A Beggar At The Table

Olympic aftermath

March 1st, 2010

Well, Canada did alright at the Olympics, eh? 14 Gold is a new record for the Winter Games, although, as I noted to my brother on the phone, there are more events now as well. But whatever. It was fun to watch what I did of the games, and now life goes on.

I’m not sure that Crosby’s goal was anywhere near the Paul Henderson moment of the 1972 Summit Series, but it was fun.

As I noted in my sermon yesterday,

I must admit, the Olympics are enjoyable. And, humanly speaking, they have their importance. It is good to see these athletes from around the world gather together, representing the pride they have for their countries. But what is the end result of the Olympics? Pride, certainly, but also significant debt for Vancouver, for British Columbia, and for you and me, as residents of Canada. Debt which will be paid by our national obligation, taxes. The citizenship of this world always ends up pointing us back to worldly things. The pride we gain from something like the Olympics is a pride which ends up contributing nothing to us of eternal value. For the various skills and talents of this world, apart from the Gospel of Christ, are so much vanity, a chasing after the wind.

I guess it’s just a matter of perspective. The Olympics are over, and I’m sad that there won’t be all these wonderful winter sports on TV, but on the other hand, there are more important things to be concerned with than sporting events. 30 minutes playing in the snow with ToddlerK does me more physical good than watching the Olympics, and 30 minutes reading the Scriptures does me more spiritual good than watching the Olympics (although it was nice to see the segment on Cindy Klassen which pointed to her faith).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the Olympics last for a time, and are enjoyable enough, but the Word of God stands forever. As a called and ordained servant of the Word, the Olympics have reminded me of my calling, and the importance of doing the best for the congregations with the gifts God has given me.

And I suppose that’s not a bad lesson to draw from the Olympics.

Just because

February 14th, 2010

It’s the Olympics… so…

GO CANADA!

The week of techfun

January 22nd, 2010

My week of technology not behaving continued this morning, with my Acer Aspire One dying after Windoze rebooted. Black screen, no hard drive action, just the fan.

Fortunately, it’s something that happens to pretty much every Aspire One at some point, so there is a readily available workaround, which I used, and brought it back to life! Yay!

*Posted from the resurrected Aspire One*

A small rant

January 19th, 2010

So, MTS, the *only* high-speed provider in our area (they own both the phone and cable companies) just changed over their email provision so that it is now a Windows Live service.

The truly annoying thing about this, more than anything else, is that the Live server does not want to play nicely with my Thunderbird email client. As of right now, I’m about tempted to start switching everything over to my bythefont address, but I just haven’t been able to bring myself to make the switch.

Of course, when I called MTS Tech Support their only response was to tell me to switch to Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express. Thanks, but no thanks.

*sigh*

So as of right now, I’m a little less than pleased with our ISP but I honestly have nowhere else to go for high-speed internet other than Xplornet, and I don’t want to lay out $$$ for satellite internet over what is essentially just a major annoyance.

—–
UPDATE:
A second MTS tech support agent just phoned me and with her help, I was able to finally get the outgoing email to work. Much nicer phone manners, much more helpful than the first support agent as well. Still annoyed that MTS has a monopoly, still not stoked on the MSLive thing, but at least my email’s usable again. That’s the most important thing to me.

Stuff and more stuff

December 31st, 2009

Stuff and more stuff fills up the harddrive of our main computer here at the Klages ranch. I need to go through and do a purge of the useless stuff in order to free up space for important things, like the video and photo footage of our kids.

This morning, out of a sense of nostalgia, I looked at a few of my favourite programs I have downloaded in the past, and realized that anything related to them can be easily and readily deleted. I simply haven’t had the time to learn how to do 3-d rendering in Blender or POV-Ray, or generate world landscapes in Terragen. I don’t have any real use for Adventure Game Studio. All of these are great programs that I’ve fiddled with for a few moments, but I have more important things to do than to play with software, even interesting stuff.

So, tomorrow morning, New Year’s Day, I will begin my great purge of stuff from my downloads directory, hopefully freeing up a couple gigs of space for photos and such.

It feels like a turning of the epochs for me, in a sense, but it’s time. I’m not a computer geek anymore, not like I once was, and it’s time for me to go back to being a mere hobbyist.

A Tale of Two Christmases

December 24th, 2009

As I begin to write, it is mid-afternoon on the 24th. The sermons are written, the snow is gently falling, the driveway is shovelled, the presents are wrapped, the children (and Kelly) are napping. A general sense of peace and quiet falls on the house.

Peace. Quietness. Happiness. Pleasant, if snowy, weather. Time with family and with friends. It seems that this is the heart of the Christmas which the world knows. (Perhaps not so much ‘quietness’, but you know what I mean.) The Christmas of the world is one of sensation and sight, one of presents and garlands and ribbons and bows, one which ramps into high gear around the end of November and which winds up on or about the 26th of December (or the last family gathering, whichever comes later).

Listening through some of my favourite Christmas CDs this last couple of weeks, I have noticed that there is a deep divide between the different albums. It isn’t so neat-and-tidy as “Christian” CDs are one way and “secular” CDs are another. “Christian” Christmas albums seem to be divided on this point, as do “secular” ones. Rather, there are two different basic understandings of Christmas which are simultaneously battling against each other. The one Christmas is almost over. The Christmas music will stop being heard on the radio and in the malls very, very soon. Here in Canada, the ramp-up to the Boxing! Day! Sales! has already begun. Cultural Christmas, Generic-Winter-Gift-Exchange Holiday, is almost done for another year.

So what of the other Christmas? It only begins tonight, in about two hours time, when I speak the invocation for the gathered worshippers at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Winkler. It begins with the sound of the ringing of the church bell and the people singing hymns. This Christmas is focussed not on the feelings and the family time, but rather on this curious infant born 2000 years ago, who just happens to be God. God is born. The Word is made flesh. The world changes.

Some time ago I lost my sense of wonder at the tinsel and trappings of Christmas. Commercialism and holiday specials on TV, save the Charlie Brown Christmas, simply don’t touch me anymore. Even opening presents with my family doesn’t really excite me that much anymore. But the good news that “unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord”, that still hits me every year. That still gladdens and excites me.

So, as you celebrate this Christmas season, I hope and pray that for you Christmas is not over with the unwrapping of the gifts but that it only begins with the wrapping of the Christ-child in swaddling cloths, and His sleep in the manger. I pray that this Christ-mass would be a time for you to celebrate the Word made Flesh in the Word and in the Body and Blood of the Lord’s Supper. May the wonder of the Gospel truth of the God who became man in order to die on the cross and save humankind be yours throughout the twelve days of Christmas and all throughout the coming year.

“Nails, spear, shall pierce Him through
The cross be borne for me, for you
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The babe, the son of Mary.”
(William C Dix, “What Child Is This?”, verse 2)

Already?

December 21st, 2009

It’s the 21st of December already and things are just starting to become ready for Christmas here. Just as well, I suppose, since Christmas starts with Christmas Eve services on the 24th, but it’s still amazing to me how fast this fall has fallen away from me.

I will write a proper Christmas post, Lord willing, in the next couple days. Blessings to whoever reads this as you prepare for the Christmas season and for the return of our Lord!

An observation of sorts…

November 13th, 2009

I realized that my imagination was not working very well, lately, and the best cure I know for that is to read. Read interesting books full of memorable characters and places, books which awake my mind and set it wandering again.

For whatever reason, however, two of the authors considered as among the greatest of the SciFi/Fantasy genre in the last 50 years do nothing for me. I have now honestly given both Philip Pullman and Frank Herbert a fair shake and I simply cannot really get into their writings.

I’m positive that this says much more about me as a reader than it does about them as writers, but it’s just an observation. Given that Douglas Adams and Isaac Asimov, both avowed atheists, are authors whose writings I enjoy, it can’t be a simple matter of the anti-religion aspects to Pullman and Herbert. But just the writing style does nothing for me… go figure.

Time to go grab some Alexander McCall Smith or some JRR Tolkien or Evelyn Waugh or Geoffrey Chaucer or Jonathan Swift, maybe.

In honour of Remembrance Day…

November 11th, 2009

Here’s the message I preached at the 2008 Remembrance Day Service here in Winkler.

Remembering
Micah 4:1-5
Winkler Remembrance Day Service, 2008

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken. For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever.
(Micah 4:1-5 ESV)
Remembrance Day. That’s what we call today in Canada. Not Veterans’ Day, not Armistice Day, even though we gather on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to recall that armistice signed 90 years ago today. Remembrance Day. It is a chance to remember, to call to mind the important things.
The reality is that much of what did happen has been lost to the tides of time; the recent movie Passchendaele is one Canadian’s attempt to retell the story of that battle in the First World War so that we do not forget. My great-grandfather, Christian David Kuhl, who was an enlisted man in the Canadian forces in the First World War, never made it to the front lines, thankfully, or I might not be here today. Instead, while overseas, he became ill with the flu, that other great killer of the second decade of the last century. Between World War I and the Spanish Flu, millions upon millions lost their lives. The trenches of mud were littered with the bodies of young men from all over Europe and North America. Death. It is a painful thing to remember.
The Second World War, likewise, has its stories and its griefs. This is the war with which most of us here are more familiar. It was the first use of an atomic bomb, as human beings discovered more effective yet impersonal ways to kill each other. Yet it was also a war fought with good reason; to prevent an evil man from destroying the Jewish people and indeed all others who were not up to his ideal of the human race. Even so, millions upon millions lost their lives. My grandpa Klages’s brother Lorne Klages and brother-in-law Nelson Prowd, both of whom served in the Second World War and came home alive, died young of cancer. The family still wonders if it might not have been something they encountered while in the war. Death. It is a painful thing to remember.
Even for those soldiers who made it home alive, most had friends or comrades who did not make it home alive. The wars were hard times indeed. Our soldiers bravely continued on, to the oft-forgotten Korean War in the 1950s, to various parts of the world as called upon to keep the peace or make the peace. Currently our troops are in Afghanistan, in a war which seems to have no rules of fairness. Our soldiers are over there trying to make Afghanistan a safe place for women and children to be, and yet you hear of roadside bombs and suicide bombings on the news all the time. This is a war which has no easy objectives, no clear end target, because the enemy no longer seems to have any clear cut goal or leader. And our soldiers are still dying; not in nearly the numbers as in previous wars, but every death is a death. As the Anglican minister and poet John Donne once wrote, “Every man’s death diminishes me, for I am a part of every man.” Death. It is a painful thing to remember.
The reality of this world as we now know it is death, and war is one of those causes of death. Jesus foretold that there would be “wars and rumours of wars,” when He was describing how the world would be as the end approaches. That’s the world. We may find peaceable solutions to this location or that location’s particular problem, but the truth of the matter is that as long as there is coveting, as long as there is hatred, as long as there is fear, as long as there is anger, there will be war, and there will be death.
So when we hear a passage such as the one for today, from Micah 4:1-5, it can seem like a pie-in-the-sky dream. A world without war, a world where the true God, the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is worshipped by all nations in truth and purity. A world where people beat swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. A world with no more hatred or animosity between peoples, a world with no more fear of your neighbour, a world where everyone is content to sit under their own tree and rejoice in the goodness of the Lord, to walk in His name forever. A world that looks nothing like our own.
After all, what is our world if not a race to accumulate money and possessions, a nice house, a new car, a decent retirement income, and all the things we want to have? What is our world if not the rat race to get ahead at any and all costs, to prove how valuable to society you are by how much material worth you have when you die? What is our world if not a place of sins against God and our neighbour–sins of greed and coveting and dishonest dealings and murder and immorality of every kind, sins of putting our own wants in the place where God should be?
The world as we know it is an unfair, inequitable place. As long as this world is what it is, there will be sorrows and struggles and faults and failures. There will be sin. For sin is the root cause of all this fallen reality. Sin is at the heart of why there must be war. Consider all the wars in the Old Testament, how the ones condoned by the Lord were there precisely to punish the heathen nations for their sin against the Lord and how the ones which attacked the Lord’s people were there to punish the Hebrews for their sin. Sin is at the heart of why there is hatred and anger and fear and coveting. And as Ezekiel 18 points out, the soul that sins dies. Sin brings death.
So Micah’s picture that he paints for us must needs be a picture of a time where sin is no more. For only where there is no sin is there the true peace with God pictured in this reading. The peace with God which we call “heaven”. An eternity which was made possible for us to be part of through Jesus Christ alone. For this world, broken by sin, needed to be repaired in order for the peace from God to even be possible.
God has made that repair through His Son Jesus. For Jesus lived that sinless life, at peace with God, which none of us can live. He lived free from sin for He is the Son of God. He came to this earth to suffer a violent death, to sacrifice Himself on the cross of Calvary, in order that we, who have been slaves to death and destruction, might live a new life. He died that we might live, and He rose from the dead that we might also live with Him for eternity. He overcame the devil once for all, in order to free us from our imprisonment, and while the battle still rages, the war is nearly over. Jesus has won. Evil has been defeated, once and for all. His death might not be pleasant to remember, but it is in the remembering and cherishing that we have life.
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.
I’m looking forward to that time when there will be no more war, when all those from all nations who trust in Christ will together ascend His eternal holy hill and worship Him. I’m looking forward to the day when all will have what they need and be satisfied. I’m looking forward to that day when we no longer have to fear death, for death itself will be no more. I’m looking forward to the day when there is no more fear, no more need to learn war.
Yet for now, I also appreciate and commend the work which our military must do. It is not pretty or pleasant, but it is essential to the well-ordering of a nation which is in a world laden with sin. We should honour our veterans for the time they spent in service to our country so that we can have the freedoms we so often take for granted. We should pray for our armed forces that they carry out the duties which they have been given with integrity, trustworthiness, and honour, showing respect for the lives of the innocent, and bringing to justice whichever situations they might find themselves in. We should pray for their commanders and leaders that they choose wisely and well the situations to place our armed forces in, in order that their goals might be achieved in the least destructive ways. And most of all, we should pray that our Lord Jesus would come quickly and bring an end at last to all wars, so that there is no more need for remembrance, for the former things will have passed away and the new life, the life which never ends, will have come at last. Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.

Married!

October 15th, 2009

Blessings to Rev. Adrian and Rebecca Kramer as they wing their way back to Oz. All the best in your married life, Bec and Adrian! Come visit us in Canada sometime soon!

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