Spirituality Column #451
July 7, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Americans celebrated our “endowed by our Creator” personal freedom and national independence this weekend with the Fourth of July.

Our American life is so abundant, so filled up, so replete with opportunity, so tolerant, so limitless in its horizon, and so rich in its history and accomplishment.  As nations of the world go – you can gripe about America if you want to, but take a quick, prayerful look at the Middle East, equatorial Africa, and large swaths of Asia – we have been especially, wonderfully, divinely endowed with a way of life where, from the standpoint of human aspiration, there’s not much missing.

America’s founding uniquely expressed the towering yet conflicting images of man as presented not only by the Bible and Jesus Christ, but also by the Enlightenment  and its human-focused, God-as-an-adjunct, unblinking secular vagaries and man-made morality.

Spirituality Column #450
June 30, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

After 30 years away from church, one day I arrived back in church.

And something clicked.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, I became very serious about figuring out why Jesus mattered, because suddenly and unexpectedly He did.

My reaction to the message of Faith, Hope and Love (1 Corinthians 13) being preached that Sunday 14 years ago was quiet tears.  Larger than squishy emotion, larger than wonderful preacher Russ Blowers’ words, was a flame that lit in my soul.

All of a sudden I was a Christian, and what was missing from me at that moment was any knowledge of what that meant.

So, I came back the next week, and the next, took a “new Christian” class, began reading, really reading, the Bible, was baptized, started going to worship on Sunday and Bible study on Wednesday, became more and more involved in prayer, study, reflection, reading and church ministries which continues to this day.

Was I a better person?  No.  We are all sinners, in or out of church.  There are thoughtful people who do good things who do not believe in Christ, and there are pious multitudes of bad eggs nested inside the church doors.  And multi vice versa.  I get it.

But even a sinner can take Christian learning and relationship seriously, and I have.  Along my way, I’ve noticed some often-missed faith-life truths.  For example:

In my Episcopalian youth, I got the “church service” thing but not the relationship-with-Jesus thing.  Standing liturgies (written church services) provide a sureness of conformity and a splendidness of words. But beware not to miss the richness of human creativity and divine relationship one experiences by reading the Bible first-hand and praying personal prayers.

During those 30 non-church years I experienced plenty of “big” things that surely enhanced life’s meaning.  But I missed entirely that the biggest of all “big” things is the Creator God Himself, and that all meaning resides in His creative, redeeming Son Jesus.  The births of our children and great career moments are big, but nothing is as sure, as promising, as glorious, as hopeful or as long-haul significant as Jesus Christ.

And what’s missing from today’s Evangelical church?  There exists little appreciation for church history and scant respect for church traditions the liturgy so ably protects.  Christian history predates Billy Graham, C.S. Lewis, the Great Awakenings, the Protestant Reformation and the Great Schism of Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

There exist 2,000 years of depth – of thought, freedom and creativity – that prove to me this Jesus thing is supremely important; that it is life itself.

My prayer is that nobody misses it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) focuses first on the Person of Christ.  Get that, and you’re not going to miss much.

Spirituality Column #449
June 23, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

I was a busy-with-church Episcopal kid, a virulently disinterested non-church agnostic adult, and then caught on with the evangelical Jesus thing in my late 40s.

For the most part, I haven’t missed a church service or a weekly Bible study in 14 years, or an “In Spirit” column deadline for almost nine.

What happened?  Did I lose my mind?  Get hit by holy lightning?   Jump, shout and convulse with the sudden indwelling of the Holy Spirit?  Nah … nothing like that.

I’ve told this story before, and I’ll tell it again because it’s very nearly my all-time favorite story.  One evening in August of 2001, a few days after his 8^th-grade school year started at Carmel Clay Junior High, my then-13-year-old son Eric calmly asked at the family dinner table, “Why don’t we go to church?”

Consider, Carmel has two enormous, vibrant Catholic parishes; plus a half-dozen of the largest protestant churches in Indiana are either in or very near Carmel. With tons of educated parents with money who are raising their children together, Carmel fits, and is, the broad-brush, demographic picture of a church-going community.

So of course kids on Carmel school buses chatting about life, chat about church. Encountering the topic among friends, Eric wondered why we didn’t go. So that night at dinner, he asked.  Mom and Dad, encountering a young teenager so obviously expressing an interest in church, were stuck for an answer.

As it happened, Eric’s Aunt Julie (his mom Jean’s sister) was a fervent Christian looking for a new church.  While we at that point failed to understand Julie’s faithful fervor, we nonetheless appreciated her help identifying a church.  Julie lived near Lawrence North High School, we lived in southeast Carmel, and a big church conveniently located halfway between was East 91^st Street Christian Church.

Jean did “recon” one week, and the next Sunday, Sept. 2, 2001, we took our sons Eric and John (age 9) to church.  The “E91” youth ministry downstairs was warm and inviting, and we headed to the “big service” upstairs.

Sitting near the back, I was nonplussed by the unusual (for a former Episcopalian) modern music, unstructured worship and free-form prayer.  Then a guy named Russ Blowers, that very day celebrating 50 years of ministry at E91, got up and started preaching 1 Corinthians 13 and the truth of divine love.

And I realized: this truth wasn’t about me, it was about Jesus Christ.

And surprisingly, softly, and as privately as I could, I started crying.

In a good way.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) eventually noticed something missing from both the old church and the new.  That’s next week. Btw, E91 is located where LNHS originally was going to be built.

Spirituality Column #448
June 16, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

I’m reminiscing about my diverse church-going experiences, hoping to describe a couple of missing faith-life links that are worth pointing out.

To quickly review, I was an active Episcopalian kid followed by a three-decades-without-church blank spot.  Since 2001 I’ve attended an independent Christian church as I age toward senior citizenship.

This week I want to discuss the main thing I learned during those middle 30 years: every reason imaginable not to go to church.

Always conservative in my political thinking, I nonetheless lapped up college philosophy at a liberal arts institution, bought into the humanity-glorifying ideas of the Enlightenment’s secular humanism, and somewhere in my mid-twenties believed I’d discovered the ultimate, that’s-all-there-is truth embodied in the non-God, self-directed Objectivism of Ayn Rand.

That world-view fit perfectly with my self-absorbed life as a young sportswriter and subsequent years working in college and professional sports and corporate public relations.  It was a good run until it all pretty much ended in my early 40s.  The upside of my career coming unglued was that I suddenly had time to be an attentive dad to my two young sons, to coach youth baseball, be a Boy Scout leader, and generally just be around.  The downside was a financial downfall that eventually cost us our family home and my marriage.  Hard times.

Regardless, church, through my early 40s, had nothing for me.  I’d endured career and personal upheavals before, had survived cancer in my mid-30s and as a 40^th birthday present to myself and family – especially my sons who I wanted to see grow up – I quit smoking.  I was resilient, strong and sufficient.  I would occasionally pray – the Lord’s Prayer is prominent in the Episcopal liturgy – but didn’t have the foggiest idea who or what was on the other end of the prayer line. 

Whatever early church lessons I’d learned had not stuck.  I remembered the Episcopal litany, but not the Christian lessons.  The beautifully-written Book of Common Prayer was as opaque, obtuse and confusing as the Bible, which, although I owned one, couldn’t find in my own house.  I was fine, and Jesus was just too much trouble.

I’d occasionally watch a random Christian preacher on TV, weigh their salvation message against my imagined superior philosophical station, and wonder if I was missing something.

Nah, still too much trouble.  Eventually things clicked, and only now do I fully appreciate the irony of having had a career in public relations but completely not getting the idea of “relationship” with the Creator of All Things and Judge of All Men.

Which, come to find out, is the whole ball game.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) finally stopped missing the point, but points to what’s missing.  More next week.

Spirituality Column #447
June 9, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

My Christian life, going back to the beginning, has seen two entirely different approaches to doing church.

And it includes a 30-year stretch with essentially no church at all.

As an Episcopal altar boy – an acolyte in ecclesial parlance – my early teen years routinely saw multiple weekly trips to my neighborhood St. Andrew’s Church in Kokomo, Ind., where along with other boys I assisted Father Cooper with various traditional liturgical chores regarding the Anglican Eucharist, an activity Catholics know as Mass and Evangelicals call simply Communion or the Lord’s Supper.

Of the acolytes, I lived closest to the church so it was easy for me to ride my bike or cut through backyards to be there for weekday services – the men’s 6 a.m. communion during Lent, for example.  After logging hundreds of Eucharist celebrations, I had the words and movements down pat.

I was shocked the first time I attended a Catholic Mass, a Christmas Eve one-off in college, because the Catholic service was nearly identical to my old Episcopal service.  It would be another couple of decades before I learned that I shouldn’t have been surprised, because the Anglican Church formed in the 1500s as a direct offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church.  England’s King Henry the VIII, who had written extensively in support of Roman Catholicism and against Luther and Protestantism on the Continent, wanted a divorce and had to form his own church to get one.  The Anglican Church was basically the Catholic Church without Rome.  I used to joke that the Episcopalians were just the Catholics who didn’t have to go to church.

I’m not sure anyone thought that line was funny, but I digress.

In the late 1960s the church’s liturgy changed, I changed (age 14), Father Cooper retired, I didn’t know the new Episcopal service, and I couldn’t sing.  Church didn’t offer much action, high school activities beckoned, and I drifted away.

Looking back decades later, I realized that the true issue was that while I knew the basics of the Jesus story, could recite the liturgy and loved Father Cooper, I didn’t know Christ.  I just didn’t get that part of it, the cosmic hugeness and significance of the concentric mega-mysteries of Creation, God’s love and glory, the Trinity, the totality of Truth residing in Jesus, the bright light of the Holy Spirit, the inspiration of scripture, the fellowship of all believers, relationship with the Father, and the assuredness and finality of the Kingdom of God.

Today when I look at my old Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, I am ashamed I missed all that, because it most assuredly is in there.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) eventually figured out what was missing.  More next week.

Spirituality Column #446
June 2, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“The gospel was not good advice but good news.” – William R. Inge

An  archive article from my favorite publication “First Things”  explains that a preacher’s primary task is not to tell us the rules how we should behave, which at heart most of us already know, but the good news of who we actually are – children of God – which many folks can’t believe.

The difference to the hearer is whether one leaves church feeling berated and hopeless because of one’s sins, or feels empowered and hopeful because the God who created humanity in His image loves us and provides a way “home” – back into His glorious kingdom – through the work of and our faith in His son Jesus Christ.

It’s the difference in the imperative mood casting condemnation – “Do this or else!” – and the indicative mood casting information – the grace of divine light, eternal salvation, absolute truth and identity in Christ.

The first tears down, the other builds up.  The one sends us home “on flat tires,” the other buoys our spirits to soar on eagles’ wings.  One creates fear and attention to self – “Am I following the rules?”  The other creates freedom, liberty, courage, and love of self, others and God – “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

Inge’s colleague V.A. Demant, in his book Christian Polity, writes:

“Tell people only what they must do, and you will numb them into despair, you will turn the gospel into a shabby replica of the world’s irreligious and nagging moralism, with its oceanfuls of good advice.

“But tell them what they are, of their dignity as made in the image of God, and that their sins are wicked perversions of their nature … tell them that the world with all its horrors is still God’s world, though its true order is upside down; tell them that they can do all things through Christ, because of him all the powers of their nature are directed to fruition … and you will help to revive hope in this dispirited generation.”

The article’s author John Jay Hughes, a Catholic priest from St. Louis, notes: “It is a paradox … that preaching morality will never motivate people to be good.  It will discourage them.  It will inevitably bore them.  It may even drive them into a state of despair [that] if they are not good God will not love and bless them.

“Proclamation of the Gospel – what God has done, is doing and will continue to do … will motivate people to love God and neighbor like nothing else.’

Amen.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) accepted the Lord not because Walters himself (admittedly) is so bad but because Jesus Christ is so good.

Spirituality Column #445
May 26, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

Life and Death and … Life
By Bob Walters

"I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the father except through me.” – Jesus, John 14:6

Life – human life, that is – can be large or small.  Joyful or joyless.  Purposeful or purposeless.  Faithful or faithless.

Typically it’s some combination of all that, laden with hopes, fears, aspirations, successes, failures, wonders and surprises.   God’s love is life’s greatest component, Satan’s hateful trickery its worst.  Our great challenge as humans is sorting out the things of God that lead to life, and the things of Satan that lead to death.

It’s not always an easy call.  We are taught in today’s world to nurture and revere our inward-directed passions amid a culture that increasingly equates freedom with irresponsibility and irreverence, and assigns God a station of irrationality and irrelevance.  The ironic, life-diminishing, misdirecting, incomplete, self-centered, message is everywhere: “Life is what we make it.”

In our busyness to “make it” in life, we are systematically directed to replace the source of love and life, God, with the foundation of sin and death, Satan.  It usually doesn’t feel like that’s the choice we’re making because Satan is the purveyor of earthly comforts; he’s a fan of man and an enabler of our appetites – power, money, sex, whatever.  It just so happens that his goal is to leave us with Godless, eternal death.

One of Satan’s great tricks is to encourage us to replace God the Father with “god the other.”  Worship the earth, worship power, worship money, worship your family or worship a political stance, a choice, a sports team or an academic cause celebre.  “God the other” provides no eternal promises, no salvation from sin, no participation in divine glory, no relationship with God the Father, and no rest in the Kingdom of God.  “God the other” offers a single end-game, one goal, and one outcome – death.

Not that the temporal overcoming of human discomfort with technology is a bad thing; who doesn’t like fast travel, modern healthcare, instantaneous communication and air conditioning?  How easy it is to mistakenly pursue comforts as an end in themselves – which makes comfort a god – rather than understanding that the God of all comforts is the exclusive purveyor of life everlasting.

Why is life everlasting important?  Because God’s glory is important, which makes the life God gives us important, which makes all the choices we tender regarding this life important.  Life is so much bigger than what we see; and death is so much worse than we can imagine.  Christ is the way to join God in His life.

The choice is ours, but Jesus is telling the truth.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thinks life is overlooked as a gift from God.