Walking Among Vultures

[HKHaugan]

I know from time to time as I watch a game with a team I’m rooting for and they make a bad play or two, I’m convinced they’re going to lose. And that regardless of the score and the time left in the game. I can feel that way on the first and last play. That’s my pessimism. On the other hand when a player seems to have a good record to pull a team through I display some hope and optimism.

I have to admit, watching a game is a totally consuming emotional experience. I don’t want to feel the pain of losing whether it’s happening 3,000 miles away or right here close to home. When I face it realistically I wonder why I get so involved. Even if there is a win, the feeling after is a mixture of relief and some joy but it all is short lived. There’s nothing lasting about it. I start either looking forward to or dreading the next game. I get absolutely no payback from the outcome one way or the other. Furthermore no one in any of the team organizations I back knows me or even cares about my existence, what I feel, what I like or don’t like. Have you noticed that no one from any of those teams in which we invest our emotions ever calls to find out what we think, feel or ever asks our advice on how they could do better?

Why do I put myself through all that, expending all that energy and then, on top of that, to pay for it?

If I really analyze it, come to grips with why I take it so seriously, it’s all about me. I want to be attached to something that is successful, that’s “No.1”, because I was directly or indirectly connected with it as an alumnus, a member or a citizen. ‘Bragging rights’ is the term to describe this ‘water cooler mindset.’ It’s really about ego isn’t it? The ego needs to feel justified, successful and secure.

The ego has a self-protecting methodology. It’s called ‘isms.’ They are self-manufactured--- pessimism, optimism and already mentioned above. Add to these fatalism, emotionalism, truism, denialism, romanticism, stoicism, triumphalism, militarism, monism, theism, dualism, denominationalism (Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Methodism, Lutheranism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism, the subtle nuances in each, etc.) and authoritarianism. All have one thing in common; they are developed as self-defense strategies for the ego. The ‘isms’ rise and fall depending on what has, might or will happen to the ‘I’ in each of us. Note that all ‘isms’ begin with ‘I’. They define some of the strongholds we use to survive and control our lives apart from God. Take the ‘ism’ away from each and you will find an idea from God that has been separated from Him.

In a prior writing I suggested ismatosis as the ismatic disease that has ismopathic symptoms, diagnosed through ismiatry and cured through ismatherapy using a ’12-step’ program in which we go from confessionism to curism. The problem with this redefinition is that God is left out of the entire process. What really happens is that without God we simply transfer the dynamic from one ism to another depending on the force it exerts on us. Like the alcoholic or drug addict who needs a cure, not a substitute with a less self-destructive behavior (from heroin or ‘meth’ to methadone, alcohol to smoking or food), we need a cure that actually removes the internal self-dependency problem.

Enter Jesus Christ.

He is where true confrontation takes place between reality and avoidance, between a band aid and a cure and between life and death. Until we place everything in a spiritual context our mind and heart are vulnerable. It is in the spiritual that all distress finds its source. That’s why sin is the soil in which the isms take root. Sin is the ego-driving force to see life only from my personal perspective and believe “I am the master of my fate and I am the captain of my soul,” to quote Henley’s famous angry ode to self.

Jesus exposes sin not only as a generic problem in the mind, heart and spirit but as an individual and personal source of every anxiety and self-dependent tendency. Are we anxious in our daily movement with those around us, what they might be thinking about us, how we can best present ourselves in our conversations and make good impressions, in other words, ‘getting it right?’ Do we muddle about in the puddle of past happenings that can never be changed, cuddle with memories of words that can never be recovered and dwelling on what could have been but will never be possible? What is this but a search for forgiveness in the deepest place, the heart, where no human can tread without someone to lead the way? Where only Jesus has bridged that gap of the unresolved, the unrecoverable in a hopeless quest for self-forgiveness?

Herein lays the nub of the problem of sin---we can’t forgive ourselves. Our imperfection tires us, makes our hearts sweat, weighs on our mind and worries our spirit. It makes us angry not only with ourselves but with the world around us. Anger, being a self-directed response to imperfection, lies unresolved and turns into depression. There is no inner mental or intuitive ability to handle its onslaught.

It takes someone else to carry that burden, that overweight knapsack, as we climb a seemingly endless mountain. When Jesus trod alone up the trail to Mt.Calvary, He bore that backpack. It was a crude wooden cross symbolizing the frustration of every person’s inability to escape their internal desert---their lost vertical relationship with perfection and their lost horizontal touch with one another. There He absorbed the brunt of man’s self-inflicted isolation, sin, and bled out His physical blood, the symbol of life, spiritual life, to paint for us a picture of our real inner heart catastrophe. We lost it all, our relationship with God and our relationship with one another. So He put Himself on our treadmill, took up our backpack with every person’s inner alienation and invited the sum of all our fears to execute Him. There they were, the impersonal agents of death, like vultures perched and waiting---the political, military, social, intellectual and religious powers of a God-less society. This is the world destiny for anyone who ignites their ravenous hostility. Jesus took them all in His stride and their fangs were the nails to bring their point home.

And what were those words He spoke as He surveyed not only His lonely agony but the leering faces of sin’s ultimate injustice? “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” When Jesus prayed those words, His Father opened the door for forgiveness to pour out to all those who would turn their minds and hearts to Him.

More on sin and forgiveness to come.