Written last Friday.

Holly and I study language with a tutor at 6 am each morning. This morning, though, greeted me with the heavy whir of helicopters and the screams of sirens. By the time I went to work, traffic was backed up and I had to detour through the city.

But you couldn't help but see it all.

The black clouds of smoke billowed over the city. You could feel the heat pushing back against the morning breeze. My commute took me right to the edge of the fire, and people were streaming from the alleys, escaping with whatever belongings they could. The fire struck one of the crannies of the city, the places where the poor squeeze in while they eek out a living amidst the growing middle and upper class of Phnom Penh. They build shacks of wood scraps covered with thatch and tin. They fill up the spaces between the large concrete houses that rise above them. There was no room for a fire truck to get to the blaze. The most anyone could do was escape. In this case, over 200 houses were destroyed. Amazingly, no deaths have been yet reported.

Later, on my way to a meeting, the fire was finally contained. It looked like the area had been bombed, all that was left was charred remains and rubble.

This is the first article on the fire.

I will try to update as I find out more of the devastation and what is being done to help the victims. I would also like to reflect a little on some of the justice issues the fire brings to the foreground.

But now, it is time to mourn with all those who lost so much this morning in Phnom Penh....

There are lots of weddings these days in Cambodia, which are all day (or even multi-day) events. The actual ceremony is often small - it is the reception that is the big deal. (In fact, they are such big deals that many unfortunate couples go deep into debt to make them happen, which is not the perfect way to start a marriage).

Some people rent out a center or a hotel for the reception, others set up a tent on the street. In our neighborhood, we usually have a couple of receptions every week. There's a good reason - you probably won't get rained out in the hot season. I have only been an official guest at one of these receptions. You enter on a red carpet through a wreath of (usually fake) flowers. The bride and groom are waiting there, greeting each guest, and each guest is videotaped.

[A typical street celebration setup, before the crowd - this one for our neighbor's first year birthday party. A wedding would look similar.]

Inside, you are seated at a table and wait for the table to get full before food is served. Then you have a 10 course meal (everything from peanuts to fish heads to sticky rice custard molded into tasteless seashell shapes). A band plays really loud asian-style karaoke music, which hurts the ears but excuses one from conversation. When everyone finishes, you get up and leave at the same time. Then you stand in line and give an envelope of money to pay for the meal and benefit the couple. The envelope is opened and the amount of your gift is recorded, with your name, in a register. Meanwhile, your table as been cleared and more guests are being seated. It is a long and loud night. But you do get a chance to wear Khmer silk. :)

[And, just for kicks, here's a photo of Holly and I in our Khmer silk - complete with wind-blown hair on our rooftop.]

I went to an engagement ceremony last month, as well. It was in the province. We started several blocks away from the restaurant, at the groom's house, with a fruit processional. A big crowd of us walked the street, carrying silver platters laden with fruit, crackers, soda, etc. We paraded like this until we got to the restaurant, attracting the attention of the neighbors and collecting several excited children along the way. Then we sat and listened while pastors exhorted and the couple played an engagement version of the newly wed game (how many years have you dated? do you have other girlfriends? What's his favorite color? etc.). This went on for about an hour, and then we had a hurried meal (only another hour) and got on the road. I didn't dress up for this one, but the bride and groom were both wearing traditional Khmer clothing and it was very formal. From my understanding, an engagement is quite official and usually lasts a year.

The downside to all the weddings (and funerals) in our neighborhood is not just that it as loud as a heavy metal concert. It's also that we often don't have electricity, and the streets are the most comfortable place to go for a breeze. Oh well, gather the rosebuds while ye may.... :)

I'm posting an excerpt from a sermon I preached 3 years ago. Unfortunately, it still applies.

A Palm Sunday Sermon: 2 Years in Iraq
The Triumphal Entry: "Ride On, In Majesty..."

We’ve just read about Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In many churches, children will carry around palm branches. Brightly colored pictures of a smiling Jesus on a donkey will be passed around. It’s a great story and perfect for illustration in Bibles. It is also the same story where the religious leaders come and demand Jesus to quiet the people, and Jesus simply responds, “If they are quiet, the rocks will start shouting instead!” It was an exciting day, more exciting than we’ll probably ever understand. And the more I read this text, the more I am amazed at how little I’ve been taught about its meaning through my life. These people were exalting Jesus as the King; this was a political parade, full of expectation. Jesus rode a colt – a prophecy made by Zechariah about the Messiah and King of the Jews. Most of the crowd laid their coats down for Jesus to ride upon – the same thing the crowd did to Jehu when he was made king in 2 Kings 9. And Jesus was publicly heralded as the ‘Son of David’ who ‘comes in the Name of the Lord.’ No wonder the religious leaders squirmed. The people were choosing a new authority for themselves, without their permission or approval. And Jesus let them.

Rememering the Curse: "Driven out...."

This Sunday also marks the end of our study of the curse of sin from Genesis 3. The last verse of that chapter is very simple and sums up the whole judgment on Adam and Eve: “So [God] drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.” That conclusion – the picture of God evicting His creation from the place of beauty and peace of Eden, into the thorns and thistles and sweat and death of the fallen and cursed world – stands starkly contrasted to Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Driving out and riding in – these two actions by God represent the need and the means of our salvation. To protect Adam from eating from the Tree of Life and so living forever in his corruption, God had to drive him out of the garden. That was an act of mercy, and the Scriptures tells us that God, in His compassion, also made Adam and Eve clothes from animal skins to cover their shame. That God had to do these things points us to the reality of our sin. But how would God remedy it? We see the answer in Palm Sunday. God has descended to our level – not merely becoming human, which was humbling enough for God – but by riding into the worst, going the deepest, humbling Himself to the uttermost.

Perhaps Jesus was smiling that day, like He is in the Sunday School pictures. But Palm Sunday was not primarily a day of joy for Christ. In accepting shouts and acts of the King, Jesus knew He was sealing His fate. For that He came. Luke puts the day in the perspective that we too often miss – “When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes.” Jesus looked on Jerusalem and cried, seeing all the pain and grief of His own crucifixion. And His sight encompassed more, to at least the destruction of Jerusalem. ‘The things which make for peace’ were not what Jerusalem was expecting.

2 Years in Iraq: "The things which make for peace...."

We still live in a violent, destructive, fallen world. In fact, yesterday's date, March 19, marked 2 years of our current war in Iraq. Palm Sunday seems to be the most appropriate time for us to look beyond our political opinions and see and weep over our own times from Jesus’ Palm Sunday perspective. “If we could know in this day, even us, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from our eyes.” Not many people if any, for instance, could see what has unfolded in Iraq. There have been some very good things, from what we can hear. And we should certainly give weight to those things. But there is also a time for grief, for accounting for the pain and tragedy that we wish had never happened. What I invite you to this morning is not to deny the good things, but to also acknowledge and pray for healing of the wounds that always accompany the violence of war. What wounds? Economically, who is happy that, although initial cost estimates were $60 billion, already we have spent over $130 billion and President Bush has requested another $82 billion? Or humanly, who is happy about the over 1,500 US soldiers who have died in combat or the 11,000 who have been wounded? The tragedy only grows considering the over 18,000 confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths in the last 2 years, mainly women and children?

Those numbers flash too easily across our TV screens, if we hear or see them at all. But do you remember the Fallujah battles? Analysis of “the civilian dealth toll in the April 2004 siege of Falluja ... leads to the conclusion that betweeen 572 and 616 of the approximately 800 reported deaths were of civilians, with over 300 of these being women and children.” Scott Lipscomb has reported that of the verified civilian deaths where an age is confirmed, over 25% have been children. On this count, he said: “Every one of some [18,000] Iraqi civilians killed was a loved human being, whose loss creates heartbreak and bitterness among the bereaved families and communities. Each death deserves recording, each life deserves honouring. This harrowing list ... brings home the fact that, no matter how tragic has been the loss of American life, the loss of innocent Iraqi life has been greater still, and is a loss that is just as irreparable.” I have not seen enough grief on America’s part over these deaths, and it is precisely to this grief that I feel a commitment to Jesus calls us to.

Jesus’ tears also call us, personally and nationally, to humility. The world’s problems have never been permanently solved by war. Do you remember calling the first world war “the war to end all wars”? We tragically learned that there is no such thing. Wars are just as dependable as taxes. The American led war in Iraq will not end the violence of the world, any more than the violence in Jerusalem that led to Christ’s crucifixion brought the predicted national security the political and religious establishment desired.

Moreover, what Palm Sunday calls on us to acknowledge is that OUR eyes have also been blinded to God’s solution to things. As Christians, we have too often wanted Jesus just like Jerusalem did – we’ll claim Him as King but only on our own terms. We are too easy and too familiar with the world’s answers, and too uncomfortable with God’s. God’s ways are too risky, too wasteful, and too impractical. We turn Palm Sunday into a Happy Day Parade, instead of Jesus’ descent to death on the cross. And so we can slip into all sorts of ways of avoiding joining Jesus’ ride into suffering in Jerusalem – we can love our enemies and still kill them; we can love the poor and still ignore them; we can love the humble and still think mainly of ourselves. We can continue in such a way – but if we do, have we really loved God?

What are the things that make for peace? It is not enough to display our slogans to end war or support our troops. We must become peacemakers. We must enter our community and world, amid all the shouts and hoopla about who is king, and see beyond it. We must take up the cross and follow Jesus. We must take the risky, wasteful, and impractical way of God – of loving enemies, sacrificing our own comforts to help the poor, and thinking of others before ourselves. We must trade the blind eyes and ignorant shouts of the Jerusalem crowds for the teary eyes and prayers of Jesus. The words, though, may be the same. For ‘Hosanna’ simply means, ‘O Lord, save!’ And if Palm Sunday doesn’t put that shout on our lips, then we have missed the point and the hope of Jesus for our desperate, violent world.

Statistics and quotes from:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ ; http://icasualties.org/; the Sojourners Vigil Toolkit (http://www.sojourners.com/); & David Batstone in sojomail, 3/17/05.

Monday, I spent a relaxing day in the province touring the Takeo community development projects with the visiting MCC Resource Generation group. Strolling in the woods, we saw the hard and beautiful work of reforestation alongside the scars of war and the craters from B-52 bombs. We saw rehabilitated canals alleviating hunger - canals originally built on the backs of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. We heard the success stories of setting up a Rice Bank, where people could borrow rice in the hungry, dry times and pay it back during the harvests. We learned about the community credit union, which kept the villagers money in the community and protected them from paying (and defaulting) on high interest loans. I couldn't help but be joyful at seeing and hearing all these stories, at seeing and hearing men and women who had lived through years of uncertainty and tragedy, now standing as witnesses to change, happily showing us their gardens. I bought some eggplant - the good fruit of a land that was devastated just a few decades ago.

Cambodia is a land of tough history and tough realities, so experiencing things like this is extremely important to creating awareness and hope for others who are not on the good side of things yet. Here, 4.6 million people live on less than a dollar a day. Up to now, 50 cents was considered enough to get the basics of food and water - but that is changing as, in recent years, the food crisis has been accentuated by inflation.

Over the past year inflation has spiked at 10.8 percent, compared with 2.8 percent at the end of 2006, driving up the cost of food and other staple goods and pushing the most vulnerable deeper into poverty.

"About 8.5 percentage points of December's inflation rate of 10.8 percent was accounted for by food price inflation," said the International Monetary Fund's Cambodia representative John Nelms.

For as many as 2.6 million people living in extreme poverty, the situation has been worsening over the last several years, which have been marked by poor harvests brought on by natural disasters such as flood or drought.

This inflation has, in some ways, been the price the poor have had to pay for the great success of the rich. Tourism, the garment industry, and a real estate boom have injected a lot of cash into Cambodia, created some very wealthy Cambodians - and a setup a vulnerable economy. The result, in the words of one of Cambodia's poor, is "This year I'm not at all hopeful...."

READ THE ARTICLE HERE.

Meanwhile, threats to the most important natural resource, water, continue. Cambodia has made great strides in water management, but it shares water with neighboring Asian countries, and nothing is simple. Thailand has considered diverting water from the Mekong, and Cambodia remains vulnerable to water shortages across the region.

Despite the challenges, my trip to Takeo gives me hope that solutions exist. The only question is whether we will seek those solutions out before the suffering of Cambodia is increased even more....

One of the lessons that has been most abiding in my reading of Wendell Berry over the years has been his attentiveness to consequences and the importance of knowing a place well enough to understand the consequences of our actions on that place. When he writes against hubris, the whole thing is predicated on the ability of a person to slow down enough and stop long enough to actually see what is happening. Hubris goes unnoticed when we are flying through life at break-neck speeds. But our hubris, like all our actions, also bears consequences. As Berry has put it, “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

So here is one of Nature's votes, a memorial to our own hubris:

Swimmers' Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

The summary is this -

... researchers estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching.

Even low levels of sunscreen, at or below the typical amount used by swimmers, could activate the algae viruses and completely bleach coral in just four days, the results showed.

Seawater surrounding coral exposed to sunscreen contained up to 15 times more viruses than unexposed samples.
[However,] Danovaro says banning sunscreen won't be necessary, and points out two simple things swimmers can do to reduce their impact on coral: Use sunscreens with physical filters, which reflect instead of absorb ultraviolet radiation; and use eco-friendly chemical sunscreens.

I'm not encouraging us to feel guilty or become defensive for using sunscreen, I simply think this is a great example of how we impact those around us (including the earth) without even meaning to. I doubt any swimmers lather on the sunscreen with a diabolical laugh, "Die, coral reef! Die!" It was unforeseen, and it was unknown until someone, some scientist, slowed down enough to know a place, to notice the bleached corals, and to trace out the cause.

My own hope lies in knowing a place - its people and its earth - like this. Even though I wander over the earth, I can be mindful, slow, attentive, and ever-careful of how I live and love. The great irony for those of us who move so fast is how joyous moving slow can be. If we let go of compulsion and enjoy the present moment - the way the wind gently lifts the papers on my desk, the sound of voices drifting up the stairs, the hum of traffic, the noise of construction - there is a depth of happiness there I never find at high speeds. I become aware of my own hubris, that I have forgotten my own part in this world. I have lived without wonder, but wonder returns in the mindful moments, returns with joy and pleasure at the simple fact of life and breath and sense.

Hubris is a forgetfulness. We forget the here and now. We forget our interdependence. We forget that, even unknown to us, we may be working against our own joy of living. To quote Berry again,

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

It is our greatest joy and task to cultivate this awareness and wonder, even in the most unnoticed actions, and to have the humility to place our hubris to the test - when we buy our clothes, when we flush our toilets, when we drive our cars, or even when we grab the sunscreen and head for the beach.