Sacrifice

Philippians 3:8-9 - "What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith."

In that powerful verse in Philippians, Paul lets us know what he considers a winning formula for the game of Life. He says “If I can lose all things” I win the game. In fact, he calls all the other stuff “rubbish.”

This week we begin exploring eight ingredients in a “with-God” (Immanuel) life: celebration, study, pilgrimage, submission, prayer, obedience, confession and sacrifice. We begin with “sacrifice.”

Benjamin is studying great religions in his 5th grade class and this week had a test on Buddhism. I’m always impressed with Fairfax County’s schools because when I was in 5th grade, my knowledge of Buddhism extended as far as the joke “Q: What did the Buddhist say to the hotdog vendor? A: Make me one with everything!” (Ha!) According to Benjamin’s material, one of Buddhism’s primary tenants is that we all suffer, and that the reason we all suffer is because we all have “wants.” The more we can remove ourselves from “wanting,” the less we will suffer, and the closer we will come to some sort of enlightenment. (I know there are much more complex explanations of Buddhism, but the 5th grade version is a good place for my intelligence level.)

As Christians, Paul reminds us we are very strange people because we’re not about working towards a life void of suffering. In fact, we are people who are looking for opportunities to “suffer” on behalf of Christ. At first glance it looks similar to the Buddhists’ attempts to eliminate wants, but Paul reminds us it is more than this. We are consumed by a “want,” a desire to be like Christ! We sacrifice all things, not as a trade off to balance some cosmic energy, but so we can experience increasing enlightenment as Christ lives in us.

This week we will look at the first space in the with-God game of Life …the space that says, “sacrifice all you have.”

Mark

A Three-Dimensional Jesus

After nearly three months in the book of Numbers, it’s good to return to the New Testament and talk about Christ every week for a while. We will be looking at Christ in the book of Luke and focusing on his upward, inward and outward reach in life. As Martin Luther King reminded us last week, most people are content to concentrate on one dimension of life. He called it the length of life, and it’s the part that involves being a better person: better at our jobs, better at our various roles, more self-disciplined. It’s an inward focus to make ourselves better, and if we are not careful, we can become convinced that’s all there is to mastering life. It’s the stuff that most New Year’s resolutions are aimed at…losing a few pounds, getting more organized, exercising, etc.

Yet, there is more to life than just length of life, more than just an inward focus. There is an outward and upward aspect to life, too, which is crucial. We need to look no further than the life of Christ to see perfect examples of how a complete person might integrate those things. Jesus was amazing in how he was able to keep all three aspects in harmony…the inward, the outward, the upward. For the next several weeks we will be looking at Jesus in the book of Luke to see how he integrated these three aspects of life to be the most complete person who ever lived.

Mark

Daddy, Who is the enemy?

Over the Christmas break my family and I visited one of the most popular destinations in Washington D.C.—the Steven F. Hudvar Hazy Air and Space Museum. It’s an impressive place. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The Hudvar Center, along with another building on the National Mall, showcases the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world.

Toward the end of my visit I overheard something that I won’t forget. As I stood in front of a Bell UH-1H Iroquois, one of the most effective helicopters ever created, I overheard a little girl ask her dad a question. She was probably about five or six years old. Both of them stood about two feet away from me. While holding her dad’s hand and looking curiously at the massive Vietnam copter, the little girl asked, “Daddy, what is that for?” With little hesitation, and without taking his eyes off the copter, the father replied, “It’s to defeat the enemy.” The little girl then asked, “Who is the enemy?” “Well, at that time,” the father explained, “it was the Vietnamese.” The little girl didn’t answer and they continued on to the next display.

I couldn’t help but think of how a Christian ought to respond to such a question. Who is the enemy, really? What does the Christian religion say about the identity of the enemy? Touring the Hudvar Center, one cannot help but be impressed by the incredible technological advances our country has achieved in the last hundred years. At one end of the museum was a small glider built in the early part of the twentieth century; a symbol of the simple achievements of the first aviators. At the other end of the museum sat a massive space shuttle, used to experiment with entering and exiting the atmosphere. It was surrounded by numerous other rockets, satellites, and space suits. The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Sixty six years later Neil Armstrong is walking the surface of the moon. The rapid pace of technological advance is astonishing.

What is more astonishing is that, regardless of such a Herculean advance in military technology, human beings remain incapable of stopping human hatred. Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be the perfect example of how technology submits to the will of its creator. Unfortunately, technology is inhibited by the moral shortcomings of the human condition. Don’t get me wrong, technology maintains peace for millions each day, through the force of military coercion, and this is a political good. But technology cannot get at the root of the problem with human beings: it cannot conquer evil.

This is where the Christian view of evil provides a more realistic and nuanced account of what is actually wrong with the world. Unlike the father’s answer to the little girl, the enemy is a much larger and menacing reality whose defeat requires a power that military might cannot produce. The enemy is not the Germans, the Vietnamese, the Russians, or even the Wahhabi Saudis of the Middle East. The enemy, according to the Christian religion, is evil with its expansive kingdom of unruly characters: Satan the father of what is false, and the instigator and tempter of man; human persons, with their disposition inclined toward the domination of others and the exaltation of the self, barely able to see what is true and good. The children of evil are those who buy its program of lies and therefore become full of hatred and fear. Hatred and fear causes people to perceive their fellow humans as the ultimate threat. This makes us race to create bigger and better killing machines. If our country is to firmly grasp the hand of peace and justice, especially in a war on terror, the "enemy" must first be recognized as the evil that it is. This vice-producing evil is what we must speak of when asked by the little boys and girls, “Who is the enemy?” To not do so is to ignore the overall illness of man and treat its symptoms of hatred and fear as the primary problem

Matt