The Mercy Seat (Lyrics and Music by Nick Cave)

Mercy Seat
It ALL began when they come took me from my home
And put me on Death Row,
a crime for which I am totally innocent, you know.

I began to warm and chill
To objects and their fields,
A ragged cup, a twisted mop
The face of Jesus in my soup
Those sinister dinner deals
The meal trolley's wicked wheels
A hooked bone rising from my food
All things either good or ungood.

And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.

I hear stories from the chamber
Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger
He died upon the cross
Might I say, it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade
Or at least that's what I'm told

My kill-hand's
tatooed E.V.I.L. across it's brother's fist
That filthy five! They did nothing to challenge or resist.

In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I'm told
All history does unfold.
It's made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.

Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied.


And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is burning
And I think my head is glowing
And in a way I'm hoping
To be done with all this twisting of the truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway there was no proof
And I'm not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is glowing
And I think my head is smoking
And in a way I'm hoping
To be done with all these looks of disbelief.
A life for a life
And a truth for a truth
And I've got nothing left to lose
And I'm not afraid to die.

And the mercy seat is smoking
And I think my head is melting
And in a way that's helping
To be done with all this twisting of the truth
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
But I'm afraid I told a lie.

By Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds






By Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
sung beyond the grave by Johnny Cash on Solitary Man

God's Report Card (Under-achiever?)

As we take a quick look around the world it is a stretch for us to say that God is all powerful and all loving. 

The question of  why is suffering so common and indiscriminate has no good answer.  Some, like Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People", try to save God by claiming that He is Good but not all Powerful. In this framework God is involved and is caring but is limited and often can do no more than suffer along with His creation. I struggled for a long time with this apparent diminishment of God. I tried writing Theodicies to make God no less than what theologians and preachers have claimed He is, but God can not be saved by any trick of language or sophistry of reason from a hack like me or a genius like (insert name of your favourite theologian or philosopher here)................................................. 

God stands before us as nakedly proud and overbearing as Job's encounter describes Him.  We, like Job, can demand an accounting but we will not get one.
So we are left with a clear choice...we either accept the ambiguity and the confusion of a world at odds with the simple faith of our youth and bow before this mystery...mouths closed...hearts broken, yet still hoping
or we must forfeit our faith and the hope of a redeemer who will stand with us upon the earth and someday give meaning to the trail of absurdity that we have unwillingly walked upon.

I am closed in between these two options and I only slightly favour the way of faith over resignation.
I can never be sure if the thread by which my faith hangs will hold but as it holds I remain in the church and remain a Christian.


Absurdity is so evident that I can not deny it, I can not rationalize it, I can not mitigate it. Therefore I tentatively embrace it and say that the evidence of our lives tells of a God who is unknowable and who favours the unexpected and the unexplainable. The evidence suggests that He is a connoisseur of the bizarre. As such I can even make peace with monumental natural and human disasters because beauty is no longer in the eye of this beholder it is only in the Eye of The Beholder.

And the Beholder apparently loves the deformed, the damaged, the odd and the poor.....after all, He made so many of us.  The ugliness and suffering of this world must have a beauty and a reason far above our ability to perceive it.   So we must simply accept the world we have and continue to love mercy and to live life as if  Love is eternal and powerful.

If what God wants for this world is as simple as we thought it was, then this world is a testimony to an Under-achieving God....but, if we examine it as the art of the creator and curator of curiosities and mysteries whose ways are beyond our finding out it is truly a place of wonderful and bewildering beauty . Such a world is not evidence of an under-achieving God. It is evidence of our under-perceiving.

Lord give us eyes to see and hearts to perceive the beauty in the ugliness around us and faith to embrace this life even when we can not perceive the beauty beneath.

LH

God as underachiever...not if He is Curator and Creator

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).

Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Words of Woodsy Wisdom (God as an Underachiever)

Woody Allen Quotes



I am at two with nature.

It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there
when it happens.












If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But
the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an
underachiever.

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One
path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total
extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam;
I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly
not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones
slept better... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much
more.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I
definitely overpaid for my carpet.




What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's
worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.



Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over
much too soon.

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is
finite. This is a very comforting thought-- particularly for
people who can never remember where they have left things.

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.





(To most of this I can only say an ironic Amen.)

What if God is as much Curator as Creator? (Seeing the World as a Divine Curiosity Shop may save God from Woody's charge)

Pieces taken from MOBA The Museum of Bad Art

"Indeed, it is not an easy thing to struggle against mighty forces like the giant orange cat consuming humankind. The artists here do not stoop to common human endeavors and limitations and only sometimes rise up to them."

from
museumofbadart.org
(Now, that is bad enough to be good.)

Creator or Curator? (Seeing the World as a Divine Curiosity Shop makes Woody's assessment seem slightly misguided.)

Ted Turner takes a turn

"I regret anything I said about religion that was negative. … Religion is one of the bright spots as far as I'm concerned, even though there are some areas, like everything else, where they've gone over the top a little, in my opinion."
Ted Turner, announcing $200 million anti-malaria partnership with Lutherans and Methodist denominations. The media mogul who once called Christianity "a religion for losers" says he now prays for sick friends, explaining, "It doesn't hurt."

Oscar Got It Right

Nothing is so important as human life, as the human person. Above all, the person of the poor and the oppressed... Jesus says that whatever is done to them he takes as done to him. That bloodshed, those deaths are beyond all politics: They touch the very heart of God.

- Oscar Romero
March 16, 1980

Al Queda Dreams My Nightmare

I was depressed last night so I called Lifeline.

Got a call center in Pakistan ...

I told them I was suicidal.

They got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck or fly a plane !!!

Jesus Against the Rapture

To watch is to be prepared for the unexpected. It is to give up the illusions of straight-line extrapolations, the silly assumption that current trends will continue. It is to abandon the calculations of the pundits about the swinging of some invisible pendulum. In this time, particularly, it is to accept the fact that life will not go on as it has. A change is in the offing, but no one knows what direction it will take. History is the realm of contingency, the unexpected. The proper eschatology is watchful expectancy for the Abba's work and will, and a wary guardedness about the rebounding perversity of humankind. The danger is to preempt the future with our own agenda and our own eagerness to be proven right by history.

- Robert Jewett
Jesus Against the Rapture

Happy Re-Birthday Israel

When I was a card carrying member of the evangelical, charismatic, biblical inerrancy crowd I believed that the rebirth of the Jewish nation was a miracle.
I still see it as a type of miraculous event but we can scarcely know what this miracle means especially when we consider that modern Isreal was birthed in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. The unspeakable atrocities committed there forced the Western (dare we say Christian) World to come to grips with our history of anti-semetism. The guilt we felt was the goad that finally pushed the cause of a Jewish homeland to the top of the world's agenda. In 1948 the miracle of rebirth was realized. Its continued existence takes on almost miraculous aspects when one considers how it has been the object of the military, political and spiritual wrath of nearly all its neighbours and much of the rest of the world.
No doubt this amazing land inhabited by a remarkable people has not lived in perfect righteousness since its founding but they have striven to make a good life, ruled by law, democracy and compassion.
In my simpler days I took comfort in the sign of Israel's rebirth and its miraculous existence. I hoped that the return of Jesus would follow fulfillment of ancient prophecies about regathering God's people from the four corners of the earth. I even calculated that there could be no more than 70 years from the time of the formation of the modern state of Israel till Christ's long awaited Parousia. The prophecy of the 'greening of the fig tree' and Christ's promise that the generation who saw this greening of the nation of Israel would not pass away till He comes in power seemed to point to a soon coming King who would put an end to this present darkness.
I reasoned that a generation could be interpreted as 3 score and 10. '4 score for reason of strength' seemed like an exception and not a definition so I told a few confidants that if Christ did not come back by 2018 then all my literal interpretations of scripture and prophecy would have to be rethought. I guess my rethinking has been a little ahead of schedule. For several years I have not been able to find a reasonable coherence of interpretation that allows a simple literalistic treatment of the scripture to stand and so I no longer cling to my old ways of seeing and believing.
I celebrate the miracle of Israel's existence and pray for peace in Jerusalem and all the nations surrounding her but I do not see the miracle as a portent of the second coming any longer.
I have to trust that Jesus has come in power as prophesied and He did so in the generation of his first followers and that coming in power was a spiritual transforming experience that has always seemed weak and unimportant in natural terms but is like the leaven in the dough of our violent self justifying hearts which will continue to do its job until the kingdom of peace and love preached by Jesus has come in power and glory.

May His Kingdom Come
His will be Done
In earth as In Heaven.
forever and ever
Amen!

LH