Pastors' Blog

Boy—even our Santas are in trouble. At its recent conference in Philadelphia, the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas (that really is their name!) declared that their priority this Christmas is not keeping their long white facial growth curly and clean. Their number one concern is H1N1. Come to think of it—that’d be your chief concern and mine, wouldn’t it—given all the little runny-nosed tikes sitting upon your rotund lap and cheerfully coughing and sneezing straight into your cherry-cheeked face! So for this Christmas our department store, WalMart and city mall Santa Clauses have requested that they be given national priority for the swine flu vaccine. And who can counter their logic? “After all, you wouldn’t want us passing on the last kid’s nasty swine flu virus to your little cherub, now would you?”

But then again, maybe it’s not such a bad idea—being contagious at Christmas time. Can you think of a more opportune season for your contagious faith to spread to others—the others at your office Christmas party, or the others next door where you live, or the others you’ll be sitting beside for that plane ride across the country? Turns out Christmas is a glorious time to be contagious for Jesus.

And if you need a Christmas precedent for going contagious over him, how about that eighty-four year old widow prophetess named Anna. “She was very old . . . . [but] she gave thanks to God and spoke about the [Christ] child to all” (Luke 2:36-38). Because when you’re infected with joy over the promised Savior, it’s OK to spread that contagion to all who will listen to you. Just like Anna.

So this Christmas here’s your H1N1 checklist: remember to wash your hands often, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, go easy on the sweets, take along some Kleenex and grab a handful of Happiness Digest’s in our pamphlet racks by the entrances to our church. Don’t go to church at Pioneer? Then stop by your local Christian bookstore and buy some colorful pamphlets that you can contagiously spread all along your way through this joyful holiday. Catching the H1N1 can be deadly. But catching the contagious truth about Jesus will save the life of the one you infect. So go and spread him . . . with “great joy!”

While the nation continues to mourn over the senseless Fort Hood tragedy last week, let us be cautious about jumping to at least one conclusion. Thirteen families grieve the deaths of their soldier loved ones tragically killed on homeland soil, and one family grieves the yet inexplicable actions of a loved soldier who “snapped” into that killer. But exacerbating the post-mortem analysis is the fact that the alleged killer was not only an Army psychiatrist, but a Muslim, soon to be deployed to Afghanistan. Was it Nidal Hasan’s faith that prompted his actions?
Some say Yes. Why else would the killer reportedly have been shouting, “Allahu Akbar” (God is great!), as he sprayed his deadly fire? While I am not defending this American Muslim soldier’s betrayal and actions, I am, as a member of a minority faith community myself, concerned with how quickly elements of the public and press can raise insinuations against a misunderstood minority religion. How quickly those who share the same minority faith convictions can become suspect in the eyes of the larger community. President Obama, in his eulogy this week at the Fort Hood memorial service for the victims, carefully threaded the needle upon which public opinion seems to teeter: “‘No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts. No just and loving god looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world, and in the next’” (South Bend Tribune 11-11-09).
And what would be our just response to Muslims, whether neighbors or strangers to us? To live by Jesus’ Golden Rule, whereby we treat them with the same fairness and understanding we would want to be treated with were another David Koresh of Waco infamy to rise up and claim kinship with our own community of faith. I.e., the vast majority of any community of faith is a God-devoted, faith-filled part of our human family. And while our faith understandings differ and our perspectives about God/Allah are not always alike, nevertheless we can and must affirm the common ties of faith in God, compassion to all, and hope born of the belief that the Holy Book of God promises a better day for his earth children. If tragedies such as this one could become the catalyst for our own intentional (though halting) efforts to reach out to the Muslims we may yet meet and come to know, imagine the good that God himself might yet bring.
“For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” (Romans 5:15) It’s that “how much more” that will yet “overflow to the many” that must spur us on to love even as God does, no matter which grieving family we belong to.

“20 reasons America has lost its soul and collapse is inevitable.” Not exactly the sort of headline that CBS’s staid economic website, MarketWatch.com, is used to running. In a sobering, columnist Paul B. Farrell opens with the pronouncement, "We've lost 'America’s soul.' And worldwide, the consequences will be catastrophic." He suggests it’s a gut sense we all have: "You know something’s very wrong: A year ago, too-greedy-to-fail banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience. Now magically, they're back to business as usual, arrogant, pocketing outrageous bonuses while Main Street sacrifices, and unemployment and foreclosures continue rising as tight credit, inflation and skyrocketing federal debt are killing taxpayers." His indictment of Wall Street is biting. It "has lost its moral compass." Farrell outlines twenty top reasons why he believes American capitalism is doomed—from the life cycle of empires to today’s financial disparity (where "America’s top 1% own more than 90% of America’s wealth") to the explosion of the federal debt from $11.2 to $23.7 trillion. He concludes, “The coming collapse [with a “high probability by 2012”] is the end of an ‘inevitable’ historical cycle stalking all great empires to their graves. Downsize your lifestyle expectations, trust no one, not even media. . . . [T]here’s absolutely nothing you can do to hide from this unfolding reality or prevent the rush of the historical imperative.” (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-soul-is-lost-and-collapse-is-inevitable-2009-10-20) What a bleak prognosis! And yet, while this financial analyst may be right in his prognostication, he is wrong in his despair. I’ve invited two young adults to the Pioneer pulpit today. Why? Because I believe this new generation of young (from 18 to 30) represents the greatest potential for God’s kingdom in the history of earth. Farrell may be right—they have come on the scene in a time of great impending crisis. But that’s precisely the genius of divine timing. For here are young men and women—undaunted by statistical doom, unafraid of immense challenge, unashamed of the gospel—who are volunteering their lives in the mission of Christ! And this year at Andrews University we are inviting them to focus first on their own peers on this campus. For the last two months a team of them has been in training, preparing to lead this campus this winter in a university-wide week of revival and reformation. Young adults ministering to young adults—there is no more effective combination for the Spirit of Christ. No wonder that great messianic prophecy predicts that it will be the young that flock into the Messiah’s army in the final battle: “Your troops [the Messiah’s army] will be willing on your day of battle. Arrayed in holy splendor your young will come to you like dew from the morning’s womb” (Psalm 110:3 TNIV). The commentator Derek Kidner describes these young warriors as “a splendid army silently and suddenly mobilized.” And that is why I believe we can be unabashedly optimistic about earth’s future, no matter how economically doomed it turns out to be. For in the final battle it will be the young on Christ’s side through whom God will triumph! “With such an army of workers as our youth rightly trained might furnish, how soon the message of a crucified, risen, and soon-coming Savior might be carried to the whole world! How soon might the end come—the end of suffering and sorrow and sin!” (Ed 271) Who needs twenty reasons for doom—when God has one reason for hope! No wonder he gave us the young.

Television is huge on hospitals lately, have you noticed? “Three Rivers,” “House,” “Trauma,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and of course the ubiquitous “ER” reruns—the entertainment industry is in the health care business, it seems. Why? Because everybody loves a healing. Third millennial life on the edge (the real thing) can get as messy as an emergency room, can’t it? So what’s not to like about a fifty-eight minute show that ends (more often than not) with a fractured life put back together, a broken body (or heart) healed just before the final credits roll? Do you suppose that’s why people go to church, too? Hoping against hope for a healing, a mending, a broken life reset, a heartsick spirit rejuvenated and cleansed? Having spent a few nights with my mother-in-law in an emergency room, I’ve learned—though I don’t have a medical bone in me—that ER’s can be messy places, sort of the soiled and stained “living room” of the hospital. It isn’t hard to figure out why. Because people who come to emergency rooms are in the grip of a crisis. That’s why you can experience the coagulating odors of vomit and urine and blood and Lysol-like antibacterial agents wafting in the frenetic air of that saving place. Gurneys and beds once wrapped in sterile white sheets are now splattered and contaminated. But that’s OK, because everybody that works and lives in a hospital knows: “This is why we exist—why we’re here—to get dirtied and stained and exposed, while we scramble to save another life.” Isn’t that true about the church, too? The well-worn yarn about it being a hospital for sinners more than a haven for saints still rings true, worn or not, doesn’t it? Because the community of faith is also a community of love. Radical believing is matched by a radical and sometimes countercultural kind of loving that doesn’t insist on political correctness, but rather embraces the broken life and the fractured soul for who he, for who she is—another earth child of the Father in desperate need of healing and wholeness. So of course we or they come to this community in the grip of crisis—that’s what an ER is for. Who defines crisis by esthetic beauty? The non-virtual reality of human life is defined by its urgent need for urgent care. Which was Jesus’ point: “‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12, 13). Heterosexual sinners, homosexual sinners, all of us in the grip of life’s survival crisis are the very ones for whom Christ raised up this healing community we call church. That we come as we are but do not stay as we are is simply a shining tribute to the transforming power of the Physician who drew us to him and to each other in the first place. Which still makes this the best place for the Doctor in the House to practice his healing work, doesn’t it?