Happy Thanksgiving

A man in Arizona calls his son in Chicago the day before Thanksgiving and says, “I hate to ruin your holiday, but your mother and I are divorcing; forty-five years of misery is enough.”  Frantic, the son calls his sister in New York and tells her the news.  She immediately calls and screams at her father, “You are NOT getting divorced. My brother and I will be on a flight tonight; don’t do a single thing until we get there tomorrow. The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife and says, “Ok, Dear, it’s all arranged; the kids are coming home for Thanksgiving and are paying their own way.”

I thought that was hysterical, though it only got a mild chuckle last night at our Thanksgiving devotional.  I guess maybe I just like devious plots that you pull on your kids! 

Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday, but thanksgiving itself is a sacred act of worship that we offer to our God.  Many of the passages in the Bible that talk about the giving of thanks to God appear in the context of worship.  Notice some examples--

Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts. (1 Chronicles 16:8-9)

With praise and thanksgiving they sang to the LORD: “He is good; his love to Israel endures forever.” And all the people gave a great shout of praise to the LORD. (Ezra 3:11)

The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song. (Psalm 28:7)

Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts. (Psalm 105:1-2)

Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for men, for he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. Psalm 107:8-9

You are my God, and I will give you thanks; you are my God, and I will exalt you. Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever. (Psalm 118:28-29)

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the God of gods. His love endures forever. (Psalm 136:1-3)

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:19-20)

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

I was taught growing up that there are five acts of worship—singing, praying, preaching, communion and giving.  Those work OK if you define them broadly enough to cover all the other acts of worship they don’t cover.  And maybe thanksgiving is just a form prayer (see 1 Timothy 2:1).  But how many corporate worship services do we have that focus on the giving of thanks?  Maybe one a year… during this time of year?  I wonder if there is as close a connection between thanksgiving and our worship as there appears to be in the Bible?

Here’s something that struck me yesterday as I was putting together our thanksgiving devo.  We have only 4 songs in our hymnal that use the word “thanksgiving.”  Only 2 songs have the word “thankful” while 16 us the word “thank.”  It is interesting with the emphasis that is placed in scripture on singing and thanksgiving that this theme isn’t represented any better in our singing worship!

Pay It Forward

A woman pulled up to the drive-thru at a Starbucks in Sacramento, CA and ordered a double-tall, ginger snap latte. (ginger snap?)  When she paid for her coffee, she paid double, thus paying for the person behind her in line.  The person behind her then paid for the person behind him, and the chain effect continued 109 times as people continued to pay-it-forward, buying coffee for the person behind them in line.  April Fredrikson, the Starbucks barista said, “We still recognize that we're all kind of in it together, we're all in the economy thing together and to come here and just like pay it forward and help everyone out, it's really a community contribution.” 

What a great reminder that we are in this community thing together and that means we need to look for ways to pay it forward.  In 2 Corinthians 1:3,4—

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

We receive comfort from God so that we can pay forward that comfort to others.  It works with coffee and other material blessings as well as with the emotional and spiritual support Paul discusses.  John Donne said, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”  God places us in relationship with others so that we can bless them and they bless us.  We are to pay it forward.

On Seeing the Unseen

Hebrews 11 is often called "the hall of fame of faith."  The writer points to the example of the Old Testament faithful to encourage his readers (and us) to live lives of faith.  The theme that appears again and again in this chapter is that these heroes of faith were heroes because they were able to see that which could not be seen.  Faith is being “certain of what we do not see” (11:1). That is the characteristic the writer highlights in these heroes of the faith--

• Noah saw things “not yet seen” (11:7). When God confronted Noah with the message of the coming flood, he had nothing to go on except faith. He had never seen a flood before, and he had certainly never seen an ark! But faith allowed Noah to be able to see the unseen. For him, the real world was that which could not be seen except through faith. And thus, “By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (11:7).
  
  
• Abraham saw by faith a city that could not be seen (11:8-10). Abraham was certainly not looking for an earthly city. If that is what he was after, he would have never left his birthplace in Ur, the greatest city on earth at the time. No, Abraham was looking for a city that could not be seen, the city of God. And because he kept looking for that city, he never really quite fit in to the world around him. He was a pilgrim and wanderer in this world. Faith led him to see the unseen as the real world.
  
  
• Moses was also able to see Him who is unseen (11:24-27). Moses made the choice to throw his lot in with the people of God. He chose to be a Hebrew slave rather than the prince of Egypt. Why? Faith gave him a clear view of the reality could not be seen. Because he gave up such power and influence, he never really fit in with the world. And yet, his influence is still felt today in the real world of faith.

The writer wants us to understand two things about the heroes of faith.  First, they saw the unseen world of faith as the true "real world."  Second, in doing so, they never quite fit into the seen world of the here and now.  This is important for people who struggle to live lives of faith. It teaches us to expect hardships and difficulties. When we live in the real world, we should expect to not fully fit into the world of the here and now. That was true of Noah and Abraham and Moses.  Should we expect it to be any different for us? 

After We Die

Roger suggested that I look at Patrick Mead's blog entitled Tentpegs. Patrick (who at one time preached at Grandy Street in Norfolk) is answering tough questions that his readers send in. (If I ever get readers, I may try that. Then again...) Since his question and answer for today is about the passage I preached on Sunday, I thought I would cut and paste it. That and because it is so much easier than writing something of my own. Warning, this is a l-o-o-o-o-n-g blog entry, though it is about average for Patrick's entries--

What happens to the righteous after they die? Do they sleep somewhere until God wakes them up on the last day? Are they conscious at all? Do they go to heaven? Are they in paradise? Are the dead aware of what is going on on earth? When we are resurrected, is it just our bodies or are our souls remade or resurrected, too?

I knew the answers to all of these questions — and more! — when I was a kid. Long before PowerPoint or MediaShout, we had bedsheet sermons, sometimes called "chart" sermons. For those sad, poor, ignorant people who don’t know what I am talking about, a bedsheet sermon wasn’t a lesson on the Song of Solomon but, rather, a bedsheet strung in front of the auditorium and festooned with illustrations, lurid colors, scripture references, and a really cool title. We loved these sermons because there was something other than a preacher to look at during the lesson. Besides, it was as close to "art" as we were allowed to get in the church. (think I’m kidding? When our church bought a Methodist building, my father had them remove or cover the stained glass windows. The beautiful altar rail and furniture on the stage were all removed and replaced with a plain wooden pulpit and a bench seat for the song leader and preacher to use. This was normal in my religious tribe)

An aside: once when we were visited by several Big Preachers in the Brotherhood at the same time, my mother ran out of sheets and had to get creative. She made up a bed for me in a corner of the house. When I pulled back the blanket to climb in I was greeted with huge letters asking "Where Are The Dead?" This is one eight year old that didn’t sleep well that night. I kept fearing that I would unwittingly roll over on the "tartarus" section and, if Jesus came back, he might leave me there.

Anyway, "Where Are The Dead?" was a very, very popular sermon. Most traveling preachers had a version of that bedsheet sermon and it had been made into a tract (religious booklet) and a flimstrip that gave most of us kids the heebie-jeebies. Taking most of its material from the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke 16, this was a very cool sheet. Dead people who were righteous were "carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom" and deposited in Paradise, one of the three subsections of Hades, the waiting place for the dead. The other two places were Tartarus — a place of torment for the wicked — and the Great Gulf, or the area that lay between Paradise and Tartarus that was so wide that no one could cross from one place to the other.

Then… one day… Jesus would come again. Arrows on the sheet showed souls from Paradise meeting up with Jesus and then meeting up with their resurrected bodies and entering heaven (after formal judgment). Souls in Tartarus met their bodies, too, but they were then tossed from the fire in Tartarus to the fires in hell so their situation didn’t really change much.

There are problems with this view… but there are also problems with every other view I have seen. I love Edward Fudge’s work, for example, and wouldn’t want to engage him in a "smart contest" but I don’t buy his view of this passage — which is anything but traditional. Neither do I accept the bedsheet sermon as entirely accurate.

The fact is… I don’t know for sure what happens next. There. I said it. I have absolute trust in God that He will do the right thing and that I will be with Jesus in heaven for eternity but I am not sure about the process and what I will see or feel or experience from here to there. Many passages are salted throughout scripture saying that we "sleep" but there are others such as this passage in Luke and some in Revelation which show us as being alive, aware, and active after death. In Revelation, we see martyrs talking to God, asking questions, and speaking about things going on on planet earth. At the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah walked with Christ without any mention of them being remade or resurrected just for that one event. Because of passages such as that, I cannot buy the "no consciousness until Jesus returns" teaching.

Neither can I say that we stay in Paradise until judgment day after seeing so many already in heaven in Revelation. I’m not at all sure there is a separate place called Paradise. It might just be another name for being with God. I don’t think the rich man is still in Tartarus (where preachers assured us he was still calling for a drop of water after all these centuries) or that he will then be transferred into hell one day. I think he was burned up, annihilated. I don’t think that people in heaven can see their friends and relatives burning in hell, much less that they can turn a blind eye to that and enjoy heaven while that view is off the port bow, so to speak.

Yet, even if the evil are annihilated out of sight of the righteous, where are the righteous? I find it informative that those who were able to see beyond the veil were not allowed to speak of it. Paul says he saw things "it is not lawful" to speak about. John the Revelator saw and heard something in heaven that the angel told him he was not allowed to repeat. "Do not write" was an strange order to receive after he’d been told to write so many other strange things, but there it is. No one was allowed to enter or see what was there and then give a guided tour later! In case you wonder, that DOES mean I have big problems with those who write about their visits to heaven. I cannot say they didn’t go there because I’m not God and I don’t know for sure. However, I know the brain and I know how the release of chemicals, the behavior of pain receptors, and the clash of memories and expectations can produce incredibly realistic visions and memories of things that never happened. (remember — I’m not a theologian but I AM a scientist who deals with the brain)

While I don’t know what will happen for sure, I am absolutely, 100% sure that we who belong to Jesus Christ are going to love how it all turns out. I am so very excited to get to see it for myself! Contrary to the country song popular right now that states everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to go now… I want to go now! I am Paul in Philippians One; the only reason I can tolerate staying here is because I know that means I have something to do for Jesus. My work, evidently, isn’t finished yet. Sleep, transference into Paradise, or the express train to heaven…. either way, those who believe on the Lord and who walk in His steps are going to love whatever it is that happens next.

On Prominent Church Members

There's an old joke of the successful Texas oil man who retires to his hometown in Oklahoma.  The little church there is dominated by a rich man who gives the lion's share of the contribution and who in return always seems to get his way.  Anytime anything was proposed that he didn't like, this "prominent member" would say, "Well, I've given a lot of money to this church, I and just think..."  And sure enough, he would get his way.  Finally, the old Texas oil man got tired of this routine.  Just when the man was launching his, "I've given a lot of money" speech, the oil man interrupted him and asked, "Just how much money have you given here?" The man stammered, "Why do you want to know that?"  He answered, "Cause I'm fixin' to buy you out!"  And he did!

Unfortunately, this old joke is not so far fetched.  It is common for "prominent members" of churches to believe that their prominence (money-given, services-rendered, time-spent, family connections or whatever) means they get to have their way.  They expect that their needs or opinions will always outweigh all others.  In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul seems to argue that just the opposite should be true; the parts of the body that are the weakest should be the ones of which the body should take special care—

Those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.

Paul seems to think that the “more prominent” parts of the body of Christ (whoever they may be) should go out of their way to take care of the less prominent parts (whoever they may be). Jesus has already bought us all out, and we should take care of all members of His body.

 

There is a difference between an organization and a family.  In an organization, there is a hierarchy of importance.  Those who contribute the most to the organization are valued the most.  Well, the church isn’t an organization; it is a family.  In a family, everyone is valuable just because they are part of the family.  They may not perform as vital a function in the family as another person, but they are valuable simply because they are family.  Daddy may be the breadwinner and the entire family depends directly upon him.  At the same time, Baby doesn't contribute a single function to the family... except providing constant chaos.  But who is the most important?  Well, everyone in the family is!  Pragmatically, it is Baby who will get the lion’s share of the family's attention because in a family, the one who needs the most attention is the one who gets the most attention.

 

We must make the church the kind of family where there are no prominent members or non-prominent members.  We are family, and we must not allow ourselves to order ourselves based upon the hierarchy of an organization.  We are God's family.  And thus we are of equal value to God and thus to one another.

President-Elect Obama Get's It Right

Did you catch the Barak and Michelle Obama interview last night on 60 Minutes?  Mr. and Mrs. Obama answered a variety of questions from the historical significance of his election to the family's selection of the new first dog. It was a good interview.

But it was the last question of the interview that gave me hope for our future.  Steve Kroft asked Mr. Obama, "As president of the United States, what can you do, or what do you plan to do, about getting a college football playoff for the national championship?"  His response was--

I think any sensible person would say that if you've got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there's no clear decisive winner that we should be creating a playoff system. Eight teams. That would be three rounds, to determine a national champion... I don't know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I'm gonna throw my weight around a little bit. I think it's the right thing to do.

There you have it!  Our new president-elect shows that he has the intelligence and conviction to assume the role as leader of the free world.  I now wait with great anticipation for him to launch the first air strike on BCS headquarters!  

Smoke Test

I knew there was some easy way to embed a YouTube (or GodTube) video in the blog.  People not that much smarter than me have been doing all along!  So I just got the bright idea to Google "How to insert YouTube video in blogger" and got a link entitled "How to insert YouTube video in blogger."  Brilliant!  Simply Brilliant!  See yesterday's post for my "smoke test."  (That term is from my Dad's days as a typewriter and calculator repairman; if you plug the newly repaired machine in and it doesn't smoke, it's fixed!) 

Speaking of a smoke test... Jon Wilson sent me an article by Cal Thomas entitled "Religious Right RIP" from the conservative political website Townhall.com.  Thomas argues that it is time for Evangelicals to lay down the sword and pick up the cross.  Those aren't his words, but that is the gist of what he is saying.  The smoke test for advancing the kingdom of God isn't political power but living out God's power in the lives of individual believers.  Let me quote a section of the article and encourage you to read the whole thing.  Good stuff.

Too many conservative Evangelicals have put too much faith in the power of government to transform culture. The futility inherent in such misplaced faith can be demonstrated by asking these activists a simple question: Does the secular left, when it holds power, persuade conservatives to live by their standards? Of course they do not. Why, then, would conservative Evangelicals expect people who do not share their worldview and view of God to accept their beliefs when they control government?

Too many conservative Evangelicals mistake political power for influence. Politicians who struggle with imposing a moral code on themselves are unlikely to succeed in their attempts to impose it on others. What is the answer, then, for conservative Evangelicals who are rightly concerned about the corrosion of culture, the indifference to the value of human life and the living arrangements of same- and opposite-sex couples?

The answer depends on the response to another question: do conservative Evangelicals want to feel good, or do they want to adopt a strategy that actually produces results? Clearly partisan politics have not achieved their objectives. Do they think they can succeed by committing themselves to 30 more years of the same?

If results are what conservative Evangelicals want, they already have a model. It is contained in the life and commands of Jesus of Nazareth. Suppose millions of conservative Evangelicals engaged in an old and proven type of radical behavior. Suppose they followed the admonition of Jesus to "love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison and care for widows and orphans," not as ends, as so many liberals do by using government, but as a means of demonstrating God's love for the whole person in order that people might seek Him?

Through the Eyes of a Child

Someone evidently asked a Sunday School class to write letters to God.  And then someone else put some of their answers into a video on GodTube.  Warning: This pegs the cute-o-meter pretty hard!

Boy, these kids sure have goofy ideas about how God works, right?  I couldn't help but think that God thinks the same thing whenever we wax elloquwent with our best reason explanations of things like the Trinity, free-will vs sovereignity and where Cain got his wife.  "My kids sure have goofy ideas about the way We do things."   God speaks to us in the Bible in "baby talk" because that is all we can understand.  Oh, we must do our best work in trying to understand what the Bible says, but please don't think that God is somehow limited to our limited understanding of what He tells us!  Randy Harris once said, "Don't tell God what He can't do; it annoys Him." We would do well to sing with David the song of ascents in Psalm 131--

My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; 

.....I do not concern myself with great matters 

..........or things too wonderful for me. 

But I have stilled and quieted my soul; 

.....like a weaned child with its mother, 

..........like a weaned child is my soul within me. 

O Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore.

A Death He Can Use

"It is not, of course, that we are to run out and actively seek a miserable life like Lazarus’s. Contrary to the misreading of the spiritual advice of earlier centuries (for example, the go-hunt-for-trouble interpretation of Donne’s “Be covetous of crosses, let none fall”), we are not to go searching for loathesome diseases and rotten breaks. Life in this vale of tears will provide an ungenteel sufficiency of such things... The truth, rather, is that the crosses that will inexorably come— and the death that will inevitably result from them— are, if accepted, all we need. For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctible; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot."

-- from Robert Farrar Capon in Kingdom, Grace, Judgment

Blab It and Grab It

I’m not a fan of the kind of religious yellow journalism that is constantly out to nail heretic hides to wall.  I think we have better things to do than sift through someone’s web site sermons and articles looking for heresy.  I’ve had that happen, and it can be annoying.  Anyone who preaches and teaches long enough are going to say things that are imprecise and therefore erroneous.  It isn’t helpful to root around and find those and publish them on your blog.

Saying that, I stumbled across a video on you tube of Joel Osteen's TV show.  Osteen preaches for Lakewood Church, largest church in America; his sermons are broadcast to millions each week.  Osteen is a leading advocate of the Prosperity Gospel, sometimes called “Word of Faith” or “Health and Wealth” or “Name-It-and-Claim-It” (or as someone put it, “Blab-It-and-Grab-It”).  Whoever posted the video put in their own comments, and while most are fairly accurate criticisms, they aren’t exactly done in a sweet spirit.  Watch the video and try to ignore the comments.

What Osteen says in his sermon is that Jesus died on the cross so that we could have a financially prosperous life.  He doesn’t say it quite that bluntly, but then he ALMOST says it that bluntly.  He suggests that Jesus resurrection gives us the abundant life, which is a life of total victory—

Not partial victory where we have a good family and good health but we constantly struggle in our finances.  That’s not total victory.  

The point of the death and resurrection of Jesus is financial prosperity?  Osteen says nothing about sin or forgiveness.  He talks about, well, health and wealth.  One of us is missing the point of the cross, and I don’t think its me!

Here’s my point.  I wonder how many of us act like the point of the cross is finances?  What do we focus on, spend our time on, and worry the most over?  Maybe ol’ Joel is just preaching like many of us are acting.  Maybe that's why so many people listen to him.

Election Day Eve

I’m not sure how it happened, but I have evidently recently become a Greg Boyd groupie.  I first read his book “Letters from a Skeptic,” an exchange of letters between Boyd and his unbelieving father on the nature of faith.  I then started working through his book “God of the Possible,” an introduction to “Open Theism” which argues that the future is only partly known and determined by God.  I’m about a quarter of the way through that one.  

Then I decided to preach an Election Day sermon… which wasn’t on Election Day or had much to do with the election.  I remember that Boyd had this book entitled Myth of a Christian Nation; after reading some quotations from it, I decided that I needed that book before I preached the sermon Sunday.  But I didn’t have time to order it, so I had to go to Lifeway and pay retail.  I called to reserve my copy, and when I got there I discovered they only had the hardback version, so this was really going to set me back.  As it turned out, they had it on clearance for $1.99 plus tax!  I didn’t really use it for the sermon, though I did refer to it in my Sunday night discussion.  To paraphrase Jim McQuiggen, “I think everyone should be forced to read Boyd’s book… if they want to.”

Boyd’s book is summed up by the title of the sermon that inspired it (whose title I co-opted for my discussion last night), “The Cross and the Sword.”  Boyd believes that Christians are called to be citizens of the kingdom of God who live out the sacrificial life of the cross; all governments are part of the kingdom of the sword who “lord it over” and “exercise authority” by the sword (Matt 20:25).  While civil authority is ordained by God, the kingdoms of the world are controlled by Satan (Luke 4:5-7).  The church must live out the kingdom of God on earth, and the exercise of political power is antithetical to that calling.  The subtitle of Boyd’s book is, “How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church.”  

The devil, of course, is in the details, but much of what Boyd says makes sense.  This was the best $2 bucks I’ve every spent.