Lent

Lent – what is this time all about? Many of us are limited in our knowledge to knowing it begins when we see those people with the ashes on their foreheads and ends with Easter. But what do we DO for Lent.

Lent encourages us to concentrate on five spiritual disciplines. The first of these is prayer. Obviously, we would say that it is the obligation of every Christian to make prayer a priority all the time in their spiritual life. However, during the period of Lent, the believer is encouraged to be exceptionally diligent in the observance of the Divine Office. The Divine Office includes eight periods of prayer throughout each day, beginning with daybreak and ending with a prayer at midnight or immediately before sleep. In the original form these prayer included hymns to be sung even if the believer was worshipping alone. In this season of Lent concentrate on your prayer life. Schedule times of prayer, each day and every day!

The second discipline is penance. Penance can include all behavior designed to express a believer’s sorrow for their sins. This often includes fasting. With great apologies to my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, I would paraphrase it like this. If God needed convincing as to the sincerity of our faith, what would you do to convince him you were serious about obtaining salvation? In this season of Lent express your sorrow for your sins in a way most appropriate to you.

The third discipline is repentance. Repentance is a turning from sin and seeking to lead a holy and righteous life. It is fair to say that most of us are quite conscious of our sins, but we do little to rid ourselves of that sin. We ask forgiveness and, for the most part, go on our merry way with only half-hearted attempts to make sure we don’t do the same thing again. In this season of Lent, don’t just give up a bad habit, concentrate on the SIN in your life and seek to turn from it as best you can.

The fourth discipline is almsgiving. Where are the poor, the lonely, the suffering, the widow, and the orphan in our community? What can you do to help them? In many other religions around the world almsgiving is not true almsgiving unless it is given directly to the person in need. In this season of Lent, find a person you can help, not an organization (as much as they may need it as well), but a person. It will change your life and theirs.

 The fifth discipline is self-denial. Self-denial helps us focus on leading a simpler lifestyle. We begin to separate our needs from our wants, things we tend to get confused on a regular basis. Self-denial is an area where only a few of us excel. We like our comforts, and most of us try not to think about what we might contribute to the Kingdom of God if we were willing to live with a little less. In this season of Lent see if there may be ways you can decrease your personal expenditures to sponsor a hungry child or a missionary in a foreign land.

May these practices enrich every aspect of your life during the season of Lent and beyond. Amen

Pastor Craig

Grace and Works

There is a tension between Grace and Works these days. Granted, the Scriptures seem to hold both as very important for a person seeking to live a life that glorifies Jesus Christ. The Epistle of James tells us that faith needs an expression. In other words, the fact that you are a follower of Jesus Christ should make a difference in your behavior, indeed, your whole world view.


Romans, and other writings of Paul tend to highlight the infinite separation between God and humanity that only the Grace of Jesus Christ can span. No action of humankind can transform us from sinners to saints. Martin Luther is said to have gone as to the extreme of adding a word to that well known verse in Romans 1:17. To the phrase, “The just shall live by faith,” some claim Luther added the words “alone” in his translation of the Bible to emphasize the failure of humanity to fulfill the Law of its Creator.

We like Grace. I would guess that all of us would prefer Grace over Justice. Justice convicts us of our failings. With Grace there is yet hope for us.

However, it seems that our modern culture has forgotten James as well. The call of James is a call to personal holiness. It involves a denial of the self, a setting aside of what I want and what I think and a bend my will to the will of Jesus Christ.

We have cast aside the righteousness of Christ and substituted our own. We hold to the forgiving God but reject the God of justice, the same God that is a consuming fire. We trade the clear meaning of Scripture of an explanation that always seems to confirm our own set of prejudices and viewpoints. Most often we do this through a total rejection of the Old Testament as outdated, irrelevant material that has been replaced by the New Testament.

Granted, without the grace of God, we spend an eternity apart from Him. However, once the grace of God enters our life we are called to abandon the old life and accept a whole new way of living, believing, acting, thinking, relating, and moving through the world. Discipleship is far more than a mental recognition of the historical person of Jesus Christ. It is a process of our own transformation into a living, breathing member of the Kingdom of God.

The early Church went as far as to declare the rejection of the Old Testament and the need for personal holiness a heresy and referred to it as Anitnomianism. It is time for us to recognize it as the same and to start the call to holiness where it is needed most, with ourselves. Any of us can point out the sins of others, but what the transformed and transfigured Christ calls us to do first and foremost is to allow the Holy Spirit working in the world to begin its work in us. Amen.
Pastor Craig

Exceedingly & Abundantly

How much would you pay to be healed? What is your health worth? What is it worth to you to maintain your relationships and be in community?

On the negative side, we won’t stay there long, we read about a murder in east Tennessee because someone “de-friended” someone else on Facebook! Granted, this is unhealthy form of relationship to say the least, but it serves to illustrate how desperate some people are to have friends and be in community.

OK, quickly to the positive side. If you could pay a sum to take away an illness that impacted every aspect of your life, how much would you be willing to pay? How far would you go? How much of your material goods would you be willing to liquidate to be healthy?

In the Old Testament passage of II King 5:1ff, it seems that Naaman left home with over $400,000 dollars in silver, more than $4,000,000 dollars in gold, and ten changes of clothes. I think it would be safe to say that the clothing was not something he selected from his wife’s Good Will box that was about to be donated. Namman expected to pay top dollar and he came with the money in hand.

It is impossible for us to put a dollar value on our health. Most of us, if we had the money, would spend almost any amount if we felt that we could beat cancer, overcome heart disease, or recover from AIDS. Some families go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt with experimental treatments and drugs to grab a few more years, or maybe only a few more months, of life.

A friend of mine, who at one time was one of only a handful of people in the world being treated for a particular form of cancer,  said, “After my insurance maxed out, I quit reading the fine print at the bottom of the forms I signed telling me that I would be entirely responsible for the bill. What difference did another $10,000 make when you already owed a sum you could never pay back?”

Now, imagine the title of  our message for today – EXCEEDINGLY AND ABUNDANTLY. The exceeding part and the abundant part have nothing to do with stress and anxiety. They have to do with blessings. Imagine, buried alive under debt, stress, tension, anxiety, fear, and worry, only to have the dirt shoveled away and to feel the rush of cool, clean oxygen filling our lungs. It is an experience most of us have nothing to compare with. Yet, it is the very experience God gives to us in the person of Jesus Christ. Exceeding and Abundant love, mercy, compassion, grace, and life!

Pastor Craig

Grasping and Having

Lately, I’ve been considering the idea of “having” and “obtaining.” More aggressive terms could be “seizing” or “grasping.” I am reminded of the phrase Carpe Diem, or “Seize the day” from the movie Dead Poets Society. The phrase actually comes from a Latin poem by the author Horace. The actual phrase goes like this Carpe Diem, quam minimum credula postero, or “Seize the Day, putting as little trust as possible in the future” for the future is unforeseen, and one should scale back our hopes for it and drink one’s wine in the present.[1] I would say our society lives out that motto quite well, maybe not in the sense the quote was used in the Dead Poets Society but certainly from the aspect of giving no thought to tomorrow.

We go through life with little thought of the consequences. We grasp or chase after “the good things in life.” Even much of our election rhetoric has involved “putting the American Dream within reach” with the understanding that more Americans can then achieve that for which we all grasp. For some of us, the recession put a major obstacle in those plans to grasp and obtain.
However, it seems Scripture has a different outlook on this whole attitude. Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:19-27 to not worry about storing up treasures on earth where all sorts of bad things can happen to them, but to store them in the kingdom to come where our treasure is beyond all that is corruptible. Most of us don’t do a good job of that. We worry and fret. We grasp and seize only to have the things we have spent so much time and energy obtaining fail us when we are confronted with a crisis of self rather than one of need.

We look for something that will not fail us, something that is always there whenever we need it. We turn to our relationships only to find even they don’t stand up to that test.

Our own love is based on “if”, “when”, or “because” rather than simply loving. In all of our grasping, will we ever learn to strive for the right things?

Sarah Young writes in Jesus Calling: Seeking Peace in His Presence “To receive My peace, you must change your grasping, controlling stance to one of openness and trust. The only thing you can grasp without damaging your soul is My Hand.” Imagine that! The only thing that will not, indeed cannot, ever fail us is the hand of our Savior, the thing easiest to obtain, grasp, seize, have, and strive for because it is the only thing in this life given to us totally and completely as a gift of grace. It is love without the if’s, when’s, or because’s. It is simply Love. Take the hand of the Savior as you walk this day and into the future knowing that when you put your hand in His you put your problems and your future there as well.

Pastor Craig

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_diem

New Birth

Birth is a wonderful and painful thing. This past week, 2,100 Presbyterians gathered in Orlando to give birth to two separate organizations. As some of you have already heard, a new denomination was formed, The Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians. More than 100 congregations, many with great sadness, cast off the lines tying them to the dock of the PCUSA and set sail in this grand new adventure. The rest of us stood, waving and wishing them well, rejoicing as well in that we are their one tie back to the PCUSA.

However, the rest of us had a birth, or rebirth, of our own. We come back to our congregations with a fresh realization that narrative trumps numbers. We come seeking a new way of doing church. What new way, you ask? For churches willing to commit to one another within this fellowship, we come together in something very much like the parish council which FPC Ennis has been a member of for almost 40 years! However, our dialogue takes on a new form. We ask how God has been working within the walls of our congregations, what ministries the Holy Spirit has led us to support and promote outside the walls of our congregations, we commit ourselves and our families to study of the word at home and not only in church, we share ways God has challenged us to share time and talents, and we seek to develop new worshiping fellowships outside of our own Sunday morning gathering.

In short, we promise to be the church God has always called us to be and we share with one another how close we are coming.  It means we wish to remain accountable to one another, share in best practices of ministry, eliminate the air of suspicion and mistrust that has, at times, existed between higher governing bodies within the PCUSA and the local congregations, and to become more transparent with one another.

In many ways this means we change everything. For most of you in the pew it changes nothing. We will do the same ministry we have always done. We remain firmly implanted within the PCUSA. We continue the wonderful ministry to our shut-ins and nursing home folks. We go to presbytery meetings, even though that may have been one thing many of us would have been willing to change! We are committed to inclusivity, gender equality, and bringing the justice and mercy of Jesus Christ to the world around us. Our Gospel and preaching remain as firm as they have always been.

What an exciting time to be a part of the PCUSA!

Pastor Craig

Who Do You Belong To?

Who do you belong to? I know you know the answer to that question. When it is asked in the context of the church bulletin, we know the answer should probably be in the same context. Our minds start to work and we come up with all the possible spiritual or religious answers – Jesus, The Holy Spirit, our Heavenly Father, the entire fellowship of Christians. You know, any of those will get you in the general area even if you don’t hit the exact context the one asking the question may have wanted.

If the question were asked at a larger social gathering you may have pointed to your spouse, date, or other person across the room and replied, “Oh, I’m with. . .”

Within our religious context though, why is it that we so often act as if we are our own? I Corinthians 6:19,20 tells us something quite different; “You are not your own. You have been bought with a price.”

That’s correct. You have been bought and paid for. You no longer own your own life. You no longer have the final say on anything anymore. It is indeed appropriate when the Scripture calls us servants of Christ.

If that is indeed correct, and it is, it is our highest goal to do the will of our master. We bend our will to his. What he labels as important, that very thing moves to the top of our task list. We don’t get to make the rules anymore.

In light of this, what are those things our Master has labeled as priorities? Love one another, even to the same degree that he has loved us. Go everywhere, telling everyone of the grace and mercy of our Savior. Shelter the homeless. Feed the hungry. Give to those in need with no thought of return. Clothe the naked. Seek justice for the weak. Deliver the oppressed. Forgive because we have been forgiven much.

My goodness! It seems like we have a great deal to do. We pull out our list of things to do and scan through each item. If you’re like me, you will quickly find that only a handful of them would fit into God’s priority list for the day. Indeed, we arrive at the end of the day to find the hungry still hungry, the homeless still exposed to the elements, the lonely sitting by themselves, our enemy not reconciled to us, the oppressed still oppressed, and those in need of the Light of Jesus Christ still wandering in the dark. Maybe it is time to plan our day as we read the Scriptures, centering our planning around our theology instead of our own desires.

Pastor Craig

Sleepy

In the story of Rip Van Winkle, a well-loved, joyful, albeit lazy and unproductive villager literally sleeps through the American Revolution. He unwittingly follows the lead of a spirit and drinks from a keg that puts him into a deep sleep. He sleeps through the war. He sleeps through the growth of his children. He sleeps through the death of his wife and friends. Twenty years later, when he finally awakes, Rip Van Winkle is understandably disoriented. His proclamation of loyalty to the King gets him in trouble since America now bows not to King George III but recognizes George Washington as president. Rip walks around in a fog, unable to reorient himself to the new reality.

There are certainly things we wish we could sleep through. We would like to wake up and find that our situation had dramatically changed, hopefully for the better. The problems of life seem overwhelming from time to time. Unfortunately, we wake up to the same set of problems, in general, that we went to bed with, and this is true no matter how long we have slept. Sleep accomplishes little unless what we really need is rest.

The Scriptures themselves warn against idleness and laziness. Paul himself advises one church which seemed to be having problems with people eager to share in the distribution of free food to those in need, “if any shall not work, neither shall he eat” II Thessalonians 3:10. Paul certainly seems firm about getting people to take care of their own responsibilities.

The Scriptures repeatedly tell us to “Awake!” We are to be about the work of the Kingdom of God, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, befriending the lonely, comforting the dying, bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ to a lost world in search of hope. That isn’t a task that is accomplished in a day, not in a year, not even in a single lifetime.  The Church (Yes, that is with a capital “C”) has been at it for centuries, and we are to be about that same work every day of our life. Living out the Christian faith involves making that vision our vision, about accepting not just the person of Jesus Christ, but also his priorities for living and our life. It is my hope for 2012 that we be used of God to move the Kingdom closer to reaching those people and that no person within our sphere of influence may be able to say that they have not felt the presence of Christ through our hearts and hands.

Pastor Craig