Without Fear of Molestation

"Without fear of molestation from the civil authorities." That's a prayer phrase that I heard growing up in many (if not most) of the prayers prayed in church on Sunday mornings. It was right up there with phrases like "ready recollection" and "guide, guard and direct" (which usually came out as one word "guideguardndirect") and other things that I really didn’t understand but repeated in my own prayers nonetheless. Well, I knew what the words "without feat of molestation" meant, but I didn’t really understand that this was really a big problem for churches this side of the Roman empire. After all, I when started to Deer Park Elementary School back in the early 60’s, we still began each day by reciting the Lord’s prayer and absolutely no school activities were ever scheduled on Wednesday nights because that was church night. We didn’t fear molestation from the civil authorities. Even after Madeline Murray O’Hare’s work to remove prayer from the schools (much of which seems to have taken place after her death, if you believe the bulletin articles and email that still occasionally find distribution). The idea of the civil government actually molesting (OK, I always found that word a bit strange) people because of their faith seemed rather remote. And to a degree, it still does.

But it doesn't to Jamie Murray, the owner-operator of the Salt and Light Café in Layton, England. As you might infer from the name of his establishment (Matt 5:13-16), Murray (no relation I trust to Madeline Murrat O’Hare) is a Christian who operates his business in a way that gives honor to God. Since the café opened eight years ago, Murray has been playing Bible texts over the TV screen that can be seen by patrons. Just Bible verses and Bible messages running innocuously on the wall mounted screen. Well, these messages weren’t innocuous to one patron who was offended by the message, and rather than just going to some other establishment for fish-and-chips, he complained to the police who responded by forcing the TV’s to be turned off as a violation of Section 5 of the Public Order Act. When Mr. Murray prays about "molestation by the civil authorities," it is no stock prayer phrase to him!

Neither is it a stock phrase to Youcef Nadarkhani, a Christian minister and leader of a network of Christian house churches in Iran. Bro. Youcef is in prison in Teheran and might possibly be executed by the time you read this for his refusal to recant his faith in Jesus Christ and convert to Islam. In Iran, it is not technically illegal to be a Christian, but it is a hanging offense (literally) to convert from Islam to Christianity.  The Iranian government insists that because Nadarkhani's parents (or perhaps grandparents) had been Muslim, then he was under law Muslim… even though he had not ever practiced that religion. While there are many others in Nadarkhani's position in Iran, none is so prominent in leading Christian churches, and thus the fundamentalist Islamic government is going to make an example of him because of it. Pray for our brother believer in Christ and all our brothers and sisters who live in a situation where "molestation by the civil authorities" because of faith in Jesus is simply a way of life.

We take so much for granted, don’t we?

The Greatest Love of All

Several years ago, Robert Schuller sent me a copy of his book Self-Esteem: The New Reformation. (Actually, he sent it to thousands of preachers, but it made me feel better about myself to think he'd sent it to me personally.) In that book and other writings, Schuller redefined the gospel in terms of self-esteem. Jesus came to give us us back the proper view of ourselves that God intended for us from the beginning. Schuller defined sin as "any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem." He suggested that "a person is in hell when he has lost his self-esteem." Thus salvation is being saved from this loss of self-worth, "To be born again means that we must be changed from a negative to a positive self-image--from inferiority to self-esteem, from fear to love, from doubt to trust." Well, if that is the gospel, then perhaps we should see Whitney Houston as a new-gospel singer as she croons, "Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all."

Not only was Schuller wrong, he could not have been more wrong.  The central act of Christianity is the cross where Christ "made himself nothing" (NIV) or "emptied himself" (NET) as He died on the cross (Phil 2:7). The cross was not about self-esteem; it is about shame (Heb 12:2), a shame that we also bear as we follow Jesus outside the camp (Heb 13:13). We are given a new identity as children of God, and that does indeed recast how we view ourselves (1 John 3:1-3). But God calls us to "share in His holiness" (Heb 12:10), and our self-esteem often takes a beating when we see just how short of that we are able to come. Paul is not pumping us our self-esteem when he says, "What a wretched man I am!" (Rom 7:24). The fact that God loves us and that Jesus died for us and that the Spirit indwells us DESPITE our wretchedness does not change the fact that we are indeed wretched. And the greatest love of all is learning to lay down our lives for others (John 15:13, 1 John 3:16).

I really enjoy reading Experimental Theology, the blog of Dr. Richard Beck, a professor of psychology at ACU.  In his most recent blog, he dealt with the idea of self-esteem and Christianity as it relates to the second great command. "Love your neighbor as yourself." Beck suggests that as it is often taught in churches, Jesus is teaching two things here: (1) we must love ourselves and (2) we must love others as ourselves. Thus as Schuller argues (though not to the same degree), the gospel is concerned about pumping up our self-esteem as a platform for loving other. I liked the way he addressed that idea--

Actually don't think Jesus has this very recent, Western psychotherapeutic situation in mind. I don't Jesus is saying anything at all about self-esteem in the second Greatest Commandment. And it worries me a lot that churches are leading with messages of self-love. I don't think Americans need to hear a message that starts like this: "The first thing you need to do is work on loving yourself. And when you've got that down then you can turn to loving others." Because, as best I can tell, a lot of Christians are spending their whole lives just working away on the first part of that equation. Year after year American Christians are spending all their spiritual formation energy on learning to love themselves. And that seems a bit screwy. 

What I actually think Jesus is trying to say in the second Greatest Commandment is that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. As I argue in Unclean, Jesus is trying to blur the boundary between Self and Other. Jesus is trying in the second Greatest Commandment to form an identity relationship between Self and Other, to see our lives as intertwined. The hallmark of this fusion is empathy, the ability to stand in another person's shoes and ask a simple question: "If this were me, what would I want?" Basically, "love your neighbor as you love yourself" is just another version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Click over to Experimental Theology and read his entire post; I think it will be informative. Let me sum up with how Beck sums up, "The secret, I think, isn't to try to go from a low self-esteem to a high self-esteem. The secret is to just stop playing the self-esteem game altogether. The key is to get out of your head." I like that... I'm just not very good at it.

The Ten Commandments

Message to My Devoted Fans (both of them):  I have comment moderation on the blog set so that anytime anyone comments, I get an email that allows me to allow or disallow the comment from being posted.  This is not so that I can keep disagreements to a minimum (which I'm not opposed to) but a practical necessity sense 90% of the comments I get are spam (somehow I've picked up quite a following of people selling wedding dresses!).  I noticed last week that it had been awhile since I received any requests, and sure enough GMail (by Google) decided that all notices from Blogger (by Google) is all spam.  Anyway, I'll either change the moderation settings or manually check the Blogger dashboard to approve comments.   Sorry if you thought I was ignoring you.

At present, my Sunday morning adult class is undertaking a study of the Ten Commandments and I'm also leading my Sunday night Middle School small group through the same study.  After an introductory lesson setting up the series, we're taking one of the commandment each week and  trying to unpack it for our world today.  Since Middle School students live in a different world than do their parents, the commandment unpacks a little differently.  And we're having much more fun on Sunday nights.

One of the things the kids seemed to enjoy was this video on how to learn the ten commandments in order by using your fingers.  I gave them a pretest at the beginning, and we couldn't as a group name them all in any order.  After they watched the video once, they had them nailed.  Pretty cool.

On Faith and Being Sensitive

People of faith must often navigate mine fields to live our beliefs in our progressively more and more secular culture. Just ask Dr. Richard Scott, a Cambridge-trained doctor who practices in Bethesda Medical Centre in Margate, Kent in England. He was in a consultation with a young man who was suicidal and had several medical and personal issues. At the end of that consultation, Dr. Scott suggested that he might consider faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that meant a lot to the doctor through the years. Several months later, the young man complained (actually, it was his mother who complained) to the medical authorities that his own faith (likely Islam) had been demeaned. Dr. Scott was called before a medical board hearing, and he must now defend his actions or he could lose his medical license. “A line was crossed because Dr. Scott expressed his personal religious belief to a person who he knew was a vulnerable patient in a way that was plainly liable to cause the patient distress.” Dr. Scott responded, “He had an awful lot of problems, and the thing to know, that God loves us and Jesus loves us and you can deal with stuff in the past, in terms of hurt or guilt or fear of failure, stuff you can only really find through Christianity.”

It strikes me as ironic that Dr. Scott works at a hospital named for the place in John 5 where Jesus healed an invalid, and yet just mentioning the name of Jesus in a conversation with a patient in the context of healing got him brought up on charges!  The good doctor asked the patients permission before sharing his message of faith, and he only offered it at the very end of the medical consult. Religious faith can clearly have a positive impact in dealing with medical issues (see 1, 2, 3, 4).  If that is the case, then how is it inappropriate to offer a faith-based message as a possibility to consider.  Of course, I do understand that the patient was particularly "vulnerable" because of his illness, but it was precisely that vulnerability that caused him to need something else in his life; what he had was clearly not working for him.  The problem here was not the the doctor offered some sort of extra-medical advice to this patient; the problem was that this man of science suggested that there may be something of value in the idea of God.  And those other men and women of science who make up the medical board don't want to admit that God... or at least that they aren't God.

Christians must be sensitive in bringing up the topic of faith in a world where we can no longer assume that most people have it.  There have been more than enough uninformed and insensitive proponents of faith who act like they are spoiling for a fight as they run roughshod overs in a rush to win arguments and defend positions.  But the idea that seems to have become the status quo in our multicultural word is, "It's OK to have faith as long as you don't try to share it with others."  That is impossible for Christians to accept, because one of the tenets of out faith is "Go into all the world and preach the gospel."   Sure, we have to find ways to be sensitive as we share our faith, but we MUST still share it.

Pat Robertson and Nicholas Sparks

Pat Robertson recently made headlines by suggesting that it was Biblically acceptable for the spouse of an Alzheimer’s patient to divorce them and then remarry someone else. Robertson said that he wouldn’t "put a guilt trip" on someone for divorcing a spouse with Alzheimer's disease, arguing that Alzheimer's is itself "a kind of death." So Robertson told a caller asking about struggling with the disease, “if he’s going to do something, he should divorce her and start all over again, but to make sure she has custodial care, somebody looking after her.”

His reasoning seems to be that because the Bible teaches that widows and widowers are allowed to remarry (Rom 7:3). Alzheimer’s “is a kind of death,” so the spouse of one Alzheimer’s should also be allowed to divorce and remarry (as long as arrangements are made for a caregiver). By his reasoning, the “Christian” thing would have been for James Garner to have kicked Gena Rowlands to the curb and started dating other women, turning “The Notebook” into “The Little Black Book.” Am I the only one here who thinks that this makes Nicholas Sparks sound more Christian than Pat Robertson?

I can imagine some exasperated wife (maybe mine?) reasoning, “When my husband flops on the couch all day long on Saturday and Sunday watching college and pro football, it’s like he’s DEAD, so that means…” I do know of a Christian wife who divorced her husband because he had lusted after another woman (not sure how she knew that) and thus he had “already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt 5:28). Everyone knows that adultery is grounds for divorce, so she got rid of her husband and felt perfectly sanctified in doing so. Pretty convenient, huh?

Pat, if you want to give people permission to white out the “in sickness and in health” clause in their marriage vows, please don’t blame that on the Bible. Every page of scripture reveals to us the faithfulness of God. The reason that God hates divorce is not simply because God wants to preserve the family as the foundation of society and a safe place in which raise children. No, God hates divorce because God is Himself faithful— His “faithfulness reaches to the skies” (Psalm 57:10). Unfaithfulness contradicts the perfect nature of our Almighty God. When we are faithful, we become participants in the divine nature of the God we serve (2 Pet 1:4). Faithfulness isn’t always easy, but it is always divine.

The Gift of Time

Shelli Eldredge was on vacation in Hawaii, touring with her husband and two sons on mopeds when a terrible accident left her in a coma. She had about fifty broken bones, including a shattered pelvis, broken spine and a crushed skull and facial bones. She was not expected to live, and one of the doctors told her husband that he should seriously consider disconnecting her from life support. She remained in a coma for weeks, and Shelli’s husband Stephen, himself a doctor, thought that it was "pretty apparent that she wasn’t going to wake up." He decided that he was not going to give up, and his "gift of time" allowed what can only be called “a miracle” to take place.

After several weeks in a coma, one of Shelli's doctors walked from one side of her bed to the other and noticed that she tracked his movement with her eyes. Later, after her husband joked with one of the doctors, Shelli laughed out loud. They were all stunned, and Stephen asked, “Shelli, did you hear that?’” She responded by raising her eyebrows. That started a process of recovery, and today, three months after the accident, Shelli is walking and talking and determined to come all the way back. Shelli, Stephen and the boys were recently on the today show telling their story to Matt Lauer.

The gift of time.  I wonder how many troubled marriages that seem to be flat-lining or limping along on life support with no hope of reconciliation could be brought back from the brink if only we would give the gift of time so that God could do His work?  How many struggling Christians who give up on their church and maybe even on God would be given new life and vitality if they just gave themselves and others the gift of more time.  Friendships, jobs, family relationships, church ministry-- sometimes what we need is to give ourselves and others the gift of time so that God can heal and restore.

13 I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.
14 Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. (Psalm 27:13-14)

Army of the Lord

OK, it HAS been awhile sense I've posted anything here. I'm still mourning the end of a summer that ended abruptly with VBS, vacation and Hurricane Irene. Lynn and the girls are back in school (Angelynn as a brand new teacher at Warwick High). Summer's gone; I have to deal with it. So it's back to the old routine... which I plan on including a blog post or two or three each week.

We just ended a short sermon series on Spiritual Warfare Sunday. When many people hear "Spriitual Warfare," they think of angels, demons and exorcism. So... do demons possess people today like they did in Jesus’ day? I really don’t know. I doubt Satan would want top do that much our modern world where most people don’t believe that Satan even exists; it would be silly for him to disabuse them of that notion. What I do know is that the Bible never commands us to exorcise demons. There is no passage that outlines an exorcism. Jesus told them to go away, and they went away. It didn’t always work that way for the apostles (Matt 17:14), which probably is why they were so hacked off when they came across the unknown exorcist (Mark 9:38). Of course, it really turned out badly for the sons of Sceva when they tried to cast out demons in the name of Jesus (Acts 19:14).

No, we are not told to cast our demons or how to go about casting them out. But we are told some specific things that we are to do concerning spiritual warfare.

• We are told to “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7)
• We are told not to “give the devil a foothold” through our anger (Eph 4:27)
• We are told to “Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Pet 5:9)

The emphasis on our participation in spiritual warfare is not on how to get the devil out of others; it is rather the necessity of resisting the devil’s hold on us.

The problem is that many of us have come to believe that sin really doesn’t matter that much anyway. After all, how many were brought up thinking that a lot of things were sinful (dancing, drinking, going to movies, mixed-swimming, and the beat goes on) that they now believe to be no big deal. In fact, the whole idea of sin is pretty much no big deal any more, which is a bit awkward on Sunday morning when we remember the price Jesus paid for our sin, a price that makes no sense if sin isn’t that big of a deal any more. You really do get the idea that sin isn’t nearly as gnarly as we once thought it was when you consider the following factoids:

• Christians vote against abortion, but we get as many abortions as others
• We say we believe in sanctity of marriage, but divorce at higher than culture
• We can fuss over social drinking, but we  are alcoholics at rate as culture
• Polls say as about 50% of our men and 20% of women use pornography
• Barna suggests as many Christians as non-Christians cheat on marriage
• 51% of Christians admitted on one poll they lie (were they being truthful?)

What’s going on? We can defend the reasonableness of faith with philosophic and scientific evidence, but if make no difference in how we live our lives, then why would anyone want it? When we become just like the world around us in every recognizable way, then why would they want to become like us. In fact, HOW can they become likes us—they already are like us?

The old Acappella song “Army of the Lord” asks the question, “Are we walking into the enemy camp laying our weapons down?” More and more of us don’t even know there’s a way going on!