One of our Brazilian students, Tiago, sent me a video clip from Haiti. It was shot by a Brazilian U.N. peacekeeper soldier moments after the 7.0 magnitude quake struck Port-au-Prince a week ago. While I can’t understand the Portuguese voiceover or subtitles, the footage reality transcends all languages. Cement rubble lies strewn in the city street, a thick cloud of dust hovers above the surreal scene, while survivors stumble in a daze, in silence or with tears and screams. As the peacekeeper walks through the mayhem, filming as he proceeds, suddenly into view there is a cathedral, its façade crumbled across the street. But amazingly a giant porcelain crucifix towers toward the sky amidst the strewn debris. Some are gathered on their knees before the hanging Christ, with arms outstretched toward him, pleading in voices loud enough to be heard on the video. And you don’t have to speak Creole to know the content of their prayers. It is a scene you will not quickly forget.(http://fantastico.globo.com/Jornalismo/FANT/0,,MUL1451469-15605,00-VIDEO+MOSTRA+PRIMEIROS+MOMENTOS+DA+TRAGEDIA+NO+HAITI.html)
Where was Christ on that day and these now ten days hence of incomprehensible tragedy and mounting human loss? Is he a porcelain God, unmoved by suffering, even of this magnitude?
The ancient prophet quietly confessed, “In all their affliction, he was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9). In all our affliction, God is afflicted? It is true—the Eternal One, who emerges from amidst the narratives and nuances of Holy Scripture, is often times perceived by our distressed hearts as deus absconditus, what Martin Luther called “the hidden God.” And those sobbing prayers at the foot of that porcelain crucifix no doubt were directed in their anguish at the “hidden God”—the incomprehensible One who in our suffering can seem so very far away.
But the irony of that dust-choking scene from Haiti is that it portrays a more compelling truth: it is in the midst of our desperate human pain that the cross still towers with hope. For in the face of its Victim, we gaze upon the face of God—the only God in the universe who has entered into our human tragedy and in our affliction continues to be afflicted. How can we know? Because the cross is his own multiple-magnitude sacrifice to purchase the right to one day obliterate evil’s dark and tyrannical rule in Haiti and here. “Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory” (I Corinthians 15:54).
But until then, in all our affliction, he is afflicted. Or in the words of William Blake, “Till our grief is fled and gone, He doth sit by us and moan.”
Pastors' Blog
By Pioneer Pastors
Haiti’s devastating earthquake on Tuesday afternoon is our crisis, too. As I sit here and write the next morning, initial reports from Port-au-Prince indicate that much of the capital city of nearly 1.5 million residents lies buried beneath collapsed rubble, as the result of the 7.0 magnitude record-breaking temblor. The Parliament building, the presidential palace, the United Nations mission headquarters, hospitals, schools, churches and untold numbers of apartments, houses and tenement buildings have been flattened. How many lives have been lost in this epic disaster no one, of course, yet knows. Some already fear untold thousands of casualties.
The scale of this human tragedy would be large enough had it occurred in a more developed nation on earth. But the crisis reality is that Haiti ranks as the most impoverished nation in the western hemisphere. Already dirt poor, the vast majority of this island country now face a withering and nearly hopeless immediate future. As it would happen, over the holidays I read Mountains Beyond Mountains, the moving story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard Medical School graduate, who as a young adult plunged his life into the Creole countryside of Haiti, tackling and treating rampant tuberculosis and AIDS in the central plains. I can only imagine his thoughts today in the wake of this disaster.
But the crisis is not utterly hopeless. And that’s where you and I come in. We slept last night in homes heated and comfortable. We eat today at tables laden with bountiful food. But how would our King have us to respond? “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me” (Matthew 25:40, 35, 36 TNIV).
What can we do? Beyond joining a recovery team right now or an emergency aid team over spring break here at the university, we can give. May I suggest an emergency donation to ADRA (Adventist Development and Relief Agency)? ADRA is our faith community’s rapid-deployment emergency response organization, and with the monumental need for food, clothing and water in Haiti, our contributions are essential. Giving is as simple as going to www.ADRA.org and clicking on to the “Donate Now” icon. “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for Me.” Jesus is spending overtime in Haiti right now. Wouldn’t you like to join him in an earthquake of compassion?
Do you really think new “pat down” measures at the airport will make air travel more secure? I read a piece by syndicated British columnist Gwynne Dyer, and I’m afraid he’s right. In response to the Christmas Day attempt to bring down that Detroit-bound airliner through concealed explosives on one of the passengers, government officials have had to devise some sort of official “upgrade” to our present travel security to assure the traveling public that the skies once again are “friendly.” Dyer comments, “It is the duty of all public officials to ‘do something’ whenever a new threat appears, even if there is nothing sensible to be done.” The truth is that profiling international travelers by nationality or country of birth or origin (as the new security regulations do) not only lumps vast numbers of innocent people into the category of “suspicious” (or, guilty until proven innocent), it assumes that terror and terrorists are limited to these watch-listed nations (which is hardly true). And as for hand searches, most agree that the only effective method of full-body screening would need to include “body cavity searches.” And the public will not stand for that, will we?
So shall we then despair of air travel this New Year? Hardly! Dyer responds that we are still fifty times more likely to succumb in an automobile than in an aircraft. His point? “Accept that nothing is perfect” (SBTribune 1-6-10).
My point? There is no ultimate travel security through technology or by regulation. Just ask the Apostle Paul, who himself was shipwrecked three times, spending “a night and a day in the open sea” (II Corinthians 11:25). The compelling reality is that as children of the Heavenly Father our deepest dependence must always be on him. Which is why that great Psalm of the Reformation, the one that inspired Martin Luther’s “Ein’ feste burg ist unser Gott” (“A mighty fortress is our God”), opens with the strong assurance of ultimate divine security: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear” (Psalm 46:1, 2). No fear with him!
What more reassuring promise could there be for you and me to daily claim this uncharted New Year? Yes, on land and sea or in the air, we’ll depend upon the vigilance of our governments to do all in their power to protect the traveling public. And as friends of Christ and obedient citizens of our countries, we will (to the best of our ability) cheerfully submit to the measures that will impinge upon us. (I tried to remember that as I was pulled out of line for a full body “pat down” at the Johannesburg South Africa airport just before Christmas—and here I thought I looked rather honest!) But in the end whether abroad or at home “God is our refuge and strength.” And he will be our help 24/7 in the voyage before us. And besides, when God “pats down” your day before you even get to it, what could make your journey more secure?
Poor Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary—he can’t even show up at a holiday party without being cornered by another distraught denizen of the English-speaking world with the query, “What are we supposed to call the decade that’s now ended?” Pretend you’re the editor of the dictionary—how would you answer all those emails? After all, we call the 80’s the 80’s and the 90’s the 90’s. But what shall we call the 00’s? The Zeroes? Hardly. How about the Aughts (English for the number 0)? Or the Ohs? Or the Oh-Ohs (I like that one!)?
Fact of the matter is the English language isn’t going to melt down simply because we can’t come up with a word for the decade that’s now behind us. And it won’t be a philological crisis if we never do. “‘It’s really amusing to me,’ said Dennis Baron, a University of Illinois linguist and curator of a Web site that decodes language in the news. ‘People think if we don’t have anything to call the decade that maybe we will forget it, that it will be some kind of orphan decade, that it won’t exist. But it’s simply not true’” (SBTribune 12-28-09). As it turns out there are other words we’ve been missing for a long time. What do you call former in-laws? (Perhaps it’s best not to call them at all.) What about a romantic friend of an older adult who isn’t married? “Girl friend” sounds too teenager-ish, doesn’t it?
And what does God call the decade that is now behind us? Interestingly enough, he uses a non-chronological term. A word that isn’t bound by the passage of time. A single word that is both descriptive and proscriptive. One word that transcends the idiosyncrasies of the English language . . . or any other language, ancient or modern, for that matter.
Just one word. But in it is contained the divine DNA of the gospel we still call everlasting. The word? Forgiven. That’s it. Forgiven. Because two hundred decades ago “on a hill far away” God from his cross forgave this rebel race of all our sins (there being no shortage of adjectival modifiers and synonyms in the English language for that very human reality that is all ours—sin). “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (I Timothy 1:15). Forgiven. God’s one word to describe the decade of your life and mine that is now past. And the one–word reason for you and me to bow down this New Year and worship him. Forgiven indeed. Thank God!
Sir Isaac Newton called it “the foundation stone of the Christian religion,” this not-so-easy-to-decipher prophecy of Daniel 9:24-27. It’s connected, “determined” or “cut off” in biblical terminology, from a much more extensive prophecy in Daniel 8 which includes a symbolic ram, goat, little horn and 2300 prophetic days or literal years. The angel Gabriel had explained to Daniel what the ram, goat and little horn stood for, and informed Daniel that the 2300 days/years would reach “to the time of the end.” Then after Daniel’s extended prayer in chapter 9, Gabriel returned to explain to Daniel how the 2300 year prophecy of Daniel 8:14 would be initiated by a series of events that would occur over a period of 70 sevens, or 70 weeks (a period understood by many Protestant scholars through the centuries as 490 years). It’s this 490-year prophecy that Newton was so excited about.
Daniel 9:25 revealed that this 490-year prophetic period would commence with the decree to rebuild and restore Jerusalem. At the time this prophecy was given (6th century B.C.), Jerusalem lay in ruins and the Jews were in captivity in Babylon. Then in 457 B.C., the third in a series of Persian decrees allowing Jerusalem to be restored was issued, and the 490-year prophecy began to be fulfilled.
Daniel 9:25-26 indicates that 7 prophetic weeks (during which Jerusalem was rebuilt) plus 69 prophetic weeks (which added together computes to 483 prophetic weeks or 483 literal years) after 457 B.C., the Messiah the Prince, that is, God’s anointed One, would come. When that’s figured out mathematically, it works out to 27 A.D. (456½ + 26½ = 483). What is absolutely fascinating about this is that there is only one year in the life of Jesus to which the Bible assigns a date, and that is the year of His baptism, when He was anointed by the Holy Spirit, became the Messiah and began his ministry: according to Luke 3:1, 21-23, this occurred in the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, or 27 A.D., exactly as had been prophesied in Daniel’s prophecy given over 500 years earlier!
In Daniel 9:27 the focus shifts to the final seven to fulfill the prophecy. And here the drama intensifies. The focus of that final week is on what happened when Jesus came in the middle of it: “In the middle of the week He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering” (NKJV). Verse 26 adds that “Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself.” Based on the number of annual Passovers Jesus attended after His baptism, scholars near unanimously agree that His ministry lasted for 3½ years (which reaches to the middle of that final prophetic 7 year period), and then He was crucified, “cut off,” “but not for Himself” (because He died not for His own sins of which He had none, but for ours). And His death for us “brought an end to [the animal] sacrifice[s] and offering[s]” which had pointed forward to His death. It all happened just as it had been prophesied. Newton believed that this prophecy, which foretold over 500 years in advance the very time when Jesus would be baptized and crucified for our redemption, was proof positive that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied by the Old Testament.
Cataclysmic consequences for our world resulted when Jesus came in the middle of the final week of that prophecy. But then, cataclysmic consequences always occur when Jesus comes in the middle of anything, or anyone.
Boy—even our Santas are in trouble. At its recent conference in Philadelphia, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas (that really is their name!) declared that their priority this Christmas is not keeping their long white facial growth curly and clean. Their number one concern is H1N1. Come to think of it—that’d be your chief concern and mine, wouldn’t it—given all the little runny-nosed tikes sitting upon your rotund lap and cheerfully coughing and sneezing straight into your cherry-cheeked face! So for this Christmas our department store, WalMart and city mall Santa Clauses have requested that they be given national priority for the swine flu vaccine. And who can counter their logic? “After all, you wouldn’t want us passing on the last kid’s nasty swine flu virus to your little cherub, now would you?”
But then again, maybe it’s not such a bad idea—being contagious at Christmas time. Can you think of a more opportune season for your contagious faith to spread to others—the others at your office Christmas party, or the others next door where you live, or the others you’ll be sitting beside for that plane ride across the country? Turns out Christmas is a glorious time to be contagious for Jesus.
And if you need a Christmas precedent for going contagious over him, how about that eighty-four year old widow prophetess named Anna. “She was very old . . . . [but] she gave thanks to God and spoke about the [Christ] child to all” (Luke 2:36-38). Because when you’re infected with joy over the promised Savior, it’s OK to spread that contagion to all who will listen to you. Just like Anna.
So this Christmas here’s your H1N1 checklist: remember to wash your hands often, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, go easy on the sweets, take along some Kleenex and grab a handful of Happiness Digest’s in our pamphlet racks by the entrances to our church. Don’t go to church at Pioneer? Then stop by your local Christian bookstore and buy some colorful pamphlets that you can contagiously spread all along your way through this joyful holiday. Catching the H1N1 can be deadly. But catching the contagious truth about Jesus will save the life of the one you infect. So go and spread him . . . with “great joy!”
“I complained to God that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” That dusty line from Thanksgivings past finds fresh meaning in Derek McGinnis’ new book, Exit Wounds: A Survival Guide to Pain Management for Returning Veterans and Their Families. November 9, 2004, Navy corpsman McGinnis was in Fallujah, Iraq, racing in an ambulance to pick up injured Marines, when a Mercedes Benz packed with homemade explosives crashed into his side of the ambulance, severing his left leg above the knee and exploding shrapnel into one eye. After years of rehabilitation at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, 32-year-old husband and father Derek is focusing his life now on assisting other veterans and families who are having to pick up the pieces and cobble together a life beyond the war. A consultant with the American Pain Foundation, he is spreading a message of hope beyond adversity. “It’s OK to have mental pain, it’s OK to have physical pain. There are methods to have a productive life” (SBTribune 11-18-09). The proof hangs in the McGinnis garage at home—the racing bibs of a long distance runner: the 2006 Marine Corps Marathon, the 2006 Army 10-Miler, and the 2007 Alcatraz Challenge. All of the races run with a flexible prosthetic left leg replete with a neatly-laced running shoe at the end of the metal post. Derek McGinnis is grateful to be running at all.
“I complained to God that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”
“Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name” (Psalm 100:4). Amen.
While the nation continues to mourn over the senseless Fort Hood tragedy last week, let us be cautious about jumping to at least one conclusion. Thirteen families grieve the deaths of their soldier loved ones tragically killed on homeland soil, and one family grieves the yet inexplicable actions of a loved soldier who “snapped” into that killer. But exacerbating the post-mortem analysis is the fact that the alleged killer was not only an Army psychiatrist, but a Muslim, soon to be deployed to Afghanistan. Was it Nidal Hasan’s faith that prompted his actions?
Some say Yes. Why else would the killer reportedly have been shouting, “Allahu Akbar” (God is great!), as he sprayed his deadly fire? While I am not defending this American Muslim soldier’s betrayal and actions, I am, as a member of a minority faith community myself, concerned with how quickly elements of the public and press can raise insinuations against a misunderstood minority religion. How quickly those who share the same minority faith convictions can become suspect in the eyes of the larger community. President Obama, in his eulogy this week at the Fort Hood memorial service for the victims, carefully threaded the needle upon which public opinion seems to teeter: “‘No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts. No just and loving god looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world, and in the next’” (South Bend Tribune 11-11-09).
And what would be our just response to Muslims, whether neighbors or strangers to us? To live by Jesus’ Golden Rule, whereby we treat them with the same fairness and understanding we would want to be treated with were another David Koresh of Waco infamy to rise up and claim kinship with our own community of faith. I.e., the vast majority of any community of faith is a God-devoted, faith-filled part of our human family. And while our faith understandings differ and our perspectives about God/Allah are not always alike, nevertheless we can and must affirm the common ties of faith in God, compassion to all, and hope born of the belief that the Holy Book of God promises a better day for his earth children. If tragedies such as this one could become the catalyst for our own intentional (though halting) efforts to reach out to the Muslims we may yet meet and come to know, imagine the good that God himself might yet bring.
“For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” (Romans 5:15) It’s that “how much more” that will yet “overflow to the many” that must spur us on to love even as God does, no matter which grieving family we belong to.
Amen to AMEN! Karen and I had the privilege of joining several hundred physicians and dentists and their families this past weekend in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. You should’ve heard their stories. Here they are—medical professionals in the thick of their careers across this nation—pursuing Christ in the marketplace of health care. Or, as dentist Dusong Kim described it, it was Christ in hot pursuit of him, as the Cessna twin engine he was piloting in the dark over an invisible patch of California below, dropped out of the night sky, its engines shut down. Clutching the stick in desperation, his mind racing, his wife and two small children strapped in beside and behind him, this dentist at the apex of a lucrative practice recounted those life-altering moments as he blindly crashed the craft into an orchard of almond trees. But out of that survival, his testimony described a redirected career, ignited by a new passion for God and his mission. Or there was young orthopedic resident Joshua Drumm, who discovered that his lifelong ambition to become an orthopedic surgeon was tanking, simply because he refused to attend the residency application interview on Sabbath. The drama of his pleading before God, the subsequent rejections from elite orthopedic residencies across the nation once his Sabbath conviction became known, his refusal to compromise his commitment to his Creator, the Philadelphia hospital orthopedic chief’s repeated attempts to persuade Joshua otherwise—his was a shining testimony of trust in God for all of us who listened, medical professionals or not. Today Dr. Kim and his family are missionaries in Bolivia. And Dr. Drumm and his wife are in a successful orthopedic residency in Philadephia. “Faith in practice”—the weekend theme for this retreat—is more than evident in the lives of these many medical professionals. And on this campus of over 3500 young adults, how many of them, how many of you, will also hear the call of Christ to follow him as a medical missionary? Perhaps not to some foreign shore, but nevertheless you are being called to be a missionary for the kingdom right here at home in this nation. Massive student loans, society’s drumbeat to reflect the affluence accorded your medical station in life—there will be myriad pressures to turn a practice into a lucrative career. But I was impressed with this hotel ballroom full of medical professionals who have chosen to reject societal norms and instead plunge into a self-sacrificing life of healing our broken world in the name of Jesus. You can be one of them one day. Why the name AMEN? Because it stands for Adventist Medical Evangelists Network. Doctors, dentists, health care professionals as evangelists? Why the surprise? After all, God had only one Son—and he called him to be a medical evangelist. Could you be in better company?
“20 reasons America has lost its soul and collapse is inevitable.” Not exactly the sort of headline that CBS’s staid economic website, MarketWatch.com, is used to running. In a sobering, columnist Paul B. Farrell opens with the pronouncement, "We've lost 'America’s soul.' And worldwide, the consequences will be catastrophic." He suggests it’s a gut sense we all have: "You know something’s very wrong: A year ago, too-greedy-to-fail banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience. Now magically, they're back to business as usual, arrogant, pocketing outrageous bonuses while Main Street sacrifices, and unemployment and foreclosures continue rising as tight credit, inflation and skyrocketing federal debt are killing taxpayers." His indictment of Wall Street is biting. It "has lost its moral compass." Farrell outlines twenty top reasons why he believes American capitalism is doomed—from the life cycle of empires to today’s financial disparity (where "America’s top 1% own more than 90% of America’s wealth") to the explosion of the federal debt from $11.2 to $23.7 trillion. He concludes, “The coming collapse [with a “high probability by 2012”] is the end of an ‘inevitable’ historical cycle stalking all great empires to their graves. Downsize your lifestyle expectations, trust no one, not even media. . . . [T]here’s absolutely nothing you can do to hide from this unfolding reality or prevent the rush of the historical imperative.” (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-soul-is-lost-and-collapse-is-inevitable-2009-10-20) What a bleak prognosis! And yet, while this financial analyst may be right in his prognostication, he is wrong in his despair. I’ve invited two young adults to the Pioneer pulpit today. Why? Because I believe this new generation of young (from 18 to 30) represents the greatest potential for God’s kingdom in the history of earth. Farrell may be right—they have come on the scene in a time of great impending crisis. But that’s precisely the genius of divine timing. For here are young men and women—undaunted by statistical doom, unafraid of immense challenge, unashamed of the gospel—who are volunteering their lives in the mission of Christ! And this year at Andrews University we are inviting them to focus first on their own peers on this campus. For the last two months a team of them has been in training, preparing to lead this campus this winter in a university-wide week of revival and reformation. Young adults ministering to young adults—there is no more effective combination for the Spirit of Christ. No wonder that great messianic prophecy predicts that it will be the young that flock into the Messiah’s army in the final battle: “Your troops [the Messiah’s army] will be willing on your day of battle. Arrayed in holy splendor your young will come to you like dew from the morning’s womb” (Psalm 110:3 TNIV). The commentator Derek Kidner describes these young warriors as “a splendid army silently and suddenly mobilized.” And that is why I believe we can be unabashedly optimistic about earth’s future, no matter how economically doomed it turns out to be. For in the final battle it will be the young on Christ’s side through whom God will triumph! “With such an army of workers as our youth rightly trained might furnish, how soon the message of a crucified, risen, and soon-coming Savior might be carried to the whole world! How soon might the end come—the end of suffering and sorrow and sin!” (Ed 271) Who needs twenty reasons for doom—when God has one reason for hope! No wonder he gave us the young.
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