Everett and Jackson

The other night our Christmas Eve "crowd" included a couple of families with little guys.  In one family, Dad was holding Jackson (who's maybe about 3 years old) on one knee and a lit candle on the other while Jackson was sobbing because he wasn't being allowed to hold the candle - until he sobbed just hard enough to blow out the candle, which startled him into stunned silence!  Mom and Dad relit the candle, and all was fine.

Then there was Everett, just a year old, who knows how to say "OH-oh!" and was saying it at the end of every hymn and carol.  Well, he doesn't know "Amen" yet, but "out of the mouths of babes will come praise" and I think he just wanted us to know he didn't want us to stop!  In the meantime, he was saying "Oh-oh" loud enough for everyone to hear, and everyone took it in stride with grins and chuckles all throughout.  

I love it when even the littlest ones are paying attention in worship!  That's life in the family of God at it's most fun.

Our "Grief-Illiterate Culture"

In an interview on the Today Show this morning, Maria Shriver made a comment about our "grief-illiterate culture" that gave us pause.  My wife and I thought that was an interesting and pretty accurate observation.  While there are still some pockets in our society that seem to know what to do about grief and mourning, most of our 21st century American culture seems to be a vast wasteland when it comes to dealing with grief and loss.

We don't know how to deal with the emotions that come with grief.  We're taught to buck up, to shake it off, that big girls don't cry and that boys certainly don't.  When we see a person at a time of intense grief who is not crying, we say "he's holding up well"; when they cry we say "she broke down."

We think reason fixes everything.  So we come with lame explanations,  pitiful comments, measly excuses for comfort that do no good.  In truth, nothing can fix the loss or cure the grief.  It will likely always be there for the person whose loss it is, but over time they will discover their own ways to look at it, to come to terms with it, and perhaps even to embrace it.

It's not our grief, so we move on quickly.  Like driving past a man standing on the roadside with a cardboard sign "Homeless Vet," we may feel a twinge of pity for him for a moment but our own plans and commitments quickly put him in our rearview mirror.  We attend the wake or the funeral and quickly move on, expecting the grieving person to do the same and are surprised when they don't.

I think we respond to grief this way because we don't understand that grief is a holy place, a sacred space.  It is a place where people meet God, or they don't meet Him.  It is a place where they are angry with Him, or they are comforted by Him.  It is a place where they hate Him, or they know His love for them.  It is a place where they wrestle with Him, or they nestle into Him.  Grief is the Jabbok River to which each of us comes eventually (Genesis 32), and some fear crossing it more than they do crossing the Jordan.

But whether in our anger, our hate, our wrestling; our being comforted, our being loved, our being nestled; our meeting God or our not meeting God, grief is still a prime place where all this happens.  Certainly we can encounter God in other places and at other times; but when our defenses are down, our props are washed away, our self-structure is shattered, our composure has decomposed - these are the places where God comes to meet us.  These are the most sacred spaces of life for those who are in them.

The Great Lie

My Message from our Prayer Vigil this evening

In days like these, following terrible and unfathomable tragedies like this shooting in Connecticut, one of the things we try to do is to understand a bit of what has happened.  Hundreds of news clips, sound bites, interviews, articles, and special reports break in at all hours and on all media to bring us the latest in somebody’s effort to make sense out of the senseless.  Eventually, Christian and non-Christian alike are confronted by the question (often asked in anger, without any real desire for clarity), How could God let something so terrible happen?

There are certain background assumptions behind this question, assumed by both Christians and non-Christians (although Christians take them to be true, while non-Christians take them to be false and just assume them to be true for the sake of argument).  These assumptions are:

1.       The world is basically a decent place.

2.       People are basically good.

3.       God is basically good.

4.       God is Sovereign (which means, He rules the whole world).

Now, when any evil thing happens (like the shootings this weekend), there are a number of possibilities.  Let’s consider them by number:

1a.     The world is basically a rotten place.  We should not be surprised when bad things happen, but rather when good things happen.

2a.     People are basically evil.  I’ve often said you have to teach kids how to be good, but they know how to be bad all by themselves. 

However, in general people don’t want to buy into either of these statements.  They prefer them in their original form, because life is a lot less scary and a lot more comfortable that way.  They also like 3 and 4, but modified a bit in these ways:

3a.     God is basically a good God; He just has trouble keeping track of things (particularly the evil ones).

4a.     God is basically a Sovereign God; therefore, “everything happens for a reason” that He hasn’t told us yet.

Here’s where all of these fall down – none of them account for the fact that there are more players on this field than you and God!  Yet when something bad happens, we try to figure it all out based on our own ideas while ignoring some basic Biblical thoughts, like these:

5.       Satan is a major player in this game, too.

6.       In the Garden of Eden, Satan’s promise to Adam and Eve was that if they ate the fruit of the tree they would “be like gods, knowing good and evil.”

7.       Since that time, all humanity has been infected by sin in general and this one in particular – that we like to think we are like God in this one respect, that we now “know good and evil.”

8.       To put it more specifically, when a tragedy happens, we want to claim this promise that because we are now like God we should get to know, to understand, where the good and the evil are in it.

9.       What we consistently fail to realize is that the promise to “be like God” and to “know good and evil” is the promise of Satan, not God!  We also know from the Bible that Satan is the father of lies, and therefore cannot be trusted to keep his promises the way we expect they should be kept.  And so, the result is that

10.     When a tragedy happens and we want to understand, we have fallen right into Satan’s trap of lies!

The better option is this:  get out while you can!  Forget understanding!  Hang on to grief, even to anger if you need to – but hang on to Christ even more closely.  Hang onto His cross, where He bore our pain and sorrow, our wounds and stripes.  Hang onto His nail-pierced hands and feet, no matter what happens!  Forget understanding – “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but Blessed be the Name of the Lord” – and just cling to Him in worship.  Thy Kingdom come!

Jesus Christ, My Coping Mechanism?

My wife and I saw "Flight" last night.  R-rated for a multitude of reasons (actually, only two - one right away, and then the second one repeated a multitude of times throughout the movie by multiple characters, if you get my drift), so I'm not recommending it from the pulpit.  However, there were lots of interesting scenes in this movie, like this one:

After the plane crash, the co-pilot is in a medically-induced coma for several days.  His legs were crushed in the crash, his pelvis was shattered, and he may never walk again, let alone fly.  After he's been out of the coma a day or two, the older pilot comes to visit him in the hospital.  At first the young co-pilot sounds angry at all that has happened to him, but then his face changes and brightens and he says "but God preordained all this."  He talks glowingly about how this was God's plan, and he knows that God will make everything to be good for those who love Him.  Meanwhile, at his bedside his young wife can be heard saying "Praise Jesus" now and again.  What a nice Christian couple!

And yet there's something incredibly phony about the two of them.  I began to suspect it with his conversation, but she nailed it for me.  Here it is:  Jesus is not the Savior of this "nice Christian couple" so much as He is their Coping Mechanism.  You can tell this by the tone in her voice and the expression on her face when she says "Praise Jesus."  The tone is anything but praiseful and hopeful; the expression holds nothing but grim determination and anger.  She's almost choking out the words "Praise Jesus."  

Her husband's explanation that his injuries were part of God's grand design comes after we see a glimpse of his anger at them.  It's almost as if he vents for a bit, then tries to push that anger back inside and whitewash it with this pious makeover.  

Most of the movie is about alcoholism and addiction in other characters; but in this little scene it struck me that this couple uses Jesus like the others use alcohol or drugs.  They use Him so they don't have to deal with the difficulties of life.  They cover up the anger they're ashamed of with false praise.  They sidestep the painful certainty that the husband's injuries would cause almost anyone else to cry out "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" by numbing it with the dogmatic explanation that "this was God's plan."  

I just have this feeling that while this couple may have seen Jesus on the cross from across the valley, they never actually made it to Calvary.  I doubt that they've smelled the sweat, heard the blood as it dropped to the ground or the harsh breathing from His dried-out mouth;  I doubt that they've touched the cross or the whip or the nail or heard Him really cry out "Why has Thou forsaken me?"  Perhaps if they had they would not be so quick to gloss over their troubles with the paintbrush of "God had this planned."  Perhaps they would instead cry and rage and scream and feel as abandoned as Jesus on the cross, and then like the thief on Calvary look up, see Him next to them, and say "Lord, remember me in Your kingdom."  It's His promise "Today you will be with me in Paradise" that they really need, not "this is all according to plan."  

By the way, a bit earlier in the movie, when the airplane crashes in a field just beyond a small country church where the believers are gathered to worship, after a moment of stunned silence and terror we can see them rushing into the burning wreckage, wearing their white choir robes and all, and pulling out passenger after injured passenger and leading them to safety on the green pasture around them.  Apparently no lectures from these Christians about "the plan of God"; just the Christian actions that said "these people will perish if we don't go get them."  That's the kind of Savior Jesus is.

Uncomfortable Companions

I just happened to notice that "Inherit the Wind" was on TV yesterday afternoon, so I stopped to watch it for a while.  Besides being a great classic movie, it's got awesome performances by Spencer Tracey and Frederic March and even an awesomely uncharacteristically greasy and weaselly performance by Gene Kelly.  Here's the scene I caught:

On a certain level, this film is about people of faith being confronted by something they perceive as a threat not only to their belief system but to their way of life.  They respond with fear; they pass laws against the threat; they get whole communities worked up about it.  The premise is, I guess, that if they let this threat continue it will likely destroy them.

Which now brings up some other questions.  Are they not confident that their beliefs are strong enough to survive such attacks?  Are they afraid because they've never been tested?  (How would the Three Little Pigs have known if their houses were wind-worthy if the Big Bad Wolf had never come along?)  Are they afraid of what might happen to them if it turns out their beliefs are not quite what they thought they might be?

Yes, people of faith need to be on guard.  Yes, Christians need to watch out for false teachers and unclean spirits.  But not every teacher who brings something new out of his storehouse is a false teacher, and not every teacher whose work is accompanied by an unfamiliar spirit is in league with Beelzebub.  Just ask Jesus!

Purity is good, and ought to be pursued.  And yet - pure iron is strong, but iron alloyed with carbon is stronger (it's steel!). I don't think it would be amiss for people of faith to take careful, faith-filled looks at some ideas that might be out of their "comfort zone" and ask "if I accept this idea, how might that make my faith stronger?"  

Not all companions on the journey are the most comforting.  Sometimes they are the ones that make us uncomfortable, but stronger because of it.

Praying for All the Saints

Please take a look at Dr. John Byron's post over at The Biblical World on Pray Continually, then please read on.

The Biblical World: Pray Continually: Thoughts on Praying with the Chu...: I noted yesterday that I was posting some of the application material from my commentary on 1 & 2 Thessalonians. I am doing this to get ...

I just today was preaching on Ephesians 6:10-20 ("put on the full armor of God") and noted that there are really only two things that Saint Paul tells us to do once we have all that armor on.  One is to "take your stand."  The other is to "pray for all the saints (and, oh yes, for Paul, too)."

He doesn't ask us to commit portions of our time, treasure, or talent for the work of the church.

He doesn't ask us to go out and knock on doors, walk across a room, ask two questions of our neighbors.

He doesn't ask us to do miracles, to hold potlucks, to have fellowship events, to conduct VBS.

He says that with that armor on we can / should do two things "take your stand" and "pray for all the saints."

But why is praying for all the saints so hard?  Why is that last on the list of what churches do?  Why is that never on the Strategic Plan or the Mission Statement?

Is it really because it's too hard?  Or is it because it just doesn't seem like we're doing much, just sitting there with our hands folded and our eyes closed and our heads bowed?  Does it seem like we haven't accomplished anything by the time we're done, like we have nothing to show for the hour we spend in prayer?

Is the reason why it is so hard for us to "pray for all the saints" that we're just too busy trying to bring order to our own corner of the universe that we can't be bothered with someone else's - even the one who invites us to call Him "Father"?

Is it because we really don't care about the other saints after all?  

Or is it just because we're all overstimulated, hyper-aroused, and attention-deficient from everything in life to do something like pray?

I don't know the answers to any of these; I just wonder.

A Christian Faces Death

We had just moved to Lodi when word came of the death of Joseph Cardinal Berardin of Chicago from cancer. In his last days and in our last days in Chicago those who had ears to hear learned much from him about how a Christian might face death.  Now we have another such opportunity, which I pass on to you here (click on this link):

Cardinal George looks to God as second cancer fight begins :: Catholic News Agency (CNA)