Wonderful Words of Life: Holy Scripture

As you will be able to tell, this is something I wrote several years ago, in 2008 actually. I was then the pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Newkirk, Oklahoma. I share this with you mainly because I am about to leave to go to Cleveland for a continuing education event but I didn't want to go two weeks in a row without a blog post. Although it is a few years old, the message is really timeless and I think you will find some value in it.

This past Thursday morning I was all alone in our sanctuary, and I sat down in the first pew. As a break from the busy day, I decided to sit for ten minutes in silence. At first all kinds of thoughts came to mind: the dried poinsettia leaves on the carpet, the e-mail I’d forgotten to send to a colleague. Then after three or four minutes my mind had quieted and I was just sitting there, being. All morning I’d been thinking about how I was so frazzled and stressed. The bad thing about taking vacation is that while you are gone little elves don’t break into your office and do all of your work for you. It is always waiting for you when you get back. So I had four days of work to complete in less than two days. I had presbytery business which I needed to finish and Sunday worship to plan. To top it off my office is so messy and disorganized that I can’t find anything when I need it. Everybody has gone on vacation and come back to that. Surely you’ve had one of those days when you feel like you are being drawn and quartered by all the different directions you are being pulled.

As I was sitting in the silence, the scripture passage I had been reading earlier in the day in preparation for this Sunday’s sermon came to mind, Jesus’ response to Satan’s first temptation in the desert. “Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” I said that over and over again as I breathed in and out. Then I realized that I was so frazzled not necessarily because I had a lot to do, but because I was living “on bread alone.” I’d been on vacation for over a week, and I hadn’t kept up on my praying and scripture reading like I should. I rested but I guess you could say that I didn’t recharge. I was just living on the surface, so when I returned to the church office I just kept on going that way. I was living on bread alone, meaning that I was not gaining my strength from God. Do you ever find yourself trying to live on bread alone?

It is inevitable. When I live on bread alone my life gets out of whack. And one of the ways that I have tried to re-center myself when my life gets out of whack, is to hike. I’ve only had the opportunity a couple of times but I like to hike the trails at the Chaplin Nature Center just west of Arkansas City. There is something about being out in the woods all by myself, listening to the wind blowing through the trees, feeling the sun on my face as it peeks through. I feel relaxed and happy. I feel close to the earth and in a way I feel close to God as though God and I have finally been able to slip away from the crowds to take a walk together. There is a sacredness to my hikes. Some of you may have had that type of experience at the beach or in the mountains. But although those hikes tend to help immensely, usually what I need when the edges begin to fray is sitting on a bookshelf collecting dust.

I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas or Angel Falls, but I’ve seen enough of nature to know that a person can come away from the majesty of nature with at least an idea that there must be a God and that this God must be good and wise and powerful. But no matter how sacred my hikes seem to be, they are not enough to give the knowledge of God that is really needed, the knowledge of God that Jesus was referring to when he said that we should live “by every word that comes from God’s mouth.”

A few hundred years ago, the folks who wrote the Westminster Confession called this the “knowledge of God and God’s will that is necessary for salvation.” In other words, the general revelation of God in creation, as beautiful and sacred as it is, or really any aspect of life as a whole, needs to be informed and transformed by something more specific: the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the unique and authoritative witness to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To look only to creation without looking to the scriptures in a quest to learn about and encounter God is living only on the surface. It is like living on bread alone.
If you think that a sunrise over the Smoky Mountains or a sunset in the desert is stunning, try looking at it again after reading in the scriptures that the One who created that sunrise and sunset also created you and loves you. It takes the beauty of that moment to a whole new level. God’s self-revelation in creation may be able to bring us to awe, but it won’t bring us into relationship with our creator. Maybe that is why my hikes seem so sacred, because I look at the woods through the lens of the Bible. I walk through the forest in relationship with the One who formed the universe. I guess that is one way to describe a Christian: someone who walks through the forest of life in relationship with the One who formed the universe. And the way we come into that relationship is through encountering God in the Scriptures. The Bible is not just an accessory to Christian faith. It is absolutely essential.

This Tuesday I am going to start teaching an undergraduate class, Introduction to the New Testament, at Southwestern College, which is a Methodist college in Winfield. The other day I had coffee with the head of the Philosophy and Religion Department. I asked if I should assume that all of the students in the class are Christians. He looked at the class roster and said, “I’m pretty sure they are all Christians.” Then just a couple of minutes later I asked for advice in my preparations and teaching. He said, “You should also assume that they no almost nothing about the Bible.” In my mind I thought, “Christians who know almost nothing about the Bible?” After getting over the initial shock I thought about how wonderful it will be to help these students encounter God’s Word and to help them realize that they may have been trying to live on bread alone. Hopefully they will come to see that life can be so much better than that. But surely many of them will come to class on the first day wondering, “Why is the Bible so important?”

As followers of Jesus Christ, we go to the scriptures because the Bible is where we learn of our Lord, of his teachings, his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead. It is the Word through which the Holy Spirit teaches us what to believe and how to live. But if any of those students become convinced of scripture’s power to transform I will not be able to take the credit for that. It will have been the Holy Spirit working in their hearts. Those students, just like all of us, must be open to the Holy Spirit working in our lives through scripture, which as I will say on the first day of class, begins with our opening the Bible. The Bible isn’t just important; it is essential for the person of faith. It does not merely inform us like a history book or an encyclopedia, but God uses it to transform us. When we let God in, the scriptures are not just a book but a place where we meet God.

So as Christians, whether we have been a Christian for eighty-five years or if we just came to faith this morning, we can’t neglect the Bible, thinking that hearing the preacher’s sermon on Sunday is enough. As I have found many times, and most recently this past week after I returned from vacation and found myself sitting in that front pew for ten minutes, it is pretty safe to say that the Holy Spirit won’t work through the Bible if it is collecting dust on a shelf all the time. Instead, we must turn to the scriptures, prayerfully asking the Spirit to open us up to God’s transforming work, working through those ancient words to conform us not to the expectations of our culture but to the likeness of Christ Jesus. We do this both as individuals in personal devotional time, but with our families, and in communities like informal study groups or church bible studies or in Sunday School.

This is Lent, a time for getting back to the basics. It is a time to decide that when the world and your busy life tries to keep you living on the surface, that you will respond, both in word and action, with “I do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Lent is a time to decide that this will be the time when you experience God’s wonderful words of life.

Kids and Ash Wednesday

Is Ash Wednesday appropriate for children? This is a legitimate question. Ash Wednesday is a very heavy day. On Ash Wednesday we are reminded of our sinfulness. We are also reminded that we are going to die. Every single one of us will someday stop breathing and our hearts will stop beating and this body will shut down and begin to turn to dust. According to traditional Reformed theology, that is all we can do on our own—sin and die. Like I said, Ash Wednesday is a heavy day. However, on Ash Wednesday we are also reminded of God’s forgiveness and the fact that “whether we live or whether we die we belong to the Lord.” Because of God we can repent, turning toward God, and moving forward in life as forgiven people. Because of God we do not have to fear death because God offers eternal life, granted through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So really we boil it down to the main meaning of the day--Ash Wednesday is a day to be reminded of our utter dependence on God.

Sin, repentance, death—sounds like a great time for kids! Okay, maybe it isn’t fun and it isn’t sunny, but that wasn’t the question. The question was whether or not Ash Wednesday is appropriate for children. My answer is yes… but it requires some preparation on the part of the parents. I think children who are just brought to an Ash Wednesday service without having been prepared beforehand will either be confused or frightened. As parents it is our responsibility to tell our kids what is going to happen in the Ash Wednesday service. Just knowing what to expect can alleviate a lot of anxiety. The songs are not usually upbeat happy songs. The tone is usually somber. Everybody lines up and has black ashes put on their foreheads and the pastor says, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” Then we have communion. It can be pretty confusing for a kid… but it can also be quite powerful for a kid as well. It just takes a little time from the parent.

Here is what I’m going to tell Wyatt, who will be in the worship service. I will spread this out over a few conversations:

“Ash Wednesday is the first day of a church season called Lent. Do you remember the season of Advent, the season that leads up to Christmas? Well, Lent is the season that leads up to Easter. The cloths on the pulpit and communion table, as well as the stole that I [Pastor Everett] wear during Lent will be purple. Lent is about 40 days long and it is a time of year when we pay extra special attention to how we are living our lives and we ask God to help us to keep following Jesus. To begin the season of Lent, on Ash Wednesday we think about how much we need God. We need to be reminded that we are to love God and love others, but that we can never do this without God's help. You will come forward with mommy and I [the pastor] will draw a cross on everybody’s foreheads with ashes. I [the pastor] will say, ‘From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.’ Those words come from the Bible and I am [he is] saying them to you as a reminder that we are human beings and we need God and that God has come to be with us through Jesus and that human beings and God come together through Jesus. There is nothing to be worried about. Everyone will be getting the cross on our foreheads, kids and grownups, because we are all human beings and we all need God.”

Through these or similar words I will have introduced the themes of sin, repentance, reconciliation, and death. The first three are pretty obvious, but death is merely implied in these words in a way that a kid can understand and that won’t cause the fears that can often come to kids when death is mentioned unnecessarily. They might even think that everyone at the Ash Wednesday service is going to die… at the Ash Wednesday service! You never know what connections will be made in our minds when we are kids. So I don’t think death, although it is a major theme of Ash Wednesday, needs to be addressed with younger children. Because Wyatt is a pastor’s child and because I’ve done ten funerals in my short time here, Wyatt knows way more about death than most six-year-olds. We’ve talked about it a great deal and in fairly great detail. However, in preparation for Ash Wednesday, I don’t think that I really need to get into the subject of death with him. I’ve told him that we get the ashes in order to remind us that we are human beings. Death is a part of being a human being, so I’ll just leave it with us being reminded that we are human beings and because of that we need God.

Here are also some other words that might be used a lot during worship that you might want to touch on with your kids. “Sin” is what we call it when we live in ways that are against what God wants for us—when we treat other people badly or when we are greedy and so on and so forth. We all sin but because God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to die for us on the cross, God is willing to forgive us and wants us to try to sin less and start living more the way God wants us to live. But we can’t do that by ourselves. We need God’s help. “Repentance” means when you decide that you’re going to stop doing the wrong thing, say you are sorry, and then start doing the right thing. “Reconciliation” is a long word that just means “to bring back together.” When two people get in a fight and then they make up they are coming back together; they are reconciling. Through Jesus, God brings us together with God and brings us together with each other. That’s why we have communion a little while after we get the ashes on our foreheads. Communion helps us to remember that through Jesus we have been brought back together with God and with each other.

Those are just some ideas. Like I said, Wyatt will be in the worship service. Josselyn, since she is only three-years-old will be in the nursery. I will, however, spend some time with Wyatt preparing him beforehand. I will be at the church early on Wednesday evening and I would be willing to spend a little time with any children to supplement their parents’ preparation by walking them through some things and letting them see the bowl of ashes and other things to disarm any anxiety or confusion they might have. Also, if there are

a few kids in the worship service, I have a children’s sermon prepared just in case that might help them to feel at ease and a part of the service. In addition, starting this Wednesday, families can pick up the daily devotion and sticker activity for the season of Lent. This year it is based on the story of Jonah and the first reading and sticker begins on Ash Wednesday.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help prepare our kids for Ash Wednesday.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett

One of My Personal Heroes: Jimmy Carter

I am writing a series of blog posts about my personal heroes. Last week I wrote about my paternal grandmother, Colleen Miller. Of all my heroes, she is the one I was closest to personally. Today I’m going to write briefly about another one of my heroes, this time someone I’ve never met. His name is Jimmy Carter.

As you all know, Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States from 1976-1980. I was born in 1978 so I have no recollection of his presidency. From what I hear, from every single person who has volunteered the information, Jimmy Carter was perceived to be an ineffective president. Some called him naïve others called him incompetent. One person said, “He tried to run this country with his Christian values and you just can’t do that successfully.” This person wasn’t saying that Jimmy Carter proselytized or even favored Christianity during his term. What this person was getting at was that he felt that President Carter valued peace over national security. I didn’t know enough to agree or disagree. Other than very little knowledge about an oil shortage and a hostage crisis in Iran, I don’t know much about his presidency at all. He is not my hero because he was president, just as Ronald Reagan isn’t a hero to many people because he was an actor. What is important to me is what Jimmy Carter has done after his presidency.

First of all, Jimmy Carter is one of my heroes because he is a man of deep Christian faith. He has shared this faith with others for decades through writing faith-based books and daily devotionals. I read his words every day for a year and I have a deeper faith because of it. Jimmy Carter shows me that it is possible to have Christian faith, even an Evangelical faith, yet not to be affiliated or aligned with the political far right. His faith has led him to tirelessly work for peace through The Carter Center, which he founded for the purposes of “waging peace, fighting disease, and building hope.” In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” You can learn about the Carter Center and their work by clicking on The Carter Center.

Jimmy Carter has spent his life serving God in Jesus Christ through trying to bring people together to settle their conflicts in peaceful rather than violent ways. That is why he is one of my heroes. Here are some quotes from him:

“I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.”

“A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.”

“I separated from the Southern Baptists when they adopted the discriminatory attitude towards women, because I believe what Paul taught in Galatians that there is no distinction in God's eyes between men and women, slaves and masters, Jews and non-Jews - everybody is created equally in the eyes of God.”

“I am a nuclear physicist by training and a deeply committed Christian. I don't have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe. But I don't adhere to passages that so and so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind.”

“My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences can be resolved in a nonviolent way.”

“There should be an honest attempt at the reconciliation of differences before resorting to combat.”

“Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.”

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children.”

“We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes—and we must.”