Psalm 118:22-23 says, “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the LORD’S doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.” This scripture is understood to be about the Messiah (at least by Christians!) and Jesus quotes it in reference to Himself (Matthew 21, Mark 12, Luke 20) in the culmination of a confrontation with the chief priests and elders in the temple, about His authority to teach.

I’ve always thought of dressed stones and wondered why one suitable to be the cornerstone would be reject but as I read the verse today it struck me that a stone which is rejected is a stone which refuses to be any shape but its own.

This is most assuredly the case when it comes to Jesus: the Jewish people in the first century were (very understandably) looking for the Messiah to come as a conquering king to throw off the yoke of Rome – most of the previous 600 years were spent as a conquered or vassal state: first to Babylon then the Medes & Persians, then the Greeks and now the Romans. And there are lots of Messianic prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures which reference Him as conquering king; these have not yet been fulfilled. Instead Jesus came as the Lamb of God, the suffering servant, God in human flesh paying for human sin as the passover lamb, in order that death will no longer have authority over those who come into agreement with Him.

So, right there, you have ‘builders’ with an idea of the shape of the stone for which they are looking, an opinion about what shape the chief cornerstone should be. And, in the natural, the builders and the architect are in agreement about the dimensions of the cornerstone. But in the spiritual realm, the Architect is God and He is the one Who says, “This is the chief cornerstone,” and thereby establishes the shape of the entire building. And we builders, straddling the natural and the spiritual, look at this entirely self-possessed cornerstone and cry, “but I can’t DO anything with that!” That Stone is entirely Itself and It does not change shape to accommodate anyone; instead we must come into agreement with the Stone.

This makes me think of Joshua 5:13-15, this powerful and mysterious interaction before the battle of Jericho: Now it came about when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand, and Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us or for our adversaries?” He said, “No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and bowed down, and said to him, “What has my lord to say to his servant?” The captain of the LORD’S host said to Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so.

Personally, I read this as a Christophany – an appearance of pre-incarnate Jesus in scripture – because an angel of God will not receive worship (in both Revelation 19 and 22 John tells of falling at the feet of a glorious being and he is told, “See that you do it not! I am your fellow servant – worship God!”) and this Person not only receives worship, He commands it (“take off your sandals; this is holy ground”).

So, if this is Jesus appearing to Joshua, why in the world doesn’t He say, “of course I’m on your side! You are my chosen people!” ???

Because it is not for this Being, commanding the army of the LORD, to be on the side of Joshua – rather it is for Joshua to be on the side of the LORD. Likewise, it is not for the stone to accommodate itself to the builders but rather for the builders to accept the Stone provided by the divine Architect.

I wrote a song we use sometimes at church which says, “Help me line up with You, line up with You, line up with You, my Lord–” and that’s my ongoing prayer, as God is doing the work of shaping me to fit His purposes and I resist the temptation to try and shape Him to fit my purposes!

God is big and unpredictable (to us, at least – Aslan is not a tame lion!); we know He is good and we know something about where He is taking us but the path is often circuitous – it’s certainly not the way we would go, left to our own devices. And so we start questioning, doubting – maybe God hasn’t taken everything into consideration? Maybe there’s something we know which He hasn’t noticed yet? (!! – I know it sounds silly, but how often do we pray as if we were instructing God on the shape of our lives? “Lord, I’m having this problem with XYZ…” “Really? Wow, Lynn, somehow I’d missed that–”) And it’s not a big step from there to thinking we have vending-machine god or portable god that fits in our pockets. We persist in trying to downsize God because, face it, He’s too big for us to see in His entirety. I’m sure it’s awesome and amazing to travel in the space shuttle or live in the space station, to look out the window and see the earth and the moon – but if you really want the whole picture, you have to leave the station or do an extra-vehicular activity. And even then, you’re seeing through the limitations of your helmet….

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

First, the National Park Service used to provide official crowd estimates but no longer, not since Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue them over their estimate of 400,000 attendees at his Million Man March. This lead Farrakhan to approach Dr. Farouk El-Baz of Boston University* to provide a more favorable estimate: 837,000 +/- 20% (20% seems like a large margin of error but maybe that’s standard; remains to be seen). Check out Boston University’s account.

Second, there were lots of excited estimates of how many people would attend the inauguration of President Obama during the last few months of 2008. These ranged from 2 million to 5 million persons. The early estimate of the size of the crowd on January 20, 2009, was 1.8 million which was later halved.

Third, Jane’s (the intel source) does IHS satellite analysis of such crowds and they estimated the PBHO inauguration crowd as 1.031 million and 1.411 million people present (not including the 240,000 ticket holders presumed present – why they aren’t included in the visual count, I don’t know). There’s an interesting article from a St. Louis newspaper which cites the L.A. Times article linked above as well as other sources.

Fourth, people use these estimates to support their position or discredit the opposing position. That’s the part that hadn’t occurred to me. Actually, the fact that estimates have such massive fluctuations hadn’t occurred to me, either. It would be instructive to notice when various media outlets consistently use low-ball estimates for one group and higher estimates for another.

That’s actually the part that’s most weird to me: I can’t understand wanting bad data or being comforted by bad data. I have no problem that we have different views and opinions – that goes with being human and it’s always helpful to me to hear a different POV – it makes me consider my position: is this a position I hold out of habit? Have the facts on the ground changed? Is my philosophical underpinning sound?

So I don’t understand why anyone would keep bad data (e.g. the “Dan Barna of NPS” quotes re: 9/12 protest march which actually referred to the PBHO inauguration) up on their website without updating it or correcting it as soon as reasonably possible. To me, that impacts the credibility of the source because either they don’t care about the real facts, wherever the bad data originated, or they’re not responding to challenges or they’re not sufficiently connected with what’s “out there” (in which case, what kind of source are they?!). I dig around a little but almost everything I find is on the first or second page of my searches; I’ll refine my searches when I discover that I’ve aimed badly (!!) but I’m not searching by ideology. Here’s a blog which reports a lot of varying data, appropriately linked, and I appreciate that (check out the Gormogons link; it’s very entertaining, especially after the UPDATE).

Sometimes it’s really hard to tell what’s going on in real time and I think it’s inappropriate to accuse folks of lying when in fact they may simply be passing along reportage “in the moment” which later changes. Websites change, stories get updated, numbers are adjusted one way or the other. MSNBC made a pretty good on-site report and their local folks estimated hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps the whole “mine’s bigger than yours” contest should be seen as essentially adolescent in nature – and yet in a democratic society, numbers do matter. If you can marginalize the “other side” by dismissing their events as fringe, well…

And I presume goodwill on the part of others, at least until I discover someone is playing fast & loose or holds a very different view regarding the importance of accuracy in data. So – thanks for being my friend! And thanks for not laughing too loud.

You can stop sniggering now…

*Throughout his career, Dr. El-Baz has succeeded in conveying the excitement of scientific research and the importance of using advanced technology. One of his efforts resolved the 1995 controversy about the crowd size in Washington DC’s “Million Man March”. He estimated the number of participants in the march using the same computer techniques applied to counting sand dunes in the desert. From Boston University’s webpage on Dr. El-Baz Farouk.

But I respectfully point out that a bailout is only a bailout if it succeeds in turning these companies around. Without teeth to renegotiate the elaborate UAW contracts, all this money can do is delay the inevitable – or, worse, become the initial trickle in a massive ongoing stream of tax-payer funding to enable GM, Chrysler, and the UAW to continue “business as usual.”

Face it, the legitimate sense of outrage from the American people regarding the AIG bailout is that they did, indeed, carry on with business as usual. Junkets, salaries, bonuses – no. A company receiving a tax-payer bailout must immediately begin to operate in a different reality. Radical reduction in salaries, particularly at the top, from which the failure stems. Bonuses come back into the bail-out fund to help other companies, as needed.

Taking federal assistance needs to be painful to a company; they need to be motivated to look for every other possible alternative to dependence upon the American taxpayers because dependence on us is going to so radically change the way they do business.

Otherwise how do we succeed? How does anything turn around if we subsidize failure?