Last week, we passed the 1-year anniversary of the horrific day in Tucson, Arizona. On January 8, 2011, a lone shooter shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen other people. Six died, including 9-year-old Christiana-Taylor Green.

Recently I read the book As Good As She Imagined by Roaxanna Green and Jerry B. Jenkins. It’s a wonderful book that portrays the life of this 9-year-old, Christina-Taylor. My heart mourned for the victims and their families but especially for the Green family. No one wants to lose his or her child.

Green and Jenkins share stories from Christina-Taylor’s short life and I couldn’t help but fall in love with her and her family. It’s reminded me of the importance of community, love of family and how enduring challenges develops the perseverance needed to survive later trials.

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There is a reason we call this the most wonderful day of the year: Christmas is truly filled with wonder. Or at least it should be. Somehow over the course of 2,000 years our wonder has become somewhat diluted, if not downright negative.

We consider the miracle of the incarnation--God taking on human form--and we pose a question we might ask of an illusionist: "I wonder how he did that?" Or worse, our wonder is more like doubt, mainly because we buy into the notion--on a practical level, at least--that Jesus was a wise teacher and a social justice advocate, but hardly the supernatural being Scripture makes Him out to be.

Neither of these senses of wonder--speculation or doubt--is anywhere near the wonder that Jesus should incite in us. We should be ashamed when we settle for a pedestrian kind of wonder. Our wonder at Jesus and the day He was born should rise far above our normal human emotions to the place where we are literally frightened at the very idea that the most holy God has identified with us in such a personal, self-sacrificial way.

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Earlier this week I read an article on CNN's belief blog that threw me into a stewing pot of thoughts. At the core is one simple word that seems so complex to live out, even in the shallowest of circumstances.

Forgiveness.

Celebrity Portrait Photographer Jeremy Cowart set out on a mission with filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson (As We Forgive) to produce a photo series project called "Voices of Reconciliation." Cowart and Hinson went to Rwanda. They wanted to give Rwandans the opportunity to make their own statements to the world about the 1994 mass killings and uprooting that took place in their backyards.

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It’s no secret that journalism thrives on nasty bacteria more than life-giving oxygen. But this week’s relentless coverage of Very Bad People is making me want to wash my hands every five minutes. 

Kim Kardashian’s faux-marriage reminds me that, at least in Celebrity-America, marriage equals marketing. Justin Bieber and Herman Cain, whom I would never place in the same sentence at any other time in history, both face sordid charges of power-groping. Conrad Murray (Michael Jackson’s unprincipled physician and convict-of-the-week) showed us all that the Hippocratic Oath means about as much as Kardashian’s Oath.  And finally, the entire Penn State football program appears ready to implode over horrific charges of a pedophilia cover-up.

Just when I’m about to take up drinking, I realize that these are only the national stories. My hometown (and yours) has little celebrity symbolism but all of the same stories: the trivialization of marriage, the misuse of power, the abuse of innocent children. The two-dimensional news stories have real people behind them--people whose sins infect the entire world. 

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You may think that you don’t much matter.

Few know you.

Few would miss you if you were gone.

Your talents are minimal.

Your funds are limited.

Your skills are pedestrian.

And in the big picture you are probably right. The world will go on just fine without you. Your absence will not make the lights dim or the earth slow its revolution.

Within half a century you will be absolutely forgotten and photos of you merely a curiosity.

This is true for every kind of human being with the exception of one: the one who Christ lives in.

He makes your small seemingly insignificant act of love or kindness an eternal milestone for someone.

He keeps your prayers forever. Selah (Pause, and think about this)

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Grace, Love & Murder?

May 20, 2011

Christian Buckley  

Some questions, or rather problems, are too big for my head to get around.  I try my hardest to work through and dissect them – but my mind just gives out.  It is like when you ask an old computer to do too many things at the same time and it just locks up and stares at you with indignation.  That’s what happens to me when I try to figure out something like how Grace, Love, and Murder  - a specific murder – fit together. Brain lock. 

A couple of preface notes to what follows are in order. 

--     This is a horrible post and will unsettle you – I hope – assuming you have a soul.

--      I, unlike I would venture to say 99.9999% of you, have first hand deep experience in this topic.  I go to death row in California every couple of months because I represent men there who have murdered people.  That work takes me through dark places, lives, and realities I didn’t know existed and still wish I didn’t.  That doesn’t make me special – it just gives you some background and probably gives me a different view of the topic.

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True or false? “God yearns to rescue people so that they know God is good.”

Awhile back I visited a mini conference in the Los Angeles area with Gary Haugen as the speaker. Gary Haugen is founder and president of International Justice Mission, a DC based organization that works in a number of countries to combat slavery and ultimately wipe it out completely.

Immediately following the quote above, Gary said, “We are called to help rescue people.” I agree with Gary. As I continue to seek in the Bible what God would have of me in this life, I am more and more convinced that it is the work of justice. In fact, God doesn’t even want my offering and worship to him if I’m not obeying his commands to care and serve those in need. Read Isaiah 58 and you'll see what I mean.

I am cautious with my heart, not by nature but through experience. Yet Trust has been a recurring call in my journey with Christ – trust, and pain, and hope.

The first call I heard from the Lord was: Trust Me to make you whole. I had accepted Christ as my Savior, but I was anything but whole. I didn’t know how healing could happen; I could not imagine any world in which I did not carry this pain with me. Persistently and gently, though, the Lord called to me: Trust Me to heal you. Like the woman who reached out to touch merely the hem of Jesus’ robe, I hardly dared ask for His attention – and He turned and gave me the fullness of His healing grace. Even now, I am staggered by the power and grace with which Christ worked in the dark places of my heart.

The second time I heard that call was in the context of writing my book and – even more so – doing publicity interviews this past summer.

For a while I wondered why Jesus went to the cross.  Seemed a little extreme. I was a decent person, relatively speaking, and quite liked the idea of being judged based on my rule following.  A gifted Pharisee seems to have no fear of morality.  What she fears, rather, are things like love and forgiveness and living by faith alone. 

Someday maybe I’ll write a book about the characters that line our street.  Today I’ll simply mention two, and how they’ve been gnawing away at my Pharisee-prone compulsions.  

We live in a transitional community, so it’s constantly lending lessons and paradigm-shifts to concepts like “family,” “wealth,” or “the Gospel.”  A neighbor and close friend of ours, whose name I’ll leave concealed, knocked yesterday at 8am.

A recent post of mine on whether we should love God or fight for him, got some push back from a friend on my facebook page.

His primary arguments are that:

1) the biblical warfare worldview is basic to all biblical revelation and prescription.

2) I created a false dichotomy between loving God and fighting for Him i.e. surely we can do both.

3) I was "fighting" against the "fighters" as I tried to promote love

Here are a few quick thoughts:

First, the Bible makes quite clear that we battle not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6), therefore any biblical battle motif cannot be construed to apply to human interactions.

This is further seen in Christ's refusal to fight, his rebuking of Peter when he cut the ear off the Roman soldier and embodied by the early church who did not fight eye for eye or tooth for tooth and instead followed Christ's example and command and turned the other cheek.

Second, agreed that two apparently contradictory things may not be in contradiction i.e. fighting and loving. For example, I love my children but I discipline them. However, that is a "paternalisitc" relationship and it not necessarily appropriate to extend that to all relationships. However, as a society we still need judges, courts, etc.. and in church we need boundary enforcers to root out evil doers (abusers of children, powermongers, gossips, etc..) and protect innocents even though our call to love the evil doers is not lessened.

Nevertheless, saying that disciplining, boundary enforcement or even fighting is consistent with love takes a lot of nuancing as they are not clearly always consistent with love. In fact, I do not think it is too audacion to say that they are rarely consistent with love and are generally consistent with humanity's desire to control one another.

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