Confession

Final Score: Georgetown 80, Belmont 55

I confess: I am not the kind of prophet who can tell the future.

I further confess: I am not a very effective good luck charm.

Living the Forgiven Life: Embrace the Transformation

(A Lenten devotion based on Ephesians 5:8-14 & John 9:1-41)

Can you imagine the man in today’s Gospel text, having been given his sight by Jesus after spending his entire life in darkness, ever approaching life the same way again? Or, to think of an even more extreme case, can you imagine Lazarus, having been brought back to life by Jesus after spending four days in the tomb, ever looking at life in the same way again? Being touched by Jesus in such dramatic ways produces changes; it brings about a transformation. We who have been forgiven by God because of the death of Christ on the cross have been changed in dramatic ways, too. But we need to embrace the transformation. Are we fully embracing the transformation that comes with being forgiven? Another way to ask that question would be this: are we living the Christian life for all it’s worth? Yet another way to ask it would be this: are we really living like saved and baptized people ought to live?

Today’s epistle text encourages us, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Some scholars believe that this was part of a hymn or a reading that was used at the baptism of new believers. How appropriate it is for us today. We need to understand that we have been saved, that we have been forgiven, that we have been raised from the dead, that we have been freed from our sins. We need to understand that people who have been made alive by Christ have been made alive really to live. We are supposed to be different and we are supposed to live differently because we are in fact different. We are in light rather than in darkness; we are alive rather than dead. So, we need to take the Christian life seriously. How seriously are you taking it? We have been forgiven by God in Christ. How do we go about living seriously in that forgiven state? How do we go about embracing the transformation that is ours?

We embrace the transformation by living in light of our experience with Jesus. The blind man in our Gospel text had been born that way. He had lived his entire life in darkness. Then, because he had been touched by Jesus, he was able to see. He had to live his life in light of that experience with Jesus; he could do no other. And why would he want to do any other? As great as the man’s experience of gaining his physical sight was, the truly great event occurred later in the story when he came to believe in Jesus as the Messiah (v. 38). That was when his spiritual blindness was cured. Even though we know nothing of the man’s life after that point, we can be sure that the greater change came because of his belief in Jesus as Savior. That’s the greatest experience there is.

You just can’t have an experience with Jesus and remain the same. But we need to be intentional about living the forgiven life. We need to be intentional about embracing the change that has come upon us. As Ephesians puts it, “Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light” (v. 8a). Notice the powerful way the verse puts the situation: sin once held such sway in our lives that it can be said not just that we were in darkness but that we were darkness. But when the Lord comes in to our lives we are not just in the light but we are light. Because of that drastic change in our reality, we are called to “live as children of light” (v. 8b). Being Christians does not put us on autopilot. We have to intentionally choose to live as Christians are called to live.

Now, we don’t do so in our own power. We are inspired and taught by the grace and love of our Lord. But the truth still is that good habits come from good practice. I’ve been reading about a baseball player who wants to be a better hitter this year. During the off season he studied film of himself. He changed his batting stance. He took lots of batting practice. Now, his goal is for the right ways of doing things to become second nature to him. Meanwhile, though, he has to exercise the discipline of choosing to do the right things rather than doing the wrong things. Otherwise, his old habits will continue to run his life. Similarly, we have to purposely choose the things that are “good and right and true” (v. 9). Such choices will pay off in the long run.

We embrace the transformation by testifying of our experience with Jesus. When you have an experience with Jesus you have a testimony about that experience. Your experience is your experience and your testimony is your testimony. If you’ve been touched by Jesus you have something to share. When the blind man was healed there was some disagreement among people as to his identity. He just kept on saying, “I am the man” (v. 9). That’s the main thing we have to tell, isn’t it: “I am the one whom Jesus touched and this is how he touched me.” We say, “This is who I am and Jesus is the one who made me this way.” We tell the story of Jesus but we know the story of Jesus because of the way his story intersects our story. We tell of what Jesus has done for us.

Some care should be exercised here. My college teacher Dr. Howard Giddens used to say of some preachers, “They say more than they know.” Some non-preacher Christians are like that, too. They feel compelled to act as if they have all the answers and as if all things are simple to those who know the Lord. We should be careful not to say more than we know, though. When the Jewish authorities told him that Jesus was a sinner because Jesus healed on the Sabbath, 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). Now, we know that Jesus was not a sinner. But we don’t know everything about Jesus because we can’t know everything about God. Such is the nature of God. But we know what he has done in our lives and that’s what we can talk about with confidence: “Once I was blind, but now I see.” We should study all we can and pray all we can and learn all we can but we need to accept that we’ll never have all the answers.

How do we testify about what Jesus has done in our lives? We do so by living as Christians ought to live. It’s interesting how Ephesians encourages us: “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” Try. Make the effort. Know that it may not always be clear. But try. And then live in light of what you learn. Certainly such living means that you’ll avoid the works of sin that characterize the ways of the world. But positively it means that we’ll live in ways that reflect the light of Christ and that show the works of darkness for what they are. We bear witness to Christ by living in ways that reflect the transformation that he has brought about in us.

But we also testify about what Jesus has done in our lives by talking about it. How we should admire this man who insisted on talking about what Jesus had done in his life. He had to go up against the religious experts of his day but he would not back down because he knew what Jesus had done for him. We need to be ready to make our defense and to share our testimony. We each have our own story to tell but each story is the story of what Jesus has done. Tell it. Tell it faithfully. Tell it lovingly. But tell it. Someone you meet today may need to hear it.

We embrace the transformation by valuing our experience with Jesus. One result of the formerly blind man’s insistence on telling his story was that he was kicked out of his synagogue (v. 34). His parents, when questioned by the authorities, had been afraid to say too much because they knew that those who confessed Jesus as Messiah were to be put out of the synagogue (v. 22). In the early years of the church such became a real problem. The man was persecuted for his faith; he was made an outcast because of his insistence on bearing witness to his experience with Jesus. He had to make a decision that his experience with Jesus was more valuable than any other relationship he had or than any other reality that brought meaning to his life

What do we really value? Do we really value our experience with Jesus? Are we embracing the transformation that Jesus has wrought in our lives by valuing our relationship with him more than we do anything else? Think of how you make decisions. Think of how you choose to live. Think of the brand of ethics that your practice. Think of those things to which you do and don’t give priority. Do your choices show that your experience with Jesus has been truly transformative and that he truly is your priority? Or are there things that you are valuing more highly and embracing more closely than him?

It is important, as we live the forgiven life, that we intentionally embrace the transformation that Jesus has caused in our lives. We need to be committed to living the Christian life. That commitment needs to be purposeful and it needs to be radical. We need to bear witness to what he has done in our lives with our lives and with our words. It needs to be clear who we are and whose we are. Is it clear in your life today?

Bracketology

The NCAA basketball tournament got underway last night with the “play-in” game that determined the team that would earn the 64th and final spot in the “big dance.” For those of you who missed it, Niagara defeated Florida A & M and earned the privilege of getting pummeled by Kansas in their next game. But, the field is now set and Niagara is in it; they should be proud.

I confess that I am not much of a basketball fan. I am a hard-core fan of baseball, which is the world’s most perfect sport. I also like to watch college football; it’s a great spectacle. Somewhere along the way I lost my interest in basketball. It wasn’t always that way. We lived in Louisville, Kentucky for seven years and during that time I became a fan of the University of Louisville Cardinals. They won a national championship during our first school year in Louisville (1979-1980) and during our last year there (1985-1986). They’ve not won one since. Obviously, we functioned as a good luck charm for them.

Lots of people all over the country are filling out their tournament brackets this week. Given that I’ve stopped keeping close watch on college basketball, I don’t do that anymore. I have considered conducting an experiment, though. I’ve heard of people conducting a similar test with the stock market. Here’s how it works. First, get some expert financial managers to select the stocks they think are going to do well. Second, get another group to select a portfolio by taping the stock market pages from a newspaper to a wall and throwing darts at it; they then buy the stocks that their darts hit. Then, at the end of twelve months, see whose stocks have done better. So, I thought about throwing darts at the bracket and seeing how it turns out.

Of course, I could do a careful analysis of each team and try to pick the perfect bracket. The perfect bracket would be one in which you pick the correct winner of every game all the way to the final. I heard somewhere that the odds of doing that are one in one quadrillion. A quadrillion is a one followed by fifteen zeroes, or six more zeros than in a billion. I understand that you have much better though still astronomical odds of winning the lottery or even of getting struck by lightning while you’re going to buy a lottery ticket. Still, lots of people are going to try and lots of people are going to bet lots of money on the outcome.

As for me, I’ll just sort of pay attention until they get down to the Final Four. If I can, I’ll watch the National Championship game.

For what it’s worth, here’s my pick: Belmont University, the #15 seed in the East Region, will go all the way. After all, I used to work there, and I’m a good luck charm.

Just ask the Louisville Cardinals.

Slim Pickins?

I have a personal policy that prevents me from identifying my choices in an election. I believe that it would be detrimental to my work as a pastor to choose sides publicly in an election contest. Now, I’ll talk issues; as a matter of fact, prophetic preaching demands that issues, including those that relate to public policy, be addressed. And, frankly, sometimes when a pastor addresses public policy issues she or he may come off sounding like one candidate rather than another. I believe, given that possibility, that it is wise to discuss such issues at times as far removed from an election cycle as possible. Of course, that gets harder all the time, since presidential campaigns now last two years or longer.

Because I am going to talk about Newt Gingrich in this post, I am going to make an exception to my policy and reveal that I voted for him once. The year was 1976 and I had absolutely no idea who Newt Gingrich was. As a matter of fact, I was not really voting for Gingrich; I was voting against his opponent, Rep. John J. Flynt. During my freshman year in high school in 1973, I had gone to Washington for a week as part of a government studies program sponsored by the Close Up Foundation. All of the students in our group were from Georgia. During the week we had the privilege of meeting with our congressional representatives. Rep. Flynt was the congressman from my district. During our question and answer session with him, he responded to a query in a manner that made me conclude, with much fourteen-year-old indignation, that he had outgrown his usefulness. I remember neither the question nor the answer verbatim, but a student asked him something about a situation in our district and Flynt’s answer seemed to me to have elements of “that’s a local problem and I’m a national politician.” I may have misheard and I’m certain that I overreacted, but I decided then and there that if I ever had the chance I’d vote against him. That chance came in 1976, the year I turned eighteen. So I voted for Gingrich. Incidentally, Gingrich lost that election. He won two years later; I believe that Flynt did not run for reelection that year.

Gingrich is in the news these days because he seems to be toying, along with just about every other politician of note and a few of little note, with the idea of running for president. In recent days his personal life has been the topic of much discussion. He appeared last week on James Dobson’s radio program and in that interview, Dobson asked him about an alleged extramarital affair. Gingrich admitted that he had been involved in an affair during the same period that he was leading the impeachment charge against President Clinton that developed following the revelation of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich expressed repentance over his actions. He also tried to make the case that the situation with Clinton was of a different nature because of Clinton’s alleged perjury. I do think that some distinction has to be made between “high crimes and misdemeanors” on the one hand and acts of personal immorality or failing on the other. Wrong is wrong, but we certainly need our public officials to respect and follow the law.

As I said, Gingrich admitted to the affair. He is in his third marriage. He has a new book out entitled Rediscovering God in America. He will be the graduation speaker at Liberty University this spring.

Let me repeat: he has admitted to an extramarital affair; he is in his third marriage; he has written a book called Rediscovering God in America; he is going to speak at Jerry Falwell’s college; and he is probably going to run for president. Many conservatives, including some of the “evangelical Christian" variety, are allegedly excited about the prospect. My first reaction to that is “Wow.” On the other hand, it may show some evidence of what some might consider a developing maturity on the part of religious conservatives. If Gingrich truly represents their positions on public policy issues and if they can trust him to pursue those positions, maybe it says something good about them that they can overlook his moral failings and/or accept his statements of repentance. Of course, when it comes to politicians with whose policies Christian conservative leaders disagree, those leaders usually want to make the case that you can’t separate a leader’s private life from his public life and that it is a slippery slope from personal immorality to public corruption.

Gingrich is not alone in having his private life paraded before the entire country. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s marital and extra-marital situations have been bandied about a lot, too. He has also been married three times and he has been involved in some very public infidelity. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission recently said of Giuliani, "I mean, this is divorce on steroids…. To publicly humiliate your wife in that way, and your children. That's rough. I think that's going to be an awfully hard sell, even if he weren't pro-choice and pro-gun control." On the other hand, Giuliani is going to speak as a part of the executive leadership series at Pat Robertson’s Regent University in April. Mitt Romney will be Regent’s commencement speaker. Romney is a Mormon who has been married to the same woman for thirty-eight years.

I find all of this very interesting and I think it’s highly problematic for social and religious conservatives. Giuliani has the leadership credentials but has personal and policy problems. Gingrich has the policy credentials but has personal issues. Romney is the epitome of a family values candidate but, and I say this with all due respect to Mormons, he’s a Mormon, and that’s going to be a problem for a lot of “mainstream” Christian evangelical types.

It is fair to ask whether some conservative Christian leaders are being hypocritical by their implicit or explicit support of candidates with whom they have common ground on the issues but whose personal lives have run so counter to what those leaders stand for. It is also fair to ask whether in other cases more liberal Christian leaders have been wrong to downplay the moral failings of other politicians with whose policies they were in agreement. It seems to me that if you’re going to bash any politician for marital infidelities or other personal sins, then you ought to bash all of them—if you have that much time on your hands.

On the other hand, maybe it’s good to be able to see beyond the personal failings of candidates and to focus on the ways in which they would lead and the agendas they would pursue. Maybe it’s good to accept someone’s statement of repentance so long as we are careful not to hear what we want to hear so that we can support someone that we think will promote our priorities. Maybe it’s good to realize that presidents and prospective presidents are real people who have to lead a real nation in the real world.

Still, I think I’ll keep holding out for a candidate who shares my values, who supports my preferred policies right down the line, who thinks just like I do, who looks and talks like I do, and who has a family that looks just like mine.

Heaven help me, I think I just announced my candidacy!

Rest assured—if nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve!

Opportunity Knocks

(A sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent based on Isaiah 55:1-9 and Luke 13:1-9)

Do you remember the Flip Wilson Show? One of his recurring characters was Rev. Leroy, who served as the minister of The Church of What’s Happening Now. “What’s happening now” is a hot topic for people who try to lead churches. We are always trying to find that balance between leading the church to be contemporary enough to be relevant while at the same time bearing sufficient witness to the old, old story. Whatever medium we use to communicate the message, we always want the Gospel message to come through clearly. One answer to the question “What’s happening now?” is that a lot of the same things are happening now that have always been happening. As my high school history teacher Mr. Julian was fond of saying, some things have been happening “ever since Adam and Eve came out of the garden.” Sin certainly falls in that category.

What is sin? Perhaps you think that it is not necessary to formulate an answer to that question. Most of us figure that we could say about sin what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in 1964 about obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” There are problems with such a presumption, however.

For one thing, we tend to see sin in others before we see it in ourselves or more than we see it in ourselves. While it is impossible to know exactly what was in the hearts of the people with whom Jesus was conversing in today’s Gospel lesson, we can make some pretty good guesses based on the flow of the discussion. Luke tells us that some people told Jesus about some Galileans who had been killed by Pontius Pilate. In response Jesus said, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way that they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?” His question pushed them to think about whether the great tragedy suffered by those people was an indication that they had greater sin in their lives than other people did. Perhaps he also intended for it to push them to consider the validity of any belief that they themselves were less guilty than those who had been killed. You know how those questioners might have been because you know how we can be. If we can conclude that others are sinners and we are not or that others are worse sinners than we are, it can, in a pathetic kind of way, make us feel better about ourselves.

For another thing, we tend to form our own limited definition of what constitutes sin. We may think of certain sinful acts as worse than other sinful acts. We may regard personal acts of immorality as sin, which they are, but tend not to think so negatively of sins of the heart, sins of attitude, or sins of neglect that are just as sinful in God’s eyes. Again, we tend to be especially skilled at calling something sin that we see in someone else’s life but turning a blind eye to the sin that is present in our own lives. The truth is, though, that sin is sin and that every human being who has ever lived, who lives now, and who ever will live is in need of repentance and forgiveness.

You see, then, that understanding sin is not as simple as concluding that we will know it when we see it. Therefore, it may be helpful for me to pose a definition for you. There are several good definitions of sin that have a biblical foundation. Sin can be defined, for example, as “missing the mark,” as “trying to be your own god,” or as “living outside of a relationship with God.” I’d like to offer another definition for you that I believe is also grounded in biblical teaching: sin is missed opportunity. Another way to put that would be to say that sin is settling for less than God in his mercy and grace intends for us.

God has given us the opportunity to live the kind of life that will lead to fulfillment and joy. Now, in some ways, life is a struggle for anybody and everybody. Living God’s kind of life does not eliminate struggle. We will all have hard questions and difficult choices and we will all experience painful events and tragic circumstances. Still, we can know fulfillment and joy even in the midst of hard times if we submit ourselves to the Lord and live in relationship with him. We can have the life God intended for us if we will look past the things out of which our culture makes false gods but which ultimately have no value—money, status, power, prestige, reputation—and let God give us the realities that have ultimate value—a relationship with him, a place in his family, and a part in his purpose.

It is sad that so many people insist on going the way of the world that turns the transient into the ultimate and that finally leads to frustration and judgment. It is a wondrous event when someone turns from that way and turns to the Savior in whom ultimate meaning is found and through whom fulfillment and redemption are experienced.

Such a wondrous event can happen for you right now. I have defined sin as missed opportunity, by which I mean missing the opportunity to live God’s kind of life which is clearly the best kind of life to live. But you don’t have to continue missing that opportunity. Opportunity is knocking. It is knocking because God is standing at the door of your heart, patiently seeking entry. He is standing there, offering forgiveness. So long as God makes forgiveness available you have the opportunity to repent and to experience real life. Why would you ignore him? How can he make the offer more obvious?

We were in a store the other day. We were ready to check out. No one was at the registers at the front of the store. I saw two employees standing in front of the customer service desk. One of them was talking to a customer; the other was standing there, listening. I walked over and stood near them, directly in their line of vision. They ignored me. Finally, I waved my arms over my head like I was trying to flag a taxi. I really did. Still, no one said, “May I help you?” One of them just looked at me like I was crazy until I asked, “Is there someone here to take my money?” She pointed me to a register at which no one was working. I walked over to it and someone magically appeared. God is standing right over there, waving his arms in front of us. He has done everything he can to get our attention. Above all else, he has sent his Son Jesus into this world to die for our sins. How much longer will you ignore him?

Indeed, God has been making the same offer for 2000 years. Have you heard the story about the jogger who would run by the bagel stand every day? The stand sold bagels for fifty cents. Every day as the jogger would pass the stand he would throw two quarters in the bucket but he never took a bagel. After months of this activity, one day the proprietor stopped him. The jogger said, “You probably want to know why I always put money in but never take a bagel, don’t you?” The vendor replied, “No, I just wanted to tell you that the bagels have gone up to sixty cents” (Cindy Hess Kasper, “What God Owes Us,” Our Daily Bread, January 22, 2007). God has been amazingly patient with us. The price of forgiveness has not gone up for 2000 years and it never will. Jesus really did pay it all.

2000 years is a long time, but opportunity will not knock forever. God in his grace has waited, giving us the opportunity to repent. But neither life nor time will last forever. Will you open your heart today to the gracious knocking of our God?

In a Country Where They Turn Back Time

(Sabbath Blog #8)

The title of this post is a line from Scottish songwriter and singer Al Stewart’s 1976 song Year of the Cat, from the album of the same name. The song begins,

On a morning from a Bogart movie,
in a country where they turn back time;
you go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
contemplating a crime.
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
like a watercolor in the rain.
Don't bother asking for explanations
she'll just tell you that she came
in the year of the cat.

I can’t be sure that the line refers to turning the clock back when a country goes from Daylight Saving Time (DST) to Standard Time. In fact, I doubt it does, given the references to Bogart and Lorre; Stewart seems to be trying to paint a picture of a romance against a film noirish, foggy, and melancholy kind of canvas.

Nevertheless, when I hear the song, I think of the fact that in this country and in about 70% of the world, once a year we set our clocks forward and once a year we set them back. Spring forward, fall back. Well, this year the United States Congress has moved the start of Daylight Saving Time ahead by three weeks so that today, ten days before Spring even begins, we went to DST.

While the idea of DST supposedly began with Benjamin Franklin, the United States was not the first nation to adopt it; that honor goes to Germany, which did it in 1916. Congress authorized DST in this country in 1918 but it was disliked so much it was repealed in the following year. President Roosevelt reinstituted it on a year-round basis during World War II as “war time.” Following the end of the war and of year-round DST, many states adopted their own DST practices. In 1966, Congress adopted the Uniform Time Act, which set a uniform pattern for time changes during the summer. Another experiment with year-round DST was tried in 1974-1975 during the OPEC oil embargo. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 moved the start of DST from the first Sunday in April to the second Sunday in March and the end of it from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November. (Historical information from CNN.com.)

The other day I heard someone ask what I think is a fair question: by what definition of “standard” is Standard Time standard when it is followed only four months of the year while DST is observed for eight months? Hasn’t DST become the “standard time”?

I do agree that there are sound ethical reasons for having and even expanding DST. For one thing, statistics show that energy, especially electricity, is conserved during DST months. Statistics also show that traffic accidents decrease during those months. We are also encouraged to put fresh batteries in our smoke detectors on the same nights that we change our clocks, and it stands to reason that lives will be saved as more of us adopt that practice. I do wonder if, since there are clear-cut advantages to the practice of DST, we ought not make it a year-round practice.

Still, I am opposed to that as a matter of self-preservation. The extended daylight in the evening makes is possible to work in the yard until well into the night. All too often what is possible comes to feel like what is necessary. When I get to thinking about mowing the lawn or trimming the hedges or raking the leaves, I’d like to have at least four months where I can say, “I can’t—it’s too dark.”

Being Baptist

I have often jokingly said that I was a Baptist before I was a Christian. While I am joking when I say it, technically it’s true. My parents, as my mother never tired of telling me, took me to the Midway Baptist Church four miles outside of Barnesville, Georgia for the first time when I was ten days old. I suspect that I was added to what they called the Cradle Roll (a means by which a baby could be enrolled in Sunday School) within minutes of my exit from the womb. I was baptized when I was seven years old. Therefore, technically, I was a Baptist before I was a Christian.

The Christian heritage is rich and diverse. All the branches of the Christian tree offer something valuable to the tradition. As a Baptist pastor, I spend most of my time around Baptists. I am convinced that I have built up a resistance to Baptist germs because I have visited so many Baptists in the hospital! When I have the opportunity to be around people of other Christian traditions I find myself comparing my particular faith expression to theirs. There is much in those other traditions that I admire. I often “catch” something very good from them. But there is much in mine that I admire, too.

A few months ago a publication asked me to contribute to an issue with the theme “Why I Am a Baptist.” I confess that on the morning that I sat down to write my article I stared at my computer screen for a very, very long time. The reason for that wasn’t that I couldn’t think of any reasons; it was a recurrence of a chronic problem I have—I always want to sound original. But I couldn’t come up with any original thoughts on why I am a Baptist. In other words, my reasons are the same reasons that many people have listed for very many years.

I have never found a better way to list those reasons than that offered by Rev. Jim Pitts in his sermon at a Georgia Baptist Convention meeting in Savannah, GA sometime around 1990. In his sermon he said that Baptists had historically stood on five great principles that began with the letters A, B, C, P, and S.

A is for the Authority of the Bible.

B is for Believer’s Baptism.

C is for Church Autonomy.

P is for the Priesthood of Believers.

S is for Separation of Church and State.

I still believe in all five of those bedrock Baptist principles. I believe in them so much that even were I to join another Christian faith tradition I would still in my heart be a Baptist.

So that’s why I still am one!