The Good, bad and ugly

THE GOOD: I am like Jesus in that I have a heart for those Robin refers to as “riff-raff” (see first blog post if you don’t get the reference).  I can love the woman at the well, I can love the tax collector, I can love the prostitute—read I can love the homeless, I can love the homosexual dying of AIDS, I can love the prostitute.  I am like Jesus in that the Pharisees of the world tick me off.  I get irritated with those who think they have all the answers and come down with wrathful judgment on those who they perceive do not have the answers.  In those ways I am a Christian.

THE BAD: I am unlike Jesus in that I don’t reach out to the modern day Pharisees with love.  They may have angered Jesus, but he always made time for the Nicodemus’ of the world.  Jesus may have pointed out the errors of their ways but he took time to walk with them.  Jesus may have been disappointed in what they were doing, but he still saw value in them.  In those ways I am not a Christian.

THE UGLY: I feel hostility towards the modern day Pharisee which is neither Christian nor loving.  I commit the very act of self righteous judgment on them that they do on those that I define as the least of these.  I don’t want to be around them.  I don’t want to value them.  In those ways I am a hypocrite.

THE HOPE: That I will learn to love as Jesus did…unconditionally and with reckless abandon.  I am learning that for each of us “the least of these” means something different.

Short stories Part 1

I need a USB port on the side of my head so that I could be hooked up to a computer and my story ideas—well the entire story—downloaded to a Word document.  Maybe someday I will actually have the time to do all the writing I would like to.  Until then I’ll just keep jotting down story ideas on crumpled up pieces of paper and saving them for the days when I have nothing to do but write. 

Lately I’ve been thinking of a lot of historical fiction stories…mostly short stories that would take only a hundred pages or less to tell.  The one that has kept me awake lately is about Jesus (most of the historical fiction ideas I have relate to Jesus in one way or the other).  In this story a Jewish man encounters the resurrected Christ.  They have a great time together, eating and drinking wine.  Well the wine fills their bladder and they must relieve themselves…like guys not in the company of women do they find a nice tree to go against.  The guy happens to look over and notices Jesus is not circumcised (his resurrected body has been healed—some will scream John 20:27 at this point…to them I say “blah, blah, blah”).  The man, even though he has felt the love of Jesus in their fellowship, decides that Jesus is at best a renegade Jew who was never circumcised and is now leading people away from the one true God.  He plots to kill Jesus…

Getting older blows

Earlier in the week I mentioned my poor mental health while stating I was in top physical condition.  That is not entirely true.  I am getting older and things I could once do I can do no longer.  I can’t workout as hard and function as a human being the next day.  I can’t demonstrate certain wrestling moves without contorting my face into a mask of pain.  I can’t break into a sprint without three and a half hours of warming up unless I want to pull a muscle.  Diving for a ball while playing sports still occurs to me, but by the time I’ve done my belly flop the ball has gone by and by the time I lift my carcass from the ground the play is over.  Not only do I have physical limitations, but my body is changing.  I have lumps where no lumps previously existed.  I’m beginning to see wrinkles.  Thankfully I’m not losing my hair, but if I were it might be ok because I could comb over the hair that has started growing on top of my ears.  Getting older blows.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t grow old like William Nolan and George Johnson did in their 1967 novel Logan’s Run in which people “voluntarily” were put to death at age 21 (in the movie version the age was graciously changed to 30) to conserve resources and to keep the world from over-populating.  I guess what I’m getting at is we shouldn’t let ourselves be defined by our vitality.  Our sense of worth needs to come from something other than what we look like, what we can do, what we think—all things that can be taken from us in a heartbeat.  Maybe it is because I am losing my vitality, but I’ve really been thinking a lot lately what it means to be a child of God.  I may not be able to lift heavy weights or play short stop or think deeply about matters, but I will always be a child of God.  My value is being me to a loving Creator.  Now that is a thought that makes a grandpa smile.

I'm unhealthy

Over the last four to five months I've come to realize how unhealthy I am.  I don't have high blood pressure, I don't have high cholesterol, I don't take any daily medication, I work out 5-6 times a week so why am I unhealthy?  I'm unhealthy because at times I try really hard not to be me.  I'm unhealthy because at times I try really hard to do things to win the approval of others or so that others will like me.  I'm unhealthy because I let what others think of me define my mood.  I don't like being unhealthy.  I'm taking steps towards become more healthy which means becoming the me that God intended me to be.  Borrowing from the wisdom of Frank Green, Hugh Prather, David Nixon, Edwin Friedman, and Dan Brunner (to name a few) I've developed a Self Care Bill of Rights that I am trying to live by.  I'm sure there will be times when I will fail miserably and my glittering image will win the day, but I am trying to get healthier.

1.     I have the right to be responsible only for myself

2.     I have the right to change my mind

3.     I have the right to make mistakes

4.     I have the right to be wrong

5.     I have the right to be illogical in making decisions

6.     I have the right to say “I don’t understand”

7.     I have the right to say “I don’t know”

8.     I have the right to say “I don’t care”

9.     I have the right to not defend myself

10.  I have the right to be Terry Clees

Would you deny Christ?

This is my last blog post of 2010…where has the time gone, it seems like I just started this thing.  I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions; I’ve already committed to reading 100 books in 2011.  Another resolution I’ve toyed with is finishing the novel I’ve been working on for about 7 years.  Reading Silence by Shusako Endo has really motivated me to dig back in and finish the story.  The novel is about an inner city pastor who ministers to prostitutes and drug dealers.  He is so successful at getting them to transform their lives that his home is invaded by one of the kingpins of the city and his henchmen who is furious at the loss of revenue and bodies.  The kingpin ties up the pastor and his wife and two children.  The pastor is asked to deny Christ or else his wife and children will be tortured and killed.  He refuses several times throughout the ordeal and the kingpin follows through on his threat leaving the pastor that only one left alive.  The Christian fundamentalist media types hail the pastor as a hero for not denying Christ; however the pastor begins to think the heroic thing to do would have been to suffer eternal hell if it meant his family would not have been brutalized.  He begins to see a spiritual director who leads him on a journey of discovery into the land of a God who looks to love rather than judge. 

That is it in a nutshell.  I find it sad to believe that some really believe God would send someone who has served God most of his life to hell for all eternity for denying Christ under such horrible circumstances.  I am thankful on the eve of a New Year that God has way more grace and mercy than we allow at times.

Incarnation

I think the more educated a person gets the more they realize just how much they don’t know.  There was a time in Bible College when I thought “you know what, I’m pretty smart, I think I have my mind around all this theological stuff”.  Later when working on my Masters of Divinity at Northwest Nazarene University I opened up my mind and saw that everything was not nearly as neat or black and white as I once thought.  I began to realize there were some things I just didn’t have an answer for.  Now that I am working on my doctorate degree I know that I don’t know crap!  Besides being a small fortune in debt and the realization that I don’t know much my education has given me TSE (theologically sensitive ears).  Much like the musician with perfect pitch is annoyed by notes played even slightly off key; TSE causes me to be annoyed by theological inconsistencies.  This reared its ugly head this week while I was listening to some Christmas music.  I was listening to “Away in a Manger” and heard these words:

The cattle are lowing

The poor Baby wakes

But little Lord Jesus

No crying He makes

After I realized that “lowing” is not the opposite of heightening, but a sound cows make I thought about why Jesus didn’t cry when he seemed to be startled awake by the cows lowing.  I asked some friends about this and the most popular answer was that Jesus wasn’t startled awake, he was simply enjoying a peaceful moment in the manger with the cows gently mooing in the background.  I pondered all this and concluded the popular answer was wrong.  You see lowing is not a gentle sound, as matter of fact a synonym for lowing is roaring.  And why would they call the baby “poor” if it had not been startled awake?  You don’t say look at the poor baby enjoying a peaceful moment.  You say “oh poor baby did those nasty cows wake you up!”  I then concluded the author of the song was making a theological point that the baby Jesus did not cry because that somehow equated to sin.  I further concluded that when people think of the baby Jesus not crying they disconnect from the fact that the baby Jesus was 100% human.  And if we forget that Jesus was 100% human we miss out on how much God loves us through the role Jesus played in the Christmas story.  Who else but a God who loves unconditionally would empty himself of all divine power (Philippians 2:7) and become like us to show us love!

The Value of Human Life

I started watching the HBO series ROME last night.  Outside of the gratuitous sex scenes I am fascinated by the show.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like to live in those days—the days just prior to the Incarnation.  Watching ROME coupled with the reading I’ve been doing on Herod the Great (did you know Herod saved the Olympic Games and ensured its future) made me think about the value of human life.  It seemed nothing in those days to kill a person—even family members.  Herod killed so many in his own family it was said “it is better to be Herod’s pig than his son”.  Unnatural death seemed to be an everyday occurrence in the days of Christ’s birth; no wonder there wasn’t a huge outcry when Herod demanded that all boys two years old and under be killed in and around Bethlehem.

                                    

Today we seem to place a much higher value on human life—or do we?  Abortions are happening at an alarming rate.  And even the anti-abortion crowd seems to only care about abortions in their own country and could not care less about children starving to death in other countries.  I am still horrified by the genocide in Rwanda where an estimated 800,000 people were murdered over a span of approximately 100 days.  The genocide in Darfur has left over 400,000 murdered.  Those numbers are staggering, yet, because they happened in a far away land we don’t seem bothered by them.  If we really believe that all people are created equal shouldn’t we value the human life in Ethiopia just as much as we value human life in Detroit?  If we really believe that all people are created equal shouldn’t the great number of people dying of Aids in Africa break our hearts just as much as children dying of cancer at Mott Hospital?  Do we really place a higher value on human life than the ancient Romans?