Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with President Bush this week and proclaimed that unless the Hamas-led Palestinian government recognized the state of Israel, renounced violence, and began serious negotiations with Israel before the end of this year, Israel would unilaterally decide which land in the West Bank to keep and which to leave to the Palestinians for a Palestinian state. Many conservative Christians in the U.S. praised Olmert's proposal, while other, more conservative Christians decried it as an abandonment of Eretz Israel, the land that God gave to Israel (i.e., including Gaza and the West Bank). All too few American Christians spoke against Olmert's proposal as unjust, untenable, and unbiblical. The modern state of Israel, which has every right to secure borders and peaceful coexistence with its neighbors, does not have a claim on the entire land some call Eretz Israel, nor does it have a claim on any more of the land it took from the Palestinians in 1967, except by negotiations with the Palestinians themselves. Acting unilaterally is unwise and will not bring peace to the region. Conservative Christians' contention that Israel has a valid claim to the land on the basis of either the extent of the Davidic kingdom or their interpretation of the words of the prophets and the book of Revelation is without foundation, as Jesus' words to his disciples in today's reading from Acts demonstrates. Jesus' disciples were eager to know when the kingdom of Israel would be restored. Jesus replied, "It is not for you to know the time or periods that the Father has set by his own authority." He then instructed them to wait to receive power to found the church and spread the gospel message throughout the world. The gospel message has nothing to do with the establishment of earthly kingdoms in the Holy Land, though it has much to say to existing nations today. In particular, the gospel that Christians proclaim should be good news for both Israelis and Palestinians, and a massive land grab clearly would not be good news for those whose land was appropriated. One of the main lessons of the Ascension is that Jesus does not lay claim to any geographical area on the planet. The modern state of Israel is no more--and no less--the basis for the kingdom of God than any other country. Christians need to leave behind their dangerous and unbiblical ideas concerning God's special love or plan for Israel. God does indeed love Israel, just as God loves the Palestinian people and the people of all nations. As Christians, we should do the same.
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Al Gore has a movie coming out soon--in fact, it's already out in Los Angeles and New York. It's not likely to be a blockbuster like The Da Vinci Code, but it's something you'll probably want to see. An Inconvenient Truth is based on Gore's multimedia presentation on the dangers of global warming, which he's been showing to people around the country for some time now. Gore warns humanity, and particularly Americans, that we're slowly--but not as slowly as some might think--changing the planet. Glaciers are melting, oceans are rising, global weather patterns are shifting, and humans are responsible for these changes. He calls on us to work together to halt the degradation of the environment before it's too late. The psalmist speaks of God's reign over the earth: "The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. He has established the world; it shall never be moved." We tend to think of the earth in terms just like this: "it shall never be moved." However, it is obvious that humans have made a definite impact on the world, in ways that have changed it noticeably. As Al Gore points out, our burning of fossil fuels is heating the planet and melting the polar ice caps, but global warming is hardly the only way in which we have impacted the planet. Gone are the thylacine, the passenger pigeon, the Steller's sea cow, the quagga, the dodo, the Guadeloupe parrot, and the pig-footed bandicoot. Human-generated toxins pollute rivers and streams. Rain forests are rapidly disappearing. Human-induced drought, the result of over-farming and other poor soil conservation techniques, is on the rise. Radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is proliferating. Most animals know enough to relieve themselves away from where they live, but where in the world are there no humans, or, a better question, where can human waste products be disposed of in a way that will not negatively impact the planet on which we all live? This is a question that humankind as a whole has not yet addressed, but it must be answered. It is true that God's reign over the earth is secure, but as God's representatives here, we're not doing that great of a job. If we believe that God created the world so that it might never be moved, we need to work together to lessen human impact on the planet and live in harmony with the rest of nature.
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In the movie Spiderman 2, a brilliant scientist, Dr. Octavius, performs an experiment that goes awry, and he is turned into a half human, half mechanical monster that terrorizes the city. Although this man-machine hybrid still possesses the human brain of the scientist, the machine has taken control of the whole, and Octavius roams about the city wreaking havoc on all, but especially on Spiderman. The church throughout the centuries has sometimes resembled the monster that Dr. Octavius became. It has frequently abandoned Christ's teachings about love and practiced hatred instead. It has waged war in the name of the Prince of Peace. It has persecuted Jews, Muslims, and many others, and it has even persecuted its own. Why would the church engage in such activities that are clearly contrary to the mandate it received from its founder? The answer is simple: it has all too often forgotten who the head of the church is. Today's reading from Ephesians says that God "has made [Christ] the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." In 2000 the Southern Baptist Convention voted to change the wording of its official confession, the "Baptist Faith and Message," in a number of ways from the previous (1963) version, but one of these changes was particularly striking. The 1963 version included this sentence: "The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ"; the 2000 version omitted it. While this change does not in and of itself prove that the SBC has abandoned Christ as its head, the modification to the earlier version is significant, and it appears emblematic of the church's love-hate relationship with Jesus Christ. We love to claim the name of Jesus, but we are embarrassed by his teaching to love our enemies. We claim to be Jesus' disciples, but we regularly abandon his admonition to lay down our lives for others; we prefer to let them lay down our lives for us. We applaud Jesus' treatment of women in the gospels, then we proceed to discriminate against women as if Jesus had never been born. We play up the Crucifixion and Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and we play down his teaching and example. The church often operates as an organism with someone other than Jesus as the head of the church. Fortunately, as Spiderman 2 demonstrates, having the wrong head is not necessarily the end of the story. Dr. Octavius discovered that he could ignore the "voice" of the mechanical monster and listen to his human brain. In the same way, the church must learn to hear only the voice of Jesus as he guides his church. There are many challenging situations that face today's church: environmental degradation, poverty, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and war, just to name a few. We don't have the wisdom or resources to address these problems on our own. We need to listen to the voice of Christ and follow the example that he set for us, but we won't be able to unless we first remove the false heads that we have followed in the past. The church can only have one head, and that head is Jesus Christ, who is "the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted" and the model whom we must follow in all of our decisions.
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If your boss promises you a promotion at work, do you immediately go out and celebrate, or do you wait to see if the promotion really comes to pass? When you close a big business deal, do you celebrate right away, or do you wait until the check clears? Some people are impulsive by nature, while others are more cautious, but the urge to celebrate when we're promised something good is sometimes too much to stifle. The standard text of today's reading from Luke says that Jesus led the disciples to Bethany, where he blessed them and was carried away into heaven. The disciples then worshiped Jesus and returned to Jerusalem, where they excitedly awaited the promised "power from on high." Several important witnesses, however, have a slightly different reading, which omits both the reference to Jesus' Ascension (which is repeated in Acts, the continuation of this gospel) and the mention of the disciples worshiping Jesus prior to returning to Jerusalem. This different reading is likely to be original, and when we listen to its version of the story, we get a slightly different picture of what transpired. Taking the second variant first, if the alternative reading is original, it is easy to explain the insertion of the disciples' worship of Jesus as an attempt to emphasize both their piety and Jesus' divinity (who else is worthy of worship?). The first variant is more interesting to me. The alternative reading omits any reference to the Ascension of Jesus, saying only that while Jesus was blessing the disciples, he withdrew from them. In other words, he simply disappeared from their sight. If this reading is original, the secondary addition of Jesus' ascent into the clouds reflects an insertion based on Acts 1, added to harmonize Luke and Acts. However, without the explicit reference to the Ascension, the disciples' joyous return to Jerusalem puts the focus on Jesus' promise that they will receive power rather than their witnessing Jesus being raised into heaven. I like this version of the story, because it shows the hope of the disciples, and hope is something we often need. When we lose our job, we still have hope. When a loved one gets sick, we still have hope. When we have problems with a spouse or child, we still have hope. Sometimes we don't need the power from on high to preach or teach, we need it just to get through the day. The promise of this passage, regardless of which reading we choose to follow, is that as followers of Christ, we have access to God's power.
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