A scientist observed several ants discarding one of their own dead. "How do they know?" he asked himself, and began mixing concoctions until he could fake an ant's death. He placed a smelly substance that marked out death on the back of an ant and put her inside the colony. Immediately drone soldier ants came and carried her off.
The Bible hosts inerrant truth, something dismissed, berated, belittled, or severely downgraded by so many church denominations. Inerrancy forces you to fall under the authority of God and his Word. You understand better that you are not special or unique; the law that accuses you of sin is the same for everyone. There are zero exceptions. Inerrancy also instructs you on the one and only way out: Jesus. One of my long-in-the-tooth seminary professors took me into his office one day and said this: “The only thing I learned – amid all this learning and studying and preparation – is Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Keep close to that because it’s the most important Truth.”
We’re inside and away from everyone so go tell the beat generation we finally found home, even though it rapes us of how things once were. Do you remember? Phrases like “new normal”, “social distancing” and “wear a mask” all broke out of the insane asylum and into the heads of faulty followers of Fauci.
The prophetic is silent. Its heyday is now rained out in an unbaptized haze of tolerance run amuck. O'Connor warned us: we really want a Christ without all that crucifixion talk. We want everyone carrying around open minds on top of shoulders broad enough to narrow nothing, and arms that carry no punch of truth, no signs of crosses, no healed withered-ness in its hands.
I wonder. As I approach history, visiting churches dating well before the declaration of our independence and the security of our constitution with its promise to make no laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion and the right for any of us to peaceably assemble together… I wonder... why are all these churches locked, boarded up, empty shells?
He made us, human beings, from the dirt of Earth, and he breathed in his very own breath to spring forth life, will, animation, and purpose within us. So, from the very beginning, God conspires with his human creatures, for, as you might know, conspire is broken into con and spire, which means together and breathed, respectfully. God breathed together with humans to give life, and in Jesus, life more abundantly.
At no other point has the whole world melted into a mold that looks like the end. You can cite wars and all their rumors but they are starting points that progressed us here to a tiny infectious agent that masquerades itself until it kills us, or at least some of us. Sound familiar? It’s the garden story recycled.
Perhaps, church life is running in a kyklos. The kyklos is how the Greeks viewed government -- in a cycle -- always turning in on itself as regimes are formed and dismantled, models made and then splintered. It goes round and round. Monarchy turns to despots turn to tyranny turns to oligarchy turns to democracy turns back to anarchy.
According to the Greeks liberty eats itself. That's Paul too - everything is permissible but not beneficial. There are definite ends to it, and, at the end of things, it's not pretty. It's usually not worth much at the start either, since liberty most often begins with war. For the Christian that war is within the soul, the wrestling match with God himself and his word.
The moon rests just the same over New Orleans and Indonesia. The gutters of Japan bucket out the last of their dead onto a radio active ocean. The tsunami heaps onto its record - a prized fighter finding punching his opponents down for count after count. Africa is baked in tyranny as children are fatherless due to years of civil war and bombs burst all over the air.
Shel Silverstein’s famous giving tree tale points out the gravity that bends us to the ground… to sit, to retrace our steps, to finally die. If you believe nature is cursed with death, you might likewise find aging as a standard fare, but maybe it’s not. The only difference between death and life is breathing. Nothing more.
The death of legend Michael Jackson fell near the legendary anniversary of the moon walk. Forty years ago the earth's skin ripped open with a rocket's red glare, bursting out to discover what the moon is made of. "Is it cheese?" asks Wallace. "Is there a man up there?" asks the nursery song. We didn't know. A whole civilization could be looking down at us this entire time, eating cheese and wondering what on earth might be going on... well... on Earth.
