The View from the West Mesa

Lauren McCain was a Virginia Tech student. She died on Monday, the 16th of April. The title is a snippet of what her father has said about her killer. Yes, it is only three days after his daughter’s death and he may well still be, and likely is, in the initial stages of his response to his daughter’s loss. He may well change his message, or at least his emotions surrounding it, in the coming days and weeks. Maybe when his daughter doesn’t come home for the summer and his house seems so empty, so quiet, so desolate, he will come to more fully grasp the violence that has been done to him and his world. And he will be entitled to changing his view. No one would blame him for changing his views, for being angry and demanding some sort of vengeance from someone . Anyone . While we deduce that he and his family have some pretty strong Christian convictions, he remains human. Feeble, imperfect, and subject to emotional and psychological conflicts and swings as are the rest of us. And so no on...

When Jesus is in the environs of Jerusalem prior to the Passover of His death, He spends time in the city, but apparently spends evenings outside the walls, in one or more of the small towns in the vicinity. It is coming into Jerusalem from one of these small towns that Jesus sees a fig tree and goes over to it. When Jesus gets to the fig tree, He searches through its leaves, looking for figs apparently. Finding no figs, He curses the tree saying that no one will ever eat figs from it again. We find out later that the tree withers and dies. None of this seems overly out of place. That is until we reach the phrase “It wasn’t the time for figs.” What? That simply doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t time for figs and yet Jesus curses the tree for not having any figs on it. Surely the creator of the universe knew that it wasn’t fig season. No, this story now takes on an almost laughable and confounding aspect. How are we to accept the text as written? How will we correlate Jesus looking for f...

The latest hubub at church has to do with reflections prior to the Lord’s Supper. Last Sunday, the speaker used an illustration of St. Patrick and how the attention paid to him has shifted over the centuries from his accomplishments in the Kingdom of God to green beer, rivers, and clothing. The speaker’s thrust was that we humans often forget the point of our faith and the purpose of our God in coming to the earth. Just as St. Patrick’s memory has shifted from hard and self-less evangelistic work to beer parties on the local college campus, we often lose track of the point of our calling and our God’s death for us. We are too often distracted by life, by work, by ourselves, that we forget who we were made and called to be. The Supper is not just a remembrance, but in that remembering, a rededication and a proclamation of faith. A faith that is supposed to lead to our very transformation into different people, with different values and goals. The importance is not in how we do it, but r...

The topic on the radio talk show’s nine o’clock hour was forgiveness. The host related a story of a lady who said that she had forgiven the people who had killed one of her daughters and severely wounded another. Her daughters were twin twelve year olds, shot by a drive-by shooter last week. The host of the show didn’t know whether or not he could forgive someone so quickly if they had killed his daughter. As you can imagine, there were phone calls galore, ranging across the spectrum of possible responses. There were those who said they would forgive someone after they had been punished, and there were those who said that the only one who can forgive is the victim and since one of them is dead, that’s not possible. Still others said they’d forgive the shooters only after “taking care of them.” Others seemed more willing to forgive. A couple folks called in to say that they would forgive the shooters because that’s what their faith said they were supposed to do, and one caller said if J...

Saul it seems, was instructed to have the Israelite completely destroy the Amalekites – people and animals. Rather, Saul allowed the Israelites to capture the Amalekite king, and to bring back the choicest live stock. When Samuel returns to visit Saul, the bleating of the sheep and the lowing of the cattle are clearly audible. Assuming that the Israelites had done what had been directed, Samuel finds this noise to be somewhat unexpected, and so he asks Saul to explain what has happened. Saul’s response is a two-parter. The first is that the people have brought back the best of the plunder to sacrifice it to God. The second is that Saul was afraid of the people and so he let them bring back the plunder [and in this explanation, we don’t know why]. Samuel’s response is his mission for God, and he will complete it. Samuel tells Saul that he has failed in his mission to destroy the Amalekites and as a result God has rejected him as king of Israel. In Samuel’s discussion with Saul, he says:...

I don’t know much about her, but I do know that the media has said “she captured our attention,” and “she wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe,” or other silly things. While she was breathing, she had a lot of attention, even a pretty poor television show for a while. But really, did anyone care? What do we know about her? Oh, that she married some rich guy, was in the middle of fighting for millions with the rich guy’s children, apparently slept with a number of weird and rather opportunistic guys, resulting in a laughable-if-not-tragic episode of one after another claiming to be the sire of her little girl, just to find out that she had left all her money to her now dead son. Unfortunately we knew much more about her than we needed to know. We know that she had little self control, loved attention, and led a life style that was unthinking and dangerous. She apparently taught her son to live the same style of life, using drugs, being unproductive, and dying early by mixing drugs in a reck...

What was Jesus asking when He looked at His disciples and asked, "Who do you say that I am?" He had gotten a few answers surrounding what the people at large had been guessing; primarily some famous prophet from Israel's history. But the people hadn't gotten it right. Jesus wasn't the reincarnation of some long-dead prophet. We may want to offer answers such as 'the messiah,' or the 'Son of God,' or some other such title. But I don't think Jesus was asking "What's my title." He wanted to know if the disciples had had their eyes openned to the working of God. And so His question is more than "Who am I?" I think He was asking something like "So, after running around the country side with me, watching me care for people, and hearing what I have said, do you think you can see God in me?" He wanted to know if the presence of the Divine among them awakened their hearts to who He and they really were. The question rem...