Spirituality Column #763

June 29, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Our Pastor’s Funeral

By Bob Walters

“My wife Pam and I met at our pastor’s funeral.”

I just love the start of that story, and love even more that it’s our story to tell. 

It was November 2007 – the 15th, a Thursday, to be exact – on a day saddened by loss but buoyed with the hope and love of Jesus that beloved pastor Russ Blowers had instilled in countless Christians during 56 years of ministry at East 91st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis.  His funeral mostly filled the 2,200-seat worship hall.

Russ, 83 and retired, had died late Saturday evening the 10th, missing by a mere 10 minutes the symmetry of this proud World War II veteran’s death being marked on a November 11 Veteran’s Day.  His friend and fellow pastor John Samples, who along with Russ’s son’s Phil and Paul had prayed and watched as Russ breathed his last, woke me with a phone call and the not-unexpected news around 1:30 a.m.

A few hours later I arrived for Sunday church early as those of us who knew shared the news of Russ’s death with others, and word spread quickly.  Russ and I had grown close during my first six years as a Christian, which also happened to be his last six years as a minister.  I say “last six years”; I don’t know exactly what a guy like Russ is promoted to upon arrival at the pearly gates, but I doubt “minister” still covers it.

Anyway, in the halls at church later that Sunday morning my cell phone rang and Phil Blowers was calling to ask if I would serve his dad as a pall bearer.  I said yes as the tears I’d held back burst forth, right there in the hallway next to the reception desk.     

E91, as we call it, is a big church. At that time, Sunday mornings saw 4,000 or more worshippers in five services at two different ends of the building.  In the couple of years preceding his death, Russ and I had taken to sitting together in the 9:15 a.m. traditional service in the main sanctuary where the choir and orchestra – yes, a full, wonderful orchestra of extraordinarily talented church members – regularly performed.

I’ve often said going to church at E91 was like going to the Indy 500 … you never see or meet all the people who are there.  A cordial Sunday morning E91 greeting, “Hi, are you new here?” was often met with the response, “No, ‘been here for 30 years.”

One fellow I knew, former E91 member Dale Collie, called early Monday morning – from North Carolina where he now lived – urging me to start an online “Tribute Site” where parishioners and friends could post memories of Russ.  I was a long-time public relations guy and communicating was my business so I picked up the challenge.  We had the site up and running later that day. (see Russ Stories – link is still live.)

The daunting part of the challenge was reaching everyone who knew Russ or might want to post on the site.  Russ, for heaven’s sake, had been the chairman of the Billy Graham crusades in Indianapolis and Channel 8’s “TV Preacher” in the 1960s.  His ministry’s reach far exceeded E91, but my first goal was to gather stories from those who knew him best – and knew each other best – there in our home congregation.

It was obvious from sitting with Russ in Sunday services that the huge music ministry was a particular delight to him, and that he was adored by its many members.  But how to notify them?  An hour or so before the funeral, I recognized the orchestra’s tympanist standing in the hallway and asked her for help.  She said her name was Pam.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) married Pam June 22, 2009.  More next week.

Spirituality Column #762

June 22, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A Heartfelt Rest   

By Bob Walters

“… a world without the Sabbath is a world without soul.”

That line is from a May 8 Wall Street Journal Weekend Review essay which is the reason our past five columns here have been about the Christian Sabbath.

While I wholeheartedly agree with the line, and I learned from the piece many salient things I did not know about the Sabbath / Sunday rest in our USA, commercial, modern world, the overall arc of the essay put an exceedingly pesky burr in my saddle.

Why?  It framed the Sabbath entirely as a construct of God’s time, i.e., a day; rather than a construct of God’s heart, i.e., the glory and perfection of God’s Creation, the love of Jesus Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. 

Here was a story about Sabbath and Sunday and America with no mention of the Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus.  “Burr in my saddle” is putting it mildly.

In a prominent seventy column-inches of copy (2,000-ish words), five pieces of art (copy-desk talk for pictures, including “big art” above the fold on the lead page), a good pitch for the writer’s new book about the value of religious tradition in a chaotic society, and focused on the central topic of “Sunday” as a good idea for a society-wide, spiritually-focused day of rest especially as experienced in American culture, history, commerce, government, and tradition … never once is “Jesus” or “Christ” mentioned. 

This is a nearly perfect example of why modern journalism drives me nuts.  In a story about Sunday: no Lord’s Day, no Jesus, no Resurrection, no mention.  None.  It’s a bit of journalistic malfeasance my old mentor George would likely call a “catastrophe.”

What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath sang the (biggish) two-line, four-column, 48-point hed.  That and the jump hed (page two), The Sacred Dimension of Sabbath Time, drew me in immediately. (Link to story appears at bottom.)

Written by New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari, the essay is an excerpt from his just-published book, “The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.”   The Iranian born, American-educated attorney is a former atheist who recently became Roman Catholic and is a reliably conservative voice.  He had a notable dust-up with liberal theologian David French back in 2019 over the propriety of “Drag Queen Story Hour.”  Though a respected cultural commentator and author, Ahmari is a Christian discussing the Sabbath who doesn’t mention Christ.

Yet he writes, “… a world without the Sabbath is a world without soul.”  Indeed.

I get that the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, Islam’s Sabbath is Friday, and Christians have been “going to church” on Sunday pretty much since the Resurrection.  And in a linguistic irony, “Sabbatarian” refers to the ethic of not opening businesses on the Christian Lord’s Day Sunday.  But missing the bedrock influence of Jesus in any discussion of American Sabbath practices is to miss the heart of the story.

Ahmari’s choice of theologians to quote was 20^th-century European Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel, who became a noted American thinker and prominent 1960s peace and civil rights advocate.  A Jew, he spoke at Martin Luther King’s funeral. 

Heschel, at 16, was already a Rabbi in Poland who then studied ubiquitous Western Enlightenment philosophy at the University of Berlin in the 1930s.  He left Germany because of Hitler.  Then, as a Jewish intellectual, he was expelled from Poland in 1939.  Because of his academic and religious writings, he was invited and went to America.  He soon lost his family back in Warsaw to the Nazis and World War II.

Heschel, to his credit, rejected modernist philosophies with their human-centric focus.  He understood that only God provided the objective truth that made morality possible.  Upon his arrival at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Heschel was deemed an “old world curmudgeon” because he found American theology education – and its students – a disappointing modernist stew of lax doctrine and non-rigorous discipline.

As an aside, Nazi antagonist and German Lutheran priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hung as a traitor in Germany in 1945, thought the same thing when he studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the 1930s: American theology was weak. 

It takes some patience to absorb Heschel’s brilliant but incomplete view of the Sabbath as a “realm of Time” (a day, prayer) vs. a “realm of Space” (winning and prosperity in this life) that Ahmari presents.  

I say “incomplete” because his Sabbath omits the rest and peace of Jesus.

Obviously for Heschel, as with most Jewish thinkers (modern commentators Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager come to mind), the eternally living presence of the person of Christ – what I would call the far superior and heavenly realm of the Heart, the heart and love of our Lord Jesus – is ignored. 

Or is, as the headline sublimely suggests to me … rejected.

Bigger than just a “day,” Jesus is a human soul’s living, heavenly, heartfelt, and perpetual Sabbath rest and proof of God’s righteousness, goodness, love, perfection, and forgiveness, reaching eternally beyond the Law in any realm we can imagine. 

That eternal reach is what we lose when we reject the Sabbath in Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) was a newspaper desk editor in the 1970s and 80s, hence the dated journalist lingo. Link: What We’ve Lost in Rejecting the Sabbath-WSJ

 Spirituality Column #761

June 15, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

The Rest of the Day

By Bob Walters

“Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, ‘So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ (Psalm 95:11) And yet his works have been finished since the creation of the world.” – Hebrews 4:1-11, verse 3

Have you ever noticed that the basic message of God in the Old Testament seems to be “Fear the Lord,” and the overarching message of Jesus in the New Testament is “Fear Not”?

That’s the difference between commandments and love.  God’s commandments are a tribal bond of daily works (OT Law) while Jesus’ love is a global bond of faith in eternal fellowship (NT grace).  The commands represent God’s correction of the first Adam who sinned in a garden, while love represents the perfect rest of the sinless Second Adam who died on a cross and was raised in resurrection glory in a garden.

When Israel – chosen by God to bring salvation to the world – failed in obedience to a commandment of the Law, it was Israel’s proper reflex to fear Godly punishment.  When God delivered our salvation in the perfect person and divine work of the “Last Adam,” Jesus, it was God’s love, not His wrath, that was on offer to whomever believed Jesus was the Christ, the son of the living God.  This was Israel, saving all mankind.

And we come to this wonderful passage in Hebrews 4:1-11, where the writer invites Israel into the new rest Jesus brings; the perfect Sabbath God enjoyed in his perfect Creation on the seventh day.  It is not the temporary rest – the shadow of a rest – as when Joshua led Israel into Canaan ending their time in the desert (Joshua 1).  This is the new, perfect, eternal rest of God, by faith in Jesus.  God’s perfect Creation is renewed by the New Creation of all things in Christ.  This is the point of the entire Bible.

In Christ, the work of the Law was fulfilled and the temporary “rest” in Canaan faded to metaphor.  The Sabbath day commanded in the Law was a reminder to Israel of the perfection, completeness, and good of God’s Creation.  The Sabbath rest offered in Jesus Christ is God’s enduring invitation to all humanity for forgiveness, love, and eternal life.  We celebrate it on The Lord’s Day, Sunday, but its joy is commemorated in the ever-abiding presence of the living Jesus illuminated by the Holy Spirit … always.

God displayed His anger toward the rebellious Israelites by not allowing the generation led by Moses from Egypt to enter Canaan, “the promised land,” and that included Moses.  The Christian believer writing this Letter to the Hebrews asserts the truth of God’s oath of anger, but notes God’s works have been finished since the world’s Creation.  When Creation was “finished,” God entered a day of divine rest.

Think of the last words of Jesus on the cross, “It is finished.”  Just as God rested in perfection on the seventh day after creating man on the sixth day, Jesus was crucified and finished his work redeeming man on the sixth day, resting on the seventh.

By renewing creation through Jesus, God’s perfect rest flows into humanity through the redeeming work of Christ: sins forgiven, iniquities covered, relationship restored, and the trust and comfort of perpetual Sabbath secured in Christ.  Fear not; God’s eternal love for His Creation, not his wrath at sin, wins out in the end. 

That’s not just a rest on Sunday thing; it’s a rest of your life thing.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes: “Enter my rest” is God’s open invitation to all.

Spirituality Column #760

June 8, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

All the Rest

By Bob Walters

“And some of the Pharisees said to [Jesus and the disciples], ‘Why are you doing what is prohibited on the Sabbath?’ … And [Jesus] said to them, ‘The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.’” Luke 6:2,5

This isn’t what the Pharisees wanted to hear.

We Christians keep saying Jesus is perfect but we also notice that in the eyes of the Pharisees, Jesus caused a lot of trouble … particularly on the Sabbath.  And what they especially didn’t want to hear from Jesus was that He was “Lord” of anything.

This passage in Luke 6 was both the first we hear of Jesus’ attitude toward the Sabbath and it is also His first encounter with the Pharisees.  The Pharisees here would have picked up – and be enraged by – Jesus’ direct, personal reference to the prophet Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7:13-14) of a coming “Son of Man” with “everlasting dominion.” 

Jesus was telling them that He himself was the fulfilment of this prophecy, and as we eventually learn, Jesus was the fulfilment of all prophecy: the perfect will of God.  This was news that threatened everything the Pharisees were: their authority, stature, power, wealth, security … and their self-perceived favored position with God.

Jesus was looking at the Pharisees and saying, as He did so many times in so many words, “Time’s up.  You have failed God, failed the faith …  and MY time is nigh.”

At issue in Luke 6 was the disciples picking grain – “reaping” (working) – on the Sabbath because they were hungry. Another time Jesus healed a man with a withered hand, right in front of them, on the Sabbath.  In John 5:1-15 during a festival Sabbath, He healed the lame man by the pool at Bethesda, telling him to pick up his mat and sin no more.  In Luke 13:10-17, Jesus heals the bleeding woman – with no expression of faith on her part – who had been sick for 18 years.  The Pharisees charged Jesus with Sabbath violations in all instances and criticized the healed man for carrying his mat.

Jesus was deliberately doing divine signs (John is the “book of signs”) on the Sabbath as a proclamation to the Jews of his relationship to the Law. Jesus was/is not under the Law, he is the fulfilment of the Law; Jesus is not subject to the rules, He is the complete unerring righteousness of God.  The Pharisees were not ready for that.

The Law was general and did not account for the varying situations of personal hunger, health, help, and salvation – rescue from a well, say – that might occur on the Sabbath.  Jesus wasn’t about applying rules; He was about applying salvation.

After healing the man’s withered arm, knowing what the Pharisees were thinking – and they weren’t happy – Jesus asked them, “Is it allowed on the Sabbath to do good or evil, to save a life or to destroy?” The Pharisees saw the healing as a “work” of man.

They did not see it for what it actually was: a work of God. 

What Jesus brought into humanity, or rather, reintroduced into humanity, was the personal perfection of God which God declared and celebrated on the Seventh Day of Creation.  God blessed that rest, made the day holy, and made the Sabbath a Law for humanity to rest and remember perfection – “the Sabbath is made for man” (Mark 2:27).

When God brought us the perfection of Jesus, the Sabbath became bigger than merely a “day of the week.”  It was God telling us that Jesus is all the rest we need.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is going to go at least one more week with this series.