Sunday, March 26, 2006

She Killed Him! That’s Wrong! (March 26, 2006)

Rebuke wickedness. Condemn evil. Hate sin.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why it has gotten so hard - so unaccountably, mysteriously hard - for Christians to take an unambiguous stand against evil. There is a weird laryngitis afflicting the church's moral voice today. It can't be long before the world becomes so puzzled by our moral reticence that it asks, "Just what is the matter with you people?"

Case in point: the murder last week of Matthew Winkler, pastor of a Church of Christ in Selmer, Tennessee. His wife Mary shot and killed him and then fled with her three suddenly fatherless daughters. Within a couple days she was found, arrested and charged with his murder.

And now you can't find a Christian associated with the case who can say that what she did was wrong.

At the church's worship service on Sunday, elder Robert Shackelford urged prayer for all involved, including the murderess. "Mary is a member of this church family," he said. "If we don't have forgiveness, then we don't have anything." He explained that forgiveness is a cornerstone of the faith.

Yes, but so is righteousness. So is "Thou shalt not kill." So is "If a man sheds blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Genesis 9:6) So is "no murderer has eternal life" (1 John 3:15). So is "murderers...will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur" (Revelation 21:8). So is the commandment not even to eat with so-called Christians who commit sins far less serious than murder (1 Corinthians 5:11)!

But I have looked in vain for denunciations of her crime that the press would surely report if only somebody would say them. Instead I read, "Mary is a sweet child, and we just love her," (Janet Sparks, church member.) And, "'It hurts us very much, but we're going to stand behind her 100 percent. I just told a sheriff's deputy, anything she needs, we'll get for her.'" (Church member Anita Whirley.)

Oh good grief. Can't somebody muster a little righteous indignation? Can't somebody say, "I want that foul fiend of darkness to rot in hell!"? I'd even settle for the numbly bureaucratic, "We condemn this act of violence." But instead all we get is, "We love her, we forgive her, she is a sweet child, we'll get her anything she needs." Were it not for the secular justice system doing its job and putting her behind bars, I'm sure that the Christian love-fest showered on Mary Winkler would inspire a thousand wifely bullets to the heads of worthy husbands tomorrow.

Murder is wrong. So are lots of other things. Don't be afraid to say that. The martyrs of Revelation 6:10 rightly wanted God to avenge their deaths, and the blood of murder victim Abel cried out to the Lord for justice in Genesis 4:10. Maybe the exalted soul of Matthew Winkler looks down with puzzlement on his quick-to-forgive former congregants and says, "Umm. Wait a minute. I kinda got shot, you know."

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Should We Try To Impress People? (March 19, 2006)

My youngest son appears to have a crush on a girl at school, and it is a really positive thing for him. I think it has been the main reason he has lost 30 pounds. (Don't worry - I'm not humiliating him by writing about this in a public forum. He never reads this page.)

I myself went from chunky to slim at 14 mostly because I was madly in love with a girl in my 8th grade Sunday School class. Like Woody Allen and unlike Sigmund Freud I never had a latency period, and was yearly infatuated with some girl in school or church from kindergarten onward. But it wasn't until my teen years that it dawned on me that I might have to change some things about my appearance (stop being fat) and my character (stop being a jerk) in order to become half as appealing to my crushes as they were to me.

It is good that we want to impress people so that they will like us. That instinct can be degraded or put to bad use, but is in itself no mere vanity. It is a Swiss Army knife of personal formation, so versatile it can liposuct body fat, clean under the fingernails and uncork good manners all at the same time.

It made Jack Nicholson take his medication in "As Good As It Gets" (He explained to Helen Hunt, "You make me want to be a better man.") It made Sayuri learn to dance and be winsome in order to gain the Chairman's affections in Memoirs of a Geisha. And it even drove the Scarecrow to pursue learning, as he sang to Dorothy,
And perhaps I'd deserve you
And be even worthy of you
If I only had a brain.


It is good to want to impress somebody, as long as the person you want to impress is good. Don't waste your time trying to impress bad people. Sculpting your body will only attract their lust, and gaining capital will only provoke their greed. And remember that no matter what you do, some people are just not going to like you. That is o.k. - lots of people did not like Jesus. The important thing is to strive to behave in such a way that good people will like you.

Sunday, March 5, 2006

People And Their Pesky Glitches (March 5, 2006)

I saw some baseball footage the other day of a catcher with a weird psychological glitch. He had a hard time throwing the ball back to the pitcher.

It was a little funny, but also heartbreaking. The poor guy would catch the ball, stand and cock his arm, begin his motion and then just stop. Maybe he'd fake a throw to first if a runner was on. It would take him two or three tries before he could overcome this whole-body hiccup. He could hit, catch, and call a good game, but tossing the ball to the pitcher froze him like a teenager asking a girl for a date. It eventually drove him out of baseball.

Lots of people, I think, probably more than we suspect, have these annoying glitches that make life harder than it ought to be. My mother, for example, said that when she was in kindergarten she could not speak in school. I mean literally could not speak. Articulate and talkative elsewhere, she completely shut down in the classroom to the point where the teacher assumed she was mentally retarded. Then the teacher gave a written test that Mom aced in seconds. Afterwards the teacher called her aside and gave her a doll as a present. Young as she was, Mom perceived that the teacher was apologizing for having dismissed her as an idiot. (Daffy as an otter, yes, but Mom was no idiot.)

It wasn't until Mom was in her 50s that she was able to read the Bible out loud in a Sunday School class. (Then she went from being nervously silent to worrying about not being able to shut herself up.) I mentioned her example to someone the other day who presented me with a terrific prayer request: to have the boldness to be able to pray out loud in front of people. Excellent! That is a useful ability, and, frankly, something that is easy for me. I even ask total strangers in distress if I can pray for them right there. (I won't tell you what my glitches are, though. Not because I fear being vulnerable, but because members of my congregation might not be reassured knowing the ways in which their pastor can be a total NUTcase.)

I wonder if St. Paul found himself freezing up at just the wrong times. He kept asking people to pray that he could talk. See Ephesians 6:19: "Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel"; and Colossians 4:4: "Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should." In 2 Corinthians 10:10 he acknowledged what some people whispered about him: "His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing." Maybe Paul suffered from a nasty verbal glitch.

I have no clue how to help those who are afflicted with glitches other than to be merciful to them, and pray, and remember that glitches abound in unsuspecting places for many a tortured soul. It is also good to be patient with ourselves, and keep in mind that all such hindrances will be ironed out in heaven, where stutterers will speak free, and the fearful will dance, and catchers for the Kingdom will fire confident strikes back to the mound.