What we need most for God to do in our world and in our lives are the very things we cannot possibly do ourselves. They are also quite often the things that we, in our frequent fits of arrogance (it’s called human pride), are tempted to think we can.
God’s people in first century Palestine were quite sure they needed the Romans thrown out of their country and excised from their lives. And so they fell prey not only to the Romans but to a succession of pseudo-saviors raising rebellion and multiplying misery.
Then, almost unnoticed except by a few shepherds out on the hills near Bethlehem and some animals cramped in their stable by the presence of a guy from Nazareth and his wife who’d managed to turn the place into a delivery room, God does something to truly save his people that the mightiest general and the strongest army on earth could never have done.
Because no one who has ever lived or who ever will live has been able to live a life completely grace-filled and sin-free, perfectly righteous and yet perfectly gentle, absolutely holy and yet absolutely winsome, God sends to us at Bethlehem the very best Christmas gift, his own Son, to lift up the fallen sons of Adam and daughters of Eve to be the adopted sons and daughters of God and “joint heirs” with Christ of the very best blessings of the Father.
Ah, we could never have done that on our own! It’s God’s gift to us, and all we can do now is to accept it through faith as a gift—or not. It comes in no other way. It is a gift. And it can be received in no other way. While all of eternity is not long enough for us to adequately praise God for the gift he has given, how dare we even begin to think that, could we give them, a thousand years of our praises, our songs, our worship, our good deeds, our pious ritual, would ever be enough to in any way even begin pay God back for that wonderful Gift? And don’t we realize that to refuse to accept a gift as a gift is to dishonor the Giver?
Yes, worship the Giver!
Yes, live to honor Him!
Yes, join the angels in singing his praises and proclaiming his salvation!
But do it with real joy because you have opened your hands and your heart to freely receive the Gift God gave at Bethlehem to do for you and for me what we could never do for ourselves.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
God's Plan Almost Always Surprises Us
Does God ever do anything just like we’d expect him to?
A world to save, a Gift to give, a Baby to send . . .
And the greatest Christmas Present ever given is all wrapped up in swaddling cloths and laid in a feed trough.
And the mother of the King is a poor Jewish girl whose wedding, the thin-lipped gossips around Bethlehem would be quick to tell you, was much less than a discreet nine months before the birth. Mark it down—those gals could count to nine just as quickly as their modern counterparts.
And the birth announcement for God’s Son? It was proclaimed by angels whose glory split the skies, but (“who’d-a-thunk-it?”) the amazing proclamation was not made at a grand meeting of pompously assembled and well-robed religious moguls of the Judean Diocese or the Eastern Palestinian Convention or the Greater Bethlehem Ministerial Association.
No, it was proclaimed to terrified shepherds whose collars, if they’d had such, would have been decidedly blue, whose theology if you could call it that, had more to do with the equivalent of Starr Cut Plug tobacco than it did with heavenly lights. These were simple and rough-hewn men who’d spent lots of time on hills herding sheep and precious little time at all in synagogues.
They’d seen angels? Yeah, right. The folks back in town knew full well that the last time old Issachar had seen an angel he’d found him at the bottom of a wineskin.
But not this time.
Oh, some of them had been a bit sleepy just a moment before, but that had changed in a heartbeat, in the blink of an eye, as the night sky exploded with light and angels ripped apart the firmament to emblazon Heaven’s message across the shimmering sky.
God’s promise of salvation and the coming of the great King had been made long centuries before. Generations of kings had come and gone. And generations of shepherds had kept watch over their sheep on these same hills while Bethlehem slept below and, slumbering uneasily with the little city, a careworn world waited for God to rouse it with good news.
But then the message of Heaven came. The message of your salvation and mine. And it came to shepherds.
Who’d a thunk it?
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
A world to save, a Gift to give, a Baby to send . . .
And the greatest Christmas Present ever given is all wrapped up in swaddling cloths and laid in a feed trough.
And the mother of the King is a poor Jewish girl whose wedding, the thin-lipped gossips around Bethlehem would be quick to tell you, was much less than a discreet nine months before the birth. Mark it down—those gals could count to nine just as quickly as their modern counterparts.
And the birth announcement for God’s Son? It was proclaimed by angels whose glory split the skies, but (“who’d-a-thunk-it?”) the amazing proclamation was not made at a grand meeting of pompously assembled and well-robed religious moguls of the Judean Diocese or the Eastern Palestinian Convention or the Greater Bethlehem Ministerial Association.
No, it was proclaimed to terrified shepherds whose collars, if they’d had such, would have been decidedly blue, whose theology if you could call it that, had more to do with the equivalent of Starr Cut Plug tobacco than it did with heavenly lights. These were simple and rough-hewn men who’d spent lots of time on hills herding sheep and precious little time at all in synagogues.
They’d seen angels? Yeah, right. The folks back in town knew full well that the last time old Issachar had seen an angel he’d found him at the bottom of a wineskin.
But not this time.
Oh, some of them had been a bit sleepy just a moment before, but that had changed in a heartbeat, in the blink of an eye, as the night sky exploded with light and angels ripped apart the firmament to emblazon Heaven’s message across the shimmering sky.
God’s promise of salvation and the coming of the great King had been made long centuries before. Generations of kings had come and gone. And generations of shepherds had kept watch over their sheep on these same hills while Bethlehem slept below and, slumbering uneasily with the little city, a careworn world waited for God to rouse it with good news.
But then the message of Heaven came. The message of your salvation and mine. And it came to shepherds.
Who’d a thunk it?
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Christmas Trees Don't Have To Be Perfect To Be Beautiful
My earliest Christmas memories are mostly wrapped around our family’s Christmas trees.
I remember Mom making creamy hot chocolate and my sister stacking the spindle of the old record player with an inch-high pile of vintage vinyl Christmas music by Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Norman Luboff Choir.
Most years the tree had already been bought at (where else?) Amarillo’s Boy Scout Troop 80 Christmas tree lot. I was a member of Troop 80 and thus expected to help sell trees each year. My younger brother was not, but he was a wheeler-dealer sort who liked selling trees and often, as I recall, managed to pawn off more trees than most of the bona fide boy scouts. Jacob (I mean, Jim) always felt Jacob of old settled for far too little when he sold his hungry brother Esau that bowl of stew and only got a birthright for it. Jim would’ve held out for hard cash and then the birthright at the end as a balloon payment.
We’d lean the tree in the garage for a day or a few on its amputation-site stump in a bucket of water while it waited to be lit and glorified. Anchoring the tree in the stand was a chore. Jim and I would crawl under the scratchy boughs and slide around on our wood floor to turn each screw just the right amount. It was never straight the first time.
Then my 15-years-older sister, the unquestioned head honcho of the process, would ascend to perform the task of highest honor as she put on the lights (bubble lights, snowball lights, and all), a job in later years graciously bequeathed to me.
Then we would hang the ornaments, a tedious task but nothing like as bad as the final stage in the process: hanging the icicles.
I don’t see those long, thin, silvery strands of foil or plastic, those “icicles,” on trees much anymore. I hope never again to have to put them on one of mine.
According to my sister, they had to be hung with great care, one at a time. Ten million or so came in a box. You’d drag one out of the box and carefully place it over a tree branch. It was essential, my sister assured us, to start at the back near the trunk and make sure the icicle hung straight down on both sides of the branch. Straight down. No clumps. Which is why Jim’s preferred method of grabbing a paw-full of icicles and launching the whole wad in the general direction of the tree was sternly forbidden. No. One at a time. Until you froze there, died there, decayed there, and Christmas never came, and it was spring and you were still hanging icicles. One at a time.
I don’t know what we thought would happen—apart from sure death—if we didn’t hang the icicles exactly right. Would Santa’s sleigh suddenly crash in flight and the FAA later determine and publish for the whole world full of weeping giftless children to see that the cause was icing—not on the sleigh but improper tree icicling by two Shelburne boys at 125 N. Goliad, Amarillo, Texas, whose wanton and reckless disregard had killed Santa?
I’m sure we never did it “right.” But I remember wandering into the living room as a little lad clad in those great PJs that came complete with feet, lying down almost under the tree, looking up through its branches, and drinking in the beauty.
By God’s grace, Christmas trees don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. Neither do lives.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I remember Mom making creamy hot chocolate and my sister stacking the spindle of the old record player with an inch-high pile of vintage vinyl Christmas music by Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and the Norman Luboff Choir.
Most years the tree had already been bought at (where else?) Amarillo’s Boy Scout Troop 80 Christmas tree lot. I was a member of Troop 80 and thus expected to help sell trees each year. My younger brother was not, but he was a wheeler-dealer sort who liked selling trees and often, as I recall, managed to pawn off more trees than most of the bona fide boy scouts. Jacob (I mean, Jim) always felt Jacob of old settled for far too little when he sold his hungry brother Esau that bowl of stew and only got a birthright for it. Jim would’ve held out for hard cash and then the birthright at the end as a balloon payment.
We’d lean the tree in the garage for a day or a few on its amputation-site stump in a bucket of water while it waited to be lit and glorified. Anchoring the tree in the stand was a chore. Jim and I would crawl under the scratchy boughs and slide around on our wood floor to turn each screw just the right amount. It was never straight the first time.
Then my 15-years-older sister, the unquestioned head honcho of the process, would ascend to perform the task of highest honor as she put on the lights (bubble lights, snowball lights, and all), a job in later years graciously bequeathed to me.
Then we would hang the ornaments, a tedious task but nothing like as bad as the final stage in the process: hanging the icicles.
I don’t see those long, thin, silvery strands of foil or plastic, those “icicles,” on trees much anymore. I hope never again to have to put them on one of mine.
According to my sister, they had to be hung with great care, one at a time. Ten million or so came in a box. You’d drag one out of the box and carefully place it over a tree branch. It was essential, my sister assured us, to start at the back near the trunk and make sure the icicle hung straight down on both sides of the branch. Straight down. No clumps. Which is why Jim’s preferred method of grabbing a paw-full of icicles and launching the whole wad in the general direction of the tree was sternly forbidden. No. One at a time. Until you froze there, died there, decayed there, and Christmas never came, and it was spring and you were still hanging icicles. One at a time.
I don’t know what we thought would happen—apart from sure death—if we didn’t hang the icicles exactly right. Would Santa’s sleigh suddenly crash in flight and the FAA later determine and publish for the whole world full of weeping giftless children to see that the cause was icing—not on the sleigh but improper tree icicling by two Shelburne boys at 125 N. Goliad, Amarillo, Texas, whose wanton and reckless disregard had killed Santa?
I’m sure we never did it “right.” But I remember wandering into the living room as a little lad clad in those great PJs that came complete with feet, lying down almost under the tree, looking up through its branches, and drinking in the beauty.
By God’s grace, Christmas trees don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. Neither do lives.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Preparing Our Hearts for Christ's Coming
Whether we’ll have a White Christmas this year or not is anybody’s guess, but a White Monday on the Second Week of Advent is now in the bag.
I love it! Nothing in all of nature is as beautiful as snow. Add to that a church at Christmas with a fire in the fireplace, four or five well-lit trees, a warm sanctuary bedecked with garland twinkling with lights, some beautiful candles, snow gently descending on the lantern in the snow-scene on the video screen (matching what’s falling outside), hot coffee waiting in the fellowship hall, and what’s not to like?
It was the first day of our now-annual Advent devotionals. I think this is our sixth year to offer these little ten-minute moments of worship daily at 10:00 during the second and third weeks of Advent.
When I hatched the idea, I didn’t know if anyone would come; I was just sure I needed to—which surprised me. The last thing I needed during the holidays was another commitment, another group of services to design and lead.
Ah, but there’s that word: “holiday.” What I needed in the midst of busy-ness was a particular time, even if just a simple and short moment each day, to pause and worship and center on the “holy,” to be still and drink in some beauty and be reminded of what God had done and was doing—even if that congregation was just me. I figured that maybe a few other folks would appreciate the same kind of worship and quiet reminder. And they have.
The little group has grown a bit each year. Not today, though. The snow pretty much did us in, but that’s fine. I used the time to prepare for the next few days’ services.
Preparation is what Advent is about. The word means arrival” or “coming.” Long centuries ago many Christians began to celebrate these weeks as a time of “preparation,” preparing their hearts for Christ’s coming—joyful praise for his first coming, preparation and hope for his second, and an invitation to Christ to enter our hearts every day.
In my service preparations, I chose a number of Scriptures that urge us to live always ready for His coming. Sitting in a warm study tucked in a beautiful setting, I found some great Advent meditations written by Christians in times past. Ugly times past. Two of the writers would die in Nazi prison camps. One wrote when it seemed that the world would soon end in nuclear winter.
Not one of these faithful men wrote hopefully extolling humanity’s power to work hard to build a perfect world. Instead, they point to the beauty and power and love of the God who breaks into this world’s ugliness and comes to bring a salvation we could never accomplish ourselves. They remind me that light most brightly in darkness, and that His is the only light that can truly overcome darkness.
Yes, it’s for Christ’s coming that we prepare our hearts. His Presence is the gift we need. His hope is the only genuine hope.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I love it! Nothing in all of nature is as beautiful as snow. Add to that a church at Christmas with a fire in the fireplace, four or five well-lit trees, a warm sanctuary bedecked with garland twinkling with lights, some beautiful candles, snow gently descending on the lantern in the snow-scene on the video screen (matching what’s falling outside), hot coffee waiting in the fellowship hall, and what’s not to like?
It was the first day of our now-annual Advent devotionals. I think this is our sixth year to offer these little ten-minute moments of worship daily at 10:00 during the second and third weeks of Advent.
When I hatched the idea, I didn’t know if anyone would come; I was just sure I needed to—which surprised me. The last thing I needed during the holidays was another commitment, another group of services to design and lead.
Ah, but there’s that word: “holiday.” What I needed in the midst of busy-ness was a particular time, even if just a simple and short moment each day, to pause and worship and center on the “holy,” to be still and drink in some beauty and be reminded of what God had done and was doing—even if that congregation was just me. I figured that maybe a few other folks would appreciate the same kind of worship and quiet reminder. And they have.
The little group has grown a bit each year. Not today, though. The snow pretty much did us in, but that’s fine. I used the time to prepare for the next few days’ services.
Preparation is what Advent is about. The word means arrival” or “coming.” Long centuries ago many Christians began to celebrate these weeks as a time of “preparation,” preparing their hearts for Christ’s coming—joyful praise for his first coming, preparation and hope for his second, and an invitation to Christ to enter our hearts every day.
In my service preparations, I chose a number of Scriptures that urge us to live always ready for His coming. Sitting in a warm study tucked in a beautiful setting, I found some great Advent meditations written by Christians in times past. Ugly times past. Two of the writers would die in Nazi prison camps. One wrote when it seemed that the world would soon end in nuclear winter.
Not one of these faithful men wrote hopefully extolling humanity’s power to work hard to build a perfect world. Instead, they point to the beauty and power and love of the God who breaks into this world’s ugliness and comes to bring a salvation we could never accomplish ourselves. They remind me that light most brightly in darkness, and that His is the only light that can truly overcome darkness.
Yes, it’s for Christ’s coming that we prepare our hearts. His Presence is the gift we need. His hope is the only genuine hope.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Turkey, Tofurkey, and No Pardon for the White House Turkey
After much deliberation and serious soul-searching, I’ve come to a conclusion. If I’m ever elected President of these United States and Thanksgiving rolls around, I’m not pardoning the turkey.
I’m sorry if that flies in the face of tradition, but if it’s ever up to me, that bird’s a goner. If you disagree, fine. Pray all you want for a “stay of execution.” My prayer will simply be that the white meat be as juicy and tender as the dark meat and that it not be overcooked.
Our nation has recently been embroiled in a poultry scandal. A major supplier of eggs (chicken eggs, not turkey eggs) has come under fire for alleged cruelty to chickens.
I’m all for kindness to animals of all sorts. I don’t even like the idea of anybody pulling the wings off of flies, though, with apologies to frogs and users of medical maggots, and admitting there’d likely be some negative ecological consequences, I’d be quite happy if they’d all die (flies, that is). “Suffer not a fly to live” is my motto. But I don’t see any reason to be mean even to a fly before splattering its innards across a flyswatter.
On up the scale, I’d say chickens are even more deserving of kindness. Down with cruelty to cluckers! They should be free to lay their eggs in peace and tranquility. I’d like to think I’m eating an egg laid by a contented bird or a leg from a clucker that was happy as a clam before it went the way chickens were created to go.
But I wonder if I could be forgiven (probably not) for wondering how much actually registers in a chicken’s very small brain. When I was a kid visiting my grandparents at Robert Lee, Texas, I remember Granddaddy walking out the back door of the house and into the “pen.” He deftly chased down a chicken, caught it by the neck, made a wish (maybe), twirled it the way he might have cranked the engine on a Ford Model T car, and off flopped the bird’s head.
What happened next surprised me. The now-headless brainless bird began to run wildly all around the pen. For chickens, at least for a little while, brains are evidently optional accessories.
I learned a good bit watching Granddaddy that day. I was a city kid. We bought chickens at the grocery store; we didn’t catch them behind our house and personally dispatch them before they hit the frying pan.
Recently, it seems that the PETA folks (all city-bred, I’d wager) wanted the folks in Turkey, Texas, where my wife’s from, to renounce real turkey on Thanksgiving and rename the town Tofurkey for a week. It didn’t happen. Folks from turkey use their brains. They know what turkey is for, and they know that tofu ain’t turkey. So, no Tofurkey.
Thanksgiving is all about being grateful to God for his good gifts. Turkeys are among his good gifts, and my gratitude for them reaches its highest point at the moment I’m eating them and thereby ensuring that many, many more will be produced than if we declared them off-limits and gorged ourselves on tofu.
So, no pardon for turkeys during the Shelburne administration. No tofu, either. We’re supposed to be thankful “in all circumstances,” but I think eating tofu at Thanksgiving would make gratitude particularly challenging.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I’m sorry if that flies in the face of tradition, but if it’s ever up to me, that bird’s a goner. If you disagree, fine. Pray all you want for a “stay of execution.” My prayer will simply be that the white meat be as juicy and tender as the dark meat and that it not be overcooked.
Our nation has recently been embroiled in a poultry scandal. A major supplier of eggs (chicken eggs, not turkey eggs) has come under fire for alleged cruelty to chickens.
I’m all for kindness to animals of all sorts. I don’t even like the idea of anybody pulling the wings off of flies, though, with apologies to frogs and users of medical maggots, and admitting there’d likely be some negative ecological consequences, I’d be quite happy if they’d all die (flies, that is). “Suffer not a fly to live” is my motto. But I don’t see any reason to be mean even to a fly before splattering its innards across a flyswatter.
On up the scale, I’d say chickens are even more deserving of kindness. Down with cruelty to cluckers! They should be free to lay their eggs in peace and tranquility. I’d like to think I’m eating an egg laid by a contented bird or a leg from a clucker that was happy as a clam before it went the way chickens were created to go.
But I wonder if I could be forgiven (probably not) for wondering how much actually registers in a chicken’s very small brain. When I was a kid visiting my grandparents at Robert Lee, Texas, I remember Granddaddy walking out the back door of the house and into the “pen.” He deftly chased down a chicken, caught it by the neck, made a wish (maybe), twirled it the way he might have cranked the engine on a Ford Model T car, and off flopped the bird’s head.
What happened next surprised me. The now-headless brainless bird began to run wildly all around the pen. For chickens, at least for a little while, brains are evidently optional accessories.
I learned a good bit watching Granddaddy that day. I was a city kid. We bought chickens at the grocery store; we didn’t catch them behind our house and personally dispatch them before they hit the frying pan.
Recently, it seems that the PETA folks (all city-bred, I’d wager) wanted the folks in Turkey, Texas, where my wife’s from, to renounce real turkey on Thanksgiving and rename the town Tofurkey for a week. It didn’t happen. Folks from turkey use their brains. They know what turkey is for, and they know that tofu ain’t turkey. So, no Tofurkey.
Thanksgiving is all about being grateful to God for his good gifts. Turkeys are among his good gifts, and my gratitude for them reaches its highest point at the moment I’m eating them and thereby ensuring that many, many more will be produced than if we declared them off-limits and gorged ourselves on tofu.
So, no pardon for turkeys during the Shelburne administration. No tofu, either. We’re supposed to be thankful “in all circumstances,” but I think eating tofu at Thanksgiving would make gratitude particularly challenging.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, November 21, 2011
God's People Are to "Overflow" With Thanksgiving
Sometimes we just make things too hard.
I was listening to one of Garrison Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” stories one day as he was talking about the deer hunting season that had just closed up in (fictitious) Lake Wobegon right before Thanksgiving.
Keillor painted a word picture (which I’ve embellished a bit) of the locals watching as city folks came up in droves in their high dollar Hummers and SUVs. The city guys flocking over to the Chatterbox Cafe for Dorothy’s coffee (any way you want it as long as it’s black and doesn’t end in é—as in latté or brevé) and a chance to retell last year’s hunting tales, were armed with brand new rifles with electronic scopes. They had their faces painted black, anti-scent scent sprayed all over their skin and the “camo” clothing engulfing their bodies, a dozen assorted deer calls stuck in their pockets along with their GPS devices, and you knew they’d just been tracking deer because of the tell-tale pieces of bark still stuck behind their ears from the tree branches they’d been wearing on top of their hats. If you walked in the café door and hollered, “Hey, Bubba!” half the guys in the restaurant would break their necks even though these guys might be computer programmers or investment financiers in their day jobs. They went up to Lake Wobegon both to bag a deer and to snag the unique excitement that buying meet at $200 per pound gives.
But the local guys who can go out and get a deer pretty much whenever they want one? Keillor says they drive out and park their old pickups, set up purple & lilac recliners, smoke cigars, play cards, tell jokes (often about city boys who dress like Rambo and spend $200 per pound for meat) and “ever so often a deer comes along and they shoot him.”
I’ll leave you to guess whose deer-bagging average is better.
Sometimes we just make things too hard.
Like giving thanks.
I’ll admit it—some biblical commands in that regard are a bit daunting. Giving thanks “in all circumstances” is a pretty tall order. I’m still working on “most”—with somewhat modest results. “In everything give thanks”? Well, ditto.
I’m afraid the witness of the church and Christian experience is unanimous: we don’t get to pick just the easy commands to try to obey. But the “giving thanks” injunction I’m focusing on this week, also from St. Paul’s pen, is this one: “overflow with thanksgiving.”
In my experience, “overflowing” usually holds a significant element of surprise. I’m thinking of “overflowing” sorts of experiences after eating too much Halloween candy as a child. Or too much paper down the porcelain. Or forgetting to turn off the water while filling the baptistry. Nobody plans those things; they surprise you—negatively.
Ah, but “overflowing” with thanksgiving is a great experience! First, we choose to be grateful people. Then God surprises us by opening our eyes over and over again to the bottomless depth of his goodness and grace, and the countless reasons, large and small, we have to be thankful.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I was listening to one of Garrison Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” stories one day as he was talking about the deer hunting season that had just closed up in (fictitious) Lake Wobegon right before Thanksgiving.
Keillor painted a word picture (which I’ve embellished a bit) of the locals watching as city folks came up in droves in their high dollar Hummers and SUVs. The city guys flocking over to the Chatterbox Cafe for Dorothy’s coffee (any way you want it as long as it’s black and doesn’t end in é—as in latté or brevé) and a chance to retell last year’s hunting tales, were armed with brand new rifles with electronic scopes. They had their faces painted black, anti-scent scent sprayed all over their skin and the “camo” clothing engulfing their bodies, a dozen assorted deer calls stuck in their pockets along with their GPS devices, and you knew they’d just been tracking deer because of the tell-tale pieces of bark still stuck behind their ears from the tree branches they’d been wearing on top of their hats. If you walked in the café door and hollered, “Hey, Bubba!” half the guys in the restaurant would break their necks even though these guys might be computer programmers or investment financiers in their day jobs. They went up to Lake Wobegon both to bag a deer and to snag the unique excitement that buying meet at $200 per pound gives.
But the local guys who can go out and get a deer pretty much whenever they want one? Keillor says they drive out and park their old pickups, set up purple & lilac recliners, smoke cigars, play cards, tell jokes (often about city boys who dress like Rambo and spend $200 per pound for meat) and “ever so often a deer comes along and they shoot him.”
I’ll leave you to guess whose deer-bagging average is better.
Sometimes we just make things too hard.
Like giving thanks.
I’ll admit it—some biblical commands in that regard are a bit daunting. Giving thanks “in all circumstances” is a pretty tall order. I’m still working on “most”—with somewhat modest results. “In everything give thanks”? Well, ditto.
I’m afraid the witness of the church and Christian experience is unanimous: we don’t get to pick just the easy commands to try to obey. But the “giving thanks” injunction I’m focusing on this week, also from St. Paul’s pen, is this one: “overflow with thanksgiving.”
In my experience, “overflowing” usually holds a significant element of surprise. I’m thinking of “overflowing” sorts of experiences after eating too much Halloween candy as a child. Or too much paper down the porcelain. Or forgetting to turn off the water while filling the baptistry. Nobody plans those things; they surprise you—negatively.
Ah, but “overflowing” with thanksgiving is a great experience! First, we choose to be grateful people. Then God surprises us by opening our eyes over and over again to the bottomless depth of his goodness and grace, and the countless reasons, large and small, we have to be thankful.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, November 14, 2011
A Tale of Wind and Sausage, War and Beauty
The wind showed up early last Sunday. The country around here doesn’t need even close to that much of a head-start to be flying by in dingy brown grit-clouds and switching counties by noon. The afternoon would be a brown mess, best ridden out inside with doors and windows sealed, a comforter pulled over your head, and your eyes inspecting the inside of your own eyelids. To top it off, I was already half gone, punch-drunk by the “one-two” combo of a cold and cold medicine.
But we’d already made plans with friends for a Sunday noon trip to Umbarger, Texas, for lunch, an opportunity to do our part in bettering Protestant/Catholic relations.
For scads of years, the good folks in Umbarger have been preparing at St. Mary’s Catholic Church parish hall 3,000 pounds or so of sausage and a corresponding amount of homemade sauerkraut to the annual gastronomic delight of thousands of faithful diners. You may now count me among the faithful. Having braved Sunday’s weather to successfully marinate my taste buds, I’m hooked, and I’ll be back.
Following the meal in the parish hall came for me an unexpected delight. Invited to walk through the church, we were treated to a feast of beauty. World-class stained glass. Beautiful and obviously professionally-painted murals. Amazing! As is their story.
The church was built in the 1920’s. In the mid-1940’s the folks there had commissioned those stained glass windows to be constructed in Wisconsin. One of the dear ladies giving us the tour remembered the priest driving her father almost crazy every day asking him to check at the train station yet again to see if the windows had arrived. Finally, they did. But, now what? Ah, the story gets more amazing.
Interned in a POW camp outside nearby Hereford, Texas, were 7000 Italian soldiers. The priest made arrangements with the authorities, and nine of those prisoners made the trip to Umbarger every day. With great skill, they installed the windows. Three were professionally-trained artists, and they lovingly painted the murals and hand-carved “the Last Supper” into the altar. The war was ending, and neither the priest nor the artisans were sure they’d finish, but they did, beautifully.
Heading home, we detoured three miles south of Hereford. Out in the middle of a field are the only remains of the old POW camp—a large concrete water tower and, lovingly built, a small chapel crafted by the Italian prisoners in memory of five of their comrades who died as captives.
When the war ended, all of the prisoners were shipped home to Italy, but some chose to bring their families back here to live in the U.S., pointing up a massive difference between the experience of American POWs in Germany and Japan, and Axis POWs here. Draw your own very important conclusions.
A remarkable story. War and all kinds of strife separate people. But those who honor Christ can share his love and beauty even in very difficult times.
Sharing some good sausage and sauerkraut doesn’t hurt, either.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
But we’d already made plans with friends for a Sunday noon trip to Umbarger, Texas, for lunch, an opportunity to do our part in bettering Protestant/Catholic relations.
For scads of years, the good folks in Umbarger have been preparing at St. Mary’s Catholic Church parish hall 3,000 pounds or so of sausage and a corresponding amount of homemade sauerkraut to the annual gastronomic delight of thousands of faithful diners. You may now count me among the faithful. Having braved Sunday’s weather to successfully marinate my taste buds, I’m hooked, and I’ll be back.
Following the meal in the parish hall came for me an unexpected delight. Invited to walk through the church, we were treated to a feast of beauty. World-class stained glass. Beautiful and obviously professionally-painted murals. Amazing! As is their story.
The church was built in the 1920’s. In the mid-1940’s the folks there had commissioned those stained glass windows to be constructed in Wisconsin. One of the dear ladies giving us the tour remembered the priest driving her father almost crazy every day asking him to check at the train station yet again to see if the windows had arrived. Finally, they did. But, now what? Ah, the story gets more amazing.
Interned in a POW camp outside nearby Hereford, Texas, were 7000 Italian soldiers. The priest made arrangements with the authorities, and nine of those prisoners made the trip to Umbarger every day. With great skill, they installed the windows. Three were professionally-trained artists, and they lovingly painted the murals and hand-carved “the Last Supper” into the altar. The war was ending, and neither the priest nor the artisans were sure they’d finish, but they did, beautifully.
Heading home, we detoured three miles south of Hereford. Out in the middle of a field are the only remains of the old POW camp—a large concrete water tower and, lovingly built, a small chapel crafted by the Italian prisoners in memory of five of their comrades who died as captives.
When the war ended, all of the prisoners were shipped home to Italy, but some chose to bring their families back here to live in the U.S., pointing up a massive difference between the experience of American POWs in Germany and Japan, and Axis POWs here. Draw your own very important conclusions.
A remarkable story. War and all kinds of strife separate people. But those who honor Christ can share his love and beauty even in very difficult times.
Sharing some good sausage and sauerkraut doesn’t hurt, either.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, November 7, 2011
How Can a Good and Powerful God Allow Suffering?
How can a good and powerful God allow suffering?
That has always been a good and powerful question, and one asked most often and most poignantly in the midst of shock, pain, and perplexity.
The question defies easy and glib answers. Pain is a caustic solvent that melts away easy answers and plastic platitudes. The answer of the Christian faith is not easy, and it is given through tears.
If God is absolutely good and powerful, and nothing less than completely loving, how can he allow suffering?
Perhaps the deepest answer is itself an even more difficult question: “How can even a good, powerful, and loving God not allow suffering?”
When God created humanity in his own image, he gave us the amazing gift which gives life and love meaning but which necessarily also opens us up to pain. He gave us free will.
God gave us the capacity to choose good or to choose evil. Puppets dangling from a divine string would never make the wrong move or dance the wrong dance, but would their dancing have any meaning or joy at all? And if the terrible choice for hate and evil and despair were no option at all, would choosing for love and goodness and hope hold any real meaning or joy at all?
In a free universe, our choices are invested with deep meaning. Would the love of your spouse so warm your heart if they had no choice but to give it? Would the hugs of your three-year-old daughter so light up your life if there were no possibility that she might choose to turn away? Would our love of the God of all joy and light mean anything if he had not given us the freedom to choose to spurn him and follow evil and the Prince of Darkness instead? And choices must have consequences.
It’s one thing to ask those questions when life seems good. It’s quite another to ask them when the whole fabric of your universe seems to have been ripped into shreds and pain and evil and wickedness seem to be masters of the day. Most of us have seen those times. But thank God himself that we have also seen the awesome power of goodness, fierce love, and nobility even in the midst of the deepest pain.
How we wish there were another way, but God himself could not create a universe where we could see the beauty of the one without the terrible possibility of the other. Christianity asserts that ours is a God so good, so powerful, and so loving, that through his own unfathomable pain, he gave his Son to save us from evil so that one eternal day pain and suffering will be forever banished.
“Weeping may tarry for the night,” writes the Psalmist, “but joy comes in the morning.”
Dear God, when we or those we love are walking through a long and exceedingly dark and difficult night, grant us the faith, the strength, and the vision only you can give as we look up for the light of the morning.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
That has always been a good and powerful question, and one asked most often and most poignantly in the midst of shock, pain, and perplexity.
The question defies easy and glib answers. Pain is a caustic solvent that melts away easy answers and plastic platitudes. The answer of the Christian faith is not easy, and it is given through tears.
If God is absolutely good and powerful, and nothing less than completely loving, how can he allow suffering?
Perhaps the deepest answer is itself an even more difficult question: “How can even a good, powerful, and loving God not allow suffering?”
When God created humanity in his own image, he gave us the amazing gift which gives life and love meaning but which necessarily also opens us up to pain. He gave us free will.
God gave us the capacity to choose good or to choose evil. Puppets dangling from a divine string would never make the wrong move or dance the wrong dance, but would their dancing have any meaning or joy at all? And if the terrible choice for hate and evil and despair were no option at all, would choosing for love and goodness and hope hold any real meaning or joy at all?
In a free universe, our choices are invested with deep meaning. Would the love of your spouse so warm your heart if they had no choice but to give it? Would the hugs of your three-year-old daughter so light up your life if there were no possibility that she might choose to turn away? Would our love of the God of all joy and light mean anything if he had not given us the freedom to choose to spurn him and follow evil and the Prince of Darkness instead? And choices must have consequences.
It’s one thing to ask those questions when life seems good. It’s quite another to ask them when the whole fabric of your universe seems to have been ripped into shreds and pain and evil and wickedness seem to be masters of the day. Most of us have seen those times. But thank God himself that we have also seen the awesome power of goodness, fierce love, and nobility even in the midst of the deepest pain.
How we wish there were another way, but God himself could not create a universe where we could see the beauty of the one without the terrible possibility of the other. Christianity asserts that ours is a God so good, so powerful, and so loving, that through his own unfathomable pain, he gave his Son to save us from evil so that one eternal day pain and suffering will be forever banished.
“Weeping may tarry for the night,” writes the Psalmist, “but joy comes in the morning.”
Dear God, when we or those we love are walking through a long and exceedingly dark and difficult night, grant us the faith, the strength, and the vision only you can give as we look up for the light of the morning.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, October 31, 2011
When God's Answer to His Own Son Was No
The answer was No. At least, it surely seems to walk like a No, talk like a No. I think it was a No.
Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was facing a terrible death and a struggle that would pit him against all the forces of Hell. Praying earnestly in an inner agony louder than the silence of the seemingly peaceful Garden of Gethsemane, the Son begged the Father, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me!”
And the answer was No.
Does that bother you? It does me, both when I forget it and when I remember it.
You see, my faith struggles may once have centered around such questions as “Does God exist? Was Jesus Christ truly the very Son of God, fully human and fully divine?” Those are very big, very important questions, and it really is not a bad thing to revisit them occasionally.
But the longer I walk on my own faith journey, the more “faith struggles” for me seem to be centered around prayer.
I pray, and others pray, and we pray earnestly in a time of deep need for someone that we love deeply. Maybe our anguish doesn’t rival Christ’s in the Garden, but anguish is still at times none too strong a word for the fear, uncertainty, and helplessness we feel in the face of some very severe struggles.
Sometimes, thank God indeed, we get the very answer to our prayers that we most wanted and would have paid any amount of money to receive. The answer comes. Freely. As a gift. A beautiful gift. And the difficulty is removed.
But, too often, from our perspective, the answer is No. It may well be that God is saying, I’ll help you through this, not around it. That can still feel to us very much like a stone-cold, rock-hard No.
Sometimes we forget about the answer Christ received to his own prayer in the Garden. Maybe we’ve been listening too much to some TV preachers and their makeup-caked wives who seem to indicate that nobody who has real faith ever fails to receive the answers they want, and that if you “do prayer right,” you’ll get the “right” answer (meaning, the very answer you most desire). That sounds to me a lot more like an “eye of newt, tongue of frog” sort of magical potion-type approach to prayer than real faith.
But then we remember the prayer in the Garden. Then we remember the answer. Then we remember that the Savior who taught us to pray about all of our needs and make any request of the Father prayed at the hour of his own deepest need, and Christ himself received what certainly seems to us to be a resounding No. And then, pray tell, where does that leave us? With any confidence at all left in prayer?
Maybe it leaves us with some very expensively bought but priceless wisdom. Maybe it leaves us with fewer easy answers but with the incomparable Christ.
We should pray more, not less, and ask for more with more confidence in our Father, not less. But we should also realize that our Lord’s confidence was not really in prayer itself; it was in the deep and abiding love of the Father to whom he prayed.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was facing a terrible death and a struggle that would pit him against all the forces of Hell. Praying earnestly in an inner agony louder than the silence of the seemingly peaceful Garden of Gethsemane, the Son begged the Father, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me!”
And the answer was No.
Does that bother you? It does me, both when I forget it and when I remember it.
You see, my faith struggles may once have centered around such questions as “Does God exist? Was Jesus Christ truly the very Son of God, fully human and fully divine?” Those are very big, very important questions, and it really is not a bad thing to revisit them occasionally.
But the longer I walk on my own faith journey, the more “faith struggles” for me seem to be centered around prayer.
I pray, and others pray, and we pray earnestly in a time of deep need for someone that we love deeply. Maybe our anguish doesn’t rival Christ’s in the Garden, but anguish is still at times none too strong a word for the fear, uncertainty, and helplessness we feel in the face of some very severe struggles.
Sometimes, thank God indeed, we get the very answer to our prayers that we most wanted and would have paid any amount of money to receive. The answer comes. Freely. As a gift. A beautiful gift. And the difficulty is removed.
But, too often, from our perspective, the answer is No. It may well be that God is saying, I’ll help you through this, not around it. That can still feel to us very much like a stone-cold, rock-hard No.
Sometimes we forget about the answer Christ received to his own prayer in the Garden. Maybe we’ve been listening too much to some TV preachers and their makeup-caked wives who seem to indicate that nobody who has real faith ever fails to receive the answers they want, and that if you “do prayer right,” you’ll get the “right” answer (meaning, the very answer you most desire). That sounds to me a lot more like an “eye of newt, tongue of frog” sort of magical potion-type approach to prayer than real faith.
But then we remember the prayer in the Garden. Then we remember the answer. Then we remember that the Savior who taught us to pray about all of our needs and make any request of the Father prayed at the hour of his own deepest need, and Christ himself received what certainly seems to us to be a resounding No. And then, pray tell, where does that leave us? With any confidence at all left in prayer?
Maybe it leaves us with some very expensively bought but priceless wisdom. Maybe it leaves us with fewer easy answers but with the incomparable Christ.
We should pray more, not less, and ask for more with more confidence in our Father, not less. But we should also realize that our Lord’s confidence was not really in prayer itself; it was in the deep and abiding love of the Father to whom he prayed.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Let's Talk About Flat Tires and Faith
Sometimes I think my funny bone is oddly shaped or maybe dislocated. Oh, it’s definitely there and works at least as well as it should, but it also works in inappropriate moments. And what strikes me as funny doesn’t always grab other folks the same way. For example . . .
I was heading down the highway toward home the other day when I noticed two signs, one almost on top of the other. One was a church sign: “House of Faith.” And just next to it was this sign: “Flats Fixed: Five Dollars.”
Okay, so it’s not a knee-slapper, and maybe the combination of those signs would only produce a grin in a theologically-minded preacher. But it does get a smile out of me. And it does make me think.
I know I have an occasional flat tire and, yes, some “flat” days from time to time. If I had enough faith, would I have fewer flats (flat tires, that is)?
Not to pick on any one church, even though this one does happen to sit right by the tire shop, do the most “faith-full” members of the “House of Faith” need the services of the tire shop next door less often than the same church’s Christmas & Easter bunch who wouldn’t know a tithe from a laundry detergent?
I doubt it. I couldn’t prove it, but I suspect that Christians and non-Christians, not to mention committed Christians and lackadaisical Christians, probably have flat tires in about the same rate and proportions.
And I suspect that the same thing is true for heart disease and stroke, cancer and diabetes, etc. Oh, I am sure that a person who is truly in love with the Lord, who displays the “fruit of the Spirit,” who is not given to fits of anger and resentment, who enjoys all of God’s good blessings but is not a slave to any of them—I suspect that person will reap some physical as well as many, many spiritual benefits. Some natural consequences of living a God-centered life are as positively and physically real as some negative consequences of living a self-centered life.
But we all live in the same fallen world. And people who live in this world have flats.
Yes, you might have a flat because you were where you had no business to be. If folks who drive to X-rated “bookstores” always came away with flat tires, they’d probably go there less often. (Would we “go to” pettiness and bitterness less often if “going there” flattened one of our tires?)
But folks also occasionally pick up nails in hospital parking lots while visiting the sick. And we need to be very careful indeed about the conclusions we draw about the “why’s” of hardship and suffering in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. Bad things do happen at times to “good” people who are full of faith.
Just before Jesus healed a man who had been born blind, His disciples asked, “Who sinned? This man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer: “Neither.”
Sometimes when you’re traveling through this world, you just pick up a nail.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I was heading down the highway toward home the other day when I noticed two signs, one almost on top of the other. One was a church sign: “House of Faith.” And just next to it was this sign: “Flats Fixed: Five Dollars.”
Okay, so it’s not a knee-slapper, and maybe the combination of those signs would only produce a grin in a theologically-minded preacher. But it does get a smile out of me. And it does make me think.
I know I have an occasional flat tire and, yes, some “flat” days from time to time. If I had enough faith, would I have fewer flats (flat tires, that is)?
Not to pick on any one church, even though this one does happen to sit right by the tire shop, do the most “faith-full” members of the “House of Faith” need the services of the tire shop next door less often than the same church’s Christmas & Easter bunch who wouldn’t know a tithe from a laundry detergent?
I doubt it. I couldn’t prove it, but I suspect that Christians and non-Christians, not to mention committed Christians and lackadaisical Christians, probably have flat tires in about the same rate and proportions.
And I suspect that the same thing is true for heart disease and stroke, cancer and diabetes, etc. Oh, I am sure that a person who is truly in love with the Lord, who displays the “fruit of the Spirit,” who is not given to fits of anger and resentment, who enjoys all of God’s good blessings but is not a slave to any of them—I suspect that person will reap some physical as well as many, many spiritual benefits. Some natural consequences of living a God-centered life are as positively and physically real as some negative consequences of living a self-centered life.
But we all live in the same fallen world. And people who live in this world have flats.
Yes, you might have a flat because you were where you had no business to be. If folks who drive to X-rated “bookstores” always came away with flat tires, they’d probably go there less often. (Would we “go to” pettiness and bitterness less often if “going there” flattened one of our tires?)
But folks also occasionally pick up nails in hospital parking lots while visiting the sick. And we need to be very careful indeed about the conclusions we draw about the “why’s” of hardship and suffering in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. Bad things do happen at times to “good” people who are full of faith.
Just before Jesus healed a man who had been born blind, His disciples asked, “Who sinned? This man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ answer: “Neither.”
Sometimes when you’re traveling through this world, you just pick up a nail.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, October 17, 2011
An Old Story of One Man's Faith Challenges Our Faith
Long, long ago a very old man stood before the Roman proconsul in Smyrna who literally held over him the power of life or death. Old Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, had been taught by the Apostle John and had known many others who had walked physically with the Lord Jesus Christ and with their own eyes had seen the risen Lord.
The proconsul urged Polycarp, “Have a regard for your age. Swear by Caesar. Swear, and I will dismiss you. Revile Christ.”
The old man replied, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me wrong. How can I now blaspheme my King that has saved me?” And he was burned at the stake rather than deny the Lord.
What a waste! What a senseless sacrifice! Unless, of course, Jesus Christ really is the risen Son of God and truly offers glorious life that never ends.
In some ways, and probably more often than we think, although most of us will never know what it’s like to stand before the authorities and be forced to make such a stark choice, we do indeed meet each day the same decision old Polycarp faced. In attitude and action, do we confess the name of Jesus as Lord or do we deny Him?
To bow quietly before the Lord and spend some time in prayer. What an absolute waste of time! Unless, of course, God really is the Father who delights to hear our prayers and who will always answer with our very best interests at heart.
To roll out of a warm bed on a cold Sunday morning (or whenever) and head down to church to meet with others who love Christ Jesus and honor Him as Lord. What a waste of time and effort! Unless, of course, the Son of God really did walk up a hill carrying a cross for you. For me.
To write a check to a good church doing good work in the name of Christ, an offering to the Lord of the “first fruits” of your hard work. What a complete waste of money! And just think how much nicer your car or house or clothes could be if you didn’t! Ridiculous! Maddening! Unless, of course, God really is God. And God really does own the cattle on a thousand hills. And God really is the Giver of all good gifts and everything we have is really his. And we really believe that it is impossible to out-give our giving God.
If I faced the decision of Polycarp—to choose to die for Christ or not—what would I choose?
I think I can know.
I think the answer is all wrapped up in the answer to this question: Have I chosen right now, in actions and attitudes large and small, to live for the Lord?
And I don’t have to wonder about that. I can know.
So what do you think? Maybe all this faith stuff is just a waste of time and money. But if Jesus really is Lord, unbelief or insipid pseudo-belief will turn out to be a very ugly mistake. It’s not a mistake I want to make.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
The proconsul urged Polycarp, “Have a regard for your age. Swear by Caesar. Swear, and I will dismiss you. Revile Christ.”
The old man replied, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me wrong. How can I now blaspheme my King that has saved me?” And he was burned at the stake rather than deny the Lord.
What a waste! What a senseless sacrifice! Unless, of course, Jesus Christ really is the risen Son of God and truly offers glorious life that never ends.
In some ways, and probably more often than we think, although most of us will never know what it’s like to stand before the authorities and be forced to make such a stark choice, we do indeed meet each day the same decision old Polycarp faced. In attitude and action, do we confess the name of Jesus as Lord or do we deny Him?
To bow quietly before the Lord and spend some time in prayer. What an absolute waste of time! Unless, of course, God really is the Father who delights to hear our prayers and who will always answer with our very best interests at heart.
To roll out of a warm bed on a cold Sunday morning (or whenever) and head down to church to meet with others who love Christ Jesus and honor Him as Lord. What a waste of time and effort! Unless, of course, the Son of God really did walk up a hill carrying a cross for you. For me.
To write a check to a good church doing good work in the name of Christ, an offering to the Lord of the “first fruits” of your hard work. What a complete waste of money! And just think how much nicer your car or house or clothes could be if you didn’t! Ridiculous! Maddening! Unless, of course, God really is God. And God really does own the cattle on a thousand hills. And God really is the Giver of all good gifts and everything we have is really his. And we really believe that it is impossible to out-give our giving God.
If I faced the decision of Polycarp—to choose to die for Christ or not—what would I choose?
I think I can know.
I think the answer is all wrapped up in the answer to this question: Have I chosen right now, in actions and attitudes large and small, to live for the Lord?
And I don’t have to wonder about that. I can know.
So what do you think? Maybe all this faith stuff is just a waste of time and money. But if Jesus really is Lord, unbelief or insipid pseudo-belief will turn out to be a very ugly mistake. It’s not a mistake I want to make.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Satan's Slogan: "It's Not Personal; It's Business!"
“It’s not personal; it’s business.”
I first heard that cold phrase in the 1972 movie The Godfather. Mafia hoodlums would assure the fellow they’re about to “off” that he should feel better about being “whacked” since the aforementioned whacking is “not personal; it’s business.”
I’m told that business tycoon Donald Trump uses the phrase on his so-called “reality” TV show The Apprentice. No surprise.
But “the Donald” quite aside, it’s clear that in our culture, all a person has to do to be considered a “success” is to have a lot of money, regardless of how it is made. So what if it involves legalized “whacking”? Crawling to the “top” over rivals’ bodies and disdaining integrity is “not personal; it’s business.”
With the Mafia, and with cut-throat business, we expect ugliness. But let me tell you where we should never expect it . . .
I’ve seen some odd and interesting mottoes or slogans below some of the church names on church signs, but I’ve not yet seen anything quite this obvious: CHRIST THE REDEEMER CHURCH: Where It’s Not Personal; It’s Business.
No, I’ve not seen it on a sign, but I’m afraid it is all too often the unspoken motto of churches that have sold out to our consumer culture and thus burned incense to our society’s most popular gods.
Eugene Peterson once wrote a letter to a pastoral colleague who was flirting with leaving his present flock for a very large church that was “more promising” and where he could “multiply his effectiveness.” (All the usual pseudo-sanctified buzzwords.)
Be careful! Peterson warned. “Every time the church’s leaders depersonalize, even a little, the worshipping/loving community, the gospel is weakened. And size is the great depersonalizer.”
Peterson didn’t deny that there is a time for ministers to move. He didn’t deny that real spiritual maturity (the Christ-like kind counter to our culture’s values) can grow in large churches, but “only by strenuously going against the grain.” Size makes spiritual growth harder, and not easier, he wrote, because real spiritual growth always takes place in community, not in a crowd.
We easily fall, he warned, to the temptation Christ repudiated as Satan urged him to cast himself off the temple so that angels might save him and crowds might marvel. When we go for the glitz, orchestrate excitement, and play to the faceless crowd, the ecstasy we seek from the crowd is as deadly to our souls as any false high we might seek through illicit drugs or sex. It’s not the joy of God; it’s false joy. And chugging its poison is tempting. It is much easier than adopting the way of the cross. It’s much easier than actually living with, walking with, and caring for sheep who have faces we know.
Christ, the Good Shepherd, knows each of his sheep intimately and by name. Pastors and church leaders should, too.
Thank God, Christ’s church is not business; it’s as absolutely personal as a Father’s tears at the death of His Son.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
I first heard that cold phrase in the 1972 movie The Godfather. Mafia hoodlums would assure the fellow they’re about to “off” that he should feel better about being “whacked” since the aforementioned whacking is “not personal; it’s business.”
I’m told that business tycoon Donald Trump uses the phrase on his so-called “reality” TV show The Apprentice. No surprise.
But “the Donald” quite aside, it’s clear that in our culture, all a person has to do to be considered a “success” is to have a lot of money, regardless of how it is made. So what if it involves legalized “whacking”? Crawling to the “top” over rivals’ bodies and disdaining integrity is “not personal; it’s business.”
With the Mafia, and with cut-throat business, we expect ugliness. But let me tell you where we should never expect it . . .
I’ve seen some odd and interesting mottoes or slogans below some of the church names on church signs, but I’ve not yet seen anything quite this obvious: CHRIST THE REDEEMER CHURCH: Where It’s Not Personal; It’s Business.
No, I’ve not seen it on a sign, but I’m afraid it is all too often the unspoken motto of churches that have sold out to our consumer culture and thus burned incense to our society’s most popular gods.
Eugene Peterson once wrote a letter to a pastoral colleague who was flirting with leaving his present flock for a very large church that was “more promising” and where he could “multiply his effectiveness.” (All the usual pseudo-sanctified buzzwords.)
Be careful! Peterson warned. “Every time the church’s leaders depersonalize, even a little, the worshipping/loving community, the gospel is weakened. And size is the great depersonalizer.”
Peterson didn’t deny that there is a time for ministers to move. He didn’t deny that real spiritual maturity (the Christ-like kind counter to our culture’s values) can grow in large churches, but “only by strenuously going against the grain.” Size makes spiritual growth harder, and not easier, he wrote, because real spiritual growth always takes place in community, not in a crowd.
We easily fall, he warned, to the temptation Christ repudiated as Satan urged him to cast himself off the temple so that angels might save him and crowds might marvel. When we go for the glitz, orchestrate excitement, and play to the faceless crowd, the ecstasy we seek from the crowd is as deadly to our souls as any false high we might seek through illicit drugs or sex. It’s not the joy of God; it’s false joy. And chugging its poison is tempting. It is much easier than adopting the way of the cross. It’s much easier than actually living with, walking with, and caring for sheep who have faces we know.
Christ, the Good Shepherd, knows each of his sheep intimately and by name. Pastors and church leaders should, too.
Thank God, Christ’s church is not business; it’s as absolutely personal as a Father’s tears at the death of His Son.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
God Uses Both Mars and Venus To Make Earth Work
If I ever actually had any doubt (and I didn’t) that, to borrow from the wise guy’s book title, men really are from Mars and women are from Venus, one evening’s dinner drama would have put that doubt to rest yet again.
There was no fuss. My wife and I really don’t fuss much. Well, to be completely accurate, we don’t fuss much REALLY. We fuss all the time good-naturedly, but that’s fun.
Anyway, we’d wasted an hour or so trying to decide what we wanted for dinner. Neither of us was too excited about what was available in the house. We finally decided on the American Heart Association’s old standby, cheese nachos. (Oh, yes, nachos are a heart-healthy food, you see, because of the jalapeños.) By that time, I was really getting hungry and was having visions of nachos resting under the oven broiler, cheese bubbling, jalapeños nicely wrinkling, and tostados sizzling to a dark brown just around the edges. Slap on a little sour cream, if you wish, and . . .
Rats! No jalapeños. How did we run out of that staple item? None in the house.
Back to Square One.
That’s when we decided on pizza. We whipped out the pizza coupons. We ordered. We wrote the check. I was halfway out the door . . .
That’s when my dear wife called out sweetly, “Do you want me to go with you?”
I know now how, Martian that I am, I should have answered this dear Venusian immigrant.
“Why, yes, O love of my life and exalted mother of my children! Yes! Come with me to the Palace of Pizza Delight, O dearest one.”
What I really said, in a hurried tone of surprise and bewilderment, was, “Huh? Well, yeah, okay, if ya want to, but hurry up! I’m starvin’!”
Gentlemen, fellow Martians, if you notice your wife’s lower lip stuck out just a tad after hearing such a reply, you should realize that people of the female persuasion, people from Venus, use this as a non-verbal expression of hurt and displeasure.
Well, she did go with me, and we even had a little time to talk about life and our feelings on the way to and fro. But what this illustrates, yet again, is a fundamental difference between the sexes.
For men, fulfillment comes in reaching a goal. Want pizza? I’ll get it! My plan is to do whatever it takes to focus only on that moment when I’m wrapping my gums around the object of my hunt and greasing my capillaries with juice from Italian sausage!
For women, fulfillment comes through the journey. Want pizza? Well, yes, we’ll enjoy eating it, but just as important as the acquisition is how we get it. “Hey, honey, let’s go together!”
Mark it down, Martians. These principles apply to EVERY area of your marriage. God made us this way, and, thank the Lord, it takes the combined perspective of both Martians and Venusians to make things on Earth work well.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
There was no fuss. My wife and I really don’t fuss much. Well, to be completely accurate, we don’t fuss much REALLY. We fuss all the time good-naturedly, but that’s fun.
Anyway, we’d wasted an hour or so trying to decide what we wanted for dinner. Neither of us was too excited about what was available in the house. We finally decided on the American Heart Association’s old standby, cheese nachos. (Oh, yes, nachos are a heart-healthy food, you see, because of the jalapeños.) By that time, I was really getting hungry and was having visions of nachos resting under the oven broiler, cheese bubbling, jalapeños nicely wrinkling, and tostados sizzling to a dark brown just around the edges. Slap on a little sour cream, if you wish, and . . .
Rats! No jalapeños. How did we run out of that staple item? None in the house.
Back to Square One.
That’s when we decided on pizza. We whipped out the pizza coupons. We ordered. We wrote the check. I was halfway out the door . . .
That’s when my dear wife called out sweetly, “Do you want me to go with you?”
I know now how, Martian that I am, I should have answered this dear Venusian immigrant.
“Why, yes, O love of my life and exalted mother of my children! Yes! Come with me to the Palace of Pizza Delight, O dearest one.”
What I really said, in a hurried tone of surprise and bewilderment, was, “Huh? Well, yeah, okay, if ya want to, but hurry up! I’m starvin’!”
Gentlemen, fellow Martians, if you notice your wife’s lower lip stuck out just a tad after hearing such a reply, you should realize that people of the female persuasion, people from Venus, use this as a non-verbal expression of hurt and displeasure.
Well, she did go with me, and we even had a little time to talk about life and our feelings on the way to and fro. But what this illustrates, yet again, is a fundamental difference between the sexes.
For men, fulfillment comes in reaching a goal. Want pizza? I’ll get it! My plan is to do whatever it takes to focus only on that moment when I’m wrapping my gums around the object of my hunt and greasing my capillaries with juice from Italian sausage!
For women, fulfillment comes through the journey. Want pizza? Well, yes, we’ll enjoy eating it, but just as important as the acquisition is how we get it. “Hey, honey, let’s go together!”
Mark it down, Martians. These principles apply to EVERY area of your marriage. God made us this way, and, thank the Lord, it takes the combined perspective of both Martians and Venusians to make things on Earth work well.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, September 26, 2011
God's Perfect Love Drives Away All Fear
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear . . .” (1 John 4:18).
The little fellow standing on the corner of the street, just down at the end of the block from San Jacinto Elementary School and his second grade class, was trying to be “a big boy,” but the tear-trails mapping their way down his crimson-flushed cheeks were proof positive that it wasn’t working very well.
Maybe big boys—you know, those third-, fourth-, or fifth-grade boys, or even those sixth grade pseudo-gods who ruled the elementary school roost, the unchallenged kings of the puerile pecking order—maybe they would have handled the calamity sans tears. He could hardly imagine a sixth-grader in tears.
But he was just a little guy. And he was standing there, waiting on his usual corner for his mom to pick him up, just as usual, but on this particular day he was holding in trembling little hands a damaged paper bag. Several streams of what looked like colored sand were slowly leaking out in hour-glass fashion from several punctures in the paper bag. The smell of perfumed soap crystals bore mute witness that the “sand grains” were in fact bath salts.
Those colored bath salts had been carefully layered into a little jar in rainbow fashion to form a second-grader’s gift to his mother for the upcoming Mother’s Day. But that was before the sack and its love-laced contents had been dropped by clumsy second-grade hands, completely accidentally but with complete devastation, to the ground.
The colors of the rainbow, now indistinct, loosed, and effectively destroyed, mingled with shards of glass in the sack which just a few moments ago had been the humble enclosure for a treasured gift and now was just a sack for trash.
I still remember the tears rolling down my cheeks.
But you know the end of the story, don’t you? You know that my tears soon dried as my mother’s kiss and her warm embrace proved yet again that she loved the giver more than the gift and, even broken, my gift was to her, beautiful.
I wasn’t really afraid that day that I might lose my mother’s love. It just broke my heart to break her gift.
But I know now that even big boys and girls sometimes stand in one of life’s corners with tears streaming down their cheeks. And they—we—are indeed afraid.
We’re afraid because we realize that the gift we so wanted to give our Father is broken, and shattered, and lying in pitiful pieces.
We’re afraid because the gift of pure lives that we so wanted to present as the tribute of love now seems anything but pure. Twisted and marred, it’s no longer beautiful.
We’re afraid.
But we needn’t be.
Our Father, our God of all grace, drives away all fear, kisses away all tears, hugs away all humiliation, and wraps up the tear-streaked beloved in the warm embrace of perfect love.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
The little fellow standing on the corner of the street, just down at the end of the block from San Jacinto Elementary School and his second grade class, was trying to be “a big boy,” but the tear-trails mapping their way down his crimson-flushed cheeks were proof positive that it wasn’t working very well.
Maybe big boys—you know, those third-, fourth-, or fifth-grade boys, or even those sixth grade pseudo-gods who ruled the elementary school roost, the unchallenged kings of the puerile pecking order—maybe they would have handled the calamity sans tears. He could hardly imagine a sixth-grader in tears.
But he was just a little guy. And he was standing there, waiting on his usual corner for his mom to pick him up, just as usual, but on this particular day he was holding in trembling little hands a damaged paper bag. Several streams of what looked like colored sand were slowly leaking out in hour-glass fashion from several punctures in the paper bag. The smell of perfumed soap crystals bore mute witness that the “sand grains” were in fact bath salts.
Those colored bath salts had been carefully layered into a little jar in rainbow fashion to form a second-grader’s gift to his mother for the upcoming Mother’s Day. But that was before the sack and its love-laced contents had been dropped by clumsy second-grade hands, completely accidentally but with complete devastation, to the ground.
The colors of the rainbow, now indistinct, loosed, and effectively destroyed, mingled with shards of glass in the sack which just a few moments ago had been the humble enclosure for a treasured gift and now was just a sack for trash.
I still remember the tears rolling down my cheeks.
But you know the end of the story, don’t you? You know that my tears soon dried as my mother’s kiss and her warm embrace proved yet again that she loved the giver more than the gift and, even broken, my gift was to her, beautiful.
I wasn’t really afraid that day that I might lose my mother’s love. It just broke my heart to break her gift.
But I know now that even big boys and girls sometimes stand in one of life’s corners with tears streaming down their cheeks. And they—we—are indeed afraid.
We’re afraid because we realize that the gift we so wanted to give our Father is broken, and shattered, and lying in pitiful pieces.
We’re afraid because the gift of pure lives that we so wanted to present as the tribute of love now seems anything but pure. Twisted and marred, it’s no longer beautiful.
We’re afraid.
But we needn’t be.
Our Father, our God of all grace, drives away all fear, kisses away all tears, hugs away all humiliation, and wraps up the tear-streaked beloved in the warm embrace of perfect love.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Don't Be One of Job's Friends!
The Book of Job is the textbook on suffering.
Open that Bible book and you’ll see an extraordinarily good man undergoing extraordinarily terrible affliction. He loses his family (except his wife, and keeping her might easily be counted among his afflictions), his wealth, and his health. He’s reduced to sitting on a pile of ashes, scraping his many sores, and praying to die. He is a picture of complete misery.
As if he weren’t already miserable enough, Job has a visit from three “friends.” The wretched fellow is in such terrible shape that they don’t even recognize him at first, but when they do, they break into such a frenzy of wailing and grief that one would think Job had already died.
In fact, I’m told that the kind of wailing they undertake is precisely the kind that happened in that culture when the undertaker had already been called!
For seven days, they sit viewing the “not yet dead” body of their friend, acting as if he were already dead, and then they undertake a premature post mortem of his trouble.
They speak. And they shouldn’t have. These “miserable comforters” begin to debate the man they’d come to console. The question is, “Why do the righteous suffer?” Job’s friends have a quick answer: “They don’t! ’Fess up, Job! What have you done to deserve this pain? We know that the righteous always prosper; only the wicked suffer.”
We do? Since when? No, it just doesn’t work that way, does it? One wonders what world Job’s friends had been living in. It certainly wasn’t the world you and I live in.
Unfortunately, Job’s friends are still around. “Turn your life over to the Lord,” they preach, “and all your troubles will be over. Life will be for you beautiful, rosy, and probably prosperous.” And then, if life is not? “What is wrong with your faith? What sin lurks in your life?”
Job’s friends.
Maybe Job’s original friends had some excuse for their folly, but their modern counterparts who can read the New Testament should know better.
They should hear the Apostle Paul telling persecuted believers, “We did not want any of you to lose heart at the troubles you were going through, but to realize that Christians must expect such things.”
They should listen to Jesus’ own words: “In this world, you will have trouble . . .”
Or they can simply look at the cross and see what the world did to the best man who ever lived.
A time of trouble is a good time to pray for stronger faith. And any time is a good time for humble self-examination.
But when trouble comes, don’t pay too much attention to Job’s friends. They were dead wrong then. And they’re almost always dead wrong now.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Open that Bible book and you’ll see an extraordinarily good man undergoing extraordinarily terrible affliction. He loses his family (except his wife, and keeping her might easily be counted among his afflictions), his wealth, and his health. He’s reduced to sitting on a pile of ashes, scraping his many sores, and praying to die. He is a picture of complete misery.
As if he weren’t already miserable enough, Job has a visit from three “friends.” The wretched fellow is in such terrible shape that they don’t even recognize him at first, but when they do, they break into such a frenzy of wailing and grief that one would think Job had already died.
In fact, I’m told that the kind of wailing they undertake is precisely the kind that happened in that culture when the undertaker had already been called!
For seven days, they sit viewing the “not yet dead” body of their friend, acting as if he were already dead, and then they undertake a premature post mortem of his trouble.
They speak. And they shouldn’t have. These “miserable comforters” begin to debate the man they’d come to console. The question is, “Why do the righteous suffer?” Job’s friends have a quick answer: “They don’t! ’Fess up, Job! What have you done to deserve this pain? We know that the righteous always prosper; only the wicked suffer.”
We do? Since when? No, it just doesn’t work that way, does it? One wonders what world Job’s friends had been living in. It certainly wasn’t the world you and I live in.
Unfortunately, Job’s friends are still around. “Turn your life over to the Lord,” they preach, “and all your troubles will be over. Life will be for you beautiful, rosy, and probably prosperous.” And then, if life is not? “What is wrong with your faith? What sin lurks in your life?”
Job’s friends.
Maybe Job’s original friends had some excuse for their folly, but their modern counterparts who can read the New Testament should know better.
They should hear the Apostle Paul telling persecuted believers, “We did not want any of you to lose heart at the troubles you were going through, but to realize that Christians must expect such things.”
They should listen to Jesus’ own words: “In this world, you will have trouble . . .”
Or they can simply look at the cross and see what the world did to the best man who ever lived.
A time of trouble is a good time to pray for stronger faith. And any time is a good time for humble self-examination.
But when trouble comes, don’t pay too much attention to Job’s friends. They were dead wrong then. And they’re almost always dead wrong now.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Pride Is the Bait on All Sorts of Hooks
I still remember a letter I received some years ago now. I was being invited to shell out $35 for a volume entitled, The World Book of Shelburnes.
According to the letter, “extensive work has been done throughout the world on a project relating to the distinguished Shelburne name.” This work will focus on Shelburnes “who immigrated to the New World between the 16th and early 20th centuries.”
Wow! That made me feel privileged. Absolutely unique. One of a kind. Wonder why they sent the letter bulk rate?
I read on.
“The first Shelburne we found came to Charles Town, South Carolina, in 1767. Her name was Margaret.” Hmm.
“Shelburne” is plastered all over the letter. Twenty times in one page. Coupled more than once with the adjective “distinguished.”
Makes me wonder why they wrote in bold print on the order form: No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended. So they could just as easily have peddled The World Book of Shelburnes to Joneses, Smiths, or McGrady’s?
I hadn’t read a full paragraph into the letter before I recognized that old “The circus is in town! Hang on to your wallet!” feeling.
Pardon me, but I’m pretty sure peddlers who pitch to our pride speak with forked tongues.
It happened in Eden, remember? The combination of a smooth-talking serpent, Adam & Eve’s abysmal lack of sales resistance, and an unvarnished appeal to sinful pride (“Eat this, and you’ll be like God!”) brought cockleburs to Paradise.
I’m happy to wear the Shelburne name. And I think I could point you to a few other wearers of the monicker who’ve done it some honor.
But I’m also quite sure a little real research would turn up a horse thief or two. And I suspect the primary finding of such research would be that Shelburnes are people just like everybody else.
You can extend that truth, if you wish. I’m very proud to be an American, a Texan, a citizen of Muleshoe, but I’m not such a mule that I’m blind to weaknesses or unaware that some other fine nations, states, and cities exist.
And, if I read my Bible correctly, there is, for those who wear the name of Christ, a great deal of room for confidence in Christ and his cross, but no room at all for arrogance regarding MY group, MY sect, MY tradition, or MY righteousness. When Christ died for us all, even the most unworthy, the Father plugged forever the last rat-hole open to human pride.
Whenever you suspect a peddler on your porch, at a political rally, in a pulpit, or using a bulk mail permit is baiting you with pride, watch out! Some unscrupulous angler is getting ready to set the hook and reel you in.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Mister Frisbie and the Music of God's Joy
I’m pretty sure I just participated in “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”
Several hundred of Mr. Frank Frisbie’s former students—“his kids,” as he has always called us—and many friends gathered at Amarillo’s Tascosa High School to surprise our former choir director on his 75th birthday and to say “thank you” to this dear man. We arrived early, rehearsed, ate lunch, and then once Mr. Frisbie was ushered in and got his breath back after the surprise, honored him with a concert.
Billy Talley directed us. He’s a good friend, cut from the same fine cloth as Mr. Frisbie, and has been Tascosa’s choir director now for almost three decades. The first quartet song I ever attempted to sing in public I sang with Billy Talley. Practice went fine. But at the real deal we each somehow started in a different key. Crashed and burned. The song? “No Tears in Heaven.”
Billy led us as we sang in Mr. Frisbie’s honor. Then our teacher himself directed us. I stood singing on the risers beside my brother (also one of Mr. Frisbie’s kids and now his pastor), and the years fell away. (Nothing else fell. By now Mr. Frisbie’s “kids” are mostly at the age where horseplay on the risers and a fall might not mean a trip to a nursing home but . . .). Amazing! To be standing back where I’d stood so many times so many years before, being directed again by such an influential person in my life.
In 1974-75, I was the choir president at Tascosa and spent a good bit of every day with Mr. Frisbie. As I actually had about three periods of choir each day during my senior year, most of my days were spent singing or getting ready to sing. During special times, we Freedom Singers spent more time away from school singing all around Amarillo than we did in class. It didn’t hurt us. It blessed us. And one of the best blessings was learning about life from this good man of deep faith.
On a One to Ten scale of tender hearts, Mr. Frisbie was always an Eleven. Beauty. Pain. Laughter. Love. All of the above and so much more would move this good man to tears. Maybe one of the reasons his heart has always been so good is that it has always been washed so often.
As he directed us again and we sang, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You,” I was half an inch away from washing the back row of basses off the risers with tears of my own. I would have done so unashamedly had I not so wanted to keep honoring him in song.
Mr. Frisbie has never stopped teaching. His life teaches me that life can be breathtakingly beautiful and filled with joy. His life also teaches me that sometimes life is difficult and poignantly painful. But Mr. Frisbie’s best lesson is that life is not God. Only God is God, and the God who is the Source of all goodness and love, all beauty and joy, loves “His kids” completely. He will walk with us through it all. One day we’ll lift hearts and voices together in a concert that will never end.
No tears in heaven? Well, none of the pain-filled kind. But I’m betting tears of deepest and purest joy will flow wonderfully. Mr. Frisbie has taught me that.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Bigger Is Most Certainly NOT Always Better
Of the multitude of really foolish ideas our society naively buys as unquestionably true, one of its most foolish, fiercely held, and utterly false beliefs is this: bigger is always better.
In 1927 British essayist and author G. K. Chesterton, in a book entitled The Outline of Sanity, wrote about what he called “The Bluff of the Big Shops.”
Chesterton wrote more than 35 years before Walmarts and such would begin metastasizing all over America and beyond, but already in England he was seeing little shops being gobbled up by big, and thus supposedly better, shops. He wrote an essay basically asserting that big stores are rarely ever better than small stores and that a society that allows its little shops to be gobbled up by big ones ends up far poorer for its folly. An honest (big) newspaper editor told him they couldn’t print it without alienating big advertisers (“big shops”). So Chesterton simply included his thoughts in a book instead of a newspaper.
He wrote that “a big shop is a bad shop” and “not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable.” He opined that “shopping there is not only a bad action but a bad bargain.” If you care about the quality of the product and the quality of the service, bigger is almost never better.
To use Chesterton’s illustration, it’s not true that having a hundred people trimming hats or tying bouquets means that you’ll end up with many more quality products and many more happy customers. The best work will always be done by “a particular craftsman for a particular customer with particular ribbons and flowers.” (Imagine that!)
If you have a blunder in a small shop the “individual customer can curse the individual shopkeeper.” Or, if he’s a nicer sort—forget the cursing—he has an opportunity to talk to a shopkeeper he knows and who cares about his business, rather than a person who is a cog in an impersonal machine.
Oh, but it’s so convenient that all those products are there in the same place. Really? In Chesterton’s England shopping in big shops simply meant that you walked indoors a long way in one shop rather than outdoors the same distance to smaller ones.
The largeness of the big shops is mainly convenient to big shop owners who are able to gobble up “better businesses and advertise worse goods.” Chesterton was quite aware that in this world big fish eat little fish, but he doubted that little fish have to “swim up to big fish and ask to be eaten.” Surely people who recognize the importance and value of little stores would do well to “vote” with their feet and their pocketbooks while some small stores with large quality (and owners and customers with real relationships) were still un-gobbled and available. Little did he know how few “little fish” would remain undigested.
Well, I’m out of space. So we’ll just let this week’s “Focus on Faith” focus instead on modern marketing. Don’t be blaming me for any comparisons or contrasts you might be tempted to draw between mega-marts and, say, some mega-churches.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Genuine Holiness Is God's Light, Not Mankind's
A “rustler’s moon.” That’s what cowboys used to call a quarter moon. It was bright enough that a rustler could see to carry out his cattle filching, but it was not so bright as to spotlight his thievery.
But here’s a fact likely lost on all but your most astronomically-gifted cattle rustlers: be it quarter moon, half moon, 13/16 moon, or blue moon, not a single photon of the “light of the silvery moon” is its own; every ray is actually the light of the blazing sun.
I think a valuable lesson lurks in the moonlight. Christ has called his disciples to be light in a dark world, but not a spark of it is ours; it is all reflected from the Son. If it is his, what business do we have being haughty about shining?
Some of the prevalent ideas about holiness are not all that shiny. The biggest mistake is humanity’s favorite folly: we focus on us and not on God. We like to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” light our own sparklers. We stand before his much-more-than-nuclear “consuming fire” proud as Punch of the firefly “holiness” we’ve caught in our own little paper bag.
Focusing on ourselves, we tend to be more sanctimonious than sanctified, sewing scarlet letters on sinners while harboring far worse sins in our own souls.
Focusing on ourselves, we focus on externals. Remember Jesus making fun of scrupulous Pharisees washing the outside of their dishes but leaving last week’s dinner to mold inside?
Real holiness is not focused on self at all. It is not sterile, not colorless, not short on blood and long on hypocrisy. It is most certainly not joyless. It overflows with the very life and joy of God.
Genuine holiness is not all about being knotted up by the “nots”: “touch not, taste not, handle not” (Colossians 2). When I make holiness something about my light rather than God’s, one more tribute to my hard work, willpower, and fine character, just one more sticky note stuck on the mirror—“Be holy” right alongside “Don’t forget to floss”—I create a sad caricature of the real thing.
Instead of becoming more like God, I become a pretentiously pious, persnickety, pain in the tail section, “evaluating” everyone else’s holiness by the twisted knots in my own self-focused tale rather than living joyfully into the wonderful story of the God whose light I was created to reflect.
I’ve long quoted the Apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 2, reminding us that salvation is the gift of God, by grace through faith, “so that no one can boast.” I’m to live as a person who is both saved and being saved. Why? Because I’m God’s, and God is at work in me.
What I’d not so much noticed were the same apostle’s words at the end of First Corinthians 1, reminding us that God’s gifts to us through Christ are righteousness, redemption, and . . . holiness. And then he admonishes, “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” I’m to live as a person who is both holy and being made holy. Why? Because I’m God’s, and God is at work in me.
Real holiness is not centered on me; it is centered on Whose I am. Any light in my life is God’s, not mine.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The Creator of the Universe Can't Be Tied Up in a Box
I once saw John Denver, hair wet and with a clothes bag tossed over his shoulder, heading through a hotel lobby toward the desk. Two weeks or so later, he crashed his plane and died.
Christian author Max Lucado is still very much alive and writing fine books. In his book Fearless he tells about introducing himself to a lady standing in a hotel check-in line with one of his books under her arm. He was hoping that her doctor hadn’t prescribed it as a cure for insomnia.
Well, wide awake she was, but she absolutely refused to believe that the guy talking to her, claiming to be Max Lucado, really was. She didn’t think he looked a thing like the thirty-year-old Max whose picture was on the back cover of her book.
Max finally gave up. The dear lady steadfastly preferred her “Max-in-a-box,” “freeze-framed in a two-by-three image” to the real thing. She missed a nice meeting with the author she admired, but she did provide him with a great illustration for a later book.
Lucado makes the point better than I could, but it really is sad when we make the mistake of preferring “God in a box” to the living Author of life and joy.
In a thousand ways, we try to tie God up in the boxes we prefer. Instead of allowing God to shape us into his image, we want him to look just like us. We much prefer him to be a member in good standing of our particular group and no one else’s. We want him to share all our pet peeves and prejudices, bless our particular persnicketiness and pious piffle. Frightened of a meeting with the Lion of the tribe of Judah, we like a safe Lord all tied up and constrained, muted and tamed, Christ the King of the universe nicely contained in a cardboard box.
The heart of the problem? Fear.
I wonder if there aren’t a good many folks who know enough about God to worry about the fire of his holiness but not enough about him to feel the warmth and joy of his inexhaustible mercy and love, not enough to let God’s perfect love cast out their fear so that they can respond to his warm embrace? They look at church folks, too often busy tying up God in their own boxes, and naturally wonder about anyone who would try to hold a nuclear reaction in a cardboard box.
And church folks? We’ve long displayed a morbid fascination with walls, be they cardboard or stone. Deep and soul-shrinking fear causes us to trust the walls that constrain and blind us more than we trust the Savior whose pardon and power free us and who will never be content to stay behind the walls we build.
Were it not for soul-throttling fear, we might all step out of our boxes more often, meet more of the family, actually learn something from each other, and together glorify the Lord we can never “manage, control, and predict.”
Two things, at least, are sure. We’ll never get God tame enough to stay in any of our boxes. But that completely untamed Lion loves us all with a joy-filled fierce and beautiful love.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
"Act Like What You Already Are: God's Kids!"
“All through the New Testament,” William Barclay writes, “there rings a plea for Christian unity.” Yes! Jesus himself asked, in his John 17 prayer to the Father, “May they [his disciples] be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me . . .” Evidently Jesus believes that one of the strongest proofs to an unbelieving world that he is indeed God’s Son incarnate is that love for him unites folks who would not normally be united.
Notice that the plea is not for us to somehow create unity between the followers of Jesus Christ; the plea is for us to recognize the unity that already exists through his Spirit.
No one knows what was causing friction between two ladies in Philippi named Euodia and Syntyche, but the Apostle Paul entreats them, “Make up your differences as Christians should.”
Probably both gals were fine Christian women, but their sad claim to fame is that they fussed loudly and longly enough that their quarrel threatened the health of the church they both professed to love. Why did they fuss? What was the issue? Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Which is probably the largest lesson of the tale.
But fuss they did. Over the color of the carpet? Over Sunday School material? (I’m kidding, but I’ll betcha the fuss was in that class of mountainous molehills. By the way, don’t we realize that it’s not good for followers of a crucified Lord to always get our own way?)
Did their quarrel erase the fact that they were both sisters in the Lord? No! The apostle doesn’t write, “Become sisters in Christ!” They already were—even when the fur was flying! What he’s saying is: “Grow up! Act like what you already are—sisters in the Lord.”
I would be a fool if I thought I needed to create brotherhood between my younger brother and myself. He is my brother. Most of the time, I’m even proud to claim him. (Then there was the time he blew the top off the neighbor’s new fencepost . . .) But whether I claim him or not makes absolutely no difference as far as our physical brotherhood goes. We are brothers because we have the same parents. We cannot create brotherhood. But we can recognize and cherish it, and that’s scads more important than one of us “winning” in some fuss.
Sometimes God’s children disagree. Big surprise? Sometimes they quarrel tooth and nail and engage in power plays. Occasionally, they even fuss over something important. Just like, well, just like children.
We Christians should be more interested in lifting Christ up and less interested in winning “holy” wars. Our divisions, whether in the larger Body or within local churches, are a slap in the Father’s face.
But even when we seem the most divided, our job is not to create unity but to recognize the unity that is already there binding believers together simply because we are children of the same Father, bought by the blood of the same Son, and given life by the same Spirit.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Monday, August 1, 2011
A Tale May Be Told By the Length of Chromosome Tails
Have you heard about telomeres?
A telomere is “a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes” (Wikipedia). Hmm.
Telomeres, it seems, are sort of like tails on the ends of our chromosomes. Like the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces, they keep our chromosomes from “fraying” and may have a lot to do with how we age. Young people have the longest telomeres. Their bodies are better able to fight off the effects of aging, such as weakening immune systems, etc. And so, may your chromosomes prosper and their telomeres be long!
A recent morning show segment on telomeres was interesting (and kind of funny). The doctor/reporter gal had made arrangements to have her telomeres tested. (Yes, you can, too, for $249.) They were revealing the results (eight percent margin of error) live on national TV.
Her physical age was on a chart. We waited for her “telomere age” to be banged up there on the same chart. (Yes, how heart-warming to a 54-year-old like me if his telomeres turned out to be what you’d expect in a 45-year-old!)
The doc was 59 (if she was honest), and we watched as her “telomere age” was revealed. Good news! It was a round number. Bad news! It was 70!
She took it pretty womanfully, I guess. She managed to get the words out, “Well, I’m not all that surprised.” Oh, but she looked surprised. She looked like she was trying her best to breathe even though she’d just inhaled a golf ball!
Having recovered somewhat for the camera, she then betrayed, I think, both the arrogance common age-long to the human race, and the particularly striking arrogance of our time. She said, “Well, I’m not too surprised. I grew up in a home with second-hand smoke, and I partied too much sometimes in college.” But since then, she allowed as how she’d lived “a good life.” She didn’t mean morally. She just meant she’d been very serious about stuff like never drinking milk a cow would actually claim, etc.
Well, living smarter will probably help you live longer (and the good doc vowed to be even more serious about it and come back in five years with longer telomeres). But I’ve got news for you: you won’t do everything right. You can’t. And even if you do a bunch right, life has a way of dealing with such arrogance. (The Greeks called it “hubris.” World-class pride.) You’ll slip in the shower and break your neck, or you’ll be such a pain in the neck that somebody will run over you on purpose and put you out of our misery!
The Apostle Paul is surely right: bodily exercise is “of some value.” But let’s be careful not to put all our eggs in this earthly basket. Besides, who in their right mind wants to live to be 120?
If we have no hope beyond this present life, then we’d better fixate on our fraying telomeres. But those who trust in God can live life with hope and joy, knowing that our life both here and hereafter is in good hands.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
A telomere is “a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome, which protects the end of the chromosome from deterioration or from fusion with neighboring chromosomes” (Wikipedia). Hmm.
Telomeres, it seems, are sort of like tails on the ends of our chromosomes. Like the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces, they keep our chromosomes from “fraying” and may have a lot to do with how we age. Young people have the longest telomeres. Their bodies are better able to fight off the effects of aging, such as weakening immune systems, etc. And so, may your chromosomes prosper and their telomeres be long!
A recent morning show segment on telomeres was interesting (and kind of funny). The doctor/reporter gal had made arrangements to have her telomeres tested. (Yes, you can, too, for $249.) They were revealing the results (eight percent margin of error) live on national TV.
Her physical age was on a chart. We waited for her “telomere age” to be banged up there on the same chart. (Yes, how heart-warming to a 54-year-old like me if his telomeres turned out to be what you’d expect in a 45-year-old!)
The doc was 59 (if she was honest), and we watched as her “telomere age” was revealed. Good news! It was a round number. Bad news! It was 70!
She took it pretty womanfully, I guess. She managed to get the words out, “Well, I’m not all that surprised.” Oh, but she looked surprised. She looked like she was trying her best to breathe even though she’d just inhaled a golf ball!
Having recovered somewhat for the camera, she then betrayed, I think, both the arrogance common age-long to the human race, and the particularly striking arrogance of our time. She said, “Well, I’m not too surprised. I grew up in a home with second-hand smoke, and I partied too much sometimes in college.” But since then, she allowed as how she’d lived “a good life.” She didn’t mean morally. She just meant she’d been very serious about stuff like never drinking milk a cow would actually claim, etc.
Well, living smarter will probably help you live longer (and the good doc vowed to be even more serious about it and come back in five years with longer telomeres). But I’ve got news for you: you won’t do everything right. You can’t. And even if you do a bunch right, life has a way of dealing with such arrogance. (The Greeks called it “hubris.” World-class pride.) You’ll slip in the shower and break your neck, or you’ll be such a pain in the neck that somebody will run over you on purpose and put you out of our misery!
The Apostle Paul is surely right: bodily exercise is “of some value.” But let’s be careful not to put all our eggs in this earthly basket. Besides, who in their right mind wants to live to be 120?
If we have no hope beyond this present life, then we’d better fixate on our fraying telomeres. But those who trust in God can live life with hope and joy, knowing that our life both here and hereafter is in good hands.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Thank God for All the Ways the Father Shows Us the Son
Oh, my aching back! I knew it would hurt today. I spent too much time yesterday on a bar stool.
Oh, you thought . . . No, I was sitting on a stool at the “bar” in our kitchen. I like to work there, but my back doesn’t like it when I do.
It was a Monday. I like Mondays. I love what happens on Sundays, but I’m okay with the fact that Mondays are as far as you can get from Sundays. I learned ages ago that anything “extra” I want to get accomplished during a given week can best be done early in the week.
So on the Monday in question I spent some time working on a kind of grandfatherly gift for my kids and grandkids.
When our four sons were just little guys (they didn’t stay little in any sense for long), more often than not, I’d put them to sleep by reading to them. My wife and I read them a bunch of the children’s books, Bible story books, etc., you’d expect. (And, yes, some fairy tales. No child should be deprived of the real-life truths found in fairy tales.)
As they got older (but way earlier than was reasonable) I read to them my favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. During Christmas, we’d read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
But we spent most of our time reading C. S. Lewis’ series of seven children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia.
I’m glad that The Lord of the Rings and several of the Narnia books are now movies. I was afraid Hollywood would butcher these books that I love, but those films are amazingly well done. Still, I’m glad that in my head, and those of my sons, our own images of hobbits and centaurs and epic voyages and wonderful Narnian and Middle Earth adventures came before Hollywood’s.
My sons loved the night-time readings, but they wanted more and longer readings than I could provide. (Since they went to sleep every night to the sound of my voice, they tell me that I have no one but myself to blame if they sleep through my sermons.)
But sometime in the midst of our reading years ago, I decided to crank up the tape recorder each evening, which means that I could later play them the tape when I got tired. I ended up with recordings of five of those Narnia books actually being read to my sons.
Now the grandkids are showing up, and Monday I spent some time “digitizing” those old tape recordings and putting them on CD so I can keep on reading to my favorite little people (if they’re interested) even when I’m not around. (I mean geographically “not around,” not dead, though I guess . . .)
Reading’s good. We all ought to do a lot more of it. Reading to kids is especially good. By all means, a good Bible story book, filled with the best stories of all, can wonderfully implant in little children’s minds pictures of Jesus and his love. But why stop there? If you’ve spent any time in Narnia, you know that it would be very hard to find a better picture of who Christ really is than that of a great Lion, awesome and joy-filled but completely untamed, named Aslan.
Thank God for all the ways the Father shows us the Son.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Oh, you thought . . . No, I was sitting on a stool at the “bar” in our kitchen. I like to work there, but my back doesn’t like it when I do.
It was a Monday. I like Mondays. I love what happens on Sundays, but I’m okay with the fact that Mondays are as far as you can get from Sundays. I learned ages ago that anything “extra” I want to get accomplished during a given week can best be done early in the week.
So on the Monday in question I spent some time working on a kind of grandfatherly gift for my kids and grandkids.
When our four sons were just little guys (they didn’t stay little in any sense for long), more often than not, I’d put them to sleep by reading to them. My wife and I read them a bunch of the children’s books, Bible story books, etc., you’d expect. (And, yes, some fairy tales. No child should be deprived of the real-life truths found in fairy tales.)
As they got older (but way earlier than was reasonable) I read to them my favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. During Christmas, we’d read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
But we spent most of our time reading C. S. Lewis’ series of seven children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia.
I’m glad that The Lord of the Rings and several of the Narnia books are now movies. I was afraid Hollywood would butcher these books that I love, but those films are amazingly well done. Still, I’m glad that in my head, and those of my sons, our own images of hobbits and centaurs and epic voyages and wonderful Narnian and Middle Earth adventures came before Hollywood’s.
My sons loved the night-time readings, but they wanted more and longer readings than I could provide. (Since they went to sleep every night to the sound of my voice, they tell me that I have no one but myself to blame if they sleep through my sermons.)
But sometime in the midst of our reading years ago, I decided to crank up the tape recorder each evening, which means that I could later play them the tape when I got tired. I ended up with recordings of five of those Narnia books actually being read to my sons.
Now the grandkids are showing up, and Monday I spent some time “digitizing” those old tape recordings and putting them on CD so I can keep on reading to my favorite little people (if they’re interested) even when I’m not around. (I mean geographically “not around,” not dead, though I guess . . .)
Reading’s good. We all ought to do a lot more of it. Reading to kids is especially good. By all means, a good Bible story book, filled with the best stories of all, can wonderfully implant in little children’s minds pictures of Jesus and his love. But why stop there? If you’ve spent any time in Narnia, you know that it would be very hard to find a better picture of who Christ really is than that of a great Lion, awesome and joy-filled but completely untamed, named Aslan.
Thank God for all the ways the Father shows us the Son.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
"Wow! That Person Really Knows the Bible!"
“Wow! That person really knows the Bible!” I hear that comment made fairly often, and I always wonder what the speaker means.
Usually they mean that someone is quite familiar with the words of the Bible, its many facts and wonderful stories, etc. On one level, that’s great, since most studies these days show that the general level of factual Bible knowledge among even Christians is appalling.
But then I wonder, how much does that person whose Bible knowledge is being touted really understand about God’s written revelation? For example, how much does he understand about the various types of literature that are contained in the Scriptures? Does she realize that being serious about learning what a particular book of the Bible has to teach means being serious enough to learn something about its context and setting? And on we could go.
I don’t doubt for a moment that one doesn’t have to have credentials as a Bible scholar to derive great blessing from simply reading the Bible and learning about the amazingly Good News of God’s love.
But neither do I doubt that those who have worked hardest to truly know the most about the facts, the message, and the meaning of the Bible are the very last to ever claim to know much about it at all. You might as well claim to truly know the Milky Way, and only the most foolish and blind astronomer would ever make that claim.
I’ve been enjoying Dr. Eugene Peterson’s memoir The Pastor. One of Peterson’s most truly wise and learned teachers at the Johns Hopkins University was Professor William Albright, then perhaps the world’s leading scholar in biblical archaeology and Semitic studies.
Peterson says that one day Dr. Albright walked into the classroom greatly excited. For years scholars had been debating the exact location (and meaning) of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had “bound Isaac for sacrifice.” Dr. Albright had awakened that morning to suddenly realize that he had discovered some very important answers. He stood before his doctoral students and laid it all out, filling the chalkboard with Ugaritic, Arabic, Assyrian, Aramaic, and Hebrew words pertinent to the issue. He’d gone on for twenty minutes when one of his best students raised his hand and asked, “But Dr. Albright, what about . . .”
Peterson says that the Professor stopped, considered for twenty seconds, and said, “Mr. Williams is right—forget everything I have said.” Amazing humility! And true humility is always impressive.
Most folks don’t even begin to realize how much we are blessed by those like the good Professor and so many others who have devoted their lives to helping us better understand God’s written word.
May we never forget that the real purpose of God’s written revelation—every page—is to help us know and become like the Lord behind it. Knowing its facts but not its Author would be sad indeed. The more we truly know of Him the more truly humble we will become.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
Usually they mean that someone is quite familiar with the words of the Bible, its many facts and wonderful stories, etc. On one level, that’s great, since most studies these days show that the general level of factual Bible knowledge among even Christians is appalling.
But then I wonder, how much does that person whose Bible knowledge is being touted really understand about God’s written revelation? For example, how much does he understand about the various types of literature that are contained in the Scriptures? Does she realize that being serious about learning what a particular book of the Bible has to teach means being serious enough to learn something about its context and setting? And on we could go.
I don’t doubt for a moment that one doesn’t have to have credentials as a Bible scholar to derive great blessing from simply reading the Bible and learning about the amazingly Good News of God’s love.
But neither do I doubt that those who have worked hardest to truly know the most about the facts, the message, and the meaning of the Bible are the very last to ever claim to know much about it at all. You might as well claim to truly know the Milky Way, and only the most foolish and blind astronomer would ever make that claim.
I’ve been enjoying Dr. Eugene Peterson’s memoir The Pastor. One of Peterson’s most truly wise and learned teachers at the Johns Hopkins University was Professor William Albright, then perhaps the world’s leading scholar in biblical archaeology and Semitic studies.
Peterson says that one day Dr. Albright walked into the classroom greatly excited. For years scholars had been debating the exact location (and meaning) of Mount Moriah, where Abraham had “bound Isaac for sacrifice.” Dr. Albright had awakened that morning to suddenly realize that he had discovered some very important answers. He stood before his doctoral students and laid it all out, filling the chalkboard with Ugaritic, Arabic, Assyrian, Aramaic, and Hebrew words pertinent to the issue. He’d gone on for twenty minutes when one of his best students raised his hand and asked, “But Dr. Albright, what about . . .”
Peterson says that the Professor stopped, considered for twenty seconds, and said, “Mr. Williams is right—forget everything I have said.” Amazing humility! And true humility is always impressive.
Most folks don’t even begin to realize how much we are blessed by those like the good Professor and so many others who have devoted their lives to helping us better understand God’s written word.
May we never forget that the real purpose of God’s written revelation—every page—is to help us know and become like the Lord behind it. Knowing its facts but not its Author would be sad indeed. The more we truly know of Him the more truly humble we will become.
Copyright 2011 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
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