Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

The other day I was talking to my brother about some family members who are considering a move to Maine.  That brought to mind E.B. White who left his position at the New Yorker along with his duplex on Manhattan's east side to move to a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, Maine.  The year was 1938 and rather thoughtfully, he took his wife and young son with him.

     Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899.  He graduated from Cornell in 1921, and bounced around through a number of different jobs (including working on a fire-boat in Alaska) until 1925 when he submitted a number of pieces to a brand new magazine called The New Yorker.  The literary editor, who years later would become his wife, recommended he be hired.  It took months to convince White to actually visit the office for an interview, and additional weeks to talk him into working on the premises.  He agreed to come in on Thursdays.  White wasn't exactly a people person.  His friend, James Thurber, would later write:

Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club.  His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.

     Thurber wasn’t kidding about the fire escape.  White used it regularly to get away from visitors he didn’t know.  Small wonder, then, that this man would choose to leave the crowded streets of New York City for a saltwater farm along the coast of Maine.

     Ask people about E.B. White and they will probably talk about Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web. Another book, well-known in different circles, is "Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style."  But while he is best known today for the books he wrote, in White's own time he was at least equally well-known for his essays.  They are still great reading.  To give you a sense, here is an excerpt from a piece he wrote on the tendency of some poets to be obscure:

There are many types of poetical obscurity.  There is the obscurity that results from the poet’s being mad.  This is rare.  Madness in poets is as uncommon as madness in dogs.  A discouraging number of reputable poets are sane beyond recall.  There is also the obscurity that is the result of the poet’s wishing to appear mad, even if only a little mad.  This is rather common and rather dreadful.  I know of nothing more distasteful than the work of a poet who has taken leave of his reason deliberately, as a commuter might of his wife… I think Americans, perhaps more than other people, are impressed by what they don’t understand, and the poets take advantage of this.  Gertrude Stein has had an amazing amount of newspaper space, out of all proportion to the pleasure she has given people by her writings, it seems to me, although I am just guessing.

     Who hasn’t been frustrated by a poet who seems intent on being as obscure and opaque as possible in the hope of appearing clever?  Their thinking seems to be that if you can’t understand it then it must be really deep.  On the other side, we have the greatest of all poets -- our Creator -- whose work is gloriously accessible, and yet is so deep and so profoundly complex that one could spend a lifetime exploring it and still have just scratched the surface.

     Pause for a moment and take a look at the world around you.  What a world God has made for us.  What a God to so richly bless us.  On second thought, perhaps it wasn’t the need to get away from the crush of people that took White to the coast of Maine in 1938.  Perhaps it was a deep love for creation itself.

“Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Romans 1:20).

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

     Teddy Roosevelt was raised a Presbyterian.  His family was part of Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York City.  As a very small child, however, Roosevelt (“Teedie” as he was called at the time) developed a peculiar fear of the church.  He refused to set foot inside if he was alone.  When his mother pressed him, he said he was afraid of something called the “zeal.”  He said it crouched in the dark corners of the church, waiting to jump out at him.

     His mother asked what a “zeal” might look like, and Teedie said he wasn’t sure.  He thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon, and said he had heard the pastor read about it from the Bible.  Mittie (his mother) pulled out a concordance and began reading to the little boy every passage that contained the word “zeal.”  Suddenly, very excited, he told her to stop.  The passage was John 2:17, “And his disciples remembered that it was written, 'The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.'”  No wonder he was scared.

     We forget, sometimes, how literal children can be.  I remember standing in the hallway outside of Mrs. Glass’ art room with the rest of my class.  It must have been kindergarten or perhaps first grade.  We were being a bit rowdy, and Mrs. Glass suddenly announced, “The next one to speak up will be on the playground bench before you know it.”  The bench was a well-established punishment for bad behavior; sitting beside a teacher while the rest of the class enjoyed their recess.  It was the phrase “before you know it” that caught my attention.

     At that magical age when anything is possible and Santa is still real, my thoughts immediately went to the idea of standing in the hallway one moment, and the very next (“before I knew it”) sitting on the playground bench.  That, I thought, would be fantastic.  So of course, I spoke up.  Mrs. Glass was incredulous.  It was maybe the only time I ever saw her angry.  I didn’t help my cause when a few minutes later, very disappointed to still be around, I approached her and said, “I thought you said I’d be on the playground bench before I knew it?”

     There are those who believe that every word of Scripture should be taken literally.  We are not among them.  One of the great church fathers, Origen, famously took a literal approach to that part of the Sermon on the Mount which begins, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…”  Only it wasn’t his right eye that (much to his later regret) he cut away.

     There are some teachings that are meant to be taken literally – the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37-40) or Jesus declaration, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).  But Scripture is also full of poetry, hyperbole and metaphor, and there are occasions when it clearly reflects the culture of the time at which it was written: the view of the cosmos, for example, evidenced in the opening chapters of Genesis; or the instruction in 1 Timothy that women should not have their hair braided when they enter into worship (1 Timothy 2:9).

     Does that mean there are some passages that we should ignore?  Thomas Jefferson simply cut out the parts of the Bible he didn’t like.  But no, we don’t do that.  What it means, rather, is that sometimes we have to dig beneath the surface – the literal take – in order to find the truth that is offered there.  We don’t discard 1 Timothy 2:9, and we don’t take it literally.  When we dig down, rather, we find that the real message is about worship: worship is not the place to be parading our wealth or status (at the time 1 Timothy was written, wealthy women would sometimes show up with elaborate braids that could only have been created by servants or slaves).

     Sometimes, taking a passage literally, as Theodore Roosevelt once did, is to miss the point entirely.  Simply skipping over it, however, can mean missing a truth we need to hear.

“All Scripture is inspired by God…” (2 Timothy 3:16).

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

At a low point in his career, with his business in jeopardy and half his staff gone, Walt Disney came up with Mickey Mouse.  His studio produced two silent shorts with Mickey, Plane Crazy  (spoofing Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic) and The Gallopin’ Gaucho (a takeoff on the swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks), but they failed to generate the enthusiasm and new contract the company needed if it was going to survive.  That’s when they got the idea of adding sound.  Walt and his brother Roy gambled everything and the resulting cartoon, Steamboat Willie, debuted on November 18, 1928.  It was a huge success.  Steamboat Willie not only saved the studio, but went on to be considered a cinematic milestone.

     The early Mickey was a mischief maker; puckish, impudent and a bit of an anarchist.  Within a few years, however, he had evolved into something very different; cute, boyish and inoffensive.  Walt Disney wasn’t about to risk the popularity of his most important product.  As Mickey lost his edge, the studio realized it needed a new star – “a character” as Neal Gabler writes in biography of Disney, “who would be immune to the expectations of civility that burdened Mickey.”

     Donald Duck was introduced in a 1934 cartoon, The Wise Little Hen.  He didn’t have his blue sailor suit yet (what do ducks and sailors have in common?), but the other qualities that would come to define Donald were recognizably present: testy, grumpy, selfish and allergic to work.  In the next cartoon, Orphan’s Benefit, Mickey and the anti-Mickey were paired for the first time, and from that point forward Donald Duck took off.  By the following year, the Duck was overtaking the Mouse in popularity.  Gabler explains his success:

In some respects Donald Duck seemed to offer audiences both a vicarious liberation from the conventional behavior and morality to which they had to subscribe in their own live and which the Duck clearly transgressed and, since his usually got his comeuppance, a vicarious revenge against the pretentious, unattractive, and ornery at a time when the entire world seemed to be roiling in anger and violence [1935 was the height of the Depression, and the year Hitler announced he was going to rearm Germany, and introduced race laws making Jews second-class citizens].  Whereas Mickey had turned into a smiling cipher, the lumpy Duck was hot-tempered, vain, pompous, boastful, rude, suspicious, self-satisfied, and self-indulgent – a taxonomy of misconduct and offensiveness.

     Unlike the polite, watered-down Mickey, Donald was free to blow his top and commit mayhem as Disney himself recognized.  Who do you think would be more likely to make people laugh?

     Donald Duck was intentionally created to serve as a foil to Mickey.  In that sense, you could say he was a part of Mickey – an extension of what Mickey could no longer be.  Are those two parts present in us, as well; the conventional and the rebellious?  In his epistle to the Romans, the Apostle talks about not understanding his own actions -- doing the very thing he doesn't want to do.  But I'm not sure that's the same thing that we are seeing in Mickey and Donald.  The need to please is as much a reflection of our brokenness as the need to rebel.  But what if we phrased it as faithfulness and freedom?

     If Mickey and Donald represent two parts of ourselves, then it would seem the way to spiritual and emotional well-being would lie in bringing those two parts together into an integrated whole.  And that, I believe, is exactly the whole that we see in Jesus: truly faithful and utterly free.  That's the life that Jesus offers to each of us.

     In Jesus we find the freedom to be faithful to God’s intent, not out of a felt need to be socially acceptable (Mickey), but because we know that in God’s intent we begin to experience life at its richest and at its best.  We choose obedience, in other words, not because we have to (what the Duck was rebelling against), but because our hearts long for the kind of life that obedience brings.

“Happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.  Happy are those who keep his decrees, who seek him with their whole heart…” (Psalm 119:1-2).

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

     From 1962 to 1967, a television series called “Combat!” ran on ABC.  It was about a squad of American soldiers making their way through Europe during the Second World War.  It was not a favorite of mine and I don’t know that I watched many episodes, but one episode has stayed with me.  It featured a new guy (like Star Trek, it was never good to be the newbie) who was a deeply committed Christian.      

 

     This new man's faith had a marked impact upon his life.  He wasn’t afraid of dying.  He believed his days were in God’s hands, or, as the psalmist put it, “In your book were written all the days that were formed for me…”  So he did his duty to the best of his ability, and was at peace with whatever might happen.  When he died at the end of the episode, he did so without fear or regret.

 

     It is this same sense that I get when I look at El Greco’s famous painting of Saint Sebastian (the one in the Prado Museum).  Sebastian, who lived from 256 – 288 C.E., was an early Christian martyr and became a favorite subject of Renaissance artists.  Tradition has it he joined the Roman army in order to assist martyrs without arousing suspicion.  Because of his courage, he was promoted to a captain in the Praetorian Guards, but the day came when his faith was discovered.  The Emperor Diocletian ordered his death, and turned him over to Mauritanian archers who tied him to a post and used him as a target.  Pierced by numerous arrows Sebastian was left for dead, but a woman came to retrieve his body and bury him and found that he was still alive.  She took him home and nursed him back to health.

 

     Following his recovery, instead of leaving and preserving his life Sebastian chose to confront the Emperor.  He stationed himself near a stairway that the emperor was going to be using, and then berated him for his persecution of Christians.  This second time there was no mistake.  On the emperor’s orders, he was clubbed to death.  He was buried on the Appian Way, near the catacombs that bear his name.

 

     El Greco’s rendering of Sebastian features his characteristic elongation of the body. While recognizable, the body is not realistic; certain elements are exaggerated to serve the artist’s purposes.  The body itself twists, moving from left to right and back again in a sinuous form.  The movement of light and dark across that form suggests flames surging upwards.  Sebastian’s head is tilted up, as well, with a calm, peaceful gaze focused on heaven above.  This is a man who accepts his fate, and whose soul longs for God.

 

     That’s the connection with that episode from “Combat!”  They each feature men of great faith, and what they got right is that faith does, indeed, impact the way we look at death.  Does that mean that Christians shouldn’t be afraid of death?  No, that’s where the two can mislead us.  Jesus, after all, was filled with anguish as he contemplated his pending death in the Garden of Gethsemane.  He even prayed to be delivered from it, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me…” The Apostle Paul describes death as “the last enemy to be destroyed.”

 

     Faith doesn’t mean the absence of fear.  What it means, rather, is that we have a source of hope and comfort even in the midst of our fear.  To put it differently, I like the idea of what El Greco was getting at in his rendering of Saint Sebastian – the idea that Sebastian found comfort in his faith even as he was being shot.  But I suspect that much like Jesus upon the cross, the anguish of that moment was very real for Sebastian.  Faith doesn’t take away our pain.  What faith does, rather, is speak to us in our suffering; assuring us that we are not alone, and that our future rests in the hands of a loving God.

 

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ?  Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35-39)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

One of my favorite stories to come out of the Civil War was about a sergeant in General Joseph Kershaw’s Second South Carolina Regiment named Richard Kirkland.  Ambrose Burnside had massed 115,000 Union soldiers just outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia.  He designed a two-pronged attack to try and drive Lee’s forces from a series of hills just outside the city.  The main assault struck south of the city and was ultimately driven back by Stonewall Jackson.  The second prong struck against the Confederate left on Marye’s Heights.  It did not go well.

Wave after wave of Federal attackers were mown down by Confederate troops firing from an unassailable position in a sunken road protected by a stone wall.  Over the course of the afternoon, no fewer than fourteen successive Federal brigades charged the wall of Confederate fire.  Not a single Federal soldier reached Longstreet’s line.   

     Twelve thousand Union troops were left on the fields approaching Marye’s Heights.  Throughout the long night and into the next day the wounded and dying cried out for water.  As General Kershaw looked out on the carnage from his headquarters, he was approached by Sergeant Kirkland.  Kirkland couldn’t stand the cries any longer.  He wanted permission to go out and help.  In the general’s own account of the incident, he turned to the sergeant and said, “Kirkland, don’t you know that you would get a bullet through your head the moment you stepped over the wall?”

     Kirkland replied that he understood the risk, but wanted to try anyway.  Reluctantly, the general gave him permission.

     Kirkland moved down to the sunken road and the stone wall that formed the front line of the Confederate defenses.  And then, armed with all the canteens he could carry, he climbed over the wall – exposing himself to every Union sharpshooter on the other side.  He was met by a hail of bullets.

     Climbing over the wall is what God has done for us in Jesus, making the choice to enter this great no-man’s land in which the wounded and broken cry out for help.  In Jesus, God chose to cross that great dividing line which separates the Kingdom of Heaven from the Kingdom of earth in order to be there for us; exposing himself to the hurts and struggles of this world; exposing himself to our anger, bitterness, hostility and rejection.

     This, in other words, is not some distant God sitting passively to one side.  This is a God who crosses the wall.  This is a God who chooses to join us on the field; who reaches amid the killing hail of our anger and sin with the message of his redemptive love.

     Incredibly, Kirkland survived that initial shower of bullets untouched. When the Federals saw him reach out to the nearest sufferer, they stopped firing.  They understood what he was doing.  For the rest of that afternoon Kirkland moved from man to man of the wounded enemy, his own comrades gladly refilling his canteens, to offer what relief he could.

     It was compassion that drove Sergeant Kirkland over the wall, and it is compassion -- it is boundless love -- that leads God to reach out to us – to cross the wall – even when we have turned away time and time again.  The God revealed in Jesus is a God who longs to bridge the gap; a God who longs to come up beside us and envelop us in his care.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Bias takes a lot of different forms.  Around 1972 I asked a friend I knew from our church youth group out on a date.  Her father said she couldn’t go.  He didn’t like my long hair, or my blue jeans, or the fact that I drove a convertible.  The convertible I could have understood, but I gather it was the blue jeans that bothered him most.  A wealthy financier, he couldn’t abide what he took as a sign of the working class.  So maybe i dodged a bullet on that one.

     In college there were a couple of more encounters that stood out.  The first term of my first year I had a professor who had a policy of never giving an “A” to freshmen.  Unfortunately, his course was a requirement for my major.  One thing I knew was that I could write great papers, so I set out to show him the error of his ways.  I wrote great papers, but I never got higher than a B+.  It was a disheartening way to begin my college career.

     Two years later I had another professor in the same department.  The issue this time wasn’t my hair or blue jeans or freshman status, it was the fact that I played rugby.  He didn’t like students who were involved in sports (or maybe it was just sports like rugby or football).  When I would share a paper, the other students would love it.  The professor, however, would always make some kind of disparaging comment.  At the end of the term he had a party for the class.  He pulled me aside and told me I didn’t have to come.  I went anyway, and early on in the party he politely invited me to leave.  Me?  What did I do?

     A year later, that same professor released the SAT scores of a couple of our hockey players.  The scores were not impressive.  In the resulting scandal, the Trustees appointed a four-person team to investigate the school’s admissions practices.  Ironically (from the professor’s perspective), I was part of that investigative group.  Ultimately it led to the departure of our hockey coach and the resignation of our president.  It should have led to the resignation of that professor for releasing confidential material, as well. 

     My personal encounters with bias are about as close as you can get to being insignificant, but they were hurtful.  Forty years later I still remember them.  And they opened my eyes to the reality of bias.  In high school the most respected person in my class was black.  Every year he was elected class president.  He went to Princeton, became a Rhodes Scholar, and went on to Harvard Law where he ultimately joined the faculty. In high school I took it as a given that any intelligent person would have risen above racial bias by the early 1970’s.

     College taught me otherwise.  I heard black students complaining about the bias of some professors.  One of my favorite professors confirmed it; he had seen it firsthand.  And with that, the bubble I had been living in burst.  I realized that for all their intelligence and education, even professors were still very human and subject to the same failings as all the rest of us.

     So here's the thing: if even the most educated can fall victim, then what hope is there for the rest of us -- the politicians, policemen, financiers, bus drivers, and yes, even pastors?  What that means is that there are always going to be bad policemen, just as there are bad professors and bad pastors.  If we know that up front, then we don’t turn a blind eye and it doesn’t come as a surprise when we encounter it.  Instead, we make sure we have systems in place to address the issues when they happen (and they surely will) in a constructive and proactive way.  We deal with them.  It's part of caring for one another.

     I know what it is like to be white and to have someone take an instant dislike of me based on something as superficial as how I look or the sport I love.  I can only begin to imagine what it is like to be black or brown, and face a bias that is far more pervasive, and exponentially more threatening.  In an ideal world we wouldn’t have this issue.  But this world, of course, is far from ideal which is why it is so very important that we be intentional about creating accountability in our own lives, and in the organizations and institutions of which we are a part.  That's what loving one another looks like.  That's what being our best, together, is all about.

“Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell.  Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you” (2 Corinthians 13:11)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Rachel Neufeld (b. Zhwartz) was born on February 3, 1925 in Sevlus, a town of fourteen thousand in southwest Czechoslovakia.  Her family owned a wine business and did very well.  They lived in a large house on the main street; and her father held a prestigious position within the Jewish community there.  The Nazis arrived March 19, 1944.

     Looking back on that moment, Rachel’s sister Anna said, “There was no time to hide.  They came in with their tanks.  There was no time.  They had guns and we were taken away.  They took all the Jews in town and put us into a ghetto in the poorest part of town.  We had nothing but the clothes on our backs… Then they took us to Auschwitz.”  Rachel and Anna were separated at that point from the other members of their family.  They never saw them again.

     After three months of forced labor, each day wondering if it would be their last, the two sisters were sent to an enormous underground plant in northern Germany to work on bombs.  At that point their greatest fear was the allied bombers roaring overhead.  The earth shook with the explosions.  The bombing continued right into the spring of 1945.  Nearly half the prisoners died, but somehow the two sisters held on.

     Two days before the end of the war, the surviving prisoners were pulled from the camp and then abandoned in some woods.  There they ate leaves and grass until the British finally arrived.  Rachel and Anna ended up in a transit camp in Budapest where they spent the next four years.  They met and married their husbands in the camp, and in 1949 moved to Israel.  Ten years later they finally made it to the United States.

     Rachel and her husband had two children, and once they arrived here she worked numerous jobs – sweatshops, day care centers, kitchens and offices – with the sole goal of sending her children to college.  She succeeded.  Both her children graduated from Brooklyn College, and one of them went on to Hofstra where she earned two master’s degrees.  One became a banker, and the other an elementary school principal.

     The last time Rachel and her sister were together, they went out for a walk.  Anna says, “It was cloudy.  I like this kind of day.  But she said, ‘Oh, what a lot of lovely flowers.’ I am very cynical about flowers.  None of them are related to me.  She was angry with me. “You don’t have a sense of beauty,’ she said.  She enjoyed every leaf, every blade of grass.’”  After surviving the Holocaust, living as a displaced person and moving half way around the world, Rachel Neufeld was killed some twenty five years ago when she fell beneath the wheel of a city bus in Brooklyn.  She was seventy years old.

 

     Who has ever heard of Rachel Neufeld?  But what a life she lived.  And what amazes me is that in spite of all the suffering and loss she had endured, she could still be moved by the beauty of some flowers, still enjoy this extraordinary creation that God has given us.  We all know people who are prisoners of their past; their lives marred by bitterness and anger.  Rachel reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way.  No matter who we are, no matter what our past, we can, in fact, choose life.

“Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days…” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

The pandemic was bad enough; we passed 100,000 deaths in this country last week.  The impact on our economy has been devastating; over 40,000,000 people have lost their jobs in the last ten weeks.  And now on top of it all, issues of race have resurfaced and protests have erupted across the country.  Driving those protests has been a confluence of events that break the heart.

     On February 23, twenty-five year old Ahmaud Arbery was jogging when he was chased down, confronted and then killed by Gregory and Travis McMichael.  A video of the shooting went viral, but in the two months that followed nothing happened.  Two district attorneys recused themselves and the case appeared to stall.  It was the growing outrage and resulting referral to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that finally led to the McMichaels arrest.  What would have happened had there been no video?

     On March 13, twenty-six year old Breonna Taylor was shot to death in her bed.  Taylor was an emergency medical technician working for the University of Louisville Health.  She and her boyfriend were asleep when plainclothes narcotics officers broke in.  911 recordings of her boyfriend’s call reveal that he thought criminals had broken in.  He fired his weapon.  Breonna was shot eight times.

     On May 25, Christian Cooper was bird-watching in Central Park when he observed a dog loose in an area where leashes are required.  He asked the owner to put a leash on the dog.  She responded by calling 911.  She was white, and she took as a given the advantage that would give her over this black man who had dared disrupt her day.  As Forbes magazine put it, “There is something eerily dark about the level of ease with which Amy Cooper threw a tantrum and threatened havoc on the life of another. And there is something demonstratively devilish about the way she changed the pitch, tone and inflection of her voice while on the call with the 911 operator so as to send the message that she was literally being physically assaulted at that very moment.”

     On that same day, in distant Minneapolis, forty-six-year-old George Floyd died.  His hands were cuffed behind his back.  His head was pinned to the pavement for eight minutes and forty-six seconds by an officer whose knee was driven into Floyd’s neck.  Three other officers stood by and watched.  Tapes of the entire incident have saddened and enraged us all.

     Isolated events in a country of 328 million people, but taken together they have touched a nerve.  They’ve touched that nerve because we've realized that these aren't isolated at all, but symptoms rather of a pervasive ill that continues to plague our country.  These events have brought out into the open what life is like for a significant segment of our population.  It’s not okay, and we need to pay attention.

     A couple of hours ago I was sitting at our table and noticed the cover of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s, Leadership. Seeing Lincoln there, I found myself wondering what he would say if he was with us now.  I’m pretty sure he would say something.  More to the point for us, what would Jesus say?  I can’t imagine he would stand silently to the side.

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

Peter Marshall was a much-loved preacher of the twentieth century who went on to become Chaplain of the U.S. Senate – quite an achievement for anyone, but particularly for a man who had immigrated here from Scotland.

     While still young Marshall spent a summer working in an English village called Bamburgh, about sixteen miles southeast of the Scottish border, and on the edge of the North Sea.  Around it were wheat and barley fields, pasture and moorland where black-faced sheep roamed.  To the west stood the desolate Chalton Moor.

     One dark night, Marshall was walking back from a nearby village.  He struck out across the moors, thinking he would take a shortcut.  He knew there was an abandoned quarry close by the road, but assumed that he could avoid it.  In her book, A Man Called Peter, Catherine Marshall describes what happened next:

The night was inky black, eerie.  There was only the sound of the wind through the heather-strained moorland, the noisy clamor of wild muir fowl as his footsteps disturbed them, the occasional far-off bleating of a sheep. Suddenly he heard someone call, “Peter!...” There was great urgency in the voice.  He stopped. “Yes, who is it?  What do you want?”

For a second he listened, but there was no response, only the sound of the wind.  The moor seemed completely deserted.  Thinking he must have been mistaken, he walked on a few paces.  Then he heard it again, even more urgently: “Peter!”

He stopped dead still, trying to peer into that impenetrable darkness, but suddenly stumbled and fell to his knees.  Putting out his hand to catch himself, he found nothing there.  As he cautiously investigated, feeling around in a semicircle, he found himself to be on the very brink of an abandoned quarry.  Just one step more would have sent him plummeting into space to certain death.

     This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, and the outpouring of God’s Spirit.  The Spirit is Christ’s promised presence; Christ’s power and guidance, comfort and strength at work in our lives and in this world.  An experience like Peter Marshall’s reminds us how near and real the Spirit is.  Most of us will never have that kind of encounter, but that doesn’t mean the Spirit isn’t at work in our lives, too.

     More often than not, the Spirit’s presence is felt in the little things: a sudden urge to give someone a call, a sense of God’s nearness during a moment of prayer, or that moment when all the pieces seem to come together just when we need it most.  The Spirit isn’t given just to some, but to all who profess Jesus.  In fact, faith itself (as Jesus made clear, Matthew 16:17) is a sign of the Spirit’s presence at work within. 

     I love Pentecost.  I love the assurance it offers that God’s Spirit is moving even now.  And I know, finally, how dependent I am upon that Spirit for everything that is best and good in my life and in my ministry.  This Pentecost, claim the promise of God’s Spirit at work in your life, too.

“By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control... If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-25)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

* WARNING STAR WARS SPOILER ALERT* lol

The Iveragh Peninsula on the southwest coast of Ireland, offers breathtaking scenery along with the highest peak in Ireland.  The “Ring of Kerry” is a winding, coastal road that takes you in a great circle around the peninsula.  When we drove the Ring several years ago, one of the highlights for us was standing on a high cliff looking out across the ocean towards the Skellig Islands.

     The Skellig Islands were made famous here in the United States when one of them, Skellig Michael, showed up in a couple of Star Wars movies.  It served as the hermitage of Luke Skywalker who found his way there to live in exile after his Jedi students were killed by Kylo Ren and his Knights.  In the movie the island was called Ahch-To, and it was not only the birthplace of the Jedi Order, but also held the ancient Jedi texts.

     Well, that might be more Star Wars history than you wanted.  But Skellig Michael was a striking choice for Ahch-To both for its geography and its history.  In fact, it was its geography – essentially a twin-pinnacled crag rising out of the sea – that led to its history.  “Skellig” is from the Irish “sceilig” which means a splinter of stone.  And that’s what Skellig Michael looks like from a distance; steep-sided and narrow.

 

Skellig_Michael By Jerzy Strzelecki  CC BY-SA 3.0

     The island consists of about 54 acres.  It is a mile around, and climbs to 714’ above sea level.  A monastery was founded there in the sixth century.  The monks’ beehive stone dwellings are still in remarkably good condition, and were featured prominently in the movie.  Situated high above the ocean, those dwellings can still be accessed by a steep flight of stone steps that rise up from three different landing points along the shore.

     In his tour guide, Rick Steves calls Skellig Michael “the Holy Grail” of Irish monastic island settlements.  He quotes the great Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw who called it “the most fantastic and impossible rock in the world.”  Monks lived on that impossible rock for more than 500 years.  Viking Olav Trygvasson, was baptized there, and would later go on to bring Christianity to Norway and become its king.

     But why would monks choose such a desolate place to begin with?  Their life would have been harsh and simple; collecting rainwater in cisterns and living off the fish and birds around the island.  Certainly, the isolation was at least part of the reason.  One strain within the monastic tradition has long been separation from the world in an effort to grow closer to God.  But another, more practical reason, may have been the natural defenses which the island offered.  Before Brian Boru finally defeated the Vikings in the Battle of Cloontarf in 1014, Viking raids wreaked havoc throughout Ireland for nearly two hundred years.  The steep sides and narrow steps of Skellig Michael forced those approaching the monastery to come in single file, and gave the monks above an enormous advantage.

 

     When we look at that island and consider what those monks endured year after year in their pursuit of God, it puts any sacrifices we might make in perspective.  God was everything to them.  He was that pearl of infinite value, more than worth whatever price they had to pay.  Not everyone, of course, is called to the monastic life, but their loving devotion does raise the question, “What is the Kingdom of God worth to me?  What price would I be willing to pay in the pursuit of God?”

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

     Seven years ago a movie called "42" was released.  It was about Jackie Robinson and his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  "42" was a reference to the number he wore for his entire career.  He made it famous not only by the quality of his play, but also for his integration of professional baseball.

     Part of the power of the movie lay in the glimpse it offered of what Robinson endured as baseball's first black player. It took extraordinary character for him to accomplish what he did.  In one scene future Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese approaches owner Branch Rickey.  He is one of the most popular players in all of baseball, and he has just gotten a disturbing letter.  He doesn’t know what to make of it.  Rickey walks over to a filing cabinet and pulls out a massive file.  It contains all the hate mail and threats that Robinson has received.  It puts Reese's letter into perspective, and he is clearly moved.

     We move to Crossly Field in Cincinnati.  It is May 13, 1947, and this is the first game of just the second road series of Robinson’s inaugural season.  Robinson is being harassed and booed.  The camera moves in to focus on a father and son in the stands.  The son talks about his hero, Pee Wee Reese, and then watches as his father begins to boo and curse Jackie Robinson.  The boy hesitates for a moment, and then joins in.   He wants to be like Dad.

     The camera shifts to the field.  Pee Wee Reese is watching as the abuse is poured down on his team-mate.  From his position at shortstop he walks across the diamond to first base where Robinson is standing.  There, in front of the entire stadium, he places his arm around Robinson’s shoulder and begins to chat him up.  Through that single gesture, Reese has made a statement to all the world: “I’m with him.”  The crowd is silenced.  It is my favorite scene of the entire movie.

http://brooklyncyclones.com/mcupark_mega/visit/statue/

     Did it actually happen?  Two different credible sources said they saw it firsthand.  The first was Lester Rodney, a reporter for the Daily Worker.  The second was Rex Barney, a Dodgers’ pitcher who recalled the moment nearly forty years later in an oral history of the team. 

     There are a couple of issues with those eyewitness reports, however.  Rodney didn’t actually write about the incident until years later, and Barney said he saw it happen while he was warming up to pitch in the first inning.  The problem there is that Barney wasn’t a starting pitcher until the following year.  Records show that in 1947 he didn’t come into the Cincinnati game until the seventh inning.

     IN an interview in 1952, Robinson himself described the event as occurring in Boston in 1948. He said the same thing in his book which came out eight years later.  Robinson's account is actually more consistent with Barney’s own, because on Aug. 14, 1948, Barney started a game in Boston – the same year and same place that Robinson himself said it happened.
    
     Chances are that Reese’s famous gesture came a year later and in a different city, but it certainly happened and it still would have carried great meaning: racism didn’t magically disappear after Robinson’s first season.  Today there is a statue of the moment outside the Cyclones home field in Brooklyn.  At its dedication in 2005 Robinson’s widow said, “It's a historic symbol of a wonderful legacy of friendship, of teamwork, of courage -- of a lot of things we hope we will be able to pass on to young people. And we hope they will be motivated by it, be inspired by it and think about what it would be like to stand up, dare to challenge the status quo and find a friend there who will come over and support you."

In the incarnation, God comes over and puts his arm around us.  In baptism, God places his sign upon us and declares to all creation, “I’m with them.”

“We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us-- and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16)

ZOOM SCAVENGER HUNT!

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

     William Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759, the only son of a wealthy merchant in Yorkshire, England.  He didn't have an easy childhood.  He was small, and prone to sickness.  He lost his father when he was nine, and was sent off to live with an aunt and uncle in London.  He came to adore his aunt and uncle, but his mother and grandfather brought him back three years later when he began to show interest in evangelical (or "nonconformist") Christianity as a result of his aunt's influence.

     By the time he entered Cambridge, Wilberforce was already independently wealthy -- the result of the loss of both his grandfather and uncle.  With no need to make a living Wilberforce proved an indifferent student, but he had a very active social life and made quite a few friends.  One of them, a future Prime Minister, was William Pitt, and it was Pitt who convinced him to enter into politics.  In what we would call his senior year, Wilberforce ran for and was elected to the House.

     Wilberforce proved to be a gifted speaker.  James Boswell, the famous biographer, would later say of his eloquence, "I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale."  Those gifts would prove crucial in the great task that lay before him.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

     The turning point in Wilberforce’s life came over the course of some fourteen or fifteen months between 1884 and 1885.  It began when he invited a brilliant Cambridge professor, Isaac Milner, to join him and some members of his family on a tour of Europe.  To his surprise, Milner proved to be a devout Christian.  Their conversations, along with Wilberforce's exploration of the New Testament and works by Philip Doddridge and Blaise Pascal, finally resulted in (as Wilberforce put it)  “a settled conviction in my mind… of the truth of Christianity.”  This was no sudden conversion.  This was a deep, exhaustive study that resulted in what Wilberforce would come to call the “Great Change”.  Years later he wrote to a friend:

It is scarce too strong to say, that I seem to myself to have awakened about nine or ten years ago from a dream, to have recovered, as it were, the use of my reason after a delirium.  In fact till then I wanted first principles; those principles at least which alone deserve the character of wisdom, or bear the impress of truth.

Emulation, and a desire of distinction, were my governing motives; and ardent after the applause of my fellow-creatures, I quite forgot that I was an accountable being; that I was hereafter to appear at the bar of God; that if Christianity were not a fable, it was infinitely important to study its precepts, and when known to obey them; that there was at least such a probably of its not being a fable, as to render it in the highest degree incumbent on me to examine into its authenticity diligently, anxiously, and without prejudice…

I am not now what I ought to be; yet I trust… through the help of that gracious Being who has promised to assist our weak endeavors, to become more worthy of the name of Christian.

     Two years after the “Great Change,” Wilberforce became the driving force in Parliament for the abolition of slavery.  This wasn’t about popularity.  This was about being faithful, and using his position to serve God.  Over the next two decades, undaunted by repeated setbacks, Wilberforce fought the good fight.  In 1807, with tears streaming down his face, he saw Parliament take its first major step by abolishing the slave trade.  Twenty six years later, and some forty-six years after Wilberforce had first agreed to lead the charge, Parliament finally abolished slavery altogether.

     Christianity, as Wilberforce discovered, has a way of being "self-authenticating" -- that is, if you take it seriously and put its precepts into practice, experience bears out its truth.  The issue isn't that people try it and then find it wanting.  The issue, rather, is that what they try isn't really Christianity at all, but rather some sociably acceptable, watered-down version that has been drained of all its power.

"I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."   (John 6:35)

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

One of the great heroes of the Second World War was a young man who never fired a shot.  Born February 7, 1919, Desmond Doss grew up in Lynchburg, VA.  He left school in the eighth grade to help support his family during the Great Depression, and then went on become a joiner at the Naval Shipyard in Newport News, VA.  When the United States entered the war, he could have requested a military deferment because his work was deemed essential, but he didn’t.  Instead, he enlisted, only he enlisted as a conscientious objector.

     Doss’ whole life was shaped by his faith.  Yes, he felt called to serve his country, but his commitment to God came first.  What that meant in practice was that while he wanted to support our country, he wasn’t willing to carry a weapon in order to do so.  He took to heart God’s command, “Thou shalt not kill.”  He thought he could serve both God and country by being a medic.  Not surprisingly, his refusal to carry a weapon did not sit well with his fellow soldiers. 

     The men in his company saw him as a liability.  They treated him with contempt, and one even threatened, "Doss, as soon as we get into combat, I'll make sure you won't come back alive." The officers weren’t any different.  They tried to intimidate and break him, at one point declaring him mentally unfit for military service.  They even tried to court martial him.  But Doss persevered.

     Then came combat, first in Guam and then on Leyte.  There his unit found the man they had labeled a coward risking his life again and again to save their own.  Doss was awarded two bronze stars for exceptional valor during those two battles, both of them with the “V” which meant “earned in combat”.

     In his book, Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley gives us a glimpse of what medics routinely did as he describes a moment in his father’s life (also a medic) during the Battle of Iwo Jima:

His telltale “Unit 3” bag slapping at his side, my father sprinted through thirty yards of saturating cross fire – mortars and machine guns – to the wounded boy’s side. As bullets whined and pinged around him, Doc found the Marine losing blood at a life-threatening rate… He tied a plasma bag to the kid’s rifle and jammed it bayonet-first into the ground.  He moved his own body between the boy and the sheets of gunfire.  Then, his upper body still erect and fully exposed, he administered first aid… then [after signaling the rest of the unit to stay where they were] my father stood up into the merciless firestorm and pulled the wounded Marine back across the thirty yards to safety by himself.  His attention did not flicker until the Marine was safely evacuated.

     After Guam and Leyte, Doss' 77th Division was sent to Okinawa.  It was there that his actions would lead to the Medal of Honor, our nation's highest military award.  The citation is extraordinary.  At point during the battle, his unit pulled back under heavy fire.  Doss however, stayed behind and one by one saved 75 men who had been wounded.  He dragged each one to the edge of a cliff and then lowered them on a rope-supported litter.  Another day he exposed himself to rifle and mortar fire, rescuing a wounded man 200 yards in front of their lines.  Two days later he crept through a shower of grenades to within eight yard of enemy forces in order to treat four men who had been cut down.  The day after that he saved two more men, each time under constant fire.  Then Doss himself was finally hit.  He was hit first by a grenade, then later by a sniper’s bullet that shattered his arm.  He was evacuated, and the war, for him, was finally over.

     Desmond Doss lived his faith.  He served God, served our country and served those around him with faith, compassion, integrity and love.  He embodied the best of who we are, and what we strive to be.  On this Memorial Day, may we remember and give thanks for so many who have given so much over the course of our nation’s history.  We owe them more than we could ever hope to repay.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:12-13)

Happy Memorial Day!

Happy Memorial from FCPC! David Billings has recorded a concert of patriotic organ music for the Memorial Day holiday! You can watch it on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/foxchapelpresby

Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

I will always remember my first computer. It was 1984, and after months of research and visits to local stores, I bought a “Kaypro.” It was state of the art – a true portable weighing just 29 pounds.  It featured a 9” screen (a text-only, green-on-black display) set in an aluminum case with two 51/4-inch double density, single-sided floppy drives.  Best of all, it boasted an astounding 64 KB of RAM (today’s computers, by comparison, might offer a paltry 8 GB – about 8 million times greater).  The keyboard snapped onto the face of the computer creating a tidy box that could be easily carried as long as you had been keeping up with your workouts at the gym.

     The operating system was CPM (which ultimately lost out to MS-DOS for any computer not named Apple), and the computer came bundled with various software.  The software wasn’t in the computer.  It was on one or two of the floppies.  You would insert the floppy into the drive when you wanted to use it.  This was cutting-edge stuff.

 

     What I remember most was the first time I used my new computer to write a sermon.  Up until then I would hand-write my first draft, hand-write a second draft, and then type the third.  Occasionally I might end up typing a fourth, but most of the time any changes at that point would simply be penciled in.  Over-all, the process was pretty labor-intensive. 

     With my new computer I didn’t have to create new drafts.  I could start with one and make all my changes right there.  I could even shift whole paragraphs with just a few commands.  This was amazing!  I ended up with a better sermon, and saved hours in the process. 

     So what did I do with all that extra time?  Here’s the thing: I didn’t use those extra hours to spend more time with my family.  I used them to accomplish more work.  What this new computer ultimately ended up doing was to actually increase my anticipated work-load each week.  Hmmm.

     In his delightful book, A Geography of Time, social psychologist Robert Levine talks about this unexpected consequence:

It is one of the great ironies of modern times that, with all of our time-saving creations, people have less time to themselves than ever before… It has often been the very creations intended to save time that have been most responsible for increasing the workload.  Recent research indicates that farm wives in the 1920’s who were without electricity, spend significantly less time at housework than did suburban women, with all their modern machinery, in the latter half of the century.  One reason for this is that almost every technical advance seems to be accompanied by a rise in expectations.

     Consider the impact of the internet.  If you were a lawyer and received a letter from your client, the client understood that she or he might not hear back from you for a week or two.  Today that same client sends an e-mail and generally expects a response by the end of the day.  And speaking of the end of the day, whatever happened to going home and being done?  Today, we go home but we are still accessible by both e-mail and cell-phone.  For most of us, real “off-time” has become a thing of the past, and the pace of our lives has become more intense than ever.

     The Hebrew the word “shabath” means “cease, desist, rest.”  It is the root of the noun “Sabbath.”  The call to honor the Sabbath goes all the way back to the second chapter of Genesis.  It is one or the earliest and most important commands in all of Scripture.  We all need time to rest; a time when we cease from work.  With the pace of our lives growing ever more intense, finding a way to carve out that rest each day, each week, and each year has become more important than ever.  It is essential if we are going to thrive.  But here's the thing: it doesn’t just happen.  Today, more than ever, we need to be intentional if rest is going to be an integral part of the very rhythm of our lives.

 “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.  So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it…” (Genesis 2:2-3)

Image by info254 from Pixabay