Faith Venture

I spent last week at a very technical conference. Lot of talk about programming for industrial applications. You’ll have to bear with me a little for the analogy to develop. Anyway, I got to thinking about abstraction–that is a way of thinking where you ignore the details and focus on generalities.

The company whose user conference I attended has developed software that allows programmers to handle complex programming tasks with greater success and ease. It’s a process called abstraction. Instead of concentrating on lines and lines (sometimes thousands of lines of densely worded text called code), the code is abstracted into small pictures that can be “wired” together. In this case, abstraction works to great benefit.

Then on the plane ride home watching the TED Talks videos on my iPad, I saw a talk given by a marvelous teacher. Then I thought about much political debate (and many people’s thoughts) over the past decade or longer about teachers. Get the distinction? One teacher or a group known as “teachers.”

Where is our focus? Do we think of people in terms of a group? Or individuals? It’s easy to make villains you hate about a group when you know many  individuals in that group whom you admire. In this case, abstraction from the individual to the group is not productive.

I can’t think of a time when Jesus dealt with groups as an abstraction. He dealt with individuals. John, in his Gospel, makes some abstractions (he often talks of “the Jews”), but John is also full of irony. He makes a comment about the Pharisees (the group) but also has talked about an individual Pharisee (Nicodemus). John likes that kind of contrast.

But I have concern when we try to reduce everyone to groups and fail to see the individual. The pastor yesterday talked about meeting a “weird” guy and then discovering he was a pastor. He went from abstraction to individual. That is much more beneficial in our lives. Instead of getting ourselves all worked up and stressing ourselves over abstracted groups that disagree with us, perhaps we could see individuals who are fellow seekers. Who have different ideas for now as they are puzzling out the same things we are–how to live with God.

Don’t look at “them.” Look at her. Look at him.

I’m not sure where this post is going. I’m beginning without an end in mind, because this incident is a tragedy.

While I was in Florida, the Casey Anthony case was coming to a close. She is the young woman accused of causing her 2-yr-old daughter to die. I think the entire population of the state watched the trial on TV. The jury voted acquittal after almost no deliberations. The one juror who spoke (probably the leader of the small group) hung her vote on a comment the defense attorney made at the beginning–that since there was no way to know the cause of death, there was no way to convict her of first-degree murder.

The facts as I got them were that Anthony was a terrible mother. She fed the little child prescription drugs to make her sleep so that she could go out partying. After the girl died, she hid the body until decomposition set in such that it was impossible to conduct an autopsy, all the while saying the baby was at the nanny’s (there was no nanny).

To take the jurors’ side (which is difficult for me), the trial was in Orlando, but they brought the jury in from Tampa. They were housed in a hotel together with no outside contact for the duration of the trial. One juror was booked on a cruise that left the Thursday after the Fourth. His motivation was hardly justice. It was getting out.

Meanwhile, Anthony has been offered $1 million for her story. And she is now free–at least of jail.

What kind of society do we live in? My disgust with lawyers reaches the same height as my disgust with politicians. But the sensationalist media makes both of them look like amateurs.

I keep asking myself, where would Jesus fit into this story. What a tragedy that no one stepped in to guide Anthony into a responsible life. What a tragedy that the parents first went along and then turned on her, but never provided tough love and guidance. What a tragedy that a little child dies and there is no criminal justice.

But I can pray that somehow the tragedy breaks through Anthony’s shell; that the tragic results of her lifestyle brought nothing but grief to her and her family become clear to her and that she is shown a better life. Many people have overcome tragedy to become Christ followers with great effect. We can pray that the same happens to her.