Reflecting on Rio

The Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are now in the history books, as they say. For the most part they were successful but with every Olympic Games there are controversies, if not outright scandals. Where there are people, a mix of good and bad things happen. There were those who got caught doping. Never fails. We all watched American swimmer Ryan Lochte and his teammates act up and then try to cover it up with lies only to get caught. He's no longer a spokesman for Speedo. Or Ralph Lauren. Or anyone else. Then there was the water - the dirty lakes and the green-water pool - and the crime and the have-nots living in the squalor of the Brazilian favelas (slums). There were winners and losers and those who, in losing, were winners.

We saw the two female runners who collided. Nikki Hamblin of New Zealand fell during the 5,000-meter race and took American Abbey D’Agostino down with her. D’Agostino helped Hamblin get back up and the two resumed running. Later, D’Agostino fell on the track suffering from a torn ACL. Hamblin then returned the favour and helped D’Agostino get back up and together they crossed the finish line. The two women didn't know each other before that day. Neither won but neither lost. 

Gymnasts Lee Eun-ju of South Korea and Hong Un-jong of North Korea are technically enemies because of political hostilities but they took selfies together before they competed in their event. Buds for life, it would seem. Forget the politics.

The noble Fijian men's rugby team that beat New Zealand in the quarter finals and then beat Britain to win the gold medal, the only medal Fiji has ever won, bowed before Princess Anne when receiving their medals.

And there's more: An Irish boxer named Michael Conlan threw a fit. Publicly. He launched into a profanity-laced diatribe to the media after losing a quarter final match to his Russian opponent after some faulty calls by the judges. Meanwhile, back home in Ireland, five-year-old Finn McManus heard about it. With the help of his older sister, he wrote a letter to Conlan and included with it his own medal that he won at school. McManus wrote, “I want you to have my school medal because you are a winner. I hope you like it.” Conlan was speechless for a time.

The heavily-favourited American sprinter Allyson Felix showed great grace in defeat in the 400 metre race, a race she would have won had Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas not made a last second dive over the finish line. Many criticized Miller's leap - which was legal - but not Felix. She congratulated her right away. 

And my favourite: Meet Piotr Malachowski of Poland. You may not remember him but he won the silver medal in discus throwing. Instead of keeping his well-earned hardware, though, he auctioned it off just today, in fact, to raise money for a three-year-old boy from back home who has retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the eye. (The total amount needed, by the way, was raised with that sale). Maybe he took his cue from American swimmer Anthony Ervin. Ervin won gold in Rio in the 50 metre freestyle. He also won the gold medal in that same event at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and later sold it and gave the money to help the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

There are more stories like these not included in this post. The goodwill shown at the Rio Games will last a lot longer than the shine on the medals won there.

Lessons from an American Tragedy

Today marks the forty-second anniversary of the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon. He quit because he had to. The corruption of the Watergate scandal finally reached his desk where the buck stopped. 

For those who are unfamiliar with this scandal, it began in May of 1972 when some people working to get the President re-elected broke into the Democratic National Committee's campaign headquarters which was set up in a hotel/office building called The Watergate in the Foggy Bottom neighbourhood of Washington, D.C. They bugged some phones for the purpose of stealing intelligence from the opposing campaign in order to gain the advantage. On a subsequent break-in in June, the burglars got caught. Nixon himself wasn’t aware of the scheme at first but some people on his re-election committee had ordered it. This is a complex story filled with intrigue, hubris, dirty tricks and obstruction of justice by some of the highest office holders in the land. To make a long story short, as the President found out about certain things, he attempted to cover them up. That made him guilty of obstruction of justice and other things, so he had to leave office or face certain impeachment and conviction.

Caught up in this scandal was Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, who occupied an office right beside the Oval Office. Colson was eventually arrested and charged for his part in the cover-up and spent almost two years in prison. After he was charged and his life was coming apart, Colson became a Christian. After serving his time, he founded a ministry that is still flourishing today called Prison Fellowship. So began Colson’s new life. (To find out more, read his book Born Again).

In his book called The Good Life, Colson wrote about one of his colleagues who also served time but never really turned around. His name was John Ehrlichman who served as President Nixon's special advisor on domestic affairs. In late 1998, years after the scandal, Colson went to visit Ehrlichman who was gravely ill with kidney disease in an Atlanta nursing home. Toward the end of his visit, Colson and his friend were discussing Ehrlichman’s situation and here is a portion of that conversation from his book.

“All at once, he (Ehrlichman) said, ‘The doctor says with a little shot of morphine, he can put me out of things. There’ll be no pain. I’ll just go to sleep. Nobody cares about me anyway. Why should I stay alive? Tell me. Why should I stay alive?’ Cold chills raced up and down my back. He was serious and I wanted to give him the best answer I could muster. I struggled to choose my words carefully. A life was in the balance. I told John that his life was not his own, that it was a gift from God. I assured him that his life was created in God’s own image, which gave him an innate dignity, a dignity unaffected by circumstances.” A few paragraphs later, Colson wrote, “The reason John Ehrlichman asked that question in such a despairing frame of mind was, I am convinced, because he saw his life, first and last, as his.” By his, he meant his own.

Ehrlichman died a very sick and lonely man on February 14, 1999. Colson did have the opportunity to visit with him one more time but during his friend’s final days, Colson had a bout of the flu so he sent one of his associates to pray with John. During the prayer, he just nodded and said nothing so Colson never knew for sure if his friend and former colleague made things right with his Maker in that eleventh hour. John Ehrlichman saw his life as his own and in the end, he had nothing. He was married three times. His kids didn’t have much to do with him. All the people who once lined up to see him, whose respect he once commanded, were all gone. In the end, he saw no point to his life and because he made it his own - all about him - there was no point to his life that he could see.

Jesus said, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? For what will man give in exchange for his soul?” The paradox of keeping what you give to God and losing what you keep for yourself is a difficult one to grasp, but it is true. History bears it out. Our biggest problem is that we stubbornly refuse to learn from history.

Why is Watergate still worth discussing more than a generation later? When you probe the whole thing and learn about what was done it reveals a number of stark realities. First, otherwise respectable people are capable of very dark deeds. Second, it's a grim reminder of the capacity of the human heart to self-deceive. All the dirty tricks done by the Committee to Re-elect the President were unnecessary because the Democratic campaign under its nominee, George McGovern, was anemic and imploding. Nixon won by a landslide in November 1972 and would've won it without much effort. His re-election committee had a siege mentality and resorted to drastic measures when no real battle was underway. Third, it was a text book example of how an organization can take on the characteristics of its leader. In the unseen world, kindred spirits tend to find each other because birds of a feather flock together.

The God Who Hates

On May 19, the famously polarizing British-Canadian author and radio and television host Michael Coren appeared on the TVO current affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Coren was being interviewed about his new book Epiphany: A Christian's Change of Heart & Mind Over Same-Sex Marriage. It was disappointing to watch. Coren was once one of the most articulate social conservatives in Canada and to listen to him capitulate, complete with his maudlin apologies, to the liberal crowd was bewildering and embarrassing. Somewhere along the line, he got tired of fighting the good fight and decided that befriending the 'spirit of the age' was the right and more personally satisfying thing to do.

In order to justify this seismic shift in his thinking, he has had to re-cast what Christianity is (in his mind) and it is obvious that he now views the faith as one of all-inclusive peace and love. Well, the man who once embraced the truth has now abandoned it and settled for its counterfeit. This is easy enough to prove. To begin with, he knows enough about the faith to know that it's about the truth who is a Person, namely Jesus Christ, the truth incarnate, first and foremost. Coren should know better than to be hung up on peace and love as an end in itself as if to just 'live and let live' is the chief end of life. This isn't how Jesus was (and isn't today) and because He was God's perfect reflection on Earth, Himself God, then God the Father isn't either.

Paikin did a good job of challenging Coren with what Jesus said about marriage and where Coren himself now stands. He quoted Matthew 19:4-5, where Jesus said God "made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.'" Coren batted away any reference to the unique opposite-sex complementarity of marriage and said Christ was talking about the institution itself.

I believe the Church of Jesus Christ needs to wake up and realize something. We don't like the word 'hate' but we need to embrace the fact that the true God in Heaven hates some things. He does not hate people, but He hates many of the things people do and this is clearly verified in the life of Jesus. Some examples: Regarding peace and love, Christ said this, "Do not think that I came to bring peace to the Earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword...and a man's enemies will be the members of his household" because of Him (Matt. 10:34, 36). This adversity comes with befriending Jesus. He also said this, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself (meaning any selfish desires) and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it" (Matt. 16:24-25). Then there are the seven letters to the churches in Asia Minor in the book of Revelation, especially the words Jesus has for the church in Laodicea, "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16).

Regardless of what you may think of these words of Jesus, we can all agree that they aren't the words of some dreamy-eyed middle eastern mystic who preached moral equivalency. No, in Jesus beats the heart of a God who longs to live with His people and despises anything that would bring them harm, isolation and spiritual death. What kind of parents would let their children do anything they want because they 'love' them? No parents who do that truly love their children. All people are created equal, yes, but not all behavior and lifestyles are morally equal.

Michael Coren has suddenly run down the rabbit hole of appeasement and I pray that he will retreat. He has surrendered to the religion of a god created in the world's image, a cheap counterfeit to the real one - an idol. The spirit of the age is the god of "peace, love and tolerance", as a world without the real God defines them, and is no god at all. Jesus calls this god "the father of lies" because all he can do is deceive and imitate.

We should never underestimate the capacity of the human heart to self-deceive. Here is an excerpt from his book, "I believe that the welcoming of gay people, who have suffered at Christian hands for so long, is at the epicenter of the modern Christian challenge and that by washing away the stains of prejudice and discrimination, we can spark a new awakening." I have two responses to that. First, many gay people have already been welcomed into the Christian Church but like all other penitents, they have confessed their sin and have taken on a new life in Christ. Jesus said, "I do not condemn you, either. Go and from now on sin no more" (John 8:11). Coren is simply trying to accommodate sin. Second, issues like "same-sex marriage" and transgenderism and all the rest of it are the results of the humanistic religion of idolatry (idol worship) that rises from our brokenness as fallen people. 

Michael Coren needs to understand something. Any awakening in the Church of Christ will come from God Himself in the power of the Holy Spirit and not from any pet subject of a people-pleasing author who has clearly lost his way. And any true awakening will not go well for "same-sex marriage" proponents for the simple reason that regarding this, God said no.

Of Wolves and Sheep

It has been just over 48 hours since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's public image took a major downturn. To recap, on the evening of a parliamentary vote, a skirmish broke out in which the PM left his seat, waded into a crowd of MPs in the House of Commons, took the Conservative party whip by the arm and escorted him to his seat. On the way, he accidentally bumped into an NDP MP and in his frustration told her to "get the f*** out of the way". She (the member) was visibly upset and had to leave the chamber.

Reaction was swift. NDP leader Tom Mulcair began yelling at Trudeau during the brief melee. The next day, Opposition leader Rona Ambrose rose in the House and calmly, cleanly and surgically skewered the PM for his actions. Social media posts about the incident haven't slowed down any. Supporters of the Conservatives in the last federal election are exacting revenge on their Liberal detractors during that campaign who pilloried then-PM Stephen Harper in post after post. Those same Liberal (and liberal) detractors are silent now on social media because they see the incivility of their leader (and perhaps their own) who vowed to bring civility back into government. It is now obvious that Trudeau's talk about change was just that, talk. His actions on the floor of the House two nights ago and his government's repeated attempts to silence the Opposition far exceed anything the Harper Conservatives did.

While all people are capable and guilty of hypocrisy, hypocrisy from those on the political and social left is particularly galling. Historically, they have often been the self-appointed champions of human rights but a quick look at Canadian history tells a different story. Eugenics is a word that is derived from the Greek word that means "well born". It first came into use in the late 1800s by a British aristocrat named Sir Francis Galton. It caught on in Canada, in Alberta, in the 1920s under the government of the United Farmers of Alberta, a party that drew much of its support from organized labour. The UFA ran the province from 1921-1935 and in 1928, it enacted the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act that authorized the sterilization of persons of lower intelligence. Under the name "eugenics", this was a social experiment that sought to eliminate people with intellectual disabilities from the province's gene pool. They sought to sterilize people of low intelligence to keep them from having children who are the same.

What is also disturbing about this is who the proponents of eugenics were. They include J.S. Woodsworth, a founder of the CCF party, the forerunner of today's NDP; Tommy Douglas, a Baptist minister who became the CCF premier of Saskatchewan and later leader of the federal NDP (to be fair, Douglas later changed his mind on eugenics) and Nellie McClung, one of the "Famous Five" who launched the "Persons Case" in 1927 to get women to be "qualified persons" so they could vote. I find it incredible that these folks who are lionized in Canadian history held beliefs that amount to ethnic cleansing which had its most extreme form in Nazism. 

It's also funny how the language of today is similar to the language back then. The UFA also used the word "progressive" to describe its social policies. I wonder if they would accept institutionalized things like abortion, physician-assisted suicide, transgenderism and same-sex marriage. One can only speculate. The fact remains, however, that liberal socialist movements in Canada have, with some notable exceptions, stood for policies that are essentially harmful to human beings, all under the guise of human rights and the common good.

A side of Justin Trudeau's nature was revealed on Wednesday night in Ottawa, a side he led us to believe was not there. Also revealed was the nature of his government which, naturally, possesses the characteristics of the leader. They all now have an image problem that won't soon be solved. Sooner or later hidden things come out and with the perversions that are being institutionalized in today's society, I believe there is much more to come. 

Love Supreme

Reading for me can be frustrating because I often read more than one book at a time. I've read a few books cover to cover but mostly, I just sift through a book's different sections, take in the ideas that interest me and when I'm satisfied, I move on. Knowing my erratic reading habits, I wasn't very enthusiastic when someone this past weekend handed me a book she thought I should read. It was a book on the Holy Trinity that I hadn't read and come to think of it, it would be the first I've ever read about the triune God of the Bible. With some down time later that day, I decided I would flip through it. It's an easy read, the whole book containing just 130 pages. It's called Delighting in the Trinity - An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Michael Reeves and I'm going to buy it for myself. It's one of those books every Christian should own and read through often just to reset themselves in the Faith.

The Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, once called love "the supreme ethic". Whether he realized it at the time (and I'm sure he did), he was citing the great battle of not just our time but of the ages. The Bible says God is love. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all that is in us and the second greatest commandment for us is to love one another. Since we are created in God's image, we humans are created to love...and everybody, even the worst of our species, loves. It's true. Hypocrites, criminals and terrorists all have the capacity for love and act upon it. If it is the supreme ethic and we are created in the image of the supreme Being, then we are born to love. As we sit in the highest position of the created order, we are unique among beings. It is, at once, our greatest blessing and our greatest curse because though we love, we don't love as we ought, and that's where things go wrong.

From the book: "What, then, went wrong? It was not that Adam and Eve stopped loving. They were created as lovers in the image of God and they could not undo that. Instead, their love turned. When the apostle Paul writes of sinners, he describes them as 'lovers of themselves, lovers of money...lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God'. Lovers we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted. Created to love God, we turn to loving ourselves and anything but God. And this is just what we see in the original sin of Adam and Eve. Eve takes and eats the forbidden fruit because a love for herself - gaining wisdom for herself - has overcome any love she might have had for God." This was the same sin that an angel named Lucifer committed - a love of himself rather than a primary love of God. See Ezekiel 28:17.

Self love is inordinate. It is pride and pride is the root of all sin. How different the love embodied in Jesus was. He loved His Father completely and would do nothing to violate His will, even when it meant dying on a Roman cross to fulfill His Father's will that sinful people be redeemed. He rebuked the tempter in the wilderness when that father of lies tried to coax Him into the imitation love that he embraced. Augustine hit the mark when he declared, "You have made us for Yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

The Bible says, "God is love", and truly He is. But in order for God to be love, He must be in a relationship because He cannot be one Being loving Himself. No, God is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God in a perfect love relationship within three distinct Persons. It is to this divine relationship we are invited to partake. It is nothing less than this. After His resurrection Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, "Go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" That is the proof, the rock-solid word of the Man who demonstrated perfectly what we were created to be like and made it possible for us to enter that reality. That is the Gospel.

A Sister Act

In this month's edition of U.S. Catholic magazine, Father Bryan Massingale of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee related the story of his sister's defection from the Catholic Church to become a Baptist. To his credit, he attended her second baptism and celebrated with her over her new church home. Of course, there is some personal collateral damage. Father Bryan and his sister and their other siblings come from a devout Catholic family. And his sister was no Catholic-in-name-only. She was devout all through her youth and into adulthood. The reason she gave for leaving Roman Catholicism was that her spiritual needs were not being met. Naturally, this disturbed her brother, the father, not just because this is his sister saying these things, but because many others are as well. In fact, Father Bryan pointed out that former Catholics are the fastest growing and second largest Christian group in America, a denomination all its own. He ended his article with a plea for his own church to take the necessary steps to stop the hemorrhaging.

It should be pointed out that any church sect or denomination can fail to meet a person's spiritual needs. By the way, it's not just the Catholic churches that are losing members. Many of the mainline Protestant denominations are as well. People are opting for no church affiliation. Then there are the unsaved in churches everywhere. There are Protestants-in-name-only just like there are Catholics-in-name-only who like to control things in the church and dull the environment for the spiritually hungry with their idols. While the idols are many, one of the biggest ones, next to the god of "self", is religiosity. Religion can obscure the important matters of the Faith such as one's relationship with Christ. The answer to this problem is simple enough. Read the Gospels and accept the teachings of Jesus at face value. Deny your selfish desires and take up your cross and follow Him every day. Pray for wisdom and discernment from God and understand that only God is righteous and righteousness comes only from Him. If you have any righteousness in you, it's God's, not yours. And it's only God's righteousness, namely Jesus, in you that can save you.

As a one-time Catholic, I know about both sides. My wife and I raised our kids in an evangelical church and sent them to a Catholic high school. Why? To teach them Reformed theology but also to teach them what I call "the Catholic Ethic", i.e. compassion and acts of service. Catholics have a tremendous capacity for these. Sure, many Protestants do as well but Catholics do it very well. It's in their DNA; there's an intelligent and articulate bearing to their compassion. They empathize easily and communicate that empathy with great finesse. What Protestants do better is teaching their theology. They care about the quality of their preaching and love to learn. They want their sermons longer and "meatier" than a Roman Catholic homily. They aren't afraid to explore the great truths of Christianity and see very clearly the primacy and centrality of Jesus Christ in all of life. There are problems with both sets of gifts, however. What good is it to plumb the great depths of knowledge if you overlook your brother and sister in need? By the same token, it's just as silly to be nice to everyone while minimizing central teachings of the Faith and losing track by getting caught up in extra-biblical religiosity.

Pride is the greatest of all sins we are told and it has many faces. Both sides need to recognize their own pride and turn from it. If we aren't childlike, says Jesus, i.e. possessing a childlike faith in His Father, we will never enter His Kingdom and it won't matter if we're Catholic or Protestant.