It’s hard to really measure all the input we hear and feel and see in any single moment of time. The brain takes it all in from the miniscule subatomic twitches to the big picture that only God can conceive. It’s all there for the brain to soak up. In fact, our brains take in so much material, out of necessity it filters out most of it. The vast majority of this information is sifted keenly and instantaneously by the miracle of the brain that effortlessly does this without troubling us with the details.

But what if we had just five minutes of uninterrupted information? Nothing to impede the tsunami flow of sensory data in such microscopic detail it would tax our brains like a lightning bolt fries the wiring in our house in the blink of an eye. What if our brain filters went on a five-minute strike to show us how important they really are to our sanity demanding a raise or better benefits? While I don’t know for sure how we’d respond, I suspect we might be forced to sit down and close our eyes trembling in self-protection and in fear we might lose our minds! We might put our hands to our ears and start singing loudly, “la-la-la-la-la-la!” as a desperate act of survival.

Besides filtering out unnecessary information, the brain also stores all this information, both the conscious data and all that mind-numbing information we have no notion of even receiving. It all lies dormant in some warehouse of the unconscious, lost but not forgotten. Everything is there, scientists believe, stored away for God knows what.

The only numbers of such size I can think of that compares to this nearly countless immensity is the speed of light (for those of you with an overly curious mind the speed of light is helpful in measuring the distance light would travel in space in one year … or, 5.88 X 10,000,000,000,000 miles - just for fun try to figure out how to say this number - then say it out loud to a friend - jot me a note to tell me what happens).

Now, to my point … nothing is lost. Not one single bit of it (or byte of it, if you insist) is missing. The brain does a handy job of filtering out needless information and therefore allows us to function with a partnership of both conscious and unconscious thinking. Because of that, we can solve problems that appear to be complex but in comparison are pretty simple. Because of the partnership of our brain’s twin levels of comprehension, we can learn to make it along quite nicely. Despite that, not one iota of data is lost. A small example of that would be the government’s ability to locate a particular single penny in the vast ocean of pennies in circulation today. How about a particular grain of sand from all the sand in the deserts and rivers and oceans of the world?

Recently, Milton Cunningham recalled a poem by Noël Coward that ponders the width and breadth of our brains by meditating on this very fact. [Milton writes a daily blog I recommend, Don’t Eat Alone; go to www.ccblogs.org where my own blog is housed to find it.] There he shared Cowell’s poem, “Nothing is Lost,” a thoughtful piece worth sharing here:

Deep in our subconscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

The Psalmist reflected on the miracle that is ours in our humanity:
I worship you High God - you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul - I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration - what a creation!
[Eugene Peterson, The Message, Psalm 139:14]

Indeed …

I’ve come to appreciate Duke Ellington’s jazz, both his band and his songwriting. I’m late to the party, but I’m getting there. In particular, I’ve come to love Come Sunday, which is beautiful as a soulful instrumental or as it’s often sung a cappella.

Ooooh…
Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty,
God of love, Please look down and see my people through.

I believe that God put sun and moon up in the sky.
I don’t mind the gray skies
’cause they’re just clouds passing by.
Heaven is a goodness time. A brighter light on high.

Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
And have a brighter by and by.
Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty,
God of love, Please look down and see my people through.

I believe God is now, was then and always will be.
With God’s blessing we can make it through eternity.
Lord, dear Lord above, God almighty,
God of love, Please look down and see my people through.

It’s just days before Easter and one of my dear friends is walking through the shadow of the valley of death. Friendships between church members and their pastors are terribly difficult to manage (if a friendship is a thing anyone can consider to be “managed”). While we maintain loving and close relationships with so many in the church, even to the point of it being very personal, there are also extraordinary relationships that transcend the usual and become very deep.

I’ve often written in the Birdie stories of my relationship with her in just that way. It’s obvious to me that in the family of faith, there are some who have a capacity to take in their pastor and see them as a close, personal friend no matter what flaws show in either one. I know there are some who see themselves as a friendship source for the pastor, but who for personal needs they can’t identify about themselves can’t really be the pastor’s friend at that deeper level. But then there are those handful where there must be a gift involved.

Gwen has been such a friend. She’s a member of another church in another city but for six years, I was her pastor, and for all that time until now, she’s been my friend. But last night, a bomb went off in the blood system in her brain and she lies in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit of the Methodist Hospital. Everyone knows that when a cerebral hemorrhage goes off in the brain, more often than not it’s fatal. Worse than death, it can lead to severe brain damage or a long protracted time in a coma. There are survivors but they are rare. The good news is this kind of event is mercifully quick in its effect. I’m 800 miles away and suffering with my friend Joe and their son Jeff on this day.

Not unnoticed is that it’s Thursday of Holy Week and this is going on bringing to poignant depth of despair on my doorstep just as Jesus was entering his last few hours. At the end of the day, he would be hunted like a criminal, put before the authorities and by morning executed at the hands of the Romans, the Jewish authorities, the crowds incited by them, and in the strangest of mysteries, by the world among whom he had become a member in human form. After he died, they buried him in a tomb and the silence of the heavens stood still … waiting and watching.

Come Sunday … Oooh, I think the Duke had it right.

The Bodies Revealed exhibit finally hit our fair city. In the Midwest, one cannot expect such cultural finery would come here first. This is not Chicago, New York or even Los Angeles. Heck, we’re not even Dallas! I hear the body exhibit is as risqué as any Junior High boy might want it to be. Nothing but nakedness … stripped down bodies … “nekkid” as Lewis Grizzard would call it. You remember Lewis Grizzard, don’t you? He was a sports writer with a knack for turning a phrase. He’s the author of such famous works as Don’t Bend Over in the Garden Granny, Them Tater’s Got Eyes and Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself. Brother Grizzard claimed there are two kinds of nakedness. “Naked” he said is when you don’t have on any clothes. “Nekkid” is when you don’t have on any clothes and you’re up to something. God bless Lewis for saying a thing as plainly as it can be said. Notice how the thought of being nekkid got me off my subject?

But Bodies Revealed is more naked than most of us want to think about because it’s an exhibit of actual bodies that have had their skin removed so all their internal organs are revealed. In fact, there are some bodies where the intricacies of the blood system is shown or the body is sliced horizontally and stretched out in sequence across a whole room so the viewer can see inside those organs that are revealed. The “icky” level is rather high and so our entire community is obviously on edge about this controversial exhibit. Last week the Catholic Bishop condemned the show and instructed all their schools to stay clear of it. I wonder how they teach anatomy at a Catholic med school?

Birdie is someone I can count on for being on point for such controversies. It’s not that she ever starts a controversy. But her head is always up and she can sniff out a good story if there’s one to be found.

“Reverend, I brought up the Bodies exhibit to my Bible class yesterday and you should have seen the stiffs come alert.” Mixing and matching her metaphors is one of Birdie’s strongest traits. “I know the exhibit is made up of dead folks from China who gave their permission to have their organs polymerized, but you would have thought the grave robbers had dug them up by the light of a full moon. My girlfriends in the Lord were dumbstruck! One of them quietly said, ‘Proper ladies won’t go see that vulgar exhibit.’ I was so flustered, all I could do was mutter ‘Humph’”

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently,” I responded. “The exhibit seems like a fine way to show how alike we all are. Strip us down to our skivvies and take away our distinguishing masculine and feminine features and what you’ll observe is that we’re eerily alike. The Good Book says we’re all created in the model of God’s own being. There’s a phrase for it in fact, imago Dei.”

“Preacher, I was in the Atlanta Airport a few weeks waiting for my flight to Memphis and I sat there watching what looked like a parade of people going by. There were folks with freckles and some with wrinkles. Some were tall and others were short, like me. I saw redheads and blondes and even some baldies! There were pale skinned folks and others with darker shades of Hispanic or Indian or African-American skin. What I realized was I was looking at the countless varieties of God’s great imagination!”

“I get that, I really do. We may look like we’re the snowflakes of God’s created children, but underneath it all we’re all cut from the same pattern.”

“Why did my fellow sisters freeze up?”

“Maybe it’s all too personal … too real. Maybe they haven’t considered what an utterly amazing creation our bodies are. I think at a deeper level, what this shows us is how absolutely alike we are as God’s amazing creatures. No matter how the accoutrements of our faces differ, we are all created in God’s image … imago Dei. Seems that would coach us into relating to one another differently.”

“Rev, you’re not suggesting what I think you are, are you?”

“Do you mean, am I suggesting we treat others as if God had made them in God’s own image no matter whether they’re like me or not? Do you mean, am I suggesting that exclusions based on appearances, or intellect, or social boundaries, or class or sexual orientation or any other human boundaries we might think up are wrong?”

“Do I have to answer your rhetorical questions like some kind of country bumpkin?”

“No, of course not. What I’m getting at is we’re given these amazing bodies from the One who designed them and brought them into being. ‘I praise you,’ the psalmist said, ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’”

“Humph, think the sisters will reconsider?”

“Go without them.”

(Note to readers: This Birdie story will appear in the April edition of Baptists Today (www.baptiststoday.org) and is built upon the frame of an earlier post on this site, “All Things Being Equal.” The locals in Kansas City have continued to argue the ethics of how these bodies may or may not have been obtained. While the debate has included the censure of the event by the Catholic bishop , there are also many persons who have advocated it strongly and have expressed their support on the editorial page of The Kansas City Star. The sponsors of the exhibit continue to claim that the bodies were obtained legally and by the signed permission of those whose bodies have been used.)

I just returned from a week and a half in Israel, the land known by some as the Holy Land and none of that was eventful in any manner other than the obvious. The joke among us was “we were running where Jesus walked.” That joke’s not even funny but it had meaning for those of us running. No matter, the ridiculous and the sublime lie in such close proximity that I think of it as “Six Flags Over Jesus.” One minute you’re standing in a place that could be considered holy in the sense that you’ve traveled six thousand miles to be in the same location something occurred in the Bible and the next minute you’re standing before a schmaltzy facsimile that’s passed off as original when in truth it’s not. At times it’s hard not to laugh. Oddities and charades abound, but such is faith.

This was a trip put together and sponsored by the Israeli Department of Tourism, El Al Airlines, and supported by the various hotels who put us up at a discount. All in all, the trip was subsidized by over half and therefore became a trip that was hard to turn down. The trip was put together by the travel agent my friend Pete Hill has used for the last two decades and that in and of itself was enough to make me bite.

The only trouble with the trip was the bizarre oddness of who I was matched with … a bus load of Bob Jonesians. Almost everyone on the trip had a connection with Bob Jones or at least were adherents of his style of theology. They were hard-core fundamentalists who only read from the King James Bible. They were adamant about abstinence from alcohol or wine. They believed in the inerrant Word of God. Not content to settle with what the Bible claims for itself (inspiration) they extended their claim to an inarguable form of biblical inerrancy. Of course we recognize that inerrancy only applies to the non-existent original autographs of scripture and not to our slightly flawed Bibles we read and study. Finally as the icing on the cake, they were hard-core believers in what’s called “a young earth.”

Maybe you’ve heard of them. They’re the ones who believe so confoundedly in the literalness of creation they hold to a strict 6-days of creation. That’s a leap of true faith and any believer should be given the freedom to believe such a thing if they choose to do so. I wouldn’t want to take that privilege away from anyone. But this group, as “young earth” believers, insist that the earth was created in six literal days SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO! That’s the 17th century Bishop Ussher plan that claimed the creation was instantaneously created in a six-day process beginning on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Not only that, but Bishop Ussher calculated that Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise on Monday, November 10 of that same year. A week and a half in Paradise roughly corresponds to the time I spent with my new friends in Israel.

I spent a week driving around the land where Jesus and all the characters of the Bible lived with a group of young earthians and was utterly befuddled by it all. Driving down an Israeli highway one day, the tour guide described a nearby mountain where some historical event took place in antiquity and said off-handedly that it occurred some ten thousand years ago. Immediately the guy in front of me bowed his head and shook it negatively. Then I heard him mutter under his breath: “That mountain didn’t exist ten thousand years ago.” Later he approached the tour guide and offered him a tract explaining why modern scientific methods of dating the age of any given object was faulted and why all such scientific investigations should be shoe-horned in a biblical literalist’s 6,000 year time frame.

One night at dinner, intrigued by what I was hearing from the group, I asked one of the elder men in the group to help me understand their position on Creation. I asked, “What do you do with the speed of light?” I went on to explain that I understood that when scientists determine we are 50,000 light years away from a star that we can now see through the Hubble telescope, we use the speed of light to describe such distance more easily in comparison to how fast light can travel in a year’s time. Because of the immensity of space, it won’t be exact in great detail, but it certainly gets us in the right zip code. “If scientists conclude the distance of that star to be 50,000 miles away, how does that jive with a 6,000 year time frame?” He answered, “We believe that when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ the lights came on.” I’m not much of a scientist, but even I knew there was a follow-up question dangling out there to be asked. “So if I understand you correctly, you would deduce that when the lights came on, that star was instantaneously beaming 44,000 light years toward the earth and thus 6,000 years later, we see the star?” “Yes, that’s what we believe.”

Well, so much for being educated! So much for Newton and Copernicus and all the others who have bled for the right to think. So much for the freedom to describe in as clear a terms as possible that which can be seen and learned. So much for the ancient voices of the Middle East that cry out “Ancient, ancient, ancient!” Shoehorning scientific facts to fit a scheme that’s contrived at best is not my idea of biblical faith.

I was the thumb on the theological hand for over a week with 19 other inerrant, young earth true-believers. Surely the divine jokester was snickering the whole time as I cruised the old neighborhood.