Vending Machines

We have a vending machine at work.  It just serves a variety of bottled water – still, sparkling and various flavours of both.  Not that far from the vending machine is a water fountain with an ever-present puddle around its base.  Bring your own bottle and it costs you nothing.

Other things one can buy from a vending machine, like crisps and chocolate, were discussed but dismissed as not conducive to a healthy lifestyle.  So, it’s just water.

A newspaper article last week stirred my imagination.  I hadn’t really thought one could be so creative with vending machines.  A cupcake vending machine seems to be all the range.  Opening times at bakeries are no longer an issue with a machine servicing the sweet tooth at any hour of the day and night.

Apparently it doesn’t stop at cupcakes.  Mobile phones, gold, shoes and bikes are also “vendable”.  You can even get does of heroin substitutes in a prison if you have a pin number.  Amazing!

Yes, we want things quickly and we want things at any time.  We don’t appear to want to wait.

The last items on the vending machine list were crockery.  The journalist suggested that access to crockery might be useful in stressful situation – you know, those moments when you would like to break something and someone’s neck is not really an option.

I thought of the extra cleaning up that the janitors would have to deal with if we had one of those vending machines in our workplace. 

I have never thrown crockery before.  I have dropped it accidentally.  I used to have recurring nightmares set in a school canteen where I would have a tray of food and the tray would always slip from my hands and crash to the floor.  The scene would repeat itself over and over.  No matter how firmly I held on to the tray or how carefully I placed items on the tray for equal weight and balance, the tray would always fall. 

My only real foray into stress release strategies in my early teaching days was to wait until the end of the day, when the classroom was empty and in that space between pupils leaving the room and cleaners arriving, I would write swear words on the blackboard and then rub them off quickly!  What I couldn’t say to a person, I could at least write it, and even though no one else read it, it was as if it was spoken and acknowledged in some way.  It helped.

I don’t write swear words on boards anymore, and given the opportunity to smash crockery, I would probably decline.  It’s not that I don’t get angry or stressed – I just try to deal with it in a much more effective way.

God allows me to take it to him.  We sort through all the rubbish and see if there isn’t a lesson or two to learn or a strategy to employ that produces less anger and stress in the first place.

I’m still wondering though if there isn’t a case to be made to management for the cupcake vending machine!

Mr Angry

Amos 4:6 – 11 makes for really heavy reading.

“ I gave you empty stomachs in every city and lack of bread in every town…I also withheld rain from you when the harvest was still three months away….Many times I struck your gardens and vineyards, I struck them with blight and mildew…I sent plagues among you as I did to Egypt. I killed your young men with the sword… "I overthrew some of you as I overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah…yet you have not returned to me," declares the LORD.

This is not a case of bad things happening randomly and God making use of the circumstances to bring about someone’s good. This is not about Satan doing the bad stuff to people and God using it to bring about his purposes. This is not about other people doing bad stuff and God getting the blame. God took responsibility for each of the disasters that overtook the nation. They were to be left in no doubt that none of it was random, none of it was caused by Satan, none of it was caused by other people…it was all caused by God! This is not even God allowing the bad stuff to happen. There is nothing passive about any of the verbs here.

I am having difficulty with this God! This is an angry God.

I was talking with a group of young people the other day about whether parents should be allowed to smack their children. Being as most of them were still of smackable age, almost to a child they disagreed. One lone hand up insisted that sometimes it was the only way to get the message across, and sometimes it came as a last resort when all other attempts at correction had failed. Another voice argued about what happens when the message of the smack doesn’t get heeded. Do you just smack harder? And then harder still? And then what comes next?

I am not sure that I have ever felt God’s smack, or if I have been smacked, whether I recognised it as a smack.

Do you just wipe out these paragraphs of scripture and say that God doesn’t do that any more? If he doesn’t do it any more, why did he do it then? If he doesn’t do it any more, why not?

I know that Jesus has entered the scene. With Jesus comes complete and total forgiveness. We are made right with God in a way that was not possible for people in the time of Amos. We have the ability to please God in a way that the people at the time of Amos didn’t have. I stand in Christ. Christ pleases God, and I in Christ please God.

Does that mean that there isn’t an angry God any longer? I don’t think so. I am just not sure what I do think about it all.

Angry

A bible story that I come back to time and time again is the story of Jesus healing the leper in the opening chapter of Marks’ gospel. I once wrote a short story based on the incident. I imagined that the touch of Jesus went a little further than just a hand on the shoulder. While the man had leprosy, or whatever the skin condition was, he was barred from physical contact – so I wanted to communicate how Jesus goes beyond the basics. I opted for an embrace rather than just a touch.

There was nothing tentative or hesitant about his touch. He raises me to my feet and wraps me in his strong embrace. I inhale the clean smell of his robes and feel the roughness of the fabric against my cheek. The sun glistens off the pale hairs on his arms. I can feel his warmth seeping through his clothes and through my rags. Long forgotten sensations cascade over me as I stand enfolded. Just as the open sores of my leprosy break and bleed, my heart breaks and my hurts bleed out. He holds me close as I am drowned in a torrent of my pitiful and wretched tears. After a while I am still. I hear his heart beat in the peace after the storm. And we stand.

As I was checking out commentaries and what other people had blogged, or sermoned, about the story, I discovered that there is some debate about Jesus’emotions. All the various version of the Bible I possess read that Jesus full of compassion, or pity, reached out to touch the leper. It would appear that some of the early manuscripts replace the compassion or the pity with anger. Jesus, being angry, heals the leper.

The anger is not directed at the leper. Jesus wasn’t angry that a man who knew the rules concerning lepers broke them. He wasn’t angry that in coming so close, the leper was putting Jesus’ health at risk. Jesus’ anger was directed at the illness, the conditon that man found himself in and the whole social isolation thing. He was angry because sin had destroyed a person’s physical being, and all his social relationships and left him less than human. This was not the world that He brought into being. He did not plan for people to live under sickeness and death.

Some commentators dismis anger and stick with compassion. Some commentators suggest that anger was softened to compassion to fit in with people’s understanding of Jesus. I am challenged by anger. Like most people I get angry about things – usually the wrong things! I can remember a few weeks ago getting very angry with a minor celebrity who said that her misscarriage was a punishment from God!

I have just returned home from a family visit. My mother isn’t doing so well. She is slowly, but surely, physically falling apart – wear and tear in just about every bodily system. In one of her many hospital visits, the doctor was doing some kind of scan and suggested they look lat her gall bladder to see if she didn’t have gallstones. My mother, ever the humourist, reminded him that the doctor s had removed her gall bladder many years ago so quite where the gallstones were hiding out might prove a mystery!

My mum is fragile. It is not just the physical body that is being eroded, but courage and confidence is also being dismantled.

This is not the world that Jesus planned for her. It’s not punishemnt from God for sin. It is just the fallen world falling on her and crushing her at times.

It’s no wonder Jesus gets angry!