Spirituality Column #485
March 1, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“We are gathered here because of one man …” – Fr. Paul Scalia, eulogizing his father Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

I love that line: “…here because of one man.”

I hope someone remembers to say that at my funeral.

Scalia talks of a man well-loved and widely hated; exceedingly brilliant but culturally controversial; legally without peer and religiously without precedent.

“That man,” Fr. Scalia continued, “of course, is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Think about what that means next time you are sitting at a funeral.  Unless Jesus Christ was, is and always will be what He claimed to be, a funeral is no more than a remembrance of the past and a compassion for the day.  Without the hope that Jesus Christ is in heaven, and without faith in His work on earth, a funeral stops when the grave is closed; ahead lays only grief, loss and fading love.

Death without Jesus has no future.

On the other hand, living and professing an abiding love in Jesus means a funeral is not the end.  The truth of Jesus is that grief is real but finite; that loss is painful but will be healed, and that love ultimately, eternally wins.  Jesus provides a future beyond the stain of our sins and the pain of earthly death.

Sadly, in all likelihood only a minority of folks really “got” what Father Scalia was saying about his dad the U.S. Supreme Court justice.  Sitting on the Supreme Court is a job designed to be apolitical but performed in an arena that draws almost nothing nowadays but politically-motivated criticism.  Scalia defended the U.S. Constitution as it was written, and those who would liberally repurpose that foundational document to accommodate modern appetites and passions found no sterner, wiser, well-spoken nor more affable opponent than “Nino” Scalia.

Predictably, many liberal media and politicians mocked Scalia’s passing, fully unappreciative of his perspicacious patriotism, legal acuity, and dedication to the proposition that truth and good do in fact objectively exist.  Conservatives immediately fumbled themselves into a panic about his replacement.  Political America, consumed with its partisan agendas and low-minded maneuvers, shamefully overlooked Justice Scalia’s tacit life’s-witness for Christ.

How bad is Political America? The U.S. President did not attend the funeral.

But back to eulogy, which more properly would be termed a “homily” because it spoke to the spiritual truths of sin and Jesus rather merely listing or “eulogizing” the good works of the deceased.  Father Scalia, the son, eloquently insisted the funeral for his own father would carry the spirit of Jesus, the Son of our Father in Heaven.

Politics was not invited.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates his favorite magazine, First Things, providing this link to the Scalia homily text.

Spirituality Column #484
February 23, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

OK, Christians, let’s accept the obvious: it’s going to be a long, excruciating, polemical grind in these United States until November when we elect a new president.

Notwithstanding the guy in the job now, the strongest major party candidates currently are the two scariest options among, frankly, several scary options.  Take a deep breath; this is a good time to remind our Christian selves about our citizenship in heaven.  It’ll help us to keep our sanity, not to despair, and to trust our eternal home.

Rest easy; God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit will get through this just fine.  They are steady, they are truth, and they don’t have to worry about voting.  For the rest of us – we spectators, respondents, sinners and patriots – it’s an annoying slog.  Freedom doesn’t have to be this difficult, but we make it that way.  Entertaining and irony-filled as the political debate and histrionics may be, this political season is now and will continue to be a daily test of our intellectual patience, spiritual endurance and civil wherewithal.

Instead of freedom in Christ being a simple, divine gift for all mankind to enjoy, even the mention of Jesus begets political fireworks.  One top candidate believes in Marxism, not God. We have an Argentinian Pope (like God, a non-voter) assailing a nominally Presbyterian candidate as being non-Christian for intending to enforce legal immigration and mitigate the terrorism threat of open Muslim asylum.

In response to all this we have the secular public commentariat, plus our religious and non-religious Facebook friends, posting occasionally accurate but more often than not the craziest, misinformed, factually bereft, doctrinally ignorant and maddening religious “commentary” imaginable … about politics.

How are we to survive all this, we Christians who would first vote for Jesus?

Here’s a thought: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness …” That’s Jesus instructing the masses (Matthew 6:33) about living for God’s Kingdom by first living for Him who died for us – Jesus.  Then, enjoy the blessing of being able to recognize, embrace and taste these signs of the Kingdom, even in times like these.

- Joy (John 15:11): “…[let] my joy be in you [so] your joy may be complete.”

- Peace (Ephesians 2:14): “…he himself is our peace…”

- Reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:19): “God reconciles the world to himself through Christ, not counting sins…”

- Illumination (Revelation 21:23): “The glory of God gives [the city] light.”

- Forgiveness (Colossians 3:13): “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

Even in an election year, the kingdom of God can sneak up on us with joy, peace, reconciliation, illumination and forgiveness.

And I vote for that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thanks Dr. George Bebawi for listing these very obvious Kingdom indicators.

Spirituality Column #483
February 16, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Why God? Why?
By Bob Walters

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”–God to Isaiah, Isaiah 55:9

“Everybody’s ignorant, only on different subjects.” – Will Rogers

“Sometimes I guess there just aren’t enough rocks.” – Forrest Gump

One can survey contemporary cultural, political, academic, philosophical and social norms and with some justification ask, literally, “What the hell is going on?”

It takes a Christian worldview to ask that question properly.  I believe in a loving God above, Jesus Christ in our hearts, the Holy Spirit glowing in our souls, and Satan everywhere in our midst confusing, conniving, condemning, conspiring and often confounding the heavenly salvation that the Father, Son and Spirit have in store for us.

Satan meanwhile aggressively and consistently proffers hell – salvation’s opposite, the fiery death below instead of the glorious life above.  Here on earth Satan runs rampant with his vicious lordship, hell routinely breaking out all over.  History records and society continues to champion and dubiously reflect Satan’s agenda.

Not to ruin the ending, but Satan’s demise and the final victory of Christ and heaven are clearly described in the Bible’s book of Revelation.

That’s fine for the macrocosmic “otherness” of all Creation moaning amid man’s fallenness, awaiting God’s eternal destiny and unimaginable glory.  But microcosmically, personally and urgently we implore: “What about NOW, Lord?  What about ME???”  The Cosmos truly is too big for most of us to meld into a cogent, personal, compartmentalized concern.  But “My Life” problems are personally felt and comprehended.  We ask God, most sincerely, “Why?”

And we wait.

It’s sad, but in a way funny, how folks just naturally seem to have a more coherent, patient, conversational and less condemning relationship with Satan than with God.  Satan gets a pass while we shout at God for answers, plea for deliverance and demand immediate, personal evidence of His goodness.  God plainly is telling Isaiah that when we earnestly ask “Why?” God says, “You wouldn’t understand the answer.”

Boy, do humans hate that.

Fact is, humanity needs a bigger question than “Why?” and one is not forthcoming.  No matter how smart or ignorant we are on any given topic, humanity can’t seem to come up with a question that beats “Why?”  But even as that question falls short, God nonetheless provides scriptural truth that we are wise to find sufficient:

“Trust me; love my Son Jesus, love one another, forgive your enemies.”

We either find peace, comfort and satisfaction in that, or pick up another rock to hurl at what we perceive to be God’s injustice.

Careful, though.  Satan is never more than a stone’s throw away.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) avoids inhabiting glass houses.

Spirituality Column #482
February 9, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“You are to bring onto the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.” – God to Noah, Genesis 6:19

News of the 21^st century’s latest politically correct, cultural insult – “binary” – was buried in a lower right hand corner of an inside page of an inside section of a recent weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Brighton College in England, it seems, abolished gender distinction in its mandatory male-female school uniforms comprised of slacks, blazers, shirts, ties and skirts.  Now any student can wear any uniform piece any time, depending upon how one is identifying, gender-wise, that day.  That’s being “gender fluid.”

If you object? You’re being “binary.”

The WSJ item, tucked away in placement obscurity, quoted British journalist Melanie Phillips in the U.K. Spectator offering the following morsel of common sense: “It’s dangerous to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid.’”

“Once upon a time,” Phillips began, “‘binary’ was a mathematical term.  Now it is an insult on par with ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ or ‘homophobic,’ to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars.  The enemy is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental.”

So, “binary” is the new thing you don’t want to be called.  I appreciate the linguistic heads-up for all of us who live as though God really, really wasn’t kidding when he made humans – and pretty much all animals – “male” and “female.”  “Binary,” Phillips points out, is a “distinction accepted by the vast majority of the human race.”

To that I say, “Amen.”  Before fairly recent days, I’m guessing the “gender fluidity” idea may have seemed too ridiculous to bother categorizing.  Men, women, male, female…is how things are, going back to the ark, Adam and Eve and Creation.  It’s how generations reproduce.  Darwin and his evolutionary progeny have never improved upon, nor replaced, “binary” reproduction.

Arrange the test tubes, laboratories, science, ethics, academics and social engineering any way you want – it still takes male parts and female parts to make baby parts.  Life isn’t “created” afresh; it’s regenerated, and the generators are male and female.  Only God “creates” life.

The man-woman thing is a cosmological, biological truth some wish to redefine as sociological, psychological fiction.  Gender confusion, same-sex sex, mixed sexual desires, etc., aren’t new; they are addressed in humanity’s best, oldest, most reliable handbook, the Bible.  And never, we note, in a way that suggests “gender fluidity” is a good or “fluid” option.

Our fullest humanity requires biological function in agreement with psychological identity; sacrificing either for the sake of the other moves humanity toward death, not life.

Walters’ (rlwcom@aol.com) point here is life, not choices.

Spirituality Column #481
February 2, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

This weekly Christian column has come together for publication 481 straight Tuesdays – more than nine years – without much political commentary.

Other than the occasional “teachable moments” where culture clearly gets God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, church, faith, hope, love, etc. – the really key stuff – egregiously wrong, very little political grist is offered here.  This is my opportunity to talk about Jesus.

I’m not shy about throwing in a relevant, timely, conversational reference to obviously secularized, God-insulting, Jesus denying, Spirit grieving machinations of the politically correct and socially outrageous silliness attendant to these modern / post-modern times.  But I don’t “do” politics or social issues here.  I’d rather focus on Jesus.

Few things we can actually touch or intellectually ingest help our focus on Jesus more than reading the Bible, studying the Bible, knowing the Bible, understanding the Bible and living the Bible.  The producers of The Bible TV miniseries three years ago – Mark Burnett and Roma Downey – explained their motivation, quoted in the Wall Street Journal March 1, 2013: “Westerners cannot be considered literate without a basic knowledge of this foundational text.”

Bingo.  I couldn’t agree more.  Yet sadly, cultural-wide, Bible literacy is waning.

Still, if one is going to quote the Bible, one should at least “get” what the Bible is saying.  It’s all too common – plus doctrinally misleading – to confuse, for example, contexts of Old Testament laws and New Testament grace.

Donald Trump stumbled into just such a faux pas last week talking to TV commentator Bill O’Reilly.  Millions of folks heard what Trump said, but I wonder how many caught Trump’s glaring mixed-metaphor Bible blunder.

O’Reilly asked Trump, who had been offended by Fox News, to consider “Christian forgiveness.”  Trump responded with “…it’s called ‘an eye for an eye.’”

Wittingly or not, Trump was quoting Jesus.  But the context was mistaken. In the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5, 6 and 7) Jesus famously mentions “…an eye for an eye…” (verse 5:38), citing a vengeful Old Testament law recorded in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, part of the Jewish “Torah,” the first five books of the Bible.

But  unless Trump, a professing Christian, was intentionally quoting the Torah – unlikely since the topic was Christian forgiveness – Trump unwittingly gave a Jewish answer to a Christian question.

The Christian answer appears in the next verse (5:39); “… turn the other cheek.”

Context errors, lamentably, are made even by Bible-reading, church-going Christians.  You cannot just insert Old Testament law into Christian forgiveness.  They rarely mix, do violence to Christian grace, and make one sound biblically illiterate.

And oh, how I pray that being biblically illiterate was politically incorrect.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) has opinions on politics, but trust in the Lord.