Saturday, December 29, 2012

320 - All These Broken Pieces

Spirituality Column #320
January 1, 2013
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

All These Broken Pieces
By Bob Walters
 
“I am leaving you with a gift – peace of mind and heart.  And my peace is a gift that the world cannot give.  So don’t be troubled or afraid.” – Jesus (John 14:27)
 
This is Jesus at the last supper telling His disciples that His gift to them will be peace, followed by comfort God will send in the Holy Spirit.
 
The disciples at this point of course are still clueless, confused, and most likely increasingly anxious.  Jesus is talking about His leaving, their staying, His dying, their living, His coming back, and His Father sending comfort they cannot possibly understand referring to a Holy Trinity they cannot yet imagine.  Faith was all they had.
 
As we watch our modern world try to cope with so much daily brokenness, it is mystifying that so many people with so much information have so little faith and endure so much pain.  The disciples were seeing something entirely new; modern mankind steadfastly ignores truth that is widely and plainly available.
 
We have the Bible, churches, preachers, teachers, fellow believers, global mission organizations, and 2,000 years of scholarship, history, evidence and tradition to teach us what the disciples could only guess.  Here in the United States we have an entire nation predicated on the foundational truth that human freedom and creativity are divinely righteous gifts straight from God – the first of first things in our souls’ DNA.
 
The first of all God’s gifts to mankind, of course, is life itself.  One would think that all together – personally, corporately, globally – the family of man would do a better job of defending life.  Somehow though, defending life has become the hottest of political hot potatoes, rather than the dearest of God’s gifts.
 
Nowhere is the brokenness of mankind more in evidence.
 
I’m thinking of the Sandy Hook shootings and how our nation has fervently mobilized on either side of the specific political question of gun control rather than the vast spiritual question of Christ’s salvation for a fallen, broken world.
 
To me it’s instructive to look at the Bible for an overall perspective on mankind’s defense of human life: we’ve never been very good at it.  Throughout the Bible chaos, mayhem, deceit and death consistently befall mankind.  No guns were involved.  God’s laws did not solve the problem then; man’s laws will not solve the problem now.
 
Our ultimate problem isn’t broken laws; it’s broken humanity.  We have no way to pick up life’s pieces, save for the peace God promises solely in the gift of Jesus Christ.
 
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is writing about salvation in Christ (see John 14), not politics, yet notices the mind-numbingly oxymoronic irony of stricter gun control laws juxtaposed with liberal abortion laws.

 
Monday, December 24, 2012

319 - Shopping for Innocence

Spirituality Column #319
December 25, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Shopping for Innocence
By Bob Walters

Two carefree, local elementary school students happily hopped off a Friday afternoon school bus recently and their tearful mother fairly rushed the curb, hugging the bewildered children tightly and kissing them furiously.

Viewing the scene through my windshield and having been listening to the radio, I knew something the startled children didn’t: that their mother’s heart had melted-down with that day’s news of the Sandy Hook K-4 elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn.

The bus’s red flashing stop arms held the moment: the mother’s children were safe; their world is not.  Not even at Christmas.

I caught the mother’s eye, nodded and touched my hand to my heart, a knowing, sincere salute to her fierce love and to the beautiful innocence of her children.  Emotion and tears came easily.  Is there any time of year when a child’s innocence is more valued and celebrated?

If we are selfish and frivolous, we will dwell on the inconvenience of this tragedy so close to “our” Christmas.  If we are circumspect and serious, we will add God’s message of Jesus Christ to our calculus of assessing both this tragedy and the holiday’s true significance.

We want Christmas to be gentle, but for God to be powerful and tough.  We want God to stop the bad guys.  We want him to protect us along with the people and things we love.  If Jesus was sent as God’s servant, then we want Him to serve us … now.

Ironically, our macro-culture is too modern and educated to believe all that religious nonsense, yet privately we are too desperate and confused to entirely discount God.  We shop for God “on sale” – on better terms for us with less at stake.  We eject God from our public midst but blame God for our troubles.  We opine, “God wouldn’t let this happen.”  Then we demand, “Well God, I’m waiting.  Fix this mess.”

We don’t know who is surrendering to Whom.

This Christmas my thoughts go to King Herod (Matthew 2).  He tried to kill Jesus but instead killed every other baby boy in Bethlehem.  Baby Jesus born in that Bethlehem manger is the innocence and righteousness that God truly desires for mankind, once the perfect image of His Creation but now fallen in sin.

Sadly, the innocent and the righteous are not protected from the fallen world’s viciousness and violence; look at what happened to Jesus on the Cross.  We are shocked at Newtown, but evil is nothing new.

It’s no wonder that we hug our innocent children tightly.

Oh, for a world where we hug Jesus even tighter than that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com, www.commonchristianity.blogspot.com) prays along with so many others for peace, mercy, comfort … and truth.  Have a merry and gentle Chistmas.
Monday, December 17, 2012

318 - Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise

Spirituality Column #318
December 18, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Shopping, Rebellion, and Surprise
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Two thousand years ago the humble baby born with the Name above all names hastened a rebellion above all rebellions.
 
Jesus born in the flesh was God become incarnate.  Everything the world thought it knew about itself and about God was turned on its head.  The God of creation, laws and power revealed Himself through humanity, faith and humility in an obscure baby born to a teenaged virgin.
 
Every Christmas we shop to surprise our loved ones with gifts.
 
God surprised everybody with Jesus.
 
Whether it was Hebrew history, Greek philosophy, Roman law, pagan gods or Asian mysticism, Jesus Christ was exactly what the world needed but absolutely not what the world expected … or wanted.
 
Hebrew scripture was rich with stories of a relational God Who was at once utterly loving and relentlessly just.  He inexplicably favored some people, and rained down wrath on others.  His standard was His own.  God’s story written in the Bible’s Old Testament assured His unique, uncreated but creative being.  Amid sin and law, amid temporal love and ceaseless treachery, fallen man wallowed in an unrelenting pit of self-interest.  God’s prophecies pointed to a coming Messiah Who would set the fallen world right with the example of God’s gloriously unselfish love, righteousness, and power.
 
The Hebrews expected the Messiah to come and kill the Romans.  The Romans, who insisted that everyone worship Caesar, were duped by the Hebrews into killing Jesus, the Messiah King whom the Jews would not worship.  The Greeks, largely unaware of Hebrew scripture, philosophically posited an objective, infinite and eternal good, never expecting that particular, personal and enormous “good” to divinely arrive on earth, in humanity, in history … in a Palestinian manger.
 
Globally, mankind created gods in every imaginable image, including his own.  Mystics and philosophers imagined a Great Beyond of riches or emptiness – man’s way of explaining the unexplainable.  Jesus Christ was God’s way of explaining His goodness, humility, love and truth.
 
With faith, Jesus toppled every other king, god, idea, and human power – defeating death by dying, erasing man’s sin with His pain on the cross, restoring man’s image in God’s glorious kingdom, and assuring man’s eternal life with His resurrection.
 
Nothing else in man’s history is as radical as that.  Man’s pedantic rebellion against man – the perpetually cross-purposed politics of society, governments, cultures, nations, religions, philosophies, and lately, science – is a ho-hum charade of pyrrhic righteousness.  Rebellion is empty without the Creator God’s Holy Son in our lives.
 
In our tongue-tied times, we are chastened to worship Jesus without His name and to celebrate Christmas without Christ.
 
It’s surprising how good it feels to rebel and say “Merry Christmas.”
 
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) would add, “Jesus loves you.”
Monday, December 10, 2012

317 - Shopping for Hope

Spirituality Column #317
December 11, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Shopping for Hope
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

During the thirty years of my life that I spent religiously not going to church, I don’t recall ever searching for “hope in Christ.”
 
I hoped for all kinds of other stuff … hoped I’d get a job, get married, have children, do well, stay healthy, etc.  I hoped this opportunity would pan out.  I hoped that problem or pain would subside.  It never occurred to me to examine the quality of hope or where it came from.  I was fortunate to ride out life’s good times and bad in the hope that things would get better, rather than in despair that they wouldn’t.
 
A lot of people have hope, especially Americans.  Optimism and freedom, the essential seeds of hope, are an American birthright.  Hope in the world, to me, didn’t seem especially better or worse than hope in the Lord.  Hope was hope.  Freedom was freedom.  What’s the difference?
 
Well … big difference, obviously, but it took faith to make me see it.
 
Right now millions and millions of optimistic, non-churched Americans are planning and hoping for a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday or whatever.  And they will have one.  They are shopping, they are decorating, they are coordinating, and they are aware that the greatest joy of this season is in the giving not the receiving.  They get the Christian meaning of the season.  They share in its joy.  But they shortchange themselves by limiting their hope to the secular holiday.  They miss the cosmic enormity of hope given to us by God in the eternal salvation and divine New Covenant power of faith that was introduced to humanity in the humility and fragility of the baby Jesus born in the obscurest of humble mangers.  The manger is Christmas, but Jesus is life.
 
Why are people so hard to evangelize when the most basic Christmas messages of giving, of peace, and of joy, are at once shared and commonly desired by almost everyone?  Because putting one’s entire life, hope and eternity exclusively into the hands of Jesus Christ through our faith requires forfeiture of our assuredness in our own power.  Even if that human assuredness is a false truth and temporal mirage, it’s easier to understand and explain than the divine assuredness of hope in Christ.
 
Christians, in love bordering on desperation, want to give that gift of hope.  And while it is more blessed to give than receive (Acts 20:35), hope in Christ has to be received in faith before it can be given in love.
 
Maybe that’s why it never occurred to me to shop for it.
 
Walters (commonchristinity.blogspot.com, rlwcom@aol.com) went to church as a kid but didn’t find his faith until he was 46.
Monday, December 3, 2012

316 - Shopping for Encouragement

Spirituality Column #316
December 4, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville

Shopping for Encouragement
By Bob Walters
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Rarely when we shop for the perfect Christmas gift are we thinking about the best gift of all – encouragement.

We generally purchase gifts based on what we think will make someone “happy” by meeting a material desire or temporary comfort.  Instead of building people up by providing the stuff of encouragement – peace, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and hope – we shop for the stuff of this world and then beat down doors at midnight to get it cheap.

Anybody see any Bible parallels or problems there?

The gift of encouragement is a much tougher “find.”  Few people put “encouragement” on their Christmas wish list.  I didn’t see a single Black Friday sale featuring a discount on or special shopping hours for “encouragement.”

Christmas gift-giving winds up being about expressing our love – a good thing – by making other people happy, preferably at a righteous discount.  But holiday gift exchanges are mostly semi-redundant expressions of our affection.  We present gifts to, and receive them from, people who already know we care.  I mean, it’s creepy to get a Christmas gift from someone we don’t like, isn’t it?  And who shops for their enemies?

This is all to say that Christmas gift-giving is geared not so much toward mimicking God’s universal encouragement of mankind but toward simple and transitory, worldly expressions of “I didn’t forget you” or “I want you to be happy.”

That’s all fine, but … the entire dynamic is out of sync with the actual story of Christmas and the glorious incarnation of God on earth.  Jesus was God’s ultimate gift of gracious, eternal encouragement to a world that didn’t know Him, would largely ignore Him, would treat Him as an enemy, mock Him, and kill Him.  Mankind never even asked for the gift God so spectacularly provided (John 1:1-14).

This was the gift of all gifts: God’s encouragement in the form of man’s eternal salvation through the humble human life and sin-cleansing death of his Son and our Lord, Jesus Christ.  The entire Old Testament points to this coming gift, but people interpreted scripture and prophecy to mean that God would give them happiness and comfort in exchange for their obedience.

People expected a trade, a transaction, a quid pro quo.  Almost everyone missed the cosmic, life-altering importance of divine encouragement – the love, freedom, grace, and life – God sent in His gift of Jesus.

Be encouraged and think about that while you’re out shopping.

Speaking of Christmas shopping, Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) published  Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary, a book of his first 260 Current columns, available at (click one) Amazon.com, Lulu.com, Barnes&Noble .  He’d be encouraged if you gave somebody one as a gift. 
           

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