Creatio Ex Nihilo

All I Want Is Everything

A few months ago, a Facebook friend of mine posted a video of a new invention that caught my eye.  It was a promotional piece about a new water-powered jet pack.  Take a look. 

Isn’t that cool? If you’re at all like me, after seeing it the first thought that occurs to you is, “I’ve got to get one of those!’  Think for a moment how strange that idea is.  When you got up this morning, you weren’t thinking about a jet pack.  Chance are, you have never even thought about getting one.  So why do you all of a sudden want one?

I think it’s because you now know it exists.  Sure, it costs $128,000, but it’s out there and it’s available for the taking.  Now most likely, you’ll leave here today and not give the jet pack a second thought.  You won’t start saving your money for one or go to your bank tomorrow morning to apply for a jet pack loan.

Unless…

Unless other people you know start buying jet packs.  What if the people next door get one?  What if the price comes down, and a family you know that makes less money than yours, or is less educated buys one?  Wouldn’t that mean that you deserve a jet pack too?  Previously, the jet pack was just theoretical and you probably didn’t give it much thought. But now, not only do you want a jet pack, you NEED one - and as soon as possible! 

Our desires are often not incarnated until we see our neighbors possessions.  When our neighbors have things that we don’t, it awakens something in us, a sense that we want that too.  We may even feel we deserve it or are entitled to it.

That awakened desire to have what others have is called coveting.  In this, the last of the Ten Commandments, God prohibits it.  A person who seeks to live life God’s way, does not covet.  We should not take things that are not rightfully ours.  Not only that, we are not even to want them.

How can we possibly live up to such a high standard?  What’s so bad about coveting?  As long as you don’t actually act on those bad desires, what’s the big deal?

False Witness: Too Much to Bear

I think there is no greater sin in a legal system than when an innocent person is falsely declared guilty and suffers the consequences.  In recent years, the news has been full of stories of men exonerated by new evidence, usually DNA, and released from jail.  Sometimes they have been imprisoned for decades and have been unjustly deprived of the most productive years of their lives.  When we hear those stories, we sympathize with that falsely imprisoned person.  We get angry.  “How in the world was such a mistake made, in this country?” we wonder.  What evidence condemned this person to a life of false imprisonment and wasted potential?

Frequently, we discover that the deciding factor in finding the person guilty was the testimony of a witness.  Just as frequently, we discover that the testimony given by the witness in the trial was untrue.  A witness gave false testimony on the stand.  Sometimes that false testimony is due to prejudice, or self-interest, or personal gain (they were paid off), or being threatened.  Sometimes it’s just a case  of ignorance or the witness being mistaken, but giving their testimony with a false sense of certainty.  Either way, when we hear stories of people being wrongly imprisoned because of false testimony, it makes our blood boil.  We think, if we were the newly released prisoner, the first thing we would do is find that false witness and wring his neck.

What kind of person, lies on the witness stand, knowing they will ruin the life of another?  Who is capable of such cruelty and injustice?

Actually, you and I are.

How can that be?  Most likely, few of us have ever had to put our hand on a Bible in court and swear to tell the truth.  If we did, it wasn’t in some life and death murder case it was just something minor like, oh just say, a divorce.  Even so, I doubt many of us have ever lied in a court of law and had it result in an innocent person going to prison for life or being executed.

True, yet every day, you and I bear false witness against our neighbors.  Our false witness imprisons people in cells of ostracism, of pain, of falsehoods and misinformation.  Like the cases of men who waste their life in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, our false testimonies can ruin the life of another, sometimes for years.  Sometimes it even kills them.

It can start while we are still young.  We hear an unflattering rumor about someone at school and in order to fit in, we repeat it.  It may or may not be true.  We don’t know and we don’t care.  We just want to fit in.  Chances are we forget about that rumor the next day.  However, I can almost guarantee you, the person about whom we said it, has not forgotten it.  In fact, not only does that misinformation follow them around the next day, it may follow them around through their entire time at school.  Years, even decades later, we may have long forgotten that rumor, but they remember the pain it caused them for the rest of their life.  They remember what it was like to go through school falsely labelled the slut, the thief, the crazy kid, or the cheat. (Interestingly all people with whom Jesus hung out.)

Add to This List: Phrases We Don't Say Often Enough

I've been thinking lately about phrases we rarely hear and perhaps should say more often to make the world a better place:

• Sorry, I misjudged you.
  
• You go first.
  
• I could be wrong.
  
• I probably took that wrong way.
  
• Would you like some of my stuff?
  
• I don’t need to buy that right now.
  
• I’d like to understand better what you believe.
  
• That's just my opinion, it's not as if God told me to think it.

That's just for starters.  Have any you would like to add?

Grand Theft Theo

It was the summer after eight grade and my good friend Stephen and I were exploring the brand new K-Mart - the centerpiece of the new Wayne Hills Mall.  For some unexplained reason we found ourselves in the outdoor sports section when Stephen eyed a fishing lure hanging on a display rack.  

“I’m taking that,” he said.

“Huh,” I asked, quite puzzled.

“Go to the end of the aisle and keep a lookout,” he told me.

“A lookout?”  What were we Alias Smith and Jones here?  It’s a K-Mart.

So I walked uncomfortably to the end of the aisle and pretended to be “looking out” for something.  Meanwhile, Stephen stealthily slipped the fishing lure under his jacket.  He rushed up behind me and said, “Come on!  Let’s get out of here!”

As we hurried to the front of the store, suddenly lights flashed and sirens blared all through the store.  Oh no, I thought, “the jig is up.”  (I don’t even know what a jig is, but that’s what everyone in movies always said in these situations.)  We looked around in a panic.  Blue lights were flashing everywhere.  Yet we were just standing at the front of the store alone.  It took a few moments for it to sink in that we had not triggered an alarm.  It was just another one of K-Mart’s infamous Blue Light Specials.

We breathed a deep sigh of relief and made our way to the door.  There we were met by the store manager, who asked to see what was in Stephen’s jacket.  He sheepishly unzipped his sweatshirt, revealing the fishing lure, tucked against his side.  The manager left me at the door and took Stephen away to the back office, where he called Stephen’s father to come in for a little talk.  Believe when you’re a fourteen year old boy and someone calls your father for a littele talk about you - it’s never good.

As I look back at this story of Stephen stealing the fishing lure, it brings back a lot of different emotions - nostalgia, regret, but most of all, puzzlement.  Puzzlement for this one simple reason: Stephen didn’t fish.  He got into all this trouble for stealing a one dollar fishing lure, which he would never use. 

Why is it that we humans have such difficulty resisting the temptation to take what isn’t rightfully ours?  Sometimes it’s for the meaningless adrenaline rush.  Sometimes it’s because of our indoctrination to never pass up the chance to get something for nothing.  Oh, but that’s not stealing, is it? It’s the reason we can’t help but pick a twenty dollar bill we see laying on the floor, even in a crowded room where it’s rightful owner is probably nearby.  It’s an opportunity for personal gain that’s too good to pass up.  So we put our ethics on hold and grab what we can while the grabbing is good.  It’s the same attitude that often fuels the sin of adultery which we discussed last week.  For many people, especially men, sex can be like money found on the ground.  It doesn’t come along often and it’s too good to pass up. It only makes sense to grab it at any opportunity.

The Felix Unger Principle Strikes Again!

A few weeks ago, I edited and appeared in this video for the TransFORM, a network to help form new missional faith communities. Apparently, the comment I make, "For many of our people we are their last stop on the way out of Christianity", has created a stir in some circles. So allow me to clarify for those who drew a false conclusion I had not anticipated.  

Many of the people who come to our church are giving Christianity one last shot. If this doesn't work, they tell me, they're giving up on the whole idea of God. Some have had bad experiences in church, some have been hurt by Christians, experienced tragedy in life or have deep theological questions that they do not feel comfortable asking in other faith communities.  For many of them, Vision is the place where they rediscover God and Jesus.

Contrary to the wrong assumptions made by commenters on other blogs, Vision does not happily usher them out of Christianity and celebrate it. Vision's calling is to introduce them to a love of God through Jesus Christ so that they would stay and become fully committed followers of Jesus. Sometimes God works and that happens, sometimes it doesn't, but it's a risk worth taking.

I find it disappointing that in an eagerness to condemn, our critics jumped to a false conclusion. As my wife Pam always advises, perhaps it would be wise to heed the advice of St. Felix of Unger...

It's Not All About Sex

In Ocean City NY, it is against the law to slurp your soup.  In Greene NY, it’s illegal to eat peanuts and walk backwards on the sidewalks during a concert. In New York State, women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business. Also in our state, while riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.

Obviously, such laws are relics of a previous era.  They were written in a time of travel by horseback and predate the age of computers, or even electricity for that matter.  We can safely ignore them without fear of slipping into some downward spiral of immorality.  “First it starts with wearing hats indoors and before you know it horses are tied improperly!”

Some suggest that the Ten Commandments are further examples of such outdated rules.  Which is curious since few people advocate stealing, lying and murder as admirable behavior.  When proposals are made that we have moved beyond the laws on these famous stone tablets, there is usually one commandment in particular the proposer has in mind.  It is this one, “You shall not commit adultery.”  In fact CNN founder Ted Turner suggested just such an update to the Decalogue a decade ago.

After all, we live in an era of friends with benefits, websites to hook us up with others seeking affairs, and our old standby, the one night stand.  How can we be expected to follow such an ancient rule?  Hasn’t the world changed?  Hasn’t there been a paradigm shift in sexual mores?  Don’t we live in a generation, the likes of which no one has seen before? 

Ah, but we talked about that a couple of weeks ago. The commandment to honor our parents is God’s corrective for generational narcissism, the belief that our generation is somehow special or unprecedented.  As we will see, these Ten Commandments, or ten utterances of God are not just a random list of rules.  Instead, I believe they inherently all build one another.  When it comes to these principles for living, our generation is not so special.  God’s same ethical imperatives that applied to our ancestors also apply to us.  In fact, they apply even more so to us.

How can that be, we wonder? Aren’t these rules merely cultural artifacts from a world that no longer exists?  For instance, in a place like ancient Israel, how did you define adultery in a society where men had more than one wife?  Ever wonder that?  I did.  Although I don’t recommend asking it in Sunday School as a young child. I rarely hear preachers from the Religious Right ask that question.