Tag Archives: Jesus

An Old Crumpled Map

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An Old Crumpled Map

I remember the ‘good old days’ of crumpled maps and highlighters guiding us along the highway toward our desired destination.
One Sunday morning, my very first Sunday serving a new appointment in a rural church, I found myself lost on my way to my first sermon at the first of three churches and three sermons that day. My confusion arose from the fact that I could not find my current location on the crumpled map in my hands. Though I had been to the church I was following a different route I was assured was faster and better. However, with each passing moment my anxiety grew as the appointed time approached! Joyfully, a member of the church, recalling that their directions were inaccurate and concerned that my following them would never bring me there arrived and led me from there to the church just in time!
Reading Scripture this morning and thinking of the spiritual condition of our modern ailing church I wonder why a similar sense of alarm at being lost does not resound resulting in heartfelt pleas for direction and guidance.
Thinking back to that time of being lost, my anxiety was driven by the fact that I knew what the area around the church should look like and what I was seeing was nothing like it at all!
Rather than take an honest gaze at where we are as a church or as individuals we would rather have a ‘virtual’ picture of our own creation. In this fantasized view of who we are and where we are we are able to add and subtract our own impressions of our spiritual ‘location’ so that we no longer feel ‘lost’? The result of this is that no matter what our actual spiritual ‘location’ is we can feel that we are not lost at all! This is indeed the worst of all positions. Had I not known I was lost, I would have been unwilling to follow someone who understood where we were and where we needed to be. In humility I focused on the back of her car and determined not to turn or stop until she did. The result was that my anxious thoughts were replaced with true joy and peace as I saw the church and knew we had arrived.
Today we have abandoned the ‘roadmap’ of Scripture. Today we have replaced the images of what our spiritual ‘location’ should resemble; the lives of Jesus, the Apostles, intrepid pilgrims before us in favor of more ‘modern’ models. Our current mental portraits of what our spiritual location should look like are shaped by money, things, budgets, popularity, in short… our culture.
Because we are gazing at the wrong picture and we are following the wrong map we no longer feel lost. On that Sunday morning so long ago, no amount of fantasizing or wishing could have changed my lostness. Only with an understanding of the reality of my lostness and humbly following someone who knew more than I would bring me to my desired destination.
Lord help us to become honest. Grant us humility to admit that we are wrong. Grant us a willingness to lay down our crumpled cultural maps and pick up Your Divinely inspired Map. As we read of our lostness grant to us a willing mind and heart to abandon our own misguided sense of direction and follow Your Spirit whom You have sent to safely guide us home from whatever corner of this fallen world we have hung our hope. Amen.

Modern builders still reject the Cornerstone

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Sitting, reading, meditating this morning before the beginning of the work day and realizing its great value I think of those I meet in the course of the day.
The world around us is driven by action and by gain. The world we live in grieves because ‘the economy’ is not performing as it should. Even the church grieves the loss of the economic engine which drove its budget.
Yet in the midst of this lost of ‘economic engine’ we have continued to receive the same gift of time, 24 hours in each and every day, to be and to become.
Our loss of this economic engine, or more accurately, its sickness, has arguable given us more of this 24 hours in each day for the pursuit of being and becoming.
Yet instead of using this gift we seem stuck in a mode of lament over our loss of what the activity of this world gives and decline in money. This is the single greatest lament I hear from those in the church.
When I take time for ‘being’ I hear no applause. When I take time for doing, visiting, launching a new program, participating in the performance of music I hear applause of some kind.
Those in the church who reap the greatest accolades are not those who focus on being present for the Lord and abiding in Christ but those who make things look good, sound good and feel good whether they are good or not.
For this reason, increasingly, success in the eyes of God in the church today will look like failure in and to the church. The ones who are praised are the ones who put on the ‘best show’ at any cost. They receive the recognition, the money, and the accolades. They are the ones who are valued, esteemed and prized for their efforts.
Therefore, time and resources are set aside for them. Their praise is upon the lips of those around and their stature grows and becomes, with time, even legendary.
While this is happening, the one who focuses on the Living Christ and takes time, precious time that could be used for doing, is considered of lesser worth and in fact at times even considered a burden or blight to the church! This is a modern fulfillment of Jesus’ experience of rejection by the religious world of His day also in which quoting Psalm 118 He says, “The stone which was rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone’. (Matthew 21:42)

The Children of Barnabas

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Barnabas accompanied Paul on his first mission expedition recorded in the book of Acts. Barnabas is mentioned in Acts for as bringing money from the sale of land to the apostles in order to care for the poor among them. Later in the book when there is a disagreement dividing the church in seeking to describe the severity of it the words used were, “even Barnabas” was pulled the wrong way.

In a world where we are measured by accomplishments and accolades we easily forget the power of encouragement. I know that God shows me truth in my heart and the ability to express that truth in words and “parables”. My sharing them here is out of a desire to help others to see and understand the world of the Spirit.

We Live in a world filled with news of floods, uprisings, death and tragedy. In a world of tragic calamity, we must understand the causes and effects of life. Without understanding the spiritual world we are like people without sight or hearing walking through life not understanding the things that strike our lives daily.

Yet because I find that most of the people I encounter have little value of these things and I often feel disparaged by the things I don’t do so well rather than the Gift God has given me. I feel rejected because I don’t remember names so well or because I am somewhat disorganized. At times I am so filled with the words that come to mind I don’t take the time I should to hear, to finish listening to the one before me.

So this morning I find a comment from one I have never met saying that my mind has value. Only a few words but words that cause my heart to soar. I would write more here but I easily begin to think that perhaps since so few look at them that maybe they really do not have value.

Just a few words from a stranger this morning remind me of a Gift that I am to share. My prayer becomes, “Lord, just as Paul spoke to Timothy to “stir up the Gift that was in him.” I find myself by only a few words from a stranger encouraged again to “stir up that Gift.” May I not fail to accomplish all You have set before me to do. As I look at the demands of this day, the needs of a dying world and the urgency to bring the remaining sheep into the fold before the time comes and we can work no longer I think, “Lord, who is sufficient for these things!” Yet, though Paul was just one man, encouraged by Barnabas, encouraged by others that one man sowed the seeds of Life that now nearly 2,000 years after his death still are bearing fruit! With God nothing is impossible!

Not one of us is sufficient for these things. Not one of us can accomplish all we are called to do without others who come alongside us. May we love one another with new raging fires of passion so that our love, our encouragement may feed the fire of another. Separated by the pain of life and the self absorption that often accompanies it our fires can dim and separated each fire may grow cold. But together the collective passion of the fire that burns within us becomes an unquenchable fire consuming the hate of a dying world and burning through the underbrush of confusion to blaze a path which together we can walk into the eternity of God.

May God grant us grace to walk together and encourage one another! Amen.

Life and Rescue

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Life is fragile. Touching a spider’s web destroys the beauty only this tiny creature can create. We, created in the image of God have been given authority over Creation for this God did on the day we were made.

There is too little in creation to go around. It is not the fault of the Creator. It is the fault of those who have been given authority to govern that creation. We have thoughtlessly, carelessly, selfishly imposed our own individual and collective wills upon creation without humbly realizing that only by means of His Spirit can we possibly manage such a task.

So the consequence is our own destruction. We have long ago passed the point of no return and sown the seeds of our own ending. Yet God in grace is giving us time. He is allowing us to see the beginning of our ending upon this Sacred World. His hope is that we might see what our own hands have wrought. We must see however, not with the seeing of knowing but with the seeing of understanding. We must see not only with understanding but with repentance and with urgency. We must learn the urgency of the deck hand who realizes the ship is going down soon and that priority must change. No longer can we afford the luxury of leaning over the rail and watching the water go by. Every moment our plight becomes more urgent. Yet the task is more urgent than any of us knows and therefore we must work in concert.

To one is given a plan, to another strength, to another wealth and still to another words of encouragement. But for all the vision must be that of helping every soul possible to escape the doom which all of us have helped to bring upon ourselves.

Understanding that we have all contributed to our collective demise should infuse us with humility. Perhaps I did not create the carnage in Tripoli but I have thoughtlessly caused other elements of our joint catastrophe. The time is now for us to forget ourselves and seek in all we do that which will help us all escape into the wondrous world of God’s new Created Order. It is this Order of which the Sacred Scripture refers as the “Kingdom of God”. For the moment we cannot see it. We can however see the effects of its Presence. Whenever there is an action done in trust, there is a new ripple of that Eternal World which moves across this world. As each of us seeks to live by faith alone the ripples become waves. Where enough of us act together those waves help the weaker and more blind among us see, feel, hear and touch the Kingdom of God. This was why Jesus did so many wondrous acts. This is why amazing acts of faith were given to that early church. This is also why the Evil One seeks to destroy our unity.

May God grant us unity and purpose bound to Him so that our trust becomes a mighty wave breaking the power of apathy and selfishness which chains those destined for Glory and Greatness within the dark holds of a perishing planet. My prayer is that together we will live in such a way that we all find our way Home.