Do you remember how Superman couldn't see through lead? This discovery may be why whenever I have an X-ray they cover parts of me with a lead dress. How would medical teams know to do this if it wasn't for Superman's boundaries?

Boundaries are great things. They provide the means for living cells to accept nutrition and fend off poisons. They also, in theory, keep neighbors at bay. I remember one morning in our Pennsylvania home being awakened by the cock crow. I discovered the next door suburban neighbors had decided to raise chickens. Determined to protect our castle, I planted pine trees on the perimeter that afternoon. What made it memorable was that the chickens lined up to watch me work, a short-lived entertainment for them as it turned out. Two houses down the man living there had planted grass seed, a boon to the chickens but the key to their demise. A day after my tree-planting I saw the chickens in the newly seeded yard. A day after that I saw the yard's owner cleaning his hatchet. We returned to a chicken-free existence thereafter.

Neighborhood associations are supposed to deal with chickens and axe-wielding angels of death, in my opinion. That is, they are called to face and solve real problems. Yet I live in a neighborhood in which the walls are too high and the boundaries too thick.  

It is a county neighborhood surrounded on 3 sides by city property and on the 4th side with a city road. Last night, at our association meeting, the neighbors dealt with serious questions, such as what happens if our well-water continues to show evidence of E Coli and how close we are to the imminent collapse of all our septic systems. This was followed by dire concerns that surrounding city neighborhoods were drawing down our water supply. But these issues were set aside for a far more pressing problem: determining the best places to dump undetected mounting yard garbage in the neighboring city property.

To the problems, no solutions were offered. To the illegal dumping that passed expenses on to the city, no shame was expressed.

The meeting ended with the annual celebration of how we of the far horizon have successfully resisted being added to the city's rolls of taxable properties, thereby keeping ourselves independent of the city. 

What's that? The neighborhood's well and septic systems are falling apart, and we need city property to handle our yard waste. The city is draining us dry. Put simply, we association members are not independent of the surrounding city: We have a dysfunctional relationship to it. My efforts to suggest that this might be the case caused my neighbors last night to suggest that my septic tank might be the one polluting the well water (we are at the opposite end of the neighborhood, with a system recently inspected and certified as workable; nevertheless, we Masseys are having our system cleaned and rechecked to make sure that we are keeping all of our skubala to ourselves). So shares the fate of all whistleblowers, I am afraid. To name a problem is to be designated as a problem.

So something and somebody is leaking, but there is truly one impermeable boundary, one impossibly thick dress that is impervious to X-ray vision and razor-sharp wit: our neighborhood association's discourse about the city or any other number of possible solutions. Like photons bouncing off a perfect mirror, no light can enter the black box of our self-congratulatory ruminations. The Titanic has struck the iceberg and we party on. The Red Death rages outside of our city gate and the masquerade ball goes uninterrupted. The grass withers, the flower fades, but no word of the Lord is sought.

Think of those institutions and organizations that operate within ideological traps of their own making. I think of congregations I have served in years past. NPR mentioned a book entitled "It Is Worse Than It Looks" about the Republican Party. Can any boundary be so impermeable as closed human minds?

It has been awhile since I blogged. I suppose the lack of protesters outside the church insisting that I have a greater web presence allowed me to snooze through the Lenten season :-). More likely, thoughts about what to blog came and went with such speed that I never found a focus. Then along came the bishop of Peoria, Illinois, and I am re-entering the game.

Daniel Jenky joined a conversation the church has had over a long period of time, which is "Who is the anti-Christ?" Popular movies show the anti-Christ with a 666 tattooed on him, a comic attempt to understand the Book of the Revelation's mark of the beast (we once decided against buying a house on the basis of the address being 666: We noticed the eventual new owners had the address changed). We will return to this numerical sign shortly, but let's consider first Bishop Jenky.

It is doubtful Jenky meant that the president is "the" anti-Christ. In the Bible (1 John 4:3) it is the spirit of the anti-Christ that is to be feared and challenged, and Jenky presumes that it is this spirit's presence - a presumption that in times past led to accusations of the Caesars, Pope Julian II, Hitler, and Stalin being the anti-Christ - that is now animating Obama. Yet all these aforementioned gentlemen could claim unanimously not to be "the" anti-Christ.

How so? The anti-Christ is rumored to be like an angel of light, who will bring peace on earth as a wildly popular and benevolent despot. He will have miraculously appearing powers. Mostly, he will be recognized by our inability to recognize him (or her), at least easily. Hitler may have come the closest to meeting this description, that is prior to plunging the world into war and creating the holocaust.

It is the ignorance of who the anti-Christ might be that leads to a certain competition among Christians to be the first to spot the beast. Some thought it was Ronald Wilson Reagan (count the letters in each name, and what do you get?), and others have thought that any president supportive of peace in Palestine or of the United Nations earns the title. It is the unpopularity of all these previous nominees and their obvious flaws that assure us that they were  not the anti-Christ.

Yet the search continues. Adding fuel to the competitive zeal is that many so-called liberal churches in Germany embraced Hitler, and it took awhile for other Christians to realize how evil he was. The Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches were particularly nefarious in this regard, a failing that can  make them anxious to pull the anti-Christ trigger at the first glimmer of a problem: "Fool me once . . . "

The key to understanding the significance of 666 is understanding 777. The latter is the number of completeness, the transformative wholeness characteristic of the loving, saving God. 666 is a wholeness reached without God, a boastful human incompleteness that insists on the respect that we accord God. 666 pridefully says that humans don't need God: We can do it all ourselves.

Obama tests lots of trial balloons that explode in his face, and the fiasco over insuring birth control and abortions was an obvious one that could have been predicted by anyone who hangs around church for any length of time. I suspect too that world peace, including peace in the Middle East, is not within his grasp. Still, alleged psychic Jeanne Dixon once observed that the anti-Christ would be born in the Middle East (presumably with a Middle Eastern name), and a man of African heritage named Barack Obama surely fits the bill. This may explain why the birthers are so determined to prove that he couldn't have been born in Hawaii.  

Frankly, until this president wins over a recalcitrant congress and stops speaking like a Black Baptist preacher, I don't think he has a prayer of being the anti-Christ. Too many people hate him for no good reason.

We lived in Florida for five years, before our older boy Will was born. It was a very decent neighborhood, although not in the nicest zip code. Lake Apopka was nearby, a significant body of water reminiscent of  Homer Simpson's Lake Springfield and just as polluted: Even the gators didn't care much for it, and whatever was swimming in it on moonlight nights, creating ripples and splashes: Well, it wasn't fish. Still, we really loved the people there, and it was home.

If you passed far enough north, near very nice Lake Mary - think of the homes of professional golfers, basketball players, baseball players, and the like - eventually you arrived in Sanford. It was not a happy place, a railroad town renowned at the time for its racial divisions. There were older nice sections in Sanford; I recall driving through some. There was a zoo there, with a pony ride for Will that ended each of our visits. But it wasn't much of a zoo, and the crowd visiting there looked pretty rough. Heck, we looked kind of rough: Those were the years we searched under sofa cushions for loose coins to bank before our bill payments were cashed.

Sanford was real Florida, away from Busch Gardens and Disney. In a sense, Florida has been one of the United States' third world countries. It was, for a long time, the land of escape, of easy divorce and bankruptcy. It still taxes its citizens little and invests even less in its schools. It took awhile for us to decide to move. But when the neighbor killed his wife, cut her up into little pieces, and stuck her in the freezer, I was shocked. When what appeared to be the same freezer that showed up in front of the house during the pre-house sale yard auction, we moved to Des Moines.

In Sanford clustered the intergenerational poor, the sometimes working poor, the ones Florida and the nation have said will always be with us. Every state has them, but Sanford had lots of them. With insufficient employment and economic opportunity, competition could take the form of racial tension. Combine that with readily available handguns, and gun laws that strive to even the odds between the threatened and those perceived as threats - perception being reality, don't you know? - and the combination is deadly.

Public consensus blames the shooter, George Zimmerman, and I do to this extent: I don't keep a handgun in my home because I fear what I would do if feeling threatened or angry. I don't walk the streets looking for suspicious people in hoodies. I don't live in a town where racial differences alone constitute a justification for aggression. I don't live in a state where politicians advocate for loose gun laws for the sake of political advantage (hey - come to think of it . . . ). Quiet voices on the margins admit that they wonder how they would have acted if they had been in the place of the shooter. And why would they be in the place of the shooter?

But the issue is larger than Trawon Martin and George Zimmerman or us. Reality never comes as discrete, isolated  persons in a vacuum or even as two separate individuals in a chance encounter. Yes, someone pulled the trigger: This is inescapable. But confining blame to these two lost souls can be distracting. Relationships are amazingly tangled, and these awful circumstances were fraught with complexity:  between the two tragic characters, one black and one Latino; their neighbors; their police force; their community; the state of Florida; national racial and economic politics; and the history and current circumstances of all of us. Neither Trawon Martin nor George Zimmerman will ever receive justice. The rest of us still have a chance for it: We have another day to figure out how to get it.

    Mercedes-Benz has come out with an invisible car - at least almost so. A camera on one side broadcasts pictures to LED panels on the other side. So as the car passes, the scene that normally would be blocked by the car appears on the car's side to be observed by passerbys. The news commentator describing the action noted the obvious: Mercedes typically doesn't build cars for the purpose of making them disappear. They get noticed.  

   People are quite different. It is amazing how completely invisible they can be. It is only when they disappear that they come to our attention. One of the great tragedies of the recent storms was a baby picked up a by a tornado and deposited in a field. Angel's parents and siblings had been killed when the tornado struck their mobile home. For a time she became a symbol of hope for victims and helpers alike. Now she has died, and she has a become a different symbol: of hopes dashed in the face of relentless nature. Of course, this is temporary: We will soon forget her completely. 

    Had there been no tornado, it is doubtful we would have heard of baby Angel at all. She might have grown up and grown old, and remained anonymous to most of us: anonymous like most people are to us, who are invisible to us. We see around and through them, and they do the same to us. Even in the church, where we are designed to be person to person, face to face, epiphanies to one another, it is hard to get people to take the time to really see each other. If they do see, they see people they know. They do not see Angel on the margins, the stranger near the back or beside the windows' glare, or in the corner. Funny how tornados and death can find and reveal people to us that we typically would overlook. Not so funny, actually.