Pastors' Blog

So how much is your mother worth? Not that she was anybody’s mother, the subject in Picasso’s painting “Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur.” Turns out she was the renown painter’s mistress—which hardly makes her an appropriate theme for Mother’s Day. And yet the buzz throughout the art world this week has been all about the auction price this oil canvas of Picasso’s actually fetched on Tuesday night. Reputed to have been painted by Picasso in just one day back in 1964, this 5 feet by 4 feet painting put up for auction at Christie’s auction house lasted a full 8 minutes and six seconds on the auctioneer’s block. In the end six bidders drove the price through the ceiling, until it soared to a new world record for any auctioned piece of art. How much did Picasso’s woman go for? A feverish $106.5 million. Not bad for a day’s work, is it?

If only our beloved mothers could have enjoyed the luxury of just a day’s work. The nation pauses this weekend to remember these devoted women we dearly love—mothers who never ended up on a Christie’s auction house canvas—and yet whose self-sacrificing love for the likes of you and me is a portrait of infinitely greater worth than any Picasso masterpiece. For truth be known, when the colors of our mothers were splashed across the canvases of our own childhoods and teen age years, how could anyone possibly affix any price at all to their devotion and love?

No wonder the scene of that shining moment was etched onto the canvas of Calvary, never to be effaced—when from the cross the God of the universe gazed down through his own tortured pain onto the face of the woman who had birthed him and bathed him, loved him and caressed him, taught him and trained him, who had fiercely held him in her heart when it seemed that all the world rejected him. No wonder his dying thoughts—not unlike young soldiers on many a forgotten battlefield whose final cries, history records, were for their mothers—no wonder Jesus whispered to his mother, when prayers to his Father were choked and stifled. The Son of God had but one mother. And to her his undying love was pledged.

This Mother’s Day as you thank God for your own mother and recite to her your love again and again, ponder this recollection of William Cowper, “On Receipt of My Mother’s Picture”:

Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass’d

With me but roughly since I heard thee last.

Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smiles I see,

The same that oft in childhood solaced me;

Voice only fails, else, how distinct they say,

“Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!”

The meek intelligence of those dear eyes

(Blest be the art that can immortalize,

The art that baffles time’s tyrannic claim

To quench it) here shines on me still the same.

I love you, Mother.

It isn’t pretty when Mother Nature blows her stack! For over a week now the economy of our little planet has been held hostage by an angry volcano fuming above the frigid plains of Iceland. They call her Eyjafjallajoekull (meaning “island mountain glacier”), and the good news is she hasn’t put on a display like this since 1821. The bad news is that back then she threw her tantrums for thirteen long months!

But there was no air travel back then. While flights have now been “ungrounded” in Europe, the airline industry has calculated that air carriers lost $1.7 billion as a consequence of their decision to keep their passengers and planes out of the wind-blown ash clouds.  But that “better to be safe than sorry” precaution came with a very heavy price tag. Without auto parts shipments, BMW and Nissan auto plants in Germany and Japan were forced to close temporarily. Flower growers in Kenya—which exports to the world 1,000 tons a day of fresh goods—threw away 10 million flowers, mostly roses, with refrigerated storages overflowing. Asparagus and broccoli ended up, not on European tables, but as cattle feed instead. Tourism in Europe dropped. Train travel skyrocketed. Oil prices fell. And then the mountain went still. Almost.

But if she should resume belching her black plumes into the heavens for a prolonged period, Reuters reported that some economists estimate the European GDP could be lowered between 1 and 2 percent. Amazing, isn’t it, how a faraway island volcano can impact an entire globe?

Just another cycle . . . or just another reminder? After all, you could hardly expect Mother Nature to keep still as this civilization approaches the day of reckoning, could you? Seismologists in Southern California “cannot fully explain” why already this year that region has experienced 70 quakes greater than 4.0 magnitude, when there were only 30 in all of 2009 and 29 in 2008.What’s going on? No—who’s coming back?

The confidence implied in that second question is captured in the hymn of the psalmist: “God is our harbour and our strength, a very present help in trouble. For this cause we will have no fear, even though the earth is changed, and though the mountains are moved in the heart of the sea;  though its waters are sounding and troubled, and though the mountains are shaking with their violent motion” (Psalm 46:1-3 BBE). Mountains shaking with violent motion in the heart of the sea—sounds like Iceland’s “Island-mountain-glacier,” doesn’t it? But never mind: “The LORD of hosts [the angel armies] is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge” (v 7 NKJV).

Great news for the students of this university who end another academic cycle. Graduate or returnee, the promise is that “the Lord of Hosts” or “the King of Angels” is with you. And who better to be with you, when nature trembles, the economy tumbles? Who better to open  a closed job market than the God whose angel still guards and guides you? No wonder Psalm 46 can be your hymn, too. “For this cause we will have no fear.”

Why wouldn’t a preacher want to visit there? We just returned from spending the Easter weekend in Birmingham, England—preaching at a conference for a group of highly motivated young adults, AdvANCE (Adventist Apologetics Networking Conference on Evangelism). And I was blessed. Not only because of their passion to communicate the everlasting gospel to their extremely secular homeland (one European survey ranked the United Kingdom as the most “godless” nation in Europe). But also because just a few miles up the motorway is the English town of Lutterworth, the final parish of the great 14^th century English preacher scholar, John Wycliffe. In that stone and brick sanctuary stands the pulpit  containing wooden pieces from the very one Wycliffe thundered from during his pastorate (1374 to 1384). Behind glass are the fragments of the robe this great preacher once wore. And on the platform beside the altar is the still crimson-padded chair he once used.

On the south wall of the high-ceilinged sanctuary is a marble mural carving of Wycliffe, dressed in humble garb, standing in front of the cross, one hand pointing to an open Bible, the other raised to his gathered countrymen. Inscribed are these words: “His labours in the cause of scriptural truth were crowned by one immortal achievement, his translation of the Bible [from the Latin Vulgate] into the English tongue. This mighty work drew on him indeed the bitter hatred of all who were making merchandize of the popular credulity and ignorance: but he found an abundant reward in the blessing of his countrymen, of every rank and age to whom he unfolded the words of eternal life.” Incensed by the mendicant friars who plied their beggarly superstitions across England, Wycliffe, at one time a chaplain to the king, became a champion of the commoners’ right to read the forbidden Holy Scriptures for themselves, in their own tongue. Three times Roman and royal courts attempted to silence the Reformer’s voice. But all three attempts failed. Before his second and mortal stroke would fell him, Wycliffe completed his translation of the Bible. But with no printing press (yet to be invented), its leaves had to be hand-copied by volunteer scribes and secretly passed throughout the country by itinerant preachers (Lollards).

Why bother with this story of an Englishman? “The character of Wycliffe is a testimony to the educating, transforming power of the Holy Scriptures. It was the Bible that made him what he was. The effort to grasp the great truths of revelation imparts freshness and vigor to all the faculties. It expands the mind, sharpens the perceptions, and ripens the judgment. The study of the Bible will ennoble every thought, feeling, and aspiration as no other study can . . . . [and] would give to the world men [and women] of stronger and more active intellect, as well as of nobler principle, than has ever resulted from the ablest training that human philosophy affords” (Great Controversy 94).

Called “the Morning Star of the Reformation” (John Hus and Martin Luther would later draw their inspiration from his ground-breaking reforms), Wycliffe died in his parish at sixty. Enraged they had been unable to publicly silence him, forty years later Rome ordered his bones exhumed, burned to ash and then cast into the nearby Swift River—unwittingly symbolizing the eventual reach Wycliffe’s teaching would have, flowing to every shore on earth. We are his spiritual descendents. Then may the God of Wycliffe raise up a new generation of young, fearless, Bible-saturated defenders of Christ’s faith! That is my prayer.

Have you read the 2300 pages of the newly passed health care bill? I haven't either. But as one report summarized the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that the president signed this week, it is "the most sweeping expansion of government social policy in more than 40 years, and perhaps the most polarizing." Regardless of your personal convictions about the new health care law, most all of us are agreed that its protracted debate certainly did not bring out the best in civil discourse, did it? And I wonder if all of this is a harbinger of days to come, the grinding gridlock of political process and national governance that in a time of economic (or any other) crisis could unexpectedly veer this nation down a pathway long predicted but hardly anticipated. But never mind that notion right now.

Because in the 2300 plus pages of this new law, is there a single word about "soul care?" Health care aplenty, of course. But what about that care that in the big picture matters most? Oh, it's true-we don't look to government to mandate the realm of the spiritual. But in all the noisy debate over the care of the body, isn't it essential that we seek the care of the heart and soul, too?

So consider this insurance policy that provides not only national, but global coverage: "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst" (I Timothy 1:15). Soul care insurance for every man, woman and child that inhabit this planet. Signed into universal law—not by the 22 pens the president used to affix his signature this week—but by the crimson of the divine signature on that cross remembered next week throughout the Christian world. It was a Good Friday for the human race, but it was a dark and awful Friday for the incarnate God who offered up his life to become the signatory of an insurance policy—health (spiritual) and life (eternal)—for "whosoever believeth in him." How could the terms of his policy be simpler? Trust the God of the universe with your life ("I ask you please to take charge of my life and lead me for the rest of my life"), ask him to be your Savior and Lord ("Forgive my sinful ways and give to me the peace of your loving acceptance)—and the very big print of the policy declares you not only have his friendship now, you can bank on his saving gift that one day will throw wide the doors to his home forever and ever. Amen.

In spite of the rancorous debate over health care, why would any clear-thinking human being reject the provisions of this policy for soul care?