Have you seen "Mission Impossible"?  I do not normally take in action movies, but was recently persuaded to see this one.  it didn't disappoint.  Action, action, and more action.  And much intrigue.

     As I watched, as I watched the machinations of the various espionage agencies vying for power, I thought about how, in the big picture, trivial all this is.  To date, the "Mission Impossible" movies have earned over three billion worldwide (and, in total, have cost around 800 million to make).  They've made many people wealthy; they're given countless moviegoers many thrills.
     But in a year, this latest installment will be forgotten, its thrills and the creativity that went into designing them shoved under the next wave of action films.  Not that it was not a good movie, just that it is so ephemeral.
     In his Idea of the University, John Henry Newman discusses the need to set all heart and knowledge into an holistic framework, to weave it into a tapestry bigger than it is.  A transcendent tapestry in which it can find genuine meaning.  Only then will it last.
     Existentialism is only as good as the certainty of the next thrill.  And in a world voided of transcendence, even that is not certain.  How do we know to define it?
     Have a great day.

     Is revenge ever right?  I just finished reading a gripping yet harrowing novel called I am Still Alive.  It tells the story of a young girl who suddenly finds herself alone in a vast and little traveled section of the Alaska wilderness.  Although she had been living in a cabin with her father, two of her father's "business associates" had recently killed him and burned their cabin down.  Her mother has been dead for years; she has no one.
     Happily, she discovers another cabin her father had stocked with ample provisions and, with a little fishing and hunting, looks set to get through the winter and get rescue come spring.  However, she wants revenge.  She wants revenge on the men who killed her father.

Tower of Refuge, Theth, Albania

     When we were traveling in Albania a few years ago, we visited a tiny mountain town in which was a "tower of refuge."  This was a place to which people could go if people in another clan had decided, for reasons of honor, to kill him/her.  It was considered sacrosanct.  No one could touch him/her there.  No one could avenge the harm that they believed this person had done to their clan.  Once this person left the tower, he/she was of course open game for revenge.

     Many religious traditions condemn taking revenge.  They do so because they believe that there is a God who exercises ultimate judgment.  Ours, they say, is not to take revenge.  In the world of I am Still Alive, however, there is no God.  There's only the girl, her father's murderers, and a lust to get even.
     In a world without God, however, revenge means nothing.  But neither does kindness.  In a blank and empty universe, how can we really know?

     What would you do?  It's a classic of situational ethics.  You're an inmate at a concentration camp.  One day, the camp commandant approaches you, holding a new born baby in his hands.  "If you kill this baby," he says, "I will spare the lives of those 5,000 adults behind me.  If you spare the baby, I will kill every one of those adults."
     Ethical positions break down in two ways.  One, the deontological.  This approach considers the inherent worth of a particular action before undertaking it.  For instance, regardless of the circumstances, lying is always wrong.  Two, the consequentialist.  This approach judges the worth of action according to its consequences and/or effects.  It aims at maximizing happiness.

     Some might like to think that they are deontologicalists, that is, they judge the worth of an action according to a universal or transcendent standard.  Whatever happens, we stick to this standard.  So would we therefore not lie if the Gestapo asks us if, during the Holocaust, we are sheltering Jews?
     Others readily identify as consequentialists.  They are more interested in achieving the greatest good for the most people.  Would they kill the baby?  Kill or not, the consequentialist is faced with the same problem:  can I always act according to my convictions?
     We might think we know, but we really do not.  God is there, yes, God will not undo our finitude.  We make our moral choices in a profoundly dark yet, paradoxically, divinely bright, mystery.

     As I have kept up with the news coverage about the hurricane force winds and immense amounts of rain currently buffeting the islands of Hawaii, I think often about the many times I have been in the islands to lead expeditions to the 13,400 foot summit of Mauna Loa volcano on the "big" island, called Hawaii.  When we arrive at the airport in Hilo after flying nine hours from the wintry depths of the Midwest, stepping off the airplane is of course magical:  warmth and sunshine, continually.  Almost like a paradise (whatever "paradise" really is!).
     (Sidebar:  our English word "paradise" is actually based on a Persian word, "paradise," (Persian and English sharing common Indo-European roots) which means "garden.")
     Although we spend most of our time well above the verdancy of the valleys and plantations that spread across most of the island, hiking through miles and miles of emptiness and red and black lava to reach the top of the volcano, we nonetheless sense its presence.  Hawaii is a marvelous place.
     Yet just as the recent eruptions of Kilauea volcano underscored the island's fragility, so did this hurricane:  sometimes even paradise is not so marvelous.  The golden aura has lost some of its luster.
     When paradise is lost, where will we go?  Eden and Arjuna's fields are long gone; only a fractured planet remains.
     Fortunately, it remains a world of point, a world created by God, a highly purposeful planet.
     Amidst the turmoil, vision and calling prevail.

     Hilary Lister.  Have you heard of her?  Probably not.  I was made aware of her when I read her obituary the other day.  She died rather young, at age 46.  According to the obituary, she had for years suffered from an extremely debilitating disease that left her a quadriplegic.

     But she loved the ocean.  Operating a boat by blowing or drawing through tubes hooked to various electronics that controlled it, she sailed widely crossing the English Channel and, eventually, circum-navigating England.  Her spirit was indomitable.

     How tragic, then, that she died so young.  Nonetheless, Lister lived her life to the absolute fullest.  And in this, however we regard the nature of existence or the reality of an afterlife, we can take encouragement and heart:  we are made to be who we are.
     In a world created by a loving and purposeful God, this truth seems to be, in a singularly profound way, the only one on which we can base our lives.
     We are made to live out, in the richest and deepest way, our creation in the image of God.

     After attending a conference on the theology of joy earlier this month, I picked up a book mentioned at the conference and have been reading it.  Its title is The Book of Joy, a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.  At one point the conversation's moderator, Douglas Abrams, recounts a story he heard about a man named Anthony Ray Hinton.  Arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, Hinton spent thirty years in solitary confinement before a court ordered his release.
     A few years into his stay, Hinton was in his cell one night when he heard the inmate in the adjoining cell crying.  When he inquired as to what was wrong, the inmate told him that he had just heard that his mother had died.
     How poignant, I thought.  Here is this man, locked away from the rest of the world, unable to affect or shape anything of importance, now weeping because he had lost the only person who really cared about him.  And he didn't even get to say good-bye.  It's tragic.
     Sure, it's easy to say that this man deserved to be imprisoned for his crimes.  And sure, it's easy to say that in committing these crimes he forfeited his right to normalcy in human relationships.  Too easy, perhaps.  So often eager are we to deal with people whom we deem to be socially aberrant that we often equally forget that they are human beings, too.  And they are as deserving of love as any of us.
     In the end, everyone wants to be loved.  Made in the image of a loving God, we are created to love.  And to do so unconditionally.

     Have you visited the recently opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, otherwise known as the National Lynching Museum?  I have not, but have read much about it, and have found myself deeply, deeply moved.  This museum is a testament to the paradox of the human being:  extraordinary magnificence juxtaposed with immense tragedy.  How grand we are, how we can be so creative and visionary and loving, yet how at the same time we so quickly descend into utterly abject moral darkness!  The history of slavery in America is a highly sordid tale, one whose legacy reverberates to this day.  It is a sorry display of assertions of cultural superiority, unbridled moral perversion, and perfidious economic greed.  I'm profoundly regretful for it.

     I hope one day to visit this museum.  I hope one day to walk into its darkness, to touch its horror of humanness.  I then hope to emerge with a clearer vision of whom we, divine image bearers, can really be.  Though we are fractured by sin, we remain creatures of enormous potential.  What can we do to find and fulfill it?
     It's easy to say that we must turn to God, although we should.  Far more difficult it is, however, to admit that we do not so much turn to God to affirm ourselves and our cultural commitments but rather to turn to him to affirm and testify to the absolute necessity of his transcendent love in the cosmos. We can do little without him.
     Jesus didn't die for people to be lynched.

     Some years ago, I wrote a book called It's all in a Word:  God, Life and Meaning.  In it, I discussed the primacy of speech in the universe, that at the center of the cosmos is the notion of speech.  It was from speech that the cosmos began, and it is in speech that we live our lives:  we live in a universe that speaks to us.  Our world is a personal world, a world that we can see, hear, taste, and touch.  It is a world grounded in the concept of communication,a world made by a communicative and personal God.
      Hence, to suppress speech is one of the darkest offenses against the dignity of every human being.  To suppress speech is to deny the essential nature of the cosmos.  This is why I applaud, applaud vigorously, the willingness of hundreds of newspapers around the U.S. yesterday to affirm the absolute necessity of a free press.  I don't think any of us likes everything the press says or does, but we seriously err, theologically as well as culturally, if we suppress its activities.
     God has given us free choice, absolute free choice.  We should allow ourselves the same.  Order is important, yes, but freedom is the essence of humanness.
     As I said in the closing line of my book, "Speak."

     Are you familiar with the work of Brian Doyle?  Although I've been aware of Doyle for some time, I had not read much of his writing.  Earlier this summer, however, I did.  I read his novel Plover.  It's a odd but insightful tale, a story of humor, intrigue, suspense, and irony played out on the vast stretches of the southern Pacific Ocean.  Without saying much about the plot, I mention Plover for the way in which it celebrates the cacophonic nature of the world.  Its crew consists of a dad and his mute child; a native of Oceania; an albatross; a sea gull; and a warbler who lives off raisins the crew leaves near the water tank.  Granted, to an extent, this scenario is fantastical, but as the months pass, things happen.  The mute child begins to speak, the Oceanian cares for a renegade pirate who has been burned badly in an attempt to take over the Plover, and the captain, a man who swore he would never live on land, meets what seems to be his true and forever love.  It's life in all of its tangled and unfathomable glory.
     And yet, I could not help but think as I read, it is a glory which I could not possibly attach to life were life the only thing that existed.  How would I know?  I'd be comparing chocolate with chocolate.
     As Aslan the lion said to Lucy in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe upon overturning the evil witch's magic that had killed him and returning to life, "There is a deeper magic still."

     As you may know, for decades, in an effort to ensure national and economic stability, the government of China mandated that every married couple could have only one child.  Forced sterilizations and abortions were common, and any couple who chose to have multiple children lived in fear of discovery.
     
Now that all has apparently changed.  In a rather ironic reversal, the Chinese government is now asking, indeed, strongly encouraging couples to have more than one child.  The country's population, it seems, is facing decline:  the number of elderly will soon overwhelm the number of newborns.

     I do not wish this to be a commentary on the government of China.  I rather share this because, to me, it underscores that, all things considered, although we do well to carefully deliberate about having children, we do even more to consider that, in the long run, we are wiser to invite, rather than thwart, the life rhythms implicit in the world God made.  The world is made for life.

     And God is life.  Let's trust him, and ourselves, to live and apportion it with wisdom and abundance.

     Alone they were and, like the protagonist of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, free.  Quitting their corporate jobs and leaving everything to explore and experience the world, Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin traveled as they wished, stepping into cultures and times far from anything they had ever known.
     And along the way, they experienced the goodness of humanity.  Even if people in many parts of the world loathe the current American president, they continue, by and large, to love Americans.  Everywhere Lauren and Jay went, they were overwhelmed with outpourings of compassion and hospitality.  People, they wrote, are good.
     One day, however, they encountered a group of men who had sworn allegiance to ISIS. The fairy tale quickly came to a tragic end.  Lauren and Jay are gone forever.  It's all extremely sad.
     Nonetheless, Lauren and Jay were not mistaken.  People are good.  Every one of us, every last one of us, is made in the image of a good God.  We are all unique and special and loved by God.  But sin has fractured God's image in us; sin has cracked the mirror.  And horribly bad things happen.
     I don't despair, however:  as the Dutch missionary Corrie ten Boom, arrested and sent to Auschwitz for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, once said, "There is no pit that God's love is not deeper still."
     Nothing can conquer a creator's love.

     Perhaps you've read or heard about the moral debacle embroiling one of the largest churches in the U.S., Willow Creek Community Church.  Briefly, it has recently come to light that Bill Hybels, the founding and long time pastor of the church, has been accused of sexually harassing a number of women with whom he worked during his lengthy tenure.  Accusations range from verbal abuse to physical groping to oral sex, and come from the testimony of multiple women.  One of the most troubling aspects of the entire affair is that when the women initially approached the church's board of elders, a group of men and women whose mission is to ensure the spiritual integrity of the church, with their complaints, the elders chose to believe Bill rather than the women.  Why?  As the chair of the elder board put it, "We trusted Bill."
     The irony of this is that inherent in Hybels's vision for the church is the empowering of women for positions of teaching and pastoral ministry, posts which many Christian churches continue to believe are not suitable for women.  As of this writing, Hybels, his two chosen successors, and the entire board of elders have resigned, and the church is now picking up the pieces of what has happened.  Although I believe the church will survive and likely emerge even stronger, the process of healing will be arduous and lengthy.
     Big picture, however, the elders' initially unstinting support of Hybels demonstrates that, Christian or not, we are all prone, usually unconsciously, to accord trust to those who, outwardly, seem to be doing everything right.  So caught up are we in what we consider to be the accomplishments of these people that we frequently fail to see when they are doing the wrong thing, even when it is brought directly before us.  We become as myopic as anyone else.  Indeed, this applies to our feelings about politicians, corporate heads, and teachers as much as it does to pastors.  We blind ourselves with success.
     Didn't Jesus say, however, in the parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13), that ultimately it is not we who can measure the "success" of what we do on this earth?  It is God.
     And as Paul writes to the church at Corinth, God's definition of success is often very different from our own.
     Pray for Willow Creek Community Church.