Twenty Years from Sliders to Red Dirt Latte

It has been Twenty Years

From Sliders to Red Dirt Latte

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Yesterday I discovered that this year is the twentieth anniversary of one of my favorite television shows in the 90’s – Sliders.

            In those days I pretty much liked just about anything science fiction, even if I lived a strict Conservative life with a very cautious philosophical and theological perspective regarding life. But most everyone has to find an outlet for their human desire for adventure – so sitting down for an hour or two of science fiction imagination was the way someone cautious about life did it. One could watch Sliders and imagine going to endless alternative earths.

            I guess it is only now, as I have somewhat broader horizons of perspective, that I can see a real connection between my love of Sliders and my Christian theology. In the Biblical world the story of Israel and the story of Christ and the whole story of redemption are built around themes like sojourn into a distant hostile place and the promised return home. There is a universal restlessness in the experience of human life that is expressed in a prophet’s lamentation that man is born for trouble like the sparks from a fire fly upward. The restlessness is seen in an Abraham who does not trust Pharaoh's desire for his wife and so he seeks his own safety by saying she is his sister. He is far from home and cannot live at ease as he might have in his home environment. Solomon, writing of the journey of his mind and thoughts in Ecclesiastes was on a similar journey, even if it were mostly in letting his thoughts seek their natural ends. In his mental sojourn he struggled to find his way home. Home for Solomon was discovered in bits and pieces. In thoughts like “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die: a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is panted.” Even a time to move on from a beautiful quote such as can be read in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 if a reader would want to. For Solomon the search for home in all his slidings (connection intended) meant a discovery of how the fear of God and the keeping of his commandments established the parameters or the walls he could call home in his sojourn. I suspect Solomon would acknowledge having made plenty of mistakes in his journey, but he might have said when all was said and done that he had discovered what his father had discovered that there was no place on earth or in heaven where He who formed us was not present.

            As a creedal Christian who confesses the Nicene Creed on virtually every Sunday I have realized that Jesus lived a life of sojourn, exile, and return. He left his father to come down to earth and be born as a man. In the Gospel of John his relationship to his mother is spoken of twice. The point that is made is made in an almost suppressed manner. He is leaving his mother and she understands and says “whatever he says to do, do it.” Then he leaves her in the care of John at the cross. He has left father and mother to be joined in the great redemption of his bride. He makes his way home to build a house with many rooms for his bride. He builds it and he will return when he has completed and so until then he in heaven and we on earth remain sojourners awaiting the completion and the moment we can say "Home at last."

            I never saw, when I watched it twenty years ago, the connection of Sliders to the universal experience of humankind, with our yearnings to recover that place we call home. It has been human from the time of Eden to be cast into the wilderness, to feel displaced, to be on a sojourn away from home, in search of home. So much of humankind’s greatest literature is devoted to the universal human experiences of being cast out of our homes and comfort zones, forced into the wilderness of sojourn and given the yearning and hope for return home. Naomi was bitter yearning for home, Odysseus wondered if he would find anyone who knew him when returning home. Sliders explored this human experience of a small group of people being cast out into foreign universes, in a sojourn into the exile while hoping soon for the return home, finding trouble but also joys in their shared journey. I did not feel free to enjoy this show years ago but now I understand it expressed such a universal human experience.

            I have to wrap it up because I discovered that the actress in that show slid from acting into a life married to a man working for the United Nations. Her life these days is composed of slides from one locale to another as their family goes wherever the United Nations sends them. She blogs; writing and taking photographs, and raising her family. She writes from places like Rome and Uganda, and also vacations to an American home that no longer has quite the same feel of home. It was a joy this week to discover Sabrina Lloyd’s website @ http://reddirtlattes.com/. Some of you who work your way laboriously through my wordy too long blogs will love her beautiful prose and photographs. Her writing style is a place to discover an example of fine blogging. I love how she weaves together words, sentences, and photos their impression making its mark on your soul. I speak enviously of those who can write blogs like this. I enjoy the art of brevity but haven’t discovered the gift.

 I think the fictional Wade from Sliders would have been proud to know the real Sabrina Lloyd who once presented her to an audience watching the adventures of that small band of sliders, moving from one earth to another earth in search of the earth that they knew as home. Art imitates life and life imitates art. “Sliders” was art exploring our lives of sojourn looking for home. Sabrina Lloyd in real life expresses on her website her sojourn, away from home, or at home in the sojourn. We discover in reading other people’s unique sojourns that we are bound together in distinctly different but universally connected human lives where we sojourn in search of home.

Why we need Confession

Why do We Need Confession?

Written by Dan McDonald based on a homily by Father Jack Bradberry

 

Altar of St. Michael’s as it appeared a few months ago

 

            This morning one could tell that Father Bradberry was speaking on a subject matter he considered important. He was telling us about confession. It seems he had heard someone speak of how confession was not that important for Christians to do. Maybe it was thought that continually confessing our daily sins was part of a Christianity that focused on sin and sought to encourage growth in grace by shaming us to where we will begin working our way back to Christ. Father Jack, as we know him, used an analogy to speak to us about the importance of confessing our sin.

            He began by asking us who among us had ever had their cars detailed? Some raised their hands. Others probably had but didn’t raise their hands. Then he talked of how for a few days after we have our cars detailed we try to make sure we keep the automobile clean. But then we take a jacket to work on the beginning of the morning because it is a bit cold, but when we get to work we don’t think we need the jacket. We put it in the back seat and then when we drive home the weather is spring like and balmy. We don’t give a thought about pulling the jacket out of the back seat when we get home. Then one has a meeting and takes a folder full of papers with him to go to the meeting. After the meeting you are going somewhere and you put the folder full of filing papers next to the jacket. After you go somewhere you haven’t thought any more of them and they get left in the back seat next to the jacket. The next day in a hurry you go to a fast food place and eat hurriedly inside your car and having trash you lay the trash in the back compartment along the floorboard intending to clean out the back seat when you get home. But something causes you to decide something else is more important or makes you put off cleaning out the back seat. It all builds up.

            This message resonated with me because I am the sort of a bachelor who tends to put off cleaning until tomorrow. Eventually there is enough clutter that I am overwhelmed by the clutter and go into a state of depression over all the stuff I haven’t taken care of. The thing about sin in our lives is that it works in a similar way. We fall short pretty much every day in some way or another. We need a way of clearing the clutter from our lives before the clutter of sin’s debris overwhelms us.

            Father Jack pointed out to us that sometimes we misunderstand why God calls upon us to confess our sins; so that we might be cleansed and forgiven and go forward in our Christian walks. We can almost imagine that God is a narcissistic tyrant who wants us continually to be confessing our sin because he wants us to be feeling how low we are. He pointed out that God wasn’t calling upon us to confess so that we could feel ashamed and guilty like worthless worms. That is not the Christ that washed the disciples’ feet the night of the Last Supper. God knows that if the sins, the sins for which Christ died, are allowed to build up on top of one another without our realizing the joy of these sins being forgiven, and the joy of our being restored on the path towards wholeness of life then we will begin to feel the dirt upon our sandals. We will begin trying to make our way around the clutter in our lives and begin to feel the despair of the clutter amassing to the point that it overwhelms us. Our Lord calls upon us to seek forgiveness so that as he washes our feet we will know a sense of our being unencumbered as we move forward in the walk of life.

            Confession is a wonderful gift that God has given to his people. In our Anglican Church the way people most often confess is through a general confession included in morning and evening prayers and in Holy Communion. In some churches there is an emphasis on confession to a priest. In our Anglican tradition that sort of confession is often not a requirement as it is among Catholics and Orthodox, but in Anglicanism we are encouraged to seek out a minister or priest when we struggle with a sin that overwhelms us. In one of the Gospels, when Jesus tells the paralytic to get up and walk for his sins are forgiven, those who saw the miracle were surprised that God had given the power to forgive sins to men. After his resurrection Jesus gave his appointed apostles the power to forgive sins through the Gospel. It is interesting that churches which would say that no one should ever have to confess their sins to a minister or priest, still often have counselling ministries to Christians needing special counsel. Perhaps the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions are not so far apart as we imagine. God has gifted his church with the forgiveness of sins through the Gospel. He has given us the gift of confession first unto the Lord and yet as needed to those who care for us in the ministry that we might be encouraged when our struggles run especially deep.

            When our Father Bradberry was done giving us the homily today I felt like I had been given something to think about. I have realized that often I get depressed partly because living alone I let the clutter build around me, by putting cleaning it up to another day, to the point that it overwhelms me. I am pretty sure that I do the same in my Christian life. But we have a word of encouragement: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That is not a law for us to use to try to whip ourselves into spiritual shape. That is a promise to us from a Savior who has come into our lives and has stooped down to wash our feet.

            May these words impart encouragement to you as you walk in Christ.

Standing Honestly

Standing Honestly

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            It was summer break between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college. I hadn’t scored to be honest and it was the one thing I wanted more than anything else in my life at age seventeen. I was raised in a home where we were not very religious. But over the years I had been drawn to attend church on occasion, to read through the Bible occasionally. Life had gotten tough, because teen years are so full of stuff that we didn’t quite know how to face. For me, when nothing made sense I took a walk to our back pasture and prayed. My prayers weren’t exactly Christian prayers. They were more like wandering in the back pasture among the Hereford and Angus with my two dogs, feeling sorry for myself because life was painful and there didn’t seem much joy – just mostly sorrow and wondering if life could fit. So I would pray. I would pray and ask God to reveal himself like he had to one of the prophets. Sometimes I begged and sometimes I just got angry and told God that he must be the most selfish being in the universe. Sometimes I told him I would never believe in him and that I would never serve him. But mostly I just wanted to know if he existed. I thought if I could get him angry enough he might strike me dead. But maybe I would have the satisfaction in that final moment of feeling at last he revealed himself. Then what I have counted his answer to my prayers began to take place. Part of the answer was in the Sermon on the Mount. I had an Old Testament view of God and I felt that if the New Testament was so different from the Old, then I would have to keep the old. But when I read the Sermon on the Mount I was overjoyed to discover that Jesus spoke like the prophets. He didn’t mince his words. He wasn’t fine tuning what he said to one person and then saying it differently for another crowed. This was like the Old Testament prophets I had learned to appreciate as those who had proclaimed the Word of God. He was like them and maybe all of them put together. There was this sense about what there was in him, that all the others were forerunners and preparatory advertisers and he was the real deal the fulfillment of what the others had only been beginning.

            In a few months’ time I began to learn that he had died for my sins. I didn’t understand it the same way I do now. But I was overwhelmed that God would become man and suffer death that I might know life when I had become a sinner. I had pondered over the words of the command that I was to love my neighbor as myself and I had begun to realize I was selfish, willing to use people to get what I wanted. It seemed as if nothing could be more impossible than for me to love my neighbor as myself. Then there was that verse about whoever looks upon a woman to lust for her has committed adultery already. I was seventeen I just wanted to score. Maybe I overreacted to the words I read. I probably in some ways did over react. But as I look back I was learning that there is a big difference between having feelings of passion and desire and having love that is not the turning of a woman into our passion object so that we get to use her for our pleasure. I was seventeen and I wanted to score and also Christ had died for my sins and wow God really loved me, and couldn’t he wait until I at least scored one time. My life, at seventeen, was lived between the tension of would I score; and the tension of would I at last follow Christ.

            Eventually I determined I would score. I was a bit upset with God and I would score. I was on a vacation and had picked the perfect girl for the deed. She had no morality hang-ups and maybe if I played my cards right. There was a group of us playing cards and she was at the table. Somebody said something about Jesus freaks. The gal said she didn’t believe in God, in Christ, in the church, or any of that expletive deleted. I thought for a moment about how in so many ways I believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. I thought of a passage where it said that Jesus had said that whoever confesses him before men, he would confess before the Father; and whoever denied him before men he would deny before the Father. I thought “not here Lord, maybe some other time.” Then the thought ran through my mind that one could not serve “God and …” It was as if God were calling me to make up my mind right then and there about scoring or following Christ. I felt as if time had stopped completely, as if the universe had stopped moving and it was waiting for what I would say in that moment. I said with as normal of a voice as I could muster in the moment, “I don’t know much about the church, but I believe that Jesus Christ is who he said he was, the Son of God.” I felt free. The tension was gone. I hadn’t scored. Maybe I never would. Maybe I never will. But I was following Jesus, not so much because I had found him but because he had found me.

            For a long time I’ve felt like I needed to say something about the issue of homosexuality. I stand with the old path, and others are going to have to figure out where they stand. I have no doubt that a lot of brothers and sisters struggle with same sex attractions and with the passages they see that seem to speak against it. There are now a lot of people saying they have found something or another in the Greek to disprove what seems to be there in so many of the translations. I guess I am a sceptic because there were a lot of Greek Church fathers who spoke the language of Greek and never saw what some American with a few years of college Greek saw. I know that Americans pride themselves in being smarter than all other people ever in the history of man, but still I think it strange that all those Greek Church fathers never noticed what an American noticed with a few hours of Greek in college classes. I can only stand where I must stand. For every brother or sister struggling with an attraction I will pray for you to stand with Jesus and follow him. I will stand with you and pray for you. We live in a tough world and there is no temptation facing you that is not common to humanity.

I know a lot of people will disagree with my stand. But for me it is something like that evening when a group of young people were playing cards. After I spoke my words that evening the talk about religion, church, God and Christ didn’t come up again. I had spoken and the next hand was dealt. That night I felt like I was standing alone. But now I feel there are those who struggle with attractions and yet believe the Scriptures and the Christian tradition have spoken. You might believe you are alone but you are not. For those who struggle with feelings to which they feel they must say “no” you are not alone. It kind of felt today important to say.

Agora - Movie Review

Agora: A Movie Review

 

Downloaded from Shutterstock.com image id 260935547

Copyright Fabio Pagani

 

Written by Dan McDonald

 

Agora (2009) with Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Ashraf Barhom, Michael Lonsdale, Sami Samir and others. Directed by Alejandro Amenabar.

 

            In the most Conservative days of my life I might not have watched “Agora”. I would have treated the movie as an attack on my Christian faith. I would have yearned, not to have to think of a time when people motivated by a commitment to the Christian faith could resort to mob activity where they destroyed their opposition, both plundering and murdering people in disputes. I might have understood this part of history as something to be forgotten or not believed. But the story of what happened to Hypatia is a story too important for Christians to ever forget. The Psalmist spoke on an occasion of sins of his youth that distressed him unto old age. In our day there is a tendency to believe that no one should be ashamed. But there is a shame over our former activities both personal and corporate that likely should never be forgotten unto the day when a Savior wipes the tears from our eyes and tells us that the former things are no more. We cling to forgiveness for such sins but they grieve us when we think back upon them. Perhaps our Christian sins, which we have done as a Christian community also need to impact us, not that we might make rants against people that have not learned what we have learned, but that we might remember what others of our own ilk have done if we forget. I would like to forget what happened in Alexandria during the days when a woman named Hypatia taught a philosophy class.

            The movie “Agora” seeks to portray the dark times of Hypatia’s Alexandria at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century leading up to Hypatia’s death in 415 AD. Rachel Weisz presents the movie’s picture of Hypatia. She is a respected philosopher, who teaches students regardless of creed and maintains that while the Christian is obligated to believe what they cannot see, that she as a philosopher is expected to question everything she can see as well as what she cannot see. She would prefer to teach a class where all the members of her class whether pagan, Jew, or Christian see one another as equals and worthy of respect. But Alexandria’s turmoil will affect all of them. The city’s turmoil grew as Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, protector of his Christian flock vies with Orestes, the Roman Empire’s prefect in the region, who seeks to govern equitably over all persons living in Alexandria. As the varied people groups turn on one another Hypatia as an advisor to Orestes becomes a symbol of the non-Christian opposition and threat to Alexandria’s Christians. It is the story of how Hypatia becomes hated by the mob, a Christian mob, which will murder her, hew her body into pieces and drag her through the city streets. It is a history we who are Christians want to forget, but perhaps for that reason we must never forget it.

I suspect that the producers of this movie saw application from the history of Hypatia’s time with that of our own. Rome’s culture wars were real, and were often wars fought to the death. It would have been a foreign and strange idea to Romans, that one’s religion was primarily the expression of their individual faith and beliefs. The Roman idea of religion was more rooted in civic realities. The idea of Rome was that it was an eternal empire. Religion was an expression of the state, a nationally recognized meaning for the citizenry of the empire that would be forever. In essence the gods and goddesses were ideas that represented the eternality of Rome. Perhaps this is why it became easier for Rome to change its gods and goddesses to that of the Holy Trinity than it was for Rome to imagine that one day its empire might be no more. Rome could still exist if the old city on the Tiber was abandoned in favor of a new one on the Bosporus. Gods and capital cities were temporary ways of imagining the empire that would never end. Perhaps that is the reason why when Christians became the privileged religion of the empire it so quickly became capable of eradicating every group and every individual conscience not under its command. Rome changed the fashion of its religion, but the empire remained intact for its last centuries.

This is a movie where we are reminded of how our religious principles which seem sacred to us can become words twisted into instruments meant to terrorize others. For those of us living in modern times, these ancient disputes resulting in riots killing hundreds seem like strange events serving mere abstract principles. “Agora” shows these struggles in their very human context until we are forced to recognize that culture wars whether in Rome, in a polarized American Republic, or in the terrors of the Middle East all have similarities with one another and with what took place in ancient Alexandria. In every culture war there are those who are privileged and those whom the privileged believe must be controlled and marginalized.

For me the sobering reality of which I was reminded by “Agora” is that it took so little time for Christians in Rome to move from being the persecuted people suffering for their convictions to becoming the ones capable of oppressing and slaughtering their enemies. It makes me try to increase my grip on the words of him who once said, “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” That, it seems to me, is wisdom to be cherished both by those being persecuted and those who have been granted both power and privilege. For as much as our faith is tested when enduring persecution, it is probably more tested when enduring eras of power and privilege.