An Upside Down Power

Too many people spend all of their allotted time on this earth trying to become rich and famous or rich and powerful or maybe just rich or maybe just influential. Reality says that only a few people get to any of these slots. The lot for all the rest might be to envy them. But Jesus tells us not to envy because God will judge by different rules. One’s possessions or position do not count.

What matters is what we give of ourselves. God encourages people to give the most of themselves. God’s plan does not honor the people who wield power, but people who love their neighbors and help those in need. It is how we use that power. God won't reward the people with great talent only, but He will remember the people with great hearts. It is how we use that talent. How does God defines greatness ? His definition has nothing to do with points on a scoreboard. It is all about how we live our lives. Perhaps we think we have never lived near human greatness—but maybe we just haven’t thought of it in this light.James and John ask Jesus for permission to sit with him at the head table when he comes into his kingdom…one at Jesus right hand and the other at his left hand. In most meetings, the boss sits at the end or like the Prime Minister in a Cabinet meeting—he sits in the middle.

In any event, the most trusted or senior members of the team are closest to the head person and this allows them to prompt the boss discreetly as needed. People of lesser rank perhaps do not sit at the table but are placed around the outside wall. The boss is front and center in any arrangement and the trick for everyone else is to get as close as possible.James and John thought that Jesus would become king once they reached Jerusalem…and they wanted the two most honored seats. Jesus, you will recall, had already chosen three disciples as favorites and the three included James and John.

Peter was the third. Since James and John were brothers, it was easy for them to bond. In this case Peter was the outsider and he was being pushed to the side. "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" Translated, he was asking James and John if they were able to share his fate. Imagining Jesus at the head of the table, they assured him they were able. Jesus then told them that they would share his fate, but he couldn't promise them the seats at his right and left.But when Jesus was actually lifted up it was on a cross and there was a thief at his right hand and a thief at his left hand. That was one of God's ways of warning us to expect some surprises in his kingdom. In God's kingdom, the old rules –– the world's rules –– won't apply. We will have to learn a whole new set of rules. God gives all of us a glimpse into His kingdom. Jesus explains the new rules. He begins by talking about the rulers with whom James and John are familiar.

Those rulers lord it over people. The ones whom people usually count as great are really only tyrants –– oppressors –– people who exercise power cruelly and unjustly. Jesus tells James and John –– and us –– that the kingdom of God isn't like that. So who will be the great people in God’s kingdom? There are people here on earth whom most of us might not consider as great and most importantly, they don't think of themselves as great. Not many people know their names, but God knows their names. These people show all of us the way. They give themselves in quiet service to our church or our children. They are here at church whenever there is a need at here or in the community. There will be a look of surprise on their face when Jesus says, "Come and sit with me.""Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all."

On Eagle's Wings

Two of my favorite modern Christian songs are sung by the artiste Josh Groban. One of the is titled” On Eagle's Wings” and another is titled” You lift me up”. Both these songs have lifted up my spirits on many a depressing day. The old prophet Isiah's lines promising that "they shall mount up with wings like eagles" (v. 31) are so memorable.... Sorting through my various memories I remembered first a time when I sat on top of a cliff and watched a motionless raven riding an unseen wind, occasionally folding up his wings and dropping breathlessly before extending them again to soar.

Then I thought of a time when I took a s short holiday in Goa , watching seabirds get waddling starts before a breeze would lift them gently above my head. Finally I considered a family of sparrows that once nested outside my window of my 8th floor office in Delhi's Nehru Place, occasionally breaking into the silence of my room with a salutary song. None of these light and dreamy images worked with me, however. Not this week.As a pacifist, I have struggled a great deal with my own feelings about the violent turns being taken in our country , some more graphic than others. One illustration that I recently read about and that horrified me was the thought of Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh that once returned Jawaharlal Nehru to Parliament , now being represented by a mafia don. . Sometimes I am quite guilty of reading the morning newspaper and taking it to heart, making it personal.

As I read all that I do , I also sad realize that I have very little power to counter the ominous movements around me. Some times, I feel tired and angry and sad and confused, I walk on the frightening border of hopelessness at times.So some airy notions of birds taking flight are sometimes hard to embrace as I feel more the albatross of cynicism growing heavier around my neck, worrying less about my own ability to fly and fretting more honestly that I might instead just sink like a stone. And in a rather uncommon way as I read Josh Groban's songs based on Isaiah , I felt that someone from a very long time ago was saying something to me, pleading desperately that I not lose heart. All I can say is that I want very much to hear those words and to believe in them.

The words that seem to be speaking so deeply are drawn from Isaiah 40, an entire chapter that is made of the dialog between hope and doubt before it ends on a note that asks us each to remain engaged in the struggle. It was written ages ago to a people that had been living in exile and, during that time, found themselves in the tension between their own hopes and doubts, the promises of their faith and the sad social context in which they lived. This is the audience that the author of Isaiah 40 is addressing, and it is to a tired and skeptical people that he offers his word. Some of his chapters intended to comfort a weary people by reminding them of an old vision and singing of a new empowerment. There are some hopeful words here, if not any easy words, and perhaps that is why they can still speak as strongly in the present as they did in that long ago past.

So to an exiled people the prophet begins to speak or maybe even to anybody who has ever felt like a wanderer, caught in the troubles of this world and its sorrows, feeling the bitterness between what we dream and what we have got.It seems to me that the prophet knows the feeling all too well, because his opening lines, which read very much like poetry, acknowledge under their surface that things are not yet as they should be. "A voice cries out," he writes, "In the wilderness prepare the way, make straight in the desert a highway [so] every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain." (v. 3-4) The voice crying out is really the voice of the old writer, who is beginning to offer an image of a time just around some corner when things might be transformed.

While the author understands that the current context is oftentimes a painful one, he wants to say and so he does say that the future is open. Using his words to invite us into this beautiful vision, the author paints what is uncertain in the colors of a thousand possibilities.Unafraid to voice his dreams the prophet writes, "Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together," (v. 5) which is another way of saying that the manifestation of the divine shall be everywhere and the love of God shall be shared by everyone. This is a very beautiful sentiment and, as it imagines what the world might become, it is directed rather pointedly at everyone who has, for one reason or another, stopped imagining their own hopes for the future.

The Book of Isaiah has perhaps the highest hopes of all, for its pages tell that lions and lambs could one day find rest together, swords might be refashioned into ploughshares, and hospitality shall be shown to the stranger and the outcast. And the comfort that the prophet means to offer here can be found in the universality of his statement. Not only will the people wither and fade but so will the nations and the rulers, all who act oppressively on the earth and live in violence towards it, they¹ll go too, for they are no more than "dust on the scales" (v. 15). While this may strike some as the most morbid form of encouragement, the old writer is trying to affirm that there is something more transcendent than the power structures currently in place and the systems that seem to surround us.

While surely we are participants in those systems, the prophet wants to remind us that we might also become participants in something much greater, something that he would call a divine purpose. Because what won¹t fade, the old book tells, is the very word from God. And it is that word that has always issued an invitation for us to make justice and love through our living, in the hope that we are joining in something sacred as we do it. Isaiah 40 goes on to tell of the wonder of the divine, conjuring up majestic images of God, but throughout it is still possible to hear that there is a dispirited audience listening in.

It seems to me that the writer never really loses sight of this, since he concludes his magnificent descriptions by saying rather plainly that God "does not faint or grow weary." (v. 28) At the end of it the prophet will say something like, "Every one of you is tired, I know. But maybe one day we¹ll reach the end of all our waiting, maybe one day we¹ll see that our efforts have made at least a part of this dream into reality. And maybe on a day like that we really might feel light as eagles carried by the wind's current. Who knows?" So as Isiah understands and acknowledges the reservations of his hearers, he still speaks strongly against the cynicism of inaction and asks us each to take the risks of responding in faith. Perhaps the aforementioned eagles might serve as an interesting example. In our lives we may not always be able to soar gracefully but we can take the first small steps and leave the nest to trust in what cannot always be seen but can be hoped in and worked for and maybe even lived out if we feel as risky as the young bird who paces and yearns for the sky.

The cross at the core of our faith

Many of us come to church from time to time wondering really if God really exists -- and if God does exist, does he, she, it really care about us and about this world of ours. When we learn of some utterly senseless human event through our newspapers or the television, do we wonder if God is really good, if love in this creation does bear the last word? Or do we live in the shadow of some relationship, broken, grieved, a wound we just cannot seem to shake? Indeed, when we come to church, do we ask the question deep down, does anybody -- anyone -- really give damn? For me? For this world? And if they really knew me, could they possibly love me?
Those kinds of questions plagued the members of that church of the Hebrews week after week, year after year as they gathered for worship and service. The promises of God seemed down the drain. As time went on, and as they looked out on and experienced an unfriendly and largely uncharitable world, increasing numbers of them concluded: God is dead; Divine love is a hoax; hope is no more than wishful thinking. And their church began to disband.

"Hold it!" pleads our author to the Hebrews. "Wait a second! There is something you have to remember in this troubled world. Before you give up, before you let cynicism rule the roost, before you go away spiritually fatigued, religiously abandoned - listen to this!" And in those verses we read a moment ago, our preacher tells us the cross of Jesus Christ provides the decisive clue to resolving the doubts dogging us. Here, at the cross of Christ, writes our preacher, "through the offering of the body of church once and for all" we see joined and aimed at us like a laser beam the core of our faith, the shape of our love, the power of our hope.

The cross? The core of our faith, you say? How so? And just what is the core of our faith? O friends, listen: in face of wars and rumors of war; in face of a troubled, often heartless, merciless, dog-eat-dog world, in face of cancer, AIDS, the senseless slaughter of children by children; in face of our living precariously with the misunderstandings and self-deception, malice and conflict souring our lives together; in face of a world where our best intentions get turned inside-out, upside-down and used against us, where our boldest and most generous dreams can collapse and inflict injury; in face of cold, unheeding forces so often swirling about us, we confess our faith in a God who, through all life can dish out, loves us, hangs on to us and will never let us go.

Now that is our faith. And faith -- faith! -- It is. In many ways the observable, the objective facts of our lives deny a God who loves, refute a God who is good, and dismiss a God who gives a single whit for us. Indeed, the bare fact of the cross of Jesus itself denies a loving God. If ever we see a place where mercy fails, where human and divine abandonment evidence themselves; if ever there exists an occasion where goodness loses, where innocence gets trampled, where the worst human beings can do to one another happens, it happens at the cross. For anyone to say, in face of the hard, cold facts of the cross, that we are loved by the creator of the universe is an act of faith -- a decision for trusting love at the heart of the universe when the facts belie it.

So why, then, why is this our faith? What do we see here at the cross of Christ enabling us to trust in a loving and gracious God when much in the world says "no" to this conviction? Listen carefully: at the cross of Christ we confess the lengths to which Love will go to restore wholeness to those for whom Love feels most tenderly. We confess here the risk Love takes when it seeks its wandering, lost, cantankerous, yea rebellious children -- when it seeks us. In the cross of Christ we encounter, and are ourselves embraced by, Divine grace itself risking death to restore a broken relationship, to heal a gaping wound, to weave together again a harmony so that our scrapping, tangling fighting human race might become, in truth, a family of God.

We know that love does not calculate the cost when it goes after someone. You know love is a spendthrift in pursuit of those it will not give up. We know the pain, the anger, the humiliation involved when someone betrays us, slander us, misread our motives, walk out on you, and turn your heaven into hell. What can restore the relationship? What can straighten things out? What can make for healing? Revenge? Are you kidding? Revenge brings satisfaction, sometimes a smug narcissistic glee, but healing? Never. Is it requital? Will that bind a broken relationship? It surely makes for a quid pro quo and maybe something that passes for justice -- but healing? No way! What brings healing we can only describe as grace, as forgiveness: The risk love takes, though it may be battered and bruised, the risk for reconciliation claiming everything we have -- a reaching out that can be difficult and very painful.

Some of us, perhaps, know a mother, a father, a spouse who walked with us through some wounding, grievous, shameful episode. We know they passed through it as if they owned it. We sensed they cried "No," grasped for our shirttails, dug in their heels, yet, knowing the worst, trudged almost step by step with us to the very gates of the hell we prepared for ourselves and virtually camped outside, broken-hearted and grieving until we came out. They put themselves in our place; they stood in our shoes, they accepted they shared; they bore the shame we engendered. They forgave us -- but tears wore furrows in their cheeks and inside hearts bled wildly in our behalf. This is forgiveness. It always includes self offering; it evokes identification with the other. Those who give forgiveness give themselves. Love is ready to pay whatever personal cost to bridge the gulf, to heal the wound.

So here at the cross we trust God's love. But more: like that early Hebrew congregation we need desperately to be claimed by hope; to know, as our preacher puts it, the one we trust "sits at the right hand of God," and over time, "his enemies will be made a footstool for his feet." And just as this cross invites our faith, and bears God's love, so here at the foot of the cross, in this most hopeless situation, Hope is most powerfully at work.

How could this be? How does the cross provide hope in this world where hope seems so precarious -- hope in this bloodiest of centuries -- a label haunting us even as we meet here this morning? How does the cross proclaim hope in a world where we see children murdered in their own school yards, enlisted for genocidal Rwandan assaults, wasting away in inner city tenements taking their own lives; indeed, hope, where tragedy riddles much of our existence and death terminates it? Is there any hope? Is there truly a new future for us?

As we look at the cross of Christ, we see in the cross our hope. This vast cross hanging before us is empty. As powerful a reminder as the crucifix may be of our faith in the costly love of God, this empty cross, hanging here in the heart of our nave, confronts us with power taking the worst we can do to one another -- indeed, power taking death itself and forging through it a new creation. I cannot explain it to you, I can only testify to this enthralling paradox: but an empty cross means that the power -- the power of God -- lies not in preventing hopeless situations; it means the power of God lies not in preventing the likes of crucifixion, not in intervening to stop the Darfur tragedies, the unending tragedies, senseless perversities and utter stupidities in this world. Our hope lies not in some cheap cinematic miracle. Hardly.

The ground of our hope can be seen in the empty cross as it points to the power of God in taking the body of the crucified Christ and transforming it into new being. There we see power alive and at work amid the most desperate situation, bearing with us, submitting to the worst; yet while participating with us in what may appear hopeless, working to bring triumph out of tragedy, promise out of peril, life out of death. Our hope can be seen in the empty cross because there, uniquely in our history, amid what appears to be the door slammed on the future -- there we witness the future most radically opened up. A radical choice confronts us. Again, God, that they can be nailed to wooden beams and still win! -- wiped out and they will come back! -- buried, only to break death itself wide open." In a bloody cross: Hope? By God, yes! And so we ask again: Are you looking for God? In a troubled and frequently sorrowing world, do you wonder if God is really good, if love does indeed bear the last word, if anyone finally cares about you -- us?

The Christian Doctor in India Today.

Introduction :

Christian doctors go back a long way. One of the very first followers of Jesus was Luke, a first century Greek physician. He used his excellent history taking skills to collect eyewitness accounts for his summary of Jesus’ life, recorded for posterity in the Gospel according to Luke. Since then the influence of Christians in medicine has been substantial. Christians started many of the early hospitals and hospices and many have not only survived until today but have made significant contribution in treating and welcoming those who are, poor, marginalized and the alien whom mainstream society often turns away from it gate.

Ethics and Worldview

A Christian doctor’s understanding of health, healing and health care comes from the scriptures. Necessary to the development of Scripture's view of medicine is a proper understanding of the way the world works. God created the world and actively sustains it. That is a tenet of Christian belief.. God tells us that he upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures, actions and things. Psalm 104:10 makes it clear that God causes the springs to flow into the valley. Psalm 104:15 declares that grass grows and seeds sprout not because of certain temperature and moisture conditions, but rather because God causes the grass to grow, and ordinarily under certain conditions. Nothing happens automatically. Everything happens as a result of God's active hand. God's sovereignty is not reactive, merely the power to fix what happens. Disease, then, is not just disease. The fact of an illness cannot stand in isolation. It is always seen in terms of more basic principles.

If every patient is a multi-dimensional entity, then illness is the fragmentation of that multidimensional whole. Illness, whether a stubbed toe, cancer, or debilitating chronic health problem fractures the wholeness of the being, the physical, mental, social, and spiritual. What I as a doctor see before me in my patients are not just a lumps or infections, but fractured people who, because of their illness or problem, are disintegrated. My task then is to heal or put the fragmentation of their life back together again. The Greek word for healing or health is "soteria." It means, "To make whole." The word "salvation" comes from the same Greek word. We as healers are to make it possible for fractured human beings to be brought into wholeness. In other words, a physician's outcome should be an "integer" and not a bunch of fractions

Care:

The Christian ministry to the sick has a Biblical foundation. Christian medicine is caring medicine. It should be concerned with the poor, the orphan and the widow. Scripture teaches our duty to the sick. In Mt. 25:31-46, Christ teaches that at the final judgment, He will judge us by whether we clothed the naked, fed the hungry and thirsty, sheltered the stranger, and visited or comforted the sick. We will not necessarily be judged on how many were cured or how long we prolonged life, but whether we comforted the sick... Food ,water and treatment are priorities, but not super high-tech medical care. Comfort, yes. Caring, yes. The allure of the technology of medicine is powerful indeed. There is a romance with cure that is irresistible to most young doctors. But we need just as much to have a romance with care. It is at first sight less dramatic and less thrilling. Yet it brings us close to our patients in that most privileged of settings, where a fellow human being, stripped naked in pain, fear, distress, appeals to us for help.

Patients will not acquiesce to the ultimate alienation of being reduced to standardized objects. No one will accept for long being merely identified by their illness, or seen as nothing but an assemblage of broken down biologic parts. Patients crave a partnership with physicians who are as sensitive to their aching souls as to their malfunctioning anatomy. They yearn not for a tautly drafted business contract, but for a covenant of trust between equals earned by the doctor while exercising the art of caring. When cure rather than comfort becomes the focus, failure must result. Medical training forces the focus on cure. Morbidity and mortality conferences are only part of a system designed to reinforce that death or lack of cure means failure.

In medicine, we can expect machines to give us a lot of answers. But the questions our patients ask us, the biggest ones, call for a response, not from machines but from ourselves as fellow human beings. What are our greatest fears? What of our mortality? How much of life remains? Why are we being afflicted? Are we being, or will be, punished? Can we find comfort in the embrace of a greater, divine reality? Koenig shows in this small book that far from avoiding such questions, the doctor can readily engage with his/her patients with sensitivity and openness, and that whatever the clinical outcome, those in need will have had the solace and encouragement of being recognized and valued in their personhood. Doctors, too, will find that they are by no means excluded from the spiritual replenishment that such soul-to-soul contact invariably brings.

Involvement:

What does it mean to be a Christian doctor in India today ? The challenges are many and they stare at us in the face. There are hard facts available . One of the developments of the past decade or so is that the Government, traditionally the largest healthcare provider, is under pressure to meet the evolving and rising demand for healthcare services across the country. This demand-supply interaction has created conditions for increasing private/voluntary sector participation in the delivery of healthcare services, opening opportunities for both preventive and curative care. On the one hand corporate hospitals with state-of-the art facilities cater to the elite and attract foreign patients, creating medical tourism as a new economic entity that gets undue policy attention in the National Health Policy 2002. On the other hand the majority is left to market forces, and medical expenditure is the second highest cause of rural indebtedness. On the ethical front the practice of fee-splitting, the limited sense of accountability on the part of health-care providers, flaws in the informed consent process in medical settings, and the conduct of inappropriate procedures are becoming common place.

A striking feature of the medical care system in India is the apparent lack of planning. In the recent past, the government has planned by default. In other words, by failure of regulation, it has permitted private interests in medical education to offer those courses which are considered to be 'in demand'. The courses that are in demand, as dictated by the market, are those which are most lucrative in the private sector. Thus we find that at present, radiology, orthopedic surgery, cardiology and cardiac surgery are most sought after. Most doctors, having completed their basic medical education, try to acquire a specialist qualification. Having acquired this qualification, they must choose one of two options. If they choose the public sector, there is a great likelihood that they may not be able to utilize their skills due to lack of infrastructure or deliberate hurdles by the medical bureaucracy. If they choose the private sector, they will have to compete for the limited number of patients who can pay for private care. In today's world, it is a fact that as the skills required increase, so too do the technology and cost.

In a developing country such as India, the major disease burden is of infectious diseases. Even with the changing disease pattern the world over, infective and environmental diseases are likely to form 50% of the disease burden. These diseases require primarily non-pharmaceutical solutions such as clean drinking water, a pollution-free environment and adequate nutrition. No amount of vitamins is likely to help the patient. As for the remaining 50%, lifestyle diseases will cost the economy dearly, unless preventive strategies are put in place, but these preventive strategies are primarily non-pharmaceutical. For example, the increasing incidence of diabetes and hypertension

Cannot be controlled by increasing the production and marketing of insulin. While insulin production is necessary, it must be accompanied by improving health care education and making people aware of proper nutrition. However, we find increasing aggressive marketing of anti-diabetic drugs with little emphasis on preventive strategies.

What is a Christian doctor to do in these circumstances ? Obviously , there is no pat answer , though there are principles. A Christian doctor strives first to be a Christian, striving to please God in every area of life through his calling and vocation. A good Christian doctor has good training, keeps current in what he does, is reasonably caring, is as thorough as professionally needed, and is helpful to the patient. He exhibits common sense, wisdom, and decisiveness, though being willing to admit to it when defeated; and he is willing to direct the patient to second or other opinions or specialists. In short, he/she does as he/she would have it do unto himself/herself (the Christian "golden rule").

A Christian doctor serves God in serving his fellowman by listening to his complaints and ailments, by comforting his patient, teaching him about his illness, diagnosis and prognosis, and treatments; but most importantly, serve by reminding him that there is no comfort outside of Christ. A Christian doctor advises and counsels and rebukes on occasion. He sometimes uses drugs or other remedies, if they may benefit; but he use s nothing without thankfulness to God, asking for his blessing in its use. He seeks daily to see God's hand in his world. He recognizes that to ignore God's hand is to deny Him. A Christian doctor treats the patient as fallen, a sinner in need of redemption far more than he needs our medicine. He does not remember that the patient has responsibility for himself before God, that we cannot force others to pay for his care, nor can he. He remembers that resources are limited, and therefore diagnoses and prescribes judiciously.

Finally a Christian doctor will always believe that all humans are created in God's image, which means that they deserve respect, no matter what their abilities or situation in. Such a concern to see and reflect God’s image in peoples’ lives and in the institutions that churches run may be done in many ways. It can be reflected in care for unborn children or people with dementia, in genuine compassion for suffering patients, and in a commitment to do your best for them. Seeing all fellow humans as being made in the image of God can have a great effect on the way doctors relate to them. A Christian doctor sees people affected by disease or deformity as God's "flawed masterpieces"—marvels of creation, even though marred and perhaps only for a while..