Bandits No More

July 21, 2008

Interesting People

Filed under: Friendship,War — rheyduck @ 3:27 pm

In my line of work I get to meet many interesting people. Some of the most interesting over the years have been World War 2 veterans.

My dad was a naval advisor in Korea back in the early 1970s. Since the country was fairly safe then, we were able to live there also. Living on base in Chinhae, one of our regular entertainments was going to see the movies on Saturday afternoon. Most of the movies on base were free – just the right price for us kids. One I remember seeing was Merrill’s Marauders, the story of American’s in Burma in World War 2. My later studies of history never led in that direction, so the movie (seen as a third grader) was my sole education on that subject. Until I met Joe Woodley, that is. Joe was a member of the first congregation I served, and had been one of Merrill’s Marauders after graduating from Texas A & M. Joe (a real character) put a face on my childhood memory.

My wife’s grandfather was another character. J.W. Anderson spent most of his career working at a paper mill in Lufkin. During the war he’d served as a paratrooper (513th Regiment) and was one of the few survivors of his unit (HBO’s series Band of Brothers depicted a unit very much like his own). He told of the great tiredness they experienced in combat. One time they were able to rest a little by catching a ride with a British tank unit. He promptly fell asleep. When he woke up he say destroyed tanks all around him. It seems that he’d slept through a tank battle.

J.W. was a Methodist all his life though he didn’t become a follower of Jesus until late in life. His wife had prayed for him throughout their marriage. He only gave his life to Christ after she died. Even though he was a senior citizen at the time, he didn’t “rest” in his salvation. He promptly started teaching Sunday School and leading bible studies in his home, continuing into his 80s.

Just last week I heard that Hiroshi Yamashiro had passed away last month. Hiroshi was a member of our church in California. Raised a Buddhist, he had become a Christian after his family moved from Japan to Hawaii. At the time I knew him, Hiroshi was one of the happiest people around, always quick to laugh. He kept his garden (and the church garden) going, and carried his camera everywhere, taking pictures. During World War 2 Hiroshi had been a member of the famous 442nd Regiment (all Japanese Americans fighting in the ETO).

These three have all gone on to glory now, a glory due them not because of their prowess or participation in warfare or defending their country, but to their faith in Christ. I’m hapy to have counted each of them as friends.

July 19, 2008

Dark Knight thoughts

Filed under: Dark Knight,Jesus,Movies — rheyduck @ 7:51 pm

If you haven’t seen the movie, and don’t want any hints of what happens, don’t read any further.

I saw the movie yesterday with my two oldest children. Here are a few thoughts:

  • At the end, Batman was reckoned a sinner so that the people of Gotham City could be delivered from crime. Joker had tried to show that even the best of the best would become evil in the right (wrong?) situation. Batman decided that Joker couldn’t be seen by the people to win that argument (though to a certain degree, Joker did win the argument: Harvey Dent did go bad). To defeat Joker, Batman bore Harvey Dent’s sin – but only a very few were allowed in on the secret. Jesus bore the sin of many, and did so without compromising on the truth. There was no need to maintain an illusion of the goodness of the people for whom Jesus died. It was pure grace. “Ah, but what about the common attribution of sinlessness?” Batman (falsely) wanted to see a kind of sinlessness attributed to Harvey Dent (how much of this was to cover for his own – as Bruce Wayne – over-reliance on Harvey Dent, on his own will to believe?). I see two things in Jesus’ sinlessness that help us more than Harvey Dent’s. First, Jesus’ sinlessness was in the context of non-violent, non-reactive suffering. He, like Harvey Dent, was truly tempted. He, unlike Harvey Dent, said NO to temptation. Second, as one who was tempted like we are – whether we’re the morally upstanding Harvey Dent’s or the gangster Maronys – Jesus understands our temptations, even our giving in to them, and still extends us mercy.
  • Joker saw his larger role as fomenting chaos. Chaos in the Dark Knight is seen as evil. Batman, though operating outside the bounds of order, seeks to prop up order. Is the order good? Well, not exactly. The order – pre-Batman, at least – included organized crime and its depredations on Gotham City. When we see Batman seeking to eliminate the evil in the order, we seem to be moving beyond a simple Manichean order of good and evil in constant warfare. If chaos is a kind of anti-order, perhaps even a prelude to a new order, then Batman himself is an agent of chaos. Joker seems altogether different, however. He seems in favor of no order, no predictability, no security. Jesus brought chaos – I think of his cleansing of the temple – but never served as the agent of chaos like Joker. Jesus was not for Order – just any kind of social stability – he was for the Kingdom of God and its ordering.
  • Joker is a kind of satan, some only to “kill, steal and destroy.” He lives as the accuser, the liar, the one who seeks to “help” others stray from the path.

July 15, 2008

“That’s nice, preacher”

Filed under: Evangelism,Leadership,Ministry,church growth — rheyduck @ 8:57 pm

I’m a knowledge and information junkie. I read piles of books. If I had the time and money I’d go to a ministry conference every month. I used to go to more conferences and read more ministry books, but I’ve mostly given up on them.

It used to be that I’d read a book or come back from a conference fired up with enthusiasm and new ideas. I’d tell my leaders about what I learned and what we could do and the usual response was, “That’s nice, preacher. Occasionally they’d humor me and play a loing for a little while. They really had no reason to listen, however, except to be nice. They’d been in the church longer than I’d been alive and knew how to do things. Stuff happened before I arrived (or came back from the conference, or read the book) with my my new ideas and ways of doing things. Stuff would continue to happen.  Why both learning new things when you alreay know everything you need to know?

But from my perspective they didn’t know all they needed to know. The church continued to decline as they did the same thing over and over again. “If it was good enough in the 1950s, it’s good enough for today.” They refuse to see two things. First, doing what they did in the 1950s isn’t filling the church like it did (if it did) in the 1950s). Second, what they did in the 1950s didn’t produce as much lasting fruit as they thought.

I think of the old William Booth story. He’s gone to a meeting somewhere and a society lady comes up to him. “Mr. Booth, I don’t care for your method of doing evangelism.” He replies, “Madam, I don’t care for your method of not doing evangelism.” If all we need to do is “keep the doors open,” or maintain institutions and buildings, or keep old time members happy, we might be able to get by with doing what we’ve always done. But if we’re out to keep people from running headlong into hell, then we’ll have to do something different. We’ll have to learn some new things.

<Sarcastic comments> I’d better stop there.

July 7, 2008

United Methodist Restrictions

Filed under: United Methodism — rheyduck @ 6:38 pm

United Methodists have varying views on restrictions in the church, though there seems to be a strong trajectory against restrictions in general. We emphasize Open Communion. We preach the call of Christ to all to come to salvation.

What restrictions do you see United Methodists affirming or defending?

July 4, 2008

Two Big Mistakes

Filed under: Ministry,Salvation,United Methodism — rheyduck @ 9:43 pm

In my years of ministry (mostly in East Texas), I’ve come to see two big mistakes the church has made. One mistake is characteristic of my own Methodist tradition, the other characteristic of the dominant Protestant tradition of my region, the Baptists.

I’m not a Baptist, but I’ve observed over the years that they think it’s really important that people get “saved.” Obviously this desire – whether using the same terminology or not – is common to many Christian traditions. I can look at my own Methodist tradition, particularly as instantiated in John Wesley himself, and see a powerful passion to see people come into a personal relationship with Jesus. So this in itself is not a mistake. The mistake I’ve seen is that many operate as if this is all that matters. The point of ministry/preaching/teaching is to get people saved. Once a person is saved, they’re taken care of and we can safely move on to the next unsaved person.

The modern Methodist mistake is, in a way, the opposite of the Baptist mistake. While they often assume that no one is saved (“let’s sing Just as I Am just one more time”), we usually assume everyone is. Whether our universalism is explicit or implicit from a kind of unthinking spiritual introversion, we have negelected helping people cross the line of faith. Oh, we’ll take in new members, but clarity about coming to faith in Jesus? That’s too baptistic for us.

Both mistakes have proved deadly. The mistake of assuming all we need to do is get people saved, to make a decision for Christ, has led us to believe that life with God (aka the Christian life) just happens naturally after one’s “salvation experience.” We inculcate a sense that salvation doesn’t come from works – from doing things – so we leave out the doing things that constitute actually living out life with God. We believe – and think that’s enough. Believing is certainly a good and necessary thing, but it’s mighty thin gruel, especially the face of the acids of modernity.

The Methodist mistake desn’t do us any better. With our emphasis on doing good – and the good we do is, for the most part, very much worth doing – accompanies a de-theologization of our tradition. It becomes easy for our people, as they mature, to come to think the religious verbiage is just an easily discarded husk, leaving the purity of true and universal spirituality and morality. We become comfortable living on the “necessary truths of reason” side of Lessing’s ugly ditch, missing out on the ongoing activity of God in history, the very activity in which  a life with God  seeks to include us.

No one is saved. Everyone is saved. Either strategy seems to set up too many of our people into the position of seeing Jesus as only a get out of hell free card, or a nice, but mostly irrelevant (because foreign and outdated) moral teacher. We both need to get back to the place of preaching the whole Jesus.

July 3, 2008

Help on Patriotism

Filed under: Bible,Culture,Politics — rheyduck @ 4:54 pm

I’m working on a message about Jeremiah’s patriotism. I’d love your input on my theses thus far:

  1. Though the events of the bible took place in cultures very different from our own, we can still learn from them how we, as followers of Jesus today, ought to relate to our host cultures and communities.

  2. None of the nations mentioned in the bible match up exactly with any nations in the world today.

  3. The biblical idea of “nation” is more cultural than political in meaning. This means that “nations” are more broadly ways of living than merely ways of ordering power at the top.

  4. God hold nations responsible for their actions. As with individuals, the more blessed a nation, the higher the accountability.

  5. It is sometimes hard to tell the good nations from the bad nations when we evaluate them from what we know of God’s perspective.

  6. Though many nations throughout history have claimed to be God’s special people, very few (if any) have consistently acted like God’s special people. That is, they usually trust in their own abilities and resources before they trust God, and they usually seek their own agenda rather than God’s.

  7. God’s people have tended not to handle power better than any other group of people. Jesus gives us more of an example of how to live in weakness than how to exercise power.

  8. Obeying God can require you to do things that don’t look very patriotic. Jer. 21:1-10; 27:12-15; 38:17-18. Daniel, Israel, Babylon. Persia. Jesus and Rome.

  9. Christians are called to a dual citizenship. Citizenship in the Kingdom of God is our primary allegiance.

  10. There is a real sense in which the nation-state or culture in which the Christian lives is a place of exile.

  11. Even if the place we now live is not our ultimate home, we are to seek its peace and prosperity, not just for our own sake (we live there, after all), but for the sake of the people around us.

  12. Our ultimate well-being is not determined by the success of our nation, culture, economy or military, but by the grace of God.

July 2, 2008

Short term friendships

Filed under: Friendship,Theology — rheyduck @ 7:40 pm

Back in my seminary days I did my supervised ministry at a nursing home in Lexington, Kentucky. In the course of a couple of years (I kept visiting there after my coursework was completed) I made many friends.

Pearl was the first one to shock me. On my first day there I sat down to visit with her. We talked about our lives up to that point, getting to know each other. Since I was in training for ministry, I thought prayer would be an appropriate part of our relationship. Instead of just imposing a prayer on her, I asked her what I could pray for her. “Pray that I die tonight,” she said. That was the first time I had ever heard anyone say such a thing, young and naive fellow that I was. So I went ahead an imposed a prayer on her anyway. Over the years I have learned – from Pearl and others – that it’s ok to pray for people to pass on.

B.D. was another friend. She didn’t have a name, just initials. She was in her 90s and the only family she had was her elderly son and his wife (who were themselves childless). B.D. had a lively sense of humor and was a joy to visit with. After a few weeks I showed up one day and went looking for B.D. but couldn’t find her anywhere. Finally I asked at the nurses’ station. They explained that her son had had a disagreement with the management of the nursing home and had moved her elsewhere. So I never saw my friend B.D. again. Though she was still alive, I suddenly found myself without the ability to say goodbye.

After finishing seminary I moved to my first appointment, a couple of small churches in NE Texas. I was such a youngster (though I had finished my Master’s degree by then), that people, upon meeting me, would ask to see my father. Surley I was too young to be the real pastor.

Since the church was mostly older folks, I made my friends among that set. I think I was closest to one particular family – two sisters and a brother. I took the brother  out visiting with me sometimes. Other times, we’d go to the high school sporting events together. But before I left (having been there only two and a half years), I had to do his funeral. His sisters didn’t live much beyond that.

Those are some of the problems you run into when you make friends with people in their 80s or older. You realize pretty quickly that this friendship might not last a long time. Some might ask, why bother? Why set yourself up for the pain of losing another friend?

I can think of a couple of reasons to make friends anyway. First, people who are short for the earth need friends too. I’ve had many older people complain to me that they’re lonely – that they’ve outlived all their friends. The solution to that is to keep making friends. I can’t very well give them that advice and then not be willing to be their friend.

Second, though we don’t care to admit it, we’re all temporary. While people in their 80s may strike us as more temporary (and their nearness to eternity uncomfortably reminds us of our own), we are no less temporary, and have no guarantee of any more days in this life than they.

So we followers of Jesus make friends. Some friends we’ll enjoy here for years and years. Some for only a few moments. But short or long, in the grace of God, friends are worth making.

Powered by WordPress