I am continually amazed by Easter

So I learned a verb for Latin today. Shocking, I know. Anyhow, this verb is "pasc," and it means basically to bring livestock to food. Being the diligent (albeit ignorant) Lordship student that I am, I wondered if this was where we got "Pascha" from. Pascha, in case you don't know, is another name for Easter, used frequently in the Orthodox church. So I jumped to Google and typed in Pascha. According to OrthodoxWiki (which any Greek person can edit, so you know it's right), it's a transliteration from the Greek, which is transliterated from the Hebrew for Passover. Cool. Yet still I wonder. So I break out ye olde Whitaker's Words (a free Latin translator) and typed in Pascha. It popped up with "Easter, Passover." Yea, verily, this I knew. So I typed in "pasca" on a whim. Pasca means water mixed with vinegar, a traditional drink of Roman soldiers in the field and the drink of slaves. 

If your reaction at learning this is at all similar to mine, you're clapping hands over mouth in wonder. Because Easter is all of these. Easter is the new Pascha, the true Passover, when the blood of Christ, the Lamb of God, is poured out on us and protects us from judgment. It is the time of pascamur, when we are led like sheep to the manger, to eat of the Body that was placed there for us. It is when we remember that Christ drank pasca for us on the cross, when He took our place, the place of a slave, and drained the bitterness from our cup. Yet we also remember that He drank the pasca because He was the conquering Warrior, who was in the field because His work was not yet finished. 

Anyhow. Our God has an incredible way of tying things together. He is the Master Storyteller. 

I answer my own question

So here's my answer. Why are there poor? Well, it's my fault. And it's yours. I hope it's the fault of every single one of you. It's President Bush's fault, it seems to be Obama's fault, Clinton claims it's his fault, but I'm not so sure that we can blame it directly on bin Laden, Hussein, or even the serpent. 

The poor are the Church's fault. I come very close to believing that when I stand before the Judgment Seat, God will ask me "And how about that guy you saw under the bridge and didn't stop for on January 6, 2009? What did you do about that? Hmm. Well, what about . . . " 

Most of us have heard Mr. Doug Jones's take on the gravity of economic sins. I'd agree with that. Too many preachers use the divorce rating among Christians as a barometer for the Church (this is not at all to justify or reduce the importance of marriage as holy and sacred; divorce is horrible, but we fail to realize that poverty and hunger are equally horrible tragedies). What about the number of people below the poverty line? What about the number of deaths by starvation in the US? What about the number of thefts carried out by desperate parents?  I'm not even touching Africa yet. I'm just asking you to look at what is happening in our own backyard. 

Christ said that it wasn't the healthy but the sick who need the doctor. The gospel dies in upper middle class Suburbia. It explodes in the projects. While popular European Christianity (and, some argue, even American Christianity) begins to die, the faith is growing by leaps and bounds in China, Pakistan, India, Africa, and the Middle East. Could it be because the Catholic church did so little to relieve the abject poverty of the natives that South America has never been stable and prosperous? 

What I'm saying is this: the Church is to disciple all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity. We preach the Gospel and disciple the nations by living out the faith. We start living like Christians, and people will start noticing. Spurgeon once said, joy is our missionary. As Pastor Wilson said, you don't reach atheists by debating them; you get to them by having them over for dinner. Theology doesn't save people; the Gospel does. St. James applies this to giving when he says "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" Too often Christians talk about God's love to an atheist as if it's this ethereal emotional thing that couldn't help anyone even though, deep down, it really wanted to. God's love is not a pretty, teardrop-eyed, softly-glowing-in-the-snowy-moonlight sort of thing. It's visceral, physical, and sometimes it looks like a toothless, legless, drugged up old man in a wheelchair who hasn't had a bath in a month. If an atheist looks over and sees a Christian volunteering at a soup kitchen every Thursday, when you start picking up homeless guys and buying them dinner, when he sees you sacrifice for those less fortunate, he'll be ready to hear about that love. That Love that will turn the world upside down. 

Giving to the poor is the Church's responsibility, its duty. We can't expect the government or other agencies to do it, however willing President Obama may be to do so. The poor are out there because we Christians are letting them be out there. Every family that starves to death is an indictment on Christianity; every homeless drug addict is condemnation. And who knows, perhaps the day the Church ends poverty will be last day of all? 

I am Young

I've had these thoughts running through my head for a couple weeks now, and I actually scribbled a little of the last part on the back of my lordship notes. Anyhow, no further adoing. 

Youth

I wonder what it is like to be old and white-whiskered,

For as yet I am young, and wisdom 

Laughs merrily at me from afar as I chase her, 

Ever-stumbling. 

My life is but new-started, 

My days are few, fresh, and hope-full. 

Yet my nights are heavy with thoughts and people and 

Times remembered. 

What will it be to remember even more?

And then my friends not gone away but  

Gone, their laughter forgotten from the world, 

Their song silenced. 

Nevermore, quoth the raven, and nevermore will 

The things I remember exist again, and time 

Will come when no one remembers 

Except me. 

For in remembrance a person lives, somehow, 

And the only true death in this world, as 

The Greek said, was being finally and utterly 

Forgotten. 

The song of our youth will be silenced soon 

Nevermore to be sung again, 

Nor shall there be any who remember the 

Glory of its joy. 

Joy we feel in life, in the blood that 

Pounds in our veins, joy in love, hoped 

And yet unseen. Joy in life yet unlived, joy in  

Joys yet untasted.

And behind it all we wonder, sadly. 

When will it end, when our friends will go, 

When our love will be parted, when our joys are all 

Remembered?

Of a time, I sit and think. 

And when I do, I think mostly tragic thoughts

For life is so here, so present, so much around and in me 

I can’t imagine less before than behind.

Laughing is enough sometimes when thinking of life’s vanity, 

Yet tears seem more appropriate when I 

Think about life, and about death, and how much of 

Each is in each. 

Life is full of death, ours and others and 

Ours in others, and death, we know, is naught 

But renewed, reinvigorated, reborn life 

Age after age. 

And so we cannot but sing, laugh, dance, and drink, 

We cannot but joy in Christ. For we remember, 

Though not with our eyes, when He was us and died, 

When we were Christ (though not yet) and lived. 

Let us feast like lunatics, rejoice like imbeciles, 

Dance like madmen, and love idiotically all the days of our vanity. 

For we are drunk on the wine of life – 

We are young. 

I had my modern conceptions of fairness blown far, far away

So I'm perusing - no, strike that, try break-neck speed reading - Augustine's City of God, and I come across a quotation of Genesis 17:13-14:

[God spoke to Abraham] "He who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money must be circumcised, and My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant."

Let's get this straight: a baby boy who is not circumcised by his parents has already broken the covenant with God. If he dies at nine days old and has not been circumcised, he dies outside the covenant of grace. Whoa.
Then Christ comes and renews the covenant, replacing circumcision with baptism. But does this change the principle? Obviously there is enough condemnation in original sin to damn a babe in arms. Again, the burden must be on the parents.