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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hyperseeing in a Hyper-filled Space

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Ravi Z

On the influence of media and technology, discussions continue to abound. “Is Google making us stupid?” “Is Twitter bad for the soul?” “Is Facebook changing the way we relate?”(1) There seems an upsurge in articles questioning our faltering minds, morals, and communities (ironically reaching us through the very mediums that are blamed for it). Some note the shifting of thought patterns, attention spans that are beginning to prefer 140 characters or less, information gluttony, news addiction, and so on.

There is good reason, I think, to step away from the torrent surges of information and hyper-networking to think meaningfully about how it all might be changing us—for good and for ill. For with every new improvement and invention irrefutably comes gain and loss. And just as quickly as I can build a case against the gods of media-and-technology, I can also double check my footnotes on Google, find twenty additional perspectives on Twitter, and watch an interview with the author of one of the headlines mentioned above—all of which came from articles I read online in the first place. There are clearly advantages to having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information, inasmuch as this hyper-access to people, news, and facts assuredly has far-reaching effects on cognition, as well as the way we see, or don’t see, the world.

Speaking decades before the debates over Twitter or the wonders of Google, Malcolm Muggeridge seemed to foresee the possibilities of too much information. “Accumulating knowledge is a form of avarice and lends itself to another version of the Midas story,” he wrote. “Man is so avid for knowledge that everything he touches turns to facts; his faith becomes theology, his love becomes lechery, his wisdom becomes science. Pursuing meaning, he ignores truth.”(2) In other words, Muggeridge saw that it was possible to see so many news clips that we are no longer seeing, to hear so many sound-bites that we are no longer hearing, to seek so many “exclusives” that we are no longer understanding.

Speaking centuries before Muggeridge, the prophet Isaiah and the rabbi Jesus described their audiences quite similarly. “This is why I speak to them in parables,” said Jesus, “because ‘they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand’” (cf. Matthew 13:13, Isaiah 6:9-10). Undoubtedly, we are living in a time that is complicated by towering opportunities of information and knowledge; news clips, sound bites, blogs, and editorials, all piled so high and wide that we can scarcely see around our fortresses of facts. But perhaps regardless of the era, humanity’s skill in building towers of Babel—built to see beyond ourselves yet ironically blocking our vision—is both timeless and unprecedented.(3) Learning to see in a way that “reaches the heavens,” or, as Einstein once said, “to think the thoughts of God,” is far more about seeing God than it is about seeing facts.

In the art and work of sculpture, there is a term used to describe an artist’s ability to look at an unformed rock and see it in its completed state. It has been said of the sculptor Henry Moore that he had the gift of “hyperseeing,” the gift of seeing the form and beauty latent in a mass of unshaped material.(4) Hyperseeing is a word used to describe a sculptor’s extraordinary gift of seeing in four dimensional space—that is, seeing all around the exterior but also seeing all points within, seeing in a rough piece of stone the astounding possibilities of art.

It strikes me that the exercise of hyperseeing, then, as it might apply to our towering mountains of rough and unmolded facts, is something to which God tirelessly calls us. Far from building towers of knowledge that make names for ourselves, or accumulating sound-bites until we are no longer hearing, hyperseeing (and hyperhearing) the world around us requires God’s vision and voice. “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). Far better than a world of mere facts is a world made visible by the promises of God.

Perhaps we practice the exercise of hyperseeing as we learn to see the power of the resurrection, the glory of the transfiguration, the gift of the Lord’s Supper, or the wisdom of the parables in the daily facts and movements of our lives in God’s kingdom. To be sure, the resurrection of Jesus—the rising of dead flesh to life again—is no more jarring than every other promise we hold because of him, promises we can now see in part, while hyperseeing the extraordinary possibilities of all they will look like upon completion:

“Every valley shall be lifted up,

and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

and the rough places a plain.

5Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,

and all people shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:4-5).

Indeed, the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame will leap like deer, the tongue of the speechless will sing for joy; waters will break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.(5) In a world hyper-filled with facts and knowledge, such are the sights and sounds of a kingdom the pure in heart (with or without the help of Google) shall see.

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

(1) cf. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, (July/August 2008), “Scientists Warn of Rapid-fire Media Dangers,” CNN Health, April 14, 2009, Peggy Orenstein, “Growing Up on Facebook,” The New York Times, March 10, 2009.

(2) From Firing Line, “Do We Need Religion or Religious Institutions” an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge, September 6, 1980, chapter 6.

(3) See Genesis 11.

(4) As cited by Jeremy Begbie in an interview with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Review, vol. 94, Nov./Dec. 2008.

(5) See Isaiah 35:5-6 and Luke 7:22.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Misdiagnosing Normal

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Ravi Z

Almost everyday, we are beset with news of daily atrocities, murders, and tragedies that continue to shake us. I sit in a somewhat curious state as I hear certain phrases so often repeated. “They seemed like such a normal person.” “My kids played at his/her house regularly.” Then the reporter chimes in, “How could such a normal person do such a thing?”

I guess what intrigues me in this constant replay from daily and weekly life is the surprise. The reporters genuinely seem surprised (by the actions committed) and in joining in with the social narrative’s rules, so do we!  Many centuries ago, the ancient writer Herodotus wrote, “The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.” This is perceptive.

The modern era was birthed in the consciousness of rational men and women in control of their own destinies. It was the age of reason; we can and would figure everything out. It was the age of man; no need for god, the gods, or superstitions of any kind. It was the age of science; the new insights, techniques, and technologies would allow us to build our brave new world. It was the age of progress, as many believed we would grow from good to great, and perhaps end up in (something like) Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek future, where all need has been eradicated and all live for justice and the good of all.

The problem with this, and with all utopian dreams, is that they are illusions or delusions. They are fantasy constructs of the very sort Schopenhauer and Freud attacked in terms of religion. Despite promethean promises, guru advice, or our deepest sincere desires, wanting it badly enough does not make it so. What kind of a world do we live in? Who and what are we? What is wrong in life and with me? How can anything be improved? These are world and life view questions.

Back in the 90s, I was involved in several high level consultations on the condition of Europe. We heard many informed and insightful people speak to Europe’s spiritual condition, her drift, and many of the contributors to her current malaise. After some time, one veteran Christian leader said, “The problem at the heart of Europe is the problem of the European heart.” He was citing the words of Christ. “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.  For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:20). Jesus pinpoints the human dilemma. The issue is not merely heritage, biology, sociology, politics, or economics; it has a fundamental root. As we learn from medicine, the wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong prognosis. This brings me back to the news, to the surprise at the latest outrages, endlessly paraded on our ubiquitous media. Are we misdiagnosing normal?

We all need heart surgery! We all know (in our deepest thoughts), that there are things in life and within us, over which we have little or no power, and for which we have little or no comprehension. The great physician, as our Creator and redeemer, specializes in the heart business. Broken hearts, angry hearts, selfish hearts, greedy hearts, and all kinds of hearts, can find an answer in Christ. All he asks is that we come to him and turn from our self-defined ways. Thankfully, the power to change rests in the hands of one whose power and goal it is to change us.

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

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Cross and the Cookie Jar

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Ravi Z

As a young man growing up in Scotland, like many others, I was exposed to Christianity and the symbol of the cross. However, it was a point of confusion, a mystery at best, and at worst, an object of scorn and disgust. I did not know what it meant or why religious people thought it important, but I knew I wanted nothing to do with it.

Obviously, I have had a change of mind. Why? I’ll explain as we proceed, but first, some helpful voices. Alister McGrath, Professor of theology, ministry, and education at King’s College, London, writes: “Just as God has humbled himself in making himself known ‘in the humility and shame of the cross,’ we must humble ourselves if we are to encounter him. We must humble ourselves by being prepared to be told where to look to find God, rather than trusting in our own insights and speculative abilities. In effect, we are forced to turn our eyes from contemplation of where we would like to see God revealed, and to turn them instead upon a place which is not of our choosing, but which is given to us.”(1)

In other words, nothing in one’s history, experience, or knowledge can prepare us for God’s means of drawing near. At the cross, something we are not expecting is revealed, something scandalous unveiled, something we could never have articulated or asked for is given to us. Philip Yancey, the renowned author, offers more on this:  ”Here at the cross is the man who loves his enemies, the man whose righteousness is greater than that of the Pharisees, who being rich became poor, who gives his robe to those who take his cloak, who prays for those who deceitfully use him.  The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to Kingdom, nor is it even the way to the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom come.”(2)

I have come to realize that wrong ideas and images are responsible for much misery and disaster in our lives. And I think many of us have significantly distorted ideas about the purpose and meaning of the cross. When many people think of “sin” or the human condition before God, what comes to mind is perhaps something like the image of a child caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Such an image might well be understood as disobedience or maybe even naughtiness, but is it really that important? It is certainly not bad enough to justify extreme reactions. As a result of such a metaphor, our moral reflections on sin tend to foster incredulity or disgust. The response seems totally out of proportion to the offense.

But let us shift the metaphor. Supposing one day you go for a routine medical examination, and they discover you have a deadly virus. You did not do anything. You were not necessarily responsible, but you were exposed, and infected. You feel the injustice of it all, you are afraid, you are angry, but most of all, you are seriously sick. You are dying and you need help.

Whatever the cross and the gospel are about, it is not a slap on the hands for kids refusing to heed the rules of the cookie jar. It is not mere advice to get you to clean up your life and morals. It is not mere ideas to inform you about what it takes to be nice. It is about treatment, a physician’s mediation; it is about providing a solution and discovering life.

The cross may seem an extreme and offensive measure to the problem of sin and death and sickness—but what if it is the very cure that is needed? McGrath describes our options at the cross of Christ. “Either God is not present at all in this situation, or else God is present in a remarkable and paradoxical way. To affirm that God is indeed present in this situation is to close the door to one way of thinking about God and to open the way to another—for the cross marks the end of a particular way of thinking about God.”(3) Shockingly, thoroughly, scandalously, the cross depicts a God who throws himself upon sin and sickness to bring the hope of rescue miraculously near.

Some find it shocking, some overwhelming, some almost too good to be true. It is, however, for all.

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

(1) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 104.

(2) Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 1995), 196.

(3) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 103.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Super-Sized

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Ravi Z

Walking toward the events of Easter, the suffering of the cross and the shock of the resurrection, has a way of dredging up the dust of existential questions that otherwise sit quietly along the way.

“Who can stay awake in this night of God?” asks Jürgen Moltmann of the events leading to the cross. “Who will not be as if paralyzed by it?… Is there any answer to the question why God forsook him? Is there any answer to the agonizing questionings of disappointment and death?… Is this the end of all human and religious hope? Or is it the beginning of the true hope, which has been born again and can no longer be shaken?”(1)

Beside the lacerated body of Christ, death is not a figure we can turn away from as if to say it is simply unwelcomed. And life, as it appears unhindered and uncontainable by the tomb and even the grave clothes, unexpectedly becomes a word we do not really know, despite our regular use of the term.

Many of the parables Jesus told worked to counter the unchallenged cultural interpretations that buried words in contemporary holes. In fact, his stories habitually seemed to unpigeon-hole concepts that had become so familiar they were no longer seen, words so often used in a particular way that their greater meaning had long been forsaken. Coming into a crowd, Jesus worked to remove the coded obstacles that blocked them from seeing words and truths in true kingdom-proportion.

But it is the same for us today. What do you do when a question about eternal life is answered with a story about robbers causing harm and neighbors who don’t care? Every story Jesus told, every sermon he preached with and without words moves us to rediscover the words we use and the confessions we make. The weeks leading up to the cross remind me just how often I limit and even misuse words and notions pertaining to “life” itself.

Insistence of the “sanctity of life” is one such confession oft on the lips of Christians. Created in the image of God, the church confesses that life is sacred, loved, and valued. With good reason, this confession is often voiced in arenas fighting for the unborn or ethical practices of medicine. Even the phrase “sanctity of life” likely brought to some of your minds one of these often charged and public areas of concern.

But if “life” is a word at the heart of the very kingdom Christ proclaimed, should the Christian confession of life not bring to mind all of this and even more? Should the life of a Christian not be one that offers a representation and confession of life’s sanctity on all fronts—on the streets, in forgotten prisons, in anonymous online banter? In other words, beyond our voices that rightfully cry out for the protection of the unborn and the dying, how else is our for-life stance being communicated to and within the world less predictably? In the words of Jesus, “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33). What might Christ’s kingdom-sized use of the word “life” include that we have overlooked?

I recently read an account of a pastor in Bellevue, Washington who reminded me of one such thing. Wanting his congregation both to represent and to identify itself with its missional calling, he called them to see life in its broadest context. He asked them “to recognize…that their missional calling involves the witness of their quality of life together as much as it involves service to real human needs and verbal witness to Jesus Christ.”(2) I am so accustomed to the phrase “quality of life” referring to ethics and medicine that the idea actually took a minute to settle. But once it did, I realized in fact how short-sided I had allowed that phrase to become.

If the greatest message of Christians is that God “sent his one and only Son into the world that we might truly live by being united with him,” it follows that our life together is a very representation of the life Jesus offers and the love God showed in sending his Son.(1) Here, quality of life is far more than a medical term, although it would certainly include our ethics in medical care and the means with which we treat the sick. Similarly, the sanctity of life is always more than a three-point argument or a voting record, but something Christ gives us to embody in every sense of the word and every manner of our lives together and in the world.

Moving toward the events of Holy Week, the multivalent words of Christ still mercifully confront our own, unearthing long-buried dimensions, revealing the unsearchable depths of the truly super-sized king and the kingdom our lives represent: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

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

(1) Jurgen Moltmann, “Prisoner of Hope,” in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (New York: Orbis, 2003), 146-152.

(2) Lois Y. Barrett et al., Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 8.

(3) cf. 1 John 4:9.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Treasures of the Heart

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Ravi Z

Several years ago, I visited the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For those who aren’t familiar with Carnegie-Mellon University or any of the Carnegie libraries scattered throughout the United States, it is an awesome experience to wander through towering shelves filled with books, music, and reference materials; vast resources—more than I could ever utilize—amply aided me in the writing of my research paper.

At the time, I was too preoccupied with my research to take advantage of all the resources available to me in this great library. I didn’t wonder about the history behind the library, or think about what great act of generosity made it possible and brought it into existence. Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant to the United States, represents the classic tale of rags to riches that is the quintessential reflection of the American dream. Ingenious, shrewd, and visionary without any formal education beyond grade school, Carnegie became the richest man in America during the “The Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth century.(1) Riding the wave of rapid development from the Industrial Revolution, Carnegie became the king of industry, first of railroads and then of steel.

But Carnegie’s was a mixed legacy. While he amassed fortunes, his workers languished for pennies in what is described as one of the “darkest chapters in American labor history.”(2) He may have been less ruthless than some of his other industry contemporaries by today’s ethical standards for laborers, but Carnegie was brutal in his demands for long hours of labor with very little pay.

I began to pay attention to Carnegie’s life and legacy because he is an oft-cited inspiration for two of the richest men in the world today who started a philanthropic movement to systematically give their money away. These two men are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Gates and Buffett cite an oft-quoted refrain from Carnegie: “The man who dies rich dies disgraced… And besides, it provides a refuge from self-questioning.”(3) Perhaps some of Carnegie’s own self-questioning came from the way in which he made his money, seeking efficiency and profit at the expense of worker well-being. Whatever the case, the richest man in the world believed that money made from society should be given back to society. From Carnegie’s example, Buffett and Gates go and encourage other wealthy individuals to do likewise with their own fortunes.

Capitalism, at its heart, is about multiplying and advancing capital. But what is to be done with immense profits? Despite his mixed legacy, the example of Andrew Carnegie offers an intriguing option. Wealth production should include social capital—namely, that great gains financially can be accompanied by great gains for society and for the public good. Wealth can accumulate profit not just for individuals, but for communities, cities, and indeed, regions all around the world. Just as the biblical patriarch Abraham was blessed to be a blessing, we who are wealthy in all sorts of ways can allow caritas, or charity, to guide us in bringing blessing for others. Whatever the wealth—time, treasure, and talent—can be used for the sort of profit that is more than just individual, capital gain.

Those who seek to follow Jesus have a powerful motivation to view wealth in the same manner, and his instruction on the matter is yet another illustration of his concern for the whole and not merely an isolated group. Jesus instructed his followers to “go and sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves purses which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure where no thief comes near nor moth destroys.”(4) This means, as one commentator on Luke’s gospel points out, that “possessions in themselves are neither good or bad; it is the choices that one makes concerning them that determines their significance…[T]he proper use of material goods that are non-essential to the disciple is to be manifested in the positive act of helping those in need.”(5)

In other words, wealth does create profit; but the kind of profit wealth creates is up to us to decide. It has been said: where your treasure is there will your heart be also.

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

(1) From American Experience: “Andrew Carnegie: The Richest Man in the World,” http://www.pbs.org.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth” North American Review, June 1889, Volume 148, Issue 391, 653-665.

(4) Cf. Luke 12:33.

(5) John Sheila Galligan, “The Tension between Poverty and Possessions in the Gospel of Luke,” Spirituality Today, Spring 1985, Volume 37, 12.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Passion and Power

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Ravi Z

One of the unique qualities of the Christian story is that it is presented in the voices of four different witnesses. During the season of Lent, it is interesting to look specifically at the different tellings of the events that led Jesus to the cross. The differences in each testimony offer an interesting glimpse of how personalities differ in their observing and experience of the world, as well as a potent reminder that the story of Jesus is not a flat and static conveying of information but a story as alive as the one who was tortured at the hands of the powers of this world.

For instance, as one theologian observes, Matthew’s crucifixion narrative and greater gospel emphasizes “the way of the humiliated Christ.”(1) In my reading of Matthew, I am always struck by the interplay between power and control, an interesting dynamic on which the writer has chosen to focus. Over and above the motif shared with Mark, Matthew seems to add a dimension of inquiry about power, and along with it, the hint that all is not as it seems: Who wants control? Who thinks they’re in control? Who is really in control? Roy Harrisville compares it to the paradox and reversal at the heart of Jesus’s ministry, the passion of Christ itself enacting “truths earlier hidden in the predictions and parables.”(2)

Thus, where Mark’s decisive crowd before Pilate yells, “Crucify him” (15:13 and again in 14b) and Luke’s crowd similarly, if more emphatically in the Greek, yells, “Crucify, crucify him!” (23:21), Matthew’s crowd twice yells, “Let him be crucified” (27:22b and 23b). There is a hint of a distancing of responsibility. The crowds indeed want the crucifying done, but done to him by someone else. Luke seems to further draw the distinction of choice and control, adding of his crowd, “And they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed” (23:23).

Matthew’s account seems at first passive in the “who” of the act of crucifying, a crowd calling for death at a distance. Later Pilate, too, wants to distance himself from this responsibility, adding a hand-washing scene unique to Matthew’s narrative. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” says Pilate, “see to it yourselves” (27:24). The people, preferring control over the risk of release, answer, “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25).

Now phrased in terms of blood, Matthew’s interplay of power and control is made all the more potent. Like Jesus’s many parables with their jarring sense of mysterion (mystery that is not hidden, but revealed), Matthew seems to suggest there is one in control indeed, but it is not the one who seems to be holding the power. The image of Christ’s blood upon this blind—though professing to see—crowd and their children is chilling. For unknowingly, they have declared the very thing that the humiliated servant has set out to do: His blood be on us and on our children.

Harrisville illustrates this all the more profoundly in his analysis of Matthew’s narrating of the Last Supper and the curious words of Jesus about the “blood of the covenant,” now explained in this passion narrative before us:

“The statement about the ‘blood of the covenant’ (26:28) will have its explanation in subsequent events, in Judas’s confession (‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’ [27:24]), in Pilate’s avowal of innocence (‘I am innocent of this man’s blood’ [27:4]), and in the people’s accepting responsibility for Jesus’s death (‘his blood be on us and on our children!’ [27:25]). All these will be the ‘many’ for whose forgiveness the blood of the covenant is poured out.“(3)

The story of Jesus as he moves toward the cross, told through eyes that remind us he has come for a world of unique individuals, is a story of power and weakness that turns our common assumptions and experience on its head. Like the parables, the way of the humiliated Christ confounds us, approaching in power, though hidden in the unlikely gift of a servant.

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

(1) Roy Harrisville, Fracture: The Cross as Irreconcilable in the Language and Thought of the Biblical Writers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 147.

(2) Ibid., 158.

(3) Ibid., 159.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Your Attention Please

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Ravi Z

We may live in a world full of individualists and individualism, but when it comes to reaching the individual conscience and the individual ear, it is often not so simple. For the one in the crowd, for the individual among the masses, any appeal for moral action or ethical change is likely to be heard more with one’s neighbor in mind than oneself. Whether rooted in human nature or simply another form of individualism, it seems our neighbors’ flaws are far more worthy of commentary. F.W. Boreham noted this tendency in any congregation with more than one member. “[I]n a congregation of two, each auditor takes it for granted that the preacher is referring to the other.”(1)

True to form, it is on rare occasions that the prophets, who cry out at injustice and weep loudly for repentance, seem like they are talking to me. Most of the time, they seem more clearly to be talking to a family member, a wayward culture, or a particular philosophy, policy, or party. This is perhaps why the prophets must weep and yell so loudly, though often to no avail. Though the great command of Israel assumes that we are listening—Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One—often, we are not. Or rather, we might be listening, but we are listening for someone else.

With every fiber of their beings, the prophets attempt to counter our selective hearing. The last prophet, the prophet who cried for the world to recognize the savior among them, was no different. John the Baptist came bounding through the wilderness with an immensely personal message, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and calling the masses to see their collective and individual need for the one who could make all things new. This is where Mark begins his gospel: with the cry of a prophet to open our ears. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, he tells us, begins with the call of John the Baptist: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!

Somewhere along the path to the cross, many Christians revisit these words first recorded by the prophet Isaiah and later described as the message of John. It is a message that perhaps seems easiest to hear for someone else; after all, John’s words were aimed at “the Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem” who responded by coming to the Jordan to be baptized. Or maybe the prophet’s call for preparation just seems a familiar part of a familiar story: before Jesus was recognized as the son of God, John the Baptist readied the crowds to see the one in their midst. Regardless, it is likely that all the many years of hearing the prophet’s cry for someone else has dulled the command in our minds. In fact, no matter who we hear that message for, it is actually quite a radical thought. How does one prepare roads for God? How does anyone make the paths of the Lord straight? When you remember the story of Jesus on earth, do you picture the men and women God used to prepare the way of Jesus among us, human beings who took an active role in shaping the paths of God’s coming—priests and prophets, those who prayed for God’s Messiah, Elizabeth and John, Jesus’s own mom?

Now, how much more radical is this image if you hear the command for yourself? Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight! Beginning his gospel with the cry of the prophet, Mark attempts to open the world to this very thought. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ starts with our participation in God’s activity. How are you preparing the way of the Lord, paving roads and clearing paths for the sake of God among us? It is a question every bit as much aimed at your ears and your life as it was the first audience who heard it—or your neighbors who might need to hear it.

The story of Jesus coming as an infant in Bethlehem and setting his face like a flint toward the cross in his thirties is the beginning of the great promises and reversals we anticipate because of his redemptive presence with us—beauty rising from ashes and mourning turned to dancing, waters breaking forth from the wilderness and streams from the desert. But this story is not finished. Christ is coming again and John continues to call us to prepare the way, to join in the restoration that God has already started. Indeed, all of the prophets continue to cry out with inviting and powerful images of God’s work: swords made into to plowshares and spears to pruning hooks, wolves lying down with lambs, cows and bears grazing together, justice rolling down like waters and righteousness like ever-flowing streams, the desert blossoming, the blind seeing, the lame leaping, the lowly lifted up, and the hungry filled with good things. How are we participating in this very story? How do our lives change, if the prophets are indeed talking to us?

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

(1) F.W. Boreham, “The Ideal Congregation,” Dreams at Sunset (London: Epworth Press, 1954), 88.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Unlikely

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Ravi Z

The world has always been enamored with appearance. We love power, truly exult over prestige, and fawn over those with high, popular, or noted positions. The annual Hollywood Oscars ceremony and the ever-multiplying spinoffs of the event are cases in point. As one social observer notes, “Celebrities are those who are well known for their well known-ness.” Endless hours are invested into analyzing every detail of the happenings and the who’s who on the red carpet. What are people wearing? How glamorous are they? Who are they with? Is their popularity soaring or sinking? We are so immersed in these topics, which are given such serious attention and focus, that the sheer banality and vacuity often escapes us.

Perhaps the ultimate contrast to the world’s chosen is God’s choice of messengers. Would anyone have chosen Moses? Would anyone have chosen the twelve disciples? You can almost hear the crowd, the cultured despisers, responding to the likes of Hosea, Jeremiah, and John the Baptist: “Who, them? You must be joking!”

The life of Jonah is a great case study for showing just how often we misjudge and misread. If even a professional prophet could get things so wrong in terms of understanding God and those God chooses to bless, forgive, or call nearer, how will we be any different? Yet how often, and how tritely, we invoke the truth that “God’s ways are not our ways,” while simultaneously operating as if we have it all figured out. Like Jonah, we often feel we know exactly what should happen in any given situation and are more than ready to offer advice, correction, or input. Yet the frequency with which Jonah got it wrong, the people of Israel got it wrong, and we continue to get it wrong, should truly demand a measure of humility and introspection. What does God see in the lives of those God calls? What are we overlooking? What are we not seeing at all?

In his letter to the Corinthians and throughout many of his writings, the apostle Paul seeks to unpack the mystery of God’s workings and to show that God’s ways are truly other than what is considered the norm. Paul brings home not only the surprising content of the message and the unusual choice of the messengers, but more importantly, the unconventional way that God works. The apostle does not really say anything about why or how God chooses, but simply that God does so: “It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’” (1 Corinthians 1:30-31).

To be a follower of Christ demands independent and courageous thinking and acting. It is often to go against the flow, to stand in an opposing manner, to resist what is the wisdom of the crowd. Paul’s reminder of the basis upon which God chooses should disabuse us of our self-elevation. For God’s choosing is not based on our credentials or qualifications but solely and centrally on Christ’s.  Hence, as Francis Schaeffer used to say, “There are no little people” in God’s eyes. We are all sinners saved by and dependent on grace.  Thus, we must constantly lay hold of what has been done for us and learn to rest in God’s provision, wisdom, and care. We can also rejoice that even today God deliberately, with full knowledge, and real intention, chooses the unlikely, the outcast, and the least, overturning titles of power, success, and wisdom in a world with very different scales.

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

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Surprised by the Known

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It would be strange to grow up knowing that your life is set apart. Of course, to a small extent this is the experience of many modern children. Wrapped within the dreams of their parents, they grow with the assurance of a plan and a purpose for their lives—albeit a purpose shrouded in hopeful mystery. For John the Baptist, the only son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, there was much less mystery. John grew up knowing that he would one day be called a prophet. In fact, he grew up knowing his life’s exact call: “You will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him” (Luke 1:76). He was to be a Nazirite, literally one consecrated to God and separated from the general population.

We know very little about John’s life outside of his short public ministry. We are told that this miracle child of a barren womb grew strong in spirit and lived in the desert. He ate locusts and wild honey and wore clothing made of camel’s hair. His entire life seemed to be marked with the knowledge that he was set apart for a unique and specific role. I imagine that he thought often of the day he would meet the Messiah whose way he was to prepare. I imagine that he never expected it would be someone from his own family, a cousin who grew up beside him.

John was baptizing in the Jordan River when the sky opened up and the Spirit descended like a dove, the sign that God had told him to expect. “The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is he who will baptize with the Holy Spirit” (John 1:31). The Spirit rested upon Jesus. Twice, John seems to note his astonishment; “I myself did not know him.” It is safe to assume that John knew who Jesus was; his mother, Elizabeth, was Mary’s cousin. But John did not know Jesus as the Christ, the one he had been set apart to proclaim, the one whose sandals he was not worthy to untie.

I wonder how often I do not see the person in front of me—the loved one, the colleague, the stranger I sell short as an imager bearer of God. John was so taken with what God revealed about Jesus that he realized he had never really known him. This distant cousin, present at family gatherings and near on holidays, was the Lord, the one he had been waiting for all his life. Without questioning God, without doubting Jesus, John immediately reframed his perspective and bowed before the Lamb of God. For the remainder of his days, John gave this testimony of Jesus: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. I would not have known him, except that the one who sent me to baptize with water told me…  I have seen and I testify that this is the Son of God” (1:32-34).

How quick are you to adjust your eyes to all God would have you see in the person in front of you? For the Christian, the question is repeated again and again in the gospels. If we are unwilling to let God transform the world before our eyes, there will be people we will never really know, dynamics that will go unnoticed, signs we will miss completely. In the kingdom of God, astonishment should not surprise us.

The day after John was shown the truth about his cousin, he introduced two of his disciples to the Christ. “Rabbi,” they said, “where are you staying?” “Come,” Jesus replied, “and you will see.” Like Jesus himself, this exchange has both an element of the spiritual and the physical entwined, something divine and something human. Jesus reminds us that there is a vertical quality about our lives, a reaching to taste and see the goodness of God and to know the one in whose image we were formed. But there is also a horizontal quality about the invitation of Christ to come and see. His followers are called to see the image of God in their neighbors, to be present in a crowd that prefers escapism, to reach out to the world as if reaching to Christ himself.

The disciples answered Jesus’s invitation to come and see, learning in time that it was indeed a multi-dimensional offer. They went to his house and saw where he was staying; they met his mom and saw his family. But they also discovered in his eyes a kingdom that is not of flesh and blood. They would not have known except that God revealed it. They would not have realized except that they were willing to see.

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 – Creation and Destruction

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The media recently reported the capture of one of the most notorious drug loads—leader of the Sinaloa Cartel—El Chapo, Joaquin Guzman. Guzman was captured without the firing of a single bullet. This was quite a feat given that he kept an arsenal of weapons around him at all times: semi-automatic rifles, hand-grenades, rocket-launchers, and other weapons of mass-destruction. Yet, he was completely caught off guard when police arrested him in his home in the early dawn. While the media hailed his capture as a huge success in the fight against drug trafficking, most citizens in Mexico are less sure. A seemingly intractable feature of Mexican life, there is no certainty that Guzman’s capture will slow the traffic or violence of the drug trade and its cartels.

The moral depravity of the real-life drug cartels has often been fictionalized in television and film. Whether the popular television show Breaking Bad, or the 2007 film No Country for Old Men (adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy), the violence intertwined with the illegal drug trade has often been used as a metaphor for exploring the underbelly of evil just below the surface of ‘civilized’ life. Specifically, it is an evil that continually advances and seems without end or solution. In the face of this kind of evil, it is understandable how a kind of nihilistic despair takes hold. As the sheriff laments in the film No Country for Old Men:

“I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would have operated these times. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, “O.K., I’ll be part of this world.”(1)

When I read the headlines or encounter some of the ways in which these realities are depicted in film, television, novels and other artistic media, I wonder what might make a difference in this kind of world. Is there any hope for redemption, transformation, and justice that goes beyond simply punishment? As a Christian, I wonder what difference the good news of Jesus can make in this brutal world of drug lords, traffickers, and violence.

In the face of these kinds of questions, it was a delight to learn about the work of artist Pedro Reyes. His musical project titled “Disarm,” transformed 6,700 guns that were turned in or seized by the army and police into musical instruments.(2) The guns came from Ciudad Juarez, a city of about 1.3 million people that averaged about 10 killings a day at the height of its drug violence. In 2010, Ciudad Juarez had a murder rate about 230 per 100,000 inhabitants. Reyes remarked of the guns he used that this is “just the tip of the iceberg of all the weapons that are seized every day and that the army has to destroy.” But rather than succumb to the despair, Reyes took the very instruments used for violence and created instruments for music.

Reyes already was known for a 2008 project called “Palas por Pistolas,” or “Pistols to Shovels,” in which he melted down 1,527 weapons to make the same number of shovels to plant the same number of trees. Reyes stresses that his work “is not just a protest, but a proposal.” His proposal is to take objects of destruction and transform them into objects of creation. It is not by accident that Reyes’ creative work hearkens back to the ancient prophet Isaiah’s vision of the great day of the Lord when “they will hammer their swords into plowshares.”(3)

It is not by accident that the gospel of John hearkens back to the primordial creation: “In the beginning was the Word…In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters…All things came into being by Him and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”(4) Jesus, like God’s action at the original creation, takes what is chaotic, void, dark, and brings order, meaning, and light. The light does not simply banish the darkness; it is re-worked and re-ordered by the light. Light transforms the darkness.  The creation of music from violence takes a similar cue. “To me at least,” Reyes says, “the concept is about taking weapons that are destructive in nature and chaotic and trying to make them for something else. So instead of objects of destruction, they become objects of creation.”(5) Art, for Reyes, is about transformation.

Could God take the chaos and destruction we often see in our world and transform it with our deceptively simple, seemingly small acts of creative engagement? For those who follow Jesus, that kind of engagement with the destructive forces of the world gives witness to the reality of Jesus Christ, the Creator of life, light, goodness, and love. For the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.

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

(1) As quoted in No Country for Old Men, 2007.

(2) “Pedro Reyes Turns Guns into Musical Instruments,” by Mark Stevenson, 13 February 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com.

(3) Isaiah 2:4.

(4) John 1:1,3,5; Genesis 1:1-2.

(5) “Artist Transforms Guns to Make Music—Literally” by Greg Allen, 25 January 2014, http://www.npr.org.

 

For more on this theme, join us March 28-29, 2014 for symposium on Restoration Arts.

 

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faces in a Cosmic Order

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Thomas Grüter has always had trouble putting names with faces. But unlike most of us who might have trouble recollecting the name of the man who just said hello, Grüter’s trouble lies in recognizing the face of the man who just said hello—even if it is his own father’s. His condition is called prosopagnosia or “face blindness,” and until recently the disorder was thought to be exceedingly rare. But new research led by a team that included Grüter himself shows the disorder is surprisingly common.

Those affected with prosopagnosia are not forgetful or inattentive, nor are they the social snobs they are often accused of being. When it comes to faces—even their own—they see very little that distinguishes one from another. The part of the brain that signals face recognition simply does not respond. As a result, they may greet acquaintances as strangers, struggle to keep up with plots in movies, and have difficulty finding their own children at school pick-up time. “I see faces that are human,” notes one woman of her condition, “but they all look more or less the same. It’s like looking at a bunch of golden retrievers: some may seem a little older or smaller or bigger, but essentially they all look alike.”(1)

The more I think about what it would mean to live unable to recognize faces, the more I am amazed at our ability to do so at all. Human faces are so complex, differing in both great and minute details. Our faces change with expression or circumstance, angle or shift of light; they are transformed by emotions, altered by different situations, and slowly transformed with age. Given the intricacy of the task, it is phenomenal that we should be able to recognize so many faces so effortlessly in the first place.

Yet the face is one of the very first things we learn to respond to as infants. Developmental psychologists speak readily of the importance of the human face in the life of a newborn, particularly the faces of mother and father, which the child quickly comes to recognize. Professor James Loder speaks of the tendency of an infant to smile when one holds the mere configuration of a face on a stick beside the crib. Writes Loder, “[T]he face phenomenon is not strictly something that comes only from the environment; it is also a construct created by the child and developed out of the child’s inherent resources and deep-seated longing. Children seem uniquely endowed with a potential capacity to sum up all the complexity of the nurturing presence in the figure of the face.“(2) For the child, the face plays a central role in their developing sense of the order of their very universe. Thus, when the face of the loving nurturer goes away in any capacity (which is inevitable), the child’s world is upset on some level. For what has gone away is not merely a static face but a much greater presence.

In this, children inherently illustrate a correlation drawn in biblical language. In both Greek and in Hebrew, the word for “face” is also the word for “presence.” Though we do not literally behold the face of God, it is the Father’s greater countenance that we seek, God’s very presence that comforts above all. The psalmist’s plea is that the confirming presence of God’s love would remain with him always: “Do not hide your face from me, do not turn your servant away in anger; you have been my helper. Do not reject me or forsake me, O God my Savior. Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me” (Psalm 27:9-10). Scripture seems to pronounce what is echoed in the skills and longings of a developing child. Namely, our years urge us to pursue “a relationship with the One who is the cosmic ordering, self-confirming presence.”(3) That is to say, the enduring pursuit of the faithful is a pursuit of the Face that will, in fact, never go away.

I cannot imagine the hardship of those for whom no face is familiar. But there are times when God’s face certainly seems obscure to me, and it is a painful discomfort. Though evidence of God’s assuring presence may well be around me, I am at times hard-pressed to recognize it. It is in such times when I am reminded by my own longing that God is near. In my most instinctive desire is the imprint of the face I long for. Though recognition is a task that doesn’t always come effortlessly, the longing to know the face of God is a sign placed deeply within us, an assuring mark of God’s very calming, comforting presence. Wherever we are in our stages of recognition, the promise of God is extended: For now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.

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

(1)  Nicholas Bakalar, “Just Another Face in the Crowd Even if It’s Your Own,” The New York Times, July 18, 2006.

(2) James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 91.

(3) Ibid., 95.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God and Lamentation

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“Lamentation” is not a word that is heard very often. Words like sadness, regret, sorrow, and mourning are far more common. But I believe something is lost in the dismissal of lament from our vocabulary.

The Christian hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” is for me a song of lament. Because of certain associations, it is a song that immediately evokes a sense of grief, and yet it is the sort of mourning that is both held and expressed in worship. Whether the Christian story is one you embrace or not, the connection of these two ideas—worship and lamentation—may seem even more foreign than the word itself. Nonetheless, lamentation as worship was once a significant element in the Judeo/Christian vision and experience of the world.

Worship leader and songwriter Matt Redman was in the United States shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Leading worship in several churches in the weeks following, he was immediately struck by the powerful sermons that were being preached, eloquently expressing the love of Father, Son, and Spirit to a shocked and vulnerable people. He was also struck by the distinct lack of songs he had on hand for worship in the midst of suffering. Where were the songwriters for such a time as this? Where were the poets and prophets to help the people of God find a voice in worship? Writes Redman, “As songwriters and lead worshipers, we had a few expressions of hope at our disposal; but when it came to expressions of pain and lament, we had very little vocabulary to give voice to our heart cries.”(1)

Certainly hope is a needed expression, a gift not afforded by every worldview, and lamentation in this sense is similar. But more so, lamentation is a vital aspect of a life in relation with God. Seventy percent of the psalmist’s words are words of lament! “Hear my prayer, O LORD,” the psalmist pleads. “Let my cry for help come to you. Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress. Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly. For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers.” Sadly dissimilar to many public and private expressions of grief as well as many worship services today, the writers of Scripture identify with the pain of the world and do not hold back in addressing it before a God they believe needs to hear it. For these voices, lament is not a relinquishing of faith, but a cry in worship to the one who weeps with them.

At a funeral once, a fellow mourner caught me with tears in my eyes and told me that neither God nor the one we mourned would want me to cry. Her intentions were good; she meant to encourage me with the powerful hope of the Christian story, which holds at its center the resurrection of Christ. But I desperately needed permission to lament, permission to look up at the cross with the sorrow of Mary and the uncertainty of the centurion. I needed to be able to ask why with the force that was welling up in that moment of grief, even as I clung to hope in the Son, trust in the Father, and life in the Spirit who holds us.

For anyone who needs permission to mourn, the Christian season of Lent is a time to walk the labored steps of Jesus toward the agony of the cross, the reality of its injustice, and the despair of human death and suffering. This is a profound gift for a world in need of permission to ask why, to cry out in pain, and to know there is one hearing. While songs of hope are essential in a world that is not as it should be, lament is often the honest, needed pathway there, just as the iniquitous sufferings of the cross and the darkness of a cold tomb were the way to resurrection. Neither our worship nor our journeys can deny this if they are truly to lead us to hope.

The Christian story holds a unique capacity for tears because the story itself is filled with tears. And thus the Christian can sing through the disorienting sting of cancer and unemployment and injustice, even as it moves us to reach out to those who are suffering with the love of one who will one day wipe away every tear from our eyes. It is this God who gives us permission to utter the words in the pits of our stomachs and the Spirit who helps us groan them, as we follow the one who cried: “I am deeply grieved, even to death.”

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

(1) Matt and Beth Redman, Blessed Be Your Name: Worshipping God on the Road Marked with Suffering (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2005), 3

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Who Am I?

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Many world religions today accept the man Jesus within their belief system. Muslims call him a prophet; some Buddhists consider him a bodhisattva, and New Age practitioners call him a social activist. Amidst such diverse claims of the identity of Jesus, who is the real Jesus? This reminds me of Jesus’s own question to his disciples in Matthew 16—namely, “Who do people say that I am?” A brief look at the backdrop of his question would help us better grasp the significance of this passage.

First, consider the location. The incident occurred at a place some miles northeast of the Sea of Galilee in the domain of Herod Philip.(1)It was also the reputed birthplace of the god of Pan—the god of nature and fertility—and he was staunchly worshipped there. The surrounding area was also filled with temples of classical pagan religion. Towering over all of these was the new temple to the Emperor Caesar. Thus, the question of Jesus’s identity was aptly and significantly posed to his disciples against a myriad of gods and idols.

Second, consider Peter’s response. The answer Peter accorded to Jesus’s question—”You the Christ, the Son of the living God”—was a title with implications that the original audience knew perfectly well. Peter was describing Jesus as the Promised One who would fulfill the hopes of the nation. The interesting thing, though, is that the original audience was expecting a Messiah or savior who was more of a political figure. Of course, Jesus, the disciples were discovering, was much more than this. He described himself as the divine Son of God, and the salvation he was to bring as something not just for the Jewish nation but for peoples of all nations.

Peter’s insightful confession was key in the disciples’ eventual recognition of Jesus and the turn of events that would follow. Though given divine insight, Peter was as unaware as the rest of the disciples that the victory of the Messiah they professed would come in the most unexpected way. Yet from here on, God’s plan was further revealed, Jesus’s suffering and impending death more clearly voiced. Jesus revealed that his Messiahship involved taking on the role of the suffering servant as prophesied by the prophet Isaiah. His very identity would ultimately lead him to his cursed death on the cross.

Of course, how Jesus lived and died had implications as to how his followers were to live as well. The earliest Christians understood this very well as many were persecuted for their faith and betrayed by their own families. The laying down of one’s life was a literal reality for those who would become martyrs.

Today, most of us live in environments where the question “Who do you say that I am?” is still asked in a world of distractions. We live in a context where we have endless options to choose from: a plethora of religions, pleasure and wealth, recognition, and so on. Yet the question is as pressing to us as it was for those who first heard it. Who do we say Christ is? Our response is both personal and public. That is, the confession of allegiance to Christ is both a denial of self-importance and a life of neighbor-importance.

Regardless of what we may have been told, the way of Jesus is ultimately the way of the cross. Signing up with Christ won’t give you worldly benefits, but all the forms of suffering that arise from carrying one’s cross. If we proclaim in our religiously pluralistic context that Christ is supreme over all other gods of this world, we need to be reminded that his supremacy and victory cannot be divorced from the heavy price that he paid.

Often, like Peter, we tend to expect a Lord who fits our preconceptions or ideas—perhaps one who is always “successful,” or one who is validated by signs and wonders.  Even the disciples were not spared this temptation. All of their questions about who would sit at his right hand and what one would secure from discipleship reveal that they were expecting glory as they walked with the Son. Their expectations likely did not include getting killed.

However, as they soon learned, any commitment to Christ that does not feature the cross is merely devotion to an idol, for following Christ is costly. For some, following will mean death itself. It will mean taking up the cross. It will mean living beyond comfort and preference. It will mean stepping out in love and conviction. It may mean undertaking a calling that many will scorn. Choosing to call Jesus the Christ may mean losing our lives, but then, this is the only way to truly live.

I’Ching Thomas is associate director of training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.

(1) NIV Archaeological Study Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2005), 1589.

 

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sleep and Ashes

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The Christian Vision Project was an initiative that began three consecutive years with a question. The aim was to stir thought, creativity, and faithfulness within the Christian church around the subjects of culture, mission, and gospel. In 2006, project leaders asked a group of Christian thinkers how followers of Christ could be countercultural for the common good. Their answers ranged from becoming our own fiercest critics to experiencing life at the margins, from choosing wisely what to overlook and what to belabor to packing up and moving into the city.

But today one answer in particular comes to mind. To the question of counterculturalism for the common good, professor and author Lauren Winner proposed: More sleep. She quickly admitted the curious nature of her retort. “Surely one could come up with something more other-directed, more sacrificial, less self-serving,” she wrote.  Still, she carefully reasoned through the forces of culture that insist we give up an hour of sleep here, or two hours there—the grinding schedules, the unnerving stock piles of e-mail in need of responses, the early-taught/early-learned push for more and more productivity. Thus, Winner concluded, “It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than ‘the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.’ A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent.”(1) We are also bodies living within a culture generally terrified of aging, uncomfortable with death, and desperate for our accomplishments to distract us. “The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures,” Winner concludes. “[I]t is God and God alone who ‘neither slumbers nor sleeps.’”(2)

Today the Christian church celebrates Ash Wednesday, the day on the Christian calendar that urges humanity to remember our condition with countercultural audacity. The season of Lent, the forty days in which Christians prepare to encounter the events of Easter, begins by proclaiming the humble beginnings of creatureliness. The ashes of Ash Wednesday starkly remind us of the dust we came from and the dust to which we will return. Foreheads are marked with a bold and ashen cross of dust, recalling both our history and our future, invoking repentance, inciting stares. Marked with his cross, we are Christ’s own: pilgrims on a journey that proclaims death and suffering, life and resurrection all at once. The journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us. To pick up the cross and follow him is to be reminded at every step that we are mere creatures, and he has come near our humanity to show us what that word originally meant.

In fact, in the season that marches the church toward the vast and terrible events of Holy Week, there are times when we may justifiably feel like the disciples, weary with sorrow, our own eyes heavy with sleep. Current world events and worn-out cries of anguish only deepen this wearied exhaustion. Arguably, this innate instinct is fitting. “[T]o sleep, long and soundly,” says Winner, “is to place our trust not in our own strength and hard work, but in him without whom we labor in vain.”(3) We cannot carry all that Christ carried anymore than we can carry the sorrows we now see all around us. Yet, where we are prone to exchange sound and trusting sleep for fretful slumber, helpless sorrow, or apathetic fatigue, Christ emerges through his own weariness to wake us. “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand.”(4)

The way toward the cross is one that will show both the Christian and a world of contrasting beliefs that we are all finite, fragile creatures in need of a guide, in need of sleep, in need of one who can bear far more than we are able. The cross will also show that the one we desperately need truly exists. While his friends slept, Jesus stepped closer toward betrayal and agony, going all the way to his death, so that one day he could wake us for good: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!”(5)

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

(1) Lauren Winner, Books & Culture, January/February 2006, Vol. 12, No. 1, Page 7.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Matthew 26:45.

(5) Ephesians 5:14.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – For Those in a Hurry

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More often than I’d care to admit, I find that I am in a hurry. Now, it’s not the typical kind of hurrying—rushing to get into the ten items or less lane at the grocery store, speeding through traffic, or running around juggling four or five tasks at a time. It’s more an inability to be present to my life as it is right now. So often I find that no matter the circumstances, I’m hurrying through them, wondering or worrying what is next.

This pattern of hurrying through life to the “next event” seems fairly typical and engrained from a young age. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to be in college. When I was in college, I couldn’t wait to be a graduate student. When I was a graduate student, I couldn’t wait to be a professional. I look back on those hurried days now and lament that I rushed through them so quickly.

Of course, our efficiency-driven society doesn’t help our propensity towards hurrying through life. We live in an “instant” society, and our increasingly rapid technological developments only add to our impatience when things are not achieved instantaneously. While technology has greatly improved many aspects of our lives and I certainly wouldn’t want to go backwards, I recognize that my own propensity to hurry, coupled with a society that moves at ever-quickening speeds, can be very detrimental for any kind of reflective life. How often I find myself disappointed when my prayers are not answered instantly; how angry I become when the smallest glitch slows my achievement of personal goals; how frustrated and impatient I become with others when their own “improvement” doesn’t move at my break-neck speed.

The lives depicted in the Bible couldn’t be more different from our hurried lives. More importantly, and perhaps to our great frustration, the God revealed in the biblical stories is rarely in a hurry. Abraham and Sarah, for example, received the promise of an heir twenty-five years before they actually laid eyes on Isaac. Joseph had a dream as a seventeen year-old young man that his brothers would one day bow down to him. Yet it was countless years and many difficulties later that his brothers would come and kneel before him, asking for food. Moses was eighty years old—long past his prime of life—when God appeared to him in the burning bush and called him to deliver the children of Israel. David was anointed king by Samuel as a young boy tending his father’s flocks, long before he finally ascended to the throne. And Jesus spent thirty years in relative obscurity, and only three years in publically announcing the kingdom and God’s rule that had come in his life and ministry.

From our perspective, it is difficult to understand why God wasn’t more in a hurry to accomplish the plans for these individual lives as a part of the larger narrative of redemption. The Messiah was prophesied hundreds of years before he actually arrived on the scene. We cannot help but ask why God seems to move so slowly?

In Peter’s second letter, what is considered his last will and testament, he discusses the slowness of God in relation to the second coming of Christ. Many arose even in Peter’s time asking why God was so slow when it came to delivering on his promise of an eternal kingdom. They began to mock God assuming that “as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be.” Not so, Peter argues, for the slowness of God is in fact our salvation. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance… Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by him in peace, spotless and blameless, and regard the patience of our Lord to be salvation” (2 Peter 3:9, 14-15).

The long, slow, journey, marked by many Christians in the season of Lent towards Easter morning, can be arduous for those of us who find ourselves constantly racing towards what’s next. These forty days can serve to remind us of God’s great forbearance and patience with us, even as they hearken to us to enter the wild spaces of wilderness waiting with Jesus. These days intentionally slow us and create space—what theologians call liminal space—making room for those of us who rush to wait and rest in the “in-between” and the “not yet” for God to act. Waiting for God in this liminal space gives us more opportunity to be patient, “looking” as Peter says, at the “patience of our Lord to be salvation.”

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

 

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unobscured

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A trend continues to take place in the online world of anonymity. Several websites offer the opportunity to air one’s darkest secrets. Visitors put into words the very thing they have spent a lifetime wanting no one to know about themselves. While visiting, they can also read the long-hidden confessions of others, and recognize a part of humanity that is often as obscured as their own secrets—namely, I am not the only one with a mask, a conflicted heart, a hidden skeleton. “Every single person has at least one secret that would break your heart,” one site reads.  ”If we could just remember this, I think there would be a lot more compassion and tolerance in the world.” Elsewhere, one of these sites made news recently when one of its anonymous users posted a cryptic message seemingly confessing to murder, catching the attention of Chicago Police.(1)

So often the world of souls seems to move as if instinctively to the very things asked of us by a sagacious God. The invitation to confess is present in the oldest stories of Scripture. After his defiance of God’s request, Adam is asked two questions that invite an admission of his predicament; first, “Where are you?” and later, “Who told you that you were naked?” God similarly inquires of Cain after the murder of Abel, “Where is your brother?” Through centuries of changing culture and the emerging story of faith, this invitation to confess is given consistently. “Therefore confess your offenses to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed,” writes the author of James 5:16. A similar thought is proclaimed in 1 John 1:7. “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” Perhaps the call to transparency is not from a God who delights in the impoverishment of his subjects, but a God who knows our deepest needs.

The hope of an online confessional brings us one step nearer to meeting the need of bringing what is hidden to light, and it is commendable that so many are giving in to the impulse to explore the ancient gift of confession. But perhaps such an impulse to haul the truth from obscurity is worthy of something even greater than anonymity. Light is not meant to be kept in shadows; the benefit of openness is not meant to be experienced alone. The stories and scriptures mentioned above speak of the element of community in confession, the promise of fellowship where there is courage to be honest about our selves and our needs. On websites of nameless visitors, though I tell you my darkest secret, we remain nameless to one another. While it may help significantly to know that I am not the only one with a mask, my mask remains. The anonymity factor offers the glimpse of light while maintaining the security of darkness. But isn’t this undermining the very light we seek? It is akin to lighting a lamp and putting it under a bowl.

Jesus reminded crowds full of secrets and sinners that there was no reason to do this. When a hemorrhaging woman in a swarm of people reached out to touch the fringe of his robe, she did so anonymously. Her condition would have classified her among the unclean, and it was therefore illegal to touch anyone. She probably calculated, “If I could just touch the hem of his robe, I could be healed.  The crowd will keep me hidden. He won’t be bothered; he won’t even need to know.” But this was not what happened.  Jesus knew he had been touched and immediately called the woman out of her anonymity. Before him, she was not lost in the crowd.

While we may successfully remain shrouded in disguise from the community around us, the Christian story invites the world to see that we stand unobscured before Christ and united with him nonetheless. Such a thought can indeed be terrifying: before him, we are not disguised. But more than this, it is inherently a gift. In his presence, none are kept in obscurity, hidden in mask or shroud; there are no shadows of anonymity that can hide, nor crowd large enough to keep us hidden. We are not disparaged for the flesh and blood and material of our humanity, but shown instead its true and greatest fulfillment.

The invitation to emerge from our darkest failings, lies, and secrets is not an invitation to dwell in our own impoverishment but rather a summons to light, reconciliation, and true humanity. The unique message of Jesus is that there is no reason to hide. Before we came up with plans to improve our images or learned to pretend with masks and swap for better identities, he saw who we were and was determined to approach regardless. Before we found a way to conceal our many failings or even weighed the possibilities of unlocking our darkest secrets, God came near and called us out of obscurity by name.

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

(1) Gabe Falcon, “It’s creepy and cryptic, but is PostSecret murder confession real?” CNN, September 2, 2013.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Speechless

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There are certain junctures in life when my pen stops moving, and my tangled thoughts seem to only find at their disposure fair-weathered words and deficient clichés. Trying to write a note of condolence, sending a thought of encouragement—sometimes even signing a birthday card—can stop me in my tracks. Looking for words in the midst of death and grief, or life and its best intensity, I often come up empty. Anything I might be able to scrape from my mind seems unbearably inadequate.

Nonetheless, I recognize that it is undoubtedly worse when during such times the words come easily. How do you, without difficulty, tell someone in the dregs of chemotherapy that you are sorry for them? How do you tell someone struggling with addiction to trust that things will work out, that goodness or grace, God or a higher power is with them? How do you offer anything to someone on the brink of death? How do you begin to put into words any sort of comfort that must be bigger than the sorrow—or even the abundance of life—your eyes can see? There are some words that just require our laboring over them, some truths that are too weighty to be tossed lightly into the laps of friend or enemy.

Yet, we do not always labor. Even Christians toss God’s wisdom as if it were something we could hold onto in the first place. I imagine, like Jesus among the Pharisees, God works to undo my well-worded mottos. I don’t understand the truth of incarnation just because I can quote John 3:16. And I can’t explain away the reality that life is hard or death is painful because I believe in the premise of resurrection. Whether our truth-tossing arises out of good intention or pride, Christ is always far more real than this. God will not allow ideas to remain as worthless idols—though shining or polished or well-meaning they are. Christ is more available than cliché, belief, or proverb. He is the living one our creeds will continue to speak of long after we live no more.

When the apostle Paul wrote that nothing can remove the love of Christ—neither “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword”—he was referring to struggles that were dangerously real to him and the people to whom he was writing. He is insistent that God’s love is more enduring than famine or suffering or injustice. It is stronger than death, as unyielding as the grave. How do you put this in to words without trembling? How do we explain the crucifixion without falling to our knees in shock, in wonder, in speechless gratitude?

Stumbling over words to describe the hope we profess, we can be broken again by the mystery of it all and even our misplacing of it. We can be stopped by our loss of its realness, our overlooking of the immensity of Christ and the immovability of his love. Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ is coming again. In the silence of our tangled thoughts, the one behind the creeds calls to us over and above the words.

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 – Does Religion Poison Everything?

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A common claim made by many atheists is that religion causes evil, suffering, division and war. For example, at the Munk Debate in Toronto in 2010, Christopher Hitchens argued this very point against Tony Blair. Religion, Hitchens claimed, causes sectarianism, division, strife, disagreement, war, poverty and a host of societal evils. In his best-selling book, God is Not Great, Hitchens even wrote that “religion poisons everything.”

How might a Christian respond? Well, first, I’d point out there’s a major problem with Hitchens’ argument. You could remove the word “religion” from his statement “religion poisons everything” and replace it with many other words. Politics, for example. Politics causes division, bloodshed, argument, and war. Politics poisons everything. Or what about money? Money causes crime, resentment, bloodshed, division and poverty. Money poisons everything.

You see the problem is that atheists like Christopher Hitchens have built their worldview on the idea that human beings are essentially good and that the world is getting better—a kind of naïve utopianism. But the world isn’t like that, is it? Rather, it seems to be the case that whatever human beings lay hold off, they use to cause damage. That applies to money, politics, government, science—and religion. The problem is not with religion or politics, the problem is not out there somewhere, the problem lies in here, in the human heart.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and political commentator, who survived the Russian gulags and wrote with amazing insight into the human condition, once famously said this: “The dividing line between good and evil runs right through the middle of every human heart.” What the world needs, as an answer to violence and injustice, poverty and pain, is not a clever philosophy, not a religious system, not a new politic, not more money, more education—none of these will fundamentally change anything. Rather, it needs individual transformation, a radical transformation of the human heart. Only Jesus Christ offers that possibility if we are willing to surrender our lives to him.

I often find it interesting to point out to my atheist friends that Jesus himself was also anti-religion. He regularly clashed with the religious leaders of his day because he saw empty religion as powerless, damaging, and enslaving. Ultimately that stance led to his crucifixion. And Christians, of course, cannot talk about suffering and evil, pain, and violence, without talking about the example of Jesus, one to whom violence was done. His example has inspired millions if not billions of Christians to give sacrificially, to love their neighbors, to engage in peace making. One of the most powerful recent examples was the Amish School Shooting in 2006. Not only did the families of the victims publically forgive the perpetrator and offer pastoral support to his family, they set up a trust fund to help the wife of the shooter, who had killed himself too. Only Jesus Christ offers the transformative power that makes that kind of choice possible.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The House of God

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The relationship was straightforward. The men and women of Israel were called to be God’s people and God alone was to be their God. But this identity was far from one that gave them permission to stave off every neighbor and keep every foreigner at bay. On the contrary, the vertical relationship between God and Israel had very clear implications for horizontal relationships with their neighbors. Hospitality was written into the very consciousness of the people of Israel. They saw that they were living in “none other than the house of God” and as such their very lives were to signify the master of the house.(1) It was, no doubt, in understanding the feast that God had set before her that the woman of Shunem urged the traveling Elisha to stay for a meal. Later realizing that her guest was a servant of God, she took hospitality to all new heights. “She said to her husband, ‘Look, I am sure that this man who regularly passes our way is a holy man of God. Let us make a small roof chamber with walls, and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that he can stay there whenever he comes to us.’”(2)

Modern hospitality typically doesn’t include the physical building of new rooms onto our houses. Still, the image is one with staying power. What is hospitality in world where the view is global and yet the concept of neighbor seems an increasingly distant nicety? The Christian, as for ancient Israel, is particularly affronted by the question, for how often it seems we find God asking us to do the very things that God has done for us: “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” said Jesus. “If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am” (John 14:1-3). Hospitality is a command we are given because we have been given a home. We welcome others because we have been welcomed. We build rooms in our lives for strangers, outcasts, and neighbors because we, too, were once strangers when the Son prepared us a room.

We also build rooms simply because our neighbors need them.  In Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous sermon on the Good Samaritan, he distinguishes between asking “What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?” and “What will happen to him if I don’t?”  King then asks himself, “What will happen to humanity if I don’t help? What will happen to the Civil Rights movement if I don’t participate? What will happen to my city if I don’t vote? What will happen to the sick if I don’t visit them?”(3) Choosing to do nothing in terms of hospitality, service, and justice is still very definitely making a choice. What will happen to my neighbor if I refuse to see her need for the room in my life I can offer?

Here, we might further discover that God not only encourages hospitality for the sake of the one who would receive it, but also for the sake of the world that sees it. In a memorable article in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof makes the observation that in certain countries where danger and instability are constant threats, “you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians.” He continues, “In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows, and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic.”(4)

Genuine hospitality is one of the very powerful means that Christ’s arms are seen reaching out for the world. On multiple levels, the one who builds a room for a neighbor is painting a picture, and it may well be the only description of the good news those who behold the act will ever see.

With Elisha and the Shunammite woman, we live our lives in none other than the house of God. Countercultural scenes of hospitality today may rightly be met with the surprise of Jacob, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”

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

(1) Genesis 28:17.

(2) 2 Kings 4:8-10.

(3) From A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” edited by Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (Warner Books, 1998).

(4) Nicholas D. Kristof, “Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love,” The New York Times, February 3, 2008.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Art of Discipline

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There is often an assumption made that creativity is an unbounded force, flowing freely and continually to the artist. The canvas is never blank, the page never empty, the clay never unformed. The artist never experiences boredom or tedium with regards to her craft, but instead experiences the effortless flow of creative energy each and every day. There is little need for discipline or structure in the artist’s world, or so we assume.

In contrast, most artists will tell you that creativity is something that must be practiced—exercised, as it were, just like any muscle. In fact, creativity achieves its greatest potential when bounded by discipline, and a tireless commitment to practice, routine, and structure. The painter, Wayne Thiebaud, once said that “an artist has to train his responses more than other people do. He has to be as disciplined as a mathematician. Discipline is not a restriction but an aid to freedom.”(1) Thiebaud insists that rather than being opposed to creativity, discipline provides the conduit through which creative engagement grows and develops freely.

It is not difficult to understand why many would falsely believe that creativity is by nature undisciplined, when many assume that structure and routine are signs of a lack of creativity, or worse, are signs of boredom. Boring routine appears to be antithetical to the creative life. But as author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a notebook entry, “Boredom is not an ‘end product’ but an important and necessary ‘stage in life and art,’ acting like a filter that allows ‘the clear product to emerge.’”(2)

We often make the same assumptions about growth and creativity in our daily lives. We often expect unbounded growth and instant results. We often expect the constant flow of “good feelings” surging through us. If we do not experience these things, or if the novel continually eludes us, we believe that something isn’t right. But perhaps this sentiment belies a hidden disdain for the repetitive nature of discipline and routine. We falsely believe that discipline is antithetical to the flourishing of freedom.

 

As a result, many of us find ourselves chasing after the wind of emotional experience or spiritual “high,” constantly seeking the “next thing” that will move us or make us feel good. Ritual, discipline, commitment, and structure seem impediments to growth, rather than the soil in which growth is nourished and fed. We falsely believe that transformation is like osmosis, a process over which we have little control or responsibility.

Not surprisingly, Jesus makes this connection between spiritual growth, transformation and discipline. In the gospel of John he exhorts his followers to “abide” in him—literally to rest and to take nourishment from the life Jesus offers (John 15:4-5). But as we abide we are told about the discipline inherent in abiding: “Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love; just as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full” (John 15:9-11).

Jesus insists that human flourishing is intimately enjoined to keeping his commands. Joy flows from a life that abides in the love of Jesus. Abiding in the love of Jesus, and experiencing the fullness of joy are not separated from discipline and obedience. The routine and discipline of abiding are the nutrients necessary for the spiritual life to flourish and grow.

Many might find this statement quiet paradoxical since we do not often associate joy with discipline! Daily living often feels like monotonous routine. But joy can flow when the routine of living is artfully engaged. Finding joy in faithful nurture, care and disciplined engagement with routine is not dependent on the whims of our personalities, or feelings that come and go. Joy is the result of a life lived in the rhythm of rest, routine, and discipline. As one abides the monotony of disciplined routine can be transformed into joy-filled ritual.

Life is often both tedious and difficult. Creative engagement in art and life requires both. But disciplined obedience is not a blockade to joy, but rather a doorway that opens into the presence of God. An invitation to encounter one who produces from artful discipline something beautiful that remains, awaits all who will enter.

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

(1) As cited in Clint Brown, Artist to Artist: Inspiration & Advice from Artists Past & Present (Corvalis, OR: Jackson Creek Publishers, 1998), 87.

(2) As cited in Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 41.