I mispell things!
Just a quick aside.
My mom reads more and more quickly than any non-speed reader I have eve been around. I watched her read “Our Souls at Night” in two hours while the rest of us were sitting around talking, working, and watching TV.
Evelyn Terrell is a reading fool.
I’ve mentioned before that I am reading “God Is In the Manger“ by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and “Celebrating Abundance: Devotions for Advent“ by Walter Brueggemann as part of the my Christmas preparation during Advent. I decided to start sharing some quotes from my daily readings because I am enjoying and being challenged by each book so much.
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God in the Manger, p. 22.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoLNCtDyxYs
Yesterday I had the oil changed in Fred the minivan for the last time before she reaches 300,000 miles on her odometer (hopefully nowhere near the actual last time). I am super pumped about this because while Pam and I have had several vehicles that have made it over 200,000 miles we have never had a vehicle make it over 300,000. Dollar for dollar Fred the minivan is by far the best vehicle Pam and I have ever owned.
I don’t think I’ll be able to hit 400,000 miles with Fred because the Wisconsin road salt is beginning to eat away at her, but I am really pleased with all the money I have saved from her making it to 300,000.
As a pastor and chaplain I regularly listen to people having financial problems. Driving an older car is by no means the answer to everyone’s money issues, but it doesn’t hurt because repairs and maintenance on a loan free car are usually much less expensive than a monthly car payment. Fact is that we usually tire of our cars much sooner than their life-expectancy.
It is Noah’s 21st birthday today. He is one wonderful guy. Happy Birthday buddy.
Pam bought a small artificial tree a few years ago and declared it our “Snowmas” tree. She decorates it with snow-type ornaments and leaves it up as long as there is snow on the ground. This is Helen’s (AKA Hellion’s) first year with the “Snowmas” tree.
Hellion has been fine with the real tree in our living room, but apparently artificial trees are a different matter. Hellion hasn’t left the tree and even spraying her with water doesn’t deter her. Seriously Pam has sprayed pretty much a whole spray botte of water on Hellion and it hasn’t made a difference. Hellion is soaking wet and still wants to climb the tree.
This isn’t going to end well.
We have not become a secular society so much as we have become a generically religious one. Undifferentiated spiritual objects, therapies, and programs are widely marketed. Popular religion in America tends to be an amalgam of whatever presents itself. Discerning observers have noted that these new forms of spirituality are typically American; highly individualistic, self-referential, and self-indulgent, they are only feebly related to the history or tradition of any of the great world faiths.
Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 10.
Up until a few minutes this is how they were helping me study. Now one of them is incessantly barking beside me. I’ll let you take a guess which one is loudly telling me it is time to eat.
One of the problems with reading Jürgen Moltmann besides the fact that I have to re-read everything around 10 times before I have the faintest idea what he is saying, is that once I believe I understand what he is saying I want to underline around every other sentence he writes. Of course, this completely defeats the purpose of underlining because I am no longer able to spot what I was trying to remember because of the mass of writing on the page. While reading The Spirit of Life some time ago, I was sending lots of quotes to Pam because I was so excited about what I had just read. One of the quotes I sent to her was the following:
When we try to get to know something by the methods of modern science, we know in order to achieve mastery; “Knowledge is power”, proclaimed Francis Bacon. We take possession of our object and no longer respect it for what it is. … The act of perception transforms the perceiver, not what is perceived. Perception confers communion. We know in order to participate, not in order to dominate. That is why we can only know to the extent in which we are capable of loving what we see, and in love we are able to let it be wholly itself. Knowledge, as the Hebrew word (yada) tells us, is an act of love, not an act of domination. When someone has understood, he says: “I see it. I love you. I behold God.” (p. 200)
I believe this connects with so much of our knowledge. We do it with creation, others, and sometimes even ourselves. It is knowledge to dominate and control rather than knowledge to connect and love. Connection and love are so much better than domination.
I know I should never change something about my sermon at the last minute. I know that usually when i do change something at the last moment (which I should never do) it leads to a mistake. That’s why I try to remind myself to never change anything in the message at the last moment.
Still last night while I was falling asleep I thought, “I should add an image of the baby Jesus after the slide saying ‘We Become What We Worship'”. So this morning I went to Google Image search on my computer and did a quick reuse usage rights imge search. Up popped this image.
I’ll assume that you instantly see the horns that have been added the the baby Jesus’ head. They are really pretty obvious. I should have seen them instantly. I, however, did not see them.
I didn’t pay as much attention to the image as i normally would for the images in my message PowerPoint. After all, this was a minor point that i just wanted to add an image to briefly reinforce. Without seeing the horns the image looked fine to me and, therefore, I quickly added it to my message PowerPoint without thinking anymore about the image.
At least until some “threads” asked during the message what was behind the infant’s head. I said “it is just stained glass”. Then someone said “no … why does the baby Jesus have horns?” I turned around to look at the big image projected behind me and was completely confused. Yep, those are horns. I hadn’t seen them at all before, but they were blatantly clear now.
Well, that killed that point.
This is why it is important to remember to never change anything about your message or message PowerPoint at the last minute. It also helps to be a part of a very gracious community of faith who just laugh with you at your mistakes. Thanks “threads”.
You need to take seven minutes and twenty-three seconds to view this video from Scott Hicks. Scott is an immigration lawyer, pastor, one of Pam and my friends, and one of my college roommates (he was also kind of an usher in our wedding – I say “kind of” because he was an usher but he couldn’t do his “ush”ing duties because he became violently sick minutes before the wedding). He (with another friend Joy, Pam, and me) is also apart of perhaps the longest Facebook message thread the world has ever known – aptly named “We Have All The Best Answers”.
Anyhow, watch this!
I love how often he uses the word “obligation” because if you are a Christian then how we treat the foreigner should be based off the commands of the One we call Lord. The Bible is full of commands concerning how we are to treat the outsider and the foreigner. If you aren’t a Christian then you have to make up your mind on other criteria, but if you are a follower of Christ you have proclaimed that Jesus is your Lord and therefore you need to do what He says. We need to do what He says. It is an obligation.
Far too often we choose to just think that God is on our side of an issue rather than asking if we are on His side. A while back I read Jospeh Loconte’s “A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War” concerning Lewis’s and Tolkien’s experience in WWI and how it shaped them. One of the things that struck me was how many of the parties in WWI were convinced that they were doing God’s work by fighting that war. For example,\ the German Kaiser makes the following statement.
“Remember that the German people are the chosen of God. On me, on me as German Emperor, the Spirit of God has descended. I am His weapon. His sword and His visor … Death to cowards and unbelievers!”
The same was true for proclamations of evil. If we were on God’s side then those opposed to us must be on the devil’s side. This is why Billy Sunday, the baseball player turned Christian evangelist, could make statements like the following and be cheered.
“If you turn Hell upside down, you’ll find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.”
Few people stopped to ask “are we doing what God wants us to do?” I would imagine it is hard to fight a war if both sides are asking that question. Those of us who are followers of Jesus (i.e. the Church) should be asking this question all the time. Are we doing what God wants us to do? I believe when we ask and respond to questions like that we will be more concerning with treating the immigrant as Jesus would have us to, than we are concerning with our political ideology.
The Church SHOULD act like the church. This means we need to act like the Church in regards to how we face the issue of immigration. One day we will face Jesus and He won’t just ask us about our personal piety, He will also ask how we lived out our faith in Him concerning societal issues like immigration.