"Strength and honor." Those are the words that General Maximus, played by Russell Crowe, proclaimed to his soldiers before they advanced to do battle with a coalition of Germanic tribes in the opening of the movie Gladiator. Strength and honor.
Do we wish to have strength? Most of us do. How we define strength, however, is crucial. Ultimately, strength is found in weakness. Being strong is easy; being a bully is even more so. Consciously and deliberately giving up our "strength," however, is where true strength is found. Weakness is our richest way.
And therein is true honor. Many of us honor people; perhaps some of you receive honor in turn. Those of highest honor, however, are those who see honor for what it is: an affirmation of weakness.
As I think about ancient Rome and everything it brought to the world, I think about these words. And I recall that the Empire's greatest legacy is not its strength, but its weakness, the weakness of God that, in Jesus, it crucified on the cross.
And out of this weakness long ago came the the greatest strength, a life transforming strength of weakness, of all.
Poor Tom Petty. Barely a month ago, he told an interviewer that he was finished with touring, that he didn't wish to be away from his grandchildren anymore. Now, sadly, he will not see his grandchildren at all. At sixty-six, his life is over.
And it ended in the most abrupt of ways: cardiac arrest. No sign, no warning. Just gone. In the broad span of human history, of course, one life seems frightfully insignificant. In a way, it is. But to those to whom that life was connected, it is everything.
As it is for God. Jesus didn't die for a shapeless semblance of humanness. He died for unique and special and individual human beings. For Jesus, for God, one life is everything. It is one less manifestation of goodness in his world.
I mourn for Tom Petty, I mourn for his family, I mourn for the music world's loss. He wrote some great music. And I rejoice in the gifts God gave him, and grateful that Petty used what he was given. Yet I weep at the powerful truth of humanness: we are magnificent and wondrous pieces of dust.
To quote Ecclesiastes, "Remember your creator." Rest well, Tom Petty.
Once again, tragedy strikes the American dream. This time, it struck, of all places, Las Vegas, long a destination for those in search of quick riches. Ten minutes destroyed countless dreams, leaving hundreds of households in psychological ruin, reducing too many human beings to mere plops on a radar screen.
Of course, as anyone who scans international news knows, killings on this scale killings occur on an almost daily basis in many parts of the world. Most of us read about such things, mourn, then go on with our daily affairs. Some of us pray, others send money to help victims and survivors. But we rarely factor the event into the flow of our lives. Most of the West lives in splendid isolation.
Multiple (and, to me, largely unfounded) fears of some about the specter of a world government notwithstanding, one benefit, albeit somewhat perverse, of globalization is that people all over the world know, almost instantly, when tragedy befalls others in the global community. We have more capability to care about our fellow human beings than ever before.
While I could criticize the seemingly cavalier attitude of various organizations in the West about the proliferation of firearms or lament the steady fracturing of the corporate psyche in the First World, both of which, to me, contributed to this latest debacle of violence, I instead invite people to pray. God may appear distant, yes, but if we do not believe he's there in the worst of times, we may as not well believe he is there at all. If God is God, he is God all the time. Indeed it is in this darkness, this darkness of divine indifference and human folly, we come to see this most clearly. Shorn of our hope, ripped from our moorings, stunned and broken, we have nowhere else to turn.
Always, always: love remains.
Except for a rare moment of salacious intent in early childhood, I have never read Playboy. Maybe you have. Or maybe you have read some of its racier counterparts. Although Playboy's heyday was over long ago, the death of its founder, Hugh Hefner, has stirred a malestrom of commentary across the globe. Some people lauded him for how they believe he liberated man and woman to follow their emotional passions. Others derided and criticized him for the way they feel he denigrated women. It was difficult to find anyone who was neutral. Whatever else Hefner did in his life, he managed to stir up controversy, from the right as well as the left.
Although I have my own feelings about Hefner, I found in a column by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat some cogent observations. In an eloquent paragraph, Douthat notes, "Now that death has taken him [Hefner], we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain . . . [and] conservatives should ask themselves how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself--with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president."
Well put, Ross. Though sexuality is an important and integral part of humanness, part and parcel of our creation in the image of God, it is far from the only thing. God didn't make us for a totally sybaritic existence.
If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we do not always do the right thing. No one among us eludes our own fallenness. We all, as many religions, put it, sin. We all do not always do what pleases or sustains the divine fabric of the universe.
Few religious groups understand this as well as the Jews. Tonight, Jews around the world celebrate Yom Kippur, the "Day of Atonement." On this day, Jews acknowledge their sinfulness before God. They admit their wrongdoing, own up to their prevarications. And they repent. They tell God they are sorry for disobeying and violating his commandments and laws. Then they announce their intention to begin anew to live lives that please their creator.
So the Jews have done for many centuries, and so they will do for many centuries more. Their faith remains.
Although we may not agree with the specifics of the Jewish approach, and though we may not see wrongdoing in quite the same way, we must all admit that, to repeat, we do not always do the right thing. Every one of us is (or ought to be) aware that, at times, he or she upsets the delicate balance of freedom and order that governs the cosmos.
If this balance is to be more than relative, there must be a God. The Jews recognize this clearly. So do Christians, and so do Muslims. And so do adherents of countless other religions. Absolute and therefore genuinely meaningful morality is impossible without God. Otherwise, repentance is no more than shouting in a relativistic dark, the darkness of an accidental, and therefore, as scientist Steven Weinberg observes, pointless universe.
Have you read Jane Austen's Emma? Or perhaps you've seen the movie. It's a curious little book, one that I'm reading for a class I'm teaching. I've read Pride and Prejudice, know quite a bit about her Mansfield Park, but not as much about Emma.
Given what we know about Austen's penchant for puns, at times it's difficult to know exactly what she is up to in her narrative. But it definitely seems as if she is putting the mores of her time (early nineteenth century England) under a microscope. A single woman who has lived with her father all her life, Emma delights in matching people with each other. She insists, however, that marriage is not for her. Even when a man falls in love with her, begging her hand, she declines. She's content to live with her widowed father in the luxury of his estate.
In all of Jane Austen's novels, the woman who seems least likely to be married ends up getting married. Emma is no exception. She eventually falls in love with a Mr. Knightley, a man in whom she never thought she would be interested. This brings me to my point. We humans wrestle so much with the notion of love and how we work it out in our lives. We fall in love, we may fall out of love, we may never find true love at all. Either way, we rarely know when we will encounter love; it's almost always a mystery.
This is what is wonderful, and vexing, about love: it is a mystery. But it's a good mystery. And it's a mystery that wouldn't exist were not the world itself a mystery.
Even if God didn't exist, however, love, and the world, would be mysteries. Yet if God didn't exist, they would be mysteries which we, mysteries to ourselves in an accidental world, would have no way of knowing how to love.
Are we at the end? Do these waves of hurricanes and earthquakes indicate the earth's death is imminent? Many think so. On the other hand, history is strewn with instances of people claiming that they, and they only, know when the world will end. And unless all of us are living in a dream, they all were wrong.
The larger question is this: why do humans tend to embrace the thought that the world might be ending? Why do so many of us long for the return of, variously speaking, the Creator, Jesus, or God? Why do millions of people across the planet wish for the type of relief that they perceive the world's end will provide?
We can think of many answers and possibilities. Undergirding all of them, however, is a deep seated longing for something better than what we have now. As if the world as it is will not satisfy, as if the way history has been to this point is a dead end.
I fear that this demeans what God has made. Sure, the world is less than perfect, and disasters of course happen every day, disasters of nature, disasters and terrors perpetrated by human hatred and folly (I think of, for one, the horrific ethnic cleansing currently being carried out in Myanmar), and more. We all know this. But God gave us the world to cultivate and steward, to do the best with it we can.
Though we long for relief, and are not inherently wrong to do so, if we focus only on the next life, we miss doing what we could and ought to do for the many people who are suffering, often terribly, in this life. We ignore what is before us. Looking to the end, and only to the end, is self-centered and myopic.
After all, Jesus didn't dismiss the world; he embraced it.
