Bon Voyage, Clyde Cook, Mama Lydia, and Mama Kairu

I received the news that Dr. Clyde Cook, former president of Biola University, my alma mater, died of a heart attack yesterday and I am shocked by this. At 73, he was fairly young and one cannot help but say, how untimely.
My memory of Clyde Cook is memorialized in sermon he gave at Biola University chapel, using the phrase " to burn a cathedral to keep warm" as the ultimate overkill. It was a phrase which indicated his gift of communication, especially to non westerners who prefer to paint word pictures when communicating, rather than linguistic exactitude in speech. He was a brilliant communicator and had just retired from Biola, to enjoy grandfatherhood. He left just when Biola was starting to expand and got out of the way for the new younger president to lead without him hovering in the background. It was not to be. God has accepted Clyde Cook's request for retirement.
This has been a month of people dying. My mother in law died suddenly in the hospital secondary to complications with diabetes. The week after the SoCal Kenyan diaspora met in my house, the mother of a good friend died of pancreatic cancer, a disease which supposedly kills people who drink and smoke. The strange thing was that this beautiful matriarch was a teetotaler and would not know which end of the cigarette to smoke. It seems that the season of harvest is upon us and I am reminded of words an old saint once told me, to the effect that sometimes, God gets us out of the way after fruitful service, so as not to give us a chance to sully our otherwise impeccable service. I do not know but seems to make sense. All the same, these matriarchs and patriarch will be missed in the years to come and it is time for some of us to step up to the plate and bat. To all these who have gone, John says it best:

And I heard the voice from heaven saying, Write, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; for their works follow with them. Rev 14:13

Vessels of Honor or Dishonor

3/19/08 Vessels of Honor or Dishonor

It interesting how a verse causes one to think of many different aspects of life, even though one has seen the verse before. As my wife and I prepare to lead a Young Adults Group in our home, I have been rereading Paul’s letters to Timothy and chapter 3 verse 20-21 stopped me in my tracks. The gist of the verse is essentially that any house has many vessels, many of them made of the same material and their importance is primarily determined by their use or design. As a believer who wants to please God, the challenge is that one can become something honorable or just one more plate among millions in a home.

I begun to think about the ceramic toilet bowls in my house- we have three and the many china cups that my wife so treasures: they are essentially the same since they are made of kaolin or china or ceramic clay and the only difference is that the dainty china cups are bordered with gold filigree and are set aside for tea with the special friends. The toilet bowls are not in any way special unless you really gotta go and they are all occupied and the one downstairs is occupied by a boy who reads more in the bathroom than elsewhere, and seems to think a potty bowl is an extension of the local library! It is the intent of the designer that elevates the vessels from the humble flower pot in the garden to the gaudy flower vase fired in a blast furnace so as to ensure the right finish and inlay. When you gotta go, a toilet bowl is more useful than a china cup!

While one can theoretically use the family’s special china cups in an emergency, if the bathroom is occupied, or even for number one in a real emergency, the rule of thumb is that this job is left to the ignoble vessels used as the dog plate or even as door stops. Do not dare touch mom's royal Dutton china with the hand-painted periwinkles! These are for candle light suppers with special friends.

If any one cleanses himself from filth, he will be a vessel of honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, ready for every good work.

In simple terms, it is up to you if you will become a pot or a potty, a terra cotta vase or a toilet bowl! While each can be useful, no lump of clay grows up- do lumps of clay grow? No lump of clay grows up thinking,” When I grow up, I will be the best potty in the public restrooms and will be famous”. All the clumps of clay I know are unanimous in their dream to become Royal China to be used for entertaining royalty in ball room gowns, with snooty attitudes! While I disdain the attitude, I concur with all mothers as they tell their little clumps to wash behind their ears, eat their broccoli and say thank you and please, so that when they grow up, they will become vessels of honor. They teach and train and beg and plead and threaten and cajole and blackmail until the little clumps have nightmares if they are not working hard enough to become useful to the Master:

China or chamber pot, what is your preference? Terra cotta vase or Toilet bowl? Pot or Potty? Madonna or the Madonna? If anyone cleanse herself, she will be a vessel of honor, sanctified, ready for the Master to use when entertaining Angel Gabriel or Mother Teresa or even old man Paul himself, when they come over for tea. As for the toilet bowl, it keeps the water cool for the dog or schizophrenic cat that lives in my household. Hey, if that is what you want to be known as, the great toilet bowl, well then, carpe diem!

STRAY THOUGHTS AND CHANCE ENCOUNTERS

You get one of these emails that seem to be genuine, click open and voila! some woman is staring at you but the camera has panned south. Even as you brain kicks in and you quickly erase and tag the email as spam, you realize how close sin always is to you. Looking at this woman with a vacant look on her face, you realize how dehumanizing sin really is. She is someone's little girl who has become lost and seems to be beyond salvage. Marred beauty. A jewel on a pig. An oxymoron.
The main impetus of sin is selfish and unthinking behavior. By looking at needs and appetites from a personal perspective, everything else fades into the periphery, so that I become the center of my own universe, where everything exists to support. Like the myopic French King Louis IV or one of his ilk, sin articulate the statement, "l'etat moi"- I am the state. All else is objectified in reference to me.
The objectification of humanity is the crown jewel of capitalism and each person is defined as a consumer or producer. Each person is seen as a customer to be served in exchange for their lives, subdivided into hourly wages- Do you realize that you are giving chunks of your life to your employer?
Back to our woman with a vacant look. The sin of the eyes transforms each person so that all of life is a commercial for meeting my needs and appetites. This demonic approach is patently selfish because even customers seen in reference to the way they relate to my products. The sad thing about the sin that follows and perpetuates pornography is the crass merchandising of the person. This sad creature displays her wares, without even knowing who her customers are, just staring at a camera and display her most private person to an unknown person. It is so sad to see this. I am reminded of Dr. Clyde Cook, who talked of setting a cathedral on fire, just to keep warm: the ultimate overkill.
Proverbs paint the amorous woman as one with the brazen look. The one I saw on that email
looked more like a victim of 9-11, with shell-shock written on her blank look. Yet that is the other person for whom Jesus died. The heart of God weeps and I am learning to weep with God at the things that break his heart ( Bob Pierce- World Vision).

Christmas and Beyond

2007 has been an interesting year and ended with the demons inherent within Kenya's cultural and tribal setting becoming unglued and the devil riding roughshod over the country. The dust has yet to settle. Yet, as one looks at all the mayhem and chaos that threatens to engulf Kenya, one becomes very thankful that God has spared Kenya all these years, in spite of the politicians who continue to reduce people to mere chattel and essentially manipulate them during election years.

What needs to be said unequivocally that neither Kibaki nor Raila represents me as a Christian Kenyan who is fiercely patriotic and yet realistic enough to realize that Kenya is home to different tribes who call Kenya home and have equal rights to the country. We will recover as a nation, in spite of the EU, UK, USA, and other abbreviated countries ad nauseam! We will survive because God predates all these temporal powers.
Seeing the year come and go, we as a family have been blessed by God's presence and goodness. The family has grown and continues to be the reason I get up daily, pray for them and go to work, the traffic on the CA 91 not withstanding.
Being a part of the larger Kenyan community here in Southern California continues to be humbling and invigorating as I look at the people whom God has put together, a collection of sinners, saints and everything in between, desperate to attain the American dream and yet so vulnerable to the demons of our time, whether tribal, issues of immigration, family dynamics. I see people whose love is genuine even as they try to be the hands and body of Christ to one another.
Attending a big- not mega, Church largely composed of middle class Caucasians for the last so many years, has allowed us to dissect our own Kenyan church culture from a different angle, as well as critiquing the western church from a telephoto lens of a transplanted Kenyan.
The danger is becoming a spiritual Ishmaelite, with my hand against everybody else so that we find faults in both cultures, forgetting that Jesus died for sinners, of whom I am chief.

The Temporal Nature of Evil

In the cause of trying to battle evil, we often forget that evil is temporal and always weaker than good. In Psalm 52, David taunts Doeg with this truth and reminds him that for all its’ bluster, evil is weaker than good and will ultimately lose. The evil man perishes and the ground breathes a sigh of relief. We can not forget Stalin, Hitler, and their ilk fast enough. Like the smear left on a windshield by a smashed bug, we quickly wipe it away and put it out of our mind. The evil deeds of man are so pathetically temporal that one almost feels bad for the person hell bent on accomplishing evil only to realize that their work is dead.

The righteous deeds,however are like a perfume that just seems to smell better as it ages. The older their deeds, the longer we memorialize them, seeking new ways to sound their praise. Like the proverbial lion and dog comparison, the righteous is always a lion- ARIEL, dead or alive. Their renown dogs their every step even in the grave. The character of dogs dogs them all their lives and then we quickly forget them.

The problem of evil is that while temporal it is so traumatizing that it appears as though it will last for ever.

When you have attempted to hide and evil finds your hiding place, you feel that the bottom has come off your world and nothing else makes any more sense. It seems to expand and fill your entire universe and no light seems to penetrate the “encircling gloom”.
Evil seems to have finally taken over and the only thing left to do is curse the darkness through imprecatory prayer. The psalmist is a master of this and really lets go at the enemies who surround him even when he thinks he is among friends.The broadside that false friends deal David makes him maledict them and theirs. Evil stalks the land and seems hold sway with none challenging its’ dominion.

The reality is that evil, by design is not the default mode of life: God made the universe and stated that it was good- [ and God saw it is functionally good according to design- καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς ὅτι καλόν. (Gen 1:10, Septuagint). The original design of the earth and all it contains was good because order trumps chaos any day. Creating and organizing the inhabitants of the earth was a positive and intentional activity, since the designer had purposed to do something meaningful and enjoyable. God saw that it was good. The systems of the earth were initially made for man, not man for them. The Edenic blessing was to take care of the earth, not be taken captive by the earth. The good that God talks about has more to do with form and function, less with subjective and aesthetic beauty. It is the goodness of a system well designed and fully functional. The created universe was good in fit and form and God declared it so.

When sin entered the world, the system was corrupted so that whatever emanated from it was affected. It became corrupted and mismatched- akin to using a dinner fork as a weapon. Sin was not part of the original design and therefore was a later modification of the good- it is a negative, a lack of, an absence of good, not a presence of something but a lack thereof . There is no future of evil. It will be replaced by good and God will once more be all in all. We celebrate Abraham Lincoln, not his murderer. We memorialized Martin Luther King, not the coward who shot him.

For all the problems that David went through, he kept on remembering that God would ultimately conquer all. Evil, for all its’ bluster, is temporal and an attempt to replace good.It never succeeds. It is no accident that Voltaire, the French iconoclast spent his entire adult life issuing diatribes to undo the effects of Christianity, only to have his very home purchased and used by the French Bible Society to propagate Christian knowledge.

Riding the 6.00 pm Metro Link ™ - Full Steam Ahead and d____ the torpedoes!

Sitting in the six o’clock evening train to Riverside, it is interesting to note that people do not talk anymore since they are all wired to the hilt. Everyone is listening to an IPOD or look-alike device, or listening to music via a smart cell phone. No one talks to any one else and each one avoids eye contact or gives a bromide smile if caught looking at someone else. The suited-and-tied-and-briefcase bunch attempts to look important and busy, juggling multiple phones. The sad thing is that everyone has this vacant look as they attempt to look cool and chic with all the gadgetry hanging out of their ears. It seems to be the proverbial “cutting your nose to spite your face”. All the gadgetry is supposed to enhance communication but is doing everything but that.

The only group enjoying the ride is a group of mid aged women who are conversing in animated Spanish the gist of which I am unable to catch. I doubt they have a four year degree amongst them but do not seem hampered by that. They, at least, are animated (animus- spirit) and do not appear as plastic as the rest of the inmates. They are talking and arguing and laughing and being human, and having fun to boot! The rest of us look goofy with all the wires hanging out of our ears. The blue tooth earpieces are particularly weird looking. We sit there, grunting and making important noises, like children playing house with invisible partners.

The art of communication is going down so fast that soon we will be grunting at one another since we are so wired we do not even need to talk. The more educated and connected we are, the less we communicate. Parents are encourage to buy their children phones with tracking device so they can monitor their location. What about teaching the same children how to make good decisions and then let them grow up? No, too inefficient. Text my son in school? Why not wait till evening and tell him in person what I need to say? . Too busy? Then cut off some activities. . We are ignoring the fact that ability does not necessarily translate into activity. Busily looking to streamline and smooth out all the kinks in the system, we have ignored the greater question: what problem are well trying to solve? Is this a technical problem or a human angst problem? Since we do not know, we keep on inventing new things.

I am not sure that we even remember what the original question was. We are already in the middle of research but have forgotten the original thesis. What question was Thomas Newcomen trying to answer when he invented the steam engine, or was it Isaac Newton? What was Michael Faraday’s need when he begun to delve into electricity? Are we still answering the same questions or should we be asking new ones? What do you do when you have mechanized everything including humanity? You ended up with dehumanized humanity.
I suspect that the original giant that we wanted to slay with the guillotine died in 1776 but Robespierre had to find a new villain, and so the maker of the guillotine became it’s unwitting victim. We are enamored with the guillotine and so we had to find a new use for it. Too bad we cannot use it to reduce global warming. The philosophical quests behind most of our mechanical progress have not changed much since the last century and I fear we are stuck in that class answering irrelevant questions. We are hell-bent on cutting off our hands so that we can grow new ones via stem cell research just because we can. Technology has taken the upper hand and seems to be coasting to a clear victory in the first round. Our brains and mouths will soon become vestigial organs since we no longer use them or need them, it seems. Where do we go from here? Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or worse, Orwell’s “1984”. I think the greatest indictment against us members of the global village is simply that we have forgotten what a village is. A village is where we band together and slay every dragon that threatens us. As it is now, we are slain singly by mice and mosquitoes, dying with a whimper and no glory of slaying Grendel or even Loch Ness! Monsters are slain by villages, not solo warriors.
As believers, it is even worse. Those who study such things tell us that Sundays are still the most segregated days of the week. On Monday, we work with all but come Sunday, we retreat to our fortress where we do not even know one another. Our deceptive "Hi" and half-hearted "It is good to see you " all sound hollow and vacuous. We are disconnected and have no way to resolve this except trying to stay busy so that we look successful and purposeful. We do not communicate with one another and therefore have an even harder time communicating with a God we do not see. Try to spend one hour of prayer in your group and you will vouchsafe what I am stating. As for me, I will call you and talk to you, lest I lose use of my tongue. All muscles atrophy with disuse. Ditto the brain and the larynx. The message I had from God for you was deleted before I could forward it to you. So much for technology.

DAVID, MY BROTHER FROM ANOTHER MOTHER

I have finally begun to come to terms with the fact that my brother is not here any more. I have gone through the whole gamut of negotiating with God and then being angry with him to no avail. He has resolutely set the boundaries of life and death and no amount of cajoling, negotiating, pouting, baiting or even attempted bribery will bring a reaction from Him. One has to come to terms with this or go through an entire life of psychosis and neurosis, bitter with God but foolishly trying to topple His boundaries.

My adolescent anger at God just continues to pull me deeper and deeper into mere stupidity, not even good honest sinfulness! By throwing away my marbles, I am only creating more work for myself since I am the one who has to pick up each one later. My immaturity is brought to the fore even as I choose to consider topics and visuals that I normally would not, almost in a bid to provoke God into some kind of action. He has chosen the boundaries of human activity and as much as I cajole, plead or pout, He is not about to change the universe just to placate me.

Therefore my options are very limited. I can prematurely write Him off akin to a child who denies the existence of a parent by closing his eyes only to open them later and demand lunch. My anger has dissipated and is replaced with gratitude for the many hours of gut-bursting laughter we shared as we dissected each foible we had, mercilessly and surgically removing any defences we had erected, so as to become transparent to each other.

The death of David has the potential to make me a very careful person who never tries anything risky but likewise is practically a dead bore or a carpe diem adherent who seizes every moment to make a mark for significance. The constant preoccupation with the last few days of his life has the potential to cause me to live in regret for the rest of my life. His present was like the son which I ignore but always knew was lurking somewhere nearby. Rather than focus on other places where we could have gone instead of Newport beach, I choose to acknowledge the fact that his time was up and God was gonna take him home one way or other. This was the quickest and kindest way to go and had nothing to do with any of my choices. God took the life of His servant and I was merely an onlooker who could not understand what God was doing.

I will therefore dwell on the hours we spent together as we sought to deal with matters of our ancestry and the attendant demons of our families. Surviving the absence of one parent, we both moved against the odds and many years later we were approaching middle age with our sons beginning to be stronger than we are. As we got in touch with our own mortality, we were reminded that now we were it. As long as you were around, we could be it together. Now you have left me to brave the path with the knowledge that you have gone before and will put in a good word for me since I need all the help I can get. David , you were a very transparent and simple man, everything I am not. You have left me with the knowledge that he was ready where I was not. I will get ready. Kenya is not our home and with St. Augustine, I am still seeking the city of God.

I will therefore live my life and yours and attempt things that you were yet to try. And when we meet in Valhalla, we will swap manly stories once more. Good night David.