Tuesday, January 30, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Christmas fades away into February
I know, but today I also feel that tomorrow is the last day of January. And in that ending I also feel the receding of Advent and of Christmas 2023. All those Christmases. Looking around upstairs at our home in Urbana I found tapes of sermons I preached at Waynesville Christian Church on December 10 and December 17, 1989. Margaret and I left for campus ministry in Urbana a few months earlier, and now the long-time pastor and his wife, Gary and Leah Johnson, were leaving for a large church south of Indianapolis.
The tapes included all the goodies of our Sunday services: music, prayer, communion meditations, and my two sermons. Everyone felt sad to be losing Gary and Leah, who had built up the church and fellowship with seemingly continuous invitations to work, to eat, to play and to pray. Gary’s enthusiasm never let up.
I talked about the book Prison to Praise by Merlin Carouthers, a former military chaplain and officer. He insisted on thanking God for everything, even and especially for the troubles and suffering, the sadness. In sickness and in health, for better or for worse.
But that’s tricky. Thank you for the pains in my arm, my knee, my foot. Thank for the dry mouth that accompanies me everywhere. Thank you for the cold weather and clouds. Of course it can get much worse. Thank you for my traffic accident. Thank you for Mom’s death. Thank you, in 1989, that Gary and Leah are leaving. What?
God’s presence allows all of this gratitude for the bad stuff, of course. I am also thankful for lots and lots of good things. I pray for healing, and for comfort, and for abundance, and when they come, I am thankful.
To the woman in the crowd who had touched him, he said, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.
Yesterday at church in Mahomet Greg Elliott suggested that we forgo our allegiance to the Americanized Jesus and seek the real one. He talked about the moment when Peter refused Jesus’ prediction that he would die on the cross and Jesus said roughly, “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus insisted that his disciples look straight into the tragic certainties of their future.
The American Jesus, Greg said, is an idol we have created. As a country, as a race, as a family, as a church, and as persons we tell Jesus what we want, what we think is best, and when that doesn’t happen we blame God, or we blame someone else, or we blame ourselves and wallow in our guilt, usually false. We do not grow and our faith atrophies.
I asked my friend at church how she was doing. And you know what? She took a moment and told me – first about her extremely busy work schedule, and then about her body wearing down. I talked to another friend and she too shared some of her physical struggles.
Are you kidding me? Christians who are able to look each other in the eyes and talk about their pain with neither self-pity nor bitterness toward God, and then pray in gratitude for it all, as well as asking for healing?
The people around Jairus told him, “Your daughter has died.” Then Jesus said, “Do not be afraid, but just have faith. Then he took the child by the hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” She sat up and walked around. Jesus said to her parents, “Give her something to eat.”
I want to go to a church like that! Jesus does too, I think.
(2 Samuel 18, Psalm 86, Matthew 8, Mark 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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