Monday, September 30, 2013

359 - Pope Francis: In the Company of Sinners

Spirituality Column #359
October 1, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Pope Francis: In the Company of Sinners
By Bob Walters
 
“Complaining never helps us find God.” – Pope Francis, August 2013

I am a Jesus-first, Bible-believing Evangelical Christian, and also a bit of a gym-rat when it comes to religious news and commentary.

So it caught my full attention recently when the media reported that Pope Francis, six months into his papacy, declared with a possibly negative insinuation that the Catholic Church was “obsessed with abortion, gay marriage and contraception.”

Imagine, a Pope putting God above secular culture and political correctness.

I have a BA in journalism and my favorite definition for “news” is, “The news is what’s not supposed to happen.”  In the spirit of that definition, Popes aren’t supposed to minimize “abortion, gay marriage and contraception.”  But living daily with, and being sensitive to, the characteristic liberal agnostic slant and frequent technical ignorance of the mainstream media when it comes to all things religious, I hastened beyond the headlines to discover what the Pope actually said.

And as it turns out, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Bishop of Rome, actually did say that.  It was in an unprecedented one-on-one interview conducted over three separate sessions in August, at the Vatican, by an Italian magazine editor (and brother Jesuit priest) at the behest of the U.S. Jesuit magazine, America.

The lengthy interview titled “A Big Heart Open to God” (link) was released Sept. 19 in 16 Jesuit journals worldwide including the post-dated Sept. 30 issue of America.  It covers the gamut of Church issues, doctrine, theology, cultural challenges, the Pope’s personality, tastes and pastoral concerns.  I read all 10,000 words.

My takeaway?  I think Christians everywhere should 1) read the actual interview before passing judgment and 2) applaud the Pope for his priorities.

The Pope sees the Church as a “field hospital” where the wounded and broken are healed and loved, not berated and punished.   That’s what Jesus did.  The Pope steadfastly champions Church teaching, says it’s a mistake for her to complain about culture, and says the Church’s time, energy, and spiritual capital should be primarily focused on the Glory of God and human salvation offered only through Jesus Christ.

My Evangelical friends likely wonder why I’m talking about the Pope, and my Catholic friends likely wonder why this is any of my business.  Let’s just say the Pope’s message covers several important Christian basics.

He’s not promoting the acceptance of sin; the Pope is extolling Christians to have compassion for sinners – all of us – including, he emphasizes, himself.

The Pope is telling us, without complaining, that Jesus is the best company we can find.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends 1) having a dictionary handy when digesting the Pope’s interview, 2) reading America’s editorial The Pope’s Progress, and 3) viewing The New York Times’ story (excellent overview).
Monday, September 23, 2013

358 - Systems and Concepts and Christ

Spirituality Column #358
September 24, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Systems and Concepts and Christ
By Bob Walters
 
Jesus Christ was a real person – a human being with feelings and actions who lived in and with a time, place and purpose in history.
 
Largely, these are accepted facts.
 
Jesus Christ is also the real son of God, fully God, equal to God, the Word of God, the creator of all things, beings, wisdom and truth, judge of all men, and the resurrected, divine still-living eternal savior of mankind who defeated death, forgave sin, and restored humanity’s relationship with God.  The Bible tells us so, and the Holy Spirit, when given the chance, confirms it in our hearts.
 
Largely, these are facts that only faith will allow.  For the majority of the world and more than a few Christians, the divine identity of Jesus becomes a collection of suppositional “facts” or conditional propositions because they are assertions reason cannot prove.  A common intellectual response is, “That’s a nice story, but …”
 
“But” is man trying to grab the steering wheel.
 
Man often hesitates to accept the very best parts of Jesus Christ – joy for example –because man, in general, has a tough time accepting God on God’s terms.  So man creates “systematic theology” and presents eloquent concepts of Christ, figuring – errantly – that man is smart enough to dictate terms and define God.  It’s an easy mistake to make.
 
Mankind possesses an animated lucidity and mental creativeness that works against the spiritual acceptance of “how” and maybe more especially “why” that lucidity and creativeness came to be in the first place.
 
“How” is “God made it that way.”  “Why” is “For God’s own glory.”
 
God didn’t create man to glorify man; God created man to glorify God.
 
Repackaging that truth in human terms of self-interest, egotism and arrogance, we fail to understand that our life’s purpose is far bigger than we can imagine.  Most of us can imagine glorifying ourselves; but glorifying God is a job that quite understandably seems above any earthly pay grade.  “God can’t possibly want me to do that.”
 
But, yes, He does. Jesus’ mission is hard to figure because fallen man is geared toward avoiding fear and gathering power, while the fearsome all-powerful God has provided a savior who promises peace and calls for humble service to others.  Words don’t adequately describe Christ’s mission; but the actions – and love – of Jesus do.
 
For nearly 2,000 years man has instituted systems of worship and concepts of Christ’s identity to animate and explain all this.  But systems and concepts – falling short – are liturgies and dogmas, man-made procedures and human ideas.
 
Man’s reality – and real purpose – is relationship with God through faith in Christ.
 
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is saying belief in a concept is no substitute for loving Jesus.
Monday, September 16, 2013

357 - Blowing a Big Chance

Spirituality Column #357
September 17, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Blowing a Big Chance
By Bob Walters
Author of Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

I am convinced no nation in history has been simultaneously freer to investigate religion wholeheartedly nor more reluctant to do so seriously than the modern USA.
 
Our national, aggregate religious IQ seems to peak at either end of an inverted faith bell curve, with a vapid, enormous, sagging, religiously-passive middle that entertains the notion of God on the one hand but pursues inviolable, unholy “whatever works for you”  morality on the other.  America is succeeding at religious freedom but failing utterly at religious understanding.
 
Our constitutionally guaranteed “Freedom of Religion” has been ill-advisedly reinterpreted as “Freedom from Religion.”  America’s resulting culture-wide ignorance of sectarian specifics prevents her as a political nation from accurately comprehending – or of appropriately, proportionately and morally acting in – world events.
 
Hence, I feel we are blowing a big chance to provide leadership on this planet that more than ever could benefit from the moral authority of a military and economic superpower that truly has its cultural heart in a spiritually truthful – i.e. Godly – place.
 
Religious freedom in America has never been greater. The proof?  Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses – and how many others? – operate openly and freely in a nation that will not tolerate the interruption of any adherents’ private practice of their faith.
 
That high level of religious freedom is unprecedented, even in this country.  We may think “my faith” is being discriminated against, but consider the virulent, codified, civil discrimination against, for example, Catholics and Mormons a century ago.
 
Ironically, and sadly, we also are a nation that now excludes God from the realm of civic wisdom and no longer tolerates the public witness of faith.  No single book is as important to understanding Western culture as is the Bible, yet where is that book in our broader culture today?  It is hidden from public view; an unwanted guide.  We have imposed an academic injunction against actually saying, authoritatively and out loud, what America has known from its very beginning: that the truth of Jesus Christ is the capital-T Truth that all humanity seeks.
 
“Don’t judge” – translation: “don’t think” – is the horrible response of populist elites manning the pervasive palisades of America’s contemporary religious ignorance.
 
America is flummoxed by the modern Middle East because, as a nation, we refuse to take any religion seriously and are therefore intellectually ill-equipped to understand or respond when other nations do.  We cannot publicly fashion, or even fathom, a moral response to an international crisis.  We have no battle flag to plant.
 
Religious freedom is indeed precious, but God’s truth – when Christ is allowed in the conversation – is what leads a moral nation.
 
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) believes in Christ, loves America, and cheers God’s truth.
Monday, September 9, 2013

356 - Jesus: 'Who Do You Say I Am?'

Spirituality Column #356
September 10, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Jesus: ‘Who Do You Say I Am?’
By Bob Walters

We live in a culture that doesn’t want to know what we really think.

But Jesus Christ is a Savior who does.

In each of the first three Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke (the “Synoptic” Gospels, meaning “similar”) – Jesus asks the disciples who other people, the crowds, think He is.  Each time it is followed closely by the most important question in the entire Bible.  Jesus asks the disciples directly:

“Who do you say I am?”
 
Simon, soon to be Peter, the Rock, gets it right: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:15).  Interestingly, Jesus answers by declaring Peter to be blessed, not specifically that he is correct.  Implying Peter has stated the truth, Jesus orders the disciples not to tell anyone else … at least, not yet.
 
Jesus knew that mere words – neither the disciples’ nor His own – would testify as powerfully to His true identity as His coming trial, crucifixion, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension.  The crowds were always amazed at His words, but His identity as the Son of God was something they needed to learn by faith.  Only to the Samaritan woman at the well, who mentions “the coming Messiah,” does Jesus plainly say, “I who speak to you am He” (John 4:25-26).
 
Still, Jesus’s constant use of “I am” was a public, if cryptic, signal identifying Himself as God.  Remember the burning bush, when God identifies Himself to Moses as “I Am Who I Am” (Exodus 3:14)?  Dozens of times, Jesus says “I am” – “I am from above” (to the Jews in the Temple, John 8:23), “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (to Thomas, John 14:6), “You are right in saying I am” (to the elders, Luke 22:70), etc.
 
“Who do you say I am?”  “I am” is God.
 
So, back to our modern-going-on-post-modern, me-centered, truth-is-relative culture and the challenges believers today face witnessing to society at large regarding the truth of Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior, Son of the living God, who we know personally through the Holy Spirit.  How in the world, literally, does one explain that truth to others who deny the existence of truth, period?
 
Jesus, you’ll note, answering Peter’s reply wasn’t so concerned with what “the crowd” thought because, you’ll also note, “the crowd” was wrong.
 
Peter got Christ’s identity right.  For God’s glory, that is the first and best thing any of us can do.  The next, like Jesus, is to be an example.
 
The world may not care, but Jesus does.
 
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) observes the disingenuousness of society insisting truth is relative and God is merely an individual opinion while being morally outraged at any suggestion to the contrary.

"Who do you say I am?"
Matthew 16:15 “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Mark 8:29 “You are the Christ.”
Luke 9:20 “… the Christ of God.”

 
Monday, September 2, 2013

355 - What I Have Learned about Jesus

Spirituality Column #355
September 3, 2013
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

What I Have Learned about Jesus
By Bob Walters

Too often too many of us think Jesus is smaller than He is.

I have often written in this column about how I attended church as a child, learned quite a bit about how to do the liturgy (religious service) as an altar boy through my early teens, and then by high school drifted out of the open church doors and away from a Jesus it seems I never properly knew.

In those early years I “understood” Jesus – who I now know is the Christ, the Savior, and the Son of the living, eternal, creator God – to be contained within what I saw and heard in church.  I was a child with little intellectual ignition toward imputing a bigger and proper picture of this enormous, righteous, unlimited, loving, merciful God, his servant Son and comforting Spirit.  My immature mind saw only the church “package” of Jesus.

In my ignorance, Jesus looked finite, contained and limited; safely tucked into an ecclesiastical box.

That made it easy to walk away.  And I did.

But let’s not knock church.  The Church is the Bride of Christ, a biblical  image of marriage that speaks to love, longing, patience, joy and completeness in relationship with the Bridegroom (John 3:29).  But all that is easily lost on an arrogant teenager, self-absorbed young adult, and a self-sufficient “I am the master of my fate” thirty-something career professional.

No smallish “God in a box” was worth my time.  Jesus seemed both a personal and cultural complication: an anchor I didn’t want, a sail I couldn’t rig.

I couldn’t explain it so I didn’t want it.

Three decades after falling away, I randomly attended church one Sunday.  It was Sept. 2, 2001.  My elder son Eric, then entering eighth grade, had inquired about going to church.  I was neither looking for nor expecting a revelation; I was just answering, in the active, fatherly affirmative, my son’s curiosity.

Yet for no reason I could understand, the Jesus I had relegated to the shadows of my intellect and emotion exploded into a bright light with which I was fascinated and a real person toward whom I was powerfully drawn.  Faith suddenly made sense.  I was now listening (Mark 9:7).  God wound up answering questions I didn’t know I had, and teaching me lessons I would never forget.

Jesus, I realized, isn’t someone about whom one learns and moves on; Jesus is about living life in continually growing, uniquely personal and ultimately eternal relationship with God.

And that it is a life-diminishing mistake to put Jesus in a box.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) figures we shouldn’t put ourselves in a box, either.  BTW, today Eric works in Dallas and is also a Young Life volunteer.

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