Poop and sacrifice

Not trying to be cavalier with my titling conventions; There is, really!!! a connection between these two disparate topics. Give me a few moments to explain and it might make sense.

First, one of the family dogs was experiencing some digestive issues that resulted in a rather, shall we say, ‘soupy’ version of what we’ve come to expect from our trips to the gravel dumping area. The whole matter was complicated by the fact that Teddy is a Maltese Che Zhu with a long haired tail. I guess I don’t need to go into any more graphic detail. Any one with children remembers and knows the noxious duty of cleaning up those that can’t clean themselves. In my book it is a supreme act of sacrifice. And depending on your brain’s ability to desensitize the olfactory the ‘sacrifice’ may stay with you longer than you’d wish…

And secondly, last Sunday the pastor of the church that Toni and I have been attending introduced a new series based on the book of Luke. This series at Mars Hill (marshillchurch.org) will last approximately three years as he goes through the book line-by-line. Pastor Mark Driscoll is supplementing his teaching in this series with video footage which was shot during a recent trip to Greece, Turkey and Israel. It has all the makings to be a great series. You can go to the church website and follow this teaching either by podcast or vodcast.

As Driscoll wrapped up his introduction he reiterated a question that was asked of him upon his return from the middle east: “Did you learn anything new?” His Jewish tour guide offered him some powerful insight and he shared that with us on Sunday. I will do my best to paraphrase this.

One of the many photos that were taken showed two of Mark Driscoll’s children sitting on a stone ‘bench’ with holes cut into the top and front edges of it. It was long bench and had a dozen of these openings. This was the communal lavatory of the time. No walls, no doors, no place for secret liaisons by Senators from Idaho. And consequently, no toilet paper, so there was a trough right in front of the ‘seat’ where one could scoop the running water there to cleanse oneself.

Bear with me. I’m getting to my point.

One of the means that the poor had to earn money was to stand in front of those (how do I say…) “doing their duty” was to offer to cleanse the (augh!) ‘privates’ of their customers. This was done with a sponge stuck to the end of a stick which was inserted into the hole as the patron was seated. Obviously there was an issue with using and reusing this sponge so these business people had to do their best to sterilize the sponge. A vinegar mixture was used…

“Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land  until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, "This man is calling Elijah." And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the others said, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him." 50And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and  yielded up his spirit.” Matthew 27:45-48 (ESV)

“And at the ninth hour Jesus  cried with a loud voice,  "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And some of the bystanders hearing it said, "Behold, he is calling Elijah." And someone ran and filled a sponge with  sour wine, put it on a reed  and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down." And Jesus uttered a loud cry and  breathed his last.”  Mark 15:34-37 (ESV)

“After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), "I thirst." A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, "It is finished," and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” John 19: 28-30 (ESV)

“They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink.” Psalm 69:21 (ESV)

And HERE was Driscoll’s point: That between Jesus stating “Father, forgive them” and “it is finished”, a shitty sponge was shoved into the mouth of our Savior. After offering his own body as a sacrifice for us all, his tongue was left with the taste and his nose was filled with the stench of our uncleanliness.

Cleaning up my dog’s butt and having that smell waft into my nostrils was bad enough. But the power of Driscoll’s sermon was dialed up just a touch more when I thought of this new insight and detail of one more thing that Jesus endured to “clean me up”.

What an (even more) amazing grace! I am so thankful for his kindness, mercy, patience and forbearance on my behalf.

To listen to last week’s sermon, go to http://www.marshillchurch.org/media/luke/eyewitness-to-jesus

 

Peace

The fool and the fire

The fool folds his hands and ruins himself. Ecclesiastes 4:5

Toni and I got home from work to find the chicken roasting in the oven and Matt whirling away on the exercise bike. Brooke had prepared the chicken and was roasting it at the 475 degrees per Toni’s instructions. We realized, at the sight of the overly browned chicken that the oven should’ve been set to 450. Not a big deal. Matt, trying to get in shape for the fall lacrosse season, decided he is going to take a shower before dinner and goes into the kids’ bathroom and turns on the heater/fan. The kid apparently likes to sweat MORE after taking a shower because he always uses the heater in the overhead fan unit. After a hot shower I need to cool down or I sweat for the next hour, ruining the reason for taking a shower in the first place. Not Matt. Give him more heat!

All the commotion of getting home, getting dinner ready, kids going about there stuff, trying to get everyone to the table is compounded with our weird-acting dog, Teddy: pacing about, needing to be held and constantly being under foot. Annoy-ing! But we finally get seated at the table when our fire alarm starts beeping. I get up and turn the alarm off and go back to the table wondering why the alarm sounded. I’ve set the smoke detector off with my cooking. I’m Julia Child with a fire helmet but there wasn’t any smoke when I took the chicken out of the oven. And the alarm went off again. I got up to turn off the alarm again, started to go back to the table when it went off again. I was more than a little annoyed because 1) I’m not eating dinner 2) I can acknowledge that I occasionally burn stuff in the oven and then have to deal with the smoke and the jokes about burning down the house and putting the family in harm’s way but 3) there was NO smoke with the chicken, so why am I being put-out by the alarm? As I go back to turn off the alarm, I tell those sitting at the table to check out the back half of the house to make sure it’s not on fire. Logical thinking, but understand: the way I said this was to mock the alarm. It’s like, when you’re sitting someplace and a little kid squirts you in the face with a squirt gun. The first time is OK, might be kind's cute; then he does it again and you shoot him the sneer. Then he does it again and you’re really annoyed and want to pinch his head off. Then you realize that if you just acknowledge him, say “OK, you got me” and fall over dead, he will have what he wants and will leave you alone! “OK, you got me, would someone go to the back half of the house and make sure it’s not burning down, you got me! I got dinner to eat!” So imagine that feeling at that moment when you hear the commotion and see the smoke out the playroom window! Dinner’s going to have to wait.

We remodeled the kids’ bathroom ten years ago. One of the fixtures that survived the demo was this multi-switched fan unit that had a light, heater, fan and combination of all three things that could work separately or together. We liked it because it had this cool, retro-Jetson’s look to it. Our house was built in 1956 and this fan was probably original equipment of that era. Then again, maybe not, because when we remodeled the rest of the house and redid the master bath, we found the same fan design at Seattle Lighting and installed this ‘new’ fan in the new bathroom.

Toni left the dinner table and opened the bathroom door and the room was filled with smoke and the heater unit was on. What had happened was the fan unit had burned out and the heater element was left to just cook away. The Brinks Security person on the other end of the phone with Toni; I got a ladder to look up into our crawl space above the bathroom to make sure there wasn’t a fire there (miracle one: we've got one place to access the crawl space in our low-pitched roofed home, in that bathroom); and the fire trucks had found their way to our lane and our house (miracle #2 because we live on a lane in which the houses are not in whatever system the fire department has. I’ve watched fire and medical units go around the other block and down other lanes trying to find where it is they need to go, so when the trucks pull up this is no small deal). There was no fire, just a lot of smoke. But it was close to being something worse.

When the fire guys came to the back of our house I was removing the fan unit from the ceiling (note: we have a door from that bathroom that goes out to the backyard, put in by the previous owner so they could go from the bathroom to the backyard hot tub and return, presumably to a really warm bathroom heated by the fan/heater/retro-Jetson multi-switched fan-heater unit). One of the guys had in his hand a device that looks like something a grocery store stock boy uses to take inventory but was actually a device used to find bodies in smoke-filled rooms with little or no visibility. He had no trouble finding me, taking down the fan unit. But he pointed this heat reading gun at the element in the fan and it was 300 degrees. I was simultaneously awed by the cool gun device he had and the fact that this thing was as hot as it was, and at the gravity of how close we were/could’ve been to a real fire. We smelled no smoke. Only the incessant beeping of this annoying alarm. And my dinner was getting cold (The fool folds his hands and ruins himself). 

The smoke cleared to reveal something more than a faulty fan.

Smoke detectors, nervous, skittish dog, the fire department and cold chicken. Thankful.