The Southern Baptist Environment & Climate Initiative

Something called the Southern Baptist Environment & Climate Initiative (SBECI), which is referred to by its website as a "ministry," has issued "A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change."

The initial signatories to this Declaration include, among others, Southeastern Seminary President Daniel Akin, Union University President David Dockery, First Baptist Springdale Arkansas Pastor Ronnie Floyd, Beeson Divinity School President Timothy George, Prestonwood Baptist Pastor Jack Graham, First Baptist Woodstock Georgia Pastor Johnny Hunt, Cross Pointe Pastor James Merritt, and current SBC President Frank Page.

I have intentionally tried to avoid reading what others are saying about this. I did look at the comment stream at SBCOutpost (I even left a comment myself) but other than that I have read no other analyses of this declaration.

I don't think I need to do so. I can predict with what I fear is great accuracy what the reactions will.

Many "conservative" or "fundamentalist" Baptists will accuse the framers of and signatories to this declaration of having somehow "sold out." Such commentators will say that these folks are trying to form some kind of alliance with liberals or that they are trying to cause Southern Baptists to look more respectable in the eyes of mainstream media or that they are giving undue respect to the findings of widely accepted science or that they are trying to take Southern Baptist eyes off the goals of missions and evangelism.

Meanwhile, many "moderate" or "liberal" Baptists will accuse the framers of and signatories to this declaration of being Johnny-come-latelies on the issues of global warming and climate change or of not going nearly far enough in this initial advocacy effort or of only giving lip service to environmental issues.

Also meanwhile, many "rank and file" Baptists will yawn and figure that this really isn't important and really won't matter.

I of course have absolutely no idea what lies in the hearts of the folks who are involved in the SBECI.

I do regret that the initial response of many on both the left and the right is to question those motives. Only time will tell.

I believe, though, that this effort creates an opportunity for dialogue between Baptists of different persuasions on this important issue. Regular readers of On the Jericho Road know that I have been lately advocating for more dialogue between Baptists (and other Christians) of different persuasions. It is time, I maintain, that we quit talking about and at each other and start talking to and with each other.

I therefore propose that a Conference on Baptist Stewardship of the Environment be held as soon as possible. I furthermore propose that it be held at Ridgecrest Conference Center. I furthermore propose that it be co-sponsored by Southeastern Seminary, Southern Seminary, Beeson Divinity School, McAfee School of Theology, Truett Seminary, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC, and the Baptist Center for Ethics.

This is a great example of an area in which Baptists of all persuasions should and can be vitally interested.

I say let's strike while the iron is hot and before the planet gets any hotter!

An Act of Civil Disobedience

I am with some friends in the land of the Mouse on our annual Spring Training trip. We are in the midst of six Braves games in six days at Champion Field at Disney's Wide World of Sports. So far, no good--the Braves have lost both games we have seen, one to Detroit and one to Houston.

At today's game, the public address announcer jumped the gun and invited us to stand for the seventh inning stretch at the end of the sixth inning. For those of you who are unfamiliar with baseball tradition, the seventh inning stretch takes place in the middle of the seventh inning. But when the announcer asked us to stand a half-inning early, the Philharmonic Saxophone Orchestra (they really have such a thing) rushed out onto the field and played "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and most of the people in the place dutifully stood and sang along.

I kept my seat. It was just wrong.

I'm not one to rock the boat, but sometimes you just can't in good conscience go along with the crowd.

Another Good Argument for Mutual Submission in Marriage

My father was apparently one sexy fellow.

OK, I have never written a sentence that made me feel weirder than that one.

Thankfully, I cannot testify to the romantic habits of my parents. Given that they left this lovely orb thirty years ago, I can’t question them about such things, either. I wouldn’t if I could, of course. I reckon my existence is evidence of something, isn’t it?

So, why do I choke back my embarrassment and say that my dad was one sexy dude?

I do so because of all the times that I saw him standing, apron tied around his waist, in front of the stove cooking supper or in front of the sink washing dishes. It’s one of the vivid images from my childhood: my parents sharing the burden around the house.

I never heard them quote it, but I think that they understood Paul’s admonition that we should, in our marriage relationships and in all of our Christian relationships, “submit ourselves to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Such mutual submission in Christ is the right thing to do because it’s the loving, caring, and grace-filled thing to do.

We men should need no other reason.

But now we learn that there is another, very good reason. It seems, as a recent Associated Press headline rather indelicately put it, that “Men who do housework may get more sex.”

According to a report issued by the Council on Contemporary Families, the contribution of men to the doing of housework has doubled or tripled, depending on which study you go by, over the past 40 years.

Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and author of The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (now if that’s not a bestseller it ought to be!) is quoted in the AP article saying, “"If a guy does housework, it looks to the woman like he really cares about her — he's not treating her like a servant. And if a woman feels stressed out because the house is a mess and the guy's sitting on the couch while she's vacuuming, that's not going to put her in the mood."

When I talk with couples who are preparing to get married, I always tell them that each one of them ought to be more concerned with meeting the needs of the other than with having their own needs met. I furthermore tell them that if both of them will live that way each of them will have the joy of making the other happy. A natural benefit of that is that everybody will be having their needs met and so everyone will be happy!

It’s a great system. That Bible really knows what it’s talking about!

So, guys, my advice to you is to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Put your wife’s needs ahead of your own. Love your bride with the love of Christ. Give yourself up for her in every way that you can.

And be romantic. Give her flowers, take her to a nice dinner, and go on long walks with her. And by all means, put on that apron and wash those dishes!

Do if for her.

Apparently it will work out ok for you, too.

Sneaky Easter

Easter is sneaking up on me this year. I have heard many other folks say the same thing. Usually I would chalk up such remarks to our tendency not to pay attention even to very important things, but this year we have an excuse. Easter falls really, really early on the calendar this time around.

Easter can fall on any date between March 22 and April 25. That is because Easter is always celebrated in the Western Church on the Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon, which moves around on the calendar. As I understand it, the church leaders who devised this system many centuries ago were interested in observing Easter at the time of year that most closely approximated the astronomical conditions of the first Easter.

So, the earliest that Easter can occur is March 22, which has not happened since 1818 and will not happen again until 2285. Nobody reading this has or will experience a March 22 Easter.

The last time that Easter fell on March 23, as it will this year, was 1913, so those of you who are 95 or older were around for that one. The next time that Easter will fall on March 23 will be 2160, so none of us will witness that one, either.

Therefore, for the vast majority of us, this March 23 observance of Easter will be a once in a lifetime event.

I have in the past said that I wished that Easter would fall on the same date every year. But this year in which Easter has snuck up on me has caused me to change my mind about that. I have decided that it is a good thing that the date of Easter moves around, causing us to think about it, wonder about it, plan around it, and be caught off guard by it.

After all, that’s the way it ought to be, because that’s the way that it is.

The resurrection of Jesus changed and changes everything. The event itself was unanticipated and unexpected. Nobody was looking for it. Just as some of his followers adjusted to the idea that his body was in the tomb and that they needed to pay their respects, he left it.

The new life that the resurrection of Jesus brings about even now is startling and sometimes—some of you will know what I mean—frightening. Resurrection, new life, hope for the future—they are all, when they grab hold of us, wondrous.

So Easter has snuck up on us this year.

And you never know—it may sneak up on us in some other ways.

I would tell you to watch for it—but maybe God does his most amazing things in us when we are not looking.

From Today's Devotional Reading

First let us establish three premises:

Those who do not love feel superior to everyone else.

Those who love feel equal to everyone else.

Those who love much gladly take the lower place.

Each one of us can identify his position somewhere along this spectrum, which comprises the three degrees of the spiritual life here on earth:

Death for those who do not love.

Life for those who love.

Holiness for those who love much.

[From In Search of the Beyond by Carlo Carretto]

The Christian Index on the New Baptist Covenant

In the February 14, 2008 issue of the Christian Index, the newsjournal of the Georgia Baptist Convention, Editor Dr. Gerald Harris published an analysis of the Celebration of the New Baptist Covenant entitled "Jimmy Carter Aglow Over New Baptist Covenant Celebration."

In the February 28, 2008, Dr. Harris very kindly published a letter from me that responded to his article.

I am grateful to Dr. Harris for allowing me to participate in this dialogue.

Blinded by the Light

(A sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent based on John 9:1-41)

[Image: Jesus Heals Blind Man by Heinrich Hofmann]

I was thinking about situations in which light prompts flight.

When a spotlight lands on an escaped criminal, he runs.
When a light is thrown on in a darkened room, the cockroaches scatter.
When sunlight falls upon a vampire, he dissolves.

Why does light prompt flight? Is it not because in every case the light reveals something about the nature of the one upon whom the light has shined? As John said in an earlier part of his Gospel, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather then light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed” (John 3:19-20). Criminals, cockroaches, and vampires are all evil and so they flee before the light!

What John really had in mind, though, was the reaction that people had to the coming of Jesus into the world. Jesus is the light of the world (9:5) and as the light of the world he reveals the truth about those who live in the world. He reveals the truth about you and me. He reveals the truth about all of us. But, in the immortal words of Jack Nicholson’s character Col. Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men, sometimes we “can’t handle the truth.” Sometimes we want to run from the light because we want to run from the truth.

We learn some important things when we compare the responses of the blind man and the Pharisees to their encounter with the light of the world.

Consider first the blind man who was healed. Here was a man who knew and grew in his awareness of the truth about himself. At the beginning he knew the truth about this physical condition. There was no doubt that he was blind. He had been born blind. Having been born blind, he did not even know what it was to see. Blindness was all he knew; the concept of “sight” meant nothing to him. So he knew the truth about his physical condition.

Once he was touched by Jesus, though, he began to grow in his knowledge of himself and of Jesus. First, he grew in his awareness of himself. He insisted on the truth about the change that he had experienced. After he was healed, people questioned whether or not the man they now saw was in fact the formerly blind man. His neighbors identified him primarily by his disability and when the disability went away they had difficulty accepting that it was the same person. He insisted that it was he. “I am the man,” he said. Later, when pushed by the Pharisees to agree with their negative assessment of Jesus, he said, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (v. 25). The light had come into his life and had brought illumination to him—that he knew; that he could tell; that he had to tell. He knew what he knew. He once was blind; now, he saw.

Second, he grew in his awareness of Jesus. When his neighbors asked the man how his eyes were opened, he said, “Jesus did it” and he told them how (v. 11). Joe Friday of Dragnet fame would have been pleased with his response. He had given just the facts.

When the man was asked by the Pharisees what he thought about the one who had opened his eyes, he replied, “He is a prophet” (v. 17). He realized that there was something from God in this man who had given him sight. He said so very explicitly later when the Pharisees asked him a second time how Jesus had opened his eyes. In the course of that conversation the Pharisees insisted that they did not know from where Jesus came. The man was shocked by that. “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (vv. 32-33). Jesus was from God, he came to understand.

Finally, Jesus sought the man out after he had been driven away by the Pharisees and asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man asked who it was that Jesus was talking about and Jesus said, “Me” to which the man replied, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshipped Jesus. In that moment the blind man really gained his sight. In that moment his eyes had truly been opened. In that moment he saw the truth about Jesus and we can safely assume, although we know nothing else of what happened in the life of this man, that he lived the rest of his life trusting in Jesus and bearing witness to others of what Jesus had done in his life.

Consider next the Pharisees who remained blind. The Pharisees were blinded by the light of Jesus. When they were confronted by what Jesus embodied they could not see and accept who he was. But in fact the light accentuated the blindness that they already had, a blindness that was compounded by the fact that they thought that they could see just fine.

How were they blind?

They were blind to the compassionate ways of God. Let’s consider what had happened here. A grown man who had been blind from birth had received his sight. Wouldn’t you think that the first thing that supposed people of God would do in light of such an event would be to celebrate the marvelous grace and compassion of God that had been exhibited in Jesus? But no. The Pharisees’ first response was rather to debate whether or not someone who violated the Sabbath by making mud could in fact be a conduit for God’s power. They could not celebrate because of their anxiety that a regulation had not been followed. How much blinder can you be than to think that God cares more about the keeping of a rule than he does about caring for a hurting human being?

They were blind to the saving ways of God. They tried to explain away the healing of the man. They did not believe that he had actually been born blind until his parents confirmed it. Why was that so hard for them to believe? Did they just not believe in the healing power of God? I doubt that was it.

I suspect that we find our explanation in the question that the disciples had asked Jesus: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (v. 2). Jesus pointed out that such was not the issue but rather that they needed to be on the lookout for what God was about to be up to in the man’s life. Their question, though, reflected the way that a lot of people thought and the way that the Pharisees were probably thinking. They believed that the man had been born in sin (see v. 34) and they could not tolerate the fact that the healing of such a one might just be a sign of radical grace and radical forgiveness. Such, they thought, could not be.


They could not accept where and how God was working because it did not fit with their vision of themselves or of the world. The man who had been healed persisted in telling them what had happened. He insisted that Jesus must come from God because otherwise how could he have been healed by him? Listen to their response: “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” (v. 34). They then drove him out of the synagogue. You see, in their view, they were the religious people, they were the righteous people, and so their vision of the way God worked had to be right. Here was someone who did not know what they did and who, to their way of thinking, was a sinner, and he was trying to instruct them.

And therein lies the rub. The blind man was poor in spirit; these Pharisees were not. The blind man was capable of simple child-like faith; these Pharisees were not. The light of Jesus revealed that the blind man had a heart that was ready to open up to God’s grace and love and forgiveness; these Pharisees did not. The eyes of the blind man—both physically and spiritually—were opened up by the light of Jesus; the eyes of these Pharisees were screwed even tighter shut by that same light.

The light blinded the Pharisees both to the good thing that had happened to the blind man and to the good thing that could happen to them because they were unwilling to recognize the need in themselves or in others. In a recent essay, Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about the effect that drought was having on her husband and her. They have a shallow well and they have been running low on water. So, to conserve, she’s been going to the laundromat. Folks there look at her like she doesn’t belong. Taylor said, though, that her going there has been a good thing.

Some of my friends feel sorry for me because I have to go to the laundromat, but I tell them not to. Not having enough water at home has brought me into contact with people who do not have enough of other things at home, and I am enjoying their company. I never really thought about it before, but scarcity evokes community.

When people share in scarcity they see themselves and each other in a different light. The Pharisees could see the need neither in themselves nor in the blind man nor probably in anyone else.

They thought they were passing judgment on the blind man (“You were born entirely in sins”) and on Jesus (he was a sinner who violated the Sabbath). In fact, they were passing judgment on themselves. They were revealing who they were and who they weren’t. The claimed to “see”—they were convinced that they saw the world, themselves, and Jesus in the right way—but in fact they were blind.

There is more hope for the truly blind than for those who claim to see; the latter are the self-righteous and the self-approving. But don’t such folks have to, somewhere down deep, know better? Don’t they?

I believe that there are important truths here for both kinds of people in the world and in the building—the lost and the saved.

For those of you who are, like the blind man in our text, well aware of the state of your life and the hole in your soul, you need to know that you can come into the light of Jesus and be saved.

For those of you who are, like the Pharisees, thinking that because you are at least a little better than the best person you know and that you really don’t need any help, the good news is that somewhere down deep you just may know better and the Lord is waiting to have you come into his light, admit what you are, and be saved.

Then for those of us who are Christians but are emphasizing the wrong things—keeping the rules rather than the compassion of Christ, being good rather than being forgiven, self-righteousness rather than real righteousness—you can be warmed up and lit up and brightened up by the light of Jesus.

Let the light show you who are and who you can be. Let Jesus shine his grace into you. The light of the world will show you the truth about who you are. But can you handle the truth? Will you run from the light or will you let the light change you?