It Is Time for an Insurrection

Posted on July 5, 2021 by salooper57

(Excerpt from: We Want What We Want and We Want It Right Now)

An unwillingness to wait, the tendency to force our way, is symptomatic of a trust problem. Isaiah 28:16 says, “Whoever believes will not act hastily.” The elders of Israel acted hastily because they were not believing. They had a trust problem.

We will always have a trust problem when we allow fear to boss us around. If fear dictates our actions, then fear – not Jesus – is our Lord. If we were honest, some of us would have to admit that in our hearts we have set apart fear as Lord and have been living in obedience to its word.

Jesus’s people must stubbornly refuse to be ruled by fear. But what if we are already ruled by fear? Then it is time for an insurrection. There must be an uprising; that is, we must rise up and listen to what God is saying and refuse to listen to our fears. It’s time to disobey our fears.

The elders of Israel obeyed their fears, not their God. And the result was that they were saddled with a king who was not qualified to lead, and whose competency decreased with age, rather than increased. Israel was thrown into an unnecessary civil war that lasted for years. People died. Families were divided. Misery was pervasive and God’s name was dishonored. And it probably took longer for them to get the good thing God had for them. Sometimes saying, “Now!” to God is as harmful as saying, “No!” to God.[1]

We get in trouble when we allow ourselves to get flummoxed and act out of emotion. The controversial University of Chicago philosophy professor Mortimer Adler was once part of a discussion group and the conversation was not going well. Opinions were expressed with which he disagreed. Things got heated, Adler got upset, left the room, and slammed the door behind him.

Trying to ease the tension, someone said, “Well, he’s gone.” But the host said, “No, he’s not. That’s a closet!”

When instead of waiting to listen and understand, we go rushing forward in an emotional welter, we’re liable to end up closeted from God and from our future. Israel did and the result was heartache and delay.

(This entire sermon will be posted for viewing later in the week.)

[1] Bill T Arnold, NIV Application Commentary: 1 and 2 Samuel. p.154

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The Church: Deconstructing or Deteriorating?

Posted on July 3, 2021 by salooper57

Today, many Christians, especially those under 40, are asking tough questions about the faith. They are questioning assumptions taught by, or caught from, their parents. This is particularly true of assumptions regarding sexuality and racial justice. The process is known as “deconstruction,” a term borrowed from the philosopher Jacques Derrida and applied to the faith by the theologian John Caputo.

Beliefs about sexuality and race are not the only ones being deconstructed. So are beliefs about the church. Do people need to go to church? The answer is no—for people who are not Christians. For Christians, the answer is more complicated.

Most self-identified born-again Christians who do not attend church have not concluded, based on theological reflection, that church is unnecessary. They are not deconstructing; they are merely deteriorating. Their reasons for not participating in corporate worship are frequently individualist and consumerist: they don’t get enough out of it to make it worthwhile.

The idea that the value of corporate worship can be gauged with a consumerist scale should itself be deconstructed. It is not the result of theological reflection or “the mind of the Spirit,” but the result of American individualism and the spirit of commercialism. The Bible tells a different story.

The theologian and biblical scholar Scot McKnight has written: “There must be thousands of verses [in the Bible] for community to every one verse about the afterlife … From the book of Acts through the end of the book of Revelation the gospel is the work of God to form community.”

“Community” is a buzzword, or maybe a fuzzword, among Christians today. Everyone is talking about and looking for community, but many are looking outside the church, which they consider hidebound and irrelevant. Yet the church is Jesus’s community. There are no substitutes.

McKnight notes that “The apostle Paul traveled the Mediterranean founding churches, and he wrote to churches and organized churches, and Peter and John did the same.” The individualistic spirituality of our time knows no parallel in biblical literature. As McKnight says, “There is a lot of churchiness about the New Testament.”

That is not to say that the church, either in biblical times or in our own, is without its problems. The church is full of problems precisely because it is full of people, broken people, like you and me. But the restoration of broken people into the image of God and into a community of restored people – or, rather, a community of people who are being restored – is God’s work. It is called the church.

There is much more to the church than “attending services.” The consumerist mindset that views the local church as an entertainment venue that happens to be open on Sunday mornings makes an authentic experience of church life all but impossible. Church is not a spectator sport, or a concert, or a religious TED talk. A meaningful experience of the church requires participation in a community.

Such participation involves both what one receives and what one gives. The apostles taught that God has provided each church member with a capacity to contribute to the welfare of all the rest. The Bible calls this capacity a spiritual gift.

Further, participation in the church means serving, caring for, and helping other people. The old word for this is “ministry.” In the church, every person is a minister.

Because everyone in the church is a broken-but-being-restored image of the Creator, participation requires patience. The apostolic letters to the churches are straightforward about this: “Put up with one another. Forgive one another.”

It is through serving each other, putting up with each other, contributing to each other that the church becomes a fellowship of holy love, a community that embraces one another even in life’s messiest moments. That embrace enables a process of a transformation to take place both on an individual and a corporate level.

This transformation doesn’t happen to consumerist churchgoers but to participants. It doesn’t happen while attending church as much as while being the church. It happens to people who embrace each other because they have embraced Jesus and the life – the transforming life – he offers.

(First published by Gannett.)

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“I Have Sinned”: A Study in Repentance

Posted on June 29, 2021 by salooper57
Viewing Time: 26.34
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When Faith Is Hardest (It’s Not When You Think)

Posted on June 26, 2021 by salooper57

America has begun what will likely be a decade’s long competition for international supremacy with China—a competition some western analysts do not see America winning. Relations with Russia are more tense than they have been since the end of the Cold War. Iran has just elected a hardline president who is already subject to U.S. penalties for human rights abuses. Hopes for a renewed nuclear deal are fading.

At home, the U.S. faces new economic pressures. While a post-Covid jump in inflation was anticipated, it has leaped higher than experts expected, with a 5 percent consumer price increase in May. The increase in used cars and trucks hit a shocking 7.3 percent over the same period. Food prices have risen more than they have for more than a decade.

Add to all that a deeply divided Congress and the deeply divided country it represents. If the House swings to the right in the mid-term election, one can expect a legislative stalemate in Washington. Congress has had difficulty getting anything done even when one side controls both the executive and legislative branches, as it does now.

It is a stressful time in America, which means it is a good time for a spiritual awakening—a fresh and (sometimes collective) awareness of the reality of the spiritual world. People do not wake up to new possibilities when they are comfortable but when they are shaken. America is being shaken.

What is collectively true is also individually true. Spiritual awakenings come to people, not just churches and communities. In fact, they start with individuals and spread outward from there. And they usually start during times of discontent and discomfort.

Dissatisfied people look for alternatives. Happy people do not. People who like the show don’t change the channel. It’s the people who dislike the actor and are bored by the plot who look for something better.

Likewise, it is not the happy person but the unhappy one who is open to change. I’ve met many people who turned in God’s direction because they were uncomfortable. For some, it was because of illness, for others it was relational conflict, and for a few it was because even success proved unsatisfying. But I’ve yet to meet anyone who awakened spiritually because they were comfortable.

People have told me that life is so painful and unfair, there cannot be a God. But no one has ever said to me: “Life is so easy and painless, there must be a God.” Life’s hardships, not its comforts, turn people from God; and life’s hardships turn people to him.

Even people who have turned to God, who attend worship services regularly, pray, and support the church financially, find it difficult to trust God when hard times come. The ironic thing is: they find it even harder to trust God when everything is going well. When things are going well, few people feel the need to trust.

Difficulty and uncertainty are precisely what faith needs to grow. I recently spoke to someone whose life has been especially difficult for the past few months. There have been health issues, employment issues, and financial uncertainty. He is finding it exceedingly difficult to entrust himself and his situation to God.

I wanted to tell him: “If you won’t trust God now, when things are hard, you certainly won’t trust him later, when things are easy.” When things are easy, he’ll be thinking about projects and promotions, home improvements, and a better vehicle. That is the way we operate. It’s now or never.

This has been the consistent testimony of people of faith throughout the ages. It has certainly been my story. I came to faith around the time my brother died. Over the years, uncertainty and hardship have caused me to seek God, not abandon him. Faith has sent its roots deep during times of privation, not times of plenty.

No one likes it, but we need times of strain and toil. Those who learn to trust during the bad times are able to trust during better times. They may be the only ones.

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Don’t Give Your Kids a God-on-the-Box

Posted on June 23, 2021 by salooper57

Don’t give your children a God-in-the-Box.

When our kids were small, we had a Jack-in-the-Box. We would turn the crank, the melody would play on and on until, suddenly, the jester popped out of the box. Our kids wanted us to turn the crank again and again, and it always surprised. But then they turned three, and Jack was no longer interesting. They outgrew him.

If you give your kids a God-in-the-Box, the same thing will happen. What is a God-in-the-Box like? He is powerless. If you don’t turn the crank, he doesn’t do anything. He’s safe to ignore. You can go weeks, months – years, even – without paying any attention to him but, should you want him, you can turn the crank and he will do your bidding.

Whenever parents treat God that way – ignore him for a while and only get back to him when he fits into their schedule – they are giving their children a God-in-the-Box. If those kids don’t discard him altogether when they’re grown, it will be because of nostalgia, not faith.

A God-in-the-Box can be controlled. When you need him, you just say the right prayers, give a decent amount of money, go to church, and wait for him to pop up. You just have to turn the crank the right number of times.

A God-in-the-Box is smaller than us. We can comprehend him. But the real God awes. He is unpredictable. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are [his] ways higher than [our] ways and [his] thoughts than [our] thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Even his love is beyond anything we can imagine. Who among us would ever have predicted that the God who refused to be put in a box would allow himself to be nailed to a cross?

A God-in-the-Box gets called up to serve our cause. The true God calls us up to serve his. In America today, we see the God-in-the-Box conscripted for many causes – and some of them good … But God is not a pawn…; he is king. He will not be used even in support of a just cause.

(This is an excerpt from the sermon, God-in-the-Box. To see the entire sermon, click here.)

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God-in-the-Box

Posted on June 20, 2021 by salooper57
Listening Time: Approximately 24 minutes.
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The Lesson My Dad Taught Me

Posted on June 19, 2021 by salooper57

My dad was a tough guy. He served as a Marine in the 1940s. He married while he was still in the Corps and was divorced not long after. I know almost nothing of his first marriage and only learned about it as an adult. He married my mother in 1953 and they had two sons: my older brother Kevin and me.

My dad was not an easy person to live with. When he was drinking – and he did a lot of drinking when I was young – it was best to keep your distance. I would not say that he was abusive, but he was angry. He could be verbally spiteful, especially to my mother.

He stopped drinking in the mid-sixties. Again, I never learned the whole story but there was a night when there was a run-in with other tough guys in the neighborhood and the police were called. I don’t know what my mother said to him that night, but he stopped drinking and, shortly thereafter, quit hanging out with his drinking buddies.

A year or so after that, my older brother was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. I can only think that my dad was resentful: here he was trying to straighten up and be a good dad, and this happened. My brother went through chemotherapy, many hospitalizations and blood transfusions, but his condition slowly deteriorated.

My family didn’t attend church, except once or twice at Easter to make my grandmother happy. But now, with disaster looming, my dad accepted an invitation to attend the local church. I suspect my parents, having tried everything else, thought they would give God a shot. It was a bargain of sorts: we’ll give you your due if you will spare our son.

That bargain did not work out as they hoped. My brother died. But the church took us in and on an April day in 1968, my dad professed faith in Jesus Christ.

I too confessed Christ and began to change. But the change that had begun in my dad seemed to stall out as time went on. He carried a big chip on his shoulder and lots of anger in his heart.

When hospital bills strained family finances, my mother had to go to work. Dad’s church attendance became erratic. He hit a low point and went out and got drunk. My esteem for my dad also hit a low point. By the time I left for college, the two of us were not getting along well.

I went on to get married and have kids and we frequently made the 70 mile trip home to visit. I couldn’t help but notice that my dad had mellowed. He was a gentle and loving grandpa, though the short-tempered husband continued to make appearances.

Over the next few years, the change in my dad became more apparent. I sometimes whispered to my wife, “Who is this man?” He was more attentive to my mother and more affectionate with all of us. By the early nineties, I was asking his opinion about decisions I needed to make, something I had not done since I was a child.

When he died, I officiated his funeral, per his request. In preparation, I looked through his Bible to see if he had highlighted anything, for I would often find him sitting at the kitchen table early in the morning, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, reading his Bible. He had marked many passages that spoke to him.

I saw with a sudden clarity what I had been blind to earlier. There was a correlation between the changes we had witnessed – the gentleness and kindness to my mother, the generosity he displayed toward others, his choice not to retaliate when wronged – and the scriptures he had highlighted. The spiritual life that had begun in him years earlier had blossomed and was bearing sweet fruit.

The final and, perhaps, most enduring lesson my dad taught me was that God can change anyone, even him. Even me. That lesson has proved invaluable, and I am especially grateful to have learned it from him.

(First published by Gannett.)

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Things I’m Glad My Dad Didn’t Teach Me

Posted on June 16, 2021 by salooper57

(For Father’s Day I am posting a piece first published in 2015 by Gatehouse Media.)

After reading an article by Peter Scholl, a forty-something married man with kids, living in Australia, I find myself grateful for the things my dad didn’t teach me. Scholl reflects on what contemporary culture teaches boys and men about their identity, especially in the media.

Scholl writes that when he watches sports on TV, he is confused by how the advertisers and commentators think of guys like him. He says they imagine that he and men like him all wish they were 19 again, and think “the key elements of a happy life are (in no particular order) bacon, having fun with your mates, and beer.”

Further, they portray husbands as “hopeless” men who “can’t be trusted to do the grocery shopping, buy clothes for the kids, or articulately express an opinion when it comes to colour, style or appearance.” And “as a father, you are a joke. Your kids don’t take you seriously.”

He goes on to say that the media represents wives as killjoys and faithfulness in marriage as a sign of weakness or cowardice. The only happy place for a man to be is in a bar, surrounded by friends and, no doubt, 19-year-old girls.

Now it’s true my dad couldn’t be trusted to do the grocery shopping. When my mother was recuperating after surgery, he did the shopping, and I went with him. He bought junk food, any sale item that caught his eye, and the worst tasting off-brand foods ever produced.

And he was, admittedly, a terrible cook. When he got done preparing a steak, it should have been licensed as a deadly weapon. When he tried to bake a cake for my mother’s birthday and the recipe instructed him to “fold in an egg” he was completely bewildered. The only thing my dad could find in the kitchen was his place at the table. He could not have tracked down the baking soda, had his life depended on it.

Yet he didn’t teach my brother and me that dads are a joke. We knew he meant what he said. We saw him break up a violent fight between two men who were trying to kill each other. On another occasion, he apprehended a robbery suspect as he was breaking into the store across the street, and held him until the police arrived. He taught us that dads are courageous.

I’m also grateful my dad didn’t teach us that happiness comes from flirting with 19-year-old girls. I never saw his eye wander and never heard him say anything suggestive about a woman. He remained faithful to my mother until his death in 1996.

It’s true that my dad could have taught my brother and me that the only happy place for a man was in a bar – he drank a lot when we were young. In fact, his drinking caused problems, and brought the family to a crisis. That’s when he chose to quit drinking, to distance himself from some of his friends, and to concentrate on his family. In so doing, he taught us that a dad can do things he doesn’t want to do, but needs to do, for the sake of his family.

I’m glad my dad did not teach me to swear. Looking back on it now, I’m really surprised that he didn’t. He was as tough a guy as you’d ever want to know: a two-fisted Marine, who never backed down from a fight. When I was younger (and he was still drinking), he often lost his temper. Most of the men that hung around with my dad could swear a blue streak. But I never heard him use profanity – not even once.

I’m especially grateful my dad didn’t teach me that believing in God is for weaklings. When my brother was dying of cancer, my two-fisted, never-turn-away-from-a-fight father turned to God for help. His first years as a Christian were sometimes rocky – he brought his anger and pride with him into his new relationship with God – but he stuck it out.

By his example he taught me that a man really can change. He became increasingly attentive and loving to my mother. His confidence in God increased. His willingness to be known as a Christian grew. He became a kinder and gentler man. I’m grateful for the things my dad didn’t teach me, but I’m even more grateful that he taught me this.

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Can You Hear Me Now? (1 Samuel 2-3)

Posted on June 13, 2021 by salooper57

Listening time: Approximately 25 minutes.

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Life on Earth: Comedy or Tragedy?

Posted on June 12, 2021 by salooper57

We owe the words “comedy” and “tragedy” to the ancient Greeks, whose stage plays in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. gave rise to the terms. A hundred years of films and about 80 years of commercial television have left us thinking that comedies are comic and tragedies are sad. The Greeks were more nuanced.

Tragedy may contain humorous moments and funny characters, but what makes a tragedy tragic is that it ends badly. The hero fails, the aspiration goes unfulfilled, night falls. Comedies, though they may have intensely unhappy moments and deeply disturbing characters, end well. The loser wins, the impossible goal is achieved, and a better day dawns.

Shakespeare followed the Greeks in writing both tragedies and comedies. Some of his tragedies contain comic scenes. The drunken porter’s soliloquy in “Macbeth” comes to mind. The comedies, on the other hand, sometimes include distressing scenes. Think of the “Merchant of Venice.” Act 5 ends with the young lovers together, but two men’s lives have been ruined in the process.

The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is not that one is funny and the other is sad, but that one comes out right in the end and the other does not. So, what kind of story are we in? Is life on earth a comedy or a tragedy? It all depends on how it ends.

For secularists, life on earth is, and can only be, a tragedy. Even if humanity is someday capable of removing all diseases and can stop the planet’s residents from destroying it, the story always ends the same way: the sun dies, the galaxy goes dark, the universe implodes, night falls. It may be an exceedingly long story with many happy moments, but it is inescapably tragic.

(It should be said that many secularists are working hard to make the story a happy one for as many people as possible and for as long as possible. This is commendable and should be acknowledged. God bless them.)

For secularists, life is a tragedy. For Christians, it is a comedy. They believe that God’s story ends well. Or rather, that it goes on well forever. The end is not a dark galaxy and an imploding universe but, in St. Paul’s language, the liberation of creation “into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

All great comedies – and God’s is by far the greatest – are composed of shorter stories. Whether it is Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” or Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow,”great stories are filled with characters whose individual stories intertwine and combine to move the plot forward. These internal stories can be funny or sad, pleasant or painful. They can even conclude badly.

Unlike human authors who generate their characters’ every thought and action, God literally gives his characters a life of their own. He allows them to live that life – to write their own story – as they see fit. If they refuse to collaborate with the creator, their story will be a tragedy. Yet God will edit, compile, and fit it into his own glorious comedy, which is guaranteed to end well. Just read the final two chapters of the Bible.

People who believe they are living in a tragedy are bound to feel and act differently from those who believe they are in a comedy. If the end is personal, planetary, and universal extinction, then present pleasure and comfort become all-important. Selfish people crave these temporal goods for themselves. Altruistic people seek them for others, even for humanity itself. But whether for self or others, such goods remain temporal, even short-lived.

Perhaps this explains why St. Paul writes that those who are “alienated from God … have given themselves over to sensuality…” Sensuality provides the shortest route to pleasure and comfort. Sensuality cannot lead to meaning but it does provide distraction and, if life is a tragedy, people need all the distraction they can get.

In the end, it is not what happens to us but how we respond – and who we trust – that makes our little stories comedies or tragedies, Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot,” or a tale told by an infinitely wise and loving creator.

(First published by Gannet.)

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