Tag Archives: Ravi

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Right Side of Pain

January 23, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

We shuffled back and forth between the states that sat like metaphors between our divorced parents—a summer, a spring break, a Christmas far from one of them. The pain of the one we were leaving was always palpable, but we always had to leave.

It’s strange the things you interpret as a child with the limited perceptions you have. I was very small when I determined that pain had sides—like a terrible river that could be crossed. I silently vowed I would not allow anyone to keep me stranded on the wrong side of people in pain. As a result, I spent a lifetime collecting strays, searching for the oppressed, feeling the pain of others, and desperately attempting to bind broken hearts, usually without much (or any) success. I realized one day that every community I have ever been involved with has been one somehow marked by suffering. At times, I was even somewhat frantic about expanding my circle of care. The world of souls is a sad and broken place. I was most certain of this because I was one of them, and I vowed that they would not be alone—or perhaps, at times, more accurately, that I would not be alone.

On occasion, I could be honest about unhealthy patterns to my ever-expanding circles of care. With each oppressed group, I would come among them with the best of intentions. I would give everything I could and some things I could not—love, time, money, tears, depression—until I collapsed, no longer able to give anything at all. I always thought I was retreating out of necessity because taking in pain was understandably exhausting. I figured that the metaphorical house I tried to keep filled, at times, simply needed to be emptied from over-crowding. I was opening up my house until people were hanging from the rafters and lamps started getting broken, and I was falling apart. Little did I realize, the house was falling apart before any of them entered in the first place. I was inviting them into the wrong house.

It is an uncomfortable mystery in the house of faith that sometimes God in his mercy must tear down even walls built with good intention. The psalmist knew it well: “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain… In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—but God grants sleep to those he loves.”(1) In my house, the broken and the oppressed necessarily found care with limits, hospitality with conditions. The psalmist points instead to a world re-formed and revived within the walls of the house of God. We are like olive trees, he says, who flourish in those great corridors, creatures remade by the care of Home, tears collected and life resuscitated in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever.(2)

Describing the disparity between the hospitality of mortals and the hospitality of God, Abraham Heschel writes, “The [human] conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and [the God] Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep.”(1) In other words, what if God never sleeps or slumbers in part because those who are hurting never sleep or slumber? Try as I may as a caretaker I cannot pull that off. No one can be as God to the hurting. We can stay awake with a dying loved one in his pain and suffering. We can care for neighbors who have no roofs to protect their heads at night. But the house in which the suffering find unfailing love will be God’s. Like the friends of the paralytic who carried him all the way to Christ, this is the house to which we must bring them. His is the house in which we all will live.

I think I will always move toward broken communities and I will struggle with the weight of the things I see. I struggle equally with the apathy that makes me want to flee from it all and clear away the troubled crowd. But I am convinced that the right side of pain can only be accessed through the house of God, a house built not by mortal hands, but held up by the beams of the Cross: A house filled with the loving exchange of a divine communion and the vicariously human touch of the Incarnate of Son. I know of no other refuge with great doors so open and a host who suffers but does not sleep, with rooms prepared and a table set with places even for enemies, where hospitality is not a conditional sharing of personal pains, or a self-centered preoccupation with suffering, but an extension of the very real invitation: Come to me, all who are weary and I will give you rest.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Psalm 127:1-2.

(2) Psalm 52:8.

(3) Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial, 2001), 11.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Is the Bible Sexist?

January 22, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There is a widespread belief around about the Bible that it is some kind of powerful patriarchal conspiracy which has been used to oppress women. As a female speaker I find that this question is frequently asked: “How can you as a woman promote such a sexist book? The church has tried to keep women down!” As a Christian, I believe I need to be sensitive to the issues which underlie such an emotive question. While it may indeed seem to be the case that women have been discriminated against by religion, the Bible itself deserves closer examination on the subject. How is it that many of the greatest Jewish and Christian pioneers have been women? What does the Bible really say about this subject?(1)

Throughout the Bible there are numerous positive images of women and stories that involve women. In the Old Testament women share the image of God at creation. At the end of time at the Second Coming of Jesus, the church is represented as the bride of Christ. All the way through from beginning to end, the Bible includes the feminine as an integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While it is true that the Bible is written over a long period of time into specific cultures and that some of these contexts did not give equal social advantages to women, it would not be true to say that the message of the Bible is sexist or discriminatory against women.

In the New Testament, there are quite a number of significant events involving women, particularly considering the conservative cultural attitudes of the context into which it was written. This context is demonstrated by a simple statement in John’s Gospel in the famous encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. There is a telling little sentence in 4:27 which sheds a great deal of light on just how radical the Bible is in affirming women. The disciples come across Jesus during his conversation with the woman and we are told they “were surprised to find him talking with a woman.” This is the context of Jesus’s ministry and yet he goes against these cultural trends time and time again.

He does this firstly by having female disciples. In a culture where the idea of women travelling around with a group of men, or having the status of disciple was seriously questionable, Jesus has a number of women who are included in his travelling circle who also contributed financially to the needs of the group. In fact, when Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are waiting outside to see him, he points to his disciples and says, “Here are my mother and brothers.” This statement is unthinkable unless there were women among his disciples. In the Middle Eastern culture of the 1st century, it would be unspeakably offensive to point to male disciples and use female imagery to describe them. The group of disciples referred to must have included some women.

We also see Jesus teaching women in the New Testament. In Luke 10:38, we read of Mary who sits at the feet of Jesus and engages in theological study, much to her sister’s chagrin. This phrase “to sit at the feet of” is the same formulation as Acts 22:3 where Paul describes his training under Gamaliel. The clear implication here is that Mary is affirmed as worthy of a Rabbi’s theological instruction; indeed, it is interesting that later on in John’s Gospel we read of Martha, Mary’s sister, who is the first to be taught one of the most astounding theological statements of the New Testament. Jesus says to her, “‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies.” In contrast to the cultural norms of the time, Jesus made a habit of revealing great theological truths to women. The first person who discovers Christ’s true identity in John’s Gospel is the Samaritan woman at the well. We must not underestimate how radical this is: Jesus was turning cultural taboos on their heads by teaching women and allowing women to be his disciples.

In reality, it is clear that women played a full and vibrant role in the ministry of Jesus, both as examples within his teaching and as recipients of it. While this may seem absolutely right and proper in our 21st century context we must remember how radical this was in first century Palestine. Jesus intentionally affirmed and included women. We see a continuation of this in the early church, from Lydia and Tabitha to Philip’s daughters, where women undertook various roles. While it is true to say that there are two particular passages in Paul’s writings which seem to go against all of this, by commanding some women to be silent and forbidding others from teaching, these must be read and interpreted in the context of the rest of the Bible. Paul himself gives guidelines for women when they publicly prophecy and mentions women who do teach like Priscilla.

When we come to the text of the Bible with the issue of sexism in mind, we must be clear that while God is predominantly spoken of with male imagery and ultimately is incarnated in the man Jesus, this is not to say that women are undermined or undervalued. Some female imagery is used of God, and Jesus constantly affirms the value of women, teaching them and interacting with them as human beings. Both male and female are created in the image of God and both are so precious that Christ comes to the earth to redeem both male and female with his blood shed on the Cross.

Amy Orr-Ewing is director of programmes for the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and UK director for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Oxford, England.

(1) A version of this article was first published in Idea Magazine, Jul/Aug 2005. See also Is the Bible Intolerant? by Amy Orr-Ewing (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006).

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle

January 21, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her male penname George Eliot. The work is considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian period and a masterpiece of English fiction. Rather than following a grand hero, Eliot explores a number of themes in a series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life and community. Eliot’s focus is the ordinary, and in fact her lament—in the form of 700 pages of detail—is that we not only so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really no such thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary human living. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she writes, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”(1)

The world Eliot saw around her is not unlike our own in its capacity to silence the dissonance of details, the frequency of pain, the roar of life in its most minute and yet extraordinary forms. We silence the wild roar of the ordinary and divert our attention to magnitudes more willing to fit into our control. The largest tasks and decisions are given more credence, the biggest lives and events of history most studied and admired, and the greatest powers and influences feared or revered most. And on the contrary, the ordinary acts we undermine, the most common and chronic angst we manage to mask, and the most simple and monotonous events we silence or stop seeing altogether. But have we judged correctly?

Artists often work at pulling back the curtain on these places we have wadded out of sight and sound, showing glimpses of life easily missed, pulling off the disguises that hide sad or mortal wounds, drawing our attention to all that is deemed mundane and obscure. Their subject is often the ordinary, but it is for the sake of the extraordinary, even the holy. Nowhere does Eliot articulate this more clearly than in her defense of the ordinary scenes depicted in early Dutch painting. “Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands….It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and flame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.”(2) For the artist, ordinary life, ordinary hardship, ordinary sorrow is precisely the scene of our need for God, and remarkably, the scene of God and miracle.

In this sense, maybe, the psalmist and prophets and ancient storytellers are all struggling artists, closing the infinite distance between the grandeur of God and an ordinary humanity in which God mysteriously wills to dwell. What are human beings that You are mindful of them? Mortals that You care for them?

The parables Jesus tells are also richly artistic, theological pauses upon the ordinary. Presented to people who often find themselves beyond the need for stories, whether puffed up with wealth and self-importance, or engorged with religion and knowledge, his stories stop us. Jesus seems acutely aware that the religious and the non-religious, the self-assured and the easily distracted often dance around idols of magnitude, diverting their eyes from the ordinary. And yet his very life proclaims the magnitude of the overlooked. The ordinary is precisely the place that God chose to visit—and not as a man of magnitude.

Whatever one’s philosophy or worldview, attention to the ordinary will be a gift, rooting bodies in this mysterious place, aweing these bodies to the miraculous. It is far too easy to miss the world as it really is, to hold a philosophy in hand and mind that cannot hold the weight of ordinary life. While Jesus’s own disciples bickered over the most significant seats in the kingdom, they were put off by a unwanted woman at a well, they overlooked a sick woman reaching out for the fringe of Christ’s robe, and they tried to silence a suffering man making noise in an attempt to get Jesus’s attention—all ordinary scenes which became the place of miracle. Even in a religion where the last are proclaimed first, where the servant, the suffering, and the crucified are lifted highest, the story of the widow’s coin is still easily forgotten, the obscure faces Jesus asked the world to remember easily overlooked. How telling that the call to remember the great acts of God in history is itself a call to remember the many acts of life we mistakenly at times see as less great. For the ordinary is filled with a God who chooses to visit.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) George Eliot, Middlemarch, (London: Penguin, 1994), 194.

(2) George Eliot, Adam Bede (London, Penguin, 1980), 224.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The End of Atheism

January 20, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In the last decade, a rash of fundamentalist atheists has become a publishing phenomenon. Touting that God is a delusion destructive to human life and civilization, and heralding the end of faith, these authors see only positive results at the end of atheism. Reason and rationality will conquer any “zealous” adherence or devotion to a transcendent God.

It’s fairly easy to identify with the concerns that motivate these authors towards atheism. Like them, I grieve over the violence perpetrated in the world in the name of God and religion. I can understand how Mother Teresa would poignantly wonder about God’s presence with her in the suffering wasteland of Calcutta. And certainly, I, like many others, have had life experiences that raise questions concerning God’s involvement in my life, and God’s love toward me. I can understand the despair-filled temptation towards agnosticism, or even atheism.

Yet, the world many atheists envision without God or faith is ultimately unrealistic, overly optimistic at best. Their beautiful portraits of what the world could look like if we only jettison our faith are painted with glowing brushstrokes of romantic imagery and language:

“This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ‘spiritual….’ No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation….love our neighbors, and [know that] our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.”(1)

I find this vision completely out of step with a world in which innocent civilians are being silenced and slaughtered by the thousands. Indeed, in light of the state of our world, an optimistic ending for atheism is as out-of-touch with reality as belief that the world is flat.

This vision of a godless world being a better world is, in fact, shattered by the writings of the prescient prophet and atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche as well. Nietzsche, the German philosopher who wrote in the nineteenth century, predicted what an atheistic society would look like. And unlike the pseudo-optimism of our popular atheists today, Nietzsche’s vision is harrowing and disturbing. “The story I have to tell,” he wrote, “is the history of the next two centuries…. For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection.” He claimed that the world was entering an “era of monstrous wars, upheavals, explosions and that there will be wars such as have never been waged on the earth.”(2)

Why such pessimism about the future of the world? Nietzsche argued that the actions of human beings had rendered God superfluous. In The Gay Science his madman yells, “‘Where is God?’ Well, I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I.” He goes on to doubt if even reason and the advance of theoretical knowledge, as our modern-day atheists posit, could heal the “wound of our existence.” Indeed, science, reason, and history could not overcome the reality that human beings “can rise or sink to no other reality than the reality of our drives.” One of those drives, Nietzsche argued, is the will to power, ultimately fulfilled by rogue regimes in World War I, and in World War II by the Nazi regime and the Communist regime led by Joseph Stalin.

In other words, Nietzsche’s utter suspicion of reason calls the entire optimistic program advocated by popular atheists into question. God’s absence would not make for a better world, according to Nietzsche. Indeed, his picture of a world without God, without a divine Creator intimately involved in re-creation, is a very grim place filled with darkness, amorality, and despair.

In contrast to the godless future predicted by Nietzsche or our current atheistic prophets, the prophet Isaiah, even in the midst of warnings of exile, destruction, and suffering had a hope-filled vision of a world permeated with the presence of God: “The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child will lead them… they will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”(3) This vision of a God-filled future is what Christians hope for and work towards, even as we wrestle with the challenges and the difficulties of a God-famished world. The alternative is far less hopeful.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 227.

(2) Quoted in Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5.

(3) Isaiah 11:6, 9.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Audacity of Imitation

January 19, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Unflattering as an adjective, insulting as a noun, imitation has fallen on particularly hard times. No one wants to be an imitation of a favorite songwriter, a fake impersonator of the grammy-award winning original. No restaurant proprietor wants to be reviewed as the “imitation” of a famed eatery. An idea is never lauded for being a good imitator of another. Inherent in the classification is the notion of being a lesser version of the real thing. Originality is by far the more the accepted fashion of the day. And the pressure to be original—to be different than, better than, more than—is both constant and intense. It is the modern way of distinguishing oneself, whether applying for college or making a pithy tweet. From impressions to possessions to thoughts, being original seems to be everything.

The pressure may be subtle but it can be overwhelming. It is quite likely the reason why social media seems exhausting to me, why meeting someone with similar ideas can just as easily promote worry as it might a sense of camaraderie, or why I sometimes delay writing out of dread that it’s just all been said before. The pressure to be the inventor and not the imitator, the original and not the clone, the drive to make a new statement about oneself ad nauseam is both a strange and exhausting task.

I was thinking about this trend recently as I reread some of the familiar, distinguishing lines of Martin Luther King Jr. recently. In light of our need for incessantly original tweets and blog entries, it is interesting to note that King’s most trusted advisors were horrified when they heard him launch into his “I have a Dream” speech that fateful day in Washington. To them, this speech was played out. It was old and tired and not at all the new statement they were hoping to make for the Civil Rights Movement. He had given versions of this speech in other places and on other occasions, not the least of which a crowd of twenty-five thousand in Detroit. According to those who had helped him write the new speech the night before, they agreed they needed something far more original to make the greatest mark. Together they wrote a new speech that night, but on the day of the event, King set novelty aside for a less original dream.

Like his advisors, our modern allegiance to originality might make it difficult to imagine staring at a crowd of two hundred thousand, charged with a new and bold opportunity to make a statement heard by more of the United States than ever before, and deciding in a split moment not to say something new. Thankfully, Dr. King had the courage to believe that what we needed was not reinvention or novelty but, in fact, very old news. His acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize reflected a similar conviction:

“I have the audacity to believe that… what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land. ‘And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.’ I still believe that we shall overcome.”(1)

To those inclined to obey the unrelenting orders of repackaging, reinventing, and re-presenting oneself ever-anew, proclaiming an ancient hope, being a follower of an ancient way, indeed, imitating an unlikely rabbi from the first century, likely seems as boring and unattractive as it is strange. Who wants to be an imitator, let alone an imitator of an antiquated mind and crucified body?

It may well be one of the most countercultural stances the church takes and invites a watching world to join. The Christian is an imitation. She walks a curiously ancient path toward a Roman cross of torture; he stands, unoriginally, with a humiliated body that bore the sorrow and pain of crucifixion. The way of Christ is not new. But the invitation of this broken body is as paradoxical and healing in this world as the broken body itself. For more curious than the invitation to be a follower in a world looking for trailblazers is the invitation to follow one who, though equal to God, emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, humbling himself to the point of death on a humiliating cross. True imitations of this unordinary love are far more gripping then the next short-lived new thing.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Martin Luther King, Jr., “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,” A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., 226.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Every Problem of Pain

January 16, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain today, Sir?”

Ironically, the question, a hospital’s attempt to understand and manage the pain of cancer patients, only seemed to cause my father more pain. He hated the daily inquiry that seized him almost as consistently as the sting of the growing tumor. It aggravated him deeply, more than I could say I understood. It was a philosophical quagmire for him that somehow mocked pain and amplified the problem of suffering. If he answered “10” in the midst of a painful morning, only to discover a greater quantity of pain in the afternoon, the scale was meaningless. The numbers were never constant, and what is a scale if its points of measurement cannot stand in relation to one another? If he answered “10” on any given day would that somehow control the ceiling of his own pain? He knew it would not, and that uncertainty seemed almost literally to add painful insult to an already fatal injury.

Considerations of pain and suffering are among the most cited explanations for disbelief in God, both for professionally trained philosophers and for the general public. If a good, powerful, and present deity exists, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Even for those who argue that the existence of God and the presence of evil can be reconciled, the vast amount of suffering in the world certainly compounds the dilemma. We can sympathize with Ivan Karamazov in his depiction of the earth as one soaked through with human tears. Imagine not merely one person measuring their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 but innumerable individuals: the temptation is to add all of these scales together as one giant proof against God.

In his 1940 book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis warns us against espousing such a temptation. “We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the ‘unimaginable sum of human misery,’” he writes. “Search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it.”(1) Or, said in another way, there are as many problems of pain as there are conscious beings—and God must deal with each and every one of them.

For someone like my dad, for whom weighing pain was both disparaging and unfeasible, this would perhaps have been one comfort in a maddening abyss of darkness. It means his own problem of pain was not lost in a sea of meaningless scales and indescribable measurements. It means that his frustrating, inconsistent ceiling of sorrow was itself held in the arms of God—and not vaguely absorbed in an immeasurable sum, nor given a distant, theoretical answer. It means that God had to come near not simply to pain in general, but to him and his cancer in person.

This is the scandalous confession of Christian hope. As Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “When life is hard and apparently hopeless, we can be confident that this darkness of ours can be taken up into the great darkness of redemption through which the light of Easter dawns. And when what is required of us seems too burdensome, when the pains become unbearable and the fate we are asked to accept seems simply meaningless—then we have come very close to the man nailed on the Cross at the Place of the Skull, for he has already undergone this on our behalf and, moreover, in unimaginable intensity.”(2) On the cross, in the person of Christ, the problem of pain was God’s own, felt acutely, absorbed personally, endured as one person—and answering as many problems of pain as there are sorrowing creatures.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 103.

(2) Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Scapegoat and the Trinity,” You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Sermons through the Liturgical Year (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 87.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Cross and the Pitcher

January 15, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The Kumbh Mela is the largest gathering on earth. During its last celebration in 2013, it was conservatively estimated that around ten million people would gather in the city of Allahabad in Northern India. Some even quoted a seemingly exaggerated figure of one hundred million pilgrims to this religious gathering! The Kumbh Mela (etymologically, “pitcher fair”) takes place every four years in Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nasik by rotation. In 2013, the festival was called the Maha (meaning “Super”) Kumbh Mela, which happens only once every 144 years. It is estimated that this Kumbh cost around 210 million dollars (US), but thankfully also generated approximately ten times that amount, as calculated by India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Even people from far-flung places came to make this event a success. Andrew Turner from Australia along with his wife and children built an 18 by 6 feet boat to ferry devotees from one side of the river to the other—free of charge. “I am living a dream at the moment,” he said. “When I heard that this Kumbh was happening after 144 years, I thought, I will never get a second chance…. I joined the locals and landed in Prayag and walked several kilometers with devotees… The zealous faith snapped my ties with logic and reason. It was mesmerizing.”

Hindu tradition says that there was a war between the gods and the demons over divine nectar, and in the process, four drops of nectar fell from the pitcher. These fell on four different locations, which overlap the cities where the Kumbh is held. One of those drops fell at Haridwar where the river Ganges flows, while another fell at the Sangam. The Sangam is the confluence of three rivers—the Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythological river Saraswati in Prayag. The other two drops fell at Kshipra in Ujjain and Godawari in Nasik. A dip in these rivers on auspicious dates during the Kumbh is said to rid pilgrims of their sins.

The reality of sin is clearly expressed in the Christian Bible. The universality of sin has also been declared in Romans as “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Anyone who reads the newspaper and honestly reflects on it is hard-pressed to deny the reality and universality of sin. Through the ages, humans have tried to rid themselves of sin and its consequences. Religious rituals, idols, journeys, and sacrifices have all tried to assuage and comfort the sinner’s heart, but have been found wanting.

Robert Lowry wrestles with this question in the lyrics of a hymn and arrives at a significantly different answer:

What can wash away my sins,

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

What can make me whole again,

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Oh precious is the flow,

that makes me white as snow,

No other fount I know

Nothing but the blood of Jesus

In the Christian religion, grace that is made available through the death and resurrection of Jesus is the very fount which offers release from the burden of sin and restores our relationship with God. And thankfully, we do not need to snap our ties to logic and reason, but rather embrace an honest and rational examination of a real person. This would lead us to the empty grave of Jesus—the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Death no longer has a hold on him and this victory he extends to a fellow humanity: O Death, where is your sting? O grave where is your victory?

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead offers freedom not only from the sting of death but also from bondage to sin and our many attempts to assuage it—this, not at any cost to us or anyone else, for God has freely offered the gift. Thus, we can confess Jesus as Lord anytime, anywhere, and we will be saved! It makes one gasp in wonder at the overarching simplicity and compelling elegance of this very good news.

Cyril Georgeson is a member of the speaking team with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Mumbai, India.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Whole Story

January 14, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There are stories that emerge from the life of Jesus before he was old enough to tell stories of his own. Some are more familiar than others. Some are always written out of the school plays and pageants. The prophet Isaiah told of a child who would be born for the people, a son given to the world with authority resting on his shoulders. Hundreds of years later, in Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, this story was coming to life. The angel had appeared. A child was born. The magi had come. The ancient story was taking shape in a field in Bethlehem. But when Herod learned from the magi that a king would be born, he gave orders to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under. At this murderous edict, another prophecy, this one spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, was sadly fulfilled:

A voice is heard in Ramah,

mourning and great weeping;

Rachel weeping for her children

and refusing to be comforted,

because they are no more.(1)

While the escape of Mary and Joseph to Egypt allowed Jesus to be spared, the cost, as Rachel and all the mothers’ who did not escape knew well, was wrenchingly great.

Of the many objections to Christianity, the one that stands out in my mind as troubling is the argument that to be Christian is to withdraw from the world, to follow fairy tales with wishful hearts and myths that insist we stop thinking and believe that all will be right in the end because God says so. In such a vein, Karl Marx depicts Christianity as a kind of drug that anesthetizes people to the suffering in the world and the wretchedness of life. Sigmund Freud’s estimation is similar: Belief in God functions as an infantile dream that helps us evade the pain and helplessness we both feel and see around us. I don’t find these critiques and others like them troubling because I find them accurate of the kingdom Jesus described. I find them troubling because there are times I want to live as if Freud and Marx are quite right in their analyses.

I am thankful that the story itself refuses me from doing so.

The story of Christmas is far from an invitation to live blind and unconcerned with the world of suffering around us, intent to tell feel-good stories while withdrawing from the harder scenes of life. In reality, the Incarnation leaves us with a God who, in taking our embodiment quite seriously, presents quite the opposite of escapism. The story of Rachel weeping for her slaughtered children is one story among many that refuses to let us sweep the suffering of the world under the rug of unimportance. The fact that it is included in the gospel that brings us the hope of Christ is not only what makes that hope endurable, but what proves Freud and Marx entirely wrong. For Christ brings the kind of hope that can reach even the most hopeless among us, within the darkest moment. Jesus has not overlooked the suffering of the world anymore than he has invited his followers to do so; it is a part of the very story he tells.

In a poem called “On the Mystery of the Incarnation,” Denise Levertov gives a description of the Christmas story with room for the darkness and a mystery that reminds us that the light will yet shine:

It’s when we face for a moment

the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know

the taint in our own selves, that awe

cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,

to no innocent form.

But to this creature vainly sure

it and no other is god-like, God

(out of compassion for our ugly

failure to evolve) entrusts,

as guest, as brother,

the Word.

The story of the Incarnation presents a God who offers the whole Word, who comes near to the whole story, not merely the parts that fit neatly in pageants. This God speaks and acts in the very places that seem so dark that no human insight or power can do anything. God comes to be with us in our weakness, with us in despair and death and sorrow, with us in betrayal and abandonment. There is no part of the human experience that is left untouched by God’s becoming human. And there is no part of human experience that God cannot redeem and heal and save. There are many Rachels who are still weeping—the poor, the demoralized, the suffering, the mourning. With them, we wait and watch, looking toward the God who comes into the very midst of it.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(01) Jeremiah 31:15, Matthew 2:16-18.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sign and Signifier

January 13, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Harold Camping, former president of Family Radio, declared that the world would end on May 21, 2011.(1) Camping was in good company when he made this kind of prediction. The Mayan prediction of the end of the world, popularized in the film 2012, has brought searching for the signs of the end times into the popular culture. But for Camping, this was not the first time that he made this kind of prediction based on the ‘signs of the times’. On September 6, 1994, dozens of Camping’s followers gathered in Alameda, California to await the return of Christ, an event Camping had been preaching about for two years. Despite Camping’s careful calculations and reading of the signs that pointed to his return, Jesus did not return. Camping later conceded that he misread the signs. Whether through mathematical formulae or symbolic codes contained in Scripture, as in Camping’s case, or watching after political maneuvers, leaders, and geo-political reorganization, many become obsessed with finding signs for the end of the world.

But there are other signs some seek as well. Interestingly enough, the Christian season of Epiphany is also a season of signs. The signs of Epiphany are not for calculating the end of the world, nor are they the signs seemingly marked out in geo-political happenings. Instead, those who enter into this season are asked to seek signs that reveal the identity of Jesus as God’s chosen Messiah for the world. Beginning with the visit of the foreign magi, who found Jesus by seeking signs in the stars, followed by the baptism of Jesus by his cousin John, and the various miracle stories in the earthly ministry of Jesus, the season of Epiphany enjoins all seekers after signs to look again at the ‘sign’ of Jesus.

For this reason, Christian worship often uses the text of John’s Gospel during Epiphany. For in John’s Gospel, seven signs are recorded by the evangelist: the miracle at the wedding of Cana, the healing of the nobleman’s son, the healing of the paralytic, the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus’s walking on water, the healing of the man born blind, and the raising of Lazarus. All reveal something unique about this man from Galilee.

In John chapter 6, a poignant and theologically rich section of the evangelist’s narrative, the multitudes come seeking a sign from Jesus. Many of these seekers have just been fed by Jesus in what has been called the feeding of the five thousand (see John 6:1-14). Still, they ask him, “What then do you do for a sign that we may see and believe you?” Jesus answers them by saying that he is the bread of heaven. That is, in his very person life and sustenance reside! He is the sign from God! And yet the people do not believe him. They continue to seek for other signs and wonders. Even the most religious among them, specialists in the interpretation of signs, grumble that Jesus claims to be the bread of heaven. Jesus rightly proclaims, “But I said to you, you have seen me, and yet do not believe.”(2)

What are the signs that you seek? Sometimes, we seek the signs and miss the reality towards which they point. Christians and all seekers can wonder together in the season of Epiphany—and in light of John’s sign-filled narrative—what is the point of a sign if it does not inspire belief? That is to say, what is the point of a sign if it does not instill faith as opposed to fear, belief and hope rather than dread or simply amazement, as one would view a magic trick? In this sense, the miracle-signs of Jesus invite sign-seekers further into his unique life. Simply seeing the signs, like only seeing the trees and not the forest, is not the point. The signs reveal the signifier. He is both sign and sustenance, wonder and life itself.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Justin Berton, “Biblical scholar calculates the world will end next May,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 4, 2010.

(2) John 6:36.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Body of Hope

January 12, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Dr. Paul Brand was an orthopedic surgeon who chose his patients among the untouchable. With his wife, who was also a physician, he spent a lifetime working with the marred and useless limbs of leprosy victims. In fact, he transformed the way in which medicine approached the painful and often exiled world of the leper. Whereas the disfigurements of leprosy were once treated as irreversible consequences of the disease, Dr. Brand brought new hope to sufferers of leprosy by utilizing the body’s capacity to heal. “I have come to realize that every patient of mine, every newborn baby, in every cell of its body, has a basic knowledge of how to survive and how to heal that exceeds anything that I shall ever know,” wrote Brand. “That knowledge is the gift of God, who has made our bodies more perfectly than we could ever have devised.”(1)

Philip Yancey was a young journalist when he first met this dignified British surgeon in an interview. He recalls a teary-eyed Brand speaking of his patients, describing their disease as if first hand: their unremitting suffering, experimental surgeries, societal rejection. Many memorable conversations later, Yancey would recall the healing presence this physician was to his own crippled and weary belief in God. To Yancey, Brand represented faith and hope in body, amidst nothing less than suffering and death and loss. His belief in Christ caused him to outwardly live in a very particular way. He worked to restore the image of humanity and the image of God in lives marred by disease, and so helped restore the face of God in the doubt-ridden world of a young author. As Yancey later would write of their meeting, “You need only meet one saint to believe, to silence the noisy arguments of the world.”(2)

Brand was for Yancey a physical reminder that Christianity is no mere system or organization, preference or thought process, but a way of life with one concerned as much with broken bodies as marred souls. In a 1990 lecture titled The Wisdom of the Body, Dr. Paul Brand said, “I pray that when my time comes I may not grumble that my body has worn out too soon, but hold on to gratitude that I have been so long at the helm of the most wonderful creation the world has ever known, and look forward to meeting its designer face to face.”(3) In a body like ours, God silences the arguments of a noisy world. Jesus approaches humanity as one of us, coming to make us well entirely—in body, mind, soul, senses.

Of the ten lepers Jesus healed on his way to Jerusalem, there was only one who stopped to recognize the significance of the man behind the miracle. For this one, it was not simply a life-changing moment of being healed of leprosy; it was a life-changing invitation into a kingdom and a community, into life as a new creation. Falling on his face at Jesus’s human feet, he saw the Son of God who made him well. And Jesus said to him: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”(4)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, In the Likeness of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 16.

(2) Philip Yancey, “The Leprosy Doctor,” Christianity Today (November 2003), 112.

(3) Paul Brand, “The Wisdom of the Body,” Chicago Sunday Evening Club, Program 3428, April 28, 1990.

(4) Luke 17:11-18.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Nature of Belief

January 9, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Miracles,” said my friend. “Oh, come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know now that Nature is governed by fixed laws.”

“Didn’t people always know that?” I said.

“Good Lord, no,” he said. “For instance, take a story like the Virgin Birth. We know now that such a thing couldn’t happen.”

“But look here,” I said. “St Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary; if you’ll read the story in the Bible you’ll find that when he saw his fiancée was going to have a baby he decided to cry off the marriage. Why did he do that?”

“Wouldn’t most men?”

“Any man would,” I said, “provided he knew the laws of Nature—provided he knew that a girl doesn’t ordinarily have a baby unless she’s been sleeping with a man. St Joseph knew that law just as well as you do.”(1)

It’s not difficult to find any number of people who have trouble with the nativity scene at the heart of the Christmas story. According to the Barna Research group even Christians are struggling with the virgin birth at the center of their own faith tradition. More than fifteen percent of Christians in the United States admit not believing in the virgin birth, a statistic which is readily increasing.

Across continents, atheist campaigns each year ask the world to admit over its primitive nativity scenes that we know it is only a myth or to celebrate reason instead this season. The battle these voices propose between science and faith describes something like two opposing swordsmen sworn to fight to the death. Though it is an image supported at times by both sides of the fight, it is at best a blind spot in the minds of many and, at worst, a wishful delusion.

In his 1945 essay “Religion and Science,” which begins with the above conversation, C.S. Lewis exposed one of the most common false assumptions at the heart of the science/faith divide, particularly as it pertains to the nativity of Jesus. The assumption is that this “primitive” nativity was likewise filled with primitive thinkers devoid of any sort of knowledge of biology or natural reasoning. Here and elsewhere, Lewis saw that we hold our scientific advancements as something like demerits for prior generations, perpetuating the mentality that the only accurate thought is current thought, the only mind worth trusting is an ‘enlightened’ one—of which we, of course, are conveniently members.

Yet, Joseph knew enough about the laws of nature to at first conclude the infidelity of his fiancée. He knew that babies and pregnancies did not appear on their own and thus intended to divorce Mary quietly, until something changed his mind. The disciples, too, knew enough about the laws of physics to be completely terrified by the man walking on the water toward their boat. The crowd of mourners knew enough about death to laugh at Jesus when he insisted that the dead girl was only sleeping, and to walk away astonished when she came back to life. There were also the magi, astrologers who followed their scientific calculations to the child; Philip and Andrew who knew that the mathematics of two fish and a starving crowd were not going to divide well; Mary and Martha who knew that their brother’s death was the last word; and Thomas who knew the same after he watched Jesus crucified.

In each of these objections, I thankfully hear my own. So much so, that it would appear fairly clearly that faith is not a turning of one’s back on the fixed laws of nature or physics or mathematics, but rather, a recognition in the very face of these laws which we know and trust that something from outside the law must have reached into the picture. I find each of these scenes both remarkable and reasonable precisely because of the reactions of men and women with a grasp of natural law and the same objections that any of us would have offered had we been present. It would be blind faith indeed if we were receiving a story that wanted us at the onset to fully reject the laws of natural reasoning in replacement of something else. What we receive instead is a story filled with undeniable indications—indications which suggest that something, or Someone, has startlingly stepped into the picture.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, “Religion and Science,” Undeceptions (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1971), 48.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The North Star

January 8, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I recall with clarity a night when my wife and I were on vacation in California. We had spent the day hiking in the mountains and in the afternoon had descended to explore the mysterious and ancient landscape of Mono Lake, one of the oldest lakes in North America. Pinned to the information board by the parking lot was a sign advertising a talk by a park ranger that very evening: “Stars over Mono Lake.” And so it was. That evening we found ourselves lying on the ancient sands, looking up at a night sky in which a million points of light glowed with an intensity I’d never seen before. The air was cold and clear, the hauntingly beautiful desert silence broken only by the occasional howl of a lonely coyote, cry of an insomniac gull, or call for help of a distant and woefully lost tourist.

But it was the sky that really struck me. I’d never seen it so beautiful before. In the city where we live, light pollution drowns out the splendor of the stars. Lights do punctuate the Toronto night, but they tend to be of the red-amber-green-red variety. What I was seeing, lying on those freezing sands at Mono Lake, was the spectacular sight of the night sky in all its glory. It was, for me, God’s handiwork writ large as a myriad of stars lay twinkling above me. I was awestruck and listened with fascination at the park ranger’s talk on the stars above, in particular the various constellations that slowly wheeled in front of us: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, Aquarius.

And as I looked up, I was reminded of a biblical passage about stars, one that is meant to be descriptive of Christians. The apostle Paul is speaking to the Philippian believers about the kind of community their association with Jesus compels them to be: “Therefore, my dear friends… do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life.”(1)

When I heard that passage again a few months later, my mind was immediately cast back to that night at Mono Lake and to the journey of the constellations and patterns that generations of people have seen before me. Understanding these constellations brought the night sky alive and told stories whose characters are bedecked in the very stars. And this got me thinking about the metaphor Paul uses. What does it mean to shine like stars in the Christian story? What does it mean for a person to burn brightly against the inky blackness of night? And particularly, as Christians around the world remember the account of the magi—the astrologers who followed a star that eventually stopped over the place where the young Jesus lay—is the same story being told in expectancy, hope, and light today?

Well, there are, of course, many different types of stars, but the hope I take from that starry evening centers around a few vivid memories. To begin with, constellations are made up of stars which, on their own, would be but one small, glowing dot in the darkness, but together form a bigger picture; together, they tell a more powerful story. Nobody has heard of the star “Merak,” for instance, but everyone has heard of the constellation it is a part of: the “Big Dipper” or the “Plough,” one of the most famous formations in the sky. Together, stars in constellations tell a story greater than their individual parts, and how true this is of people as well. It’s best not to judge a religion by the testimony of one bold but fleeting light. Rather, the constellation of millions through the centuries, the example of believers young and old, across tribes and nations, the witness of those who first beheld the events of Jesus of Nazareth—these are the stars that light the universe with something to ponder.

Moreover, constellations don’t stand still. They move. In particular, they rotate, slowly wheeling around a singular fixed point in the night sky—the “North” or “Pole” Star. Significantly, Christians together tell the story of hope in darkness when their axis is God alone—not an issue or a common interest—but the person of Christ who was born, died, and raised. The expectant Christian story continues to be told, as it was to the magi long ago, when the Christ child is the fixed point, our north star, our pole star, when it is he who determines how we move and turn.

Many years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands.”(2)

To sailors and navigators, before the invention of GPS, the North Star was crucial; by orientating oneself to it, you could find your way home through the wildest seas. Likewise, it is Christ’s story that makes the collective light of Christianity shine brightly amidst the darkness. It is Jesus himself, around which everything turns, who is heaven’s bright sun, whose radiance glows brighter than the brightest star, so much so that the new heavens and the new earth need neither sun nor moon. The splendor of this sight is worth beholding indeed.

Andy Bannister is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

(1) Philippians 2:12-16.

(2) Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 137.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Christmas Revealed

January 7, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The Christmas season as most of us know it has drawn to a close. All the preparations and fanfare of Christmas fade into the calendar of another year. But the church calendar, a reminder of a different rhythm within the world around us, offers the countercultural suggestion that we take the Christmas story with us into the New Year. Six days into our new calendars, after trees have come down and lights are put away and the ambiance of Christmas has dimmed, Epiphany is celebrated. Hardly dim in significance, the feast of Epiphany commemorates the events that first revealed Christ’s identity to the world: the magi’s adoration of the Christ child, the manifestation of Christ at his baptism, the first miracle at the wedding in Cana, among others.

The arrival of the magi to the birthplace of Jesus was the first of many windows into the identity of the child born to Mary and Joseph. “After [the magi] had heard [Herod] the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route” (Matthew 2:9-12). As it had been foretold, nations came to his light and kings to the brightness of his dawn; they brought gold and frankincense and worshiped him.(1) A new mystery was revealed in Jesus, and the story continued to unfold before the world.
The Christian story on the feast of Epiphany is that we are a people with whom God is profoundly communicating. Like those who first journeyed to set their eyes on the child, we are invited to see it for ourselves. We are invited to participate in a story that takes us beyond ourselves, even as it requires us to die to ourselves. But in so doing, Christ himself transforms our lives and our deaths, breathing something new where death stings and tears flow.

Jesus appeared on the scene of a people who had lived with God’s silence for four hundred years. There had not been a word from God since the prophet Malachi. The heavens were silent; but God was getting ready to proclaim the best of all news. Into this wordless void, God not only spoke, but revealed the Word as flesh standing beside us, crying with us, leading us home. Epiphany, like the Incarnation itself, reminds us that into ordinary days epiphany comes, so that even death itself cannot stop a life shared with a God willing to become one of us. There was a first Epiphany and there will be more to come. The good news of the Christian telling of Christmas is that Christmas indeedcontinues.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) cf. Isaiah 60:3, 6.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Life and Death

January 6, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Perhaps in reaching middle age, one might expect one’s thoughts to turn toward thinking more about the end of life than the beginning. It certainly seems that each year passes by faster and faster, one season racing into another and before you can blink another year is gone. The 1998 film, Meet Joe Black offers a poignant glimpse into this phenomenon. On his 65th birthday, William Parrish’s last night on earth, he gives a speech to those gathered to celebrate his life. With hesitation, he shares what will be some of his last words:

“Every face I see is a memory. It may not be a perfect memory. Sometimes we’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re all together, and you’re mine for a night. And I’m going to break precedence and tell you my one wish: that you would have a life as lucky as mine, where you can wake up one morning and say, ‘I don’t want anything more.’ Sixty-five years…don’t they go by in a blink?”

The years do go by in a blink. Ancient writers and poets often wrote about the transience of our lives, even invoking the Divine to help them remember the brevity of their days: My days are swifter than a weaver’s… Our days on earth are like a shadow… You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.(1) I was reminded of this during years of service with an aging congregation. There were more funerals than births, baptisms, or weddings. And having to bury those I had just recently befriended would take a great toll.

Despite the many emotional, physical, and spiritual challenges I faced during this time of ministry, I now see that I received incredible gifts. Journeying with someone you love through the dying process reminds you of your own mortality and finitude. The opportunity to deepen emotional reservoirs and to gain an appreciation for the preciousness of life is an invaluable gift.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus said a good deal about this dying journey. Often, he called his followers to self-sacrifice and to single-hearted allegiance by using the language of death. In Luke’s Gospel, he told the great multitudes following him that “if anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”(2) What is often forgotten in a casual reading of the gospels is that the Cross was the instrument of death and disgrace. It was an instrument reserved for the vilest offenders, and as such was an instrument of finality for the lowest of the low. Yet, whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. There is no “if” in Jesus’s statement, only whether or not we will accept the invitation to death.

The fact that Jesus issued this kind of invitation to the “multitudes going along with him” should not be lost either. To hear that death is a part of life’s purpose, and that those who would want to follow Jesus should expect nothing less, is a very difficult saying. Given the choice, most humans wouldn’t sign up for death. We cling to life as tenaciously as a wolf to her prey. I suspect the crowds dissipated after they heard Jesus speak these very difficult statements. Perhaps they were the very ones who later clamored for his death by crucifixion. It was easy to follow Jesus when he focused on the positives.

And yet, as sure as babies are born into this world and new life begins, death is inevitable. Not just physical death, but the “little deaths” we experience every day; the death of dreams, of life’s highest expectations, and the death of wanting more from life than it will offer. Is there any kind of gift given even in these moments of death? Can abundant life be found even as life marches quickly towards decline and decay? Can grace come even as we move towards Calvary with our cross?

In speaking of his own death and the gifts it would yield, Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it; and he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal” (John 12:24-25). In the face of a world that shouts to us to grab all we can now, to find self-fulfillment and be happy, Jesus extends to us the ironic invitation to embrace death in order to truly find our lives—and to find life eternal. This is both a promising and challenging invitation. Can we really find life out of death? And is it abundant even in the everyday, ordinary living most of us experience? The challenge Jesus sets before those who would follow is the challenge to “die” to what we think makes for life; it is to choose—in this life that goes by as quickly as a vapor—what would make for life indeed.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) See Psalm 39:4, 1 Chronicles 29:15; James 4:14.

(2) Luke 14:26-27.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Gifts of Magi

January 5, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I was sold on the genre of tragedy as a child at Christmastime, long before I knew anything about genres or tragedies. Jim Dillingham Young and his wife Della are the subjects of The Gift of the Magi, a short story written by O. Henry in 1906. Struggling to make ends meet in their one room apartment, Jim and Della have but two prized possessions between them: for Jim, a pocket watch given to him by his father, and for Della, her long, beautiful hair, of which it is said that even the queen of Sheba would be envious. When Christmas comes, Jim and Della have nothing to scrape together to buy even a simple gift for the other. Yet, longing to give something meaningful out of great love, each, unbeknownst to the other, sacrifices the greatest treasure of the house; Della sells her hair to buy her husband a silver chain for his beloved pocket watch, and Jim his pocket watch to buy Della pearl combs for her beautiful hair. Thus unfolds The Gift of the Magi and “the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days,” writes O. Henry, “let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.”(1)

Some short stories tell giant lessons. For me, this was one of them. In the mind of a child, Jim and Della acted out the ultimate display of love, the kind of love that breaks your heart in a way that somehow makes it feel more whole. For the sake of the other, they released willingly from their hands the very thing they wanted to hold onto the tightest. Could I do that? I wondered. And even as I asked, I saw clearly that there were two questions in the one uttered. Could I give up the thing I want most to hold onto? But also, and maybe even more plaguing, Could I love someone like that? We learn the art of self-protection at a young age, and even then I was childishly aware of it. But sacrificial love, the sacrificial giving of oneself, even when it takes a tragic or ironic turn, knocks at every wall of self-preservation with an invitation: it is terrifying but also pregnant with possibility, an invitation to the destruction of walls, but also to homecoming and to new rooms.

In the Christian account of Christmas, the sacrificial birth of Christ into the world among us brings about some of the loudest knocking ever known to human hearts. The gift of a Son into hands that would harm him presents a most sacrificial gift and a striking invitation to sacrifice everything to have it. As C.S. Lewis writes:

“The Christian way is different: harder and easier. Christ says, ‘Give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you—No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent, as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.’”(2)

To a groaning world that may not in the least suspect it is groaning for a savior, Christ comes as he came to Mary herself, wanting to stretch us physically, emotionally, and socially, taking away everything: the dark corners of our souls, even all we might have thought good or godly of ourselves—our good names, our good futures, our innocence. Mary certainly had reasons to say “No” to the devastating invitation that came to her by way of terrifying angel. For a young peasant girl, she was facing an assuring future: a husband to wed, a home to create, a good reputation. Saying “Yes” to God and to the words of the angel Gabriel was to put all of this on the line, everything she had and might have once clung to. Could you do the equivalent? Could you release security, love, reputation, or even your youth from your own determined grasp? Mary’s risk was no less difficult than the most sacrificial act you could imagine of your own life. Saying “Yes” to the Christ child and to the knocking of his love will surely bring down the houses we have built, even the rooms that house the things we hold onto most fiercely.

Yet this is precisely the invitation the story of Christ leaves before us like a gift: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”(3) He comes with the annunciation of great sacrifice and pregnant impossibilities, and he curiously assures us not to be afraid. Yet where meek and foolish souls give everything to receive him, they still find themselves the wisest.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) O. Henry, 100 Selected Stories (London: Wordsworth, 1995), 5.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 179.

(3) Isaiah 9:6.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Waiting for Light

January 2, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In ancient cities, sentinels kept vigil on the city walls throughout the night. Long, difficult hours of waiting and watching characterized the sentinel’s evenings. The watcher’s role was well understood as vital for the protection of the city and the welfare of its citizens. Morning, nonetheless, meant great relief, both for the watchmen who kept vigil throughout the darkness and for the city within the walls.

Making use of the laden imagery of those who watched for morning, biblical writers often juxtaposed the role of the watchman and the work of the prophet. Through long, dark hours of slavery and exile, stubbornness and despair, the prophets kept watch, calling out evils, calling forth awareness, peace, and repentance. “This is what the LORD says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’ I appointed watchmen over you and said, ‘Listen to the sound of the trumpet!’ But you said, ‘We will not listen’” (Jeremiah 6:16-17). The book of Isaiah expands the imagery of the sentinel’s watch even further, suggesting watchful eyes throughout the kingdom of God, servants who hold vigil day and night, watching for light even when presently surrounded by darkness. “Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices, together they sing for joy; for in plain sight they see the return of the Lord to Zion” (Isaiah 52:8).

An old man in Jerusalem named Simeon was one such sentinel. All that is known of him is that he was righteous and devout, and looked forward to the consolation of his broken land. Led by the Spirit one day, he went to the temple to offer the customary sacrifice, when he noticed an infant in the arms of a young, peasant woman. Taking the baby in his arms, he began to sing:

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,

according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32).

A watchman who had kept vigil through long years of darkness, Simeon sees the infant Christ and uses the language of a slave that has been freed. There is a sense of immediacy and relief, as if the light of morning has arrived after years of shadow, and he is finally free to leave his post.

Epiphany, the historical Christian feast day that celebrates the arrival of the magi to the birthplace of Jesus, tells a similar story. Matthew describes a vigilant scene not unlike that of Simeon at the temple or sentinels on the city wall. Astrologers from the east followed a lone star through a great expanse of darkness to come upon a new born king. Their watchful journey took years. It impelled further darkness as Herod’s jealousy reared an evil demand for the murder of infant boys throughout Bethlehem. It was a solitary journey, disregarded by the masses, and wrought with difficulty. But the light was real; the glory of the LORD had risen. “Nations shall come to your light,” sang the prophet, “and kings to the brightness of your dawn” (Isaiah 60:3).

With those who first watched and waited for God to step from the heavens and into their world, we hear on the feast of Epiphany that we, too, are a world straining in the dark, waiting for a great light. But in the world of one straining to see more, Christ himself can transform our watching and our waiting, our lives and our deaths, bringing light where death stings, tears discourage, and darkness haunts: because the Light has already come! “I wait for the Lord,” sings the psalmist, “my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning” (Psalm 130:5-6). The night is long, but the light is real.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Life Confronted

January 1, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I’m at an age in life when enough of it has passed that I can make some comparisons. The last five to ten years have been strange. Several essays by Timothy Garton Ash speak to the period he calls the decade with “no name”—the turn of the millennium to the present. It is indeed a decade in which we have seen some extraordinary events, some dreadful acts of violence, an ongoing range of catastrophes, and some of the worst economic and moral failures that burst the bubble of unending prosperity and further shuttered confidence in many of our institutions.

Many years ago, the Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote of “the unbearable lightness of being.” Like many others, he sensed the hollowing out of existence, the thinning out of life, the emptying of meaning that seems to occur under modern conditions. One friend of mine calls this “cultural vaporization.” The thing is, this is not some vague idea or esoteric notion. It is a description of how life is really being perceived.

Many people today seem convinced that the point of life is that there is no point. We face what Nietzsche call “Das Nichte”—or, the nothing. Our public philosophy tells us that we are the result of blind force plus chance and/or necessity. Yet our movies are filled with romantic longings, visions of other worlds, the hunger for transcendence, and love stories between vampires or other worlds where there is a greater unity of life and being. In other words, we face a massive contradiction between what one set of experts tells us is real and what many artists compel us to hope for and reflect on. And somewhere in the middle are our own, normal, day-to-day lives.

Chance and choice: is that it? Does all of life come down to this? A roll of the dice, the power of freedom, and the lottery of life? Many centuries ago, an honest voice cried, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Why? He was reflecting on life. He was seeking happiness. He sought justice, he sought satisfaction, he sought the meaning of it all. And his journey was conducted under the sun—in other words, he looked at life from within life. It was as Derek Kidner called it “a world without windows.”

However, his observations do not end there. This book opens us to another perspective, one in which there is a God, and a God that sees, knows, and acts. The book does not descend into some simple resolution of life’s hard problems nor its on-going ambiguities. But what it does do is add something. It adds a presence, it includes a perspective, it invites reflection: If there is more to life than meets the eye, more than can be measured or managed by the senses, then this indeed makes a big difference today.

With such a difference, weight or weightiness would be restored. Absence would be filled, space would be occupied, and meaninglessness confronted. As Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This is a far cry from the new atheists who invite us to shed the childish and wicked delusions of whys and hows and accept emptiness. But what if when the God who is there and is not silent is a God of grace, a God of love, and a God of justice? On this new day of a new year, to those empty, confused, or seeking, the unbearable lightness of being can be met in the abundance of God’s fullness, a gift by the way of grace, not effort!

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Theatrical Encore

December 31, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I have never been so tired as I was when I stepped on that plane, nor so happy for so many empty seats. I was dreaming of a two-hour nap before I even found my place. Of course, as is usually the case in situations like these, when one is intent on being anti-social and insistent on having earned the right to be so, I found myself not only with a companion, but with an animated, loquacious, first-time traveler. The young woman beside me had been a child as she watched the events of September 11th unfold and had determined then never to travel by airplane; that is, until today, when events reared a need to break her own rule. She was terrified and excited and inquisitive all at once. She also noticed things I’m fairly certain I have never noticed in all my years of travel, commenting with elation, curiosity, fear, or confusion on every single one of them. By the time we landed, I not only had a new friend, I was wide awake to the disheartening reality of all I fail to see around me.

It would seem that repetition has a way of lulling us to sleep, monotony a way of robbing us of sight, or else leaving us in the stupor of disinterest. Real life examples are readily available. How many news stories do we need to hear about violence or suffering, racial oppression or injustice, before they become a despairing background noise or we fail to hear them at all? For that matter, how many stories about something small but positive do we really take in before we respond in boredom? As a colleague pointed out recently, virtuous characters are rarely the most interesting. How many times do we need to sit on an airplane or see the bird outside our window before the marvel of flight itself simply goes without notice? Like most adults, we learn to tolerate the repetitious by learning to operate on auto-pilot.

And yet, I am certain, even among the most skilled of auto-pilots, there was a time when we found ourselves, like every child, delighting in the monotonous, longing for another minute with grandpa, another page of the story, another trip down the slide. The incongruity is unmistakable. How can our failure to see be blamed on monotony, unconscious living attributed to the repetitive, when at one point monotony and repetition were not only tolerated but, on the contrary, invigorating? Blindness can easily be blamed on the world around us—and there is certainly reason to consider the daily effects of all that bombards our senses—but perhaps this is all too easy an answer. Perhaps the scales on our eyes and the dullness of our senses are multiplied not by the many repetitions in life, but by our failure to really take in the many repetitions around us.

Jesus spoke of the kingdom as belonging to the likes of little children, and many have speculated the child’s ability to see the world with wonder as one of the reasons for it. G.K. Chesterton saw the child’s ability to revel in the monotonous as another. The children’s cry for more, reasoned Chesterton, is a quality of the very God who created them. “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that God has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”(1)

For the child on the slide or the toddler with a story, “Do it again!” is far from a cry of boredom or routine. It is a cry for more of life itself. This is likewise the joy of the ancient psalmist, the cry of the Hebrew prophets, and the call of the vicariously human Jesus Christ: “Consider the lilies, how they grow…if God so clothes the grass of the field…how much more will he clothe you?” (Luke 12:27-28). Jesus asks the world to consider the kingdom around us like little children, and thus, something more like God—finding a presence in faithful recurrences, grace in repetition, an appetite for an incredible world in the ordinary and extraordinary one around us. Here, even those within the most taxing of life’s repetitions—the daily care of an aging parent, the constant burden on the shoulders of those who fight against injustice, the labor of hope in a difficult place—can find solace. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope,” said Jeremiah in the midst of deep lament. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning… The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lamentations 3:22-24, emphasis mine).

Morning by morning, the daily liturgy of new mercies comes with unapologetic repetition to all who will see it, the gift of a God who revels in the creation of yet another daisy, the encore of another sunset, the discovery of even one lost soul, and the gift of a New Year.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 65-66.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Season for New Sight

December 30, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) popularized the concept of “a paradigm shift” in the realm of scientific thought. While many of us may not be familiar with Kuhn or his book, we have likely experienced the duck/rabbit optical illusion used by Kuhn to demonstrate the way in which a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way. Kuhn described a paradigm shift as that which opens up new approaches to understanding that would never have been considered valid before.

The word “epiphany” offers another way to speak about paradigm shifts. To have an epiphany is to have the proverbial light bulb go off in one’s head, as a new idea changes the way in which one sees or understands information. The lights are “switched on” when understanding comes. The English word epiphany comes from a Greek word meaning “manifestation or appearance.” An epiphany is that “a-ha” moment that comes as a result of new vision—of blindness being turned to sight. It is, to borrow from Kuhn’s description, an experience of a paradigmatic shift in view. An epiphany thus reorients, reorders, or transforms our view from one way of looking at the world to another.

In the Christian tradition, the season of Epiphany is a season for new sight, new vision, and paradigm shifts. The season commemorates the arrival of the foreign magi at the birthplace of Jesus. Magi (not three kings of the orient as sung in the famous hymn) were a caste of wise men specializing in astrology, medicine, and natural science.(1) As the gospel of Matthew records it, these wise men “saw his star in the east” and recognized that this young child was worthy of worship as King (Matthew 2:2).

During Epiphany, Christians are asked to pay special attention to the teaching and healing ministry of Jesus for the ways in which he is revealed to be the Messiah. All who seek the truth are asked to re-consider Jesus during this season, to have eyes opened and paradigms shifted. The author of the letter to the Hebrews invites all who would look at Jesus to see in him the very epiphany of God. “[I]n these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds” (Hebrews 1:1-3). Everyone who looks at his life has the opportunity to experience epiphany, and to have vision altered as time is spent looking at his life and listening to Jesus through his teachings.

But paradigm shifts are never easy. The biblical image invoked again and again for this process is that of moving from blindness to sight. One very ironic example is recorded for in the Gospel of John. It is the story of Jesus healing a man born blind. Using the ordinary elements of clay and his own saliva, Jesus applies the necessary ingredients to literal eyes in order to create the opportunity for spiritual sight. After the man washes the healing balm off of his eyes in the pool of Siloam, his healer is nowhere to be found. The religious leaders are incensed that healing has occurred in such an ordinary way by an ordinary man.

“How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?”

The once blind man answered, “Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I do know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.”

Thinking they see the situation quite clearly, the religious leaders put the formerly blind man out of the temple, cutting him off from their community, and taking away the opportunity to make sacrifice to God. Hearing this, Jesus comes to confront these leaders who claim superior knowledge and insight. “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind… If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”(2)

John’s Gospel and the Season of Epiphany present a challenging opportunity for a paradigm shift. The Christian story proposes that it is in the humble acknowledgement of blindness that we come to see anything with clarity or insight. Ironically epiphany does not come in assuming that we know all the answers or in clever arguments or assumptions. Jesus turns all of these paradigms upside down in this story. Today, might the realization of our blindness be the paradigm shift that opens our eyes.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Reference note from the New American Standard Bible.

(2) cf. John 9:39-41.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Time Being

December 29, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In the days following of Christmas, it is almost natural to find our mood something like that of the brilliant lights we have just unplugged. Guests go home. Decorations come down. Celebrations cease. Life resumes with a little less fanfare perhaps. Poet W.H. Auden describes the letdown of Christmas almost too well—reminding me even of things I hadn’t considered:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes…

There are enough left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away…

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension…(1)

For Auden, in the days after Christmas, we step down from the heights of the holiday and along with our colored lights return to dimmer realities: daily life and its monotony, despairing headlines, another year of wearisome failures, blind spots, and missteps. Writing in 1942, Auden’s sense of the dismal reality of life after Christmas was likely heightened by the uncertainties of war and the certainty of violence. For many, Christmas indeed serves as a moment of respite in the midst of harsher realities that promise to recommence. For others, the season itself is disheartening and the aftermath is more of the same. Regardless, the picture W.H. Auden paints is one in which many can enter.

Yet Auden’s attempt to describe life after Christmas is far more than an offer of depressing poetry. Auden reminds us that we must come down from the heights of Christmas in order to embrace again the world in all of its brokenness and finitude, in order to truly receive the Child whose arrival was not marked by lights and decoration but the slaughter of the innocents at Herod’s orders and a few witnesses in an unknown stable. Auden reminds us that the time after Christmas is the time when Christ can step into the thick of our lives as he intended. Writes Auden:

To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

The countercultural Christmas story that sits at the heart of all our holiday efforts begs us to see it as far more than a peak event in December. Christmas is an annual reminder that God is on the move and was on the move long before we knew it. In fact, it was precisely into our dismal, empty, post-festive reality that the Child came near in the first place.

In the bleak moments of late winter, Christmas is not anti-climactic; it confronts us all the more. It is our startling reminder that God has not forgotten, though in the thick of our empty routines, despairing headlines, and blinding self-interest we have forgotten the Child. Yet here, in the quiet and empty days after celebrations have ceased, the sights and sounds of the Child among us can better be noticed and more authentically received. If Advent brings the world’s attention to the sounds of one who stands at the door and knocks, and Christmas marks the culmination of that knocking in the cry of a newborn king, the days thereafter usher us further into the presence of a God who not only knocks and draws near, but has forever changed the time being itself.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1991), 399.

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