Who do I owe my thankfulness?

The New Testament book of Philemon isn't the longest of the Bible. It has just one short chapter. But reading it this morning as part of my 5 by 5 by 5 devotion time gave me plenty of material for consideration and prayer.

Philemon was a wealthy leader of the first-century church, probably in Colossae. His slave, Onesimus, also a Christian, ran away from Philemon and ended up helping the apostle Paul, then being held prisoner in Rome for his faith in Christ. Paul is sending Onesimus back to Philemon accompanied by this short letter.

Paul is very shrewd here (and elsewhere). He never overtly advocates the end of the Roman slavery system, but he asks Philemon to no longer treat Onesimus as he would a slave, but as a brother in Christ, an equal in the eyes of God, differing from Philemon not in status but only in function.

Paul even offers to compensate Philemon for any financial damage caused by Onesimus running away. Then, he takes the extraordinary step--taken in only a few of his letters--of actually taking the pen from his amanuensis (the secretary to whom he was dictating this correspondence) to write the pledge himself:

I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. [Then this amazing statement:] I say nothing about you owing me even your own self. (v. 19)

Christians believe that they have been saved from sin and death and given new and everlasting life by the grace of God given to all who trust in Jesus Christ as God, the only One Who can give forgiveness of sins and life from God. We're right to give thanks and praise to God alone for this great gift.

But no one comes to faith in Christ or to a growing, consoling, empowering faith in Christ, in a vacuum. No one wakes up one morning and says, "I believe in Christ." And no one's faith deepens without the help of mentors and friends in Christ.

There has to be someone--usually many someones--who share Christ with us. Otherwise, the human default mode, being to go it alone and to be our own gods without accountability to anyone else, we would never know about Christ and the forgiveness of sin and new life given to all who trust in this crucified and risen Savior.

As Paul puts it elsewhere:

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Romans 10:14)

God saves people for eternal life with God through their faith in Christ. But God commissions people--people who gave perfect witness to Him on the pages of Scripture, Christians who share their imperfect lives and the perfect good news about Jesus with friends and family, and others--to "preach," proclaim, teach, and give away their best friend and Lord Jesus to others.

This morning, I'm taking Paul's words to Philemon as words to me.

I'm taking the time to think about all of the people to whom I owe my eternal life because, in the power of God's Holy Spirit, they took and they take the time to share the life of Jesus with me. This includes people from my past and people from my present.

I'm taking the time to name each one before the Lord and to thank Him for their witness.

I'm offering a special prayer for those who are witnesses for Christ in my life right now, asking God to bless and protect them and their families and to help them sense His loving arms around them today.

I'm also offering prayers of thanksgiving for those now with the Lord in eternity, the sainted dead, whose witness for Christ has built up my faith in Christ--people like Martha S, Bruce S, Ron C, Karen H, Great Grandma Henry,  Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty, and Sarah S, to name just a few. I'm asking God, as I pray, to give them special embraces symbolic of my thankfulness to them and to remind them that I so look forward to seeing them again soon. My hope for eternity is one I possess because they and others have faithfully shared Christ with me and prayed to God the Father in Christ's name for me. How can I not be filled with thanksgiving?

It's not a bad idea to thank God for the people to whom we owe our connection to Christ, the life-giver. You may want to do so sometime today too.

Big problem with Google cars...

...They obey all the traffic laws.

One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn't get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google's robot.

The idea of a self-driving car appeals to me a lot. But the four way stop on my daily commute, where some drivers are intent on not taking their turns, show me why the obedience of self-driving prototypes present them with obstacles.

Arthur Conan Doyle's platonic relationship with woman he loved

A fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories since reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for English class in the seventh grade and a fan of Martin Clunes' work on Doc Martin, I was interested in watching the premier of Arthur and George, starring Clunes, last night. I enjoyed the first episode.

I knew a little about Doyle. I knew that while he patterned Holmes after a diagnostician under whom he studied while in medical school, Holmes was more of an alter ego to the keenly observant Doyle than of the fictional doctor who narrates the Holmes corpus, Watson. I knew that Doyle was devoted to spiritualism. I also knew that he became an acquaintance with Agatha Christie, after the latter, who boldly stole the basic ideas for the main characters in her early Poirot stories--Holmes=Poirot, Watson=Hastings, Lestrade=Japp, Mrs. Hudson=Miss Lemon--had risen to fame. And I knew that after Christie's first husband had betrayed her and she had, deeply depressed, disappeared, a concerned Doyle offered a substantial sum of money to anyone who could help materially in finding her.

But having never delved into Doyle's life very much, I wondered whether his life was being significantly fictionalized in Arthur and George. I wondered about two things, in particular. First, had Doyle become involved in sleuthing himself for the purpose of exonerating a man he thought wrongly convicted of a crime? (It turns out that Doyle had done just this.)

The other thing I wondered about was a character in last night's episode, Jean Leckie. According to the show, while Doyle was married, he had conducted an ongoing and unconsummated relationship with Leckie. Last night, Clune's Doyle, following the death of his wife, makes understated Victorian overtures to Jean about getting married and the Leckie character tells him that they must wait for a period of time to pass before that happens. Were they juicing up Arthur and George's story line for twenty-first century TV audiences?

So, I went to that font of all knowledge Wikipedia and found this about Doyle's personal life:

In 1885 Doyle married Mary Louise (sometimes called "Louisa") Hawkins, the youngest daughter of J. Hawkins, of Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, and sister of one of Doyle's patients. She suffered from tuberculosis and died on 4 July 1906.^[39] The following year he married Jean Elizabeth Leckie, whom he had first met and fallen in love with in 1897. He had maintained a platonic relationship with Jean while his first wife was still alive, out of loyalty to her.^[40] Jean died in London on 27 June 1940.^[41]

(Note the citations.)

Apparently, Arthur and George has it right about Doyle and Leckie. And that impresses me for several reasons. One is that so many screen dramatizations of real people's lives play fast and loose with the facts.

The other is to consider how remarkable the real life Doyle and Leckie were. Here were two people deeply in love with each other who refrained from intimacy when they could have been together--even in the Victorian Era, the high and mighty, which Doyle was, could get away with behavior that would otherwise be considered scandalous--all because Doyle remained loyal to his wife.

The Victorian Age may not have been as primitive as it's often portrayed as being.

A Course on Miracles from Jesus

[This was shared during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church, Springboro, Ohio, earlier today. All of the Biblical citations in today's message are from the English Standard Version (ESV) translation.]

Mark 7:24-37
Today, I want to talk with you about miracles. Particularly, the miracles performed by Jesus and, in our own day, the miracles that come when people call out to God in Jesus’ name. 

Probably all of us have experienced the agony of prayers offered for loved ones or for ourselves when God seemed to ignore what we prayed for, when the miracles we've sought haven't come. Nothing is more painful or haunting for the believer in Christ than this. And it's something I want to ask the Lord about when I get to see Him face to face in eternity.

But I’m confident that if we were to poll this group of worshipers this morning, a majority of us would affirm not only that Jesus works miracles, but also that we know of at least one miracle from our own lives or from the lives of others, that can only be attributed to Christ. When I had a heart attack five years ago, I had what's called the widow maker, a 100% blockage of the left anterior descending artery, I was told by my cardiologist that, given the lack of risk factors on my part, he had no way of explaining why I'd had the heart attack. He also said that he was also nearly as baffled by my survival. (My body had developed lots of ancillary arteries that were picking up the slack.) But his nurse cut to the chase on this last point. I survived, she said, because God had things for me to do. I believe in miracles.

Let’s acknowledge something, though: Whenever we Christians talk about miracles, we’re in dangerous territory. 

One reason this is true is that there are televangelists who have built vast empires on their claims that God wants our entire earthly lives to be miraculous walks in the park and that if we haven’t experienced a miracle in the past twenty-four hours, there must be some deficiency in our faith. It’s a deficiency likely to be cured, they imply, if we’ll send their ministries a $100 love-offering. But this notion of miracles being the normal mode of life on this earth flies in the face of Biblical truth. 

The most common Greek New Testament word which we translate into English as miracle is semeia. As we’ve pointed out before, it’s a word that literally means sign. Whenever Jesus perform a miracle even today, He takes the chance that some people will be so astonished by the miracle that they fail to see the sign that the miracle gives. Every one of Jesus’ miracles point to His lordship over the universe. They're signs of His capacity to conquer and destroy the power of sin and death over our lives, which He accomplished on the first Easter, when He rose from the dead. 

All of Jesus’ miracles call us to faith in Him, not in the signs themselves. 

To believe in the miracle and not the miracle worker is to pursue a “what’s-in-it-for-me-now?” religion. It’s utilitarian. 

To believe in the miracle-worker is to know that God is for me, whether things are going badly for me or whether, as a sign of His grace and power, Jesus visits me with a miracle. 

This is exactly why Jesus scorned the crowd that came tearing after Him following His feeding of the 5000. He told them in John 6:26: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” 

Jesus performs two miracles in today’s gospel lesson. In addition to their being signs of His dominion over life and death, they also are signs of another truth about life in His Kingdom. 

Let’s take a look at this lesson, Mark 7:24-37. 

First though, let’s set the scene because understanding the context in which these incidents take place is a key to understanding what Jesus wants to tell us today. Our gospel lesson picks up the narratives from Mark’s gospel that we looked at during the past two weeks. 

Two weeks ago, Jesus declared that His disciples were not defiled by failing to observe ritual cleansing before sitting down to dinner. 

Last week, He told us that nothing from outside of us can render us unclean in the eyes of God, only the sins that come from inside of us can make us unclean. 

(In the bargain, He declared that all foods are clean. I suppose that means Big Macs are clean, though they’re hard on the arteries, and I hope it means that Chipotle’s burrito bowls are clean.) 

Be that as it may, we come to our gospel lesson. Verse 24: “And from there [Jesus] arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden.” 

After declaring that all foods were clean, Jesus goes to Gentile territory, a place that His critics would have regarded as unclean. He goes there apparently to rest, not to minister. 

While Jesus did minister to the stray Gentile who approached Him in Judea, of course, and though, after His resurrection, Jesus did send His disciples to make full-fledged equal partner disciples among the Gentiles, Jesus was clear about His own mission. As He puts it in Matthew 5:24: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 

But by simply going to this Gentile territory, Jesus was making clear that no place, no person, no nation, is so unclean or so distant from God that it's beyond the scope of God’s dominion or grace.  

Verse 25: “But immediately [There’s that favorite word of Mark’s again, immediately. Here it conveys that the Son of Man, Who had no place to lay His head, didn’t have a moment to rest.] [immediately] a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.” 

This scene violates so many cultural norms of Jesus’ day that if the Pharisees had seen it, they might have gone crazy! 

In a Gentile house, a Gentile woman dares to speak to a Jewish man in front of other Jewish men. And this unclean woman asks that this Jewish man would employ the power of Judea’s God to cast a demon from her Gentile, unclean daughter. 

The cultural norms of Jesus’ day would have said that He should turn His back on this foreigner, that He should spurn her, that He should ignore her desperate need. 

But Jesus was no slave to cultural norms. Instead, His heart was, in Martin Luther’s phrase, “held captive to the Word of God.” 

So, rather than rejecting this woman, Jesus decides to teach His disciples, including you and me, an important lesson by satirizing cultural norms and, in a friendly exchange, bantering with this woman before saying yes to her prayer.

Verse 27: “And he said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.’ But she answered him, ‘Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.’  And he said to her, ‘For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.’” 

I love this dialog! 

Jesus first signals that He intends to honor the woman’s request when He says, “Let the children be fed first.” The implication is that she will be fed second. In Jesus’ Kingdom, there’s plenty of love to go around, whether we’re Americans or Syrians, Iraqis or whatever. 

But also in saying what He does in verse 27, Jesus parrots the bigoted conventions of His fellow Judeans: “I can’t give you what belongs to God’s children, lady. Don’t you know that the nickname given to Gentiles by my countrymen is dogs?” 

In Judea, people didn’t keep dogs as pets; they were just unwanted scavengers. And to call Gentiles dogs was to say they were nobodies, non-humans, unworthy of the attention or help of God. (This is what many Muslims today mean when they call non-Muslims, infidels.) 

The woman immediately picks up on Jesus’ Saturday Night Live-worthy sendup of His fellow Judeans. And, drawing on her culture’s habit of keeping dogs as pets, she says: “Yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” 

Jesus saw her faith and He delivered her daughter from evil. 

Verse 31: “Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. And they brought to him a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged him to lay his hand on him. And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ And his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” 

Here we have a second Gentile, this one a man and this one suffering from a physical rather than a spiritual ailment. As was true of the little girl, someone else came to present the man’s need to Jesus. In effect, they prayed to Jesus, just as we do when we pray for those who have spiritual or physical needs. Again, Jesus doesn’t turn His back on these foreign petitioners. 

He honors their faith in Him. He performs a miracle.

Verse 36: “And Jesus charged them to tell no one. But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.’” 

Jesus told the crowds not to tell others about the miracle because He knew the danger of worshiping the miracle instead of the miracle worker. Jesus didn’t want people to see Him as a genie who could be bottled up until we get into a jam, a pushover who will bend to our wills and otherwise leave us alone. 

To see Jesus in that way is to miss the point and it is to be far from Him and the eternal life He gives to all who turn from sin and believe in Him as God and Messiah. 

Jesus wanted--Jesus still wants--all people to see Him for Who He is: Lord of heaven and earth; God in flesh appearing; the hope of sinners; the only way to life with God; the only way to sanity and peace. 

As someone has pointed out, there were many people who suffered from spiritual and physical ailments who Jesus, in His time on earth, never met or had the opportunity to heal. If miracles were the point of Jesus' ministry, He could have healed the whole world long ago. But what good would it do any of us to be healed of disease, but not be cured of the sin that cuts us off from life with God? 

Today, we who confess Christ as Lord and God are the beneficiaries of His greatest miracle and sign: His death, in which He bore our condemnation for sin, and His resurrection, in which He opens up everlasting life free of sin and death, to all who trust in Him. 

And today, He calls us to go where He never went in His time on earth, sharing the benefit of His death and resurrection with others: praying for the hurting; serving our neighbors; and making disciples of Christ through our confident sharing of the good news of Jesus. In fact, Jesus says that we will do greater works in His name as His Church than He was able to do confined to His singular human life in first-century Judea, precisely because we can pray, serve, and make disciples in the power of His name!

Jesus always performed His miracles as signs of His dominion over life and death. 

But in the miracles we’ve looked at today, He also gave signs that no one is beyond the scope of His grace and lordship and that we who confess Him as Lord, should see everyone as worthy of our prayers, our compassion, our help, and our proclamation of Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. 

May God help we redeemed sinners, bought out of death by the blood of Jesus Christ, to see others, even those who hate us, as our mission field. 

And, as we do, may we see them with the compassionate and humble eyes of our miracle working Savior Jesus. Amen

Good Day Sunshine by the Beatles

This was the first song heard when I arrived at a recent wedding reception.

When I Look at the World by U2

The hardest prayer...and why I pray it

I've said it before, the hardest prayer we're commanded by Jesus to offer up to God our Father is, "Your will be done."

I've been a Christian now for nearly four decades and that prayer never gets easier for me.

But when I think of what Christ did for me on the cross and from the tomb made empty by God's love, how can I pray for anything but that God's will be done?

The apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:18: "I consider that the our present sufferings [even, presumably, our self-inflicted sufferings, those that result from our own selfishness] are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed" [when Christ returns and the dead who in this life trusted in Christ will rise to live with Him for eternity]."

When my eye remains on the resurrection prize and when my heart is filled with sufficient gratitude for Christ's death and resurrection for me, I can pray that prayer, trusting that God is bent on making all things right. Even when I prefer that my will be done.

It's Saturday...Learn to Moonwalk

Look, I know you'll be spending most of the day glued to your TV sets watching C-SPAN's coverage of the National Book Festival...or college football. But before you get all sedentary, you could learn to Moonwalk.



But, if you prefer sedentary, you can watch the first time Michael Jackson publicly performed the Moonwalk, during the big Motown twenty-fifth anniversary show in 1983.



Or, you can simply read about the Moonwalk here. Interesting to note from the Wikipedia entry on the Moonwalk dance move:

There are many recorded instances of the moonwalk; similar steps are reported as far back as 1932, used by Cab Calloway.^[5] In 1985, Calloway said that the move was called "The Buzz" when he and others performed it in the 1930s.^[6][7]

In 1944, Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien featured the move in their performance of "Under the Bamboo Tree" in Meet Me In St. Louis.^[8]

In 1955, it was recorded in a performance by tap dancer Bill Bailey. He performs a tap routine, and at the end, backslides into the wings.^[9] The French mime artist Marcel Marceau used it throughout his career (from the 1940s through the 1980s), as part of the drama of his mime routines. In Marceau's "Walking Against the Wind" routine, he pretends to be pushed backwards by a gust of wind.^[10]

In the 1950s, Dick Van Dyke performed a similar variation of the moonwalk and camel walk in his comedy routine called "Mailing A Letter On A Windy Corner".

In 1958, Mexican dancer-comedian Adalberto Martinez "Resortes" also performed the moonwalk in the film Colegio de Verano (Summer School)...

Choreographer Bob Fosse moonwalks in his role as the Snake in the 1974 film "The Little Prince". 2^[13]

James Brown used the move^[14] and can be seen performing it in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Another early moonwalker was popper and singer Jeffrey Daniel, who moonwalked in a performance of Shalamar's "A Night To Remember" on Top of the Pops in the UK in 1982^[15] and was known to perform backslides in public performances (including weekly Soul Train episodes) as far back as 1974. Michael Jackson was a fan of Jeffrey Daniel's dancing and would eventually seek him out.

Also in 1982, Debbie Allen performs a moonwalk during a scene with Gwen Verdon in Season 1, Episode 10 ("Come One, Come All") of the TV series Fame.^[16]

So, it didn't start with Jackson. But he sent the mass popularity of the move, the buzz or the backslide, over the moon.

While you're learning the Moonwalk and all about its history, I'll be hard at work and prayer. After all, this is Serious Sermon Saturday.

Chipotle

I'm not the only one who loves it. It's now the number one healthy fast food choice.

The Refugee Crisis

The flood of refugees from Syria into Europe has multiple causes. But whatever they are, the pictures for followers of Jesus Christ are horrifying.

Praying for the refugees flocking from war-torn Syria to Europe right now.

Praying that wherever they end up, they will be welcomed by Christians who, in serving and welcoming these poor people, know that they really are serving their Lord (Matthew 25:31-46).

Praying too, that God will give wisdom and compassion to the leaders of the world in dealing with these people, the helpless victims of a barbarous regime and the rise of Isis.

Praying also for safety and help for the hundreds of thousands of Christians already displaced from Iraq. Praying for all Christians who face persecution and the threat and reality of murder and maiming for their faith in Christ in Muslim countries.

I was a refugee when my family fled to Egypt. pic.twitter.com/ec4J7COiFi

— Jesus Christ (@JesusOfNaz316) September 3, 2015

Music

Listening to one of my favorite LPs. Here are a few of my favorite lines:

Touch me, take me to that other place
Teach me, I know I'm not a hopeless case

Later:

And if the darkness is to keep us apart
And if the daylight feels like it's a long way off
And if your glass heart should crack
And for a second you turn back
Oh no, be strong

Walk on, walk on...

Home, hard to know what it is if you've never had one
Home, I can't say where it is but I know I'm going home
That's where the hurt is...

And:

I'm a man, I'm not a child
A man who sees
The shadow behind your eyes...

I don't wanna see you cry
I know that this is not goodbye...

More:

In a little while
Surely you'll be mine
In a little while... I'll be there
In a little while
This hurt will hurt no more
I'll be home, love

When the night takes a deep breath
And the daylight has no air
If I crawl, if I come crawling home
Will you be there?

In a little while
I won't be blown by every breeze
Friday night running to Sunday on my knees
That girl, that girl she's mine
Well I've known her since,
Since she was

A little girl with Spanish eyes
When I saw her first in a pram they pushed her by
Oh my, my how you've grown
Well it's been, it's been... a little while

ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh

Slow down my beating heart
A man dreams one day to fly
A man takes a rocket ship into the skies
He lives on a star that's dying in the night
And follows in the trail, the scatter of light
Turn it on, turn it on, you turn me on

Slow down my beating heart
Slowly, slowly love
Slow down my beating heart
Slowly, slowly love
Slow down my beating heart
Slowly, slowly love

Go, Buckeyes!

Count it on one hand! 5 DAYS! ICYMI: The BTN finale of Scarlet & Gray Days will air again tonight at 9:30! #GoBucks
Posted by Ohio State Buckeyes on Wednesday, September 2, 2015

"Never trust anyone who is rude to a waiter"

That's the title for this article by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian.

Through the years, I've only been served by a few demonstrably incompetent waiting staffers at  restaurants. But I tend to give even those folks the benefit of the doubt.

Why? Because, together with dining room hosts and hostesses, serving staff are sandwiched uncomfortably in the middle, between managers, cooks, bussers, and customers. Each of those other people have their own sets of pressures and expectations, each of them likely to make the waiting staff the objects of loud criticism and nastiness.

Plus, it's hard work: Standing and scurrying for hours. Patiently explaining menu choices, dealing with customer choices that have nothing to do with the items on the menu, and toting large trays of hot food (or cold, if the kitchen is in slow gear), to name just a few things that make waiting tables hard work.

I have a set of simple rules that I try to follow in dealing with waiting staff:

1. Remember that they're human, just like you. Do unto them as you would want them to do unto you if your roles were reversed.
2. Say, "Please" and "Thank you."
3. Ask them how they are, when, as they're trained, they ask you that question.
4. Care about the answer.
5. Unless the service was horrible, never tip less than 20%. Never. NEVER.
6. When you sign your receipt, add a little note. My notes usually go like this: "Thanks for the service. God bless you!" (I was delighted to learn recently that a guy I know has the same practice.) The person who waits on you may never see you again; but you can make a lasting impression by brightening their day, expressing appreciation, and helping to clean up the bad reputation some self-righteous prigs give Christianity, by writing a simple note like that.
7. If you can't do these things sincerely, fake your sincerity. Who knows? You might actually come to like behaving in these ways.

Like Cooke, I don't know how much to trust a person who makes it a habit to mistreat waiters. I surely wouldn't trust a person like that to be my pastor, accountant, president, or friend. Bullying is never a compelling character trait.

[Thanks to a Facebook friend for posting the Cooke article.]

Understanding Faith

[This was shared during worship this morning with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio.]

Mark 7:14-23
Our gospel lesson for this morning opens with these words: “Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, ‘Listen to me, everyone, and understand this…’” 

The word in the Greek in which Mark first wrote that is translated as understand is σύνεσις. It has nothing to do with intellectual firepower. It has the idea of getting with a fact. Here, Jesus wants the crowd to "get with" what He wants to convey to them, something even a little child can understand.

Now, Jesus spoke these words on the heels of the incident that occupied last Sunday’s gospel lesson, when Jesus scorned the Pharisees and teachers of the law for laying human laws on people and turning salvation from God into a contract in which they said, “If I engage in these human traditions, God has to give me what I want.” But in response to the Pharisees' and the scribes' supposed piety, Jesus said: “You turn your backs on God’s commandments in favor of your own traditions."

Having made His point, Jesus is done with the Pharisees and the scribes and, we're told, calls the crowd to Himself. 

Jesus was always being followed by crowds. They weren’t His followers, although some would eventually come follow Him maybe. The crowds were the were the curious. They were curious about this Man Who claimed to be God, Who performed miracles, and set people free to know God.

The Pharisees and scribes hadn’t understood Jesus’ teaching, because they hadn’t wanted to. They exemplified a truth about which writer Upton Sinclair once said, “"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." 

Jesus doesn’t force God’s truth on people. 

He doesn’t force salvation on anyone. 

Each person, one at a time, must either receive Christ as God and Savior or not. And they must keep receiving Jesus or not every day, which is why Martin Luther says that the lifestyle of a believer in Christ is daily repentance and renewal. 

But no person will receive Christ as Savior if they do not first understand the difference between religion, which is what the Pharisees practiced, and faith, which is what Jesus offers all of us.

Faith is nothing but total trust in Jesus as God, Lord, Savior, and King. 

Faith is trusting that the God Who took on human flesh, died as He took on the punishment we all deserve for our sins, and rose so that all who believe in Christ, surrendering their lives and wills to Him have life with God that never ends. This is what Jesus wanted the crowds to know, understand, experience, and live.

So, Jesus calls the crowd together and says--I'm paraphrasing here: “I want you to understand that you don’t have to go through some ritual purification ceremony every time you eat. That’s not what a relationship with God is about.” So, as we’ve noted, Jesus called the crowd together and said, “...understand this. 'Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.'” 

Whatever physical dirt may accidentally enter our mouths when we eat is not going to destroy our relationship with God. It’s the unclean things that come out of a human being, the sin that emanates from them that defiles them, that declares independence from God and His moral law for all humanity, that drives a wedge in our relationships with God and others. 

Don’t worry about performing all these ritual laws that the Pharisees give you, Jesus was telling the crowd. Be more concerned about what the sin already inside of you can incite you to do and say and obsess over absent the Lordship of Jesus over your life!

In verse 17, we’re told that Jesus left the crowd and went into “the house.” Jesus has now left the curious crowds and is huddled with the Church, the people who follow Him, believe in Him. It's exactly what's happening now as we worship, gathered in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Now we know that Jesus is both true God and true man. So, He always understands what's going on inside of us better than we ourselves don But if Jesus had entertained any notion that the disciples in the house understood His teaching any better than the crowd, He would have been quickly disabused of the notion. We're told: “...his disciples asked him about this parable [the short parable about what goes into a stomach not defiling a person].” 

Jesus' response to the disciples is classic. Verse 18: “‘Are you so dull?’ [Literally, Jesus asks the disciples, ‘Thus are you also without understanding?’] Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” 

And then Jesus speaks in terms that any of us can understand. Verse 20: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

As I read these words of Jesus, I must ask myself, “Do I look like a person whose life has been and is being transformed by the grace that comes to those with faith in Christ?” Or, “Do I look like a person who goes through the religious motions? I come to worship. (Heck, I even lead worship.) I recite the Creeds. I say the Lord’s Prayer. I periodically help at Saint Vincent’s. I say prayers. But is my heart with Jesus? Is my will with Jesus? Is Jesus my all and all?”

Surveys in recent years show that the attitudes of Christians regarding some of the sins that Jesus lists--sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, and so on--are indistinguishable from the attitudes of the surrounding culture. Christians pretty much commit the same sins as their non-Christian neighbors. But they feel OK about it because on the Sundays they’re in worship, they mumble a few words of confession. And, after all, as our Lutheran pastors always remind us, we’re all sinners; we’re just sinners who are saved by grace through faith in Christ. So, many Christians think, it’s all good. 

The demonic character in one of George Bernard Shaw’s plays could act as the spokesmen for many: “I love to sin. God loves to forgive sin. It really is an admirable system.”

This way of thinking is really just another new human commandment. This command says: “Give Jesus, really the idea of Jesus, your intellectual assent. Confess that, ‘Jesus is a nice guy’ and you get heavenly fire insurance against the flames of hell. You get a ‘Pass Go, Get Out of Jail Free’ card.” 

But guess what goes untouched with this human command? The very thing that Jesus came to change: Our hearts, not that organ in our chests that pumps out blood, but the seat of our wills, where we decide how to live our lives, the heart that lies within us that causes us to sin. 

Jesus came to change our hearts, to change our very beings. He came to transform us from the inside out so that in this life, however imperfectly, we seek to follow Him, do God’s will (even when we don’t want to), love God, love others, and help others to know Jesus too. He came to transform us from the inside out so that in the life to come, God will give us a completely new life in Him, where all that exists on the inside and on the outside is a heart and a life devoid of sin, covered and filled with the purity and love and power of God.

Jesus’s words today confront us with a choice about what we want. 

Do we want human traditions that make us look clean on the outside but leave us dirty and far from God on the inside, where we live? 

Or do we want a relationship with Jesus, God revealed to all the world, a relationship that brings us to life, that helps us move away from superficial religiosity toward becoming the people we were made to be: people of love, hope, and integrity. 

The better choice should be obvious. God help us all--God help me--to make the right choice, to completely and unreservedly throw in with Jesus, each day and always. Amen 

Shelter from the Storm by Bob Dylan

Love. This. Song. From my favorite Dylan LP, Blood on the Tracks.

How Sweet It Is by James Taylor...and by Marvin Gaye

And here's the original version by the amazing Marvin Gaye.

Joe Morgan, my all time favorite Red

Today in Reds history, 1978: Joe Morgan smacks his 200th home run and becomes the first player in history to have 200 homers and 500 stolen bases.
Posted by Cincinnati Reds on Thursday, August 27, 2015

More have died from civilian gun wounds since 1968...

...than have died in all the wars in US history, from all causes. Sobering paragraph from Politifact:

There have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths since 1968, compared to 1,396,733 cumulative war deaths since the American Revolution. That’s 120,130 more gun deaths than war deaths -- about 9 percent more, or nearly four typical years worth of gun deaths. And that’s using the most generous scholarly estimate of Civil War deaths, the biggest component of American war deaths.

Another word for photoshopping: defamation

This is not a political rant. You can like President and Mrs. Obama or not like them. You can like Obama's policies and philosophy or not. I express no opinions on politics...except to family members and sometimes, friends, and in the voting booth. This post is not about any of that.

What it is about is the manipulation of imagery to misinform, stoke fires, generally get in the way of civil discourse, and defame people.

Yesterday, a friend who undoubtedly did not suspect manipulation on the part of the person who created the image he shared, posted this:

Frankly, to paraphrase Patrick Henry, "I smelt a rat."*

For one thing, I couldn't imagine Michelle Obama being so stupid as to play into the hands of those who think she's a radical whacko who hates the United States of America.

Her outfit was unique, one that she likely would have worn on only one patriotic occasion.

So, I googled "michelle obama Veterans Day." I found the image below, a still from the news story of a local ABC affiliate from Veterans Day, 2011. It was captured during the playing of the national anthem prior to the first NCAA Carrier Classic basketball game that day. As you can see from the jacket he's wearing below, even President Obama was photoshopped from a different event into the picture above.

This is the full report from which the above still was taken:



The great thing about the Internet is that everyone has access to it and can share all sorts of things. The bad thing about the Internet is that everyone has access to it and can share all sorts of things, even false and defaming things.

The Obamas aren't the only victims of such nonsense, of course. It happens to all kinds of people: Republicans, Democrats, Christians, atheists, Muslims, white people, black people, brown people, yellow people.

But this kind of defamation is always wrong.

And it makes me think: If you have to resort to character assassination to make your point, maybe you don't have a point.

As a Christian, of course, I've been taught that God takes a dim view of defamation. It's a sin. The Eighth Commandment says: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."

And as a Lutheran Christian, I'm privileged to be familiar with Martin Luther's explanation of that command from God: "We should fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, lie, or gossip about our neighbors, but defend them, speak well of them, and put the most charitable construction on all that they do." Even when we disagree with our neighbor.

To the person who created this photoshopped image: You may doubt both Obamas' patriotism, but that doesn't warrant making up "facts" to buttress your doubts.

One last comment: When I think about what the families of public officials and would-be public officials are put through, it's a wonder that anybody runs for political office. Ever.

[By the way, I looked up the investigation of this meme on snopes.com after I wrote the above. It's here.]

*Henry was talking about the Constitution, and he was wrong in his gloomy assessment of the document, which completed America's Revolution, coupling the cause of liberty with the sustaining principle of mutual accountability.

Message in a bottle, yeah

A German woman, Marianne Winkler, on holiday at the German North Sea island of Amrum, has found a message in a bottle.

It came from a marine biologist in Plymouth, England who set that bottle and over a thousand more of them into the North Sea sometime between 1904 and 1906. The researcher, George Parker Bidder, was trying to learn more about "deep sea currents."

Bidder's reward for those who broke the bottles, retrieved the messages they contained, and notified him at the Marine Biological Association of the retrievals, was a shilling. The shilling basically went away in the UK in 1968, then definitively in 1971. But the association was true to Bidder's promise. According to the smithsonianmag.com, "the association found an old one for sale online" and forwarded it to Winkler.

Read the whole thing.

What seems wrong with cable news

Today's events in Virginia were horrible. Their coverage by most cable news outlets--I looked in on CNN, MSNBC, HLN, Fox, and OAN today--brought into view what, to my mind, is one of the cable news industry's biggest faults: Its incessant, exploitative coverage of tragedy.*

Because the channels broadcast twenty-four hours a day, having long ended what used to be called "news cycles," even before the coming of the Internet, the beast of unfilled, advertising revenue-rich time must be fed. The more sensational and horrific the tragedy, the better, as far as the news channels are concerned.

And, it doesn't matter how little new information is surfaced or how trivial it may be, as the hours grind on, it goes on the air. If it bleeds, it not only leads, it stays there.

Even when the cable channels stick to the facts and resist the temptation to report rumors from fear of being beaten to the punch by the competition, the long and obsessive continuation of "coverage" of tragedies, amplifies them, giving them more prominence than the millions of other events--good and bad--that happen every day, more prominence than seems healthy or to the benefit of news-consumers.

Constant repetition of even "straight reporting" of a tragic event amounts to yellow journalism.

And I can't help suspecting that, in ways nobody at the cable channels intend, people with psychological issues, are encouraged to take out their resentments in violent ways when they see how a whole nation can appear to be paralyzed by one sick person's rampage.

I don't want horrible events to be swept under the rug, denied, or ignored. And I certainly want the victims of violence to be honored for the good people that their family and friends experienced them to be.

But I also don't want those who bring us news to ignore what happens in the lives of the 7-billion other human inhabitants of Planet Earth in order to boost their ratings. Or, exploit the victims of violence. Or effectively, for some people in bad places psychologically, make heroes of killers.

*OAN is a straight news operation by day, which I sometimes look in on at breakfast and lunch. The network was not sensationalizing today's events. I've never watched the network's evening programming.

Beautiful Night by Paul McCartney

A Verse to Remember

For my 5 by 5 by 5 devotion time (and yes, I am way behind schedule) this morning, I read Colossians, chapter 2. I was so struck my Colossians 2:6-7 that I decided to commit to memorizing it. Now, I pray God will help me to live it.

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in Him, rooted and built up in Him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

Now I need to check if I got it right. This is from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) translation. 

I mentioned this passage today on Facebook and explained my motivation for memorizing Scripture: "...I've decided that if my memory ever goes, I want some of God's Word to be lodged in [what's left]..."

Confession and Absolution Song

I began composing this song about twenty years ago and finished it as I drove to church for worship on August 16. This completion of songs has never been my forte. That's a confession from me before you read this Confession and Absolution Song. (I have finished some songs over the years. But right now, I have about 180 song fragments recorded on my phone.)

There is a melody for this and all the songs, but since I neither read music nor play it, just the lyrics here for now.

A few years ago, a friend heard a few of my song fragments and encouraged me to finish them. Here's one.

Father, forgive us for all of our sin
Come, Holy Spirit, make us clean within
Through Jesus Christ, we know You're our Friend
Alleluia
Alleluia

A Friend indeed, but also our King
The One to Whom all creation sings
Our needy selves are all we can bring
Alleluia
Alleluia

Now all who call on the name of the Lord
The One Who saints and angels adore
You have new life and life evermore
Alleluia
Alleluia
© 2015, Mark Daniels

God's Word...Nothing More, Nothing Less

[This was shared yesterday during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Springboro, Ohio.]

Mark 7:1-13
Sometimes, I’ve thought of compiling a book of common sayings that people attribute to God, Jesus, or the Bible, called Stuff God and the Bible Never Said. 

There are lots of untrue things people claim come from God. 

Like, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” In fact, the Bible teaches the exact opposite of that. Psalm 54:4 says: “Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me.” 

Another fake Biblical saying goes: “The good die young.” According to Genesis, Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. But it makes no mention of him being an especially bad man. 

Years later, when life expectancies were shortened by the working of sin in the human race, Moses lived to the ripe age of 120 years old. And, Deuteronomy 34:7 says “[Moses] died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone.” According to the Bible, people die when they die and it has nothing to do with how good they are in the eyes of the world. All human beings are sinners who deserve death. That's the bad news. But as Paul says in Romans 6:23: “...the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That's the good news. Whether we’re young or old, repentance and faith in Christ give us life, here and, in perfect unmediated fellowship with God, in eternity.

A common falsehood attributed to God these days tells us: “Jesus taught tolerance.” Not true. Jesus taught love. And He lived love. Love and tolerance are not the same thing. 

This isn’t to say that Christians are supposed to act as moral vigilantes, enforcing God’s moral law. We’re not Muslim Jihadists. 

But loving a spouse or a friend or a child or a fellow disciple doesn’t mean that you let bad behavior go unchallenged. 

A Christian congregation shouldn’t tolerate false teaching from a preacher, for example. And the reason is very simple: You love the people who will be guided the wrong way by false teaching and you love the one who gives the false teaching. 

We shouldn’t even be tolerant of sin within ourselves. Love of God should compel us each day to come to Christ, seeking awareness of our sins, forgiveness for those sins, and the Holy Spirit’s power to overcome the temptation to repeat them. [See here.]

What all these sayings falsely attributed to God have in common is that they reflect a desire to put human thoughts and human ideas into the mind and mouth of God. They’re a human effort to cut God down to manageable, controllable, understandable human scale. We attempt to evade God’s Lordship over our lives by claiming that these human thoughts come from God, that God is our co-conspirator in believing in and doing the exact opposite of what God, the Creator and King of the universe, has revealed to be His will.

This was the core problem with the Pharisees. We run into them at the very beginning of today’s gospel lesson, Mark 7:1-13. We’re told: “The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus…” The Pharisees were in first century Judea, at the time Jesus walked on the earth, and for several centuries after His resurrection, a sect of Judaism. Pharisaism was the biggest movement in Judaism at that time.

Despite claiming great devotion to God and to God’s Word, the Pharisees’ teachings really did forget God and God’s Word. They spun off pious-sounding falsehoods like the ones I would include in my imaginary book, assuring themselves that by keeping these laws, they would be too good for God to keep out of His kingdom. And in the meantime, they would crush others less knowledgeable of their arcane rules under layers of humanly-created laws, allowing the Pharisees to feel superior and in control.

We see all this in what comes next in our gospel lesson. Verses 2 to 5: “[The Pharisees and teachers of the law] saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.) So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, ‘Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?’”

Let’s be clear. This is not about hygiene. The Pharisees had created a series of laws that existed as an oral tradition in Jesus’ day and which, 200 years later, were gathered in a book called The Mishnah. Among the laws they made up was one based on ritual laws for the cleansing of hands by priests serving in the temple found in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. But the Pharisees taught, and many Jews unfamiliar with the Bible thought, that every Jew had to engage in ritual washing before every meal. 

The Pharisees put human tradition on the same level as the revealed Word of God. In fact, they really don’t claim to do anything other than that when they ask Jesus: “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders…?”

No matter how well-intentioned, whenever we equate human traditions, human thoughts, or human wisdom to God’s revealed will and Word, we stray from God, we lie about God. 

And this is true whether it’s done by the legalistic Christian who says you can’t dance, play cards, or drink beer (which would kill Lutherans), or it’s done by what we call antinomians, the loosey goosey Christians who say that God’s moral law is outmoded, so people don’t have to repent for shacking up, telling white lies, or approving of same sex marriage in the Church. 

All of this adding to and taking away from the Word of God is something people do in order to take control of their lives, others' lives, and this world. But it’s a foolish effort. 

As God reminds us in Isaiah 45:5: “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.” 

And just in case we’re inclined to replace our wisdom for that of God, God tells us: “There is a way that seems right to a man,  but its end is the way to death.” [Proverbs 16:25] 

As I’ve often told my Catechism students through the years, “If God and I disagree, guess who needs to change his mind?” 

Look at the first part of Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law. He quotes Isaiah 29:13 in verses 6 to 8: ““Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.’” 

For all their scrupulous adherence to religious traditions, Jesus was saying, the Pharisees were really far away from God. 

That must have been a jarring thing for people who were in the temple all the time and thought of themselves as super-believers. 

They have their contemporary counterparts. In his book, Evangelism That Works, George Barna, a Christian who is a sociologist and student of church and societal trends, claims that half of those who attend worship at Protestant churches on Sunday mornings have never intentionally accepted Christ as their God and King. 

I’m not talking altar calls here; I’m talking intentional surrender to Christ. Beyond the ritual. Beyond the recitation of the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or verses from Scripture, as wonderful and foundational as that all is. 

Surrender entails following the God we know in Jesus Christ, in tough times and easy, through life and through death. Barna says that half of all churchgoing Christians are committed to that, meaning that the glass is half full. But shockingly, it's also half empty. 

Someone has said that the gospel ”is not just a gift to be received, but a new leader to follow.” The Pharisees weren’t following the God you and I are privileged to know through Jesus. They were following human rules which they were attributing to God. That left them far from God.

There is good news in all of this for us today, though! 

We don’t need to be in ignorance about the will of God for our lives. And we don’t, as much of the lies attributed to God would have us believe, have to follow a weak God Who surrenders to us or our adherence to rules or our traditions or wisdom. 

We can know God through His Word, the sacraments, and the fellowship of believers. 

We can know that we follow the living God Who made the universe Who has entered our world and told us in John 6:29: ““The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.” (If you had your Bibles with you today, I would urge you to underline that passage.) 

You don’t have to follow a human rule book. You have to follow the Jesus testified to on the pages of the Bible.

This past week, I had a conversation with a man who isn’t a member of our congregation, who lives in this community. He asked about our building situation. He seemed baffled that I wasn’t worried. After a while, he said, “I guess you’re trusting in God.” 

I am. I’m certain that God will take care of us, first of all, because God sent His Son Jesus to die and rise in order to save those who dare to believe in Him. And I’m certain too, because of my experiences and your experiences with God’s faithfulness. We know, as God taught Abraham centuries ago, that God will provide for His people. 

No matter how many ways people try to distort the Word and the will of God, irrespective of how many things people claim that God and the Bible say, we know and we follow the God revealed for all as the way, the truth, and the life in Jesus Christ. He alone is true. We can say, with Psalm 62:6, “Truly [God] is my rock and salvation [not my performance, not my reasoning, not my supposed goodness, not my adherence to humanly-created religious rules or expectations, but God]; He is my fortress; I shall not be shaken.” Amen