Christmas Memories

I'm sure most of us have a lot of Christmas memories.  I do, largely because so much of the ghost of my my Christmas past was caught on home movies and video. In fact, one of our Christmas traditions is to sit around and watch video of Christmas gone by. We haven’t done that this year yet; no one can remember how to work the VCR! But those memories are as vivid as if I were watching the tape now--

• Memories of Lynn holding up her first cellular phone (which was the size of a suitcase), and saying “I got a car phone” to the camera. The girls still mimic her saying that.
  
  
• Memories of Tressa watching her little sister open a gift and then realizing that it was one of her old toys that we had gotten from the attic and were “re-gifting” (back then we called it “hand-me-downs”). Tressa would start to say, “Hey that’s my…” and then her mother jerked her out of frame.
  
  
• Memories of Angelynn opening a Christmas card, holding up the contents for the camera and saying, “A check!” And then she threw it down behind her as she headed for a package that looked more like a toy.
  
  
• Memories of me as the cameraman waiting until all the gifts were opened and then saying, “Hey, the camera was off; wrap them all up and let's do it all over again.”  The girls love that!
  

Of course, my most vivid Christmas memory is of the Christmas morning we spent in Mary Immaculate Hospital in 1981. If you want a little extra Christmas hoopla, have a baby on Christmas morning in a Catholic hospital!  We headed to the hospital just before midnight on Christmas Eve, and our Christmas baby was born at 8:20 that morning. The first thing the doctor did was to turn on the radio in the birthing room so we could listen to Christmas music. (To this day, Lynn starts doing Lamaze breathing every time she hears “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”). One of my most vivid memories of that day was Lynn hurting (back then, women were women and painkillers were for men) and holding my hand so tightly it hurt… and not letting go for about four hours. I had to visit the facilities, but I couldn’t because she was holding my hand. By the doctor came in and distracted her so that I get to the restroom, I had been doing Lamaze breathing with her trying to manage my own pain. For some reason, she never felt sorry for me. Go figure.

Christmas memories.  Christmas is indeed a special time of year. It is a time of joy and celebration, of home and family, and time off from work. That’s why “Tis the season to be jolly,” right? But not everyone is jolly this time of year. In fact, holidays can be the most depressing time of the year. We have expectations that are never really met in reality. Some don’t have family or good family memories. Some suffer through financial woes and sickness and divorce and the death of loved ones, and these always seem hurt more at this season. There can be a great difference between the way things should be and the way things really are.

While we celebrate the Christmas season, may we remember those for whom this season is very difficult. May we remember Jesus’ words that “It is more blessed to give than receive.” May we also remember what He said about banquets—don’t invite people that can repay you but rather invite those who can’t, “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” Jesus says, “Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Lk 14:14).

When Band-Aids Aren't Enough

The book Night of the Grizzly tells the true story of 1972 bear attack in Glacier National Park. Two young women who were camping in the park were mauled to death in separate attacks by a rogue bear. This story might not play very well today— it actually blamed the bear, not the victims, for the attack. And the heroes of the story were rangers who tracked down and destroyed the rogue bear.

In the story, there were two doctors vacationing in the park that did their best to save one of the victims. Both knew from one look at the victim that she had no chance of survival, but they valiantly fought top save her anyway. As they worked to repair the damage caused by severed limbs and severe tissue loss, they noticed a young, dazed park ranger putting peroxide and Band-Aids on scratches. One of the doctors later remarked how struck he was by the irony. Here was a woman literally eaten alive, and someone was putting Band-Aids on scratches?

OK, this is a pretty visceral illustration, but we need to see the point, I think. Doesn’t it seem at times like the church in putting Band-Aids on scratches? We can find ourselves so embroiled in trivial things while the more important things of the faith are ignored. Jesus died to make us one, to tear down the dividing walls between us and we seem intent on building those walls back while the world goes its merry way to hell.

Some of the issues that those in my religious tribe have fought and divided over in the past now seem pretty silly when viewed from the distance of time—multiple cups in communion, individual Bible classes, the support of orphan homes, the use of modern Bible versions, whether or not we worship with instruments, and the list goes on. What is it that seems so important to us today that will seem silly in 100 years? How many people can or can’t hold a microphone during church? Whether or not women can or can’t, must or must not, take a more active role in the worship service? Whether we like to admit it or not, most of the things that we have fought and divided over are about how we do church in the hour or so we are together on Sunday mornings. Is this really the essence of the gospel message?

The world around is bleeding and dying and needs the gospel of the resurrected Savior.  Dare we waste our time and attention putting Band-Aids on the scratches? Perhaps it’s time to not focus so much on what we do “in church” and focus more on being church, the body of Christ ministering to a dying world? How do we do that? Surely we must start by putting down the Band-aids.

Three Dog Night

I'm not talking about the classic 70's rock band.  No, I LIKED them.  "Joy to the World" ("Jeremiah was a bullfrog...) was a classic! No my rant for this morning is about MY three dog night last night.  This morning I was woke up by a dog whimpering or snuffling or whatever.  We have had a little pomma-terrier-whatever mutt named Maggie at our house since 2000 when we finally got a dog for Angelynn.  But Maggie was Angelynn's dog for two weeks; then she became Lynn's dog.  Neither Angelynn nor Lynn had a vote; Maggie chose Lynn.

We didn't know Angelynn harbored this grudge until she came home for summer break this summer with a German Shepherd puppy named Marley.  Her dog.  Marley is almost a year old now, and for the last month (and the next one) Marley has been living with his grandparents (that be us!).  The beast is almost big enough where I could buy him a saddle and ride him to work.  He is a constant bundle of energy who wants to play all the time and will chew anything he can get (I'm on my third pair of shoe strings and I have no slippers... and he literally ate Lynn's homework last week).  OK, I have to admit that he's kinda cute part of the time.  The rest of the time he's lucky I don't keep a loaded gun around.  Of course if I did, he'd probably eat it.

Angelynn came home for Christmas break Saturday, and this time she brought a six-week old Maltese puppy named Bella... for Tressa.  Now Tressa has always said she hates dogs.  All of a sudden she lost her mind or something and had to have this dog.  And guess where little Bella is staying for the next several days?  With us.  This is the dog that woke me up whimpering this morning, and ended up in bed with me!  So a three dog night.

I would say that I love all my grand-dogs and wish they could stay with us forever, but then that would be another Three Dog Night hit-- "Liar."

Who Do We Worship

Back in October, I mentioned a piece by Ben Stein that had been circulated around the internet. Unfortunately, his article was combined with an interview of Anne Graham Lotz and several others and with other stuff made up out of whole cloth and then it all was attributed to Stein. Sites like snopes.com are extremely helpful in separated internet myth from what is true. If we are concerned with truth, it is dangerous to pass along stuff you are emailed or stumble across on the web. A lot of it is simply false.

Anyway, I suggested way back when that Stein’s article (the one he actually wrote) was actually pretty good, and I suggested that I would reprint (repost?) it a bit closer to Christmas. Well, it is a bit closer to Christmas, so here it is straight from his website. (It was written in 2005, so his reference to Nick and Jessica is a bit dated. Maybe replace it with Brad and Angelina?)

Herewith at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart: I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important? I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is, either, and I do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.

Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are. Is this what it means to be no longer young. It's not so bad.

Next confession: I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are: Christmas trees. It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, "Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.

The Fifth Act

I ran across an old blog by John Mark Hicks, a Bible professor at Lipscomb. John Mark has all kinds of connections here at Denbigh. His father was the preacher in the church where Lynn grew up, so they’ve been friends forever. John Mark and I were old camp buddies, and we were at Freed together. John Mark held a seminar for here at Denbigh several years ago, and Lynn and I have him at Pepperdine for several years now. You can read some of John Mark’s works at his web site.

In his blog, John Mark compares our lives as Christians today “living out biblical theology” to a troop of Shakespearean actors performing a play. The analogy isn’t perfect, but then no analogy is. I thin this one does a good job capturing our task as people who live in God and under the Bible.

Our life in Christ is analogous to a group of Shakespearean groupies who have newly discovered a five act play by Shakespeare. It was previously unknown. But the problem is that the last act is missing. We only have the first four acts. The last act is lost. Suppose, however, these scholars, actors, etc., want to perform this play. How can they perform it without the last act? They will have to improvise. In order to do so, they have to "live and breathe" the works of Shakespeare. They will know all his other works, thoroughly know this present play, understand how his mind works, etc. With their "Shakespearean mind" they write and perform the final act as they imagine Shakespeare would have written it.

The analogy is.... We have Scripture which bears witness to the mind of God in Christ. We have the first act-Creation. We have the second act--Israel. We have the third act--Christ. We have the fourth act--the early Church (Acts & the Epistles). We are the fifth act. And we currently perform that fifth act as best we can imaginatively enter into the mind of God in Christ. We live out that mind; we perform the fifth act on the basis of the first four acts.

John Mark goes on to point out that we don’t have a script for living the Christian life in the 21st century. We come across many questions and issues that could not possible be addressed directly in the Bible. I had a professor that was once asked to speak at big a philosophic conference in Europe on “The Bible and In Vitro Fertilization.” Where do you look in the concordance for verses on that—under “I” or “V?” No matter where you look, you won’t find it there. You won’t find specific verses on the Christian and gene splicing, thermonuclear war or recycling. Our (post)modern world brings us in congress with many issues not addressed in the Bible. All we can do is to we seek the mind of God in Christ through the first four acts of the play, and then seek to live out what God would have written had He written the fifth act.

John Mark adds that God has written the sixth act of the play. We know how the story ends. There will be a new heaven and earth where there is no more of the props that dominate the first five acts-- death, mourning, crying and pain. God will make everything new. That is God’s own breathtaking conclusion to the drama of the cosmos. All we have to do is immerse ourselves in acts 1-4 so that we can Biblically improvise our little part in act 5. If we do that, we will be center stage with Jesus taking our bow after the final curtain.

Christmas Services

"Boy, this must be a busy time of year for you!" I get that a lot when people find out that I'm a minister. This is the Christmas, and churches do a lot of special things during this time of the year. I got a postcard from the Presbyterian church across the street advertising their special Christmas services-- two on Christmas Eve, one on Christmas Day and one the day after Christmas. There have been times in the past when we have done Christmas plays for children. One year we did a big Christmas musical entitled "I'll Be Home for Christmas" that involved 1/2 of our church. We'll have our "Christmas service" this Sunday where we sing Christmas songs and
reflect on the meaning of birth of Jesus. So we're not opposed to that sort of thing (though we usually get someone from internet-land writing in to complain that we would do something so "denominational.")

Well, we certainly aren't opposed to doing special things during this special time of the year. But one thing is usually true of our church Christmas services-- they are never on Christmas! Most of our church is from other places, so generally when school lets out, our church lets out and scatters to the four winds. We can't plan anything special during the holidays because we can't count on people being in town. So while many churches are planning big Christmas eve services for next Wednesday, we're trying to decide whether to have services at all! Maybe we'll just anoint next Wednesday as "stay at home night" for the few people who aren't out of town anyway.

So this isn't particularly busy time of year for me. I still have a week of vacation time left, and I think I'm going to take it and let Roger preach the Sunday after Christmas.

The Weight of Our Baggage

In his book The Living Faith, Lloyd C. Douglas tells the story of Thomas Hearne, who was on an expedition to explore to the mouth of the Coppermine River. A few days after they had begun, a party of Indians attacked and made off with most of their supplies. His comment in his journal after this apparent misfortune was, "The weight of our baggage being so much lightened, our next day’s journey was more swift and pleasant." Douglas makes this observation--

Hearne was in route to something very interesting and important; and the loss of a few sides of bacon and a couple of bags of flour meant nothing more than an easing of the load. Had Hearne been hole in somewhere, in a cabin, resolved to spend his last days eking out an existence, and living on capital previously collected, the loss of some of his stores by plunder would probably have worried him almost to death.

Remember the poor widow of Luke 21 who gave her last two copper coins to God? Maybe she was willing to loose everything she had because her heart was moving toward God as the only true source of wealth. Jesus said, “This poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.” (Luke 21:3-4)

Once we become settlers, we hoard our blessings of time and talent and money for ourselves. When we continue to explore and move toward God, we may decide that much of our stuff weighs us down and holds us back on our journey. We know in our hearts that we can't take anything with us when we die. Maybe our journey would be "more swift and pleasant" if we didn't travel with so much baggage!

I know that the timing of this post is pretty bad—right before Christmas when we are rushing to add to our baggage. On second thought, maybe the timing is perfect.

Testing the Spirits

When I was a youth minister (long, long ago and not so far away), I met a young man who turned out to be a youth minister in another Christian tribe. We struck up a conversation and shared a cup of coffee. We had a lot of things in common— we had similar educational backgrounds, similar job challenges… and elders. But we also had some basic differences. He had a different eschatological expectation than did I. And he was more charismatic than was I (I have about as much charisma as a rock). So… what do you think we ended up discussing the most— our similarities or our differences? You guessed it! We ended up in a friendly debate over a variety of doctrinal issues.

After we had gone round and round on amillennial versus premillennial end-time theories (why did we get stuck on that?), he finally said, “We getting too hung up on doctrine stuff; why not just stress Jesus?” Then he added, “Maybe if we stress Jesus, maybe all these other things won’t matter so much.” Well, it took me awhile, but I came to see that he was right (Lynn would say that this usually takes a long while.) I still think I was right on the individual issues that we discussed. And I think it is good to have such discussions when they are done in a Christian and brotherly way (and I think they were that day). But I think he was right that our common ground in a common faith in Christ and a common reliance upon His work at the cross trumps makes our doctrinal differences less critical.

My NT reading today begins, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). We are to test the spirits because not all are from God. The Bible says too much about the dangers of apostasy to believe that doctrine is unimportant. The elders at Ephesus would face (and cause) a distortion of the truth (Acts 20:29-31). Timothy would have to deal with the doctrine of demons (1 Tim 4:1-2). But at the same time, we must understand that the gospel is not at stake with every difference or nuance in our understanding. There are some issues over which we fight over and just aren’t worth fighting over! I think Paul may be talking to us when he refers to controversies which are “foolish and stupid” (2 Tim 2:23-24).

Yes, John tells us to test the spirits to see whether they are from God because there are many false prophets in the world. But John’s test of doctrinal orthodoxy is pretty basic, and it says nothing about one millennial positions or mode of church music. He focuses on Jesus, “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God” (1 John 4:2-3).

My youth minister buddy thought that if we would focus more on Jesus, our doctrinal differences might not matter nearly as much. I wish I could have that cup of coffee with him all over again. I think the conversation might be different.

Peace on Earth?

Tis the season to be jolly!  At least that is what some of you tried to convince yourselves as you were out before dawn on Black Friday trying to beat the hordes to the one item that Wal-Mart or Best Buy had on sale for next to nothing.  There are all kinds of stories in the news like this one from Fox News--

According to the Manatee County sheriff's report, 37-year-old Thomas Edward Lackie was arrested last week after he threw a 3-foot Christmas tree at his father. The tree missed, but Lackie then tried to use the steel base from the tree to strike his father. His father and mother were able to grab Lackie's arms to prevent the attack. Deputies say the tree could have caused serious injuries because the metal base weighs about five pounds. Lackie was charged with felony assault.

Someone needs to take a chill pill and a refresher course on "the reason for the season." Trying to brain your father with a Christmas tree seems is a fairly egregious violation of the "peace on earth and good will toward men" that this time of year is supposed to be about.  Perhaps someone went a wassailing a wee bit early?

The pastoral winter scenes that mark many of our Christmas cards belie the fact that this season is the most stressful, hurried and harried time of the year for many people.  Christmas shopping for an every expanding list of gifts, spending money you don't have on stuff we don't need for people who already have everything-- that's not the way to peace on earth or anywhere else. 

If there really is a reason for the season, surely it's not making sure Wal-Mart has a happy new year. 

Silly Love Songs

I was just sitting here thinking about an old Paul McCartney song he wrote in his Wings days entitled “Silly Love Songs.” You know the one—

I read somewhere that this song was written in response to John Lennon criticism that McCartney had sold out and was writing silly love songs that sound more like Engelbert Humperdinck. So McCartney wrote "Silly Love Songs" which became a #1 hit (for 5 weeks) and was one of top songs (#13) of the 1970's.

So why bring up silly love songs? Well, it’s Ezekiel's fault. My daily Old Testament reading brought me to Ezekiel 33. Earlier in the chapter, Ezekeiel is given his famous challenge to be God’s Watchman (33:1-20). It was the job of the watchman to sound the alarm when danger threatened the city. If the watchman sound the alarm and the city fell, then he was absolved of responsibility. But if the watchman failed to raise the alarm, then the responsibility for the city’s demise rested on him. Ezekiel then faithfully acts as God’s watchman as he delivers the news
that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. (33:21-29).

One would think that being a prophet of gloom, doom and destruction would be difficult. Just ask Jeremiah how well such a prophet is treated! But Judah’s response to Ezekiel was very different. There was something about Ekekiel that was evidently entertaining, and the people gathered to watch the show. Notice Ezekiel 33:30-32

“As for you, son of man, your countrymen are talking together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, saying to each other, ‘Come and hear the message that has come from the Lord.’ My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to listen to your words, but they do not put them into practice. With their mouths they express devotion, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. Indeed, to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not put them into practice.

Did the people listen to Ezekiel? Yes and no. Yes, they listened… like they would go to a concert and listen to a silly love song. But no, they did not listen… they did not take his words seriously enough to act upon them. God says, “They hear your words but do not put them into practice” (33:32). The text ends on an ominous note for Judah, ““When all this comes true—and it surely will—then they will know that a prophet has been among them.” (33:33)

Do we ever listen to preaching while not listening to it? Have you ever heard a really good sermon, and then you mentioned that it was a really good sermon to someone. And then they asked you, “Really? What did he say?” And you couldn’t really remember? What’s wrong with that? Listening to God’s word does us no good unless we are willing to act on it. We might as well be listening to silly love songs. We might as well be building a house on a foundation of sand.

My Head Hurts

My head hurts. I started reading an online debate posted on Al Maxey’s website between Al and Darrell Broking. The topic of the debate was “Patternism,” the idea that the NT is a specific blueprint or pattern that determines every aspect of Christianity so that every church will look pretty much alike in every detail. OK, by the way I described the topic, you can tell I’m not a subscriber to that idea. The reason I started reading the debate was an email sent to Al and posted in his Reflections (a weekly email post that I read). Al posts all of his emails-- supporters, detractors and all in-between. Most of the emails aren’t quite so vitriolic as this one--

Al, you are lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut and just as venomous. Hypocrite!! Judgment is coming, and the Hell you deny is awfully hot! It is pretty clear that you belong to the postmodernistic Emerging Church Movement, or the "Church of Make-Believe." You all write about "grace," "the cross," and "love," but you actually root none of these concepts or items in New Testament teaching. You've merely co-opted the imagery to fool folks into accepting your leadership on your journey into theological oblivion and subsequently into the abyss. Blind leader of the blind!! Folks like you are Socialists and Marxists in their social views as well, which is where you will eventually wind up - in the political camp with the far left of the Democratic Party. You're all a bunch of half-baked, ultra-ultra-liberal New Age hippie freak-types who have more in common with the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus and the Nazi Martin Heidegger. By the way, Al, the Nazi Heidegger, your philosophical godfather, says "Sieg Heil" to you in your bunker! We were close to the truth about you when we were ragging on you about the military.

Well, isn’t that special! Can you believe anyone would respond to someone with whom they disagree in such a juvenile, infantile rant?  Would anyone see this as Christlike behavior? Did Jesus say, "They will know you are my disciples by the vehemence and ugliness with which you nail heretics?  No, Jesus said something about love, a topic the author of th email evidently doesn't much appreciate.

Sadly, the author of this paragraph isn’t a ten year-old in need of some serious woodshed time but rather a preacher in our area.  Evidently there aren't enough heretics nearby to root out (he disfellowshipped us several years ago), so he had to go after Al Maxey some 2000 miles away in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  So many heretics, so little time!

What’s the point of bringing this up on my blog? Well, I spent so much time reading through the debate that I might as well get a blog for my trouble… and not just a headache.

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.

I Was Just Thinking...

I was just thinking that I needed to write something in the ol' blog.  But then I was also thinking that I really didn't have anything to say... which is a definite problem when its time to blog.  Just as I was thinking that I wasn't thinking of anything to write, I got an email from Wineskins' editor Greg Taylor.  (Well, he didn't write it to me personally, but he did include me!).  As I was reading his note, I started thinking that what he said is what I am thinking too.  So here is what I am thinking today.

This week on the Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor quoted John Adams, who said, "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide."  

Are we in danger of committing democra-cide? 

Isn't it ironic that we are now trying to nurture democratic nations internationally while we rush headlong into the fire that burns with a white hot passionate hatred toward people different from us in our own nation? And we're just talking about people in different parties, to say nothing of the other racial, religious, social ways we express disunity and hatred.

How many times in the last few weeks have you uttered, "He's an idiot" or "She's an idiot" about a candidate or friend who emailed you a newly minted narrative to discredit a candidate? If we think we can barely live in a world led by the party we oppose, what does that say about our world view, what we trust in?

This week, Newsweek's Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham asked the question, "Is there a religious reason to vote for or against Obama or McCain?"

Judging from the pile of desperate emails we're getting, the answer is yes. And many on both sides of the aisle believe there are religious reasons to vote for one or the other party or candidate. 

I'm of the party of people who have grown exasperated at the notion that religion can only be expressed through one particular party. That doesn't make me a Republican or Democrat. My conservative friends think I'm a Democrat. My liberal friends probably think I'm Republican. 

My voter card still says Independent. Maybe next time I get a card, I'll ask if they can record "Christian" on my party affiliation. Because I'm a Christian who believes a particular political party or candidate is not the answer to my prayers. 

Return to Me

Researchers seem to disagree on just how common infidelity is in our culture today.  Some studies suggest that 60% of men and 40% of women will cheat on their spouses; others studies set the figures much lower, at 24% for men and 14% for women.  But even if this lower figure is accurate, that means that 30% of marriages are impacted by unfaithfulness.  And infidelity is the leading factor in between 22-29% of all divorces and only about 35% of marriages survive an infidelity.  That means that with time and work and patience, marriages can survive an affair… but they usually don’t.  (See http://www.infidelity-etc.com/index.php/4)

In Jeremiah 3 (our OT reading for today), God is portrayed as a spouse who has been wounded by Judah’s infidelity in worshipping other gods.  Like many a wandering spouse, Judah wants God to just get over the unfaithfulness, “Will you always be angry? Will your wrath continue forever?” (Jer 3:5).  Judah does not understand how deeply their infidelity hurts God, and she does not really move to change her behavior, “This is how you talk, but you do all the evil you can” (Jer 3:5b).  What God sees in her people is “the brazen look of a prostitute” (Jer 3:3).  And yet God pursues his wandering spouse, calling her to repent and return—

“If you will return, O Israel, return to me,” declares the LORD. “If you put your detestable idols out of my sight and no longer go astray, 2 and if in a truthful, just and righteous way you swear, ‘As surely as the LORD lives,’ then the nations will be blessed by him and in him they will glory.” 

Jeremiah 3 begins with God asking, “If a man divorces his wife and she leaves him and marries another man, should he return to her again?”  That is the very thing that Moses divorce law forbids in Deuteronomy 24.  A man could not divorce his wife and then remarry her after she had been married to someone else.  This was to protect women from being divorced casually or on a whim “to teach them a lesson” and then taken back.  Marriage was to be forever, but then so was divorce.  And yet here, God was willing to take back his "wife" Judah after her prostitution with idols, a point God had made to an earlier generation through the life and writings of Hosea.

We need to understand how our sin hurts God.  Sin is not something that our holy God can wink at and overlook.  And yet, God in his mercy and love is always willing to take us back if we will repent.  The call of God to his rebellious people is always “return to me.”

“Would you now return to me” (3:1) 

Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the Lord” (3:12)

“Return, faithless people for I am your husband” (3:14) 

“Return, faithless people; I will cure you of backsliding (4:1)

Excessive Celebration

I’ve mentioned Al Maxey several times in this blog.  If you aren’t subscribed to his Reflections email, you should be.  Al occasionally makes mincemeat our of some of our Church of Christ sacred cows, and he does God’s kingdom (and especially our little corner of it) a great service in the process.  He was also the first preacher I ever heard preacher who wasn’t wearing a tie (he was in a Hawaiian shirt… he was also in Hawaii), so I liked him before he ever said anything!

In this week’s installment of Reflections, he takes to task a preacher who was taking liberal churches to task for the highly offensive practice of... applauding at baptisms.   Players in the NFL sometimes get penalized for “excessive celebration.”  To clapp and cheer when someone gives their life to Christ and has their sins washed away is excessive celebration that has no place in church!

Al points to the celebration at the homecoming of the Prodigal Son where they was music and dancing because the lost was found and the dead was alive again (Luke 15:24).  This is the joy that is expressed in heaven when the lost one comes home (Luke 15:7,10).  It is the kind of joy expressed by the Ethiopian Eunuch who “went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39).  It is hard to see why expressing that joy together in the assembly would be inappropriate.  On the contrary, it is inappropriate not to express joy!

Why would anyone be so critical of spontaneous applause of approval and joy when someone is baptized?  It is basically seen as a worldly violation of worship protocol that is neither decent nor in order.  Al quotes from the preacher (named John Waddey)--

"One way to respond to those trying to justify their practice is to ask if they would applaud at their mother's funeral. If not, why? Would they have applauded at Christ's death and burial? Why not? Baptism is a symbolic re-enactment of the death and burial of Jesus Christ. Is that an appropriate time for applause?"

Waddey rightly points out that baptism is a sacred of reenactment of Jesus death and burial.  But then no one claps (in my experience) when someone goes into the water.  In our experience here at Denbigh, applause break out when the person comes UP OUT OF THE WATER! Baptism is also a picture of Jesus’ resurrection and our resurrection from sin into a new life.  So Al responds to the funeral analogy like this-- 

Waddey wondered if someone would actually dare to applaud at their mother's funeral. John, if she rose up out of that coffin ... YES, I would applaud. God help me, I might even shout and leap into the air! Should we express great joy (as do the angels in heaven) when someone arises from the watery grave? If not, why not, John?! For those who are offended and distracted by such expressions of joy over a brother brought to life, there is ample room outside the Father's house in the darkness with the elder brother! He didn't care for the celebration either!

Amen! I don’t believe that excessive celebration is one of the problems that we have in church… following baptisms or at any other time!

Letters from a Skeptic

I (finally) finished reading Greg Boyd's book "Letters from a Skeptic."  Boyd is founding senior pastor of Woodland Hills Church, an evangelical mega-church in St. Paul, MN.  Trained at Yale and Princeton, Boyd taught for years at Bethel University in St. Paul. He has written several books on theology and apologetics, but "Letters from a Skeptic" is different... and very personal.

The skeptic is Edward Boyd, Greg's father.  The book is an exchange of about 50 letters over three years discussing questions of the rationality of faith in God.  Ed Boyd begins the exchange as a hard-boiled unbeliever with serious questions about his sons faith.  Why is the world so full of suffering? How can you believe that a man rose from the dead? Why do you think the Bible is inspired? Do all non-Christians go to hell? How can I be holy and sinful at the same time?  The discussions were straightfoward and generally free from philosophical and theological jargon asa  son shares with his father why it is reasonable to believe that Christianity is true.  The book ends with Ed Boyd's acceptance of Jesus and a testimonial of the change that faith made in his life.  Click here for a local newscast that reported on the book. 

Toward the end of the book, the issue being debated stopped being the existence of God and the reliability of the Bible-- it was the church.  Or really, it was the kinds of Christians that Ed expereinced in his Catholic upbringing and on religious TV.  These believers seemed to have all the answers and all the rules; he wanted to know how he could ever be righteous on his own. 

Dad, you are perfectly correct! No one can live the Christian life! No one has, does, or ever will (this side of heaven) perfectly live the Christian life! Do you think for a moment that I'm any better at doing the "holiness routine" than you? You know me better than that! It's as impossible for me as it is for you.

But this is just the point, Dad. It is the central motive for all of Jesus' ethical teachings. We are unable to perform our way to God on our own: thus, we need a Savior!

Throughout Jesus' ministry He was confronting people who (like the Christians you've confronted) believed that they were righteous before God on the basis of how good they were. They didn't think they needed a Savior.

So how did Jesus help them? He helped them by showing them what they'd really have to be like if they were to be righteous before God without a Savior.

So, for example, the Pharisees were proud because they didn't appear as sinful as other people, but Jesus tells them they need to "be perfect, even as God is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). Good luck!

So too, some self-righteous folks were proud for never committing adultery, but Jesus (not Paul) told them "if you've lusted after a woman in your heart you've already committed adultery" (Matt. 5:27-28, my paraphrase). 

He makes His point precisely because everyone has lusted in his heart!

Then again, these religious types were very proud because they had never murdered, so Jesus told them "if you get angry or even say 'fool' in your heart towards a brother, you're already in danger of hell fire" (Matt. 5:21-22, my paraphrase). The point, Dad, is that left on our own, we are all "in danger of hell fire. "

The list of verses could go on, but the point would always be the same. If you're going to stand before God on your own basis, Dad, you have to be perfect, for God is perfect. 

Any imperfection is eternally incompatible with the character of God. Being "relatively good" just doesn't cut it. Being "sort of holy" will get no more brownie points in heaven than being a dope-addicted prostitute. One must have God's own perfect righteousness.

In the Eye of the Storm

“In the Eye of the Storm” begins with one of my all time favorite Max Lucado stories.  It concerns Chippie the parakeet and the fact that you never know what live will bring.  There was old Chippie, sitting on his swing and minding his own business when all of a sudden he was “sucked in, washed up, and blown over.”  Here’s the story--

The problems began when Chippie's owner decided to clean Chippie's cage with a vacuum cleaner. She removed the attachment from the end of the hose and stuck it in the cage. The phone rang, and she turned to pick it up. She'd barely said “hello” when “sssopp!” Chippie got sucked in.

The bird owner gasped, put down the phone, turned off the vacuum, and opened the bag. There was Chippie— still alive, but stunned.

Since the bird was covered with dust and soot, she grabbed him and raced to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and held Chippie under the running water. Then, realizing that Chippie was soaked and shivering, she did what any compassionate bird owner would do . . . she reached for the hair dryer and blasted the pet with hot air. Poor Chippie never knew what hit him.

Ever have a day like that?  You think everything is going well, the then the wheels fall off and the roof cave. And maybe you can relate to Chippy after his hard day.  His owner was asked how he was doing and replied, “Well, Chippie doesn't sing much anymore—he just sits and stares.”  

Our Old Testament reading for today is God’s promise to Israel, and to us, to be there when we are sucked in, washed up, and blown over by life.  In Isaiah 43:2-3, God says--

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; 

and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. 

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; 

the flames will not set you ablaze. 

For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

God never promises to keep us from the storms of life, but He does promise to be with us through those storms.  He promises to restore us and life us up after the storms.  And unlike Chippy, once we are restored, we will sing to the Lord a new song (Isa 42:10-13).

The process of getting from the storm to the new song is called “faith.”

The Ultimate Sacrifice

Gayle Williams was in Afghanistan working with a interdenominational Christian aid group called SERVE (Serving Emergency Relief and Vocational Enterprise), a charity that works with handicapped Afghans.  The 34 year old British citizen was shot and killed this morning while walking to work, targeted for assassination by the Taliban.  Her crime was sharing her Christian faith with others.  

SERVE officials have denied that Williams or any of their people are actively proselytizing to the Christian faith, which is against the law in Afghanistan.  But perhaps a faith real that it drives one half-way around the world to help others in desperate need is enough to seen by the Taliban as evangelistic?  Can one give a cup of cold water be given in Jesus name without it being done in Jesus’ name?  Praise God for people like Gayle Williams; may God bless her family and friends.

What I couldn’t help but wonder is this—if the Taliban started shooting people in American for evangelizing, how many of us would be in danger?

Reflections on the Debate

I participated in a public debate in West Virginia when I was in grad school. No, I wasn’t the disputant (the one debating) or the moderator (the one officiating). I wasn’t even the time-keeper (the one, well, keeping time). I was the guy who sat up on the stage with the overhead projector flashing the slides when one or the other called out, “May I see Slide #317J please.” There were hundreds of slides, so this was actually a big job. Maybe my subsequent fascination with PowerPoint was born on that polemic platform!

The debate got pretty ugly pretty quickly. The moderators kept jumping in with “point of order” objections. The disputants constantly tried to outdo one another’s sarcasm, even to the point of drawing cartoon caricatures of each other on their slides. (Of course, the slides were flashed on the screen with a crisp and professional efficiency). At one point, the disputants called each other “the devil.” After the debate was over, both sides claimed that great victories had been won for the cause of truth. Actually, people came away from the debate having what they believed before the debate confirmed and reinforced. I remember the whole thing being rather embarrassing.

I watched part of the Obama-McCain debate last night.  So... what did we learn from the debate? McCain is feisty.  Obama is smooth?  That each of them has “a plan” to make things better.., though they are hazy on exactly what those things are.  Surely, the only people coming out of that debate with strong feelings for one candidate or another were people who had gone into the debate with those strong feelings.  

My take on the debate is summed up by this clip from Pat Paulsen and his presidential run back in 1968.  Paulsen was a comedian whose satire on the political process often hit pretty close to home.    He also perfected the ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth.  And is it just me, or did Paulson look a lot like Ron Paul... who also may still be running for president somewhere?

Columbus Day

One of the things we did during our first trip to Ukraine was to visit classes at Kiev State University and talk with the students. This was back in 1993, and most Ukrainians had never seen an American before. So the students got the chance to try out their English on Americans and ask questions about life in America. And we got the chance to do a little preaching. One of the first things they said was “So today is Columbus Day in your country; tell us about that.” Not one of us knew it was Columbus Day; we needed the Ukrainians to tell us.

I needed them yesterday. I came to work and was confused why Cathy wasn’t already here. I even went so far as to pull up the email she sent a couple of weeks ago telling me when her vacation was coming up… and it wasn’t yesterday. It was almost lunch time before it dawned on me that yesterday was Columbus Day, and Cathy is off for all federal holidays. Technically, my contract says that I am supposed to be off for federal holidays, but that does require that I remember when they are!

I did something yesterday that I used to do routinely in my youth but thought I’d never do again. I played over two hours of tennis. Singles. Three sets. And won. Now I might concede that this wasn’t at quite the same level that I played back in my Freed-Hardeman days, though I’m sure Doc Woods would probably add that I didn’t really play at that high a level back then anyway! And it sure did take me awhile to roll out of bed this morning… not to wake up, but just to roll out of bed. I thought I was going to have to take the holiday today that I forgot to take yesterday!

Thy Will Be Done

Someone sent me a transcript of a great commentary piece on faith in America given by Ben Stein on CBS.  Unfortunately like so many other things circulated on the Internet, the piece wasn't completely accurate.  Part of it was indeed commentary by Stein, part was an interview (also on CBS) with Anne Graham Lotz (Billy Graham’s daughter) just after 9-11.  The rest was just made it.  Another example of the fact that most of the stuff circulated over the Internet may have a bit of truth decay.  (Snopes.com is a great place to fact check things you receive to see if they are true.)

Saying all that, the Ben Stein article is actually pretty good, and I'll probably reprint it a little closer to Christmas… if I remember.  And the September 13, 2001 interview with Anne Graham Lotz is good too.  Jane Clayson, the CBS interviewer, asked Lotz,  “I've heard people say, those who are religious, those who are not, if God is good, how could God let this happen? To that, you say?”  Here is her reply--

I say God is also angry when he sees something like this. I would say also for several years now Americans in a sense have shaken their fist at God and said, God, we want you out of our schools, our government, our business, we want you out of our marketplace. And God, who is a gentleman, has just quietly backed out of our national and political life, our public life. Removing his hand of blessing and protection. We need to turn to God first of all and say, God, we're sorry we have treated you this way and we invite you now to come into our national life. We put our trust in you. We have our trust in God on our coins, we need to practice it.

This is a good reminder that we really can’t have it both ways.  We cannot on the one hand reject God in our private and corporate daily lives and then expect His blessings and protection in times of crisis.  God will eventually give us exactly what we want-- to be left alone.  But there are consequences. To paraphrase a line from C.S. Lewis, we can say to God “Thy will be done” or He will say to us “Thy will be done” and then leave us to our choice.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Isaiah was on a roll this morning.  Well, I was reading him this morning; he got on his roll almost 3 millennia ago.  Writing to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, Isaiah warns against the very sins that would cause the Northern Kingdom of Israel to be destroyed by Assyria.  In fact, Isaiah’s words to Judah in Isaiah 1 sound almost identical to the condemnation Amos directs at Israel in Amos 5.  They both condemn a religiosity that focuses on ritual and ignores holiness and helping others.  Compare Isaiah 1:10-17 with Amos 5:21-27.  Both guys are using the same sermon outline here.  Both guys probably had veins bulging and spit flying as they preached it!  Get that way myself sometimes… which explains why our folks never sit on the front rows!

Unlike Amos, Isaiah turns on a dime and sounds more like Jesus in Matthew 11:28-30.  His voice and his face soften (at least in my staging of the scene) and he offers the quintessential Old Testament invitation in Isaiah 1:18—

18 “Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD. 

“Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; 

though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. 

There was a time when preachers went soft on the soft and gentle invitation of God.  The fear factor of hell-fire and brimstone was too useful.  You keep your people scared straight and smelling the sulfur.  Today, most of us are too soft on the brimstone and seem to portray God as a cosmic grandfather with lots of goodies and few expectations.

I think we need both pictures!  God hasn’t gone soft on His expectations; it’s still as Hebrews 10:31 suggests, “a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Isn’t Hebrews in the New Testament).  But God is the God of Calvary; the cross is His invitation of love.  He still promises “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”  This message of judgment and forgiveness are two sides of the same coin.

Aaron's Drippy Beard

There are some things that churches today seem to empahsized much more than does God.  For example, while the New Testament talks about "the assembly" of Christians, the details are never really fleshed out.  Churches today really stress the details,  hence all the drama over the "worship wars."  Think about all that has been said and written about the right style, form and format of church music when the New Testament barely has enough material on music to make a good paragraph.

On the other hand, God seems so obviously interested in some things to which the church barely gives lip-service.  How much does the Bible say about unity, peace and harmony among believers?  But we'd rather fight over church music! 

God goes to great lengths to emphasize unity.  Look at the rather unique imagery of Psalm 133 where David extols the the beauty of fellowship and unity.  He affirms that it is good and pleasant when God’s family lives together in peace and harmony.  This little Psalm is dripping (pun intended) with metaphors that emphasize this message of harmony.  There are two types of anointing here that stress the sweetness of unity:

• Anointing of the Priest.  Here the oil runs down Aaron’s beard and onto the collar his robe, joining the priest and the priestly robe are together.  Though the sweetness of the oil isn’t specifically mentioned, that seems to be the imagery here.
  
  
• Anointing of the Mountain.  Here the dew of Mt. Hermon, the highest of the mountains in Palestine and one known for its moisture, falls on (and thus anoints) little Mt. Zion, the hill upon which Jerusalem sits.  So the two mountains are joined by the anointing.
  

Maybe the focus of the Psalm is seen in the second couplet of verse 3— “For there the LORD bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.”  It is God who takes the initiative to make unity possible.  It is on Mt. Zion, at the Temple, in the presence of God that this blessing of unity is given.  This sweetness of harmony is not possible when based solely on human power alone.  Just think about how well people get along today in the region of Mt. Hermon and Mt. Zion!  It was God who made unity possible in Israel.  It is God who makes unity possible today.  And that is Paul’s point in Ephesians 2:17—

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.

Not only does God demand unity, He is working to bring it about in us.  If we keep ourselves close to Him, then we will also stay close to all others who are seeking Him.  When we come closer to the cross, we also come closer to each other!  That’s why unity is no optional extra for those seeking the face of God.  The closer you get to Him, the more you bump into to others seeking to get close to Him as well!

"I Saw Only the Gold"

It is one of those stories that (sadly) you see in the paper all the time.  Richard Harper was having an adulterous affair with Michelle Reynolds.  They were so deeply in “love” that they decided to kill Michelle’s husband Thad Reynolds so they coud be together.  So they did.  The 36-year-old father of four was stabled 19 times as he arrived at the Frito-Lay distribution center where he was a district manager.  There is no happily ever after for anyone in this story; both Richard Harper and Michelle Reynolds will spend the rest of their lives in prison and the Reynolds children will grow up without either parent.

What makes this story unusual is that all three were members at Hollywood Baptist Church.   Richard Harper was the associate pastor and Thad Reynolds was one of the deacons and did part-time marriage counseling.  The adulterous relationship began because of a church relationship; the murder co-conspirators and victim were all part of the same church family.  Don’t you think at some point someone might have thought, “Hey, this is wrong?”  Maybe before the adultery?  Or at least at some point during the adultery.  Or before the conspiracy?  Or maybe before the murder was actually committed?  How could these good Baptists get to the point where not only was adultery acceptable, but so was murder?  

I don’t know, but likely it was the same basic process that led the man after God’s own heart to commit adultery and murder.  David had an affair with Bathsheba and then murder her husband Uriah so that he could marry her.  Afterward, David was still pious enough to condemn the offender in Nathan’s fictitious story for “pet lamb larceny” and condemn him to death.  It wasn’t until Nathan pointed his long boney finger and said “Thou art the man” than David was knocked off his high horse and onto his knees.

I remember reading somewhere (Irving Wallace, I think) of a Chinese legend of the thief whoso dazzled by the emperor’s gold that he tried to steal it even though it was highly protected by armed guards.  The thief was easily arrested, and they asked him as he was carried off to a certain fate, “Why did you try to steal the gold when all of these guards were around?”  The man replied, “I didn’t see the guards; I saw only the gold.”

The murder of Thad Reynolds reminds us.  The sin of David and Bathsheba reminds us.  We can get so focused on getting we want that we start justifying and rationalizing until what we want to do somehow seems the thing we must do.  That can lead to things like adultery and murder.  And it can lead to a host of other sins as well.  If we are not careful, we can ignore all of God’s safeguards because all that we can see is the gold.

On Wall Street and Martians

Things aren’t looking too good for the ol'  economy right now.  First there was Congress' refusal to pass a $700 billion (that's with a “B”) bailout bill and then Wall Street plummeted in responseto their refusal .  If things keep going this way, I will OWE money to my IRA when it is time to retire!  Most pundits seem to agree that some sort of bailout bill will HAVE to be passed, but then you can see why some in Congress might want a little time to think about it beforwe stroking a check (on our account) for that amount of money.  Who knows where this will end. Surely either Obama or McCain or both will revive the Clinton mantra, “It’s the economy."  Or maybe, “It’s the stupid ecomony!”

Thomas G. Long tells a story that comes from some of the older members at the little country church here he grew up in.  The story was told and retold so many times that parts of it are bound to be apocryphal... but it is a true story nonetheless—

On certain Sunday night in October 1938, the evening prayer services were in full swing when a man named Sam charged into the prayer meeting trembling with fear and excitement. Finally gaining the breath to speak, he shouted, "Martians are attacking the earth in spaceships! Some of ‘em have already landed in New Jersey!" The preacher halted in mid-sentence; the congregation stared at Sam blankly. "I s-s-swear," he stammered, now a little unsure of his footing. "I h-h-heard it on the radio." What Sam had heard, of course, was Orson Welles’s now infamous Mercury Theater radio production of War of the Worlds, but no one in the congregation was aware of that at the moment. For all they knew, the world outside was coming to a flaming end. The little flock looked apprehensively at the preacher, but he was mute and indecisive, never having had a sermon disrupted by interplanetary invasion. Finally one of the oldest members of the congregation, a red-clay farmer of modest education, stood up, gripped the pew in front of him with his large, callused hands, and said, "I ‘speck what Sam says ain’t completely true, but if it is true, we’re in the right place here in church. Let’s go on with the meetin’." And so they did.  

Whatever may come in this life, from stock market crashes to alien invasions, we need to get a tighter grip on our faith and get on with living it.  God is God and all is well.