  Yet regardless of the specific wording, its sentiments remain basically the same:  the importance of making a difference in the world.
     These particular words appear on a plaque posted by the play area in a park near my home.  The plaque remembers a woman named Linda, a woman who had devoted her too short life (she died of a heart attack at 46) to caring for the children who participated in her after-school program at our community's park district.  It's a fitting memorial to her, she who had worked so tirelessly to promote the welfare and well being of every child who walked through her doors.
     Do not all of us wish to make a difference in others' lives?  It's likely.  Although how we measure the nature of this difference varies greatly from person to person, we generally agree that, when all is said and done, we want our lives to matter.
     And why not?  When we're gone, we're gone.  This life is it.  Though I do not dispute the fact of an afterlife, I feel as if we need to focus on the present life before we dream of a future existence.  After all, we cannot live again if we do not live once first.  Let's frame the future in terms it deserves:  certain but intimately rooted in, contingent upon, and wedded to the now.
     As Jesus demonstrated the night before he was crucified, although we may not want to taste the "cups" (the pains) of this life, we will never taste the joys of the next life until we take up and invest in the challenge of the present.  Whoever we are and whatever we do, we should strive to make a difference, not tomorrow, but today.  A difference for us, a difference for our fellow creatures, a difference for God.
     Without God, we can certainly make a difference, but only with God will it, in a cosmos planted in eternity, genuinely last.

     Although I've read countless news accounts of the tremendous horror that visited the people of Nice recently, I still have difficulty fathoming the depth of the grief that it has occasioned.  Killings happen all over the world, yes, and grieving faces appear in the news daily, but watching this outpouring of remembrance and pain, captured so visibly and directly by an omnipresent news media, and listening to the survivors sharing their stories has broken me.  I have little else to say than to ask, "Why, God?"  Nothing I do will bring these people back, and nothing I say will be sufficient consolation to those who have lost loved ones in such sudden fashion and, it seems, nothing I say will move the heart of God to do anything to address what has happened.  He cannot change it, he cannot undo it: the world has, once again, displayed its epistemological contusions and chronological independence.  God can only stand by.
     So it seems.  Then why did Jesus, though he wept over the death of his friend Lazarus, go on to raise him from the dead, telling his friend Martha that, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me will live even if he dies" (John 11:25)?  Jesus did so because he knew that despite a world in which love too often seems gone, love prevails in ways that overwhelm all notions of form and presence:  the world itself cannot contain it.
     That's the beauty of God.  It's a beauty that puzzles and vexes, yes, but a beauty that, in a singularly sublime way, stuns and astonishes beyond our finite ken.  And this is precisely why, in these dark times, we need it.

     "Though the vision is yet for the appointed time; it hastens toward the goal and it will not fail.  Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay."
     While the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk who wrote these words was doing so in the shadow of the impending destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, his thoughts seem more relevant than ever to us today.
     The central issue is, whose vision?  As mass killings, terrorist and not, continue to happen around the globe (I think, this morning, of yesterday's attack in Nice, France), we wonder much about this question.  Even if we believe history has a point--and we all to some extent do--be it the outworking of a Marxist, humanist, or capitalistic, or other type of secular agenda or, from another standpoint, the eternal intentions of God, we struggle to understand precisely how, amidst the tumults of existence, it will happen--or if it will happen.  We wander in a sort of blissful finitude, aware of our presence but unaware, too, of where everything is going and what it ultimately means.
     When we therefore face the uglier faces of humanity, as we seem to be doing with increasingly greater frequency lately, we remember that there's us, little old us, full of hopes, aspirations, and dreams, and there's that in which we live, breath, and move:  a mystery beyond our knowing.
     Whether we believe in God or not, we cannot escape the truth of our human vision.

     We've all been puzzled and confused at times, have we not?  This morning, however, I was especially so.  I read the results of a highly respected Pew Research poll which indicates that nearly eighty percent of white evangelicals intend to vote for Donald Trump in the November U.S. presidential election.  Forty-five percent of these add that they "mainly" intend to vote for Trump as a vote against Hillary Clinton.
     As one who considers himself a white evangelical, I'm stunned.  Donald Trump has waged one of the most racist, xenophobic, and mysogynist campaigns in American history. He has derided disabled people, bragged about his private parts, ostracized reporters, encouraged attacks on those opposing him, and in words that should trouble every evangelical heart, professed that he never needs to ask God for forgiveness.
     Huh?  It seems that the evangelicals who intend to vote for Trump are being far more pragmatic and utilitarian than they ought.  They are elevating what they deem to be practical over what is really real and true.  If they hope for America to be "great again"--whatever this means--evangelicals should focus not so much on the alleged abilities, promises, or the relative good (as they see it) of a candidate, but rather on his or her methods, lifestyle, and character.  As Jesus put it so well in Luke 12, "What if you gain the world but lose your soul?"
     One day, one day many years away, the world will end.  The soul, however, will not.  It will last for eternity.
     What's more important?

     Is slavery mentioned and discussed in the Bible?  This was a question posed to me at my atheist discussion group last night.
     Of course it is.  That's obvious even from a cursory reading of the text, Hebrew as well as Greek.  The people of ancient Israel shared many cultural commonalities with their neighbors in other parts of the ancient near east.  One of these was slavery.
     When God gave Israel instructions on how to deal with its slaves, he was recognizing a cultural reality.  He was acknowledging that Israel was a creation of its time.  He didn't like slavery, he didn't condone it.  He simply wanted to regulate it in the best interests of slave and owner alike.
     We see this in the New Testament, too.  Well aware of the cultural realities in which the early church lived, God tried to find a middle ground.  He tried to balance social dictums with biblical truth.  Paul's letter to Philemon demonstrates this aptly.
     The larger issue before us, however, is one to which some in my group pointed last night.  Because the Bible mentions and regulates slavery, they contend, we must ignore everything else in it.  Slavery invalidates the entire Bible.
     To me, this is myopic.  Do we dismiss the whole of the Iliad because it contains a few scenes invoking the supernatural?  Do we dismiss quantum theory because it presents some things we cannot readily accept or understand?  Hardly.  The Christians who led the abolition movements of the nineteenth century understood that the Bible is more than its parts.  They realized that although the Bible is the work of human beings, it is also the work of an eternal God who over thousands of years shaped a consistent and coherent narrative of his love for humanity, a God who spoke to each successive generation of people in cultural language they could grasp, a God who ensured that what is revealed in the pages of Scripture is existentially conditioned to speak to not just its immediate readers but to readers of all places and times.
     Besides, if we insist we judge the Bible by our standards, we must then ask ourselves this:  from where do we get them?
     The circle is endless.

     Ah, humility.  It's worth a lifetime of study.  As the world continues to recoil from the seemingly unceasing paths of violence too many of our fellow human beings are taking to resolve their cultural frustrations, I share words of Edward John Carnell, the second president of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, on humility.  So he observes, "Even as we never allow either ourselves or others to approach the heart from a humble, loving acceptance of the mystery of the heart, so we must approach others with an equal sense of mystery and with equal humility and love."
     Well put, Dr. Carnell.  Even though we too often fail to appreciate the mystery of the human heart, we must nonetheless strive to approach the hearts of our fellow creatures in full view of the mystery embodied in them.  We'll never find humility until we recognize the complexity and presence of mystery, the mystery of life, the mystery of living, the mystery of the heart.  We will never succeed in being humble if we fail to acknowledge that there will always be dimensions to us--all of us--that defy ready explanation.  Humility is accepting that yes, we are material, but that we are transcendent, too.  We are creatures of immense mystery, mystery which several lifetimes of study will never unravel fully.  We must confront the fact of our mystery, our curious capacity to hold immanency and transcendence simultaneously in our person, before we can truly love and understand our fellow human being.
     God did not make us mechanical and material beings only, but creatures with profound depth and point.  We're present, yet we're mystery; here, but everywhere else, too. Humility is acknowledging that we will never know it all, that we are finite, that we have boundaries.  Humility is recognizing that we are woefully contingent and dependent beings: we live in visible form, yet speculate and ponder its limits in the face of overwhelming mystery.

     "Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good."  So writes the apostle Paul in the twelfth chapter of his letter to the church at Rome.  As the people of Iraq regroup after yet another suicide bombing, this one at a place of worship; as people in Saudi Arabia pick up after an attack at one of the holiest places in Islam, as people in Bangladesh try to move on after a devastating bombing; and as people across the U.S. attempt to come to grips with the horrendous waves of violence sweeping across its inner cities--and as we hear, and witness, too many calls for and acts of revenge--we do well to remind ourselves of the sentiments this verse expresses.  Though we are deeply saddened, though we are thoroughly exasperated, though we are shocked and numbed by these deeds, we must do everything we can to not let their darknesses overcome us.  We must exercise all the self-discipline we can muster to avoid falling into the trap that these atrocities have set for us.
     We must look beyond who we are most prone to be:  selfish, self-centered, and entirely finite beings.  We must consider moral realities which we are not regularly inclined to conjure, ethical frameworks which we are not bent to normally pursue.  Left to our own devices, we will fight evil with evil.  And we will accomplish nothing.  Yet if we recognize that our moralities are but sparse reflections of a much greater moral purpose, one resting in a divine vision, we can move forward with grace, equanimity, and calm.  If we decide that the pain we see does not obliterate the fact of transcendent value, we have recourse, we have hope.  We have point.
     As God wept when his son Jesus died on the cross, so does he weep for all of us, all of us caught in these unfathomable torrents of suffering and pain.  God loves, God cares. We may not see him, we may not hear him, but he's there.
     If we wish to go on with reason and probity, we must let God overcome us first.

     Are you familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan?  As Jesus tells it in the tenth chapter of the gospel of Luke, it describes how after two Jewish religious leaders who, upon seeing a man who had been accosted by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road, quickly turned away from him, a third man, a Samaritan, stopped to tend to him. Setting aside his immediacies, the Samaritan, a member of a people group despised by the Jews, cared for a man who had been brought up to hate him.  Not only did the Samaritan address the traveler's medical needs, he subsequently took him to a place of lodging and paid for his stay.  When the next morning the Samaritan had to leave, he told the proprietor that he would cover all the traveler's expenses for as long as he had to stay there.  It's a classic tale of selfless caring for one's fellow human being.
     Why do I mention the story of the Good Samaritan?  I came across a news item this morning from Israel that brought it vividly to mind.  On his way to Jerusalem to do his Ramadan prayers, a Palestinian physician, Ali Shroukh, came upon an overturned car in the road. When he looked inside, he saw part of a Jewish family, father, mother, and two children, severely injured, victims of a terrorist attack (the father was unfortunately dead).  Like the Good Samaritan of old, this modern day Good Samaritan set aside the demands of his schedule and, perhaps more importantly, any misgivings he may have had about helping a member of a people group whose more vociferous advocates had called repeatedly for death to all Palestinians, to offer help.  This brave physician elevated his basic human desire to help a person in need over any cultural remonstrations that may have told him otherwise.  He did what was most real, what was most true.  He did the most important thing:  he loved.
     God is love, the apostle John writes, and so he is.  When we love, when we reach selflessly to care for our fellow human being, we drive a stake into any and all efforts by people around the world to convince us to abandon, for religious, ethnic, political, or cultural reasons, a member of our humanity.  We remind the world that yes, we are more than social conflict and machination, and yes, even if we do not believe or state it openly, there is a God.
     Where would love be in an impersonal universe?
     Thank you so much, Dr. Ali Shroukh!  You humble us all.  (I hope you enjoyed Eid al Fitr!)

     As I think about July 4th, I cannot help but think of my mother.  July 4th six years ago, she passed away at the age of 88.  Mom had a good life, I'd say, a life full of many rich experiences, a loving husband and four children, plenty of friends, multiple satisfying outlets for her many talents.  Though my siblings and I still miss her, we are thankful for the time we had with her.  We are thankful for how she raised us, we are grateful for the love she steadfastly showed us.
     Some of us lose our mothers when we are young, others when we are old.  I suppose I fall somewhere in between.  Either way, although we will mourn them to our dying day, we stagger before the enormity of what a mother is.  How does one picture a person who brought us into this world, a person who taught us about life, a person who stood by us as long as she lived?  How does one think about a person to whom we owe pretty much everything?  It's overwhelming.
     As I traveled in Albania recently, spending a night in the Albania Alps and hiking amidst its mysterious forests and glens, I thought often about Mom.  She loved the outdoors, she loved seeing new places.  And she passed this love onto me, a love for which I will be ever grateful.  Whatever I have experienced since leaving home, I do so in the path which Mom laid before me.  In more ways than I can count, I am dependent on her, who she was, who she made me to be.
     In this, however, I rejoice.  I rejoice that God, in his immense graciousness, gave me a mother like Mom, gave me a mother who helped me to love all that is wild, and encouraged me to pursue all that is true.  For isn't that we want most for our offspring, to be willing to explore the incisive wildness of genuine truth?
     Micah 6:8 observes, "For what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk circumspectly with God?"  Loving the world, loving its people, and loving God:  thanks, Mom, for everything.

     As we in the West, specifically, Canada (July 1st), America (July 4th), and France (July 14th), prepare to celebrate our respective "independence" days this month, I think often of how privileged we are to do so.  After traveling recently through some of the countries under the grip of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and hearing firsthand about the many restrictions on social, economic, and personal freedom its people endured for too many decades, I am doubly thankful.  At the same time, however, I am painfully aware that we in the West have been "free" for as long as we have not because of who we are but because of how, through a series of cultural and historical circumstances over which we did not have full control, we landed as we have.  We are neither better nor worse, nor are we necessarily luckier or more deeply blessed.  We all live in the shadow and legacy of various forces and agencies, eternal and not, that silently shape human destiny, forces and agencies that, unbeknownst to us, have also led us to define freedom as we do.
     There is freedom, and there is freedom.  One day, while talking to a group of his opponents, Jesus remarked, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).  What did Jesus mean?  We all deserve personal freedom, yes, and we all deserve to know truth.  Both are within our grasp as human beings.  Genuine freedom, however, is more than either one.  Genuine freedom is understanding why we can even entertain the idea of freedom at all, why we are beings who are capable of comprehending such a thing.  Genuine freedom is knowing why we are here, why we are how we are, and why one day we will no longer be around.  And these are questions that, finite and limited that we are, we will never understand on our own.  How can we?
     Whatever freedom you seek--and we all seek some--seek foremost the freedom in which freedom itself is found:  the freedom of knowing the fact and truth of, in Jesus Christ, the person of God.  For it is from God, the progenitor of order and meaning in the universe, that all freedom must ultimately come.
     In short, we're free to be free, but we are not free to be free to be free.
     Have a great day.