Look at This!

Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines, displacing at least 600,000 people and killing upwards of 3200 people.  The death toll continues to rise as rescue and recovery efforts continue.  Supplies of food and water are only now beginning to reach many of the victims.   The people need our prayers and support.

In the midst of the death and destruction there are, of course, acts of heroism and nobility, and there is one thing which stands out as truly amazing.  I am a rather concrete, historically based, and non-superstitious Christian.  Images of Jesus on food, or in the shape assumed by a Cheeto, or in a stain on a door, I find to be ridiculous.  I am skeptical of religious relics, signs, and supposed miracles.  I do not deny their existence, I merely realize that we cannot base our faith on them. 

Look at this. 

Holy Cow! Jesus is in My Screen Door!

In early December of 2009, Moses, a half-Jersey, half-Holstein, calf was born on Brad Davis' farm in Sterling, Connecticut. What is special about Moses that made the international news is that on his forehead is a patch of white hair in the shape of a cross. Some have already started with the predictable "maybe God is sending us a message from above." No one is sure what message God might be sending on the forehead of a cow. It's the wrong place anyway. As one sarcastic blogger opined, "... religious icons should only appear in cheese ... you can find that in the Bible."

In the film, Screen Door Jesus (2003), it's not a cow's head but the front screen door of Old Mother Harper, an old black woman in a small Texas town. On the screen some, but not all, see the smiling face of Jesus. the entire population of the town and then the outside press show up in Mother Harper's front yard and start taking sides. So many people come, tramping her flowers and leaving trash, that Mother Harper gets righteously annoyed.

It seems that Jesus (or sometimes Mary) appears everywhere: on billboards, in pictures of spaghetti, in water stains, in the shape of a deformed Cheeto, etc. and that pathetic people, desperate for a proof of what they want to believe, rush to worship the holy item. Jesus told us that we don't need that.

"Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." John 20:29.

Rushing to fawn over a piece of cheese or a Jesus shaped mushroom brings ridicule to the Church. They already think we're crazy and then we go and prove it.