A Really Good Day

Yesterday was a really good day. Paul Renganathan, a missionary we help to support in Chennai, India was with us. Paul is doing a marvelous work spreading the gospel and building up God’s people there. He shared some of the work that is being done in Chennai and across India in our Bible class time, and then he preached for us during the worship hour. I have uploaded to YouTube a short version of the video he shared with us.

I had to cut the video down to fit YouTube's limitations, so there is actually even more going on in Chennai. Keep this truly amazing work in your prayers. Paul generally is here while Lynn and I are gone to Pepperdine, so it was a treat to hear his presentation this year. It was also a treat to join Paul and several of our members for a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant Saturday. Thanks Cathy and Steve for a great lunch!

We were on vacation last week and Paul preached for us this week… so this was the third time in 30 years that I’ve gone two weeks in a row without preaching. That was traumatic for me. OK, it was probably quite pleasant for everyone else, but I had a hard time. I guess I feel better when I keep this illusion going that Denbigh can’t get along without me, but they always seem to get along just fine.

A Sign from God?

Last week, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America met in Minneapolis to approve a resolution that lifts the ban of practicing gay and lesbian people from their clergy. ELCA churches can now to hire homosexuals who are in “committed relationships” to serve as ministers. This makes the ELCA the second (I believe) large mainline protestant denomination to make this move. I believe this is wrong, but it’s not what I want to talk about today.

It seems that while the ELCA was in Minneapolis for their meting, there was also an unexpected, rapidly-developing tornado that visited the city. The ELCA meeting was to begin at 2:00 p.m. and the tornado touched down at about 2:00 p.m. Two buildings damaged by the twister were the Minneapolis Convention Center (where the ELCA was meeting) and Central Lutheran (an ELCA church across the street). That is a very interesting coincidence, isn’t it?

I read two very interesting blogs that were theological reflections on this event. Both writers disagree with the ELCA decision and believe that homosexually is a sin. Both serve churches in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Both take a totally different slant on their in-town tornado. The first blog is by John Piper who sees the tornado as a warning to the ELCA to turn from their approval of sin. The second blog is by Greg Boyd who wonders what the message is of the other 1300 or so tornados that touch down each year and why so few hit the liberal states that most promote homosexuality (Massachusetts, New York, Vermont) and why so many hit the more conservative Bible Belt states that make up tornado alley. Read both of the blogs and tell me what you think.

As we mentioned last night in class, while we are on firm ground talking about what God has done (as revealed in scripture), it is pretty arrogant to point to a current event (like a tornado for example) and talk like we know what God is doing. Could God send a tornado as a gentle reminder? In the book of Job, a tornado was sent by Satan to kill Job’s family and then later God spoke to Job out of a tornado. Without the book of job, we would have no idea from where those storms came. Could the AIDS epidemic be God’s judgment on sin? Or could the AIDS epidemic rather be God providing his church with a great opportunity to minister to marginalized people?

I think we need to be very careful before we speak as God’s interpreter of current events. Ecclesiastes 5:7 reminds us, "Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore stand in awe of God."

A Mixed-Message?

There is an interesting article in Christianity Today and another on MSNBC on abstinence, marriage and the message that young people often hear in Evangelical churches. Churches do stress the importance of sexual purity in the Christian life. Programs like “True Love Waits” stress the importance of chastity and holiness for Christian young people. While the emphasis on chastity is Biblical and unchanging, what has changed is the church’s attitudes toward marriage itself. Christian young adults are pressured by the culture and often by their parents and church to postpone marriage until they are finished with school, have gained life experience, and are economically stable. So there is this double message of no sex before marriage AND waiting before you get married.

Mark Regnerus, a University of Texas sociologist and author of the Christianity Today article ("The Case for Early Marriage") suggests that while the church has stressed chastity, we have also to a degree devalued marriage by “by discouraging it and delaying it.” He goes on to suggest that the church’s emphasis on chastity without a similar emphasis on marriage hasn’t worked very well. He says that about “80 percent of unmarried, church-going, conservative Protestants who are currently dating someone are having sex of some sort.” Christians aren’t that much more likely to wait for marriage than non-Christians. He goes on “I'm certainly not suggesting that they cannot abstain. I'm suggesting that in the domain of sex, most of them don't and won't.”

So is the point to make get our kids are married by the end of high school? Of course not. We need to do a better job of teaching the Biblical mandate of sexual purity and chastity. We need to do a better job of preparing our kids for the discipline, self-sacrifice, and faith that is required for successful marriage. We need to do a better job of teaching our children that marriage is a covenant and that divorce is not an option. But maybe we need to do a better job of realizing the incredible pressure created by those dual expectations of waiting for sex until marriage and waiting for marriage until after college-and-career launch. And maybe we need to remember that only one of those two messages is Biblical and non-negotiable.

At the Crocodile Dock

The level of excitement and exhaustion just went up a megaton around here-- VBS began last night with a roar. The building was full to the brim with K-5 graders running and hooping and learning. We also have an unofficial toddler class made up of children in our church, many of whose parents are working in the VBS. We can't advertise that class because we already have just about more than we can handle. In fact, we just about had as many kids as we could handle. As Kati was making the “everyone bring your friends tomorrow” speech, there were folks in the back wondering where would put their friends! I’m not sure what the fire marshal would say the limit is for elementary school kids in our building, but we seemed to be pushing the saturation point last night.

I did learn something about communication last night. The question, “Will you do the VBS opening” can have two meanings. It can mean, “Will you do the WHOLE opening, worship, Bible story setup, opening skit and memory verse?” It can also mean, “Will you do the opening dramatic skit.” When the VBS director and the VBS volunteer interpret that question differently, the result is blank stares by everyone. My nomination for sport of the week is Kati Rutherford who jumped in with 3 minutes notice and stood in the gap between a bunch of screaming kids and pandemonium. Great job, Kati!

I remember VBS when I was a kid as being cookies and Kool-Aid, some Popsicle sticks glued together, and some pretty long Bible lessons with a few more flannel-graph visual aids than normal. (If you don’t know what flannel-graph is, it was kinda like PowerPoint made out of an early form of Velcro). In fact, that was pretty much what VBS was for many years after I came to Denbigh. Well, this isn’t your father’s VBS. All kinds of movement and song and dance (literally) that all point to and revolve around a Bible story and application. The kids really seem to enjoy it, and the adult workers I spoke to last night really enjoyed it too. (I was a bit selective and to who I talked to and when).

Watching these little munchkins so excited about being here and singing and learning about God, it’s really worth all the trouble… that other people go to!

A Bowl of Cereal

When I was a kid, we used to have these big family reunions. And I do mean big. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother had 12 kids who survived to adulthood. Most of their children had large families as well, so when the Copeland clan got together for a family reunion, it was a really big deal! This extended family eventually become so extended that these reunions became more and more difficult to pull off. And because that first generation of Copeland kids have almost all gone on to another family reunion, the big one here on earth isn’t the same. I'm not even sure they happen anymore.

Grandmother used to love to tell the story of the social faux pas I committed at our family reunion when I was 5 or 6 years old. The family then met at my great-grandmother’s house (next door to Grandmother’s) during Christmas. It seems that (and mind you that I’ve never had any external verification of this event) we were all standing before the grand table (likely several tables) loaded down with all manner of meats and vegetables (most of them home-grown) of all shapes and varieties. But as I looked over that table containing more food than produced by some small counties, I turned up my nose and said, “I want a bowl of cereal!” Grandmother would just cackle when she told that story… over and over.

OK, only a dumb kid would settle for cereal in the middle of a banquet feast! But I wonder if that isn’t what we do with God. God has placed within each of us a holy hunger for Himself. David writes in Psalm 63:1, “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” He goes on to say in verse 5, “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.” David knew that his deepest hunger was for God and that he only could be satisfied by God. Each of us has that same God-shaped void that can only be filled by God.

And yet we settle for a bowl of Cheerios. That than fill ourselves with God and His goodness, we choose to fill our lives with money, things, pleasure, entertainment and the list goes on. God wants to full us with Himself, and we settle for other things that never quite seem to fill us at all. God wants to us to dine at his table and be filled with this goodness. And we decide to have a bowl of cereal.

Angels and Demons

Tomorrow night, I will close a rather long Wednesday night class series that I shamelessly entitled “Angels and Demons.” It has nothing to do with the Dan Brown thriller (I still haven’t seen the movie yet). This series was a look at what the Bible says about angels and demons, two topics that I have really not been drawn to much over the years. What surprised me (and shouldn’t have) was that angels are all over the Bible. I thought angels kinda kick things off and then show up on special missions, like announcing the birth of Jesus, and then kinda fade off the scene. Nope! Angels are scattered all over the Bible, and they are more common in the New Testament that they are in the Old. For example, a quick count shows that angels are mentioned 24 times in Luke and 22 times in Acts… and 13 times in Hebrews. In the Old Testament, Zechariah (20), Judges (17) and Genesis (15) lead the way. Oh yeah, angels are mentioned 77 times in the book of Revelation. On the other hand, demons are mentioned 73 times in the Bible, and 63 times are in the gospels.

What conclusions do I draw from this? I conclude that angels are mentioned a lot in the Bible. How’s that for profound? OK, I’ll go a little further. When angels showed up in the Bible, people usually didn’t recognized them as angels and were shocked and terrified when they did realize that the man they were talked to wasn’t a man but a messenger from God. In other words, people in Bible times expected angels to show up about as much as you and I expect angels to show up, and yet they showed up… a lot. So maybe angels today are doing more than just strumming harps in heaven and are still ministering spirits to the people of God. If we ever do meet an angels that we recognize as an angels, it would be like meeting Roma Downey with special effects back-lighting.

What about demons? When demons show up in the gospels, they are confronted and overcome by the power of Christ. Demons are also mentioned in the epistles, those instructional letters to the church, but there is no instruction on how to cast out demons, bind demons, or name the demon that’s in control of Cleveland. The emphasis in the epistles is on living holy lives, resisting temptation and not giving the devil a foothold in our lives. We can imagine a world like Ashton in This Present Darkness where demons are flying all over the place and are battled back by angels. But the impact on our lives are the same—we are to pray and watch and live holy lives.

Here is a YouTube of a skit Lynn and Kati’s cabin did that portrays how life our lives may be impacted by angels and demons. Is this how it really goes? Maybe.