The Poor Are Welcome Wherever We Worship (April 2, 2006)

Church must be free.

The English word "free" is ambiguous. I do not mean that the church must be liberated - I mean it should not cost anything. Gratis is the word in Spanish. Church must be gratis. Not so that anyone should be relieved of his duty to tithe and give generously, but so that the poorest of the poor will always be welcome to anything that the church, as church, does.

I can trace two sources of my conviction. One is my mother, who grew up in Chicago in the Depression as the daughter of a mostly unemployed alcoholic. She told me how pleased she was as a teenager to go to Moody Church and see at the entrance a plaque that read, "Ever welcome to this house of God are the stranger and the poor." She was welcome! You did not need a penny in your pocket to walk through the great wooden doors of Moody Church.

But you do need some pennies now, hundreds of them, to go to Moody's "Friday Night Sing." Before Mom passed away in 2001, she told me that she felt Moody betrayed its long-standing commitment to the poor when it started selling tickets to things that took place in the sanctuary.

The other source of my conviction is 1st Corinthians 11. The Apostle Paul was outraged at the way the Corinthian church was abusing Holy Communion. "It is not the Lord's Supper you eat," he said (v. 20). At issue was the fact that the rich had made it their private party - some were even getting drunk while the poor were shut out with nothing (vs. 21-22). Paul insisted that they reform their practice and celebrate the Supper worthily by doing it together and waiting for one another (v.33).

I don't think today that we violate the principle of egalitarian worship at the Lord's Supper. But we do violate it elsewhere. I believe the spirit of 1 Corinthians 11 is violated whenever we set up structures whereby poor Christians are denied worship opportunities that the rich can participate in.

That is why I will never authorize the selling of tickets to a church-sanctuary event. (We will either fund it some other way or we won't do it.) That is why, at my former church, when some wanted to assemble a group to attend a mega-church Christmas pageant replete with real donkeys ($5 tickets, $15 for good seats), I let others announce and organize it, but did not participate myself. That is why,
whenever Chuck Swindoll or David Jeremiah or Tony Evans announce another ocean cruise that features their Bible teaching, I turn off the radio or switch to the Catholic station. Cruises are fine. Jesus cruises are not. The poor can't participate.

Please understand, I have no problem with the rich being able to afford things that poor people can't. That is life. I favor right-wing capitalism, am at peace with the fact that the rich can get better health care and education, and believe that compulsory redistribution of wealth is a great evil. But in the church all worldly economic advantages and privileges have no place. As a pastor I guard against even their most subtle intrusions. As spiritual groundskeeper I try to keep things as level as I can at the foot of the cross.

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."

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.

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.

Getting Over Grief (February 26, 2006)

"How long will you mourn for Saul?" (1 Samuel 16:1)

I was surprised how much those words took me aback when I read them in preparation for a Sunday School lesson on David. Before David's story begins, God has to tell a very depressed Samuel to "get over it." The first king that he had anointed, Saul, proved unworthy. Saul's line was supposed to continue forever, but now his kingship would not even make it to the second generation. What a blow! Samuel had selected, supported and pinned his hopes on Saul. When Saul turned away from the Lord, Samuel grieved. It would have been wrong not to.

Just as it would have been wrong for him to go on grieving forever. There comes a moment when you have to say "O.K., enough, time to move on."

Of course you can't say that right away. The Lord himself "grieved" over having made Saul king (1 Samuel 15:35). Jesus paused a while to weep over the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). Job's friends grieved with him seven days (Job 2:12-13), and that turned out not to be long enough.

I don't know what is the right amount of time to grieve. It varies depending on the loss. We grieve little at the passing of an aged saint; much at the sudden departure of a young man. Then again, Israel "grieved for Moses...30 days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over" (Deuteronomy 34:8) - but even one day was too long to mourn the wicked young traitor Absalom (2 Samuel 19:1-8).

People differ on what they feel they have a "right" to grieve over. When I heard a young preacher talk about how much he and his wife suffered when she miscarried early in her pregnancy, I remembered my mother saying that a woman should not even announce that she is with child until she is pretty far along. All child-bearers miscarry, she said (she herself had lost several that way), and, relative to losing
a full-term baby, it is a minor sorrow that should be borne quietly.

It is hard for those who have not suffered a particular loss to intuit its severity. My sister lost both her son (he was murdered) and her husband (he cheated on her and abandoned her) the same year. Which is harder - to lose a son to death or a husband to wickedness? According to my sister, it is not even close: her husband's betrayal was worse than death.

But even deaths and worse-than-deaths must not be allowed to hold hostage forever our duties of work and our pursuits of joy. My mother sometimes quoted Joshua 1:2, where God says bluntly, "Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you...". That is, quit crying about Moses and get busy with the task at hand.

May God give us grace to know the opportune time when we must discard righteous sorrow in order to resume even more righteous activity. And may he supply all the strength for that too. We'll need it.

Prayer Meeting Paradox (February 12, 2006)

I would like to introduce you to an effect that I have found so odd, so striking - and yet so common - that I have decided to give it a name. I'm going to call it the "Prayer Meeting Paradox."

I first became aware of the Prayer Meeting Paradox in 1989, when my wife and I and our year-old son were living in Costa Rica learning Spanish. On occasion Linda and I would hire a baby sitter and go see a movie. First-run Hollywood movies only cost about 50 cents, and they were in English. (We ignored the subtitles.) We only got to see about four or five movies during our year in Costa Rica, so whenever we went I looked forward to it as a real treat.

But, I confess, I was never that eager to go to a prayer meeting. It is not just that I was struggling to learn the language. It was more of - well, let's face it - a prayer meeting is something you go to out of duty, not because you can't wait to have such a good time. Frankly, I would have been glad to have an excuse not to go ("It's raining buckets tonight - even with my umbrella I'll get soaked. Better stay
home."). But if something prevented my seeing a movie, I probably would have been peeved. My problem is that by nature I am just not that spiritual. As C. S. Lewis once confided to a friend, "Being religious really goes against my grain."

But after going to a few movies out of joy and a few prayer meetings out of duty, I noticed an effect that amazed me. After a movie I'd leave the theater feeling either vague dissatisfaction or nothing at all. But after a prayer meeting I would have such a rush of joy it was like walking on air. Every prayer meeting left me exultant. This is the Prayer Meeting Paradox: you don't want to go, but when you do, you wind up being unbearably glad that you went.

I have experienced the Prayer Meeting Paradox many times since. Thursday afternoons in seminary, for example, I would drag my reluctant self over to the nursing home for prayer and Bible study with the old ladies - and then by the time our fellowship would end an hour later, it was like somebody (the Holy Spirit, I guess) had slipped me an Ecstasy pill.

There may be explanations, sociological and biochemical, to account for the Prayer Meeting Paradox, but I don't think they exclude this spiritual explanation: The devil does not want you to pray with people, and he tempts you to avoid such gatherings. But once he has succeeded in tempting you away, he has no reason to reward you with pleasure. You're like the male praying mantis who, having rendered his service, is chewed up and digested by the mate who cares nothing for his well-being.

God, on the other hand, delights to reward our obedience with some "after-the-fact" joy. But since he desires obedience for its own sake, the joy that follows must be a little elusive, not precisely sought after, perhaps dimly remembered, and experienced only as a byproduct. Were it not so, then our good actions (like prayer meeting attendance) would be mercenary. We would be lab rats pressing the "prayer bar" just for the release of sweet endorphins. God does not want behaviorally-conditioned rats though: he wants sons and daughters. To that end, the connection he establishes between obedience and joy must be nuanced, even a little paradoxical.

There is a way to test my theory empirically. But you have to drag yourself to a prayer meeting to find out.

I Welcome Your Disagreements (February 5, 2006)

My heart gave a little leap for joy in our Sunday School class when someone raised her hand and said, "I disagree with you."

Great! Now the discussion can get interesting. Not that it was dull before (though, who knows, maybe it was), but a direct challenge to a statement of mine or of anybody else gives the whole conversation a keener edge. The sharp blade of disagreement is the tool a teacher needs to refine his own thoughts, retract his mistakes and clarify his obfuscations. Learners benefit when disagreement is expressed, since no other dialectical knife can better carve our thoughts into lean and worthy units.

The worst teacher I had in seminary was one who took disagreements personally, and who graded us on how precisely we regurgitated his opinions back to him. My how dull his classes were! It seemed we were learning not to engage and reason but to listen and repeat. The"listen and repeat" method is fine for multiplication tables, but
truths that are deep and satisfying are arrived at by weathering bombardments of "I think you're wrong," or, "I would put it differently."

Solomon liked a good argument. When he wrote "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another," he was indicating in part his dissatisfaction with the dullness of thoughts achieved in isolation. Even the wisest man in the world needed the stimulation of a few "No-Men" to fine tune his proverbs. St. Paul also liked it when people refused to take his word for it. Acts 17:11 says, "The Bereans were of
more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." Paul wanted them to test his words against Scripture.

In C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the ship's crew come to an island inhabited by invisible simpletons, the Dufflepuds. The two parties sit down for dinner, and Lewis writes,

The meal would have been pleasanter...if the conversation had not consisted entirely of agreements. The invisible people agreed about everything. Indeed most of their remarks were the sort it would not be easy to disagree with: "What I always say is, when a chap's hungry, he likes some victuals," or "Getting dark now, always does at night," or even "Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it?"

Yes, yes, the ocean is wet, night is dark and hungry people like to eat. Snooze. Your life should be purpose-driven. Snore. (Sorry - that last one was a cheap shot.)

Don't be a Dufflepud. Once in a while say something people might actually object to. And if other people (even your pastor!) say something amiss, speak up with a hearty "You're wrong!" If your words are seasoned with grace, no reasonable person will be offended.