Over a Lifetime

Yesterday was a pretty big day for Arthur Winston. He finally retired from his job as a public transit worker in Los Angeles. And it was also his birthday—his 100th birthday. Winston moved with his family to California from Oklahoma, and in 1924 he was hired by what was then Pacific Electric Railway Co. He left that job in 1928, but he was rehired by them in 1934. The transit company changed its name several times and merged with other companies, but through all the changes Arthur Winston was there. And in three quarters of a century of working with the transit company, Winston missed only one day of work. One day! That back in 1988 when his wife of 65 years died.

Consistency. Endurance. Perseverance. Very little that Arthur Winston did in his job repairing buses was particularly notable. He says, “It wasn't heavy work, that's the main thing. It's fast but not heavy, and I don't mind the work, so that's how I got by.” Not one single thing he did was amazing, but doing it over a lifetime day-in-and-day-out was amazing. That is a lifetime achievement story worthy of note and reward. What reward did Winston receive for his accomplishment? A free lifetime bus pass! Winston says that he is really looking forward to exploring parts of Los Angeles to which he has never been!

How many amazing things have you done in the service of God? Yeah? Me neither. Some people do, you know… but they are too busy doing them to read my silly little blog! What God calls us all to is faithfulness over the long haul. He calls us to be consistent and persistent in our service to Him. Listen to what Paul says to Rome—

[God] will judge all people according to what they have done. He will give eternal life to those who persist in doing what is good, seeking after the glory and honor and immortality that God offers. (Romans 2:6-7, NLT)

Eternal life goes to those who “persist in doing what is good.” Don’t get me wrong, God both calls and enables some of us to do amazing things like Abraham and Moses and David and Paul. But God calls us all to be persistent and consistent as we seek to do good, serve God and love others. The amazing part of this is that if we will just trust God, He will supply the endurance and persistence we need to be in this faith business for the long haul.

Now may the God who gives perseverance and encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus. (Romans 15:5, NASB)

Operation Maple Sweetness

Vermont Governor James Douglas made the news recently when he expressed disappointment with the war effort in Iraq. No, he was not protesting the president’s handling of the war; he was upset that troops were served imitation maple pancake syrup rather than genuine Vermont maple syrup. Similar concerns last year kicked into gear a campaign called "Operation Maple Sweetness" which sends Vermont syrup to service members serving overseas. The project has delivered 500 gallons of genuine maple syrup, and donations are still being solicited from the general public. If you are interested in helping with this national emergency, send a donation to Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association, 491 East Barnard Road, S. Royalton, VT , 05068.

Well, it’s good to know that are elected officials are not just sitting around and doing nothing while our guys and gals in uniform are sacrificing for our freedom! Hey, I like genuine maple syrup as much as the next guy. But it seems to me that maybe a campaign to get our troops state-of-the-art flak jackets or state of the art armor for their humvees would be a little more helpful than making sure they have genuine Vermont maple syrup. I realize that familiar “creature comforts” are important when you are stuck so far from home, but one has to wonder whether the troops were suffering because they were eating imitation maple syrup (like most people back home) or whether this was more of an issue for the governor of our largest maple syrup producing state!

Much too often the church gets involved in maple syrup campaigns. We are called to serve God in a world ruled by “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Eph 2:2). People all around us are hurting as the institutions that once gave them meaning are falling apart. The family has become brittle and kids are raised by one parent. People move around so much that community and extended family no longer gives them identity. And the church, the one institution that can give meaning and truth and hope, so often doesn’t stress any of those. We fracture and divide over Bible versions, church music, women’s roles on Sunday morning, and dozens of similar issues. A generation ago it was orphans’ homes, communion cups, and Bible classes. What will it be a generation from now?

It’s OK to argue over whether genuine maple syrup is worth the extra money over Log Cabin or Aunt Jemima imitations. But when you are at war, some issues don’t matter all that much. When we focus on the war effort, then the back seat issues... well, they take a back seat. Will God’s army will ever keep the front burner issues on the front burner? We should be able to recognize them—they are ones that are shaped like a cross!

With all Your Might!

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might."

This familiar text from Ecclesiastes 9:10 reminds us that we are to serve God with all our strength. Serving God is never a competition, although we sometimes treat it that way. I remember reading of a small boy who came home from school all excited. He told his mother that he had tried out for a part in his first grade play, and he had gotten a part. When she asked him what was his part, he said, "I get to sit in the audience and clap and cheer!" (For some reason, I can relate to that kid... well, except for his postive attitude!) We can learn two things from that little boy:

• First, it is important to have people who clap and cheer. Those who encourage and support are just as important as those who may have "bigger" parts.
  
• Second, if your gift is to clap and cheer, then you must do that enthusiastically and with all your might!

The church is a family where everyone is valuable and everyone has a role. To whatever degree God has gifted you, to that degree you must serve Him and His church. But no gift is more important than any other gift. No work is more important. However there is another important message in the end of Ecclesiastes 9:10—

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

Whatever our task is in building up the body of Christ, we had better get busy doing it for the time is coming when there will be no more work. Whatever it is that God is calling you to do or to be in His kingdom, stop putting it off! We need people who clap and cheer alright, but we need them to start doing so NOW!

Unbelievable!

Unbelievable! Members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas have shown up at about 100 funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to protest homosexuality in America. This church has conducted several high-profile demonstrations against homosexuality. In fact, it's church web site is www.godhatesfags.com. And it's latest tactic is to show up at the funerals of young men and women who have died for their country to raise placards and shout slogans proclaiming a God who hates.

I cannot imagine the pain of loosing a child or a spouse. And I certainly cannot imagine the pain of having my loved one's funeral used as a bully-pulpit by a group of radicals trying to get across a point… any radicals and any point. The first amendment concerns here are sticky, but Rep. Mike Rogers will soon introduce legislation to outlaw such an intrusion on the grief of these families. He is on record as saying,

American families burying their husbands or wives and sons or daughters who died while fighting for their nation are being subjected to horrible verbal and visual attacks by protesters… No grieving family should be faced with such disrespect or threats and intimidation.

Homosexuality is a sin. The gospel is the power of God that overcomes sin. But a bunch of hateful people waving hateful signs and shouting hateful slogans while intruding upon the grief of others is NOT the gospel. And this kind of behavior will NOT turn America back to God! If anything, it will have the opposite effect. Oh, this may make Fred Phelps and the confused folks at WBC think they are serving God. Just like people who blow up abortion clinics and murder people think they are serving God. Just like people who fly airplanes into buildings think they are serving God. Hey, if you want to do evil things, then go ahead. But don’t blame God for evil behavior. Trust me… that will annoy Him!

No Safe Place

As Lynn occasionally keeps reminding me (like I'm going to forget), it is almost time for our yearly pilgrimage to the left coast for the Pepperdine Bible Lectures. We have been blessed tremendously for the last 16 years by the challenging Bible study, uplifting worship and great fellowship at our brotherhoods premier gathering. For Lynn and I, the Pepperdine lectures are (literally and spiritually) a mountaintop experience.

For many of those years, Lynn and I have taken the three days before the lectures actually start to enjoy a little mini-vacation on the California coast. Hey, we out there anyway, so why not. After a year or two do seeing all the Southern California tourist stuff (Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, a Dodger's game, etc), we found a little resort town halfway between L.A. and San Fran called Pismo Beach. There impressive cliffs cascade right down to the ocean, and the long, sandy beach provides one of the most impressive beach walks anywhere.

Yesterday, Pismo Beach made the national news, likely in the only way a sleepy little tourist town is going to make the national news. A 60 year old homeless man walked into the Denny's where we've eaten a dozen times and began killing people. Two men were killed, one right in front of his granddaughter, and a married couple were wounded. Then the gunman turned his gun on himself. This kind of mindless violence is unfortunately not rare, but in Pismo Beach? In our Denny's? Our quiet little getaway became Baghdad for a day. No place is safe.

There is no safe place in this world. No matter how sleepy and off the beaten path, no place is completely safe. No matter how well we take care of ourselves, our health is never safe. No matter how hard we try to raise our kids right, they will never be completely safe. Our marriages, jobs, relationships and our very lives are never really safe. The only safe place is in God. Paul said, "For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God" (Col 3:33). Faith does not keep the bad things from happening, but it does keep the bad things from destroying us. When our lives are hidden with Him, then Christ become sour life (see Col 3:34). and then nothing can harm us... ultimately. David says this in Psalm 31:7-8 (NLT)--

I am overcome with joy because of your unfailing love,
for you have seen my troubles,
and you care about the anguish of my soul.
You have not handed me over to my enemy
but have set me in a safe place.

March Madness

This week begins the annual “March Madness” that is the NCAA college basketball tournament. That means that a lot of people who seldom follow and know little of college basketball are busy filling out their brackets and predicting the winners. My completed bracket is sitting on my desk, and in case anyone is interested, I have North Carolina, Villanova, Duke and Arkansas in the final four. I have to pick Duke every year or else Angelynn (a huge Duke fan since she was about 3) won’t speak to me. And I always pick Arkansas on the theory that one year I have to be right! (I’m now glancing over at my 1994 Arkansas National Championship commemorative Coca-Cola bottle… the year they beat Duke for the title!)

A couple of things hit me as I was filling out the sheet. First, I doubt that I would have a much better winning percentage if it was last year’s brackets I was filling out. I do seem to remember that North Carolina won, but aside from that, last year's results are pretty much a fog. The spotlight will be focused on college hoops over the next several weeks, but in the end what will it matter? A lot of things that seem to matter an awful lot right now don’t really matter at all. My old Greek teacher used to say, “If something won’t matter in a million years, then it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Of course, he usually said that after I complained about a grade.

Second, these brackets would be a lot easier to fill out if I could read the sports section of the newspaper three weeks from now. What makes predicting the future so hard is that it hasn’t happed yet. (If I’m getting too profound for you, please let me know and I’ll slow down). One team will get hot at the right time, raise the level of its play and have its stars shine through for “one shining moment.” And that’s why they will win the tournament. The hard part is knowing which team will do that. In the contest that really matters, that between good and evil, we already know who will win. John wrote in Revelation about the forces of evil aligned against the Lamb. He wrote in Revelation 17:14—

They will make war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.

Filling at the brackets for the ultimate battle between good and evil is
easy. The Lamb will overcome… and so will we if we remain faithful to
him.

It Needs to Be Easier?

Well, the calendar keeps ticking down closer and closer to April 15 and we keep getting reminders that the tax man cometh. I almost went ahead and bought my copy of TurboTax yesterday, but decided to wait. Hey, I’m not going to install it until April 14, so what’s the rush! Having tax software sure makes do-it-yourself tax preparation a breeze. Well, maybe not a breeze but at least bearable.

Well, for those in the TurboTax generation who like to do-it-yourself, there is a new trend that makes things really easy of you aren’t getting along with your spouse. The trend is do-it-yourself divorce software. Google reports dozens of web-based or software-assisted divorce option. These allow people to get friendly, non-contested divorces with a minimal investment of in time and money. A story in the AP reported that it took only 20 minutes, $400 dollars and a couple of months to get a divorce in New York using the tools at one web site! Why waste any more time or energy in dissolving a marriage? An article on one of these web sites suggests this—“Divorce and alimony should be like MacDonald's or Wal-Mart – reliable, standardized, predictable and consistent.”

That’s the world we live in, isn’t it? But that is not suppose to be the church we live in! we realize that we live in a fallen world as broken people, and the happily-ever-after we desire isn’t always our reality. But for ones who have committed their lives to God, His word thunders through the centuries from Malachi 2:16—

“I hate divorce,” says the Lord God of Israel, “and I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment,” says the Lord Almighty. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.

Divorce breaks faith with the spouse who we pledged to “love, honor and cherish until death do us part.” God says through Malachi, “you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant” (Mal 2:14). But Malachi goes to say, “Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his…” (Mal 2:15). To break faith with our spouse is to break faith with God himself. No, divorce is not the unforgivable sin. Yes, the church should open its arms to minister to those who have gone through (and are going through) divorces. But we also need to be clear on what it is that God wants. He still hates divorce… He always will.

God in the Little Things

After the tragedy of September 11th, one company invited the surviving members of other companies that had been decimated by the attack on the Twin Towers to temporarily share their office space. At one morning meeting, the head of security told several stories of why these people were alive.

• One man was late because his son started kindergarten.
• Another man stopped on the way because it was his turn to bring the donuts.
• One woman was late because her alarm clock didn't go off in time.
• One man was stuck on the NJ Turnpike because of an auto accident.
• Several of those present had simply missed his bus.
• One woman spilled food on her clothes and had to change.
• One man’s car wouldn't start; another went back to answer the telephone.
• One woman had a child that dawdled and missed the school bus.
• One man wore new shoes, got a blister and stopped to buy Band-Aids.

All of these people are alive today because of little things. Many of these are the same ordinary little things that can cause us such stress in our every day life. Now I’m not sure that I would argue that all of these (or maybe any these were) the direct intervention of God. But I do believe that God can use the little things in our lives to bless us… and strengthen us. Maybe there are more sacred things happening in our lives every day than we realize. When you get stuck in traffic, miss an elevator, turn back to answer a ringing telephone that turns out to be a telemarketer… remember that God can be at work in the little things.

The Point of Worship

In his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about a man he calls Jimmie C. As they met for the first time, Jimmie talked about growing up in Connecticut and his life in the navy in the forties. But he spoke as if it was still 1943 and he was still nineteen. When Dr. Sacks left the room for a couple minutes and then returned. Jimmie C. again met him warmly, introducing himself as if they'd never met. Jimmie C. suffered from Korsakoff ’s Syndrome, a complete loss of recent memory. He had a perfect memory up to 1943; but everything else was gone. He had no short-term memory at all.

As conversations continued over the next months, Sacks kept hearing about Jimmie brother who was in accounting school and who was engaged to some girl from Oregon. Of course, his brother had been married and been an accountant for over thirty years. Jimmie had no memory of the last 30 minutes or the last thirty years. For all practical purposes, the clock of his life had stopped in 1943. And Dr. Sacks couldn't help wondering if this “lost mariner,” as he called him, was really a full person. “Is this man’s essence gone?” he asked. “Does he even have a soul?" Then one day Sacks saw Jimmie C. in chapel during a worship service… and came to see him in a whole new light.

I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before… Fully, intensely, quietly in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakoff’s then, nor did it seem possible or imaginable that there should be; for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism— that of mean¬ingless sequences and memory traces— but was absorbed in an act, an act of his whole being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity, a continuity and unity so seamless it could not permit any break. Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual atten¬tion and act.

Do we not share something in common with Jimmy C. here? We live in a world that distracts us and distorts our memory of what is really important. We live our lives at such breakneck speed that we lose sight of the pursuit of God. And then each week we come together for worship… and our memory is restored. In the act of worship we are reminded of what is truly true and really real. In worship, the secular gives way to the sacred, and the human makes connection with the divine once again. Worship focuses our lives and reorders our priorities. It is in our connection with God through worship that we remember what it is to truly be human.

It Was a Joke

Over the last month or so, a series of fires burned down church buildings in Alabama. There did not seem to be a racial pattern to the burnings—five churches were predominantly white and five were predominantly black. All of the churches were Baptist and all were in rural parts of the state. There was no reason known for the fires— no notes, demands or political statements. One pastor said, “We were fearful while they were on the loose because we did not know their agenda.” We know their agenda now. The fires were set by three college students who set the first fires as “a joke.” The later fires started to throw investigators off the track.

At the same time this was happening, a bank was being robbed in Williston, North Dakota. A man named Ryan Wright was wearing a ski mask when walked into the bank and demanded money. When the terrified tellers began to comply with his demands, he told them that he was “just kidding.”

I don’t think that the “Hey, I was just kidding” defense is going to work in either of these cases. My girls would sometimes try to cover a sassy remark with “I’m just kidding.” It didn’t work for them either. I don’t think it is any accident that those involved on both crimes were drunk at the time. But you know, just like alcohol lowers the inhibitions and leads us to bad behavior, sometimes trying to be funny does the same thing. I know that I have cross the line and said things that were hurtful because I was trying to make a joke. And I’ve been stung by the attempts at levity by others. Hey, this wasn’t exactly robbing a bank or burning down a church, but efforts at humor can cause pain nonetheless.

The Bible wants us to take seriously the power of our words. Our language can be a fire that destroys others (James 3:6, Prov 16:27). Paul warns us to guard against unwholesome talk and to speak words that build each other up (Eph 4:29). Later he says “Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place” (Eph 5:4). Jesus says that we one day will have to give an account of every careless word (Matt 12:26). Maybe “I was just joking” makes about as much sense to God as an excuse for us hurting others with our words as it does as an excuse for burning down church buildings and robbing banks.

Sometimes Cheesy Can Be Profound

I'm not a big fan of cutesy articles forwarded to me as emails. I am especially not a fan of those forwarded emails that are attachments that you open and get is another attachment, so you keep opening them like one of those Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. Generally, those forwarded email messages I receive get deleted without being opened. Not not always. Every once in awhile I get one that I actually read and enjoy. Randall sent me one the other day that I did read. (OK, the reason I read it is that he is one of my elders!) But it also reminded me of something that we all need to remember, I think. Here is an abbreviated version of the story--

Several years ago, a new preacher moved to a new town. One day he rode the bus from his home and discovered that the driver had accidentally given him a quarter too much change. He debated with himself what he should do; after all, it was just a quarter. When his stop came, he paused at the door and then handed the quarter to the driver, "You gave me too much change." The driver smiled, "Aren't you the new preacher in town? I have been thinking lately about going to worship somewhere. I just wanted to see what you would do if I gave you too much change. I'll see you at church Sunday" When the preacher stepped off of the bus, he prayed, "Oh God, I almost sold your Son for a quarter."

Cheesy preacher story? Yes, but a reminder of an important truth. Today someone is going to test your commitment to your Christian faith. Oh, they may not do it intentionally like this bus driver. But they are going to say or do something that will put your faith commitment on the line. It may be a slow and inept cashier. It may be an annoying co-worker who is more in your business than in their own. It may be a neighbor who has a really short fuse. Whoever it is, they will test your commitment to live out your faith in Jesus. They will test how seriously you take following the Christ. If we are not careful, we may find ourselves selling our Lord for a quarter... or less.

Making Cookies... and Memories

The other night, Lynn was baking cookies. On top of her two full time jobs-- teaching at Denbigh High School and putting up with me, she still had time to bake cookies for us to give away when we go out visiting. (Of course, I did my part by eating a few just to make sure they were fit to give away! ) To fully understand why baking cookies was significant enough that I'm writing about it, you need to understand that we have been on the Atkins diet for the last three plus years. Snacks for us have been pork rinds and globs of lard! (Actually, we've had low-carb ice cream, which really isn't too bad). So homemade cookies was really a special and exotic treat!

But as good as they were, the cookies themselves were not what stands out for me. As I was enjoying the smell of baking cookies wafting throughout the house, the aroma triggered a flashback. For just a split second, I heard little giggling voices, the sounds of feet running through the house, and little girls begging to eat the cookie dough before it was baked. The smell of cookies present triggered memories of cookies past… and just for a second the house seemed rather empty. Why can such pleasant memories make you sad at the same time!

Bob Hope used to sing, “Thanks for the memories.” Pleasant memories of the past are important, and they have made Kodak a lot of money. But we need to realize is that today, the present, right now-- we are making memories for our future. The only way we can have pleasant memories one day in the future is by living life to its fullest right now. Solomon said, “Don’t long for ‘the good old days,’ for you don’t know whether they were any better than today.” (Eccl 7:10, NLT). What are you going to do today? Why not make some cookies… and some memories?

Parties and Prostitutes

In the opening of his book, The Kingdom of God is a Party, Tony Compolo tells of a trip to Hawaii. When you travel from the east coast to Honolulu, your biological clock runs wild for a day or so, and the first night there, Compolo was both hungry and awake at 3:00 a.m. He went off to find an open restaurant., but the only thing open was a greasy spoon diner run by a guy named Harry. So he sat down and ordered a donut.

As he was beginning to eat, a group of prostitutes entered the diner and sat at the counter, trapping Compolo among them. One of the prostitutes mentioned to her friend that the next day was her birthday. Her friend said cynically, “Why are you telling me? Do you want a party and cake; is that what you want?” The first prostitute, named Agnes, said, “Why do you have to be so nasty? I was just telling you. No, I don't expect a cake and a party; I've never have had a birthday cake in my life!” There was something about this woman that touched Compolo. After they left, he asked Harry if these girls came in every night. When he found out that they did, Compolo and Harry decided to give Agnes a party. Harry did the cake, Compolo did the decorations and Harry's wife got the word out.

The next morning at 3:15 there were crepe-paper decorations, a huge birthday cake and about thirty prostitutes and street people in the diner. When Agnes walked in, everybody yelled “Surprise” and they sang happy birthday. Agnes almost collapsed, and she began to cry uncontrollably. She was at her very first birthday party, and the party was for her! She didn't even want to cut the cake; she took it back to her apartment so she could look at it for a couple of days.

After Agnes left to take her cake home, something just prompted Compolo to say, “What do you say; let's have a prayer for Agnes.” It just seemed like the thing to do at the time. After the prayer, Harry said, “Hey, you didn't tell us you were a preacher. Why kind of church do you belong to anyway?” In one of those flashes of inspiration where you to say exactly the right thing at the right time, Compolo answered, “I belong to a church that throws parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning!” But it was Harry who told the punch line to this story; he said, “No you don't. There are no churches like that. If there was, I'd join. I’d want to be a part of a church like that!” You know, who wouldn't?

Who was it with whom Jesus spent his time? Why was Jesus criticized by the religious establishment in Luke 15:2? He ate with tax collectors and sinners. Jesus wasn’t refined or discriminating enough in his selection of companions. He threw parties for prostitutes (metaphorically if not literally). Has the church become too refined and sophisticated to walk where Jesus walked? Maybe we need to throw a few more parties for people who have never been to the party.

Ashes to Ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. For those who follow the liturgical church calendar, this is the beginning of a very special time of year. Ash Wednesday takes place forty days before Easter, not counting Sundays. It is a time of penance marked (literally) by the wearing of ashes on the forehead of the worshipper. In Biblical times, the wearing of ashes was a sign of mourning. The ashes of Ash Wednesday signify mourning over one's sins and what Jesus did to take them away. The observance of Ash Wednesday is often accompanied by fasting.

My upbringing in churches of Christ was somewhat less than liturgical. Not only was the observing of special days not practiced, doing so was generally condemned. So we generally have a hard time relating to the power of formal ritual. And in doing so, I think our anti-tradition tradition has hurt us.

I know someone will object “But the Bible never says (i.e. authorizes) to observe special days.” No, and it never says (authorizes) have an invitation song either. That is our traditional (ritual) way of publicly offering people a chance to respond to Christ. Have traditions that help us focus on the things of God are good. So having a special day to stress corporate repentance and make a public commitment to that repentance cannot be a bad thing. Have a special season each year to fast, give up unnecessary material things and focus on necessary spiritual things cannot be a bad thing.

Part of the Ash Wednesday tradition are these words spoken as the ashes are applied, “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” We do need to be reminded of that, don’t we? And we need to live like we believe that it is true.

Bad News / Good News

Well, the Winter Olympics are finally over. It would be an understatement to say that I’m not a huge fan. For me the biggest thing about the Olympics was that I have to decide whether to watch the 11:00 p.m. news on Channel 3 or Channel 13 because the Norway vs Sweden curling match went long again on Channel 10. And does anyone else suspect that the real reason people like to watch skiing, ski jumping and even skating is also the reason people watch NASCAR… the crashes?

The US team actually did pretty well this year. Sure, their total of 9 gold medals and 25 total medals was down 20% from Salt Lake City, but the drop off after hosting an Olympics is usually 40%. The US team placed second in the medal count, which is pretty good. But the overwhelming feeling is that this Olympics was a total bust for the US team. High profile failures of high profile Americans like Bode Miller and Sasha Cohen leave the impression that this year was a total downer. You see, a little bad news seems to trump a lot of good news.

That is how it is in our lives, isn’t it? God blesses us in so many ways. Sure, we may have been blessed by God with great families, jobs, health, friends, houses, food and on and on. But what we tend to focus on is that we’re not advancing in our career as fast as we would like. We convince ourselves that we really won’t be truly happy until we’re able to replace that old clunker of ours with a brand new car. God may bless our church with great people, fresh perspectives, opportunities and freedom, but what we focus upon are the few things that we don’t like and won’t be happy unless and until they are changed. Perspective! Job faced the disasters of his life by saying, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.”

Hotter Than a Pistol

Jason McElwain ended his high school basketball career on a high note, scoring 20 points on 3-three pointers in just under four minutes. He says, “I was really hotter than a pistol!” He was. The amazing part of the story was that Jason McElwain was the team’s manager, not a player. He had been the junior varsity’s manager before that. The game in which he scored 20 points was not just the best game of his high school career… it was the only game of his high school career!

Jason McElwain is autistic. He didn't begin speaking until he was 5 years old. He was once terribly shy and withdrawn. So it was totally out character when he approached the basketball coach in junior high asking for a tryout. Jason so impressed the coach that he was made the team manager. And it was love for basketball and the team that brought Hason out of his shell. He made friends. He found a place on the team. And he thrived. And then came that magic night with his team far in front and the crowd chanting his name. He finally got into the game… and the rest is history! His teammates carried him off the court, his coach said, “It was as touching as any moment I have ever had in sports.”

What a powerful metaphor for church! Church is not to be just a focal point of religious activity (as in worship). Rather we are to become a family where we get to know and love one another. Church is a spiritual family that celebrates one another’s victories and shares in one another’s sorrows. Paul says that we are to “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.”(Romans 12:15). Church is the safe place that cheer one another on to love and good works (Heb 10:24). Church is the place where we carry one another—sometimes on our shoulders in victory, sometimes on our backs in weakness. When church functions as church, then even the slowest and smallest of us can feel “hotter than a pistol.”

Cruel and Unusual

My dad sometimes likes to parody the politician who says, “I have friends on one side of this issue and I have friends on the other side… and I always stand by my friends.” Sometimes it is just hard to know what to think; sometimes it’s just easier not to think.

The death penalty is back on the front burner of public debate. In 1983, Michael Morales was convicted of the 1981 and murder of 17-year-old Terri Winchell. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection last Tuesday, but the execution was put on hold by district court judge Jeremy Fogel. Fogel was not be satisfied that Morales would feel no pain in dying by lethal injection, and inflicting pain would be cruel and unusual punishment. So Fogel ordered that an anesthesiologist or other medical professional must administer the anesthesia (the first drug in the lethal injection tail). Since this tends to violate the Hippocratic Oath (ya think?), no such medical professional was found. So the execution was put on hold and after almost a quarter century, due process is still processing.

At the same time I’m following this story, I’m reading Richard North Patterson’s novel Conviction. The story centers around a retarded and black man on death row and his lawyers' valiant efforts to save him. The problem is that no one except his lawyers believes that he is retarded nor (everyone presumably concedes that he is black). The drama in the novel is played out in the same court as the drama in real life. The details are different, but the debate is much the same.

Patterson's story gave me reason to pause; sometimes the issues we want to be cut-and-dry just aren’t. While I am sure that capital punishment is just and right, I am also very not sure that it is carried out justly and with impartiality. If the poor and the non-white are so much more likely to be on death row, does that not cast dount on the fairness of the whole process? One of Patterson's characters (a lawyer) suggests that the one trait all those on death row have in common is that they had incompentent lawyers.

This story in the news bothers me. The presumption that the “cruel and unusual” clause in the Constitution precludes any pain is preposterous. The guys that wrote that clause knew all about hanging and firing squads; they would not have known of any way to execute without pain! Even more disturbing to me is the fact that of the two dozen or so web sites I scanned on this story, about half had pictures of Morales. A fourth had pictures of death penalty protesters. They all had ads. None had pictures of Terri Winchell. No one talks too much about her cruel and unusual death.

What are my views on the death penalty? “I have friends on one side of this issue…” I do believe that without faith in a just and loving God, true and final justice is only illusionary.

Actually Believing...

I was never a fan of the old Seinfeld TV show. I know some of you (like my brother-in-law) thought it was the funniest show ever, but I just never got it. Hey, it was a “show about nothing,” so what was there to get? But as I was flipping channels last night, I came across an old Seinfeld rerun and paused just long enough to catch the following exchange. I think it reminds us of something about our world.

Jerry, George and Elaine were all sitting in a restaurant talking, and Elaine was upset. She had borrowed the car of a friend (presumably a new boyfriend) and was surprised to find that all the buttons on his car radio were tuned to Christian rock stations. It bothered her that he would listen to Christian rock. George replied, “I like Christian rock; it’s so… uplifting.” But Elaine moaned, “You don’t suppose that he actually believes in something.”

Jerry came to her rescue, “Maybe the buttons were already set that way when he got the car and he never bothered to change them.” Elaine said, “Yeah, he is kinda lazy.” Jerry continued, “Or maybe he just didn’t know how to program the radio buttons.” Elaine replied, “Yeah, he is kinda dumb.” Jerry then asked her, “Why does it bother you so much that he would have beliefs?” Elaine said, “Lazy I get. Dumb I get. I just don’t get religion.”

That’s the world we live in... and we need to make a note here. There was a time when most people were something religiously. Maybe they hadn’t been to a church in awhile, but they at least understood the concept of Christianity. That is no longer the case. We live in a secular world that no longer really understands faith. We are surrounded by Elaines who just don’t get Christianity. It is up to us to live it—powerfully, positively and pragmatically. If there was ever a time when it was appropriate for believers in Jesus to endlessly debate the fine points of theological minutia, today is not the time! It is time for believers to come together at the cross, live the cross, and take the message of the cross to the world. We are never going to agree on all the details— two thousand years of church history should have convinced us of that.

Our world is casting about for something in which to believe. When it sees Christians fussing and fighting among ourselves over issues that make no sense, surely they will respond—“Lazy I get. Dumb I get. I just don’t get religion.”

Lessons From Noah

An article by Scott Sager in the latest issue of New Wineskins gives a rather imaginative application to the strange story of Noah’s drunkenness after the flood. Noah went on a bender and found himself naked and in a drunken stupor in his tent. Ham did not treat his father with dignity, and is later cursed for his disrespect, but Shem and Japheth covered up their father’s nakedness. Noah was a good man who made a bad choice; Ham’s bad choice was not handling his father’s failure with sensitivity.

Sager uses the Noah story to point to our restoration heritage in Churches of Christ. He suggests that, like all religious movements, there have been moments in our past when we have had our “Noah moments.” We’ve made bad choices that have had bad consequences on our desire to follow after God. For example, for years our accepted practice regarding racial equality and segregation was just wrong. Rather than covering that nakedness, we either were silent on or even openly opposed civil rights. What will we do with the nakedness of the past? Let me quote one section of the article--

Honest reflection requires an admission that there have been times when we have somehow gotten drunk on pride and made a spiritual decision that exposed our own nakedness. For instance, in the past some of us have gotten drunk on the pride of being “the only Christians.” We have exposed our nakedness by telling the world we were the only ones going to heaven…We exposed our nakedness when we drank the pride of a superior blueprint theology and exposed our nakedness when we insisted that kitchens in church buildings, one cup or two, Sunday school or not, mattered to God.

What are we going to do with our Noah moments? Shem and Japheth are the heroes in Noah’s story because they worked to cover over their father’s nakedness. If we are to be faithful sons and daughters of our spiritual forefathers, then we must do the same. That does not mean that we ridicule or belittle their choices or their faith—that was the way of Ham. It means that we will work to continue their commitments while making better choices in those areas where we believe they got off track. We place our trust in the God of grace to cover over our inadequacies in our choices… and trust the next generation to continue our quest.

Take the Test

I read recently of a new test for people fifty and over. Since I’m rapidly rolling downhill toward that demographic, this got my attention. This twelve question test measures your chances of dying within the next four years-- the more points you get on the test, the greater the chances that you will die. The test was created at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center to measure risk factors linked with mortality. For example, I would get two points just for being male (a bit gender-biased but I would get to skip the two for diabetes or smoking. The test is supposedly 81 % accurate for older people, but critics point out that it does not consider family history and that it is almost meaningless for people at the younger end of the scale.

I must confess that I’ve considered the question of morality a bit more often than I used to. If nothing else, turning fifty in July will mean that I have to live to be 100 just to be middle aged now! Bryant Clayton kidded me last night about living through more football history, “Like back when they played without facemasks!” The sad thing is that I he was right! I used to watch Tommy McDonald catch passes from Roman Gabriel; McDonald retired in 1968 as the last player who played without a facemask! Time marches on.

But no matter how old you are, death is an eventual certainty. It doesn’t matter whether you think about it or not. It doesn’t matter how well you score on some test. And it doesn’t even matter whether you are prepared or not. Unless Christ returns first, all of us are going to die. The ratio is 1:1 of biths to deaths! None of us knows exactly when it will happen, but all of us need to live like we know it will happen. How will live while we are alive is the only way we can prepare for a life that never ends.

God Is Interested

Rob Schenck and two colleagues entered a U.S. Senate hearing room the day before the January confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and anointed each seat with “holy oil” to bless the proceedings. He had done the same thing for Chief Justice Roberts' hearings. We explained to the Wall Street Journal, “God is interested in what goes on there.” Schenck is president of “Faith in Action,” an evangelical organization whose mission is to “reintroduce the Word of God into the public debate surrounding legislation and policy matters.” Schenck considers himself “missionary to Capitol Hill.”

Our fellowship has always taken radically different viewpoints concerning Christianity and political involvement. Alexander Campbell spoke before the Virginia House of Delegates; David Lipscomb wrote a book arguing that Christians should not run for office, serve in the government in any form or even vote. I think our tradition broad enough to satisfy any political, non-political or even anti-political stance.

I think Schenck is right when he suggests “God is interested in what goes on” in our nation’s capitol. Paul specifically tells us “Pray this way for kings and all others who are in authority, so that we can live in peace and quietness, in godliness and dignity” (1 Tim 2:2, NLT). The king for whom Paul solicits prayers here is Nero Caesar, the very king who would later have Paul killed. If Paul wanted the church to pray for Nero, then we should be praying for our rulers. God is concerned with what goes on in our government and our country. The gift with which He blesses us all is intercessory prayer. Why not take a moment to pray for our leaders that they may lead so that “we can live in peace and quietness.”

More Than a Cup of Coffee

Convenience store operator Dale Lanier has found an interesting and creative way encourage people to read and memorize the Bible. If they walk into his store in Snead, Alabama and recite the Bible "Passage of the Month," they get a free soft drink or cup of coffee. It's not like he expects folks to memorize Genesis or something. This month's verse is Psalm 118:8, "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man." Lanier has been doing this for the last six years. He says that he usually gives away between 2 and 12 drinks a day. Sometimes an entire family will come in, recite a passage, and receive their free drink. Lanier believe in the power of the Bible, and he has found a very practical and imaginative way to emphasize it.

That got me thinking that we should do that. Next Sunday, anyone who comes in and quotes a Bible verse can have a free cup of coffee. (Of course, anyone can come Sunday and get a free cup of coffee, but don't tell anyone). If we really do believe in the power of scripture, won't we do something concrete to prove it? If we really do believe that the Bible is a word from God, then won't we show that in some real life way? The real prize we win when we commit ourselves to learning something from the Bible is a fresh and renewed view of God. What David said about sacrifice in Psalm 50:23 applies to our prusuit of scripture as well--

²³ He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God.”

Worship Together

Well, we are a month-and-a-half into our new worship schedule. I guess that is too soon to decide whether it is a good thing or a bad thing… or just a thing. On the one hand, our worship has been tremendous! The combination of our praise team with the whole church singing together (rather than divided into two services) has been pretty amazing. I’d rather worship with you guys than anywhere else! (And I’m sure you’d rather hear me preach than Jeff Walling or Max Lucado! Amen? Hello?) But the other hand, it still feels really strange to have church first and then Bible class. After 26 years of preaching and then going home for lunch… well, it is hard to get used to something different. I’m probably not the only one who is struggling a little bit with change.

The change was intended to bring us back together into single communion service as a way of emphasizing unity. Gathering around a common table to simultaneous remember the sacrificed body of Christ and proclaim our unity as one body in Christ is a powerful metaphor. No one (at least, no one here) would argue that multiple services and multiple communions are wrong. There are many different ways to “do communion” (Tressa and Angelynn visited a church that has weekly communion on Sunday night in small groups, trying to recapture the communal setting of the first century). But for our specific church situation, the elders thought the symbolism of one communion service bringing us together as one body (1 Cor 10:17) was powerful enough to make squeezing together into one service worth the effort.

Symbolism can be profound. But we need to understand that everything about our worship proclaims (or should proclaim) unity. We sing together with one voice praising God and encouraging each other. We come before the throne of God together to petition Him in prayer. We come together as children allowing God to speak to us together through his word. Everything about coming together in worship proclaims that we are one family coming to worship one God. The power of our worship together is the together!

Where We Hang Our Hat

Dan Ericksen tells a story all too familiar in the annals of church history. In the 1890's there was a small Baptist church in Mayfield County, Kentucky. The church had two deacons who were constantly arguing and bickering. One of them put up a small wooden peg on the back wall so that the pastor could hang up his hat. When the other deacon discovered the peg, he was outraged, “How dare you put up a peg without consulting me!” The people in the church took sides and the congregation eventually split. Today the residents of Mayfield County still refer to the two churches as Peg Baptist Church and Anti-Peg Baptist Church.

How silly! But before we get too smug lookign down our nosesa on those Christians for their silliness, we have something of a history of division in Churches of Christ, don't we? A casual observer may find our reasons for our division just as silly as the Peg/Anti-Peg controversy:

• At the same time the controversy raged in Mayfield, our churches were splitting over church music and how to best support our missionaries and mission efforts.
  

• Since that time, we have divided over how cups in communion, classes in Sunday School, and what precisely will happen at the end of time (like God is waiting to see what we decide so He'll know what to do).

We could go on and on enumerating controversies, but this list is depressing enough. All of these are pretty petty reasons to divide. In fact, it is rather hard to imagine a noble reason to divide the church Jesus prayed would be one. Sure, there may be many reasons why we feel comfortable at one place and not at another. Paul and Barnabas had to agree to disagree at one point. But pointing fingers? Splitting hairs that split the church? Gathering our robes around us and proclaiming, "All who are on the Lord's side come to me?" Is that our job?

In 1 Coprinthiasn 15, Paul gives us a peg upon which to hang our hat, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." We will never stand together on all the minutia of things that take place when one is "doing church." And we shouldn't all agree on such things; there is something to be said for variety! But let's hang our hat on the one thing that really matters-- the cross on which Jesus died.

Some Heavy Thoughts

I have been having trouble generating any enthusiasm about getting back seriously on my low-carb Atkins diet. The combination of the holidays and our cruise has left me with an additional ten pounds that I would like not have. But after eating bread, pasta and even pizza for awhile, going back to doing without them is difficult. I’ve considered the idea of trying another approach to weight loss; is there a bread and pasta and pizza diet? But what I won’t be trying is the Hong Kong approach I ran across recently--

A bold weight-loss program of the Life of Life Healing Spa in Hong Kong involves actually setting fire briefly to the parts of the body holding the most fat, according to a December dispatch in London's Daily Telegraph. According to owner Karen Chu, the fire follows an energy flow "reading," full-body exfoliation, high-pressure hose spray, and herb-and-potion and alcohol rub-downs (but wet towels and a fire extinguisher are at the ready in case of problems). Chu said about 100 clients have undergone the treatment, with no complications, and the ones interviewed by the Daily Telegraph reporter praised the service. Chu said the treatment is based on traditional Chinese medicine, but a Hong Kong doctor interviewed by Agence France-Presse said, "I have never heard of such a thing."

Ouch! A lot of people have been burned by fad diets and crazy weight loss schemes, but this is a bit ridiculous! It kinds makes my low-carb breakfast bar seem like a piece of cake!

Has it even hit anyone as a bit ironic that we live in a country in which one of our major problems is getting too much to eat! No matter what approach we take to weight-control, we are truly blessed to live in a time and place in which food and other life necessities are so plentiful. How dare we take that for granted! How dare we forget about those who don't have enough. Maybe if I spent more time in prayer thanking God for His bountry and asking His blessing on those in need, I wouldn’t have so much time to hear the call of that bag of cookies that someone left in the kitchen after the Super Bowl party!

Twist of Fate

I ran across the following story in an news article on MSNBC’s website recently. In is one of those "Twist of Fate" things that reminds us that our actions can have real and positive consequneces of others and ourselves.

Seven years ago, Kevin Stephan (10) of Lancaster, N.Y., was a bat boy for a Little League baseball team. A player warming up accidentally hit him in the chest, and Kevin’s heart stopped beating. A nurse named Penny Brown happened to be at the game, and she rushed to Stephan and performed CPR. It was fortunate for Stephan that Brown was even there at the game that night. She had been scheduled to work, but was given the day off at the last minute. Here quick thinking and training saved a life; what she didn’t know at the time was that this would save her life as well.

Seven years later, Penny Brown was eating at the Hillview Restaurant in Depew, N.Y., when she began to choke on her food. When people realized that she was in serious trouble, they began to scream for help. Fortunately for Brown, working that night at the restaurant was one Kevin Stephan, now a seventeen year old Eagle Scout and volunteer junior firefighter. He rushed to Brown and performed the Heimlich maneuver. He saved Brown’s life-- the saved had become savior.

We live lives that are so interconnected with those around us. John Donne reminds us that none of us are islands apart from others; we are all “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” The life we live impacts those around us, just as their lives impact us. As Christians, we must realize the influence we can have on others around us. We impact others as we serve God joyfully and faithfully. We are a blessing to others when we refuse to be negative or pessimistic. We add to the good in the world when we avoid gossip and criticism. We bless others when we thankfully focus on our blessings. And in turn, they become a blessing to us. The joy of the Lord will be our strength… and it can become the strength of others as well. The spiritual life that your positive influence will help save just may be your own!

Bad Game / Good Time

Sure, it was a sloppy game between inferior teams (neither of which were the Colts). But our 12th annual Super Bowl party was a huge success. We had a great crowd for our worship (at the strange hour of 5:00 p.m.) The competition in our homemade soup (SOUP-er Bowl, get it?) was fierce. The winning soup along with all its competitors was polished off along with our Outback Potato Bar, a jillion hot dogs, and plethora of other foods with no nutritional value whatsoever. I just hope that no one was noticing that despite preaching yesterday on self control, I sure made my share of trips to food tables! “I couldn’t help it; that’s just the way that I am!”

We saw something important illustrated last night. In the second quarter with the action heating up, there was a disastrous fumble. Not in the game... here! Our aging video projector was blindsided and tumbled off its stand and bounced several times on the floor, pieces flying in all directions. The crowd was hushed. Trainers rushed in and feverishly began to work. After as long delay, a picture was restored… with purple blotches (damaged LCD panel) and a ghosted picture (a twisted cable). It was a miracle the bulb didn’t pop. As we worked on the projector, no one left or complained or seemed to care. The game was on hold, but the party continued! We were there not just for the Super Bowl—we were there to be together! We were able to finish the game; sadly, it looks like the projector is finished as well!

One of our guests commented on how great it was that we were able to be together as a church to have fun together. He said, “That is the way it should be.” You know, I think that’s right. We had a great time of worship and teaching yesterday. It it’s great we could just have a great time together too!

Super Bowl Sunday

I can’t believe that is almost time for the Super Bowl. OK, what I really can’ believe is that my Colts again went home early after it really looked like this was the year. I have to admit that I had a hard time getting too excited about the big game. I mean, the Seattle Seahawks for crying out loud? Who would ever think that “Seahawks” and “Super Bowl” would ever be used in the same sentence? And no matter how hard I try to stay on my diet, every time Sunday they mention Ben Roethlisberger (Roesthlis-BURGER), I’m going to want to get something to eat!

So who cares about the big game? Well, I just happened across a story about the Christian faith of some of the key players on Seattle Seahawks. Team leaders and huge stars like quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, safety Michael Boulware and MVP running back Shaun Alexander are all extremely vocal about their faith, routinely giving praise to God and referring to their faith in post-game interviews. And when the Seahawks take the field against the Steelers, head coach Mike Holmgren will be without his wife Kathy and one of their four daughters. They will be on a medical mission trip to the Congo with Northwest Medical Team, a Chriustian relief group. He explains, “My wife has been there before and my daughter is a nurse so they will enjoy it more. It’s more important.” More important? Than the Super Bowl? To the coach? Defensive line coach Zerick Rollins put it this way—

My faith in God is first in everything I do. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Super Bowl or a preseason game. You have to prepare to do your job and do it well, but the first thing you do is give God praise because He deserves it.”

It’s great to run across people on the center stage of this Super Bowl soap opera that have their lives centered. So just when I’m ready to declare myself a Seattle Seahawk fan, I run quotes like these—

"I don’t think we put any value on marriage any longer in our country and, to me, the wedding band is a symbol of my wedding bond with my wife and my bond with God." (Safety Troy Polamalu on why he will wear his wedding ring during the game)

"People think this game may go down in history, but it’s really only temporary. I thank God that I am here, but I know I have to ask Him for guidance because I didn’t know what to expect.... I can’t let this game get me too high or too low. I have to stay focused on God and stay focused on His word." (Wide receiver Antwaan Randle El)

"I’ve been praying every day that I would honor Him and I’m praying now that I don’t embarrass Him during this time. I want to give Him His praise all the time and use this time as a platform not for me, but for Him." (Center Jeff Hartings)

Cool, huh? Here are guys that have worked all their lives to get into the big game, and when they get there, they want to talk about faith and God! So who am I rooting for in the big game? Seems like I have brothers on both sides… and I always stand by my brothers!

When You Trip and Fall

I knew there was a reason that I stayed away from museums… and china shops. A recent Reuters report tells about a visitor to a museum in Cambridge, England who tripped over his own loose shoelace and tumbled down a flight of stairs. The good news was that he was unhurt. The bad news is that he tumbled into a display case housing a collection of vases from the Qing dynasty of China, shattering every vase in the display!

Here was this guy who goes out for an afternoon to the local museum to expand his horizons. One minute he was taking in some culture; the next minute he is tumbling head over heels, smashing the culture to smithereens! Museum director Duncan Robinson was actually quite stoic, “It was a most unfortunate and regrettable accident but we are glad that the visitor involved was able to leave the museum unharmed.” At least that is what he said.

We’ve all been there more often than we will admit, haevn't we? One minute we are browsing around through life without a care in the world; the next minute we are tumbling head over heels smashing through something valuable and breakable. We say or do exactly the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time… leaving a pile of shattered feelings behind in our wake. we know what the guy felt like sitting at the bottom of the stairs with the shattered pottery pieces all around him. Aren’t you grateful that God is eternally forgiving and gracious when we trip and fall? Shouldn’t we seek to be a little more forgiving and gracious to one another?

A Matter of Priorities

OK, I'm just a little sensitive about buying this new TV, OK? Huge case of buyer's remorse. Hey, I bought it so that I could give the old one to my daughter who lost her's to a thief. Of course, I could have bought her the NEW one, but I'm trying to teach her reserve and self-discipline. (No one is buying this, are they?) Then I come acress this story--

MANTECA, Calif. -- A California pastor accused of selling his town's oldest church has pleaded guilty to embezzlement and agreed to 18 months in prison. Randall Radic had preached at First Congregational Church of Ripon for nearly a decade before he sold the church last October for $525,000, allegedly using the money to buy a BMW. Authorities said he also faked documents that gave him possession of his house, which was owned by the church, then used the property to take out loans.

So maybe preachers can be as swept away by materialism as anyone else? Maybe from watching religious TV, you may have the idea that we have MORE of a problem than anyone else! There is nothing wrong with a new TV. (Pause for an "Amen"). Hey, there is nothing wrong with a new BMW (but $525,000?). There is something wrong when we let our values get completely out of control... or controlled by the world. That's somethign we all have to struggle with at times. Excuse me, but I need to check the BestBuy delivery schedule for this week!

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Well, they haven't moved Arkansas any closer to Virginia! After a very long car ride, singing praise songs until I was hoarse (of course, I had just preached so I was already on the way to hoarse) and a pretty good mystery novel on Recorded Books, I made it to Arkansas. After spending the night with my folks in Little Rock last night, I'll be with the girls the next two days giving Angelynn her car, Tressa her TV and Jasmine a city sticker from her Dad. (Is it just me, or does it seem Jasmine gets the short end of that stick?) I'll fly home Wednesday just in time to teach my class.

Last night, Mom and Dad mentioned the name of someone who had supposedly been at Denbigh sometime in the 1980's. The problem was that we could not remember them (I won't mention their name because I sure they read this blog and I don't want to hurt their feelings). Dad disappeared into his office and reappeared with three very full folders of old church directories dating back to the beginnings of Denbigh. We went through them looking for this family, but we never did find them.

What a trip down memory lane. I was reminded of people that I have not thought about for years! I thought again of how many people have come through Denbigh over the years. We have had so many from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard (along with a few Marines and maybe even some CIA spooks from Camp Perry, but then how would we know) come in and out of our church family over the last 25 years. They left a little of themselves with us and took a little of us with them. Hopefully the good parts.

Influence. Denbigh has touched a lot of lives over the years... and has been touched by a lot of lives. I hope that in some small way we have been able to enrich the Christian life of all of these people... I know they have enriched us. Maybe we can have a Denbigh reunion one day as we gather around the throne of glory. I look forward to it.

Seeing the Unseen

It seems that I might be in the market for a new TV. It's really not my fault; I have to buy one. Over the Christmas holidays, someone broke in to my daughter's apartment and stole her TV... as well as doing some other pretty strange stuff. Being a loving parent, I want to help her get back on her feet and get over her trauma. Of course that means giving her my 27" TV and replacing it with... ahh, something somewhat bigger than 27"! after all, HDTV will eventually be REQUIRED, and so who am I to buck something legistated by the government?

Stuff! It is so easy to think that stuff we want is really stuff we need. It is so easy to buy into Madison Avenue's hype. If we aren't careful, we can thing the hype is real. The film The Gods Must Be Crazy is the story of a tribe of people in Africa so remote that they had never contacted anyone from outside their world. An airplane flew over their village and someone threw a Coke bottle from the plane. They decided that this artifact was a gift from the gods and thus of great value; they didn't know that it was only garbage. They had seen the airplane and had a glimpse of the sky, but they decided that the garbage, the junk, was what was real.

Everyone in the village wanted this gift of the gods for himself or herself. They fought over the artifact; their entire existence became centered on possessing it. They did not realize that their lives had come to be centered on junk. But they were wise enough to understand the damage, and they decided the gods must have been crazy to have ever given them the object. So they began a journey to throw the object off the edge of the world. They didn’t know that the gift of the gods was no deposit and no return!

Faith is the ability to see what is really real and what is really junk. God calls us to focus on that which is of real value surrounded by the world of junk. The thread than runs through Hebrews 11 is that the great heros of faith were men and women who could see what was unseen. We see the junk, and the junk can glitter. But all that glitters is not gold. The toys and trinkets around us are fun, but they are not real. May God help us to be people who more clearly see that which is unseen. Can we see it any better in 42" Hi Def?

A Sure Thing

Sometime ago, we decided that it would be helpful if I had a cell phone. I don't know what we were thinking, but it made sense at the time. We are adding a phone to Lynn's existing service, and Alltel at the time had a pretty good deal on a PDA smartphone with email and web capabilities. I like gadgets, and I do use a PDA, and carrying one device rather than two was appealing. And the messaging on this smartphone was provided by on the the best known names in the business-- Blackberry. How could I go wrong?

Fortunately, my natural inclination to put off financial decisions as long as possible allowed the "deal" to expire before I made the purchase. Blackberry's maker Research in Motion was sued for copyright infringement, and the Blackberry service as of this morning is in real danger of being shut down. It seems they "borrowed" some technology owned by another company, and that technology is at the center of their service. So once trendy Blackberry users may later this week be the owners of message devices that can't sent or receive messages!

You can't count on anything in this world to last. The only thing certain in life is its uncertainty. (Hey, this was the year that my Colts were certain to make the Super Bowl! Right!) There are no sure things in this world. We may think that we can count on our job, on other people, on our investments or on our health-- but they all let us down eventually. But God never does. The Hebrew writer contrasts trusting in money and trusting in God (Hebrews 13:5-6)

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you. So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

Maybe the only thing more useless by the end of the week than owning a Blackberry will be owning stock in Blackberry! We can't count on anything... except God.

One-Eye-and-Half-Sense

I heard an old, retired preacher say years ago, “We don’t study the Bible any more; we just read it and remember what someone once said that it means.” I think he may be right. It is so easy to assume that all basic doctrines of the Bible (and most of the minor ones) are really pretty simple. In fact, anyone who has one eye and half sense and an honest heart can understand God’s will perfectly. The only reason that there are so many different denominations (and differences within our own) is that so few people really have honest hearts. Except for us, of course

Here’s a newsflash. God is far too wrapped in majesty and mystery for us to ever get our tiny little minds around Him. God Himself reminds us of that in Isaiah 55:8,9 (NLT)--

“My thoughts are completely different from yours,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

Yes, God revealed Himself to us in scripture, but He did so only in the “baby talk” that we can understand. We would be foolish to limit the eternal God to words simple enough for us to grasp! What Paul says about our final reward can be applied to all the things of God, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor 2:9, NLT).

So anytime we talk about the things of God, we need to do so on our knees, driven there by holy fear. It is arrogance that leads one to act as if the things of God are so easy that anyone with one eye and half sense can see it and that anyone else who disagrees with them must be dishonest or disinterested. That attitude is certainly not driven by holy fear.

Character Inside Out

In Alexander Dumas' classic The Three Musketeers, d'Artanian meets his future friends when he alternately offends and then challenges each of them to a dual on the same day. His encounter with Porthos is a point of warning for us, I think. As d'Artanian rushed to catch up to another gentleman with which he had a dual (he sure fought a lot of duels), he literally ran into Porthos. Porthos was showing off his new suit of eye-popping, finely embroidered, rhinestone-studded clothes to his friends when the rushing d'Artanian became entangled in his cape. The cape tore loose, revealing the fact that Porthos' distinctive suit was only distinctive in the front. He only had enough money for half a suit; the part that was covered by the cape was not very fine at all. Porthos had wanted to impress his friends with his fine clothes, but d'Artanian's clumsiness revealed him to be a fraud.

I wonder how many of us play the part of a spiritual Porthos. We give a great deal of attention to the part of our religious lives that shows to other people-- we attend services, become involved in church programs, and defend what the Bible teaches. And yet, on the inside our hearts don't really belong to God. It's all a facade; it is a suit of clothes only decorated on one side. Which sounds a lot like the metaphor Jesus uses to descrine the Pharisees in Matthew 23:25-28

25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. 27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

God wants us to be an inside-out people. He wants us to give attention to the way we are, not how we seem to other people. It is from the heart that we speak and act (Matt. 12:34). We cannot impress God with religious rite, right doctrine nor good behavior unless it is a reflection of our heart. God will take a humble tax collector over a full-of-himself Pharisee every time. Why? Because God knows our hearts!

On the Mountaintop and Beyond

Yesterday was the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. (Yes, it would have been better if I'd written this yesterday, but it was a holiday!). On this day, our nation pays tribute to one of the most unique and significant people of our generation. It is good and right that we remember and honor men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who helped to found this country "of the people and by the people." It is good and right that we honor Dr. King who led the movement that forced our country to be off all the people and by all the people.

King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death sparked riots that rocked Memphis, Chicago and many other parts the country. For many, King symbolized the civil rights movement, and it was a shock that he was dead. Well, it was a shock to everyone except Dr. King. The last paragraph of his last public speech given the day before his death was eerily prophetic--

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life-longevity has
its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've
seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know
tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy
tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have
seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

A generation later, Dr. King would not recognize his country. Sure, only the incredibly naive would say that the problem of race has been fixed. But only the incredibly dishonest would argue that ours is not a totally different world.

I was only 12 years old when Dr. King was killed, but my memory of the event is very clear. The Sunday night following his death, we had a youth group meeting at church. During that gathering, one of the older teens blurted "I'm glad they finally shot that n*****" Several openly agreed with him. Though there were several adults present, they said nothing to challenge that statement. Where do teens learn such hate?

The sad historical fact is that most white churches defended the status quo and opposed civil rights. Segregation was not just tolerated by churches; it was enforced. Several of our colleges had to be forced by the government to open their doors to blacks. I know of ministers who were fired because they baptized and discipled too many of "them." The theme of racial and ethnic equality in Jesus Christ is a major theme that runs through the New Testament. Oneness of Jews and Gentiles in Jesus was not just a sidelight issue for Paul, it was his ministry. Books like Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians and others stress this equality. And yet the church missed it for so many years. What else we are missing?

Make Yourself Indispensable

Several years ago, The Daily Press carried a story about a man named Adolph Stec. His neighbors thought Mr. Stec had abandoned his little house and moved out of town. Some continued to cut his grass occasionally while others gathered his mail until the mailman began to skip the house because it looked so abandoned. Eventually work crews came out and cut off his utilities.

But it wasn’t until May 8, 2001 that he mystery of Adolph Stec was solved. Developers bought the house at tax auction, and they entered to inspoect the property. They discovered Mr. Stec’s almost completely decomposed body sitting in his living room chair. A newspaper was in his lap and a calendar was on the wall were both dated February of 1997. Mr. Stec had been dead in his house for more than four years, and no one had missed him! One of his neighbors said,
"He really wasn’t a very friendly man, not nice at all. So everyone just went on with their lives. He must have abandoned the place, we thought." How sad that someone could be so completely expendable, so totally dispensable!

I wonder how many Christians make thesmelves that dispensible at church. Sadly, church for many has become a place where you go to fulfill religious duties. It much more like a religious theater where holy things are observed than a spiritual family where holy relationships are made and mantained. May we come more and more to see Denbigh as our little logo suggests-- "God's Family Under the Cross."

Spring Came Early

Spring came early at the Tucker house yesterday! No, I’m not talking about the unusually warm weather (I’m actually going to cut my grass this afternoon if things dry off). No, our most important harbinger of spring arrived in the mailbox yesterday—the Pepperdine Bible Lectures program book! I actually stood outside for 10 minutes skimming the program before I went inside, and then I spent another 30 minutes reading it in more detail! I really have to do that because once Lynn gets it, I won’t get it back for weeks. By March, she’ll have all her lectures underlined and most of her clothes laid out!

Actually, getting the program this early is a rather rare treat for us. There have been several years where the program book didn’t come in the mail until after we get back from the trip. Of course, the entire program is online, and we sent off our reservations the same week we found the PDF application on the web site. But there is something about having the program book in hand that is a sure sign that spring is coming. You can keep your robins chirping in the backyard and the first game of baseball season. For us, spring is about making airline reservations to LAX. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to log onto CheapTickets.com.

The Heart of Worship

There is a certain unsettledness that goes with any major church change-- like changing our worship times and format. And with unsettledness comes discomfort-- what was wrong the old way of doing church anyway? It is easy for us to become sidetracked by the forms and formats of worship that forget its focus. After all, when we come together as a church, we have to do something. And we all have our own ideas about what we should do-- old songs vs new songs, planned worship vs spontaneous worship, short sermons vs shorter sermons. And there is something to be said about using the very best forms. But sometimes we can focus so much on the externals of worship that we miss the heart of worship.

Matt Redman tells how his preacher led him to look at worship in a different way. Redman is a worship leader; that is both his gift and his ministry. But for a period of weeks, it was decided decided that the church would worship without any music at all—no instruments, no singing, no nothing! During that time, the church concentrated on worship withou songs. For Redman, this focus was painful. But it was out of that experience that Redman saw worship in a whole new way, and he wrong wrote his classic praise song “Heart of Worship”--

When the music fades, all is stripped away
And I simply come longing just to bring
Something that's of worth that will bless your heart
I bring you more than a song,
For a song in itself is not what you have required
You search much deeper within
Through the way things appear
You're looking into my heart
I'm coming back to the heart of worship
And it's all about You; it's all about You, Jesus
I'm sorry Lord for the thing I've made it
When it's all about you, it's all about you, Jesus

The first question we need to ask about worship is not about its form or format; the first question is always about its focus. Worship is about God. Sure, the form worship tales impacts people, and therefore we must think about the forms. But the focus must always be God.

A Great Day

Well, yesterday was a very interesting day! It was the first Sunday that we were all together in one service after four years of being “separate and apart.” This was a major change for us in how we do church. Whether you were used to coming at 8:30 or 11:00, everyone now comes at the very strange time of 9:45! Maybe the most unique part of our change is having worship first followed by Sunday School, an order that most of us haven’t seen before. (What would Paul say about having Sunday school second?)

I’m sure there are a dozen glitches that we’ll have to work out. For example, we pulled out extra chairs and blocked aisles at the back in violation of the fire marshal’s “suggested” seating restrictions. We'll need to get better at ushering people down front. We do want the fire marshal to worship with us at some point, so we might want to work on that! We may need to scrunch the rows closer together so we can have an extra row on each side... but that will mean going from business class to coach as far as leg room!

Things went very, very well. The singing was truly amazing! I can’t remember being in a service anywhere where there was more energy and spirit in the song service! I did feel a little extra pressure in preaching because I had only one “take” to get it right! (With two services, I had two chances to feel good about how well the sermon went!) I thought Bob’s "Elder’s Blessing" comments were particularly appropriate. We even ended the service exactly on time! And it was so very encouraging to see the auditorium so full!

Let's commit ourselves to making this new schedule work. It's going to seem a little awkward for awhile, and that's OK. Let's work together as God's family under the cross to allow Him to work in us..

You Can't Please Everyone

Here I sit bleary-eyed for the third straight morning because again I sat up too late to watch a college football game. Actually, this time it was THE college football game—Texas and USC in the Rose Bowl for the national championship. For once, the game actually lived up to all the hype as Texas won on the final play. Scanning the sports headlines this morning, the pigskin pundits' post-mortem on the game gives all the answers as to why Texas won and why Vince Young is the best player in football… and why he should go to the pros early and why coach Mack Brown is a great football coach. Of course, these are the same experts who where saying yesterday that USC would win and why Mack Brown always lost big games. As my Dad says, an "ex" is a has been and a "spurt" is a small stream under pressure; put them together and you have an expert.

I doubt that Vince Young is paying too much attention to the ideas, opinions and thoughts of the experts. In fact, the ideas, opinions and thoughts of other people are never a good basis for making decisions. Why? Because they are always changing; they are always a moving target impossible for us to ever hit. It doesn’t matter what car you drive, what neighborhood you live in, or what career field you pursue, you will never make “them” happy. A line from the old Ricky Nelson song suggests, “You can’t please everyone, so you got to pleas yourself.”

Paul would disagree with that as well. He says that our job is not to please others or ourselves’; we are to please God, “We urge you in the name of the Lord Jesus to live in a way that pleases God, as we have taught you” (1 Thess 4:1, NLT). Think about it. We know we can't always satisfy others... and neither can we seem to satisfy ourselves! Our ideas, opinions and thoughts seem to change too. What we thought would bring us happiness or meaning or stability or whatever end up failing us. We can’t live to please others or ourselves— so we must please God. In fact, it is when we live to please God that we really also please ourselves and others. That’s Paul’s statement in Romans 14:17-19 (NLT)--

17 For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. 18 If you serve Christ with this attitude, you will please God. And other people will approve of you, too. 19 So then, let us aim for harmony in the church and try to build each other up.

The Power of Prayer

My favorite shore excursion on our recent Caribbean cruise was a four and a half hour walking tour of old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Growing up in the shadow of Jamestown and Williamsburg, my knowledge of colonial history is a bit slanted toward the Anglo; I know very little of the much older Hispanic side of colonial times. It was very interesting (and tiring) to walk all over old San Juan and listen to our tour guide Ramone discuss another aspect of our history.

One of the things we toured was the Square of La Rogativa, a small park with a statue of a rather scary looking priest leading a procession of women. The statue comemorates a British attack on San Juan in April of 1797. San Juan's defenses made it very safe from attacks from the sea, but this invading British force landed up the coast and had flanked the city's defenses by attacking from land. In response to this very grave situation, a local priest organized a Rogativa (prayer procession) in which dozens of townspeople carried torches and marched through San Juan praying to God to deliver them. The British mistook the torchlit procession as the arrival of reinforcements, and they retreated without launching their attack. Someone decided that such a story deserved a statue.

A Barna Research poll indicates that while more than 90% of Americans pray and 60% pray daily, less than half of those expect God to answer their prayers. Do we? Do we believe in the power of prayer? Are we really convinced that God breaks into human history and touches lives with His power? When we wrestle in prayer with problems, do we believe that God both hears us and acts to answer? In the case of La Rogativa, the power of prayer was seen in the prayer itself. If the people of san Juan would have sat in fear behind locked doors with ringing hands, they would have been defeated. But by boldly marching to the throne of God in prayer, they were led to liberation and freedom. God does not always answer prayers so dramatically; if He did, then we would spend all of our time building statues! But God does answer prayer! May He give us the faith to spend more time in 2006 on our knees than we did in 2005!

A Really Cool World

Lynn and I have returned safely from our week floating around in the Caribbean. We appreciate so much the church sending us on this cruise for our 25th anniversary (last May) with the congregation here. (Although I did get a little suspicious when there was no return trip voucher to get us back to the airport and then our return flight was cancelled!) We had a wonderful time. Thank you so much, church.

Sunday afternoon there was to be an interdenominational worship service on the ship just as we were leaving Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas to return to Ft. Lauderdale. Whoever was in charge of conducting the service failed to show up, so about 20 of us sat around waiting. There were hymnals there, so we sang for awhile until it was certain that no one was coming. So we decided to just share some scriptures and thoughts, and so we had our own little small group. We then ended with a chain prayer.

One of the prayer phrases used stuck in my mind and heart. We had just spent the day on a tropical island where you could swim with tropical fish, ride horses on the beach, snorkel with giant stingrays, sail, kayak or just lounge in the 88 degree sun... or do all of the above. As we were thanking God for the blessing of the trip and asking His mercies on our return trip, someone added "and thank you, Father, for creating such a really cool world for us to enjoy." I'm not sure I'd ever heard "really cool" used in a prayer before, but that about said it. God did make a really cool world to bless us. He wants us to enjoy His goodness; He wants us to bless and serve others so that they can enjoy His goodness as well. We need to step back more often to take in the magesty and goodness of God to remind us who we are and who we are called to be. You don't need to be on a tropical island to do that. But if you just happen to on one...

Happy New Year!