The Easter message in “Life of Pi”

If you, like me, have seen and been blown away by the movie “Life of Pi”, I can recommend that you read the book! It reads beautifully and is, in many ways, even better – as you’d expect. The only time movies or stage plays exceed the original work on which they are based is when the original benefits from a haircut to get into two hours.

Full respect to Victor Hugo. He was an amazing writer. But the Schönberg/Boublil “Les Miserables” is one such rare example of a great book becoming a stunning stage show and now, in turn, movie.

But back to “Life of Pi”.

There is a scene in the movie where Pi discovers Christ while visiting a tea plantation. In the book, this is chapter 17.  If you haven’t seen/read “Life of Pi”, let me mention that Pi, a Hindu by birth and environment, has a full first name of Piscine, and his father runs a zoo. In this part of the story he is meeting with one Father Martin, a Catholic priest

That’s enough to explain the following extract.

Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgment that comes down heavily. My experience with Father Martin was not at all like that. He was very kind. He served me tea and biscuits in a tea set that tinkled and rattled at every touch; he treated me like a grown-up; and he told me a story. Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.

And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine Father saying to me, “Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate the camel. The week before it was painted storks and grey herons. And who’s to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them.”

“Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up.”

“Hallelujah, my son.”

“Hallelujah, Father.”

What a downright weird story. What peculiar psychology.

I asked for another story, one that I might find more satisfying. Surely this religion had more than one story in its bag–religions abound with stories. But Father Martin made me understand that the stories that came before it–and there were many–were simply prologue to the Christians. Their religion had one Story, and to it they came back again and again, over and over. It was story enough for them.

I was quiet that evening at the hotel.

That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnappers and usurpers. What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation ? Death ? I couldn’t imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified–and at the hands of mere humans, to boot. I’d never heard of a Hindu god dying. Brahman Revealed did not go for death. Devils and monsters did, as did mortals, by the thousands and millions–that’s what they were there for. Matter, too, fell away. But divinity should not be blighted by death. It’s wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of Himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

Love. That was Father Martin’s answer.

That’s how insane Good Friday is!

That is how much our Father wants to save His errant “lions”.

It is too easy to take Calvary for granted. It’s just another event in the Church year. It’s commemorated in just another Communion service.

It is radical.

It is God loving abundantly

Pitiful NGO or the Bride of Christ? It's all about the Cross

In his first public mass after accepting the Ring of the Fisherman, Francis I is reported to have said:

"What happens when children build sand castles on the beach? It all comes down."
"If we don't proclaim Jesus, we become a pitiful NGO, not the bride of the Lord," he said.
"When we walk without the cross, and when we preach about Christ without the cross, we are not disciples of the Lord. We are mundane. We are bishops, priests, cardinals, popes, but we are not disciples of the Lord."
http://m.apnews.mobi/ap/db_6776/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=qlsj3cbN

I think I am going to like this Papacy!

Rejoice for a comrade deceased

I have done quite a bit of thinking in the last few hours.
One thought that has kept coming to mind is from the pen of Charles Wesley:

Rejoice for a comrade deceased;
Our loss is his infinite gain;
A soul out of prison released.
And freed from his bodily chain:
With songs let us follow his flight,
And mount with his spirit above:
Escaped to the mansions of light,
And lodged in the Eden of love.

(My Salvationist roots are showing again! Wesley rejoiced for a
"brother". "Comrade" sings better!)

We don't think like that any more!
Since the word went around that one of the leaders in our church had
died, there have been a number of comments to the effect that we cannot
be sad because he is in a better place. But we don't in this 21st
century, seem to grasp the fullness of our Heavenly Hope as our
predecessors in the faith did.

Maybe we don't see heaven in all its glory because we don't see earth in
all its horror.
Maybe we see heaven as "a better place", but not as an "infinite gain".
Maybe we need to stop stumbling to keep up with a post-modern world
where right and wrong are relative lifestyle choices and stand again on
the Truth that this life is not good.
- to recognise again that we live in bodily chains.
- to stop paying lip service to Paul's pained exclamation: "What a
wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to
death?" (Rom 7:24)
- to stop thinking of life as fixable and acknowledge that death is
indeed "escape to the mansions of light" from the real murk of this life.

This world is not our home. And it's not a nice place. At our peril we
have come to be content with this fallen world and everything that comes
with it.

This world is not fixable. No greening of the environment or giving of
rights to the marginalised, however worthy, will in and of themselves
make the difference.
But that is not to say that we have no hope.
Exactly the opposite.
Seeing the stark horror of the world and the infinite glory of Heaven
reveals the immensity of the hope we do possess.

With Paul again, "we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about
those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no
hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so,
through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep." (1
Thes 4:13-14)

There is a glorious hope! (There is too an abhorrent horror for those
who have no hope, but that, beyond a call to intercede for them, is
another topic)
There is a heaven to gain and an earth to shun

'Tis Jesus, the First and the Last,
Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home,
We'll praise Him for all that is past!
And trust Him for all that's to come".
(Joseph Hart)

The light of truth; the lunacy of reason

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep
matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one
created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of
which we look at everything—Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains
everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility—Detached
intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all
moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light,
reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made
Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the
patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a
special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which
all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We
are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something
both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle
of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable,
as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly
reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them
all her name.
G.K Chesterton - Orthodoxy

From which C.S Lewis presumably drew his own and better known
extrapolation:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only
because I see it, but because by it I see everything else
"Is Theology Poetry?" (1945)

He's back!

Well, Harold Camping may have got it wrong when he told us that it was all over on May 21.  But I'm not sure that he has learnt much from the experience.


Driving home last night, I flicked my radio to the AM band, and along with the amazing plethora of stations from Gabarone to Zanzibar (and a few others like VoA which is relayed through Selebi-Phikwe), there was Family Radio again.


Not an exact quote but "if we study the Scriptures hard enough we will be able to determine exactly when the Lord will return" doesn't yet tell me that Mr Camping has learned to interpret "no one knows the day or the hour" the way I do.
He still believes that the Generation of the End began in 1948 and that the Church ended then.  To get around the obvious problem with this, he says that a "generation" is nothing to do with human lifespans, but rather a period in the history of the chosen People.  Nice footwork, but it therefore follows that, so long as Israel exists as a nation-state, we are in Camping's Last Days.


He's wrong about the Church, but you know, so far as the End coming while Israel is here, I think he may be right.
We do not know when.  We cannot know when.  It is not given for us to know when.
But soon and very soon....

May 21

So what IS going to happen on Saturday?
We don't know. We cannot know.

We can do some clever maths, we can build in some stunning assumptions, we can create a hypothesis, but we cannot know.

Or can we?

When Jesus himself said that NO-ONE knows the day or the hour, but the Father alone, did he mean no-one at that time? Or did he mean no-one ever.

Because, when we start down the road of "well that is no longer true", where do we stop?
Those who are telling us that we are going Home on Saturday have already crossed the heresy line by saying that "the Church Age" is finished. Leaving aside the nonsense that is pedalled as "Dispensationalism", any idea that the Church is ever over is directly contrary to what Jesus taught. "The gates of Hades shall not prevail against it".
Ever.
Period.

These folk (who Jesus loves enough to have died for, by the way - just before we deride them unnecessarily), they also tell us that we have in recent years been living in the Great Tribulation.
Really?

True, there have been more Christians martyred for their faith in the last hundred years than in the previous 19 centuries together. But can we really say that things are so bad that, were He not to cut the time short, none of us would survive?
No, we can't. Not yet.

And has there been persecution on a greater scale than we can imagine?
Happily not.

Sorry, Brother Camping. The Great Tribulation is coming, and probably soon. But, with mixed emotions, it is not yet.

Bottom line, we cannot, and will not know the day or the hour of Jesus' return, our departure or "Judgement Day".
But that does not mean it won't be on Saturday. And if it is, there are a good number of Christians who will find their joy mixed with a little embarassment when they are raptured.
"No, it's not May 21. It's... Er, um, Hello Lord, I wasn't expecting you just yet".
He told us to be ready, precisely because we do not know the day or the hour.

And as I contemplate if it is on Saturday, or tonight, what a wonderful excitement I feel. Tinged with pain, yes. I have so many good friends who I don't honestly believe are yet ready.

But I know that He is still Sovereign.
He is still in control.
He will set the timing perfectly.

And I know in whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day.

Bonhoeffer, LoveZim and me

Earlier this year, Eric Metaxas published a remarkable book "Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy".
(Dear Santa, I wouldn't mind a copy....!)
 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's story is remarkable, and beyond the scope of this post.  His commitment to God and to his country led to a quite remarkable series of choices and to his involvement in events that would change the passage of world history.

To quote from Metaxas' website:

As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a pastor and author, known as much for such spiritual classics as The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as for his 1945 execution in a concentration camp for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

(Aside:  Valkyrie is an excellent movie dramatising the events of that fateful assassination attempt.)
(Dear Santa, I wouldn't mind a DVD of this either!)

LoveZim is "a network of churches and organisations, established with a vision to invite the diaspora and the global church to support Zimbabwe in prayer and practical action."

Next Sunday, 26 September, there is a worldwide call to "The International Prayer Day for Zimbabwe".

A full description of LoveZim's vision and activities is also beyond the scope of this post.  The commitment to our country and the move of God in it are wonderful, and challenging.

Now, let me be clear to say that my intention is not in any way to try and equate Adolf Hitler with Robert Mugabe.  Nor would I presume to say that the Holocaust in anyway parallels the fact that so many Zimbabweans are in dire straits when it comes to health and food security.
I'm not saying that!

But what if...?

When Bonhoeffer arrived in New York in June 1939, he knew he was in the wrong place.

He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr: "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people... Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security."  He returned to Germany on the last scheduled steamer to cross the Atlantic.  (en.wikipedia.org)

Am I content to "just pray", or is God calling me to "share the trials of this time with my people"?

When will God call me to take treasonous activities to act against the Powers that He has placed in authority over me?
And when does "Thou shalt not kill" conflict with my ability to serve God?
I don't pretend to understand the immensity of the decision Bonhoeffer took.  But the attempt to assassinate Hitler was planned and executed, and this mighty man of God was part of it.

Now again, I am not saying that such action would be appropriate, necessary or justifiable in Zimbabwe in the 21st century.

But what if...?
Am I content to "just pray", or is God calling me to actions that mean I must be ready to be stripped naked and hung with thin wire?

Oh, I hope not.
Prayer is good.  There is no "just pray" when we realise that our prayers are direct petitions to Almighty God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.
But forgive me if I start my prayers for Zimbabwe by asking that He accept my prayer and spare me the path He called Bonhoeffer to.

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”  — DIETRICH BONHOEFFER