Fearfully and Wonderfully Made...Yeah, You!

Every now and then, I’ll meet someone who asks, “Are you the Mark Daniels who writes the column?” “Yes,” I answer.

Sometimes they tell me, “You are such a good writer.”

That always comes as a shock to me. I love to write. But I can think of only a handful of things that I’ve written in my lifetime that I like.

This self-critical attitude may incite me to pursue my personal mission, which I summarized a few years ago: “Using the communication gifts God has given to me, I prayerfully inspire and lead people to follow and live for Jesus Christ.”

But even to have written that statement was hard for me. While many people have told me over the years that I’m a gifted communicator, I find it difficult to accept.

That’s because ever since I was a little boy, I have wrestled with feelings of inferiority, of unworthiness. Back in my school days, it seemed that everybody else was either smarter than me, more athletic than me, cooler than me, or all three.

I carried these feelings into adulthood. Looking back over my first fifty years, I see how they have held me back. I see too, how they sometimes have led me to do wrong simply as a way of proving myself to the world or to myself.

In the Old Testament, a king named David spends part of a worship song, Psalm 139, asking God to show his sins to him so that he can turn from them and ask God’s forgiveness. David knew he was imperfect.

But without any arrogance, in the same psalm, David also marvels that God had created him so well. “I praise you,” he says, “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

David wasn’t being an egomaniac when he wrote those words. He understood and acknowledged the first gift God gave to him: himself.

I need to be able to do that. Maybe you do too.

Maybe you have gifts and abilities for which you repeatedly receive compliments, but you refuse to believe in their value...or in yours. I can confidently tell you that God wants you to stop doing that!

A man named Zaccheus was so short that when Jesus came to his hometown of Jericho, he couldn’t see Jesus over the heads of the welcoming crowd. So, Zaccheus climbed a sycamore tree and got a good view. He was stunned when Jesus looked up into that tree, callled Zaccheus by name, and asked if He could come to Zaccheus’ house.

No wonder Zaccheus was stunned. He’d probably always wrestled with feelings of inferiority because of his slight stature. As a tax collector in those days, furthermore, he was an extortionist ostracized by the good religious people of town.

But Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, saw the possibilities in Zaccheus. That day, Zaccheus turned from sin and let the love and acceptance God offers through Jesus Christ begin to change his life forever. It’s likely that Zaccheus still wrestled with feelings of inferiority and temptations the rest of his life. But in Jesus, he knew that he had God’s approval and encouragement, the ability to become the best Zaccheus possible, and the second chances every one of us needs.

I’m thankful that God gives these same blessings to me. It’s still hard for me to accept compliments. But when I let God’s forgiveness and acceptance, offered through Jesus soak into my life, I can acknowledge God’s gifts to me and use them as God intended them to be used.

He can do the same for you. It begins when you turn away from sin and ask Jesus to be your God and best Friend.

Hope: The Key to Surviving and Thriving Life's Tough Times

"I am the most fortunate man that ever lived...you can't imagine how fortunate I am to have had the full and rich life...I have...You`ll never know a person who is as fortunate and has experienced as rich and full [a] life as I have."

The speaker was Senator John McCain who, as a young Naval officer, spent years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp and was nearly killed by the experience. In spite of that, he considers himself "fortunate." After hearing McCain say this on C-Span's Booknotes television show, I was so stunned that I looked at my son, watching the interview with me, and exclaimed, "What a guy!"

How is it that some people go through grim experiences and are crushed, while others, like McCain, survive and eventually, thrive?

I asked myself this question again recently as I sat in a Disney World food court where my daughter worked these past eight months and conversed with one of her co-workers. I'll call him Frank. Frank asked how I'd enjoyed being a pastor for twenty years and I said that I’ve really liked it.

"I liked my old career for twenty-two years," he told me.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I was a research engineer. But my job got sent overseas."

Frank told me that he chose to view this setback as the chance for a fresh start. "I decided that I wanted to work with the imagineers at Disney. But it's tough to get with that department off the street. Still, I know that Disney is a great company. So, we moved to Florida and I took a job here at this food court. Disney is deliberate about creating opportunities for networking and they do 85% of their hiring from within the company. So, having proved my reliability here, I'm awaiting word on getting a management position in food and beverage.

"Sometimes, it's hard for my wife. She was used to seeing me go to work in the morning in a suit and tie, briefcase in hand. Now, I wear this food services uniform, wipe tables, and stack chairs. But I believe something good is going to happen."

When psychotherapist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, he observed his fellow prisoners, trying to understand what the survivors--like him--had in common. They believed that somewhere ahead, something good was going to happen. They had hope.

I don't know what the ultimate source of hope is for John McCain or of Frank. But I do know my source of endless hope that never gives out, a source that sustains me even in the most difficult of times. My hope comes from Jesus Christ, the God-Man Who died and rose again to give life to all who will daily turn from sin and follow Him. A risen Savior has an eternity of hope to give away.

The Bible says this about the hope---and peace---Jesus gives to us:

"Therefore, since we are justified by faith [in other words, we don't earn heaven by doing good things; it's a free gift to all who turn from sin and follow Christ], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we alo boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit...(Romans 5:1-5)"

If you’d like a hope that never dies, I recommend Jesus Christ. He's proved hope enough for me to survive and to thrive.

[Mark Daniels is pastor of Friendship Church]

An Unexpected Bible Lesson

You don’t expect to hear interpretation of the Bible on a prime time network television show, especially an accurate one. But that’s exactly what I heard on one show recently.

This summer, both my wife, a school librarian, and my son, a college senior, have become fans of the NBC hit, West Wing, episodes of which are re-run every day on cable’s Bravo network. Because my office is at home, I’ve heard and seen sporadic snippets of the show, which recounts the life of a fictional U.S. president and his administration.

On a recently re-run episode, the president, played by Martin Sheen, and his wife, played by Stockard Channing, walked through the executive mansion, discussing, of all things, Ephesians 5:21-33. It’s found in the Bible’s New Testament. In the passage, the first century Christian evangelist Paul talks about marriage.

Paul tells wives to “be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”

Husbands are told to love their wives “just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

Often, the passage is used as justification for male-dominated marriages by some, and as reason for repudiating Christianity by others.

But, the fictional President Bartlett rightly concludes that Paul isn’t commending male domination. He points out that the whole section begins with the words: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

In other words, marriage is meant to be a fifty-fifty partnership between two equals. Husbands and wives are to be submissive to one another, subordinating their wills and egos to Jesus Christ, the God-Man Who died and rose to give us forgiveness for sin and everlasting life.

One of the primary principles for faithfully interpreting passages of the Bible is the axiom, “Let Scripture interpret Scripture.” We aren’t to read our own cultural or personal biases into the Bible. Instead, we look to what other passages of Scripture have to say on the subject at hand. Doing so allows us to see the patterns and themes of the Bible’s teachings throughout all 66 books of both its Old and New Testaments.

The Bible certainly arose in a patriarchal, male-dominated society. But repeatedly, the God of the Bible calls His followers away from sexism.

For example, Jesus violated the sexual taboos of His time. Men and women of first-century Judea where He lived weren’t supposed to speak together in public. But repeatedly, Jesus initiated conversations with women.

Women were prominent among His followers, something no self-respecting rabbi of His time would have allowed.

The first people to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection, chosen by Jesus for that task, were women, not men.

Women had prominent leadership positions in the early Church.

And Paul himself, supposedly a proponent of male domination, is the one who wrote that in the new kingdom Jesus gives to all who follow Him, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus...If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28-29) In God’s eyes, men and women are equal. Period.

It heartened me to see the West Wing’s liberal Democratic president and his wife portrayed discussing the Bible together. In doing so, they fulfilled a Biblical mandate. God told the ancient Israelites to keep His words and to recite them to their children and to discuss them while at home or away, all the time. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

Seeing a network TV show take God’s Word seriously was heartening enough. But it was even more encouraging to hear the fictional President Bartlett get the Bible so right and to show Christian faith in such a positive light.

Fame and the Man on the Moon

After a recent conference in Minnesota, I settled into my seat on a commuter jet flying from Chicago back home to Cincinnati. As I did, I looked up to see Neil Armstrong.

Our eyes briefly locked. He perceived that I recognized him. I sensed him bracing himself to be fawned over for perhaps the three-billionth time since he became the first human being to walk on the Moon. But, much as I would love to talk with Armstrong, I let him pass. Even after the flight, by the baggage carousel, when it would have been easier, I didn’t approach him. I never even considered doing so. I respect him too much for that.

Neil Armstrong always wanted to be successful. But I don’t think he ever wanted to be famous. Unfortunately for him, fame came with success.

But after he’d taken one giant leap into history, Armstrong wanted to live a normal life. He didn’t become a recluse, although some accused him of that. He simply took a job teaching engineering at the University of Cincinnati and knuckled down to perform well.

Fame is a weird thing, though. People assume that the famous owe us boundless access. If they deny us that access or seem to slight us by their diffidence, we can be disappointed or hostile.

Fifteen years ago, I was part of a two-person conflict mediation team brokering peace at a congregation in Moulton, Ohio, near Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta. One evening, we made our final recommendations to the congregation and later, there was a fellowship time over coffee, punch, and cookies.

One woman had a burr in her saddle and it had nothing to do with the congregation’s woes. She was angry at Neil Armstrong. I guess she felt the need to discuss it with a pastor. Being the only one present, I became her ad hoc counselor.

The previous night, she’d attended a funeral visitation for one of Armstrong’s relatives in Wapakoneta. Armstrong had been there and when she approached him, he hadn’t recognized or remembered her.

Offended, she asked me, “What do you suppose happens to a person when they get famous that they don’t even remember their friends?”

“Um,” I began uncertainly, “when was the last time you talked with Neil Armstrong?”

“I guess it’s been about thirty years,” she said.

“Well,” I offered, “don’t you imagine that he’s done a lot and met quite a few people over the past thirty years?”

“I suppose,” she said. But I could tell that she was still convinced that of all the people he’d known in his life, Neil Armstrong certainly should have remembered her.

I’ve argued in this column before that celebrities are people too. We who are so anxious to have our names put on lists to keep from being bothered by telemarketers and who get perturbed by pop-up ads on our computers can certainly understand why the famous may not be anxious to treat every person they pass in a restaurant like their bosom buddy.

It seems to me that when we have chance encounters with celebrities---especially those who have never courted fame, like Neil Armstrong---that the least we can do is remember Jesus’ Golden Rule to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

So, after I saw Neil Armstrong on that flight home, I sat back, savoring the notion that, though I would never meet him, I was flying with the man on the Moon!

[Mark Daniels is pastor of Friendship Church. You can find his columns, sermons, and other writings at markdaniels.blogspot.com on the web.]

Can Democracy Take Root in the Muslim Middle East?

On a day dominated by fear of an al Qaeda attack on American financial institutions and reaction to actual attacks on Christian churches in Iraq, it was interesting for me to finish reading a set of articles assessing the prospects for Middle East democracy in the Spring, 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. Five articles---from Martin Walker, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Daniel Brumberg, and Haleh Esfandiari---tackle the subject from diverse vantage points.

What emerges, especially from Ibrahim's article, the one I most enjoyed, is a feeling that prospects are surprisingly upbeat for democracies that have respect for human rights to emerge in the Middle East.

One reason for such an assessment, as Ibrahim points out, is that the region has experienced flourishing democracies before. But the failure of those democracies to extend economic opportunities, along with military defeats incurred by moderate and democratic governments---most notably in 1948 and 1967---have hurt the development of democracy in the region. People have instead craved the security---financial, military, psychological---that they've felt democracies in the past have been unable to provide.

It appears to me that this multifaceted insecurity, along with the revulsion at western-supported royalist regimes like that in Saudi Arabia, have played a key role in fueling al Qaeda-style hostility to the United States.

But, according to Ibrahim, there is great desire for democracy in the Middle East today. He claims that the repressiveness of post-Shah Iran has turned many Muslims off to a radical Islamist approach to government. He writes:

What made the Islamic alternative especially credible was the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. The event gave a great moral boost to advocates of the Islamic vision in several Arab countries, who then posed a serious challenge to the entrenched populist regimes of Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, and Sudan. Only in Sudan did they manage to seize power, through a military coup in 1989. But the blood shed during the Islamists' challenge to regimes in Algeria and Egypt, and the harsh and backward implementation of sharia by the Islamic Salvation Front in Sudan and the Taliban in Afghanistan, in the 1990s, disillusioned many who had been hopeful. Even the revolution in Iran quickly ran out of steam, its version of the Islamic vision discredited by a reign of terror at home and adventurism abroad.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Ibrahaim says, Americans may have been inclined to envision a Muslim world virtually united in its hostility to democracy and to America. But he points out events that Muslim nations were as revolted by the attacks as Americans and that in three countries---Turkey, Morocco, and Bahrain---moderate Islamic parties committed to democracy, pluralism, and tolerance won election in late 2002.

He also mentions a World Values Survey showing widespread acceptance of democratic ideals among Jordanians. More than 70%, for example, believe that Islamic leaders should not influence political decisions.

It appears to me that one reason the terrorists working under the banner of Islam would attack churches is to promote this notion of a holy war between Islam and Christianity. And, as Ibrahim and others point out, the radical Islamists legitimize repression, violence, and an anti-democratic ideology by an appeal to Muslim notion of shariya. Shariya demands that governments and every citizen of the nation be forced to abide by strict observance of Islamic law. It simply forbids any other religion. Because of this idea, Osama bin Laden and other radical Islamists have expressed horror at the Western notion of "separation of Church and state," regarding it as a tenet of atheism.

For most Christians, the idea of the separation of Church and state is not a daunting thing. There are several reasons for this.

One is that Christians believe that faith is a voluntary proposition. Each person must for themselves decide whether they will acquiesce to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It's contrary to the teachings of Jesus and of the Bible for anyone to be coerced, whether by law or violence or other means, into a faith commitment to Christ. (Of course, that doesn't mean that some misguided pseudo-Christians haven't or don't try such tactics.) The New Testament insists that it is the kindness of God that brings people to repentance, not coercion.

Another is that embedded deep within Judeo-Christian history is the experience of being a marginalized people living under the dominion of governments whose religions, social systems, and basic assumptions about life were different from that of Jews and Christians. Ancient Israel was overrun and overtaken by foreign rulers. Judea in Jesus' time was under Roman rule. The early Church was often persecuted by that empire. Yet, for all the differences with ruling authorities, believers in the God of the Bible were encouraged to obey their rulers, so long as those rulers didn't ask them to violate God's holiness. (To see how these two elements are held in tension, you might want to read Romans 12 and 13 in the New Testament.) So, long ago, most Christians embraced the notion that while people of faith can live and function faithfully within a society with whose values they don't entirely agree, certainly an attitude necessary for the proper functioning of democracy.

According to Ibrahim's historical survey anyway, Islamic nations have in the past shown the flexibility necessary to make democracy work and done so in a way consistent with their heritage. He feels they can do so again and really want to do so. From what little I know, I'm inclined to agree with him.

Whether the American war in Iraq, arousing and feeding the anger of the region's most well-organized political and terror organizations, the radical Islamists, is going to prove a speed bump or facilitator to the development of democracy in the Middle East remains to be seen. I recommend getting this issue of The Wilson Quarterly. Then, write your comments here and tell me what you think.

Farewell to a Faithful Fridge

[Today, a new refrigerator came to our house. That's not so momentous, to be sure. But with this new appliance, the one that's been in our kitchen since our place was constructed sixteen years ago, is being relegated to back-up status in the garage. There was however, another refrigerator of which we disposed today, an old Frigidaire, which until it completely died about a year ago, had been a member of my extended family for fifty-four years. Below is a September 17, 1997 column I wrote about that fridge. May it rust in peace.]

It's the Fridge That Keeps Going
Objects hold little sentimental value for me. But there is one inanimate gem I pass by every single day that arouses feelings of appreciation and something like wistfulness in me.

It's a refrigerator---a white Frigidaire that stands less than five feet tall and wobbles every time you open and close the door.

It can't make ice. It couldn't distribute cold water if it wanted to. The freezer is a tiny compartment just big enough to accommodate a half-gallon of ice cream and two ice cube trays. In fact, its overall capacity for holding goodies is, from the standpoint of a family living in the '90s, severely limited.

But, man, can that refrigerator keep things cold! And it's been doing so since 1950. That was the year my grandparents graduated from the Ralph Kramden-style ice box they'd used in their old house and bought the Frigidaire, placing it in the kitchen of their newly constructed home.

It gave many years of faithful service before they bought a bigger refrigerator. The Frigidaire thus inaugurated a new phase of its life when it was relocated to my grandparents' basement. Later, when they bought a bigger refrigerative behemoth, it became a third-string bench warmer. It sat, collecting dust, mostly unplugged and unused, in their garage.

Then in 1978, my wife and I moved out of the apartment we'd rented for nearly four years and into a house. My grandmother gave the Frigidaire to us. Suddenly, it was a first-stringer again.

In Fall, 1982, we moved so that I could do my year-long seminary internship in Michigan. That was followed by one more year of classes back at the seminary in Columbus. Everywhere we lived for those two years---we moved four times in that period---provided us with refrigerators. So, the Frigidaire was in storage until October, 1984.

That was when we went to the first church I served as pastor, a congregation in rural northwestern Ohio. We recruited a crack crew of movers who, unlike the drivers of those sleek orange moving vans you see on the interstates, drove a truck that reminded us of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. When the truck drove off for our new home, full of nearly all our earthly goods, I was sure it had no shock absorbers and I wondered if we would ever see our possessions again. Amazingly, our goods sustained few casualties from the trek.

But within hours of our arrival, it became clear that the Frigidaire was among the injured.

"It's 34 years old," I told my wife and a member of our church. "Maybe we ought to scrap it and buy a new one." My wife winced at the expense and the member intervened. "I've got a nephew who's a whiz-bang on Frigidaires," she told us. "Why don't I give him a call?"

It took three visits from the nephew to bring the refrigerator back to life.

When we moved to Clermont County (in a real-life moving van) back in 1990, the Frigidaire became a second-stringer again. The house we live in, built two years before our arrival, came with its own fridge.

But the ancient refrigerator is perhaps rendering its most noble service of all now. Every Saturday morning, members of Friendship Church and I share simple acts of kindness in the Name of Jesus Christ with our neighbors. For most of the past eight weeks that's meant giving away cold cans of Coca Cola. And guess where I'm cooling 144 of those soda pops every Friday night?

I don't know how old the Frigidaire is in "refrigerator years." Given the reality of "planned obsolescence," pretty ancient, I'll wager. But that ancient object from time to time incites me to mutter a little prayer, "Whether I'm young or old, God, help me to be such a reliable servant of You and others." And then, when nobody's looking, I pat it affectionately.

The Happiness Project: Happy When the World Turns Away

Matthew 5:1-2, 10-12
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, August 1, 2004)

I grew up the oldest of five kids. All through my school years, I struggled with Math, barely getting through each class. The two siblings closest to me in age, Betsy and Kathy, were three and six years behind me in school. Sometimes, after I’d moved up a few grades, I’d see that they had Math homework in the very text books that had so troubled me when I was younger. I’d pick up the books and look at the problems and be amazed: the Math I had found impossible three and six years before was easy; I wished that I could go back in time and ace the old classes.

That’s sort of how I've felt as we've progressed through that section of the New Testament book of Matthew called the Beatitudes. Here, at the very beginning of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, He presents a series of portraits of blessedness or true happiness. Jesus’ pictures haven’t exactly conformed to our usual understanding of what happiness looks like. As I’ve prepared these messages, I’ve felt like I did tackling a new Math class as a kid. Each of Jesus' beatitudes has been a tough assignment!

But as difficult as each of the first seven beatitudes were to deal with, the message from Jesus for today makes the first seven seem like child’s play. This is the hardest one. Jesus says:

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and speak evil of you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Reading Jesus' words about the happiness of persecuted people, I'm reminded of the man Abraham Lincoln once told about. It seems that a whole town had turned hostile and tarred and feathered the guy. Asked later what the experience had been like, he said that he would gladly have passed on the whole experience "if it weren't for the honor of the thing."

In a nutshell, Jesus is saying that among the happiest people on the planet are those have been honored for their faith in Him by encountering hostility and persecution in the world. And if the world is against you because you seek to follow Him, Jesus says, that’s a badge of honor, putting us in the select company of Old Testament prophets who engendered similar reactions!

That's a little daunting, to say the least. But before we just turn our noses up at what Jesus tells us today, let's---as one of my seminary professors used to say---"unpack" His words. Let's try to understand what Jesus wants to tell us about the happiness that comes to those who follow Him even when the world turns away.

I think that there are two major ways that followers of Jesus can experience hostility or rejection or persecution as they strive to follow Him.

One comes from inside ourselves.

The other comes from outside of us. The two sources of this outside persecution are the world and the devil.

From inside ourselves, we can be persecuted by our own evil thoughts. As you know, one of my favorite preachers is Gerald Mann. In one of his sermons, he tells the story of what happened when, back in the 1970s, his church unable to pay him much salary, he moonlighted by getting involved in buying and selling real estate. Mann did one deal that allowed him to turn a quick $50,000.00 profit. At the closing, the guy to whom he was making this sale asked if he could pay in cash, with $35,000.00 of it in one dollar bills. Mann said that would be all right. There would be no checks, no paper records.

A few months later, Mann went to his accountant’s office to have his taxes done. They went through all the paper records and then the accountant asked, “Any other income?” Mann hesitated a second and said, “No” and left. Five minutes later, he was driving down the road and decided to make a U-turn. There was no way he could lie about that income! He told the accountant that he’d forgotten about the additional $50,000.00.

Half of that went to taxes and for months afterward, the sinister, earthly part of Gerald Mann’s nature persecuted him. “Why,” it demanded, “would you have been so stupid as to have done the right thing like that, especially when you know how the government wastes money?” He felt internally persecuted for having done the right thing.

Let me tell you something, folks, the follower of Jesus eventually does feel happy and blessed when we do the right thing. But before we feel good about it, we're first we’re likely to feel miserable. For our long-term happiness and for our eternal happiness, I personally have learned that the best thing we can do is resist doing evil and do what God wants us to do.

From outside ourselves, we can also be persecuted. This can happen in simple acts of shunning or in putdowns by others who view our commitment to the God we know through Jesus Christ as being quaint, stupid, naive, or unnecessary. I've experienced that. I'll bet you have too.

This past week, we watched the second episode of the TV show, Joan of Arcadia. CBS is rerunning this series on Friday nights and I’m really enjoying it. If you’ve never seen the show, it tells the story of a seemingly typical teen named Joan who keeps being contacted by God. In the most recent episode, God tells her to get together with the "geeks" of the Chess Club. Her friends are horrified. But Joan learns that when we dare to respect and reach out in a loving, accepting way to others, God will bless us even when the world turns the other way. In spite of the world turning the other way---persecuting her, Joan is blessed.

The book, Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus recounts true incidents of people from throughout the world for whom following Christ engendered a more serious form of persecution. They are the martyrs for Christ. That word, martyr, comes from the New Testament Greek word, martureo. It literally means I witness. A martyr is one who believes, or entrusts their whole lives into the hands of Jesus and by their lives and words, gives witness to His love, power, grace, and goodness. A martyr is one has turned from sin and death and turned to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and life. Over time, that term has also come to mean someone who has suffered or died precisely because they do trust Jesus Christ completely.

One of the martyrs in Jesus Freaks is Mary Khoury, a Christian teenager who lived through Lebanon’s civil war, a conflict that went on from 1975 to 1992. Fanatical Muslims forced their way into Mary’s home one day, waving pistols at the entire family and threatening, “If you do not become a Muslim, you will be shot.” Mary knew that Jesus had once been given a similar choice. Jesus had been told to renounce His claim to be Savior of the world so that He could avoid the cross. But Jesus knew that without His death and resurrection, no human being could never have eternal life with God. So, Jesus went to the cross. Mary decided that she would not renounce Jesus. Mary told the men, “I was baptized as a Christian, and [God’s] word came to me: ‘Don’t deny your faith.’ I will obey [God]. Go ahead and shoot.” With that, Mary heard a gun go off behind her and she fell limply to the ground.

Sometime later, the Red Cross found the bodies of Mary’s family members. Miraculously, Mary, on the floor next to them, had survived. But a bullet had severed her spinal cord. Both her arms were paralyzed, stretched out beside her, bent like Jesus’ arms had been when He was on the cross.

You might expect Mary to have become bitter. But she had the happiness and the blessing of one who has done the right God calls us to do. She knew that God had a plan for her life. “Everyone has a vocation,” she said, “...I will offer my life for Muslims, like the one who cut my father’s throat, cursed my mother and stabbed her, and then tried to kill me. My life will be a prayer for them.”

Whether we’re persecuted by our own evil thoughts or by others, we can take comfort.

We take comfort first from knowing that we’re not alone. God is with us always. A God Who suffered and died on the cross will not abandon us when we suffer for our faith.

We can also draw comfort from knowing that the closer you and I are to God, the harder life sometimes gets. The fact that we encounter opposition and difficulty can be a sign that we have grown close to God. There are reasons for that. One is that following Jesus is a little like walking up to a lighted mirror after a new zit has appeared on your face. When you and I get closer to the light of Jesus, we see our faults and sins and it bothers us more than it did when we ignored Christ or His will for our lives.

We also see that we're growing closer to God in the ways others may try to trip us up in following Him. Most people want Jesus' blessings without having to bow to Jesus' authority over their lives. When others see followers of Jesus earnestly trying, with God's power, to follow Christ, they resent the audacity of it. They're bound to hurl insults and monkey wrenches our way!

The everlasting life and hope that we have as Jesus-followers is a free gift. But the more we live in Jesus’ orbit, the more opposition we will run into, whether it’s the evil from within or the evil from without. And that opposition or persecution in fact, is often a sign of our growing closer to God.

But the happy people--the blessed people--are those who know that God is bigger than our enemies, that God’s blessings are better than the world’s curses, and that the God we know through the resurrected Jesus will still be standing when all the things that scare us in this life have passed away. Jesus followers know that God can bless them now and forever.

They also know that God can use their lives--and sometimes their deaths--to help the rest of the world experience the same happiness they have from following Christ. The happiest people are those who cling to Jesus Christ no matter what. They’re the people who know that they are part of Christ’s kingdom forever. They’re the people who know that just like God’s Old Testament prophets who were often rejected by the people of their time, they can be used to draw others into a relationship with the God we know through Jesus.

A Christian woman held in a Soviet prison camp back in the 1960s for the crime of following Christ, wrote a stirring prayer. It says, in part:

“God, accept all my sufferings, my tiredness, my humiliations, my tears, my nostalgia, my being hungry, my suffering of cold, all the bitterness accumulated in my soul...Dear Lord, have pity on those who persecute and torture us day and night. Grant them, too, the divine grace of knowing the sweetness and happiness of Your love.”

I ask God to help me pray that prayer. More than that, I ask Him to help me to mean it.

[NOTE: By the way, I hasten to add that there are such people as fanatical Christians. These are people who have so departed from the love of Christ that they try to force people into following Him, whether through social pressures, legal measures, or violent intimidation. It is utterly wrong and utterly contrary to the will of the God we know in Jesus Christ!

[The prayer at the end of the message also comes from the book, Jesus Freaks.]

Just Getting Into Joan

Last week, my wife suggested that we watch as CBS re-ran the pilot of its series, Joan of Arcadia. We'd both heard good things about this series that recounts the experiences of a seemingly typical teenage girl when God (taking carnation in various human physical guises) shows up in her life and asks her to accept by faith the instructions given.

The reactions of young Joan are as confused and as conflicted as one would expect, not unlike people like Moses and Abraham when God appeared in their lives and gave them instructions. But like Moses and Abraham, Joan ultimately takes the faith plunge and does what God tells her to do. At the end of the two episodes we've seen (we watched Episode 2 with friends tonight), God has accomplished the unexpected and, since this is God we're talking about, retained an aura of divine, yet accessible, mystery.

I'm intrigued by this show and hope it continues to be so interesting and positive.

Great Expectations

One of my favorite web logs is that by a woman named Rachel from New Zealand. It's called Cre8d Journal. In her most recent post, she references a television series in that country and asks an interesting question:

Expectations

Last night on "The Insider's Guide to Happiness" the narrator says that it's better to go through life with no expectations. That way, you won't be disappointed.

According to the dictionary, expecation means: "eager anticipation, to look forward to, to consider likely or certain, the idea of looking ahead to something in the future, to anticipate."

Agree or disagree? Are expectations a bad thing? Is disappointment such a bad thing that we must avoid it at all costs?

I couldn't help responding ( I added a few things here)...

Whether to have expectations or not depends on what (or on Whom) one places one's expectations, I think.

Some people expect to win the lottery, but never buy a ticket. They're risk averse.

Some people expect perfection according to their standards. But, as Sting wrote years ago, "to look here for heaven is to live here in hell."

I think that Christ does invite us to have expectations and hopes, but in Him and His will. He calls us to take the risk of faith in Him.

I like the line in the Psalms that says to "Delight in the Lord" (which reads like a precondition to me) "and He will give you the desires of your heart." I don't always delight in the Lord, I must confess. Most of the time I "delight" more in me and my agenda. But I imagine that if I delighted in the Lord, I would always want what God wills.

One of the reasons people counsel against having expectations, I think, is that all of us have been hurt by life. It's easier to give up than to believe in a better day. (Or, as a character in one of Steve Taylor's old songs says, "Life unwinds like a cheap sweater, but since I gave up hope I feel a lot better.") But that doesn't seem like much of a way to live to me. Every day I ask God to help me put my hope in Christ. I'm in the process of learning how.

What do you think?

Friday Items for Prayer and Thought

Last night, I had a great time “working” at the Clermont County Fair. What I did wasn’t really work though. It was fun! For four hours, I took sandwich and beverage orders at the Clermont County Ohio State Alumni Association stand.

An Alumni Association veteran, Jim, did the hard work, grilling the great cuts of meat that have people routinely gathering round the stand, sometimes in droves. An OSU engineering graduate, Jim has been working this concession during every county fair for twelve years!

It’s a labor of love for the Clermont group of Ohio State alums. Proceeds from the sales help support an annual scholarship for Clermont County young people who are going to OSU.

This and that from last evening and recent days...

• It was Demolition Derby night at the fair last evening and it’s obviously a crowd-pleaser. It took me about an hour to make the trip from my house to the fairgrounds, a trip that would ordinarily take about ten minutes. Roads leading to the fair were crawling parking lots. I was told that grandstand seating was already full hours before the derby began, in part because many folks attended both a patriotic tribute to the troops and the car-crashing.
• Some folks, I’m told, were aware that Cincinnati TV stations were going to attend the patriotic program and had dressed “accordingly” for their fifteen seconds of fame. Some dressed to the nines. One woman did a Morgana impression, dressing as scantily as is legal and chasing the TV cameras. To their credit, I was told, the camera people ran faster than she could.
  
• At the stand, a man from Miami Township stared at me for a few seconds and asked, “Do you write for the newspaper?” I said that I do. He said, “I’ve always wondered about you.” That’s always a scary thing to hear. It turns out that he grew up in Mulberry and there was a guy in his youth group then who was named Mark Daniels. The picture that appears with my column apparently makes me look enough like that “other Mark Daniels” that he had wondered if we were one and the same. He also told me that he couldn’t remember what I’d written about in my columns. I assured him that sometimes I don’t either.
• Another woman, accompanied by what appeared to be her daughter and granddaughter, ordered some sandwiches. We talked while their food was being grilled to order. The woman asked me, “So, what are you taking up at Ohio State?” I was taken aback and just said, “I’m sorry?” “What are you studying at Ohio State?” she asked. When I explained that I was fifty, she was incredulous, certain that I was “pulling her leg.” I told my wife later that either the light was horrible by the concession stand or I may have fallen in love all over again.
• I love visiting with people under such informal circumstances and it can be an opportunity for real ministry. I learned this from two mentors: Pastor Jim Petteys and Pastor Ron Claussen. Jim was the supervising pastor for my seminary internship experience. Ron was a colleague and later, a member of the first congregation I served as pastor in northwestern Ohio. Both understood the “theology of interruptions,” the need to be open and available to people no matter what our agendas may be for the day. It’s in people’s times of need that we have the best opportunities to share the love God gives us through Christ. A lot of the time that special ministry expresses itself best not in what we say, but simply in our being there and listening. (Of course, I pray the whole time I listen and talk. One of my most frequently-offered prayers as I visit with people is, “Lord, give me the right words and the right silences.”)
• When I got back from the fairgrounds last night, I watched some of MSNBC’s postmortem of the evening’s Democratic National Convention session. I thought that it was interesting that John Kerry saluted and reported for duty. Back after the death of John Heinz, the Pennsylvania senator, Mrs. Heinz-Kerry’s first husband, a special election to fill his term was held. It was won by a Democrat who, on the night of his victory, stood at attention, saluted, and said that he was reporting for duty.
• Finally, I’ve received this email request for prayers from my German colleague, Pastor Jochen Mueller-Busse: (1) That God will decrease the power of money and of imagery rather than real ideas in the political campaigns of our democracies; (2) That God will protect Islamic holy places from attack, because such attacks only increase tension in the world. Good prayers!

Because we are all neighbors whom Jesus has called us to love, more and more I like the advice of theologian Leonard Sweet, “Get glocal!” In other words, let’s try to live the godly love of neighbor, whether that neighbor is local or across the globe.

Back to preparing my sermon for Sunday...

Fred Flintstone in a George Jetson World

That's how I felt when my wife and I went to Best Buy tonight. Our mission was simple: to buy a new wall-mounted telephone containing digital answering capabilities.

But apparently because so many people are now contracting with local phone providers for multiple mailboxes, only a handful of the models on hand actually had answering capabilities built-in. Here I'd thought we were cutting edge. But the tide of technology had obviously passed us by!

My wife then suggested that we take a walk through the appliance department. Since our microwave oven dates back to the Reagan Administration and our refrigerator came with the house in which we live, built sixteen years ago, I agreed. There, among the stoves and washing machines, I realized what a cave man I truly am!

We came upon a range, the oven of which doubles as a refrigerator. That way, busy commuters can keep cold items refrigerated until a timer kicks the oven on. That seemed practical to me, even though a little extravagant. (Especially extravagant for me since I "commute" down two flights of stairs to my basement office each day.)

But what really blew me away was the tall stainless steel refrigerator/freezer with the television set in the door! The little descriptive blurb attached to the unit touted its supposed practicality, saying that it allows people to save counter space. (Sheesh! I don't even have a TV set on my counter, leaving me several permutations behind the advance of suburban America!) The blurb also explained that you can hook your refrigerator to cable or to a DVD player in another part of the house.

Just imagine, with that little beauty, while you get popcorn or drinks from the kitchen, you won't have to miss an action-packed minute of the latest Jackie Chan thriller, otherwise playing in the main theater: your family room. Or, after a hard day at work, you can simply yank a gallon of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Mocha out of the freezer and barely moving a muscle, plop down on your kitchen floor to watch exercise videos.

As we drove home, I fantasized about some future archeologists on a dig in suburban North America, coming to a find more impressive than Pompeii: The ruins of a massive housing development filled with overweight people, gazing at their refrigerators.

Conveniences are wonderful. But is there a point when we say, "Too much is too much"? I think that the TV in the refrigerator may be that point for me.

Late Lunch This and That

Wolfing down a late lunch, I thought that I'd post a few things I've been thinking about...

First: The column on discerning the will of God turned into a monster. No matter how many runs and re-writes I took to the topic, nothing worked. So, as they say, it's back to the drawing board...unless it's not God's will right now.

Second: I'm a political junkie and I admit it. But my wife is an enabler. I had successfully avoided watching any of the Democratic National Convention coverage last night until she came home late in the evening. So, when she turned on the television, I simply had to keep her company. It was my spousal duty.

I loved the panel MSNBC assembled for the evening: Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Andrea Mitchell, Willie Brown, and Joe Scarborough.

Scarborough, whose over-the-top partisanship on his own show rubs me the wrong way, is at his best when, as part of a panel, he analyzes things political. His comments last night that John Kerry's heroic military career would allow him to sleep well at night if Kerry were president (even though he disagrees with Kerry on nine out of ten issues) was a particularly gracious thing to say.

Matthews and Fineman are, of course, absolute pros. Both are so insightful and as always, I appreciate Matthews' evenhandedness and obvious love for both America and its politics. It's always a joy listening to and watching him!

Something that struck me as I watched last evening's festivities is that while Jimmy Carter has become the elder statesman of the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton is its elvis statesman. Like him or not, "the man from Hope" has undeniable star power. Part of that must come from his obvious love for people, an attribute about which both Mitchell and Brown commented last evening. In his ability to convey empathy and communicate accessibly and compellingly, Clinton is the Democratic Reagan. Like Reagan, Clinton communicates optimism. That's an indispensable asset to the leader. Optimism, to paraphrase the Bible's words about love, covers a multitude of sins.

There's another thing Clinton has in common with Reagan, I think. Those who knew Reagan in his younger days in Hollywood say that he was a motormouth, unable to stop talking about the minutiae of public policy issues. Clinton is the same way. That makes Clinton's tight and disciplined delivery last evening all the more remarkable.

Third: There's a really good article about Marshall McLuhan in the Spring, 2004 issue of the Wilson Quarterly. It was written by Tom Wolfe, today's would-be Mark Twain. It paints the guru of "understanding media" as something of a lovable carnival barker. Although McLuhan was a man of undeniable brilliance, he also was a self-promoter who liked to speak in the language of deliberately obscure paradox. (At least according to Wolfe.) Another insight that Wolfe offers is his belief that McLuhan was deeply dependent on the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin. Wolfe is such a good writer and he obviously has a warm affection for McLuhan.

Fourth: A book I've been reading lately is Brother Lawrence's Practicing the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence believed that we could be in constant conversation with God, something he tried to enact in his mundane activities in the monastery kitchen.

I love this notion, one that resonates with me as a Lutheran. In my tradition, we emphasize things like the priesthood of all believers (First Peter 2:9-10) and a theology of the cross, theology done "from below," rooted in the God Who took on flesh, dwelt among us, lived as a servant, and died for us (John 1:1-18; Philippians 2:4-11).

I also love it because when I am at my best in life, it's when I live with the consciousness of God's presence and the desire to glorify Him in all that I do.

Conversely, my life is always at its worst when I "go it alone," leading me to act in ways that were I to catalog them here, would cause people to have a rather low opinion of me, I think.

But here too, Brother Lawrence is helpful. Part of living in a constant consciousness of God's presence is remembering that He is a God of grace, "slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." Lawrence repeatedly underscorse the fact that once God has called attention to our sins, we should confess them and then, "without anxiety," keep on living in the cheerful certainty of God's love and His willingness to help us avoid such sins in the future. It reminds me of the wonderful words that appear in First John:

...if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous...

Fifth: The latest issue of The Lutheran magazine reports on a study comparing female and male preaching styles at Lutheran congregations. The study was done as part of her graduate thesis at Ball State University by Tracy Paschke-Johannes. In it, Paschke-Johannes is quoted in the article as saying, that she "looked for themes and common usage of persuasion...any phrase or words used to change a person's thoughts or actions."

Among Paschke-Johannes' findings:

• Women who employed "repetition" did so with greater frequency than did men.
• Men "explained" God's relevance to everyday situations more than women.
• Women were more likely to "tell stories on themselves," revealing their faith struggles or making themselves the butt of their humor.
• Women were more likely to joke or make "sarcastic comments" about their children.
• Few prayed either before or after their sermons.
• Men were more likely to explain the Greek background of Biblical words.

A few reactions:

1. While it's difficult for me to tell from this article, it appears that the study is based on a very small sample of sermons. (Which may be understandable; not even a preacher like me would want to sample too many sermons). According to The Lutheran, Paschke-Johannes looked at fifteen sermons by women and fifteen by men.

2. All of the sermons used in the study were posted on the web. That makes it difficult to know whether Paschke-Johannes's conclusion that only three women and two men prayed either at the beginning or the end of their sermons is accurate. I post my sermons (messages) on this web site; while I always pray before I preach, I never write my prayers out, or post them on the site. One suspects that I'm not alone in that practice.

3. It's possible that some of the differences in preaching style, whether as it relates to revealing personal faith struggles, comments about one's family, or relating the Scriptures to real-life situations, might have less to do with gender than it does with generational differences or differences in personal piety.

It may in fact be worthwhile to know about the differences between male and female preaching styles. It could be particularly helpful in understanding the effects of various preaching styles on congregations. But it's difficult for me to draw any conclusions from at least the summary of Paschke-Johannes' study.

That's more than enough for now.

The Happiness Project: The People Who Make Peace

Matthew 5:9
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, July 25, 2004)

Back in the 1960s, a young Christian, a white Quaker from the North named David made a courageous decision. Aware that African-Americans in the South were daily subjected to the physical, social, emotional violence of legalized discrimination, he would go south and befriend African-Americans and whites. He would be a peacemaker.

One day, David and one of his African-American friends walked into a drug store and ordered two Cokes. In a moment, David felt something sharp and hard being pushed into his back. He turned to see the most hate-filled face he’d ever seen. It belonged to a man who was holding what David now saw was a knife. It was aimed at his heart. David looked into eyes full of contempt and said, “Friend, whether you push that knife into my heart or not is obviously up to you. I want you to know that in either event, I love you.”

How did the knife-wielding man react? His hand trembled a bit, he dropped his weapon, and he ran from the store. That man had come face-to-face with a response to violence he may have never seen before. Usually, we react to violence in one of four ways. We either fight, run, refuse to get involved, or we give in. But David evidenced a fifth response to violence. I call it the Jesus way. He stood his ground and refused to meet violence with violence. He had the courage to say in effect, “I’m not going to be a monster. I’m going to be a human being.” David truly was what Jesus calls a “peacemaker.”

Now, when Jesus and the New Testament writers talk about peace, they can mean three different things, often all at the same time.

First: They can be referring to the end of hostility between people, whether between nations or individuals.

Second: They can mean the peace between God and us that comes to those who entrust their lives to Jesus, Who died on a cross to bring that relationship of peace.

Third: They can also mean the peace of mind that comes to our lives when we know that through Christ, we belong to God forever.

The New Testament also makes it clear that all three of these forms of peace are gifts that come to our lives through Jesus Christ. That’s why the Bible says that Jesus “is our peace” and calls Him the “Prince of peace.”

But the peace of Christ is not some abstract concept achieved through advanced study or contemplation.

The peace of Christ is more like a disease---a good disease---that gets transmitted from one organism to another. And what are the cells that Jesus uses to transmit this good disease? You and I are. The followers of Jesus are the conduits by which peace comes to people.

And that, to tell you the truth, is precisely where I have always struggled with Jesus’ words in today’s Bible lesson.

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” I sure want to be called a child of God. Maybe you do too. I want everybody to live in peace. Theoretically, anyway. But, as David’s experience in that drug store demonstrates, being a peacemaker can be dangerous.

One thing that makes peacemaking dangerous is that we live in a violent world. Not only can we, in extreme circumstances, be threatened with physical violence, we can also be subjected to other kinds of violence. We can be rejected and snubbed. We can be ignored or treated as though we don’t even exist. There may be people here this morning who have been at the receiving end of that sort of violence. Frankly, I don’t know if I have the courage to be a peacemaker in such a world. And yet, this is precisely the kind of world that needs courageous peacemakers.

A Christian who was involved in the struggle for all people to be treated fairly back in the 1970s was once telling a group of people how important it was for Christians to make peace by being peaceful themselves, even risking responses like the one David evoked. Someone objected, asking, “Don’t you realize where advice like that might lead some of us?” “Yes,” said the Christian leader, “I know where it leads. Before you start down this path [of being a peacemaker] you better make sure you look good on wood.”

I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when He told us that anybody who follows Him needs to take up a cross first? If so, it scares me.

But peacemakers risk more than their lives. To this point, I haven’t mentioned something important in this series of messages on happiness that I’ve been doing on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5, verses 1 through 12. It’s this: In the balance of chapter 5, as well in chapters 6 and 7, Jesus expands on the portraits of blessedness or happiness He gives. And so, at one point, later in chapter 5 of Matthew's book, Jesus explains what it means to be a peacemaker by saying:

“You have heard that it was said. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”

These words frighten me too, because here Jesus is saying that once we throw in with Him, entrusting our lives and our futures to His hands, we need to be so secure and so certain of our destinies with Him that we willingly give everything that we have and everything we are to live with love for God and love for neighbor.

I find that difficult, to say the least. This past Tuesday afternoon, our son and I went to see the Reds play the Brewers. We had a great time. We ate lunch at the Machine Grill. We bought seats up near the top on the first base side so that we not only enjoyed the game, but also sat in the shade, soaking up gentle breezes and occasionally, looking out over the Ohio River, watching the barges and the speedboats pass by. It’s sort of what I imagine heaven will be like, folks.

But as we walked back to our car, a clean, respectably dressed man approached me. “Sir,” he said, “may I speak with you for just a moment?” He said that he’d recently lost his job and while he had put in three applications just that day, he didn’t know if any of those would pan out yet. “I just need a few dollars.” I cut him off and walked away.

Was the guy scamming me? Probably. But as the day wore on, I remembered the words of a woman, formerly a member of this congregation, who said that whenever she was confronted with beggars as she walked around downtown, she always gave them money. “If they’re lying,” she told me, “the onus is on them. But my conscience is clear. I do what I can for them.”

And Jesus’ words---”Give to everyone who begs”---couldn’t be clearer. It would have been easy for me to have pulled out a couple of bucks and handed them to the man who talked to me outside of Great American Ballpark. Instead, for the rest of the night, I wrestled with my conscience and offered a prayer of grief and repentance to God. I vowed to God that, with His help, I would live differently. I would be a peacemaker who gives love in all its forms to my neighbors in need.

And then yesterday, after the wedding, I was greeting people when an interruption came. Somebody told me, “There’s a young woman wanting to speak with the pastor.” I was introduced to a slight young woman. “I was just wondering,” she said, “if maybe my family could get some help. My father has MS and is unable to work any longer. Could you donate a few dollars to help us?” My heart started erecting new walls even as the young woman spoke. I hid behind them and said, “Our church doesn’t really have money set aside for things like that. We do give to organizations that help with such situations, but we don’t have the money.”

I don’t know if the young woman was scamming me, too. But that’s beside the point. I could have handed her a few bucks. The fact is that I was afraid---afraid of having less for myself, afraid of being played for the chump.

And fear, I have discovered, is the main reason we fail to be peacemakers. We’re afraid of losing our property, our lives, our positions. But the follower of Jesus Christ knows that everything we have---our very breath---is just a gift from God. Even when we give our lives away out of love for God and neighbor---exactly what Jesus did on the cross, the Jesus-Follower knows that God has more life and blessings up His sleeve for us. And He’s committed to giving those blessings to anyone who turns from sin and turns to Him for forgiveness and new life for all eternity. So, we don’t need to be afraid. I wish that I could remember that in the day-in, day-out living of life!

Holden Village is a camp in Washington State run by the Lutheran church. It’s a place where people often gather to talk about how they can be peacemakers. Once after a lecture, one man whose farm sat astride an Indian reservation, shared with the lecturer that some of the Native Americans who lived nearby to him kept stealing gasoline from his tank. A lock he’d installed was broken and removed. A spotlight failed to chase thieves away. The lecturer listened as this man struggled to understand what the Jesus way was through this problem. Finally, he suggested a solution to the man. Why not put up a sign that says, “Help yourself if you need gasoline”?

The farmer’s reaction was incredible. “Oh, would that be freedom,” he said, “to be able to do that and have the awful burden of protecting that gas tank off my mind!”

Real peacemakers, having totally surrendered to God, experience that kind of release, I think. They experience true happiness. I hope to be that kind of happy person someday. I can only pray that God will have patience with me until I grow up enough to get there. I will have to simply keep depending on His grace that accepts me as I am and that loves me too much to let me stay there.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” Jesus tells us today. May we all learn to be Jesus’ peacemakers.

[The true stories of David and the farmer, as well as the quote from the Christian peacemaker about looking good on wood, all come from John and Mary Schramm's book, Things That Make for Peace. I am heavily indebted to that book for inspiration for this message.

[The summary of the New Testament's teaching about what peace is, comes from the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible.

[The list of typical reactions to violence appears in the Schramm book and summarizes insights shared by Lanzo del Vasto in his book, Warriors of Peace. I haven't personally read this book.]

Thoughts on the Political Conventions

While C-Span and the cable news outlets will give extensive coverage to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, gone are the days of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the major networks.

There are good reasons for that. The problem with the national conventions--Democratic or Republican--is that the political professionals have bled the life from them.

Once upon a time, the conventions were places where people fought out in the open about policies, principles, visions, and candidacies. It was messy and it was riveting. Not messy and riveting in a Jerry Springer or Survivor-way, though.

Nor did the conventions display the sort of deliberately-impolite games of mutual assault that pass for news programming much of the time these days. No calculated pseudo-outrage. It was real. One only has to remember Abraham Ribicoff's speech at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when he incited the wrath of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, accusing the Chicago police of practicing storm trooper tactics against the war protesters that had assemble there. The debates at past conventions were genuine and the stakes were authentically high.

Today, conventions are set pieces, pep rallies with sound bites, occasions when everybody smiles for the cameras and tries to appear united for the fall campaign. It is good that the slovenly appearances of delegates to the early-television era conventions have been replaced by people who appear to have bathed, changed their clothing within the previous forty-eight hours, and seem not to be hungover. But media consultants have thrown the baby---democracy in action---out with the bath water.

The parties would do well to get rid of the conventions altogether, along with the expenses associated with them. After all, the free TV exposure they get from them isn't really worth their effort. A shrinking audience, composed of partisan devotees and political junkies (like me) are the only ones likely to be tuning in....and I can't even vouch for me this year.

Instead, the parties could purchase a series of live broadcasts in which the candidates interact with voters and answer their questions. Although I abhor living in this era of reality TV, such a format change might very well reach today's disillusioned voter.

[PS: This isn't the column on God's will that I promised to try and complete and post today. I hope to complete it after I preside over a wedding this afternoon. I originally wrote this post as a comment on Chip Taylor's Miscellany blog. I've made a few minor changes here.]

A Ramble-log Blog

Earlier this week, I sent an email notification to family, friends, and colleagues about a column I'd posted on this site and said that I'd planned on posting a number of new columns throughout the week.

I learned again the wisdom of Father Myke, the NYFD chaplain killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him what you're doing tomorrow."

His words echo those of James in the New Testament: "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.' Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring...Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." (James 4:13-17)

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. (Thank you, John Lennon.) So, this past week, instead of stockpiling columns, as I'd planned, life happened and I wrote one column. (My other posts here this week weren't, for the most part, written for the column I write for the Community Press newspapers. They were posts written just for the blog, like this one.)

One of the reasons I wasn't as prolific as I'd hoped to be was the honest, prayerful wrestling I've done this week with the text on which I'll be preaching---God willing---this coming Sunday morning: Jesus' words in Matthew 5:9. There He says, "Blessed [happy, blissed-out] are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

The more I studied---in, among other places, commentaries by Lenski as well as Albright and Mann, Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, and the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible---the more complicated and daunting these seemingly simple words from Jesus became.

The passage also sent me to a book I hadn't read in many years. To some, it may seem dated, but it spoke to me again and provided a hefty amount of inspiration for me as I prepared my message. It was John and Mary Schramm's 1976 book, Things That Make for Peace. If you can get your hands on a copy of it, this book is well worth the short amount of time it takes to read. It's nothing more than a journal, incorporating reflections on personal experience, reading, and current events. It is in many ways, a very political book and I don't always agree with its politics. But it is at root, a deeply spiritual book written by two people struggling to define how they will live their faith in Christ in the social, political, and economic spheres of life. The book is a period piece, in a way, recalling a time when "Christian political activism" was almost always associated with the political left, the opposite of today. But, in what could be a lesson for today's Christian political activists, right and left, the Schramms begin not from a triumphant, holier-than-thou perspective, but from the cross of Jesus, displaying a humble willingness to take Jesus literally when He exhorts His followers to "take up their crosses and follow Him." You'll see how this book influenced me again with this week's reading of it when I post my Sunday sermon in a few days---God willing.

Things That Make for Peace also referred me another book that has been collecting dust on one of my bookshelves, John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. I did read it more than twenty years ago, but hadn't cracked it open in a long time. While I only had time to make a small dent in the process of re-reading it, I'm enjoying it too.

I also finished reading an interesting little book this week: Simple Matters: Almost Everything You Need to Know About Life, Relationships, and Knowing God by two guys who write under the names Bruce and Stan. (They're really Bruce Bickel, an attorney, and Stan Jantz, a PR guy for Berean Book Stores, a very good "in" for one who wants get published.) I like the breezy and frankly, simple, style of this book which was probably written to be a gift for high school or college graduates. But people of all ages might read (and re-read) it profitably.

With few exceptions, I like the advice they give on a variety of topics, ranging from "Stuff" to "Patience," from "Goals" to "Conflict." Their advice on "Common Sense" will figure in a column on which I'm working and hope---God willing---to complete tomorrow.

Before going to bed at night (or while waiting to see my physical therapist), I've also been continuing to read Stephen Ambrose's one-volume biography of Eisenhower. Ike has just started his first term as president in my reading. This is a really good book!

I will close now. God bless you...thanks for reading!

A Plea to End Over-Specialization

My son has forwarded a column by David Brooks to me. In it, Brooks discusses Charles Hill, one-time aide to Secretary of State George Schultz, and a class that Hill co-teaches at Yale.

But, inspired by Hill, the column ends as a plea for a different approach to post-high school education and it's one I endorse.

I have always felt that the primary goal of undergraduate education isn't to produce specialists, but people who know how to think. It's fine for people to have major courses of study during their undergraduate years. But during those years, they should also receive what we once called a "liberal" education, one that liberally exposes students to a range of human knowledge---be it in the Arts, the sciences, social studies and theory, theology, whatever.

It is partcularly important today that our colleges and universities produce generalists rather than specialists. For one thing, the accelerated rate of change is such in today's world, that people who become overly-dependent on a speciality can quickly be rendered obsolete.

For another, the issues with which we wrestle in today's world are insusceptible to single areas of specialtization. Creative multidisciplinary approaches are needed for us to deal with matters as disparate as finding a cure for cancer, defeating terrorists, feeding the world's hungry, or promoting compassion.

Confession time: As an undergraduate at The Ohio State University, I chafed under the requirements that I take classes in fields in which I had no interest. But like the inoculations I got as a youngster to ensure that I didn't contract things like polio or small pox, I know now how good it was for me to have taken classes in statistics, economics, and biology. (Even though I hated taking them at the time.)

More than that, I know now how good it is for societies that undergraduates emerge from their college or university experiences as well-rounded people with a broad sensitivity to what the human race does and doesn't know at the moment they graduate, to have a strong foundation of broad-based knowledge with which to face life, and at the very least, to be able to vote and participate in society responsibly.

One of the books I've been reading lately is Stephen Ambrose's one-volume version of his biography of Dwight Eisenhower. An often-overlooked period of Eisenhower's life is his brief and frustrating tenure as president of Columbia University. Ambrose records an incident from that period:

Columbia was an outstanding university with a brilliant faculty composed of highly sophisticated specialists who were dedicated to their research. They regarded Eisenhower as hopelessly naive. When one scholar told Eisenhower that "we have some of America's most exceptional physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers," Eisenhower asked if they were also "exceptional Americans." The scholar, confused, mumbled that Eisenhower did not understand--they were research scholars. "Dammit," Eisenhower shot back, "what good are exceptional physicists...exceptional anything, unless they exceptional Americans." He added that every student who came to Columbia must leave it first a better citizen and only secondarily a better scholar.

Anybody familiar with the life of Dwight Eisenhower will know that when he spoke of being "exceptional Americans," he wasn't upholding a jingoistic, shallow patriotism. Ike was an internationalist and a small-d democrat. For democracy to function, he was saying, every citizen and especially every leader, must know how to think and have an appreciation for how the world and how democracy works.

At the very least, colleges and universities need to break up the musty air of specialization from time to time by bringing in people like Eisenhower at Columbia or, in the case of Yale University cited by Brooks in his New York Times column, somebody like Charles Hill. They can help students move away from the navel-gazing that inheres in so much scholastic specialization and introduce them to the essential life-skills needed for solid citizenship and effective, sensitive leadership in whatever field of life.

My Bible text for this coming Sunday is Matthew 5:9, in which Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." Of course, this is a complicated text. As a Christian, I believe that real peace begins when we accept the peace between God and we human sinners that God offers to us through Jesus Christ. When that wall of enmity is erased, we have peace inside and we can be creative--even daring and bold--in sharing that peace with others.

But it also seems to me that we ill-equip our children to be peacemakers---whether in their families, communities, careers, or in the international community---when we consign them to specializations that render them insensitive to the thoughts, feelings, experiences, or knowledge of people engaged in other pursuits in life.

So much hangs on the question of how our colleges and universities will train our young. I hope that people like Charles Hill of Yale University are the harbingers of good things to come!

An Anniversary That Can Fuel Our Dreams

Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of the most sublime and stunning achievements in human history: the landing of two astronauts---Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin---on the Moon. No one old enough to have watched these events on their television that July 20, 1969, will ever forget Armstrong's matter-of-fact pronouncement: "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Even more stunning, maybe, was the moment when Armstrong, a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, set foot on the lunar surface.

A wonderful symmetry attached to this son of Ohio being the first human being to kick moon dust. After all, it was two Ohioans, Dayton natives Wilbur and Orville Wright, who invented powered flight; it was Columbus native Eddie Rickenbacker, the one-time Indy 500 driver and later president of Eastern Airlines, who was America's first flying ace, during World War One; and it was John Glenn, of New Concord, Ohio a Marine hero during the Korean War, who was the first American to orbit the Earth.

The primary emotion this anniversary evokes in me is wistfulness. I pine for what might have been. If we human beings could have spent a fraction of the time, effort, money, and intellectual capital we've spent on war and terror these past three-decades-and-a-half, and instead, built positively on the foundation of the first moon-landing, who knows what progress might have been ours? What new discoveries about the universe and ourselves might we have made? What new technologies and new medicines might have resulted? We'll never know because, to a great extent, we've remained earth-bound, literally and spiritually.

It boggles the mind that an event which Richard Nixon, then president, in a fit of understandable but exagerrated hyperbole described as the "greatest...since Creation," is so widely ignored today.

It's as though we've forgotten how to dream, to dare, to hope, to climb.

I hope and pray that we will learn once again to do these things. I hope that the people of the world will say, "We've been to the Moon. Let's go for Mars. Let's explore the cosmos."

From my perspective as a Christian, I believe that we have a sacred obligation to explore creation, to know it and by the knowing of it, gain a deeper appreciation of the One Who designed it all.

May the anniversary of the first Moon landing compel us to once more let our dreams take flight!

A Good Site to Check Out

The web site for the Dorado Covenant has been expanded. The covenant itself has also attracted many more Lutherans as signatories. This brief document is, in my estimation, a ray of hope that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America of which I am a part, will find its way through the current crisis over the authority of God's Word, to true commitment to the Christ revealed on the pages of Scripture and amplified in the Lutheran Confessions. Check out the site and please consider adding your name to those who've already endorsed the Dorado Covenant.

There are other groups working to reform the church. Among them:

WordAlone

Solid Rock Lutherans

Why We Worship

Often, when I talk with people who have worshiped with us at Friendship Church, I’m told, “I get so much out of the service.”

I appreciate hearing that, of course. But the fact is that what we get out of worship is not nearly as important as what we put into it.

Worship isn’t really about us. The old English ancestor of our word worship is the word, worth-ship. When we worship God, we say how worthy He is of our honor and complete surrender. That’s what we offer God when we worship.

So, some may wonder, what’s the good in that? Is God such an egomaniac that He needs to exact praise from people? Actually, it turns out that we need to praise God more than He needs our praises.

A few years back, I read a true story from a pastor who was visited by a young man going through a tough time. The woman to whom he was engaged had broken things off. This had followed a string of break-ups of other relationships and friendships. He was frustrated because he just couldn’t seem to stay connected with people. It made him feel depressed and inferior.

At first, the pastor was surprised by the young man’s story because he seemed likable. But as their conversation wore on, something began to dawn on the pastor. The young man used the word “I” alot. He was totally self-absorbed.

The pastor got an idea. He told the young man to worship on each of the next four Sundays and then come back for another visit in the pastor’s office.

A month passed, the young man visited the pastor, and in the course of this second conversation, the pastor began to notice a change in the fellow. He was less self-conscious, more interested in others. In a year’s time, continuing this pattern of hour-long conversations with the pastor followed by four Sundays of worship, the changes in the young man were remarkable. In fact, by the end of the year, he had become engaged to another young woman.

Was it magic? No, it was as simple as this: Through regular involvement in public worship, the young man realized that he wasn’t the end-all and be-all of the universe. For one hour a week, He was compelled to focus on God and that influenced the rest of his week.

When we join others to worship God, things happen in us.

First: We get rid of the pressure to be our own little gods. We know that the job of “God” has been filled and we can rely on God to do His job well, including take care of us through thick, thin, life, death, and beyond. We’re also ready to take our marching orders from Him.

Second: Secure in our place in God’s kingdom, we can love others, listen to them, and be concerned for them, giving them the same love God gives to us.

Worship is more about what we put into it than what we get out of it. But because of God’s fantastic compassion for us, it turns out that the more that we put into worship, the more we get out of it.

The Happiness Project: The People Who See God

Matthew 5:1-2, 8
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, July 18, 2004)

For six weeks now, we’ve been looking at some words Jesus shared privately with His inner circle of followers one day on a Judean hillside. They appear in the fifth chapter of the New Testament book of Matthew, in twelve verses we call The Beatitudes. In them, Jesus talks about happiness. Interestingly, in the Beatitudes, He doesn’t give us a how-to manual. Instead, He presents a few word pictures of what happy people look like.

Today, He presents a sixth picture of happiness: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” It seems to me that happy people who see God have three main characteristics in common.

First: They give up. I don’t mean that they give up hope. The happy people I know have an eternity of hope. But happy people do give up something.

One of my heroes is the writer and scholar, C.S. Lewis. As a young man, perhaps because of his experiences during World War One and because as a little boy, he had seen his mother die in spite of all sorts of prayers said on her behalf, Lewis was a committed atheist. But in the 1930s, after his scholarship had exposed him to cultures, literature, and myth from throughout the world, he found himself wrestling with the possibility that Jesus Christ really was the God and Savior of the world. One day, while riding in the passenger car of his brother’s motorcycle, Lewis found himself suddenly realizing that he believed in the God we meet in Jesus. He called his coming to faith in Christ as being “surprised by joy.”

Lewis gave up his doubts about God for good reason. I’ve mentioned before the story of two men standing on a pier as a large cruise liner sailed into harbor. The one man tells the other, “You know, nobody made that ship. It just appeared in the harbor one day, every rivet, engine, and deck chair in place. All by itself.” The second man clearly thought that this theory was nuts. He knew that where there is a creation, there must be a creator. We all have doubts and questions about life. But the fact that you and I are living indicates that there must be a God.

And that has implications for our lives. Six years ago, three research psychologists reported in The Journal of Clinical Psychology that people with strong spiritual beliefs were typically satisfied with life, while those without such beliefs were usually unsatisfied with life. Happy people give up on the notion of a world without God.

They also open up. Back in my atheist days, I used to make the most horrible comments about God, about Christ, about people who believed. I couldn’t understand how they could believe in a God you can’t see, especially with so much tragedy in the world. But then, I met real-life followers of Jesus. They were people who had personally dealt with lots of tragedy in their lives--the death of children and spouses, nervous breakdowns, divorces, loss of health, property, income. And yet, they had the power to keep on believing. They had opened up to Jesus, allowing Him to be their Boss and God and best Friend. They knew that only a Savior Who has been through death and gone on to rise again can really be relied upon to help us through all the seasons of our lives. They made me want Jesus in my life, too.

Finally, one night in the study of the house we were renting at the time, I prayed as best I knew how. I told Jesus, “I don’t know everything about You, Lord. But I want to give my life to You.” Jesus didn’t magically answer all my questions about life and He certainly didn’t make me perfect. But for the first time in my life, I felt a peace in my heart.

In the New Testament book of Revelation, Jesus tells us that He is knocking at the doors of our hearts. If we will just open those doors, He will come and be with us forever. Happy people open up to Jesus.

Happy people give up, open up, and they get cleaned up. The word that Jesus uses for pure in the original Greek of today’s Bible lesson is katharismo, from which we get our English word, catharsis. People who undergo catharsis are those who purge themselves of bad things, so that good things can come to them. To be pure in heart is, quite simply, to be a person who lets Jesus Christ cleanse us of all our old emotional baggage, our destructive habits, our ill-advised ways of thinking, and all of our sins. He washes them away and because of His goodness and power, makes us fit to live with God forever.

The famous pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, once had a terrible weight problem. And it was getting worse because he was incapable of saying no to sweets. He knew that this was a spiritual issue. He knew that his body was a temple given to him by God. He knew that he was allowing himself to be led in life not by God, but by the food he constantly craved. So complete was his dependence on the god of food that Schuller began to doubt the existence of the God we know through Jesus Christ.

One night, he cried out to Jesus in desperation:

“Dear Jesus, I don’t know if You’re dead or alive. I don’t know if You are even real! I have believed it! I preached it! But I can’t prove it by my weight control. Jesus, if You are there, can You help me?”

A calm came over Schuller after he prayed that prayer and he sensed Jesus telling him, “I have snatched you from destruction.” Difficult though it was going to be, Jesus Christ had cleansed Robert Schuller of his reliance on food to make him feel good and fill the void in his soul tha can only be filled by Jesus. He knew that Christ was going to help him regain control of his body.

When we turn from sin--whatever our sin--and turn to Jesus Christ, His love cleanses the sin away and He gives us the power to live changed lives. When we invite Jesus’ cleansing power into our lives, that’s when we see God for sure!

In a nutshell, Jesus tells us today that happy people are those whose hearts and consciences have been made clean by the death and resurrection of Jesus. They’re the ones who have seen that life is too big and complicated to try to deal with it on their own. They see that a Savior Who died on a cross understands the sorrows and difficulties of everyday life. They understand that without Jesus stepping in to be our advocate, friend, and Savior, we would stand naked in our sin before God. They let Jesus cleanse them, washing away all the obstructions that would otherwise keep them from seeing God.

Happy are the people Jesus has made pure. They’re the people who give up on life without God, who open up and let Jesus enter their lives, and who get cleaned up, letting Jesus scrub away their sin. Those are the people who get to see God. No wonder they’re happy!

[The message received some inspiration from a chapter in the wonderful book, The Be Happy Attitudes by Robert Schuller. It's there that he tells of his struggle with weight control.

[C.S. Lewis talks about his conversion from atheism to faith in Christ in his book, Surprised by Joy.

[The 1998 study on the relationship between spiritual beliefs and happiness is cited in The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It by David Niven, Ph.D.]