Justified

Vice Attracts Virtue

Throughout our lives, we have all been exposed to stories about hidden gems of human beings who have been serendipitously discovered by those with the power to better their lives. Usually, they have a rare but prodigious gift that is presented as having the potential to make the world a better place. I'm thinking here of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, Shaquille O'Neal in Blue Chips, Jamie Foxx in The Soloist, and the list goes on and on.

These stories always warm the heart at first, but then a realization sets in. I am not a mathematics prodigy. What about Ben Affleck? I am not an athletic 7-footer who weighs 300 pounds. What about the nameless guy he dunks over? I wouldn't even know how to correctly hold a cello. What about the schizophrenic homeless man with no talent other than finding the next heroin fix? What inherent virtue do they have that will attract the halls of power?

This is not a reflection on doing more social justice. Frankly, I find sermonizing on that to be a little bit nauseating these days. This is a reflection on justice itself. More specifically, the benefits of virtue and what is attracted to virtue (virtue being a catch-all term for gifts, right living, etc.). The way the world works is the way the world has always worked. It is ingrained in you and in me. A specific quality, gift, or trait that enables survival, fame, power, money, companionship, love, etc. The inherent good attracts the good. Conversely but consistently, the inherent bad attracts the bad: alienation, abandonment, punishment, aloneness, imprisonment, execution, and death. This is shorthand for justice.

It is the basis for all human activity. Justice. Virtue. Traits. Reward for obedience. It is the basis for all relationships and all religions except for the true meaning of Jesus Christ (which only re-asserts itself about once every few centuries, it seems).

This all occurred to me in a new way during the Susan Boyle to-do. If you have been lost at sea these past couple of months, she is a middle-aged Scots woman of nondescript appearance who has a lovely singing voice. She rocked the world with her tremendous performance that can be seen here. A "diamond-in-the-rough", she was called by all the elites who deigned recognize her. The halls of power took notice and her trip to fame began.

Instead of dwelling on the problems that took place in her rise to fame, I began to think about another character. She is actually a fictional character but she produces real-life reaction in the viewer. Breaking Bad is a show I watch (and would recommend only for those with strong stomachs... especially this season). This character is a woman who is addicted to crystal meth. She has a lover who is addicted to meth as well and a little boy who is neglected and malnourished. This woman is fairly grisly in appearance and kills her lover in a quite gruesome way. The slightest memory of this character never fails to repulse me. And yet...

Romans 5:6-10 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

What is this? Justice and virtue turned on its ear to be replaced with grace, mercy, and alien righteousness? This does not compute. God through Jesus Christ came for His lost sheep who have no virtuous lever by which reward can be expected? In fact, love sought out evil like a heat-seeking missle and embraced the unembraceable. Vice, in other words, attracts the only One with any true virtue.

The Gospel for Those Broken by the Church

Dr. Rod Rosenbladt on "The Gospel For Those Broken By The Church" from Faith Lutheran Church on Vimeo.

Law and Gospel Discussed at Wittenberg Institute

Roscoe P. Coltrane

Do You Have A Zombie Plan?

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Luke 19:5-10)

I hope you (like me) are really getting into the new AMC series The Walking Dead. Great story, great acting, and great cinematography. You see the zombies walking around people's middle-class homes or around a downtown area and it just looks believable (and terrifying). In the midst of this, there is the drama of realistic human interaction with this post-apocalyptic (zomb-pocalyptic) scape and it just rings true. Much like the fight over racial tensions that we looked at in the previous post.

There is something other-worldly, though, that happens in both Episode 1 and 2. And it is as surprising as it is touching. Rick Grimes is the sheriff's deputy who awakes from a coma only to find this terrible new world and reality have replaced that which was familiar. He cannot find his family and there are precious few survivors. In addition, he keeps running into zombies who want to eat him alive.

The first zombie he sees in Episode 1 is a really pathetic one. She is quite disfigured (picture included in the poster) and everything below her torso is unusable. Still, she wants to kill Rick just as much as any of the others do. After Rick later gets his bearings, regains his strength, and arms himself, he returns to the place where he first sees this particular zombie. She has crawled away so, at great risk to himself, he tracks her down. He then does something very un-Woody Harrellson-like. He looks at her with great compassion and says, "I am so sorry that this happened to you." He then painlessly puts her out of her misery.

In Episode 2, a group of survivors kill an exceptionally motivated and virulent zombie. After finding out that they are trapped and zombies identify potential victims primarily by smell, they decide to use the dead one as a source of "zombie grime" that will help them slip past unnoticed (gross, I know). Before they "harvest" the grime (which is not a scene for the kiddies, by the way... as if any of this is), Rick takes out the zombie's wallet and finds his name. There is some money and a photograph or two of his family. In a way, he eulogizes what was once a very real and motivated threat to life and limb. A sense of compassion enters the scene.

This reminds me very much of a section of Paul Zahl's book Grace in Practice called "The Relation of the Un-Free Will to Compassion". Here is a portion of that section:

A Short Talk on Grace