Go and Learn What This Means

My new niece Addison

In the Christian bible, the writer Matthew ascribes the following saying to Jesus: "Go and learn what this means: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners."
The phrase is haunting me. Go and learn what this means. How does one go and learn mercy? I realize that it haunts me because, for the most part, my life situation doesn't require mercy all that often. And, my life path does not intersect persons in desperate, visible need of mercy all that often.
And both of those, I think, reflect sin. Sinful institutions, sinful societies, sinful individual decisions, because the people that I name as brothers and sisters are in need of mercy. And if they need it and I don't, then we are divided. And division, especially division between the suffering and the not-suffering, is sinful.

Perhaps the best way to go and learn is to enter situations vulnerably, to join with the vulnerable. But I don't know.

Picture posted on www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=8524

But that's China

3000 people died on 9/11/01 in America's busiest city. I heard a country song about it yesterday in honor of Memorial Day.

3000 people died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Extreme Makeover Home Edition just built a new church and pastor's home there last week.

4000 US troops have died in Iraq since the war's inception. The US spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military spending. It is arguably the most emphasized plank in the presidential campaign platform.

The death toll in China reached 60,000 today from the earthquake. Nearly 100,000 died after the Myanmar cyclone. We remember our nation's fallen in all its wars this weekend. We will not remember the date of the earthquake or the cyclone on Memorial Day 5 years from now. Those people are farther away. We feel for them, enough to utter how tragic it is that they've died while watching the evening news. Sure, people are people, but that's China.

Seven Minutes of Terror

“Abraham and Isaac” by George Segal (b. 26 November 1924)

NASA is about to land a rover on Mars, and the engineers are anxious. They are departing from their recent success with air-bag landers, and trying to navigate with parachutes and rocket thrusters. There is a lot that can go wrong during the entry and soft landing. They've only been successful at landing on mars 55% of the time. That is great in baseball, but not so reassuring when millions of dollars and lots of science is at stake. The critical point in the 8 month journey is the landing - the contact with the atmosphere - the slowing down process. It takes roughly seven minutes to go from 13000 miles per hour to a complete stop, and everything has to go just right. For the engineers with careers on the line, it's seven minutes of terror, CNN says.

Seven minutes of terror. It was a good headline - it grabbed my attention. Fox might want to think about using that label for their international news spot. It could boost ratings. If I think back on my life, seven minutes of terror could aptly describe my experience as a 10 year old on Space Mountain in Disneyworld.

Or the time when my wife and I, when we were newlyweds, went on a canoe trip on a river in North Georgia. We had read in a guidebook that miners had drilled a shaft through a horshoe bend in the river. It was a few hundred yards from the entrance to the exit, at the elevation of the riverbank, and water flowed through the shortcut. "IF you can see daylight coming from the other side, odds are there are no dangerous obstructions." When we arrived, we anxiously debated whether to try it or not - how brave were we feeling? Was it worth the risk? Ah, to be young again. We pointed our canoes into the cave, and paddled forward.

It was like a real-live mine ride, minus the corporate liability prevention measures. We were instantly surrounded by blackness. The water picked up speed to a swift rapid pace, and so did our canoes. Several mid-shaft dropoffs added to the terror. Our paddles banged against the close, cold, wet rock. Our screams were not of the manufactured variety that you hear on a roller coaster to add to the fun; we were terrified, and the ride would not stop.

Our canoes tipped just before the current jetisoned us out the other side. We emerged bruised but otherwise unharmed, imagining all of the ways that the descent could have gone wrong. Seven minutes of terror.

I wonder what it was like for Abraham, when God asked him to sacrifice his son? Anxiety building, resolve wavering, exit considered, faith overcoming, all quietly kept in Abraham's heart. With each curious question of his son, the tears must have welled in Abraham's eyes, sucking the moisture from his already dry mouth and throat. And then, the moment when Isaac's curiousity unveiled the truth. There was no other sacrifice to offer. Dad is going to kill me as he serves our God. Seven minutes of terror, before the ram was produced and the story had a happy ending, all the while leaving the participants and the reader with a disturbing and innocence-killing aftertaste.

Oh, that we could promise the world only seven more minutes of terror. Oh, that the Janjaweed militias would have only seven minutes of numb destruction remaining. Oh, that the Lord's resistance army would have only seven minutes of child-soldier training left in their strategic plan of chaos. Oh, that there was only time for one more house-to-house search in Iraq. Oh, that a drunken father would come home angry for the last time, and after seven minutes of reckless searching, would pass out and later awaken to peace, repentance, and eternal sobriety.

Come quickly and provide us a ram, Oh God. Sacrifice our innocence if you must, but spare our children from another seven minutes of terror.