To Hell in a Handbasket...

From our “to-hell-in-a-handbasket” department... It was reported today that the Damson Dene Hotel in England’s picturesque Lake District was replacing its traditional Gideon Bibles in each room with a copy of the popular “adult” (“adult” as in “pornographic”) novel Fifty Shades of Grey.”  The hotel, which was ironically bought from a Methodist group several years ago, decided that having Gideon Bibles around was “wholly inappropriate” in our postmodern, secular society.  What better way to be “appropriate” than to provide free of charge a widely popular smut novel?  Jonathan Denby (not Denbigh), the hotel’s owner remarked, “Everybody is reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ we thought it would be a hospitable thing to do, to have this available for our guests, especially if some of them were a little bit shy about buying it because of its reputation.”  But then Denby quickly added that he himself had not read the book.  Well, maybe now he can get a room and read it.

We do live in a postmodern, post-Christian, secular society.  One of the things that means is that we can forget the nod and special treatment that our culture once gave the church.  When I was a kid (granted, a long time ago), we didn't have school events on Wednesday nights because that was church night for many of the students and the school didn't want to interfere.  Well that has gone the way of the dodo bird, hasn't it.  People in our culture no longer just accept the Bible as the “The Good Book.” It is just one book among many.  People no longer describe good manners and helpfulness as “the Christian thing to do.”  In fact, they may be more likely to see waving a hateful sign and telling people they are going to hell as “the Christian thing to do.”  The Christian faith is going to have to compete in the marketplace of ideas with a host of other and conflicting ideas.  And in that marketplace, putting a pornographic novel in the nightstands of hotels is just as likely as putting a Bible there.

So how are we going to get people to take the Christian faith seriously today?  There is only one way.  And it’s not wringing our hands and shouting “Woe is we” as we complain about how our society is going to hell in a handbasket.  No, what Christians have to do today is to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and go out and live the joyous, triumphant, expectant and praise-filled life that Christianity was and is designed to be.  We are to reflect and replicate as best we can the life and teaching of the most amazing, gracious, loving, accepting and positive person the world has ever produced… because He was the power that produced the world.  The way we get people to take faith seriously today is to live it as it was meant to be lived. 

Oh sure, people died in the arena for doing that in the first century.  So what’s your point?

Idlewild 2012

Another year at Camp Idlewild is in the books. Every year I decide that I'm getting too old for such things; in fact, this year I had decided that this was my last. But then God saw to it that I had 24 middle-schoolers (12 boys and 12 girls) who were cooperative, enthusiastic, good-natured, well-mannered and just plain fun... how could I go out with a group like that? Also, I had a crack staff of volunteers that made the week smooth as silk. And maybe a redesigned staff quarters (that we nicknamed "The Taj Mahal") made "roughing-it" at camp not really rough at all. It was a great week; thanks to all the campers and staff that made it so. Here is a sampling from the week--



The theme this year was "Heroes of the Faith." The classes each day looked at different Old Testament characters who had to trust in God during difficult times. My favorite moment from class was when Keri relabeled a can of tuna fish as "Cat Food" and then challenged the boys to try it (which, surprisingly, they fought for the chance to do). Point: Job (or Moses or one of the other heroes of the faith) had to endure some things that were yucky on the outside but they trusted God to get them through it (the boys were disappointed when they found out that the cat food wasn't really cat food). The winning cabin skit (from Boys Cabin #1) retold in Idlewild fashion the story of Moses, one of our heroes of the faith--



In the evening devotionals, we looked-- not at God's heroes from the Old Testament, but his rules. The kids learned the Ten Commandments in order and we looked at several and tried to make applications to their lives. The kids were super attentive during these 30 minutes at the end of a long, tiring and hot day; I sometimes had a hard time getting through all my material because of all the (mostly) good comments they were making. Here is Girl's Cabin One reminding us of what Jesus really wants from us--



Two weeks before camp started, I had no male counselors (always the hardest position to fill); I ended up with four and let one of them stay home (he was going as a counselor the next week and needed to conserve his energy). Thanks to Ethan Bynum, Jerrod Tatum and Will Respess for stepping up... and keeping Roger and I out of the cabins! Here is Girls Cabin #2 reminding us that we need to be careful what we hope for and focus on things that last--



The weather was HOT, hitting 100 once and hovering nearby most of the week. But the weather was for the most part dry, which made it easy to stay on schedule. As great as the camp facility is (and it was in great shape this year-- the pool was perfect and the new staff quarters and girls bath house were great), there is really not much to do at camp when it rains. We did have a real frog-strangling gulley-washer the last afternoon and evening, but we got through it. Here is Boys Cabin #2 telling us what to do and not do in a thunderstorm--



My one request from the board for a facility change would be to re-position the volleyball court back under the trees in the shade. It was too hot much of the time on some days that physical activity was dangerous. But it seemed 15 degrees cooler in the shade. Back in the olden days, the volleyball court under the trees served as the functional center of the camp-- when there wasn't anything organized going on, the kids played volleyball under the trees where it was cool )and the net was lower and the court smaller than regulation)... or they say on the benches around the volleyball court and talked. I would like to bring that back.

It was a great week. If you didn't get a chance to go to camp this year, start making plans for next year. I am.

I Don't Have a Clue!

One of my teachers in college used to tell us never to “preach your doubts.” This is similar to warning trial lawyers never to ask questions in court that you don’t already know the answer to. Preachers aren't to raise issues or questions in a sermon for which they have no answers because that will just confuse and frustrate people. Maybe that's why some people think that preachers know everything about the Bible; we aren't allowed to bring up the multitude of questions for which we have no answers.

Does that same principle apply to blogs? Is it OK to raise questions in my blog that I don’t have answers for? Well, that is precisely what I'm going to do this morning. Because I don’t have a clue in what is going on in our daily Bible reading from 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21. Here’s my summary of the story—

David angers God by conducting a census of fighting age men. David finally realizes (too late) that this was a bad idea and repents and God offers David his choice of punishments—3 years of famine, three months of fleeing from enemies, or three days of plague. David chooses the plague and 70,000 people died… and David realizes he made the wrong choice.

The story ends with David offering sacrifices of repentance on the threshing floor he bought from Araunah, the site upon which Solomon would later build the Temple (2 Chr 3:1). So what’s the problem with this story? From my limited and perplexed perspective, there are plenty of questions here.

• First, we aren't ever told why this census was such a horrible sin. Moses had been commanded to do that very thing in preparation for the conquest of Canaan (Exo 20:12). Maybe the census shows a lack of trust in God?  Later David resists another census because “the LORD had promised to make Israel as numerous as the stars in the sky” (1 Chron 27:23).  But we aren't told.
  
• Second, who was it exactly that incited David to take this census? In 2 Samuel, the idea seems to come from God, “the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah” (24:1). In 1 Chronicles, the idea comes from Satan, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel” (21:1).  Sure, David made the decision, but did the temptation come from God or Satan?
  
• Third, Joab (himself no spiritual giant) instantly knew that this census was a bad idea and tries to talk David out of the plan. OK, that a little our of character for him, but then why in 1 Chron 27:24, is it Joab that begins his own effort to count the fighting men?
  
• Fourth, does the punishment fit the crime? David commits adultery and murders his faithful servant to cover up that sin, and the punishment was the death of a child and constant turmoil within David’s family. But here David counts his army and the punishment is 70,000 deaths of innocent and ignorant people? Maybe it’s just me, but something seems a little out of kilter there.

God is God and God is All-Sovereign. One of the fringe benefits in being God is that you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone.  Maybe the point of stories like this is to remove the fiction that we have allowed ourselves to buy into that we can reduce the Bible to neat and simple stories that fit nicely together with one another and with our theological understandings. God is too massive for us to understand, even in these stories that He has left for us. These stories speak to us of the One who lives in unapproachable light, and thus they sometimes jostle against one another in ways that don’t fully make sense to us. Should that surprise us? Or should it rather surprise us if those stories fit together too neatly and nicely so that we would wonder if they were really about God?

Second Verse Different from the First...

Our reading for today from Psalm 95 should sound very familiar to many of us. Not because we read the Psalms so much that we have them memorized but because we sing them so much we have part of them memorized. Several of the praise songs we sing from time to time come from Psalm 95. In fact one of them is cleverly titled "Psalm 95" (Music by Jason Hill, Dick Dalzell and words by God)

Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord
Let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving (and extol)
And extol him with music and song...

Actually that song is Psalm 95:1-5 word for word out of the NIV.  So you might not like the song, but it's hard to complain much about the lyrics! The same is true for the song "Come Let Us Worship and Bow Down" by Dave Doherty. He picks up where Hill and Dalzell leave off in Psalm 95:6-7a

Come let us worship and bow downLet us kneel before the Lord, our God our Maker.For He is our God,And we are the people of His pastureAnd the sheep of His hand,    And the sheep of His hand.

These two songs are very different (the first is way uptempo, the second is slow and reflective) but they come (almost) word for world from Psalm 95. They also share in common the fact that ignore the second verse and stern warning of the Psalm--

Today, if only you would hear his voice,8 “Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”

So maybe that part of the psalm is just harder to put to music; it is definitely not happy-clappy. But the message of this part of the psalm must be important because that is the part that is picked up and used by the writer of Hebrews... twice (Heb 3:7-11, 4:3).

God is "the Rock of salvation" and we are "the people of his pasture" not because of what and how we sing on Sundays. The stern warning here is not to harden our hearts as Israel did at Meribah and Massah when they complained against Moses because they did not trust God to provide them water in the wilderness. They complained about the hardships of the journey and did not trust God to provide for them. You see, if we really believe that God is our Rock (from where water comes) and that we are the people of his pasture (thus taken care of by Him), then we will not have hard harts and become discouraged by the difficulties of our journey. That generation of Jew did not enter the rest of Promised Land because they didn't trust God on the journey.

It's one thing to sing the praise songs on Sunday. We need to sing them because they remind us of who God is and what God does. But those songs have meaning only if they lead us to trust and obey God daily as we live through the wilderness that can be our lives. We need to sing that last verse of Psalm 95, because that verse is the point.

A Hundred Nails in Your Tire?

9 I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples.
10 For great is your love, reaching to the heavens;
your faithfulness reaches to the skies.
11 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
let your glory be over all the earth. (Psalm 57:9-11)

Sometimes we all feel like the service station guy who is the subject of one of those little "true life experience" blurbs at the bottom of the page of Reader Digest.

Shortly after I moved from Alaska to California, one of my studded snow tires went flat. The service-station attendant took one long look, shook his head and said, 'Mister, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’ve got over a hundred nails in your tire!

Some days your life can feel like your tire has gone flat, and then some days it feels more like you have a hundred nails in it. Life can be stressful, tense, difficult and trying... and those are the good days. Sometimes   we just feel totally overwhelmed. Just like David was in our reading from Psalm 57.

Read verse 4 and you think David is in the jungle surrounded by wild beasts. Read verse 6 and you think David is on the battlefield surrounded by enemies. But read verse 5 and you think David is in church! What gives? David is having a really, really bad day. The superscription suggests that he wrote this while in a cave hiding from Saul. His enemies were literally closing in around him, and so David cries out to God.  (We assume David writes the Psalm later while reflecting back on the case; crying out either in fear or worship is not recommended for those hiding out in caves!)

But something happens on the way to David's lament; his desperate cry for help becomes a deliberate cry of worship. What David needed at this difficult time of life was to know that God was near. And the way that we feel the nearness of God was through worship. So David the persecuted becomes David the worshipper. He first makes the decision to praise (verses 7-8) and then gives himself to praise (verses 9-11).

One thing is clear. David would not have understood the well-intentioned but wrong-headed notion that we sometimes express in our announcements or prayer that in order to really worship, we must  "leave behind the cares and concerns of this world."   Last Sunday, we even sang, "Lay your burden down, every care you carry..."  Do we have to do that before we can worship?  David didn't. He rather brought his cares and concerns to God and praised God despite them and because of them. His need for God because of those burdens drove him to praise God. Worship for David was the conduit that brought him into God's presence for healing and comfort. Maybe there is a lesson there for us. Has you life suffered a flat tire? Praise God!