April, 2018 - The Narrow Path

April 19, 2018April 23, 2018

Where Are Our Churches?

The world is a hot mess! Not many would argue this point. There are murders in our streets and in our homes. Children are being bought and sold by sex traffickers. Hatred and intolerance are the order of the day. One cannot trust the media or the government. Morality is at an all-time low. Family values are a thing of the past. Video games and social media are the central influences of our youth. The debauchery practiced during the reign of the Roman Empire does not hold a candle to the practices of today’s society. Laws protect the criminal. Surely we are on the express train to the End of Days. Armeggedon must be just over the horizon. All these statements lead me to the big question. Where are our Churches?

More than just an hour a week

Don’t get me wrong, I think there are many strong Christians congregating together to grow in the image of Christ. However, it isn’t enough to meet for an hour on Sunday and then go about the status quo. We should take a lesson from Christ tossing the money changers from the Temple. It is way past time to stand up. Be heard. Make a difference. Jesus was not a pushover. We shouldn’t be either. We are supposed to love each other. Does the father show his son love if he does not offer him direction and correction if needed? Does God the Father not guide and correct his errant children.

Churches as Something for Everybody

Churches have obviously not caused the downfall of society as we know it. They did not destroy family values. But why have they not taken a wider stance in rebuilding the lost values of our people? Have we grown too comfortable in our pews hearing messages to make us feel good? Have our churches, with their coffee bars, and stage performances, their gymnasiums, and their pablum-for-the-soul preachers rotted our perception of what we are to be about? Beloved, if your Pastor is not challenging you to be more like our Savior, to pick up your cross and bear the weight of its burden, you may as well have stayed home. We were made in God’s image, not He in ours.

Casting Crowns is one of the leading groups in Christian music today. One of their most popular songs challenges the complacency of today’s Church. The lyrics to If We Are The Body get right to the marrow of the matter:

“But if we are the body
Why aren’t His arms reaching?
Why aren’t His hands healing?
Why aren’t His words teaching?
And if we are the body
Why aren’t His feet going?
Why is His love not showing them there is a way?”

Where are our Churches?

Why are more of our churches not present in the inner cities, teaching children to read? Should not more church groups be feeding and clothing the homeless? Why are there not enough church-run food pantries? Should not our churches and our pastors be incensed by the lack of respect and love for our fellow man that has become so evident in our youth culture?

What are they teaching?

There are far too many mega-churches today, with edifices that cost millions of dollars, preaching the gospel of prosperity, conforming God into our image, hardly ever making congregants squirm in their pews because the message from the stage confronts their sinful lives. Letting their people pick and choose which sins to overlook.

We as a brotherhood of Christians have become lazy. Our Churches have allowed that to happen. It is apparently too easy to attend services on Sunday and retreat back to our comfort zones. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are not being challenged effectively. We cannot be the hands and feet of Jesus if we are not making the effort to be the hands and feet of Jesus. It is way past time to reach out to our neighbors in need. It is time to put down our smartphones and parent our children. We may not feel that we can change the world but we can change our part of it. We just have to show up. Stand up.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34 ESV

I don’t believe that Jesus was proclaiming the need for violence but challenging His followers to be different from the rest of the world. To stand up for Christian principles, and challenge the world to bring change. When has there been a greater need than now to do just that? We must stand up, become warriors for Christ. Pick up our swords and fight for God. If your church is not moving you toward making a stand, to reach out to those in need of some Jesus in their lives, not moving you to be the hands and feet of Christ; then maybe it is time to change…churches.

April 18, 2018

There Is No Place Like Home, Part II

When last we were together, I shared that the life of a young person in a military family can leave quite a mark on the makeup of a young mind. That the transient lifestyle that I lived caused me to crave something permanent. Left me believing that I might never have what I wanted most, a place that I could call home. I left the story having experienced an epiphany. The lightning bolt of realization had struck. Indeed, there is no place like home!

You have been cordially invited… Home

I may have come late to the party but I had been carrying my invite in my back pocket for some time and didn’t even know it. The permanence that I longed for was something that I possessed all along. I just had to claim it. I have written before that we are “just passin’ through” this world. There was never meant to be any permanence here. My home, and yours, is already waiting for us. Our place has been reserved. Jesus has gone before us to prepare the place. He told the Apostles:

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:1-3 ESV)

When Jesus spoke of the final judgment, He said

“Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34 ESV)

When I had been Baptized I had been given the invitation. The deed to my permanent home was in my unworthy hand. I need not look any longer in this world.

The Communion of Saints

In this world, we are called to fellowship with other Christians as we are instructed throughout the Gospels and Epistles. I believe that we do this for several reasons. We are surely in training in this realm for our eternal life in the next. The Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Hebrews:

^“And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” (Hebrews 10:24-25 ESV)

I am pretty sure that we can all use the support, the prayers and the encouragement that should be part of meeting regularly with our fellow Christians. I may be the one amongst us that needs it the most. What better place to prepare for our Heavenly home than in the midst of those who are striving for the same things in life.

Jesus came to heal sinners

When the scribes and Pharisees asked the Disciples why Jesus spent time with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus responded:

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17 ESV)

I have often heard that church is not a country club (or hotel) for saints but a hospital for sinners. This last statement has been attributed to many from St. Augustine to Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby). Whoever said it, I believe they had Jesus’ words in mind. Though the building in which we meet is by no means our home, I believe that Church is a place we belong. We are called to congregate together, to support each other, to pray for each other and the world. To praise the One who made us. A place to rejoice in our blessings and share the Grace of God with each other. To celebrate our various gifts.

A place to belong

The communion of Christian fellowship is a place to gain the strength and renewal needed to face the world. Our Churches should be full of the Love of Christ, one should be challenged and encouraged there, uplifted and confronted. Even this transient heart can find comfort and peace there, a sense of belonging. It is a place to help us find our Home. It may not be our final destination but it is a great place to start. After all, there is no place like Home!

April 14, 2018April 14, 2018

There Is No Place Like Home

I have previously shared that I am the son of a sailor. That will create a lot of different thoughts amongst my readers, I expect. It brings forth many things about my character that will strike a shared chord with other military kids. Most who were children of non-military families may not readily relate to what I am about to share. There are a couple of striking givens to being a military brat. Having no real home is among the worst of them.

As a kid, we moved around a bunch as my father was transferred from base to base. From one house to the next, but we didn’t live there long enough for any place to feel like home. In fact, I was never in any school more than 2 years until I got to high school. My father retired in 1968, my freshman year and I begged him to let us stay at his last duty station so that I could have a normal high school experience. He relented after much discussion and, oddly enough, I went to high school (all 4 years) with the kids with whom I had been in first grade. Auntie Em, “There is no place like home.”

Good and bad baggage

Life moving from pillar to post taught me two life lessons at an early age. The first is that nothing is permanent. There is a built-in obsolescence to everything. Relationships, if you formed them, were never meant to last. A

pretty heavy piece of baggage to burden a young person with. Secondly, because of the first lesson, one had to learn to be outgoing, introverts had no chance if you were going to grow even a temporary relationship. The good news, I guess, is that I learned the second lesson well, developing a gregarious, outgoing personality on the outside, secretly (for the most part) dreading the “next shoe to fall,” wondering when my world would be shattered with a new move.

Home is good while it lasts

My teen years were not uncommon for the late 60s and early 70s. My grades were good and I had friends that I still have today, several decades later. We made wonderful memories, the kind made by people who shared much and laughed often. My friends and I enjoyed all the mischief that our small town would tolerate and some that it would not. We were richly blessed, but my transiently-trained heart still longed for something. Not quite trusting all that I loved about my life to remain solid. Not to turn into an ephemeral cloud of smoke to vanish into thin air.

Self-fulfilling expectations

I longed for something permanent. Most of my adult life I struggled with the haunting carry-over, the psychological stigma of the expectation that everything ends too quickly, nothing is permanent. Not meant to last. My marriages suffered, as did my early job history. I desperately wanted something permanent, something rock-solid, something that I could call my own. If things were going too well, I would manage to begin to eat at them causing a rift that would eventually cause the split I expected. For much of my 30s and 40s, I thought that the something I craved, my permanent thing was a home. I was not wrong but my mind was not yet ready to see a truth, the Truth that had been waiting for me all my life.

Was blind but now I see

The thunderbolt of epiphany struck one day while having a conversation with my Rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Collierville, TN. While speaking

to Fr. Jeff Marx, he told me that St. Andrew’s was my home. The conversation had been a fairly serious one, light-hearted but full of meaning and I don’t really think that Father Jeff was even aware of the stunning understanding that had opened up before me. Nonetheless, my eyes had been opened like the blind man before Jesus (Mark 10:46-52, Luke 18:35-43, ESV )

Please join me in a few of days as I reveal what I learned. I am sure that it changed my life. Not just in part but the whole. There truly is no place like home.

April 4, 2018

Good(?) Friday

Bound, scourged, beaten, mocked, spat upon, made to carry/drag a heavy load up a hill, nailed to a cross, made to suffer the tortuous death of a criminal although an innocent man. This does not sound like the way a good day should play out. In fact, it sounds like a terrible day. The worst day. Throw in the fact that the Light of the world was extinguished. Big storm. The curtains of the Temple split asunder. Good Friday? Not by a long shot, except for one miraculous detail.

Not a very good Friday

Having seen many crucifixes hanging on the walls of homes and Catholic Churches, I have always been struck by the almost antiseptic look of the crucified Christ. Nearly all the sculpted images show Jesus as being in pretty good shape. Pretty pristine. Not until I saw The Passion of the Christ, the 2004

movie by Mel Gibson, did I truly connect with the absolute brutality with which Jesus was treated. I am still horrified nearly to tears at the images of the scourging. The scourge that was used on the Lamb of God was an instrument designed to inflict ultimate pain, to wreak incredible havoc on the human body. A whip-like device, the scourge had pieces of metal or bone incorporated into the several lashes which were meant, not just to bruise and cut, but to savagely rip flesh from the body on the receiving end of its sting. Jesus was not just whipped. He was scourged! Not a good day for any man.

Via Dolorosa

After being further mistreated by the Roman guards, made to wear a crown of thorns and beaten on the head with a rod Jesus was made to carry his own

cross, his device of further shame and eventual death, up the Via Dolorosa (meaning sorrowful way) from the Praetorium, where He had been sentenced, to Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls. Hardly able to stand, losing large amounts of blood, falling twice, finally Simon the Cyrene was enlisted to carry His burden. Good Friday? This is sounding like a horrible day and it is not nearly over.

The Weight of the World

Our Saviour was surely reaching the lowest point in his young life. The devastating torture was horrible but maybe not the worst of Jesus’ pain. Along with everything that Jesus had and was about to endure, Jesus was carrying the weight and suffering caused by shouldering the sins of the world. Not just man’s previously committed sins but all of mankind’s future sins as well. What a crushing load!

Back to the cross. . . Jesus was nailed, hand and foot, to this object of punishment and shame, then hoisted into the air to hang for hours. Designed

to make it excruciatingly difficult to breathe, Jesus embraced the indignity of the cross. Suffering, bleeding, extremely weak, laboring to breathe, he still mustered the compassion to pardon the sins of one of the criminals who occupied this despised hill alongside his own cross. He may have been spared, due to his condition, the further insult of watching the guards cast lots for his clothing.

The Light of the World is extinguished

He finally gave up His life in an indescribable cry of anguish, asking God to forgive his persecutors. Enter the aforementioned storm and curtain tearing. The Lamb had been sacrificed for the sins of many. Jesus was innocent. He knew no sin but became sin. The Light of the world was extinguished. The WORD had been taken out of the world He came to save. Jesus’ lifeless form was taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb.

Good Friday transformed

Here is the big payoff. The miracle that turned the worst of Fridays into Good Friday. The best of Fridays. On the third day, Jesus arose from the tomb. The grave could not hold Him. Prophesy was fulfilled in the Resurrection of the Christ. All that heinous punishment that was dealt out on Friday was necessary to fulfill the Profits. The U shaped drama had been acted out. God

came down from Heaven and became man. He suffered death on the cross and was buried. He defeated the grave and rose from the tomb. In forty days he would ascend to His seat at the right hand of the Father. No slight of hand. No conspiracy. No mass hallucination. The mystery of Faith is etched on the hearts of Christians everywhere. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. Hallelujah!