Resurrection Life

Easter 5, 2012: In which the preacher invokes "The Big Lebowski" in a congregation full of 80-year-olds. Crickets chirped. Oh, and Jesus teaches us to "abide".

Gospel: John 15: 1-11

 

Today’s Gospel text follows on the heals of the message that Glenndy Ose brought to us last Sunday.  Last Sunday Glenndy spoke of Jesus as the Great Shepherd of the Sheep an image we quite like to have until we recall that, hey, Jesus is calling us sheep.  All we do is just kind of stand there and let Jesus do all the work.  To which I respond: exactly.

 

This morning we hear Jesus refer to himself as the vine and to us as branches.  Another quite intriguing picture of who Jesus Christ is but again, kind of a disheartening image for someone who wants to know what it is they need to do to get into heaven.  

 

Each of our girls developed their independent gene in similar ways and they both made those developments known to us in their use of language.  For one of them it was they word, “Self”.  If we tried to do something for her she would snatch whatever it was out of our hands with the words, “self self!”.  Likewise our other daughter notified us of her independence by grabbing the spoon or whatever we were trying to do for her with the words, “Oni me, oni me!”

 

Those traits continue in each of us as we grow and develop as adults.  We are a people who are proud of the things we accomplish for ourselves.  We pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and soldier on making our way through life to each his own.  

 

The news has had quite a few stories on the decline of the mainline church and the rise of the mega non-denominational church.  Why is this happening one radio commentator wanted to know?  One young woman phoned in and said, “I go to such and such church because their message is relevant to my life and is filled with good advice.  The sermons teach me how to be a better spouse, a better Christian, and a better person.”

 

We like to have a checklist of things we have to do so that we can then be assured of our place in God’s presence.

 

But then these little vignettes pop up in Scripture and it turns everything that we want to do on our head, instead it is showing us what it is God is doing to bring us together and to give us life.  We just sit there in the sheepfold or stay clinging to the vine.  No branch gets to exclude any other branch, it’s not our job, God does the pruning and tending to His garden.

 

Our job, if it can be called that, is to abide in Christ.  In the movie the Big Lebowski the character played by Jeff Bridges was called simply, “The Dude” and the dude was known for one thing and one thing only... the Dude Abides.  The dude was always around and always would be.  The dude stays the dude even when everything else around him was going crazy.

 

So when Christ is talking about the branches abiding in the vine is he using the same definition as the dude?  I think so.  We cannot win our salvation by doing checklists of good works, our salvation was won for us by Christ, our good shepherd, our vine.  

 

We, in turn, have been grafted into Christ by virtue of our baptism, we have become part of the vine.  It is our job to make sure we stay that way, thus, while good works are not our salvation, making sure we stay near Christ is.  Like any living thing our faith our relationship with Christ needs to be nourished to stay alive, thus, when we come to church, study God’s word, find fellowship with other people on their life’s journey’s, we find ourselves drawing our life and our light from the true vine, Jesus Christ.  But, when we do not we find ourselves soon lost and dried out, ready to be thrown on the fire.  When I get into conversations about faith with seekers or with those who just aren’t sure about the whole God thing yet I like to explain our my spirituality, my faith, is like having an extra gear waiting for when the going gets rough.  People of faith have been proven to be more resilient to life’s curve balls because we know when confronted by these things that we are not alone.  It is not up to us alone to walk through this life.  We have each other, and more importantly, we have our true vine, jesus Christ.

 

Amen.

 

"While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering": a sermon on the future of an established, declining congregation with great things in store for it.

3 Easter 2012

Luke 24: 36b-48

Pastor Chris Enstad

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen indeed!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!

Brothers and sisters, I bring you grace and peace in the name of our Risen Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ.  Amen.

“While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.”  

What an amazing statement by Luke. “While in their joy they were disbelieving and wondering.”  

In truth, those could be the words stamped on the outside of just about any Christian congregation could they not?  Oh, I know that there are plenty of Christians walking around feigning certainty but, usually I find that that certainty is really a smokescreen for uncertainty.  Indeed, often times the louder a Christian shouts at an unbeliever or questioner about the faith, the more often you have to wonder what they have that the rest of us don’t.  Christ appeared in the flesh only between the Resurrection and the Ascension, so, unless you have Jesus locked away in your basement then you are in the same boat as the rest of us.

We possess a very real but a very fragile faith.  Faith in and of itself is a gift given to us by the God who created us.  But, in giving us that gift, God entrusts it to some very human humans,  frail, easily distracted, sinful, judgmental, and capricious.

I have had friends in the faith who have had awful things happen to them or to someone they love, get lost in that most scariest of questions, “If there is a God, why would he let something so awful happen to me or to that person?”  

I also have friends who have so many crazy things going on in their lives that they seek a Christian faith that is unchanging, unshifting, uncompromising.  Both of those extremes, unfortunately, miss out on the living breathing gift of the fragile but real faith granted to us by the God who created us and loved us.

Elim: A people of joy who still, at times, disbelieve or wonder about this whole God thing.  I wonder if a church put that phrase on the outside of the door if more people might not darken the doors.  A church is all too often seen by those who are questioning, those who perhaps are in active states of disbelief, they are often seen as clubs for those who have it all down pat when, in fact, if folks out there knew that, “Hey, we have questions too,” might they not join us in our journey as a church?

I wonder….
“While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering”.

You know, I wonder about this whole thing all the time.  Who is this Christ that we claim has risen from the dead and what in the world does it have to do with us?

We say that we meet Jesus when we walk in the doors of this place.  Pr. Theim referred to the sign that is in the pulpit up here “That we would see Jesus”.  Well, if I’m doing my job and Pr. Marcia is doing hers and Pastor Theim is doing his, and we are meeting Christ in the flesh when we walk in here... what is keeping us from sharing that amazing news with all of the souls walking past the doors of this place.

The last verse you heard in the Gospel text this morning says, “You are witnesses of these things.”…….You are witnesses of these things.  

But, man oh man, don’t we wish we could just be witnesses and not have to testify to what we have seen?  We don’t want to be seen as being too pushy or too in your face like some other kind of Christian that we see on TV or on the street corner.  But, we can testify to the wonder of the resurrection in many other ways.

Being a believer gives us the story to tell.  It gives us the path to walk.  It gives us our way forward.

Elim is taking great steps in faith did you know that?  I don’t think we have all grasped the significance of four congregations worshipping together in the same building.  Do you know what kind of seed it is that God has planted?

Pr. Theim preached on Easter Sunday.  Some folks questioned that decision, others got it.  The way ahead for our congregation will not look or sound like the Elim of 40 years ago.  This afternoon a team made up of the pastors and 4 lay people from Lao Lutheran and Elim will gather around a meal to begin dreaming of new ways to expand our relationship with each other.  The opportunities are really and truly amazing.

But tell me this: What do you think might happen to us when we move beyond a landlord/renter relationship with Monument of Faith or All God’s Children churches?  One is a Pentecostal denomination, the other is non-denominational, what kinds of new ways of being Elim might happen when we take those next steps?  

And, what about new ministry opportunities in our community that are making themselves known to us?  We are actively putting together outreach teams for Lakeview Elementary School and Good Samaritan Speciality Health Community.  Please, let me or Shirley know if you would be a part of those teams.  

Or, how about our soon to be made, agreement with the Red Cross to become a disaster response location or with Families Moving Forward as they seek to increase the number of places homeless families can stay for a week at a time.  Or, North Memorial as they dream with us about ways we can serve as a health care outpost for them?  

The opportunities for us to make a positive structural impact on our community are amazing.

But, the question I have been holding out to our leadership is the same one I am holding out to you:

“What can Elim do uniquely better than the 1,000 other congregations in our area?  And why are we doing it?”

A pastor friend of mine put that question in an even more powerful manner: “If Elim were to cease to exist tomorrow would anyone in our city notice?”

I pray the answer to that last question would be, “Yes.”  My answer to the first two questions is from our scripture this morning: “Because we have witnessed the resurrected Jesus Christ, we have received the promise of salvation we have been commissioned today to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all nations.”

We are called to get over the fact that we are at once a people of joy and disbelief and are a people called to witness to our city, our families, and our world what an amazing thing God has done.

I asked our council last week to think about what kind of newspaper headlines might be written about Elim in three years time.  We had several pretty awesome submissions.  Let me share mine with you, and mind you, this is just visioning so, don’t get too freaked out:

The headline reads: “93 year old congregations closes its doors and reopens as The Oasis Church.  Come and see a multi-cultural, multi-denominational church as it works for transformation in the Robbinsdale area.  Come and experience the Oasis, a cup of cold water for your life’s journey.”

If you thought having the Laotian pastor preaching on Easter was pretty far out, just hold on to your socks.  

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen, indeed!

Alleluia, Alleluia.

Amen.

Technorati Tags: Elim Lutheran Church, Lutheran, preaching, Luke 24, sermons

Challenge: Try preaching 1000 of your best words this Sunday

In listening to a singer-songwriter speak about his craft recently, he said something that struck me as quite poignant.  A woman asked, "How do you know a song you are working on is 'done'?"  His response, "When I am making an album I know that I have to say everything I want to say in 3 1/2 minutes, that kind of economy forces me to be creative with what I am saying and how I am saying it."

As preachers we have often been led to believe that we should preach until we are done, but there are often no brackets around the sermon moment.  Often preachers circle the landing field three or four times before landing the plane, as they say.  

And so I have been challenging myself to paint my sermons as though the canvas is only so wide and so high.  I have been crafting sermons that have a limit.  In self-limiting the sermon I believe two things are happening: I am making my points in a clearer, more succinct way and two, I see fewer glances at the wristwatch.  

How am I doing this?  By challenging myself, each week, to limit myself to 1000 of the very best words I can use to preach on any given text.  1000 words is a lot of words, why not try it and tell me how it goes?

When I mentioned this challenge on my Facebook page it ignited a small firestorm of pushback from several of my ordained colleagues but several more "attaboy" thumbs-ups from my friends who have to sit in the pew and not stand in the pulpit.  I wonder if preachers were to challenge themselves to hone their craft on a more consistent basis, more like a singer-songwriter, if we might not find ourselves with a cadre of energized, talented preachers rather than burned out, dried out, emptied out ones?

What do you think?

This post was 319 words.

 

Sermon from 16 Pentecost regarding Matthew 21: 33-36 in which the Preacher takes a good look at our "Christian" "Moral" nation

16 Pentecost 2011

October 2

 

Matthew 21: 33-46

 

Pastor Chris Enstad

 

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus Christ.  Amen.

 

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.  Do you understand what you are doing here?  Why oh why are you continuing to mouth off to the religious authorities?  Why oh why are you challenging their authority in front of the crowd, don’t you understand that they work with the Roman government?  Don’t you understand what is going to happen to you if you don’t just keep your head down?  You are standing in the temple, in Jerusalem, in front of the chief priests and elders of the people talking down to them and telling parables that aren’t quite parables are they, they aren’t quite as hard to understand as some of your other parables, it’s like you’re not even trying to protect yourself from the charges of heresy and even treason.

 

Just last Sunday we heard you respond to the questioning of the authorities who came to you challenging your authority and you responded by challenging theirs and in fact knocked their authority down a couple rungs by forcing them to respond to your question regarding the baptism of John with the answer, “We don’t know.”  You told the parable of the two sons one who said he would go to work and didn’t and the one who said he wouldn’t go to work and then did asking which one did the will of the father... clearly it was the one who changed his mind.  You held out to the people of Israel yet another chance to repent and to live not just as children of God by title but by deeds as well.

 

And now today, today Jesus you continue to press your point with yet another parable, right on the heels of the first.  And now you are really going to far.

 

Why are you doing this?

 

Jesus tells this story:

 

A master of a house planted a vineyard, dug the winepress and then wanted to turn the business over to tenants who would pay rent freeing him to pursue other endeavors.  He sends his servants to get his payment, the first fruits of the harvest, and the tenants beat one, killed the other and stoned yet another!  And so the owner sent MORE servants and they did the same to them!

 

So the owner said, “Ok, maybe if I send my son they will respect him.”  But the tenants thought to themselves, “hey this is his only son if we kill him we can have the inheritance for ourselves.”  So they killed him.  “What do you think the owner will do to them,” Jesus asks the religious authorities?

 

“He will put them to death and give them vineyard to someone who will do right by him.”

 

“Ahh,” Jesus said.  “You know that it is written that the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (that’s Psalm 118)

 

“Therefore the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. “ 

 

And it turns out the chief priests and Pharisees didn’t have to think very hard to get it, and they they decided they needed to get him.

 

There are two very important, life and death important, things that we need to grasp by faith this morning. 

 

The first is that our God is a loving God.   A young pastor out in California named Francis Chan wrote a book about God’s love and he titled it, “Crazy love”.  For God’s love is indeed crazy, it is irrational, it makes no sense to us in how we treat each other and go about our daily lives of judgement, lack of mercy and compassion, it is truly a crazy God who would love us so much that he sent his prophets to proclaim His commands as our Creator and we rejected them.  

 

You don’t believe me?  Well how about let’s see how our lives and actions and politics and government and communities line up against God’s word then?  There are a whole lot of preachers getting up into their pulpits today to make a point that the church should be involved in vetting politicians.  My guess is that their sermons will be more about the empire than the Kingdom.  What politician can possibly measure up to the Word of God?  Shall we see how we are doing as a country?

 

How about Jeremiah? “ Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages, who says, “I will build myself a great house with spacious upper rooms, who cuts out windows for it paneling it with cedar and painting it with vermilion.  Do you think you are a king because you compete in cedar?  Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness?  Then it was well with him.  He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well.”

 

Oh yes the words of the prophets were rejected.

But this crazy God, this love-crazy God did not end it all for us then for good, no, he sent MORE prophets.  How about Ezekiel?

 

“If a man is righteous and does what is right and just -- if he does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife does not oppress anyone but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry, and covers the naked with a garment, does NOT lend at interest or take any profit, witholds his hand from injustice, executes true justice between man and man, walks in my statutes, and keeps my rules by living faithfully -- he is righteous, he shall surely live, declares the Lord God.”

 

Our crazy-loving God offered us the means to repentence over and over again and we rejected those efforts every single time.

 

And so God sent his Son.  And we killed him too.  But our God, the God who loved us so much that he sent his Son to win us back to him.  That God who had all rights under any sense of justice anywhere in the world to call it quits for us once and for all.

 

That God won us back because that rejected stone became the cornerstone of a whole new world. 

 

Oh the chief priests and Pharisees got it all right, and they, in the end, got Jesus, but Jesus got us back.

 

Second, we must always remember that this world, our lives, our families, our time, our money, our possessions are not ours.  We are leasing them from the one who created them all in the first place.  God asks of us the first fruits of our labors and our worship and praise and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Think back to the roots of sinful thoughts or occasions in your own lives and how many of those sins can be traced back to the moment when you forgot that this whole thing is on loan from God and mistakenly thought it was all about you and your will and your desires and YOUR opinions of your neighbors and the poor and the weak and the downtrodden?

 

When I turn on the TV and find people cheering that an old person be allowed to die because they couldn’t afford insurance, that a gay soldier might be booed for asking for equal rights from the countrymen he is protecting, and then cheered a state that has committed 237 execution supposedly because we are so certain of our own judgement that we see fit to take the life of another human being... we are so dead certain that we take it on ourselves to remove from God’s vineyard a person he created.  

 

Where is our Ezekiel today?  Where is our Jeremiah?

 

I don’t care what party you are from, I don’t care about your politics, I care about your souls, I am going to be held accountable for those.  So line your lives up to God’s word today people?  Would you not have rejected the Son sent to claim what was his Dad’s to give it to someone more deserving?

 

Thanks be to God that our God loves us more than we can love each other and forgives us for taking it upon ourselves to sentence his Son to death.  I pray that each of us and our own egos and wills and desires may fall on the rejected stone of Christ, to be shattered today once and for all... and a new house be built from those pieces, with Christ as our cornerstone, as our head, the first fruits of the true life to come.

 

On the Verge: a journey into the apostolic future of the church by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson. A Review

On the Verge is an amazing snapshot and leadership guide to what church just may be in the first part of the 21st century.  Hirsch and Ferguson have teamed up to give us a look inside 12 churches that are experimenting with life "on the edge" of where contemporary Christian communities are in an effort to bring forward the best practices for how we can be church whether large or small, urban or suburban and yes even rural!

Because, face it, we aren't being churches all that well right now.  But the authors' main point is salient and very well-taken... churches as they are constructed and run today are basically competing for the same share of the marketplace with other churches and so they are in the arms race of being the "best" everything to everyone.  We have lost our missional impulse, the impulse that says, "No, the real market is the world of unbelievers who are running around outside our door and never being invited into a community of faith!"

These 12 profiled communities are examples of those who "get it" in the 21st century... there will be no more institutionalization of the church, we simply can't affort to calcify traditions.  What is needed is a constant cycle of imagination, shifting and innovation.  If a church leader can help his people capture that process as their new life together, they will have every chance of surviving and thriving in the new era.

The book is hard to put down.  It is something every leader will want to explore with their council or elders.  I especially implore pastors in smaller mainline churches who think they don't have much else to offer the world to give the world that Hirsch and Ferguson are painting a look.  It may just be the hope you are looking for.

A Sermon in which the Pastor combines Rally Sunday and 9/11 around a Bible verse on Forgiveness.

13 Pentecost 2011

September 11

Pastor Chris Enstad

Matthew 18: 21-35

Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

Rally Sunday has become in our church culture another high holy day.  The air is festive, the choirs are back in full swing, Sunday School and Confirmation, Adult Education, all of our new Health and Wholeness offerings, things are back in gear at Elim Lutheran Church.  But, we have not been hibernating over the past three months, when we put our regular ministry offerings on hiatus, it gives the church as a whole, a chance to breathe and think and pray.  We are putting together at this very moment our Community Ministry Project Team who will work with our Consultant, Joy Skegstad, and me to plan for our next 90 years of ministry on the corner of 40th and Broadway.  Our mission is not longer restricted to inside these walls but, we aim to be a church that equips our members to serve their community and their neighbors, multiplying our reach and our impact throughout Robbinsdale, North Minneapolis and beyond.  I invite you to pray for the team as they begin their work next week and then, keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to become a part of this work.

But, today also carries with it an air of remembrance of the events of 10 years ago.  I’m sure just about everyone in this room who was alive that day remembers where they were and what they were doing when those planes hit the World Trade Centers.  

That day changed us as a country and a people in some good ways but, also some bad.  I received an email written by the CEO of Meetup.com on how he saw an opportunity in the shadows of 9/11 to help neighbors come together, to see each other and perform community service and other things together.  

But, we also have retreated to many stereotypes and tribal instincts.  When we are threatened it is easy to respond with a defensive stance that means we begin to distrust people who look act or talk differently than us.  Those things have and continue to happen today, yes, in some cases it has proved to be worth it but, I continue to wonder if our ability as human beings to grow in our understanding of people who may not have been born in the same circumstances, or who believe in quite different things than we do, I wonder if that ability has been stunted in some way and if that is a permanent condition.  The hatred and fear of Muslims and Islam, or dark skinned Arabs, is deep.  It’s all over the internet and on the 24 hour news stations.  People are profiting from keeping us afraid of each other.

Fitting then, that this Matthew text might appear today, on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, this text from Matthew 18 on forgiveness.

Forgiveness.  That has got to be the trickiest part of the Christian message that there is.  Peter approaches Jesus and asks, “How many times should I forgive my brother if he sins against me, seven’?  You see, traditional Jewish faith taught that forgiving somebody three times was a sufficient display of a humble and forgiving heart.  

But, Jesus responded, “No, seven times isn’t enough.  How about seventy times seven?”.  In fact, Jesus is saying, you shouldn’t even keep count... just keep on forgiving.

And, he then, tells the tale of the unforgiving servant.  The servant had a debt of ten thousand talents.  It was forgiven.  Do you know how large a debt ten thousand talents is?  Well a talent was roughly equal to 20 years of labor.  If a laborer earns $15/hour and works about 2,000 hours/year he earns about $30,000 a year.  So, a talent would be equal to $600,000.  So, 10 thousand talents is worth, in today’s terms, about $6 billion.   In other words, that servant was forgiven a whole lot of money... an unpayable debt was forgiven.

That servant then went and found a fellow servant who owed him a hundred denarii which was about 20 weeks worth of labor or $12,000 and had him thrown in prison.

The one who was forgiven an unpayable debt repaid that grace with impunity at someone who owed him so little.

Brothers and sisters, forgiveness is tricky isn’t it?  So often we want to hold onto our grudges or the wrongs that have been done to us in an effort to wait for our offender to ask for forgiveness.  But, what if that conversation never happens?  We think that holding a grudge means that we have power over another person, but, in reality we are still allowing our offender to have control over us because, that grudge or fault eats away at our very soul.

How many times must I forgive a brother that has sinned against me?  Seventy times seven times.

Remember this,God did not wait for us to come to him to ask for forgiveness.  God did not wait for us to get our act together and come on our knees asking for admittance to the kingdom of heaven and the family of God.

No, while we were still dead to sin, God wiped our debt clean.  Our invoice from God says, “You owed me $6,000,000,000 but, that debt has been paid in full by my Son, Jesus Christ.  

How do we repay that debt?  By forgiving our brothers and sisters from our hearts. whether they ask for it or not.  Whether or not their heart has experienced God’s forgiving Word, yours.  Yours has.  
May God continue to work his transforming ways with each of you today and in all the days to come.  It has to start somewhere, why not start with you.  Today.

A little girl heard this passage one day and said to her pastor, “You know, forgiveness must be like the aroma of a flower after it has been crushed.”  

Life does that to us, doesn’t it?  Who of us has not been hurt at some point or another.

May each of you be given the power to forgive by the Holy Spirit, that we might each become the aroma of Christ in an unforgiving world.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Reading the Bible: Day 87: Acts 22 - Romans 4 (August 31)

Well we are getting close to completing the challenge of reading our entire Bible this summer!  Some of you have already finished, I hear so way to go!

Today I am going to focus just a bit on the Book of Romans.  The entire book is dedicated to Paul's theology of the Righteousness of God over and against the unrighteousness of man.  In the letter he exhorts the church in Rome to preach the Gospel rightly divided between law and gospel.  It is this little hook, law and gospel, that launched the reformation and continues to inspire churches in their evangelistic endeavors to this day.

We live lives under the law.  Follow the rules and you will not get in trouble.  When we mistakenly bring this line of thinking into what Christ did for us we miss the point of the death and resurrection completely.  It is because we cannot follow the law, for instance the Ten Commandments, that God sent his son to fulfil the law on our behalf.  This now frees us to live new lives in him.  And so we go about our lives ministering to the needs of others and proclaiming that good news not because we have to but because we can.

So the first four chapters of Romans center on God's righteous judgement.  We are not the judge, God is.  And God has already judged mankind and found us to be lost and hopeless.  The birth of Jesus Christ, that we celebrate on Christmas, is actually a judgement day for us!  Could we make our way back to being right with God on our own?  God determined the answer to be, "no".  And so he sent his only begotten Son to get us back.

And so our righteousness is not counted to us by the number of rules we follow but by another important reformation phrase, "faith alone".  To those who believe in Christ comes the justification of the sinner... you and me.

Reading the Bible: The Home Stretch! Day 86 Acts 12-21 (August 25)

The Acts 16 story of Paul and Silas in prison is a powerful image, for me, of the life lived in Christ.  Remember that they landed in prison for healing a demon-possessed girl.  They were not imprisoned, it seems, for the healing itself but because they took away the means of making a living for the girl's parents.  For this the two men were thrown in prison.

Two things to take away from this: note that throughout the entire book of Acts, as the early church was being planted, we see the profit motive bumping up against the motive of the Gospel.  My bible finds comparisons with Simon the magician, Elymas and Demetrius the silversmith!  It does seem that pure capitalism and the Gospel are incompatible.  I am not advocating pure socialism, either, however what does a system look like where the wealthy put their hope not in wealth but in something else entirely?  Read 1 Timothy 6:17-19.  Feel free to comment on this comment as well, I'm curious to know what others think.  Truly, in the name of healing that girl, Paul and Silas actually stole from her parents... so how do those two things exist in the same world (healing and profit?)

Secondly, look at how Paul and Silas reacted to their imprisonment: by praying and singing hymns to God.  It is vitally important that we continue to teach our young people to know their story by heart so that in times of trouble they have a deep spiritual well from which to draw the water of life.  So many young people are suffering at the hands of our amoral world because they do not know enough the love God has for them.  They do not have a liturgy to draw upon.  They have not been read the Psalms.  They have not memorized the Lord's Prayer or the Creed.  How can we be surprised that they are showing the signs not just of physical but of spiritual illness?

 

Reading the Bible: Day 78: Matthew 28 - Mark 8 (August 17)

Ahh, tradition.  The Pharisees had a bit of a problem.   Jesus and his disciples were walking around not washing their hands before they ate.  They weren't following the rules.  If Jesus and his disciples were supposedly such holy men, why this dismissal of the most basic of rules regarding clean and unclean hands?

Jesus responded by calling them, "hypocrites".  You see, they followed the rules with their hands but not their heart. 

If we put the Ten Commandments on the walls of our courtrooms we would have a better country (folks who say this appear to miss the irony that this is a Christian version of sharia law).

If prayer were allowed in school, bad things wouldn't happen there.  (A friend posted something to this effect on her facebook page today)

"You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men." - Jesus N. Christ

Outword piety and appearance of holiness is, in fact, the lowest common denominator of a life in Christ.  It is the transformed heart that Jesus came to get for the kingdom.  So, yes, post the ten commandments in the courtroom, but also post the Sermon on the Mount... you know, the part where Jesus presses the ten commandments and makes them EVEN HARDER.  You know, like, when you stab someone in the back you are murdering them?  How are our Christian politicians doing in this regard?

Did you know that prayer is actually allowed in schools?  Yes it is, ask any kid who didn't study the night before a big test what they are doing right before they pick up a pencil.  It is the organized prayer that all too often ends up being, again, outward displays of piety with no corresponding change of heart or life towards helping the outsider, the least, the lost, the lowly.  I'm quite ok with not making prayer another piece of bling that a "cool kid" wears to school.  

What if that kids mom and dad taught them how to pray "without ceasing" so that the fires of faith fanned on the home hearth transferred through their child to their friends as they became, then, the "aroma of Christ" to all those to whom they came in contact each day?

Traditions do not save us like some kind of magical talismen or chant.

Jesus Christ saved us.  Let's get back to that good news rather than doing our best to establish the coolest, hippest, savviest tradition and then banking on that to get us into the kingdom... 

Reading the Bible: Day 69: Ezekiel 45 - Daniel 5 (August 8)

The Book of Daniel is the story of God's lordship over all creation, including kings and empires.  Throughout the book we will see God setting up and then removing kings as He pleases.

The story of Daniel and his friends being taken into captivity has much to speak to our Church today.  Daniel, you will have read, refused to defile himself while in Babylonian captivity.  Their efforts to assimilate Daniel and his friends into their own culture and mores was met with resistance.  And this resistance was respected by the king.

Would that the Church would learn to be this resistance as well.  I'm not talking about resisting the culture of rap music or dressing like you don't care about your reputation, no.  In fact, I think the Church has been going along with our culture by playing the prim church lady shaking our proverbial finger at "kids these days" when the real decay in our communal life goes much more deeper than swear words and short skirts.

The church has gone along with our culture and allowed itself to be assimilated into world that has used it and thrown it away for political and financial gain.  The church has turned a blind eye to the needs of the poor and for advocating for the least and the lost and the lowly in order to keep its invitation to the country club elite.  We can discuss the poor over wine and pray over the lost on Sunday mornings but we dare not turn that discussion or those prayers into action or we risk being expelled from the hoi polloi.  

And so we see the church used and abused in our political process.  God, evidently, can tell politicians to run for office but then He better keep quiet when it comes time to legislate.

No, we would do our memory of Daniel well to say, "Thanks, but no thanks" to being a cultural institution.  A Christian's presence in the room should make people uncomfortable, not comfortable.