Vacation Church

We have been in Arkansas since Friday and having a good visit with Mom and Dad. The trip was originally supposed to be to escort Angelynn back to Harding, but she got a job offer the day before we were to leave. So there is the answer to the joblessness across the country because of this recession-- just plan a trip to Arkansas. I'm not sure what the unemployed in Arkansas are supposed to do.

We enjoyed going to church with Mom and Dad Sunday. I usually preach 50 or so weeks out of the year, so getting a Sunday off was a real treat. We went to early service, so that meant getting to church by 8:15 a.m. That sounds early, but that is about 2-3 hours later than usual, so I felt like I was skipping church sleeping in so late. Beside the late hour of revival, there was several other differences going to church when I don't preach--

• I feel no frustration when the PowerPoint guys gets out of sync.
• I feel no responsibility when the songs don't fit the worship theme just right.
• I feel no pressure for the service not to last to long or too short
• I had to try not to fall into the "critic mode" that annoys me when I'm in charge. (I could so easily become Simon Crowl, and I really don't want anyone to do that).

In short, it's good occasionally to be able to relax and just let church happen and not feel like I have to make it happen. What I need to learn how to do is to relax and just let church happen when I am doing the planning and presenting. After all, I'm never really the One in charge.

Veggie Tales

Police were called to a church in Florida when two women got into a knock-down, drag-out fight with cucumbers. It seems that the church was giving away free veggies when the two ladies got into a disagreement over which veggie stash belonged to which lady. Soon the two women were pummeling each other with cucumbers, and the police had to be called to break up the fight. It is a blessing the church wasn’t giving away free watermelons!

OK, a fight at church over cucumbers sounds pretty silly. But then, having a fight at church over anything is pretty silly. Or really, it is a "shame" or a "humiliation." That is the world Paul uses to dress down the church at Corinth who were taking each other to court over property issues (1 Cor. 6:1-6). These believers were so interested in getting their way that they didn’t even think how their fights would impact the pagan world around them. In all of our fights over theological issues and church practices (fights that that outsiders could not possibly understand), did anyone possibly ponder how all this plays in Peoria. How can we be ambassadors for the Prince of Peace
when we can't get along with one another?

That church in Florida will forever be known as the place where the two ladies went at it with cucumbers. I wonder how many of our churches have forever compromised their witness because of fights, fusses and feuds that in the final analysis are just as silly as mixing it up over veggies.

A Community of the Cross

I got up this morning, kissed my sleeping wife and went off to work. It kinda felt like I was in an old Father Knows Best rerun. Usually she is up and moving around way before me. But today was the first day that school was out and teachers did not have to report for duty. One of the perks you get as a schoolteacher is getting the summer off; the other perk is a paycheck. So Lynn is now a woman of leisure… for the week or two that we don’t have something already planned.

My sermon Sunday is on the church as a community of the cross. I ran across a couple of quotations that I didn’t use in the sermon. Being a true conservative at heart, and thought I would conserve typing and use them here--

“Christianity has taken a giant stride into the absurd. Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and it is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them. It's when the absurd starts to sound reasonable that we should begin to worry.” (Søren Kierkegaard)

“In terms of human wisdom, Jesus was a perfect fool. And if you think you can follow him without making something like the same kind of fool of yourself, you are laboring not under the cross, but a delusion.” (Frederick Buechner)

If Christians really believe that we are a community of the cross saved by God's grace to love and serve Him and others, then why do we spend so much time acting like it is what we have figured out or have accomplished that really makes the real difference in being the true church. Paul says focusing on human wisdom and strength robs the cross of its power (1 Cor 1:17). When we what we do (say like the format of our church music) a requirement for salvation, then we have robbed the cross of its power.

If we really would cling to the cross for dear life, we would not risk taking a hand away to point a finger at someone else.

You Can't Please Everyone

File this one under, “You can’t please everyone.” President Obama was being interviewed by CNBC when a pesky fly started buzzing around him. He swatted at it a couple of times, but it persisted on interrupting the interview. Finally, the President reached up and smacked it dead. It was a Kung Fu moment (“When you can take the pebble from hand, Grasshopper…”). I think it was rather impressive-- I just hope Iran and North Korea were paying attention.

Well, faster than you can say “animal activist,” there was a statement from PETA decrying the president’s obvious lack of sensitivity. Among other things, PETA said, "We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals. We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals." They also sent the president a “Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher” that allows one to trap a house fly and then release it outside. So we’re supposed to practice catch-and-release on flies. Shooting Alaskan wolves from helicopters is inhumane. The kid torturing cats in Florida is inhumane. But swatting flies?

You can’t please all the people all the time. And you can’t please some of the people any of the time. It seems that every time we do anything at church, there is someone who is not pleased. When we do something just a little bit differently, some people aren’t pleased. But go awhile doing things exactly the same, and other people aren’t pleased. The line from the old Ricky Nelson song “Garden Party” comes to mind, “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself!”

I understand the sentiment. Get enough complaint and criticism, and you just want sing right along, “You can’t please everyone…” God wants us to sing a different tune. No everyone is at the same place in the walk with God. No everyone understands everything the same. There are people Paul calls “the weak” who need to be taught, but in the meantime need to be pleased. Paul says this in Romans 15:1-3

We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”

No, we can’t please everyone. But that doesn’t mean we give up trying and just please ourselves. That’s not what God did, and that’s not what God wants us to do. Sometimes we have to bear with the weak. Now, the word for weak is the word incapable or powerless; it is often used to mean impossible—see Matt 19:21, Mark 10:27, Heb 6:4). So when Paul talks about the weak, he is talking about those who are incapable of understanding, those of whom more mature response is impossible. He’s not talking about someone who knows better but refuses to act better. And even cantankerous critics need a break every once in awhile.

Nope, we can’t please everyone. But we don’t therefore just please ourselves; we seek to please God.

The Most Sepcial Day of the Year

Oh, boy, it’s almost Father’s Day. It’s the most important and special holiday of the year… NOT! A recent article by Geoff Williams in Parenting suggests that “Father's Day is an afterthought, a holiday just a few steps above the one that celebrates the groundhog and that other one that promotes trees.” He compares the gift he gave his wife for Mother’s Day (the ornamental weeping cherry tree she always wanted planted in the yard beside a fancy new bird bath) with the gift she got him (some boxer shorts and a tiny reading lamp so he can read in bed without disturbing her). There does seem to be some inequity there, doesn’t it? This reminded me of a routine Bill Cosby did years ago—

On Mother’s Day you break your back working to buy some presents… On Father’s Day you say, “Dad give me some money, I want to buy you a pack of cigarettes.” Then you smoke half the pack coming home… and it’s not even his brand.

Why the difference? Cosby suggested that it is because mothers are so much easier to give gifts to. You can paint a old rock and give it to Mom and she’ll say, “Isn't that so precious; that’s the sweetest thing…” Dad will say, “Get that old rock out of the house!” He may be onto something. Mom is still easier to buy for, largely because Lynn buys her gifts!

But I have an idea the difference in importance between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day has more to do with the importance in the closeness of the relationships. Many fathers remain emotionally distant from their children; many father are just plain distant… as in not there at all. So maybe Mother’s Day is more important because mothers are more important.

Well I never borrowed money from Dad to buy him a pack of cigarettes for Father’s Day. That’s because he gave up smoking when his kids were born because he didn’t think it would be good for them to be around the smoke (that was way, way before anyone knew anything about secondhand smoke). That was only the first of a jillion sacrifices that Dad made and still makes to make sure that my sister and I have had what we needed (and usually what we wanted). If all Dads were more like my Dad, Father’s Day would be a much bigger deal as a holiday!

Catch-and-Release

Ron Hall and Denver Moore teach us something about real friendship in the book Same Kind of Different as Me. This is the true story of the improbable friendship of a rich Texas art dealer and a poor Louisiana sharecropper. Hall and his wife Dorothy began volunteering each week at a homeless shelter, and Dorothy became convinced that God wanted them to befriend Denver. Ron made halting overtures, but Denver wouldn’t even speak to them. Finally he asked Ron, "What do you want from me?" Ron replied, "I just want to be your friend." Denver promised to think about it. And he did.

He later said to Ron, "There is somethin I heard ‘bout white folks and bothers me, and it has to do with fishin." Ron wasn’t much of a fisherman, but he promised to try to answer the question. He said, 'I heard that when white folks go fishin they do somthin called 'catch and release.'' He didn’t understand that. When "colored folks" caught a fish, they would show it off to everybody and then they’d eat it. He just couldn’t understand why anyone would catch-and-release. Then it became clear that Denver wasn’t talking’ about fishin at all—

So, Mr. Ron, it occurred to me. If you is fishin for friend you just gon’ catch and release, then I ain’t got no desire to be your friend… But if you is lookin for a real friend, then I’ll be one. Forever.

Maybe that is what is wrong with our friendships and relationships today—we’re just too good at catch and release. We eschew the brother-and-sister, family-ties fellowship that is talked about in the New Testament for the catch-and-release friendships of which Denver was suspicious. Relationships among believers in the body of Christ are relationships that are forged in blood and bathed in baptism. They are not meant to be catch-and-release.

Is God Enough?

This comes from YouTube via Bobby Valentine through Alan Smith. But you need to watch this. Do we really believe that God is enough?



This is from a sermon by John Piper, and I believe he nails it pretty well. It is easy to sit in our air-conditioned auditorium singing "Blessed Be Your Name" with our praise team and PowerPoint while everything around us seems to be going well. But what about when things aren't going so well. The point of that song and the point of our faith is that God is God during the good times and the bad. We don't serve God so that he will bless us with great cars great jobs, great home, and great families. We serve God because God is God, and God is enough. He may bless us with jobs and homes and cars and families. Or he may bless us with suffering and struggle and hardship. But God is God despite what happens in our and in what happens in our lives. God is enough.

The Old Disappearing Hitchhiker Trick

Patrick Mead has a story on his blog that relates to our study of "Angels and Demons" on Wednesday nights. An abbreviated version goes like this—

A woman is driving down the highway and sees someone on the side of the road. She has the strong feeling God wants her to pick him up, and she does. She and her rider get into a spiritual conversation, and he finally tells her that God sent him to tell people that the Lord is getting ready to come back. The woman didn’t realize that she was speeding until a cop pulled her. She apologized, telling the cop that she wasn’t paying attention because she was talking to the man, but her rider was gone. She started to insist that there was a man riding with her, but the cop stopped her and said, “You are the 16th person I have pulled over with the exact same story.”

Could God have sent an angel in this way to announce that He is coming back? Well, angels have already announced that, right? (See Acts 1:11). This particular story is a pretty common urban legend that dates back into the 40’s (see Snopes.com for more details). Actually, it is a good idea to check out any story you get in an email at Snopes.com to see if it is a documented urban legend. Let me quote part of what Patrick says in response--

It is WAY to easy to get into a one-up battle with people when it comes to healing stories, stories of miracles, numbers of baptisms, success of missions, etc. I repeat — God doesn’t need the help and it makes outsiders laugh at us. I was in a discussion once where a pastor insisted that he defeated a demon and cast him out of a parishioner while the doctor (who actually treated the person) said that medicine brought the man around to his senses. Minirith and Meier (Christian psychiatrists who run a well known clinic) are famous for saying that demons seem to be allergic to Thorazine; their way of saying that many things pastors say are caused by demons are really caused by biology and can be treated by pharmacology).

I believe in demons, angels, healings, and miracles. I also believe that the curtain between our reality and Reality in the spiritual realm usually stays closed. Consider this as an example: I don’t think Daniel saw God every day even though he prayed to Him three times a day for over 70 years. We have records indicating that God showed up in Daniel’s life — pulled that curtain aside — a handful of times. Stephen, the great martyr, saw the curtain pulled back at the point of his death. Forgive me, but I am suspicious when I hear people speak as if God not only twitches the curtain far more often in their lives than He ever did for Daniel or Paul or Stephen, but has pulled it down and snuggled next to them on the couch.

C.S. Lewis in his book Miracles suggests that a world in which miracles happened regularly would be a world of chaos and magic. God doesn’t send angels to everyone or work miracles in everyone. That didn’t happen in the lives of Bible characters, and we shouldn’t expect it to happen today. On the other hand, God just may be a bit annoyed when we start talking about the things that He can no longer do today. As far as I’m concerned, God can do anything He decides to do. I’m sure He is relieved that I have given Him my permission!

What Are Your Giant Hidden Cherubs?

We’ve been studying angels and demons on Wednesday nights. Actually, I title the series “Angels and Demons” to coincide with the new Tom Hanks movie in the theaters now. Cute, huh? The title PowerPoint slide each week is a graphic from the movie poster. Such shamelessness keeps me from having to have original thoughts.

One of the points that has come out of this study for me is that angels are all over the place in the Bible. I never thought about that. Angels don’t just show up with an occasional message for the prophets, announce the birth of Christ to the angels and then rest up for the grand finale in Revelation—they are all over the place in the Bible. Makes you wonder whether or not they are still all over the place.

My reading for this morning from 1 Kings 6 mentions angels. Well, these are really cherubs. Actually they aren’t real cherubs but the huge representation of cherubs that Solomon placed in the most holy place in the temple. He had this huge pair of cherubs carved out of olive wood. They were 15 feet tall, and their wings spanned the entire room, touching the wall on one side and the other cherub’s wing on the other. And the entire cherub carved from olive wood was overlaid with gold. Solomon made these giant golden cherubs with wall-to-wall golden wings… to be placed in a room where they would be seen by only one man only one time each year! These cherubs must have been astonishingly impressive, but no one ever saw them except the high priest... and God! Solomon would have likely said that this was the point—God would see them and thus it had to be perfect.

There are parts of our lives that we rarely (or never) let other people see. There are parts of ourselves that we keep buried deep within us— our failures and our fears, our dreams and our nightmares, our hopes for the futures, our doubts in the present and our pains from the past. Maybe we share parts of these with a few people, but we work very hard to hide them from most. Maybe we hide them from ourselves. If we make enough noise with our frantic, frenetic lifestyles, there is never that quiet time where self-examination takes place

We need to know that God knows. The same God who gazed upon Solomon’s cherubs hidden away from almost everyone else also sees the darkest and most secret parts of us that we keep hidden. After all, we are his temple and He reigns over every part of us. Nothing is secret from Him.

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. (Psalm 139:1-4)

At the Movies

Lynn and I have been talking about going to the movies. We haven’t actually gone, but are talking about it. Actually, it's more like negotiation, We don't like the same movies. I like action-adventure and sci-fi; she likes romantic comedies. We both liked Titanic and Pear Harbor— romance while stuff blew up! I think the last movie we saw in a theater that we both liked was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But we haven't been in awhile, and so we need to go to the movies (someone gave us an AMC movie card last Christmas and we still haven't used it).

We did agree on last year’s sleeper hit Slumdog Millionaire. We both hated it. OK, maybe not “hated it.” Actually, we liked the ending and the music-video-credits at the end, but there was an awful lot of dreary before you get there! That is what makes me nervous about the next movie Lynn wants us to see, Up. Why am I nervous? Because of things like I read in Greg Boyd’s blog today—

For my 52nd birthday I went to the animated movie Up with Shelley and a couple of friends. What a marvelous birthday present!! People, you HAVE to see this show (and in the theaters, not on DVD, and in 3-D, not 2-D…the 3-D effects were incredible!) Second only to Slumdog Millionaire, this show was the most amazing thing produced in the last year.

See? The same people that liked Slumdog are pushing Up. Fool me once, shame on me… Lynn talked me into seeing Slumbog because "somebody" told her it was really good. Now we are supposed to see Up because "somebody" told her it was really good. We only go to the movies a couple times a year, so I’d like for this one to be good (I still haven’t seen Star Trek or Angels and Demons for cryin' out loud). So what am I going to do? Somebody help me out here.

Wait a minute. It was "somebody" who told us to go to the last one!

Wallowing with the Heathen?

Last night I dreamed that I was outside in a fierce storm with the wind blowing in my face. Then I woke up to discover that I had pulled the mask of my new CPAP machine halfway off and it was blowing air in my face! I don’t know about this machine; I felt like I was being smothered. It is a lot easier to inhale than to exhale, so I feel like I’m constantly hyperventilating. I guess smothering on the mask or getting strangled on the hose is better than getting axe murdered in my sleep… which Lynn informed might happen if I didn’t get the snoring thing fixed.

Yesterday, I mentioned in the blog something about deacons smoking outside on the porch after church. Cathy told me this morning that they used to do the same thing at her church as well. I remember that also happening at my grandmother’s church. And this was during the time when preacher’s routinely preached against smoking as a worldly thing that Christians shouldn’t do. Is that a bit strange?

I also remember hearing sermons against “mixed bathing” (swimming with members of the opposite sex) on Sunday and then seeing my church friends at the pool on Monday. Camp still has strict rules against mixed swimming although all of the kids go to the pool and the beach all the time. One local preacher used to preach a sermon each spring on the evils of going to the beach (someone once told me that the title of his sermon was “Wallowing with the Heathen”). The sermon is routine… and routinely ignored!

My point here isn’t that we need to get back to the good old days when we didn’t wallow with the heathen. The point is that we didn’t follow the command not to wallow even when it was routinely being preached. It seems to me that we were training ourselves and our young people not to really take what the church preached too seriously. I mean, we heard that smoking and going to the pool was wrong and then saw Christians smoking and going to the pool. (Not at the same time; the pool had strict rules against smoking). So what was the point of all that?

I wonder what ways that our church today is going out of its way to be irrelevant?

Summertime Sunday Nights

Today is June 2, which makes Sunday June 7. So Sunday is a very important date on our church calendar— it's the first Sunday after the end of small group season. Instead of meeting in various small groups in different homes (some of which are not Sunday night), we will all meeting together at the church building at 6:00 p.m. for Sunday night services. We do different things on Summertime Sunday Nights--

• Old Fashion Sing-Song Night. Here every man (sorry Kati) in the church gets the chance to lead a song or two.
  
  
• Pepperdine Bible Lectures Night. The church watches a DVD of Jeff Walling or Mike Cope or Don McLaughlin preach and see what its like to hear good preaching.
  
  
• Praise Night. The praise team leads us a fast-paced, up-tempo worship and then I preach an inspiring lesson. In other words, we redo Sunday morning.
  
  
• Ministry Night. We break up into teams that sing at the nursing home, make visits, address cards, or spend time in focused prayer. We’ll do one of these right before Upward and VBS to get last minute details ready.
  
  
• Retro-Night. Here we have a throwback service where we do things just like we used to-- two songs, a prayer, a song, a sermon, a song, a closing prayer and then the deacons go out to smoke on the porch (just kidding).
  
  
• Unity Night: We’re hoping to have some joint services with other churches in the area. That is still in the works.

We have all of these things scheduled, or at least tentatively planned. What we don't really know is WHY! Why have a service on Sunday night at all? What is the purpose? We still have people who come every time the door are open; you don’t really have to do much for them except open the doors. We have parents with small children who won't t likely come unless we do something for the children, but most of the people who come on Sunday night work with the children every other service. The only guests we generally have on Sunday evening are people traveling from out of town (not people from our community).

So what exactly is the purpose of having a second service on Sunday night? Before we learned that we are saved by grace and not works, Sunday night attendance was how you separated the faithful from the unfaithful church members. OK, that is not the purpose any more, but it does seem like we ought have a purpose. Right now, the purpose of our Sunday night service is to have something on Sunday night. Measuring success is quite easy here—if we have something Sunday night, then we've succeeded! It seems like we can do better.