Look! Up in the Sky

I recommend an article at National Review Online, “Tim Tebow’s Religion, and Ours,” by Daniel Foster.  Here’s a quote: 

“That’s way too much earnestness for the ironic. It’s way too much idealism for the cynical. And it’s way too much selflessness for the self-absorbed. In short, people aren’t upset at Tebow’s God talk. They’re upset that he might actually believe it.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/284806/tebow

If you’ve seen A Christmas Carol humpteen times and you’re red-eyed from watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed, here’s a Christmas movie you might try, Funny Farm.    Oh, I suppose “Christmas movie” isn’t quite accurate.  Three quarters of the film goes by before the Yuletide season arrives.  But, let’s face it, even It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t quite a Christmas flick.   It just has that reputation. 

This Chevy Chase vehicle first appeared in 1988.  It’s a fish-out-of-water story about a married couple who move from NYC to a rural Vermont community where everybody is a bit…odd.  To give just a few examples, the sheriff can’t drive, but rides around in a taxi.  The antique dealer seemingly stocks only items that belonged to her dead husband and relatives.  The local diner serves a delicious, but unidentified, dish that turns out to be pig testicles.  The drunken mailman throws the mail out the window of his old pickup as he rockets by.  Chase’s wife, played by Madolyn Smith, finds a body buried beneath her flower bed. 

Chase’s character, Andy Farmer, has left his his lucrative sports-writer position to write a novel.  Unbeknownst to him, his wife Elizabeth has written a children’s book.  When she tearfully confesses that his book is unreadable, he throws a fit and burns the manuscript.  Later, he breaks his arm and is unable to return to writing.  When his wife hits paydirt with her children’s story, he seethes with jealousy.  

One day, his publisher comes looking for his long overdue manuscript, threatening to make him pay back the advance money.  In desperation, Chase pawns off his wife’s book as his own.  The betrayal drives a wedge between man and wife, putting them on the road to divorce.  They decide to sell their house, but worry that the oddball townspeople will scare off potential buyers.  They hit on an inspired plan.  At a town council meeting, they distribute old copies of the Saturday Evening Post with covers painted by Norman Rockwell.  They tell the citizens that if they’ll start acting like the people in the paintings, they’ll not only present a $10,000 check to the town but a $50 bonus to the participants in the scheme.  The climax takes place during the Christmas season with the enterprising Redbud-ians on their best Yule behavior, caroling like mad and uncaging deer to run across the frozen lake to awe prospective home-buyers. 

 It really doesn’t sound all that funny, does it?  But, trust me, it plays that way.  The plot is as odd as the citizens of Redbud, but somehow the movie works.  Roger Ebert praised the film’s comic vision, adding that it isn’t just funny, it’s likeable.  I agree. All this could have been served up in sloppy, over-the-top fashion, but director George Roy Hill makes it work.  He finds the right tone and sticks with it.  Chase and Smith play two flawed but loving human beings trying to remain sane in a not-quite-sane environment.  You root for them, even when they don’t deserve it.   
 
I recommend Funny Farm.

Let me preach about preaching for a moment.  I’ve never liked the word “sermon.”  It sounds bad—like a slithering serpent swallowed a sour lemon and the result was this horrible hybrid,  the ser-mon.  Roman Catholics call it a homily.  In the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, they call it a lesson.  I find “message” pretty palatable.   Regardless of what we call it, however, it’s been around a long, long, long time.  

Nehemiah and the priests read and explained, read and explained.  In the Jewish synagogue, someone read from the scroll and commented on the text.  The practice carried over into the church and has remained in the church ever since.  What Justin Martyr wrote in the mid-second century AD has characterized Christian worship through the centuries: 

On the day called Sunday there is a meeting of all believers who live in the town or the country, and the memoirs of the apostles, or the writings of the prophets, are read for as long as time will permit.  When the reader hs finished, the president in a sermon urges and invites the people to base their lives on these noble things.

These days a lot of people are turned off by preaching.  I heard a country song about two fellows talking about life over a beer:  “God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.”   That’s what a lot of people think church ought to be:  if not burping God-talk over a beer, then pooling ignorance over coffee at Tim Horton’s.  

Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck have written about the modern revulsion toward the pulpit.  I recommend their books, Why We’re Not Emergent and Why We Love the Church.  They conclude that much of the current disdain for preaching is really an uneasiness about authority and control.   To put it more simply, nobody wants to be told what to do!  

Some believers dress it up by saying preaching is a monologue and nobody’s listening anymore.  They say modern preaching is said to be a product of the European enlightenment.   It impedes the progress of the individual as he makes his lone, spiritual journey, the quest of self-discovery.    The truth is, God has always spoken through priests, prophets, and preachers and nobody wanted to listen to them either! 

I, for one, am committed to preaching and teaching because I’m committed to the Word of God.  My mandate is crystal clear: 

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage–with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.    2 Timothy 4:1-4

Sometimes I fail at it.  I swing hard every Sunday, but sometimes I over swing the ball and fall right on my, uh, notes.  But I won’t quit.  Whether I’m paid or not, I won’t quit.  Because it’s important.  Preaching matters.  Underneath the ridiculous mask of the preacher-teacher, God approaches.  So sermon time is not just my time.  It’s our time.  Woe unto you if you will not listen.  Woe unto me if I don’t hear what I’m saying! It’s not just a monologue—especially if we do what it says!

Can I get an amen?

“Every time a man raises his hand against his neighbour in the name of his faith, he renounces his faith!” 

I haven’t written about my favorite Man of Steel in a while.  I’m overdue.  Since I recently came across the above quote in a Superman comic, I figured I’d spend a little time here with my pal and yours, the Big Blue Boy Scout himself. 

First of all, let me praise and recommend one of the finest comic book shops in the midwest, The Bookery in Fairborn, Ohio.  That’s where I purchase comics old and new.  In addition to a store stocked with the latest stuff, everything from DC to Dynamite, just across the street they have a warehouse with thousands of back issues.  They also have quite an inventory of pulps, paperbacks, hardbacks, and inexpensive DVDs.  The Bookery is where I bought the three Superman comics I’m about to briefly review:

 SUPERMAN #3 is the third entry in the (latest) reboot of that title.  Superman has discarded the red trunks for something described outside the comics as a “Kryptonian battlesuit.”  Oh well, at least it’s blue.  And he still wears the red cape and the chest emblem, an Kryptonian family crest that happens, happily, to resemble the letter ‘S’.  Some things you just don’t mess with. 

In this one, Superman continues to battle an unearthly menace.  First, it took the form of a fire monster.  This time, it’s a super-cold creature that chills its victims literally to the bone.  Supes gets rid of the thing, but the victory isn’t complete.   Meanwhile, a skeptical Galaxy Communications (the outfit that bought the Daily Planet) reporter is out to cook Superman’s goose in a  TV documentary.   It seems that ever since the flying man arrived in town, Metropolis has become a target for highly destructive menaces (including, via flashback, Titano, the super-ape, a King Kong-ish holdover from the Silver Age).   I don’t like this Supes-basher any better than you do, but I have to admit, he has a point.  Superman attracts super-bad guys like flies–and people get killed in the melees.  

Still, I found all this rather depressing.  Though I liked the interaction and dialogue between the Planet/Galaxy staffers, the story was joyless.  To be fair and balanced, I remember that the Silver Age Superman stories, which I adored, weren’t particularly gay either.  In fact, at times, they could be real downers.   But that was long ago and, in the interim, it’s become fashionable to fear and suspect super-heroes.  It’s getting tiresome.  Does Superman really have to be a super-powered version of Batman?  Does he really have to be hated, feared, and suspected?   Well, in this continuity, they’re just getting to know the guy.  Hopefully, more will warm up to him–those that don’t freeze to death in the meantime, that is!     

Meanwhile, I’m intrigued enough by certain Kryptonian-spouting mystery people to keep buying a while.  I’m also wondering if the flashbacks featuring the “Fleisher” robots (a clever nod to the old Fleisher Studios Supes cartoons, one of which featured giant robots) and Titano are tales yet to be told in the pages of ACTION.  (In case you weren’t aware, the latter comic currently depicts a jeans-wearing,work-booted Superman in his earliest days.)   

Ah, but the more things change, the more they stay the same–as displayed in one of the two back issues I bought for a buck each.  In SUPERMAN #348 (1980), Clark Kent is sent on assignment by one Morgan Edge, who runs–guess what?–Galaxy Communications.  A few years earlier, when Denny O’Neil rebooted the character, Kent abandoned the newspaper beat for the TV anchor desk.  By the time this episode rolled around, he was splitting his time between the Planet and WGBS. 

Edge sends Kent out to report on a crisis in Arizona.  A rain-cloud creature, apparently conjured up by an old Indian medicine man,  is causing flooding in the desert (there’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncy!).  In actuality, it’s a creature from another dimension.   Interestingly, this issue and the issue mentioned above are similar in that they both center around a menace affecting the weather, one drenching things, the other freezing them.  I enjoyed Curt Swan’s artwork, the dialogue between Lana Lang and Clark, and, best of all, the fact that it was done-in-one.   

Finally, we come to the title from which I quoted above, ACTION COMICS #517 (1981).  It was a Christmas tale centering around religious conflict.  Written by Gerry Conway, it starts out at a Christmas party at the Daily Planet.  Clark’s super-senses pick up a disturbance outside a nearby synagogue.  Whooshing to the scene, Superman pulls Jewish and Christian (or, at least, Christmas-observing) boys apart, then proceeds to give them a lecture on religious tolerance.   It’s here that he preaches

 about raising our hands against each other in the name of Faith. 

Of course, to this Christian preacher, religious intolerance is one thing; trivializing the vital differences between Christianity and Judaism (or between Christianity and Islam) is quite another.  For believers in Jesus (as opposed to mere Christmas-tree putter-uppers), the problem is twofold:  1) Knowing what we actually believe.  2) Being able to articulate it to non-Christians in a clear but winsome way.   

Rather than continue on in the sticky area of Jewish-Christian relations, however, Conway immediately embroils the Man of Steel in a conflict between two alien races over a holy artifact, subtly dubbed “the grayl”   Along the way, someone reads a prophecy about “the Son” who will end the aliens’ holy war.  It’s never explained who or what the Son is.  Is it Superman?  Christ?  Perhaps I should go back and read the story again.  I might’ve missed something.  Anyway, the story, “The War for Peace,” was interesting if a bit heavy-handed.  for you fans of fins,  this issue was rounded out with an episode of an ongoing Aquaman tale.  

And that’s the news from Metropolis!

After their long captivity in Babylon, the Jews had at last straggled back to their homeland.  There they found ruin and rubble.  They rolled up their sleeves and went to work rebuilding the temple and the altar of sacrifice.  After they laid the foundation, they paused for a praise party.  Perhaps they paused too long, long enough to see how ugly the Samaritans were getting.  They faced opposition from these people who’d had the run of the land while they’d been in exile. 

So they quit.   They lost the grand vision and began looking out for Number One.  There wasn’t much in the way of building materials in the vicinity, but there was timber in the hills—and these people went and got it.  They built paneled houses with it.  The foundation of the temple sat for years, mute testimony to a people who’d lost their nerve and their faith. 

Enter Haggai the prophet, who administers a holy kick in the pants:  “You say it’s not time to build the Lord’s house–but it’s time for you build your panelled houses?  Wake up!”–or words to that effect.   

There was a time when I thought that a church building was unnecessary.  God didn’t live in temples made with hands, so what was the big need for a church building?   Through the experience of church planting, the Lord taught me I was right, but only to a point–the point being Haggai!    

I’ll let Eugene Peterson take it from here:  

“Compared with the great prophets who preached repentance and salva­tion, Haggai’s message doesn’t sound very “spiritual.” But in God’s economy it is perhaps unwise to rank our assigned work as either more or less spir­itual. We are not angels; we inhabit space. Material—bricks and mortar, boards and nails—keeps us grounded and connected with the ordinary world in which we necessarily live out our extraordinary beliefs. [Therefore] repairing the building where we worship is an act of obedience every bit as important as praying in that place of worship.”

Among the many things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving is our church building.  I’m also thankful for the dedication and skill of the hands that work to keep it nice.  Our building is a sanctuary, a tool, and a launching pad.  It’s a house of brick and wood, and an amazing portal into a world unseen. 

And so’s yours.   Amen.

Stephen B. Sample is president of the highly successful University of Southern California.  I’ve been reading his marvelous book, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership.  In the chapter titled, “Know Which Hill You’re Willing to Die On,” he writes about the need for a leader to be consciously aware of his moral beliefs and the basis for those beliefs.  Thus, Sample sometimes poses to graduates at commencement ceremonies this question:  How do you feel about God? 

He assures the graduates that he’s not trying to sell them a particular religion.  The question was not how should you feel about God, but how do you feel about God?   He acknowledges that, way down deep, his listeners may not believe in God, or that they may believe but have no wish to have a relationship with God.   His conclusions are so striking as to merit a quote: 

What I have found, however, is that the vast majority of people–leaders and followers alike–duck this question altogether…  Discovering how one feels about God is simply too difficult or frightening for most people to address in any serious or meaningful way. 

There are millions of people who regularly attend religious services, and yet haven’t the foggiest idea of how they feel about God, or what kind of relationship they have with their God, or what they expect of him, or what they believe he expects of them.  And similarly, there are millions of agnostics who have concluded that questions pertaining to God are simply unanswerable or unimportant, and yet find it impossible to fully suppress their concerns for the spiritual and transcendental aspects of their own existence. 

Samples goes on to imply that being fully human involves having feelings for and some sort of relationship to God.  That certainly accords with my own experience as a pastor and evangelist.  Recently, I’ve been working with some people in their twenties and thirties who’ve lived more or less apart from God all their lives.   A couple of them had lots of questions for me.  A couple of them are intrigued, but, so far, they’re keeping the church at arm’s length.  One came to one worship service and a Bible study, then…well, fled is the best descriptive term.   (I can’t get that girl to even talk about it anymore.)   A couple of these people I’ve had the privilege of baptizing.  One is growing in faith.  The other…well, the jury’s still out on him.

I have no idea what Stephen Sample’s own religious beliefs are.  I don’t know if he’s a Christian or not, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he is.  But here I stand with him:  to be human is to be aware, however dimly, of God; to wonder and worry about Him.  It’s also, unfortunately, to run and hide from Him, to sew fig leaves about our nakedness and squat in the bushes until that unearthly Presence passes by. 

I know the feelings.  I have them myself from time to time.  I believe that God became a human being in Bethlehem of Judea.  I believe that, in the face of a thirty-three year old Jewish carpenter named Jesus, we see God’s face.  Nevertheless, we’ll never be entirely comfortable with God.  Nor, indeed, should we be.  The best we can be is honest enough to admit that He scares us yet brave enough to turn to Him. 

Let’s pray that it may be so.    

What if you could go back in time and change history?  Check out my review of Stephen King’s new novel, 11/22/63, “The Stubborn Past.” 

www.thefish.com

A while back, I preached from The Song of Solomon, a biblical book which, as you may know, consists of passionate love songs.  Recently, it came to my attention that some person or persons had been upset with the sermon.  I’m not going to attempt to reproduce what was said to me about it at that time.  For all I know, the report may have been made up out of whole cloth.  I tend to doubt that, though.  If nothing else, the reporter was bothered by the sermon. 

I wasn’t greatly surprised, or particularly annoyed.  I’m a big boy.  I know that sex is a volatile subject, in and out of the pulpit.  I also know that, even at this late date, some church folks can’t handle it.   Some people have kept their brains in deep freeze for so long, they don’t notice the date, let alone what’s going on around them.   I feel sorry for them. 

As I’ve thought about it, I’m rather glad somebody was stirred enough by preaching to say something about it, even if what they said wasn’t flattering to the preacher; even if it didn’t even make a lick of sense.  Not everybody liked or understood what Jesus said either.  At one point, practically his entire congregation walked away from Him for preaching cannibalism (cf. John 6:52, 66).  At least, that’s what they said he was preaching.   Not everybody liked what Peter and Paul had to say either.  As the old pulpiteers used to say, when those old boys preached they caused either a revival or a riot!  I’d say I was in good company, then–except I’m not nearly as brave or bold as those men were.   The sad fact is, I tend more to step blindly into the yellowjackets’ nest than go bravely to it.   

But I do have my moments, times in the pulpit when I come not with a hot cup of coffee and a warm piece of pie, but with a sword.  And there’s a reason for that.  Every now and then, my church needs to know that, paid though I am, I’m not doing this for the money.  Every now and then, beloved, the church needs to be shocked, stirred, challenged.  They may not get it.  They may never get it.  But woe unto the preacher who does get it–and says nothing. 

I draw a paycheck for doing what I do.  My congregation supports me financially.  I’m not ashamed of this arrangement.  Besides the fact that the New Testament provides ample justification for paying the pastor, this pastor needs the money!  But I’m not called to make a buck any more than I’m called to shoot the bull.  Woe to me if I don’t preach the Gospel, not just the cozy, comfy parts but the sticky wickets.  Woe to me, as Jesus said, when all men speak well of me.  Verily, I am doing something wrong, something for which I will answer, for which I will receive the harsher judgment.  

Got a preacher?  Good!  Pray for him, encourage him, tell him you want and need to hear the truth, even when you don’t like it–especially when you don’t! 

As Steve Brown says, “You think about that.  Amen.”

Over a bowl of frozen chocolate yogurt, I watched another episode from the second season of Star Trek, the original series.  In “Return to Tomorrow,” Kirk, Spock, and Doctor Ann Mulhall, played by the lovely Diana Muldaur, lend their bodies to three advanced, but disembodied, alien intelligences.  The aliens say they wish the transference only long enough to build android bodies to live in.  They’ll then return the used bodies to their hosts.  Who are they kidding?  Two of the aliens, the ones inhabiting Kirk and Mulhall’s bodies, are honorable.  The third, who takes Spock’s body, is not.  

The ending is patently ridiculous, with various characters ”sharing consciousness” and minds jumping from bodies into machines and back into bodies.  It reminded me of the latter Universal horror flicks in which Dr. Frankenstein pulled brains out of people and stuck them into other people willy nilly. 

Yet the episode is not without its charms.  It’s noteworthy among fans for Kirk’s stirring “Risk” speech in which he declares why his crew should participate in this bizarre project.  The speech is worth quoting here: 

They used to say if mankind could fly, he’d have wings-but he did fly.  He discovered he had to.  Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone to Mars and then to the nearest star?  That’s like saying you wish you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to.   I’m in command.  I could order this, but I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this.  But I also must point out that the possibilities–the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great.  Risk!  Risk is our business.  That’s what this starship is all about.  That’s why we’re aboard her.  You may dissent without any prejudice.  Do I hear a negative vote?

William Shatner was always a fine actor, albeit with a tendency to ham.  In response to his passionate delivery here, some might say you could smell the bacon frying right throught the screen!   Yet, I must admit, I’m a sucker for a great speech.  When Kirk was done, I was ready to find me a Starfleet to enlist in! 

I was also struck again by the power of words, and reminded of the need a leader has to speak.  In Steven B. Sample’s marvelous book, The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, he says that any leader who thinks that a memo is as effective as a face-to-face meeting, or that an email is as effective as a phone call, is still playing in the minor leagues.  He adds:

The contrarian leader knows that the human brain is prewired at the deepest levels in favor of the spoken word; if you wish to really inspire your followers and touch them at their emotional core, you must speak to them. 

As a preacher, I know the power of words.  I know that people take my words seriously, even when I’m joking.  It’s a great, even grave responsibility to be a speaker.   Leaders are, of necessity, speakers.  I must confess that, at times, fearing that responsibility, I’ve allowed myself to sink to a lower level of communication–an email instead of a phone call.  

Good ol’ Kirk calls me back to the captain’s chair.   Risk, leaders, is our business. 

The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.  While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands.  It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them.  Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the fold were broken to pieces at the same time and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer.  The wind swept them away without leaving a trace.  But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.  Daniel 2:32-35

The Rock started out small.  An out of the way place at night, most people snoring.  It rolled like a coin between the dirty feet of shepherds in the field. 

Actually, the rock didn’t look like a rock at all.  It looked like a baby of all things.  But, even before he was a bump on Mary’s belly, he was rocking the world.  When he was born, he got some astrologers from Babylon, the descendants of the people old Nebuchadnezzar had depended on, to mount their camels and go hunting for him.  

He grew up a carpenter in the backwater of Nazareth.  Nothing more.  At least, that’s what his brothers thought. When he started preaching, he made no money, wrote no books, gathered no great fame.  The trouble the authorities had with him, the stir he caused, was basically local.  His was a routine crucifixion.  They did them all the time.  

They put him the ground and rolled a big rock over him.  They had no idea the rock would continue to roll.  They had no idea how far.  They had no idea how big it would grow or what powers would fall before it.     

No earthly power can stand before the Rock of Ages.  How much less my little kingdom?  From time to time, it’s good to look down and see my own feet of clay.  From time to time, it’s good to remember that my earthly time is passing.  But, to use Isaiah’s phrase, ”upon this mountain,” I shall remain.   “The world and its desires pass away, but he who does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17). 

See His kingdom.  Receive His kingdom.  Enter His kingdom.   Amen.