Deus Ex Machina

Deus ex machina is Latin for "God out of the machine." It refers to cheesy Greek plays that used a crane (Gk. mekhane) to lower actors that played gods onto the stage.

The "gods" would then bring resolution to seemingly inextricable problems in the plot and bring the play to a close. 

The Greek tragedian Euripides (ca. 480 BC – 406 BC) used the "crane" in more than half of his plays. Aristotle criticized the use of the Deus and argued that the resolutions of a plot should arise from the previous actions in the play.

A more accurate translation of idea into English might be "God from our hands" or "God that we make." The "God of the gaps" idea seems to unapologetically take advantage of this. Instead of seeing God in every detail of the physical world, God is used to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge.

The result of this thinking, is the more we discover, the more God is relegated to domain of the useless. I wonder how often we employ a Deus ex machina?

When we only wheel God into the narrative to fill the gaps of our understanding, we aren't engaging the Creator of the cosmos, but rather a "God that we make." May we instead embrace the tension and the beauty of seeing God as an intrinsic part of every area of our world.

Shine

Head In A Hole

I have always struggled answering the question, "What is your most embarrassing moment?" Mainly because I have lived my entire life quite free of embarrassment. That all changed tonight. 

I had a brief speaking part in our 5 and 7 o'clock Good Friday services. I had memorized my couple minutes of material and the 5 o'clock service went off without a hitch. 

But after effortlessly pronouncing my first few lines in the 7 o'clock service, my public speaking nightmare came true: a sheer meltdown of my cognitive abilities. I couldn't for the life of me remember my lines. 

After painfully ad libbing for a moment, I fessed up and told the audience I needed to get my notes. So I strolled off stage, grabbed my notes and walked back on the stage. 

I regained my composure, threw the notes on the stage, and set into my part only to freeze up again and have to grab the notes a second time. This may have happened a third time - I'm not sure. Was there a hole anywhere I could crawl into? 

Finally, I got into a little bit of a rhythm and was able to end well. 

I have been public speaking for over ten years and have never had anything like this happen. People's support of me was incredible and I acknowledge the value these character forming experiences have for me as a person.  

I grew leaps and bounds tonight in the areas of mercy, empathy, and humility, and while I hope to go my whole life without ever having something like this happen again, I highly doubt I'll have that luxury. In the end it's experiences like these that make us better people.  

I Deny the Resurrection

Filling Space

Jesus tells a parable: "An unclean spirit goes out of a person, and it wanders through the desert looking for a place to rest, but it finds none. So it says, 'I will return to my house (the formerly possessed person) from which I came.' 

It comes, finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the person is worse off than before."

In the ancient world things were "unclean" that conflicted with the god one served. The Israelites for instance, considered other nations unclean because of their opposition to Israel's values.

Israel even had a whole slew of rituals in place to help a person become "clean" who had forfeited his or her purity by associating with things not "of God." 

The person in Jesus' parable did well by "evciting" the thing that was contradictory to the heart of God. But they didn't fill their life with anything else, and so they were incredibly susceptible to the things that drug them down in the first place. 

How many of us have seen this, either in our own lives or that of others? We give up something, become better for it, but don't take action to replace the vice with virtue and end up falling even further than before.

Here's to ridding ourselves of things that run contrary to the heart of God, and then filling those spaces with things that make us more who we are supposed to be.

Donkey!!

Jesus walked on water, calmed storms, and healed people, but did you know he could ride two donkeys at the same time? 

That's what Matthew tells us in his version of Jesus' life (Mt 21). In preparation for his final entry into Jerusalem, he records Jesus instructing his closest friends to go into a village and find a "donkey, and a colt with her and bring them to me." 

They bring the two animals to Jesus, throw their jackets on both animals and then Jesus hops on both of them! Matthew tells us Jesus did this to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, "Tell the daughter of Zion (Jerusalem): Look your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (Is 62.11, Zech 9.9). 

The other gospels only have Jesus riding on the colt and make no mention of two animals, so why would Matthew tell the story this way? It is most likely because he saw Jesus as the literal fulfillment of the words from Zechariah. 

He is so serious about rooting these events in the authoritative Hebrew scriptures, that he chooses to ignore the poetic force of the passage and instead interprets it literally. 

Mentioning the smaller donkey after the first is a way of strongly emphasizing the humility and peacefulness of the one riding the animal: "Your king is so humble and peaceful, that he rides on a donkey...not just a donkey, but a baby donkey."

Jesus rode into Jerusalem being touted by his followers as the triumphant deliverer of Israel, and Matthew more than any of the other gospels presents the strongest contrast between Jesus and the rulers of the day. 

Jesus rides into Jerusalem on two animals, struggling to keep his balance, on his way to inaugurate a revolution of peace. In this revolution people lay down their lives instead of taking them, and what could be a more brilliant picture of their peaceful founder than that.

Taking Back the World

We live in such incredible tension. The world around us is filled with incalculable beauty and yet unimaginable tragedy:

Pinochet's crimes against the Chilean people remind me of what Crossan says, "The primary goal of the Church is to take the world back from the thugs":

The affirmation that Jesus is Lord, is an affirmation of a world view that is wholly different than what we typically experience. May we find the strength to truly love others as we love ourselves and so change the tragic tide of history as we partner with God as he restores this broken world.