_____________________________________________________________
While Paul was waiting… in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." …
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'
"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead."
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject."
................Acts 17:16-32 (TNIV)
_____________________________________________________________
Horton Who?
A few years back I went on my first business trip to India. All my friends and colleagues who had been there already offered stories and advice to help me “prepare” for the big differences. I heard stories about one person’s first step into an Indian market and how he was assaulted by the colors, sights and smells, the hearty, pungent, spicy scent of humans and food and dogs and cows and smoke and excrement whirling around him like a typhoon. Others told me it was like a trip to the moon.
I decided to keep an open mind. For all their differences, these moon creatures were actually still only people. I was traveling with a colleague who decided to learn absolutely everything he could about the culture before stepping foot there. His wife got him this huge book on Indian culture, which he read voraciously. Prior to the trip he'd quiz me on the nuances of Indian culture and lore. I decided I’d try an experiment. I cleared my mind of all preconceptions of India, forgot everything anyone ever told me about it, and politely ignored the Indian cultural lessons from my buddy. Whereas he would step off the plane fully armed with the power of preconception, I would wander off the plane blinking unknowingly.
Every night at dinner we discussed our various culture-shock moments from the day, and an interesting thing happened. While my buddy had something to report nearly every day, I reported nothing. There was no culture shock for me – 0. The difference was, while he was looking for all the differences based on his preconceptions, I was looking for nothing. He looked for traditions, I looked at conditions. He filtered inputs, I soaked it up raw. While we drove down the street and he pointed out the various social and cultural constructs, I looked out the window and saw children playing with dogs, mothers carrying babies, men sitting together and chatting, playing checkers.
I realized on that trip the difference between people and the clutter around them. I had no culture shock because I didn’t care about the culture, or any specific micro. I was interested in the general macro of humanity. I was looking for the universal, and found that ignoring the uniquely Indian traits made their general humanity more visible. By ignoring the clothes, I could see the people. By ignoring the faces I could look into the eyes. In the midst of all this humanity some words came back to me from my childhood—a person’s a person, no matter how small.
Layers
How do I separate micro from macro? Genetic variation between any two people is 0.01%, and many of those variations are mutations of shared traits. You are reading this on a computer of some kind, and the differences between a laptop and a smartphone are more dramatic that the differences between any two given people. Let's make a comparison between our greatest creation, the computer, and God's greatest creation, you.
It's probably a coincidence, but the model used to make a computer work is pretty much exactly the same model that makes you work.
A basic desktop computer is made up of four layers—hardware, firmware and two variants of software. It looks like this:
Hardware is the hard stuff, the motherboard, case, memory, CPU, drives, keyboards, mice, monitors and anything else that's snapped together to make up the body of the computer.
Software is all the different kinds of programs that run on a computer. You can break this down into two classes—the operating system (OS) and the applications that run on top of the operating system. Applications include web browsers and word processors and the like. The Operating System is a fantastically complex kind of software that acts like a master controller for nearly everything that happens on the layer above it.
Sitting between the hardware and the software is the firmware, software embedded in the hardware that tells the hardware how to work at the lowest level. How does the motherboard understand the memory that is installed on it? The firmware handles that.
So how is the computer designed based on how we are designed? Pretty much the same. Human hardware is straightforward—a lung is a piece of hardware that does a job. It can be exchanged or upgraded easily enough if the part is compatible with the overall system. It's not as simple with the brain, but it wasn't too long ago that a heart transplant was a daunting idea. Personally, I'd rather keep my brain, though an upgrade would be nice. Skin is a casing—it comes in a range of colors and keeps all the other parts from sliding to the floor.
Human software is pretty straightforward also. It functions on two layers for people just as it does in computers. At the operating system level you have “the mind”, that wonderful mix of intellect and emotion. The computer OS is tightly integrated to the computer hardware just as the mind is tightly integrated to the brain. You cannot run any operating system on any computer. Operating systems are designed specifically for specific hardware, just as the basic competencies of the mind are specifically a function of the brain.
Our firmware is the soul.
It all looks like this:
To understand the fullness of a person I need to see all the layers and not focus on the topmost or bottom most layers. If I look at other people and mainly focus on the bottom most layer, the body, all I see is the difference--color, shape, condition, whatever. If I look at people and focus mainly on the topmost layer, their learning and culture, all I see is difference--language, culture, clothing, whatever. Layered between these two lie the intellect, emotion and the soul. These are the least visible but the most similar attributes between us. When I looked out the taxi window I saw children enjoying a dog, a mother loving her baby, two old friends enjoying loyalty and companionship. These are human traits found everywhere in the world. Connecting at the heart, the mind and the soul is the key to connection to every other human on Earth. Understanding that my operations at these layers is no different than any other person makes it possible for me to understand our connectedness by design, and this connection is the key to compassion. With compassion, I am capable of kindness. If I operate only looking at the outtermost layers I may fall into the trap of seeing other people only in terms of isms (racism, nationalism, sexism) and stereotypes. My preconceptions kill compassion, and without compassion there is no peace.
The Means Justify the End
The thing I love most about Jesus Christ is His love for common people. His short ministry was all about comforting, teaching, feeding/healing, and preaching (e.g. heart, mind, body and soul). His target audience was not the well-to-do, but rather the poor, the wretched, the sick and lame, the outcasts and the undesirables of Jewish culture. And yet this short time of ministry in those backwards times, living among the poor and outcast, this ministry has changed the world more than all the other ministries combined.
How do the various ministries and churches of the Christian faith compare with those of our founder? I think we are far too hung up on the idea of “perfection”, of looking perfect (rich, well groomed, beautiful, safe, healthy, ad nausea) and have lost sight of the idea of being “God’s offspring” (unique, creative, willful, aware).
Jesus ended the Beatitudes with this line (Matthew 5:48, NIV):
Jesus is not telling us to be perfect as we understand perfection.
He is correcting the erroneous teachings of His church to that time. The true nature of God, Heavenly perfection, is based on love, unconditional love. It is a command to the firmware, to the soul. Love as God loves, undonditionally, without judgement or pretense, without strings and conditions. The perfection He is teaching about operates the opposite of the perfection of outtermost layers, body and culture.
Worldly perfection, outward perfection, is a kind of rigid legalism that breeds judgment.
If I only focus on the perfection that I can measure (say, the perfection of law) then I can suddenly imitate perfection, and from that vantage judge others (those who do not follow the law). I am now in a position of superiority over others I believe to be not perfect as God is perfect. I am demonstrably perfect by the measurement of Law, and therefore superior as God is superior, and surely the perfect shall judge and reign over the imperfect! Compassion dies.
In the legalism of law I loose sight of what this God-perfection is. God’s perfection doesn’t operate in this world the way that we can conceive of perfection. In fact, the beauty of the Beatitudes is that the logic of it, the defining structures of God’s perfection, are the opposite of how we understand perfection to work in this world. I should be meek, gentle, loving, compassionate, giving, sacrificing, peacemaking, putting myself in the position of being persecuted by those who hate me and hate God. In the factorings of the world this kind of “perfection” will not make me superior, but will likely get me killed.
The Beatitudes are not a means to an end (legalism to perfection). The Beatitudes are and end to a means. I need to be perfect like my Father is perfect, but this is impossible. I am flawed, always have been and always will be. I can never be perfect like God is perfect, but I can imitate such perfection. This imitation is being Christ-like, and this imitation makes me less flawed. This is the message of Paul written in Ephesians (5:1-2, NIV):
If you were the only person alive on Earth, would you matter?
Yes—if the only human being alive was a small untouchable peasant boy named Dalit, or a bastard son named Judas, he would matter more than anything else on Earth simply because he is an offspring of God. Strip away preconception, strip away body, class and culture, strip away “perfection” and prejudice and you are left with a thing of absolute beauty and value, an exceptional being possessing consciousness and creativity unique in an otherwise dead expanse of space.
While Paul was waiting… in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." …
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'
"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead."
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject."
................Acts 17:16-32 (TNIV)
_____________________________________________________________
| The long and short of it.... We are all built the same. There is one, and only one, human race. How is a truly Godly life lived? To be Godly we must treat each other as God treats us--with love, compassion, and help. If our "righteousness" gets in the way of this, it is evil. |
Horton Who?
A few years back I went on my first business trip to India. All my friends and colleagues who had been there already offered stories and advice to help me “prepare” for the big differences. I heard stories about one person’s first step into an Indian market and how he was assaulted by the colors, sights and smells, the hearty, pungent, spicy scent of humans and food and dogs and cows and smoke and excrement whirling around him like a typhoon. Others told me it was like a trip to the moon.
I decided to keep an open mind. For all their differences, these moon creatures were actually still only people. I was traveling with a colleague who decided to learn absolutely everything he could about the culture before stepping foot there. His wife got him this huge book on Indian culture, which he read voraciously. Prior to the trip he'd quiz me on the nuances of Indian culture and lore. I decided I’d try an experiment. I cleared my mind of all preconceptions of India, forgot everything anyone ever told me about it, and politely ignored the Indian cultural lessons from my buddy. Whereas he would step off the plane fully armed with the power of preconception, I would wander off the plane blinking unknowingly.
Every night at dinner we discussed our various culture-shock moments from the day, and an interesting thing happened. While my buddy had something to report nearly every day, I reported nothing. There was no culture shock for me – 0. The difference was, while he was looking for all the differences based on his preconceptions, I was looking for nothing. He looked for traditions, I looked at conditions. He filtered inputs, I soaked it up raw. While we drove down the street and he pointed out the various social and cultural constructs, I looked out the window and saw children playing with dogs, mothers carrying babies, men sitting together and chatting, playing checkers.
I realized on that trip the difference between people and the clutter around them. I had no culture shock because I didn’t care about the culture, or any specific micro. I was interested in the general macro of humanity. I was looking for the universal, and found that ignoring the uniquely Indian traits made their general humanity more visible. By ignoring the clothes, I could see the people. By ignoring the faces I could look into the eyes. In the midst of all this humanity some words came back to me from my childhood—a person’s a person, no matter how small.
Layers
How do I separate micro from macro? Genetic variation between any two people is 0.01%, and many of those variations are mutations of shared traits. You are reading this on a computer of some kind, and the differences between a laptop and a smartphone are more dramatic that the differences between any two given people. Let's make a comparison between our greatest creation, the computer, and God's greatest creation, you.
It's probably a coincidence, but the model used to make a computer work is pretty much exactly the same model that makes you work.
A basic desktop computer is made up of four layers—hardware, firmware and two variants of software. It looks like this:
Hardware is the hard stuff, the motherboard, case, memory, CPU, drives, keyboards, mice, monitors and anything else that's snapped together to make up the body of the computer. Software is all the different kinds of programs that run on a computer. You can break this down into two classes—the operating system (OS) and the applications that run on top of the operating system. Applications include web browsers and word processors and the like. The Operating System is a fantastically complex kind of software that acts like a master controller for nearly everything that happens on the layer above it.
Sitting between the hardware and the software is the firmware, software embedded in the hardware that tells the hardware how to work at the lowest level. How does the motherboard understand the memory that is installed on it? The firmware handles that.
So how is the computer designed based on how we are designed? Pretty much the same. Human hardware is straightforward—a lung is a piece of hardware that does a job. It can be exchanged or upgraded easily enough if the part is compatible with the overall system. It's not as simple with the brain, but it wasn't too long ago that a heart transplant was a daunting idea. Personally, I'd rather keep my brain, though an upgrade would be nice. Skin is a casing—it comes in a range of colors and keeps all the other parts from sliding to the floor.
Human software is pretty straightforward also. It functions on two layers for people just as it does in computers. At the operating system level you have “the mind”, that wonderful mix of intellect and emotion. The computer OS is tightly integrated to the computer hardware just as the mind is tightly integrated to the brain. You cannot run any operating system on any computer. Operating systems are designed specifically for specific hardware, just as the basic competencies of the mind are specifically a function of the brain.
Our firmware is the soul.
It all looks like this:
To understand the fullness of a person I need to see all the layers and not focus on the topmost or bottom most layers. If I look at other people and mainly focus on the bottom most layer, the body, all I see is the difference--color, shape, condition, whatever. If I look at people and focus mainly on the topmost layer, their learning and culture, all I see is difference--language, culture, clothing, whatever. Layered between these two lie the intellect, emotion and the soul. These are the least visible but the most similar attributes between us. When I looked out the taxi window I saw children enjoying a dog, a mother loving her baby, two old friends enjoying loyalty and companionship. These are human traits found everywhere in the world. Connecting at the heart, the mind and the soul is the key to connection to every other human on Earth. Understanding that my operations at these layers is no different than any other person makes it possible for me to understand our connectedness by design, and this connection is the key to compassion. With compassion, I am capable of kindness. If I operate only looking at the outtermost layers I may fall into the trap of seeing other people only in terms of isms (racism, nationalism, sexism) and stereotypes. My preconceptions kill compassion, and without compassion there is no peace.
The Means Justify the End
The thing I love most about Jesus Christ is His love for common people. His short ministry was all about comforting, teaching, feeding/healing, and preaching (e.g. heart, mind, body and soul). His target audience was not the well-to-do, but rather the poor, the wretched, the sick and lame, the outcasts and the undesirables of Jewish culture. And yet this short time of ministry in those backwards times, living among the poor and outcast, this ministry has changed the world more than all the other ministries combined.
How do the various ministries and churches of the Christian faith compare with those of our founder? I think we are far too hung up on the idea of “perfection”, of looking perfect (rich, well groomed, beautiful, safe, healthy, ad nausea) and have lost sight of the idea of being “God’s offspring” (unique, creative, willful, aware).
Jesus ended the Beatitudes with this line (Matthew 5:48, NIV):
- "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
- "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
Jesus is not telling us to be perfect as we understand perfection.
He is correcting the erroneous teachings of His church to that time. The true nature of God, Heavenly perfection, is based on love, unconditional love. It is a command to the firmware, to the soul. Love as God loves, undonditionally, without judgement or pretense, without strings and conditions. The perfection He is teaching about operates the opposite of the perfection of outtermost layers, body and culture.Worldly perfection, outward perfection, is a kind of rigid legalism that breeds judgment.
If I only focus on the perfection that I can measure (say, the perfection of law) then I can suddenly imitate perfection, and from that vantage judge others (those who do not follow the law). I am now in a position of superiority over others I believe to be not perfect as God is perfect. I am demonstrably perfect by the measurement of Law, and therefore superior as God is superior, and surely the perfect shall judge and reign over the imperfect! Compassion dies.
In the legalism of law I loose sight of what this God-perfection is. God’s perfection doesn’t operate in this world the way that we can conceive of perfection. In fact, the beauty of the Beatitudes is that the logic of it, the defining structures of God’s perfection, are the opposite of how we understand perfection to work in this world. I should be meek, gentle, loving, compassionate, giving, sacrificing, peacemaking, putting myself in the position of being persecuted by those who hate me and hate God. In the factorings of the world this kind of “perfection” will not make me superior, but will likely get me killed.
The Beatitudes are not a means to an end (legalism to perfection). The Beatitudes are and end to a means. I need to be perfect like my Father is perfect, but this is impossible. I am flawed, always have been and always will be. I can never be perfect like God is perfect, but I can imitate such perfection. This imitation is being Christ-like, and this imitation makes me less flawed. This is the message of Paul written in Ephesians (5:1-2, NIV):
- "Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. "
- "Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn't love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that. "
If you were the only person alive on Earth, would you matter?
Yes—if the only human being alive was a small untouchable peasant boy named Dalit, or a bastard son named Judas, he would matter more than anything else on Earth simply because he is an offspring of God. Strip away preconception, strip away body, class and culture, strip away “perfection” and prejudice and you are left with a thing of absolute beauty and value, an exceptional being possessing consciousness and creativity unique in an otherwise dead expanse of space.
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