Jesus Is Risen! Have some jelly beans!

Ahh, another Easter is rapidly approaching, and we're all grapping with the big questions that inevitably begin to surface around this major religious holiday, namely, what am I going to do with all these black jelly beans?

I love Easter. Easter is always a good time, except for the time when I was four and my mother took me to get my picture taken with the Easter Bunny. Oh, my mom got the pictures all right. Pictures of me cowering in fear at this gruesome creature with giant pink ears. But after years of therapy, I’m happy to report that I can now go into malls during April.

This year, I tried to make some of my friends and family some Easter Baskets. However, I somehow felt very guilty about going out to the store and contributing to the mass commercialization of this sacred religious holiday. So, in quasi-protest, I decided to only purchase candy in quantities that were spiritually significant.

I know, I know. Rationalization. But it made me feel a little better about selling out Easter. So I went to the shelves and carefully selected the quantities of candy. I went up to the check-out line with my arms full of stuff, which I plopped down on the conveyor belt.

The check-out girl looked at the mass pile of candy rolling toward her register and looked at me like, “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to scan every one,” I said. “I know how many there are.”

“How many do you have,” she asked, as she looked at my piles of candy.

“It’s very easy,” I replied. “I counted very meticulously and I used numbers that were easy to remember.”

“Ok,” she said. “Mind telling me what those numbers are?”

“Well, I have 11 of these eggs filled with Starburst jelly beans, representing the original 12 disciples, minus Judas.”

She kind of laughed at me. “Okay, how many of these?”

“Oh, I have 33 Peanut Butter Eggs, representing the number of years Jesus lived.”

She just kept scanning and politely smiling at me like I was nuts.

“Four Easter bunnies,” I continued. “Two for the two thieves on the cross, and two for the men on the road to Emmaus who Jesus appeared to.”

She scanned the candy and put it into the bag.

“And five greeting cards,” I finished.

“What do the five cards mean?” she said pointing to my cards.

“Umm, those represent the five people I’m going to be giving Easter cards to.”

So I’m a little weird. So what.

I love Easter baskets. Growing up, my mother would give me an Easter basket every year. The highlight of course, as it is every year, is the solid chocolate Easter bunny. And how appropriate, because really, nothing says “Jesus has Risen” like a block of solid milk chocolate chiseled into the likeness of a small fecund woodland rodent.

Of course, I have no qualms about this tradition. And as I dug through the 430 pounds of plastic Easter grass in the basket to get to my prize, I anxiously anticipated the sweet joy that can only come from gnawing off the ears of a candy rabbit effigy.

But this year, as I was at the grocery store buying chocolate Easter bunnies, I noticed something that was quite jarring to me. Right there, on the front of the box, it read: Solid Chocolate Easter Bunny. And then, underneath that title was a colon and a little nameplate that read:

Parsley Pete.

Like this was an action figure or something. Parsley Pete with Bazooka Action Move. I started to chuckle at this, until I realized that my chocolate Easter bunny actually had a name. This made me uneasy. I normally don’t give my food names. It would be different if this bunny were one of thousands grown on the chocolate bunny farm. But this bunny was special. It had a name. A personality. A unique identity. This was Parsley Pete, for crying out loud.

So I am now afraid to eat him. My conscience keeps bugging me.

But the Easter Basket isn’t just home to Parsley Pete. Contained within the grass are all sorts of yummy candies. And also a box of a food product which I am very wary of. They are called “Peeps” and seem to be of the same weight and consistency of styrofoam packing chips.

Now, I am pretty much a food connoisseur, and by that I mean that I will eat pretty much anything. However, there are a couple of food products which I am very wary of. The first are those orange crackers with peanut butter on them that kids used to have in their lunchboxes. You know what I’m talking about? These crackers were like, so orange they appeared to be radioactive. Personally, I don’t like my food to glow in the dark. Just a general rule.

Then there’s Twinkies. When I was in second grade, they told us that we were going to take a tour of the Hostess Factory. For me, this was like telling us that we were going to take a Field Trip to Heaven. I envisioned King Dons as big as a semi-wheel and Ho-Hos the size of large couches. But then I saw how they make these products. Twinkies, for example, are called snack cakes. They look like cake. They smell like cake. But do you think any of these see an oven? No way. They’re not Twinkie snack cakes. They’re Twinkies, America’s Favorite Snack Lipid Compounds Injected with Chemical Catalysts.

And I have always been distrustful of fruit roll-ups. There is nothing even vaguely fruit-like about fruit roll-ups. Fruit is not that flat. It’s like a Jolly Rancher mated with Fly paper, or something.

But the food product I am most wary of come out only once a year. They are those brightly colored marshmallow treats called “Peeps.” These things are apparently so dangerous that the FDA only allows for their sale once a year. Ever tried to get some peeps in, say, November? Ain’t gonna happen. There are no peeps. You’d have better luck finding good acting in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

So these things only come out at Easter. My question is this: what the heck kind of substance are those peeps things made of? It’s certainly not natural. Very few naturally occurring substances are that pink. It’s like a highlighter exploded over candy, or something.

I was talking about this with one of my friends over Easter and so we ran a little experiment Sunday. His mom was making some hot tea, so I took one of the “peeps,” put it in a saucer and poured some boiling hot water over it. I was hoping to glean some insights into its composition as I watched it dissolve.

I swear to you, the boiling water had no effect on the peep. Instead, the brightly-colored coating on the outside kind of fused together to form this impermeable shell. It was like some sort of protective faculty given to the peep by nature. So I took the peep out of the boiling water (and I had to use a spoon because the water was so hot), I discovered that I’d accidentally created the hardest substance known to man. I took a butcher knife and tried to cut the peep. I’d have had better luck try to carve a motorcycle helmet. No kidding. NASA needs to do research this and start building rockets out of this stuff.

And I don’t even want to talk about the eyes. They appear to be pieces of black metal, but I am not sure. I wonder what would happen if you put these things in the microwave. I’m afraid to find out. They’d probably mutate and grow to like 600 feet tall or something and terrorize Tokyo.

And people voluntarily ingest these things. Simply amazing.

At least we have until next year for our digestive systems to break those things down. And a whole year to figure out how to get rid of those black jelly beans.

Zookeepers, Tigers and Jesus

Editor's Note: I wrote the following article for the Easter edition of our church's bi-monthly mini-magazine, which gets sent out to 250,000 homes in our immediate mailing area. I am under no illusion that most people in South San Jose use the mailer to line their canary cages, but a lot of people do end up coming to check out our church because of this simple periodical. Anyway, I thought I'd share what I wrote.



A while ago, I spent the day at Six Flags Over Marine World up in Vallejo. If you’ve never been there, it’s a cross between a zoo/aquarium and an amusement park. It’s also kind of like a camera-phone – you know, not that great of a camera and not that great of a phone. Same thing. It's not that great of an amusement park and not that great of a zoo.

Plus, I only counted four flags. So that's a rip off.

But I did learn some things about myself. I learned that I don't like roller coasters too much anymore. They give me a headache. And I kept wanting to turn around and tell the masses of young people, "Would you mind not screaming so loud?"

My favorite parts were when I got to sit in the shade and watch the animal shows.

When did I turn into my grandfather?

The Killer Whale show was astounding. This whale was just ginormous. When it swam around, the pool, which was 68 feet wide and 30 feet deep, swished around the way that water moves in a bathtub when a toddler tries to make waves. I mean, it was sloshing around like coffee in a mug. So much power in that animal.

The best part was at the end when the whale breached entirely out of the water, and did a one-and-a-half forward flip. It was magnificent. The trainers said that all the tricks were variations of naturally occurring behavior, but I'm pretty sure in the wild, Orcas don't jump 25 feet in the air to hit red balls with their snouts. And rarely do they time it perfectly to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."

Everyone knows Orcas like Prince's later stuff. Alphabet Street. New Power Generation.

The other super cool part of the day was the Tiger exhibit. There were Siberian Tigers and Bengal Tigers. The Bengal Tiger was about 500 pounds and was white and black. It was pretty darn big. But we were told the smaller two Siberian Tiger cubs - who were 10 months old – would grow to be about 750 pounds, which is just gigantic. The weird part was that inside the cage, there was this guy – a zookeeper. He was there inside the "natural habitat" with the tigers. I asked him through the fence if he was in danger. He said, "Potentially."

At one point, one Siberian tiger cub started "stalking" the older white Bengal tiger. It would hide behind logs and when the white tiger would look over, it would duck really low, but you could see its tail sticking out. Then it got closer, jumped on top of the log and then onto the white Bengal tiger. Apparently, Tigers don't hunt by instinct, but learn by watching tapes of professional wrestling.

The white tiger batted the cub in midair with its massive paw and the tyke went flying. So the cub came back and appeared to attempt to eat the white Tiger's huge paw.

"Hey, Odin! Stop that!" the trainer yelled. He went over to the cub and pulled him away from the white Bengal tiger who was now agitated a bit.

It was then that I realized that this guy's job was pretty much to stand in a locked, sealed cage and break up fights between fully-grown tigers.

And you thought your job was tough.

While I was sitting there, I had a revelation. That trainer’s situation is similar to Jesus. The Bible says that Jesus was God, and that he came down from heaven to show humanity what God is really like. He came to help mankind. But mankind doesn’t always want help. Because getting help often means you have to change something. And people don’t like change. And if someone is helping you, that means they might point out what you’re doing wrong. And people really don’t like that. If history has shown us anything through the lives of revolutionaries like Lincoln and Ghandi and Martin Luther King it’s that trying to get people to see that they’re wrong and then change their course is deadly work.

It’s like being locked in a cage with tigers.

So then why would Jesus willingly lock himself into that cage? I mean, why would Jesus - why would God – come to earth and put himself into a position where He would be constantly mocked. Where people would call him stupid, and disregard what he said. Where people would eventually gang up on him, strip him of his clothes and dignity, and torture him to death. Why would Jesus go through with that?

Jesus said it was because of his love. He knew that many would reject his words, call him a fool, and eventually kill him. But his mission was, in part, to show mankind what God was really like. There are lots of people who might be willing to die for their friends or their family. And I have heard stories of brave soldiers diving on grenades to save their comrades. But in Jesus we find a man who is willing to die for his enemies.

Now that’s a love that’s out of this world.

The Blasphemy Challenge

I don't know if it's just my perception, but there seems to be a new wave of athiesm abounding in the United States that is more angry, more inflammatory and more emboldened. First off, two of the New York Times' Top 50 Books are books by athiests about athiesm (Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion and Sam Harris' book Letter to a Christian Nation.)

Then I came across this story which I read about on ABC News and then watched on this Nightline Special. A group of committed athiests in Philadelphia called the Rational Response Squad are encourging young people to take what they call "The Blasphemy Challenge."

A passage in Mark 3:29 reads, "whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

The Rational Response Squad is taking it literally and challenging people to gamble with their eternal souls. So far more than 1195 people have taken up the challenge and filmed themselves on camera denying the existence of Jesus Christ, God and the Holy Spirit. You can see the posts on here.

One guy even had a t-shirt on that said "F*ck Jesus" only without the * in it.

Wow.

Remembrance and Regret

Editor's Note: The following is a letter I received from a friend in regard to the Four Year Anniversay of the War in Iraq, which was yesterday.

On March 19, 2003, the United States and “The Coalition of the Willing” launched an attack, called “Shock and Awe”, against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq . On May 2, 2003 on the deck of the USS Lincoln, President Bush proudly proclaimed “ Mission accomplished”. Now, four years to the day after its start, we have been in the Iraq war longer than it took our allies and us to win World War II against the Germans, Japanese, and Italians (US entered the war on December 8, 1941; Germany surrendered May 2, 1945; Japan surrendered September 2, 1945).

What has been accomplished during the last four years?

• We found out that the reasons the Bush Administration used to mobilize our anger and galvanize our resolve were bogus. There were no weapons of mass destruction and there was no connection between Saddam and 9-11.

• There have been over 3,200 of our brave men and women killed and over 30,000 wounded, many with limbs lost and brains damaged. Many more have comeback with charred memories and broken personalities. On this day, we should all remember and acknowledge their sacrifice.

• There have been tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of innocent Iraqi women, children, grand fathers and grand mothers killed. Actually, no one knows how many for sure how many; we don’t keep records on the Iraqis that have been killed.

• For a war that was supposed to pay for itself with Iraqi oil revenues, we have now spent over $400 billion. Much of it has been through no-bid contracts to friends of the Bush Administration. Billions of that have been lost to corruption or have gone unaccounted for. Our grandchildren will still be paying for this war decades from now.

• Not even the Baghdad is secure (let alone the Sunni Triangle), outside the Green Zone, with daily bombings, mortar attacks, IED explosions, kidnappings, and assassinations.

• There is a duly-elected Iraqi government but it has failed to pull the country together, the police force is filled with death squads, and the country is embroiled in a civil war.

• The “reconstruction” has gone badly. After 4 years, Iraqis—even those in the capitol—are without reliable basic services, such as electricity, running water, and sewers—let alone adequate education and health care (but then, neither do we). Most Iraqis feel that they are worse off now than they were before the war started.

• Although there was no connection between Iraq and the 9-11 terrorists, the country is now a magnet for the World’s terrorists and a breeding ground for new ones and the World is now a more dangerous place.

• The war in Iraq has resulted in neglect of the war in Afghanistan . It has faltered and the Taliban and Al Qaeda have reemerged. For a mishandled reconstruction there, the country is now the World’s largest producer of heroin and it accounts for most of the country’s economy.

• While the Iraq War was supposed to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the War and— Israel ’s adventurism in Lebanon —has actually made the region more unstable and volatile.

• Rather than stem efforts of countries to acquire weapons of mass, our inability to win the War has emboldened Iran and they are on the verge of joining the nuclear (not “nucular” George) club.

• And finally and most regrettably, a world that was uniformly sympathetic with us and behind us after 9-11 now distrusts or even despises us.

This is what the Bush Administration has accomplished in the last four years.

The Iraq War has turned out to be the biggest foreign policy disaster of our life time, even worse than Viet Nam because the stakes are higher. And what angers me most is that the Bush Administration hides its failed policies behind the bodies of our dead GI’s. Anyone who challenges their blunders is said to be disloyal to our troops and those that sacrificed themselves for us. What could be more unpatriotic, cynical, and disloyal to America’s men and women in the service than to send them off to fight a war that was based on trumped up intelligence, has no exit strategy, and will leave (eventually) a country devastated, and a world that hates us.

This is a sad day for us all.

How Squirrels Could Free Us From Dependence on Foreign Oil

In regard to the environment, why is no one covering this story.

Apparently, in Santa Monica, the squirrel population is growing so feverishly that officials are injecting squirrels with immuno-contraceptive vaccine to stunt their sexual development. This is surprising for a number of reasons. First, have you ever tried to catch a squirrel? How are they going to do that? Perhaps they are going to use sniper marksmen from the Forest Services to shoot little tiny syringes at the squirrels while they are at play. This sounds like a complicated process.

As one commentator said, "After they inject the squirrels, they are going to pass out little tiny informational pamphlets. Really tiny. The size of postage stamps."

Maybe they will be titled "Squirrel Straight Talk: The Truth about Nuts."

That last sentence was probably inappropriate.

If only we could harness the power of squirrel libido.

Dobson: Global Warming A Red-Herring From Real Issues of Gay-marriage and Abortion

This post might sound like a position paper, but it's more of a rant based on my frustrations.

I read this today. It's a response to a letter from James Dobson to the NEA about their campaign to raise awareness of global warming as a Christian moral issue. Dobson and Co said that it distracts from the real issues, which are gay marriage and abortion.

Dobson's letter made my stomach turn.

In regard to the environment, I'm totally unable to grasp why careful examination of massive human behavior in regard to pollution is unacceptable to so many Christians. One of my uncles is this way - his acerbic attacks on global warming and Al Gore's movie are jarring. It's like he doesn't think there really is any evidence that global warming exists and that it could have bad potential effects. I have the feeling that scientists are growing tired of religion not because it isn't valid, but because the "it doesn't matter what the facts are, as long as I believe" mentality of some religious people is seen as a virtue when juxtaposed against scientific fact. It's annoying. I'm no scientist, but the scientists I do know are worried. And with the sheer numbers of people on this planet, it seems that if we aren't careful about this, it would be like pooping in our own bed. Pretty soon it's going to get unbearable.

I read this report about the human pollution in Tehran. It's so bad, it's literally killing people. My friend Nicky just got back from China, where 19 of 35 member in her party came back with bronchial infections from the pollution. And they were only there 10 days. It's not about the environment (though I think God holds us responsible) so much as it is about people having clean air and water. How is this not a moral priority?

And I don't certaintly don't understand at all why people who call themselves "pro-life" have shockingly little concern for kids who are ALREADY BORN, both in the inner city and in impoverished nations. I'm definately not saying it's one or the other - but if you're talking raw numbers, then 15 million AIDS orphans in Africa should tip the scales, at least a bit. At least mention it. And when you're talking policies, it seems to me that US international policy is really important, and should be the focus of Christian political groups.

I was talking about this with my buddy the other day, and he was saying that the reason why some abortion gets the loudest voice in some Christian's rhetoric is because nobody is against feeding the poor, therefore the unborn need energetic help to be protected.

The more and more I've thought about that, the more I disagree. I think that people might give lip service to helping the poorest children in the world, but it's an issue of motivation and focused mobilization. And church leaders have a responsibility to motivate and mobilize their people in ways that actually bring God's kingdom to pass. I honestly see no concern in Christ's teachings at all about making sure to get "our guy elected" or "make sure this law passes." He says, "Do something and be something."

It seems that's where the misplaced priorities are.

I welcome any comments or thoughts. What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong?

One Political Scientist's List of Giant Problems that Deserve our Attention...

When I was an undergraduate student at DePauw University, of the first professors I had was a professor by the name of Dr. Robert E. Calvert. His Introduction to Political Theory class was the most intellectually engaging course I have ever taken. It was in his class that I think I first experienced the joy of intellectual rigor. I would go on to take every single class that Calvert offered. He was a big reason I was a political science minor.

At any rate, Calvert recently gave a lecture at Indiana University, and though I'm not at liberty to post his entire speech, I did want to post his introduction.

The speech was given to a small college within the general population of IU. This school is filled with students who want to go out and make a positive social change in their world. Calvert was there to cheer them on, and in the process, listed what he saw as some of the biggest problems in modern American, after spending 40 years being a political science professor. His list is interesting, and ideally will prompt discussion.

1. that the American family is said to be the weakest, least cohesive, of any in the modern, industrialized world;

2. that in this most affluent society that ever existed, there is a large and growing gap between rich and poor, with what we once called “pockets of poverty” resembling what one finds in the third-world, while our middle class is said to be disappearing;

3. that America has the largest percentage of its population in prisons of any other modern nation in the world;

4. that Americans are more and more divided between those who are religious and those who are not, with consequences that ripple throughout the rest of American life, and especially our politics;

5. that American corporations struggling to make it in a global economy are abandoning what used to be their “social welfare” obligations to their employees and their families;

6. that when it comes to scandals and corruption, the American corporate world easily matches that of politics and government;

7. that the U. S., though ostensibly democratic, is governed in most matters more and more by judges and bureaucrats than by elected officials;

8. that in the name of business and presumably privileged levels of consumption, we have become the world’s largest debtor nation, and also addicted to oil;

9. that America in the world today has lost its good reputation and is distrusted or hated by peoples elsewhere, even by some of our former friends;

10. and finally – but I could go on – there is sharp disagreement among us over whether our future as a nation is somehow already foreordained by what is called globalization, or whether we still have important choices about the larger contours of our national life.

That's his list? What's yours? Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know.