Interesting...

On Monday they mentioned on the news that Minnesota had the lowest gas prices in the country. On Tuesday prices went up 17 cents. Coincidence? Maybe... But I do find it interesting.

Maybe that's why I find gas prices to be a lot like my weight. They both jump up quite easily, but both are also slow to come back down.

Cover Up

A read a helpful devotion today from "The Upper Room" about sin and cover up. The author makes the comparison to buying a new place and wanting to paint over the dirt and problems, however past experience has taught that it needs to be cleaned first. How often do we do that in our spiritual life? How often do we try and just cover up our sin, our problems, with a smile or new clothes or something to make it appear like everything is just fine? Easy targets with this kind of thing are the lottery winners or sports stars who have gone broke. They tried to cover up the dirt of their life with money, but eventually those problems reared their ugly heads again. Until we clean things up there is no amount of paint that can make the dirt go away. Maybe it's time to for us to return to the confessional.

What Are We Going to Do?

Last night we watched "An Inconvenient Truth" and it got me to thinking...
...What are we going to do to make changes at home?
...What can we do as a congregation?
...Is it really that bad?
...Can we change these trends?
...Why haven't we started doing some things sooner?

It was good. It got me to thinking. Oh, sure, there were some arguments that I questioned. I thought some of it was just scare tactics and a bit over the top. However, I got me to thinking and I believe that's a good thing. I think I need to do more. I think we all need to do more. I think we all need to think more.

Spiritual Growth

One of our 9th graders was writing about Mike Yaconelli's book, "Messy Spirituality" when she gave a beautiful definition of spiritual growth that I would like to share with you.

"Spiritual growth is an untamed search for God in the scrambled jungle of our souls."

Awesome!
Beautiful!
Thank You!

Another Perspective

I realize this is perhaps a bit dated, but it came through my e-mail today and I appreciated some of the views shared. What do you think?

==============

Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step Down

Pair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus Incident

By JASON WHITLOCK

AOL Sports Commentary

I’m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down.

Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.

We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That’s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.

We’ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.

Why?

If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.

Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won.

Have we at the level we should have? No.

Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.

Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.

Imus’ words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.

You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?

We’re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.

Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James.

Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she’s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer’s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you’d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all.

Maybe that’s the real crime. Imus’ ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker’s and Summitt’s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton’s, Stringer’s and Jackson’s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey?

None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good.

We can’t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s” is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.

We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton’s radio show and apologized. Imus didn’t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president’s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness.

Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.

Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.

Let it go and let God.

We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.

A man who doesn’t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him.

We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women bitches and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.

If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn’t act like it’s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That’s a (freaking) shame.

We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we’ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they’re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace.

It’s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They’ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.

Worry

We worry a lot in life, don't we? We worry about whether things will look good enough, taste good enough, be good enough. Watching them continue to report on Virginia Tech I heard a lot of worry behind the reports. I know I'm guilty. I worry about doing enough. I worry about my sermons being good enough or about misspeaking while leading worship. I worry that I may have done something wrong while coaching track. I worry that people won't like me. I worry all the time. Now, I'll admit, I've gotten pretty good at covering it and giving the impression that I have few worries in this world. The truth of the matter is I worry all the time, like most people I think.

The devotion today in Our Daily Bread was about worry. The author spoke of a person who initiated a game with some teenagers where whenever they worried they would use the 23rd Psalm and say, "The Lord is my Shepherd and I'm worried to death." The point being that when you have perspective you see how silly your worries are, they seem almost silly. If the Lord is my Shepherd, why do I have to worry? Jesus talked about it a different way in Matthew when he talked about if the lilies of the field and the sparrows are taken care of by God, how much more will God look after you? Maybe all of us could use a brief timeout to get a little perspective on the big picture.

God is in control. What a relief it is.

Tragedy

This morning as I was getting ready for the day I was watching the Today Show, as I normally do, and it was nonstop coverage of the tragic shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday. It is absolutely terrible what happened yesterday with the shooting. My heart grieves with the families and friends who lost a loved one yesterday.

With that being said, I also found myself so very frustrated with the coverage of the event. Is there no other news happening in the world? What percentage of the coverage was sheer speculation? I can't begin to tell you how often I heard phrases like, "We think" or "We believe"... in my mind that is not news, that is guess work. I was frustrated with the questioning of the school administration and their handling of the incident. They make it sound as if the administration was working in conjunction with the shooter. What if they sent out an e-mail to the student body at 7:30 a.m. and all of the students were milling around outside and the shooter decided to open and fire on the campus square where it would have been more difficult to confine? Would they have praised the administration for the timeliness of their e-mail or would they have questioned their recklessness in sending it too quickly? I don't get it. What ever happened to assuming the best? What if we took the slant that the administration was doing the best they could with the information that they had and they were trying fallible, human best to do what they believed was in the best interest of the entire community?

Can you tell I'm worked up yet? Anyway, what finally got me was realizing that the hyped way in which the media (I use that generally because I tried flipping through channels and they were all covering the story in similar fashion) was covering this story was simply instilling fear. Underlying, perhaps unspoken, was this notion that you better be on the watch because the next gunman is probably going to open fire right next you at any moment now. Fear is no way to live our lives. We talked about it on Sunday when I preached on the story of Thomas in the gospel of John. Once again we have a very real example of the world telling us to live in fear, but Christ comes and tells us to live in peace giving us gifts of repentance and forgiveness. We sure could use that right about now, don't you think?

Wisdom

I was reading the devotion from Our Daily Bread (ODB) today and it was based on Proverbs 16:16, that reminds us that wisdom is better than gold. The author talked about how when we go shopping we are always looking to get the best: the best car, the best house, the best blouse, etc. So according to Proverbs here if given the choice between wisdom or gold (money) then go with wisdom.

I don't know, it was a good reminder I suppose, and I liked how the author went about getting to his point. However, I just don't know how fond I am of Proverbs. Yes, I think there is some good stuff in there. I'm just afraid that in our soundbite world that we want to reduce our faith down to a set of proverbs, a series of pithy little phrases of wisdom. Is that really all the more we need? Is it really that easy?

Go ahead, seek wisdom I'm all for it... but also seek Jesus and all of the wonderful complications that are a part of living a life of faith.

Resurrection?

I don't want to compare myself to Jesus really, but I've been thinking it's about time to resurrect this BLOG. I hadn't been seeing any comments so I felt like nobody was reading, so was it worth the effort? Then life caught up to me and that just sort of answered that question.

Well, some time has passed (much more than 3 days), and I'm starting to feel like there's a different answer. I am re-energized. I have heard of people that actually read from time to time. Most importantly I get the sense that it's good for me, healthy for me, to be writing on a regular basis. So look for more to come on a more regular basis once again.

thanks!

No Exit

Peter Larson wrote: “Despite our efforts to keep Him out, God intrudes. The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin’s womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked ‘No Entrance’ and left through a door marked ‘No Exit.’”

stress

Some thoughts from famous people -- and some people you've never heard of . . .

"Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it. "

~ Jane Wagner

"Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important."

~ Natalie Goldberg, O Magazine

"To be sure, our mental processes often go wrong, so that we imagine God to have gone away. What should be done then? Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. Learn to behave thus even in deepest distress and keep yourself that way in any and every estate of life. I can give you no better advice than to find God where you lost him."

~ Meister Eckhart

Accidie?

Have you ever heard of the spiritual disease which people in medieval times called accidie? It is something that threatens all Christian workers after the first flush of enthusiasm has worn off. It's a form of sloth but not at the physical level. It is apathy of the soul. It shows in a certain toughness of mind and wariness of spirit which often results from hurt and disillusionment.

People with accidie in this sense have grown cynical about ideals, enthusiasms, and strong hopes. They look pityingly at young people and say, "They'll learn," taking it for granted that when they've learned, they'll become tough inside too. Once upon a time these leather-souled people were keen, hopeful, and expectant. But nothing happened, or they got hurt, and now they protect themselves against pain by adopting cynical, world-weary attitudes.

[Often this gets reflected by Christian people who begin to think of the church] mechanically, merely going through the motions because their light has really gone out and they're no longer expecting anything exciting to happen. They feel that they know from experience that exciting things don't happen, and that's an end of it. So they merely plod on, expecting nothing and receiving nothing.

But the Lord does not send us out on his work in order that nothing may happen. His word is intended to have impact; it's sent out to accomplish something. We ought never to settle for a non-expectant, defeated attitude. Rather we should be asking and expecting great things from God.

--James Packer, Your Father Loves You, Harold Shaw Publishers, 1986, p. 10.

Song Lyrics

As I was driving home from Owatonna the following lyrics by Audio Adrenaline struck me:

I don't need theology
to know that God's been good to me
He's given me a family
and a place to lay my head
Flung into the great unknown
I was walking on my own
now I'll never walk alone
if I did I would be dead
I can't use it all myself
so I take it off the shelf
here it is, enjoy yourself
put away your drudgery,
use it up, there's always more
that's what it's intended for
be the Lord's ambassador
to be the planets remedy

That first line, especially hit me.  I don't need theology
to know that God's been good to me.  How true!  I think we
can realize it thanks to our own experiences of God in our
life.

Reformation vs. Halloween

Do you know what day it is today? That's right! It's Reformation!... oh, you thought it was Halloween. Does anyone else find it a little sad that Halloween has become the second biggest money maker for stores? Begging for Candy, smashing pumpkins, dressing up like demons... remind me again what exactly is spiritually redeeming about the day?

Just think, instead we could be celebrating the Reformation. Do you remember that historical act by Martin Luther that was largely about helping us understand that we are spiritually free? We could be celebrating that though we are slaves to sin we are set free by the blood of Jesus! Now that seems like something to celebrate. Tomorrow is All Saints day, where we celebrate all of the saints that have gone before us, and continue to encourage us in our faith (Hebrews 12:1). Now those seem a bit more redeeming and worthy of celebrating... maybe it's just me. I'll let you think about it. Meanwhile, I need to get home so I can hand out candy. (Dentist's brace yourself)

Blind Pastor

I got the following e-mail today. I thought it fit nicely with the sermon we heard from Pastor Dave yesterday...

Pastor Steven E. Albertin told the following story. He wrote: in my church secretary's office there hangs a modernistic picture composed of a maze of colors and shapes. I realized these sophisticated, modern, and abstract pictures were supposed to contain some profound artistic or philosophical message, but I never was able to figure it out. It just looked like a jumbled mass of confusion. If there was a message there, I was blind to it.

One day while I was standing in the office, waiting for the copier to warm up, one of the congregation's kindergarten-age boys, Adam, stood beside me and said, "Do you see what I see?"

"Do you see something in that picture? I sure don't." Adam looked at me with glee in his eye, "Pastor, can't you see him? It's Jesus hanging on the cross." I stared as hard as I could, until my eyes actually hurt from staring. I wanted to believe Adam and that there actually was the image of Jesus hanging on the cross hidden somewhere in that mass of color and shapes, but I couldn't see Jesus anywhere. "Adam, I'm sorry but I must be blind. You will have to help me see."

Directing his finger to a mass of color in the center of the picture, Adam said, "There, Pastor. Do you see what I see? There is Jesus, his face, his arms outstretched on the cross." And then, like an epiphany, the image began to appear. Yes, there hidden somehow "behind" the colors and the shapes was the barely visible image of Jesus, hanging with arms outstretched on the cross. "It's amazing, Adam. You have helped one blind pastor to see Jesus. Yes, I can see what you see, Adam."

--Steven E. Albertin, Against the Grain, CSS Publishing

Thanks to all of you that help the blind pastors see Jesus!

Love?

I was reading this morning from "My Utmost For His Highest" and Oswald Chambers starts out talking about love saying:

If what we call love doesn't take us beyond ourselves, it is not really love. If we have the idea that love is characterized as cautious, wise, sensible, shrewd, and never taken to extremes, we have missed the true meaning.

He goes on to challenge our love a little bit further asking:

Have you ever been driven to do something for God not because you felt that it was useful or your duty to do so, or that there was anything in it for you, but simply because you love Him? Have you ever realized that you can give things to God that are of value to Him?

What an amazing thought, that little ol' me might be of value to God. If you ask me, that is a rather profound notion. Yet, incredibly, it is absolutely true. Now, I think that's pretty cool. Chambers then takes this notion of love and moves it to surrender, suggesting that it is when we surrender to God that we become of tremendous value to Him.

We should quit asking ourselves, "Am I of any use?" and accept the truth that we really are not of much use to Him. The issue is never of being of use, but of being of value to God Himself. Once we are totally surrendered to God, He will work through us all the time.

Hurry Sickness

Today's devotion in "Our Daily Bread" talks about what some people call "hurry sickness" where our stress levels rise because we find ourselves sucked into the fast line of life demanding quick arrivals and instant results.

It becomes even more problematic we demand this of our spiritual lives. The author makes the comparison to an apple that is not quite ripe. It's not that it's a bad apple, it's just that God isn't done making it yet. It is good. It is where it's supposed to be in it's life. The same is true of us in our spiritual lives. It takes a lifetime to really grow in our faith lives.

This struck me as well from as a pastor. There are times I look out at our congregation and I see the amazing potential for God to work through all of us, yet we seeming fall short of that potential regularly. (I have tremendous dreams for the ministry this congregation can, and will, do.) What I needed to be reminded of today was that we are just where we need to be as a spiritual whole. It will take time for us to grow into the entirety of the ministry to which God has called us.

Jeremiah 31:31-34

God's covenant demands exclusivity, much like the most intimate of human relationships - marriage. When persons marry, they promise to forsake all others: the lover declares publicly his/her choosing the beloved, exclusively.

God chose Israel; but Israel broke God's covenant by pursuing other gods. God exposes Israel's infidelity when using the lamenting yet accusatory words: "though I was their husband."

We too court other gods. In the face of our unfaithfulness to the covenant, God maintains faithfulness, forgiving our sins through the new covenant, through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

God chooses to be known to all people - from the least to the greatest - by forgiving our iniquity and remembering our sin no more. Thanks be to God!

Gracious and faithful God, we confess to you our misdirected affections. Grant us forgiveness and newness, through your Son Jesus. Amen.

Eugene R. Zeller
Peace Lutheran Church, Loveland, Colo.
Master of Divinity , 1997

What Can Be Done?

Too often, we can be overwhelmed like the disciples - we look at our small selves and think how little we have to offer, how little we can do. How can we possibly make changes in the world when we are so small, when we have so little to work with? What can we do? We respond, like the disciples, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish!" But in doing so, we shortchange ourselves and God, rejecting, by our inaction, the gifts which God gives to us.

If we say there is nothing we can do, then we are in fact saying that God has not given us enough, or good enough. Jesus shows us that we just need to use what we have, put some heart and faith behind it, and watch miracles take place. We ask, "What good will our little bit do?" But Jesus' answer is always the same - to the one cup of cold water offered to a child, to the one widow's mite, to the five loaves of bread. The answer Jesus gives is, "Let's see what good we can do here."

~Anonymous

Whatcha Gonna Do?

Last night I was in Owatonna to hear Tony Campolo speak. It really was an inspirational night, filled with plenty of challenges. My favorite went something like this:

"Let me give you a Lutheran word. Grace. Yes, absolutely, we are saved by Grace through faith... So whatcha gonna do about it?"

Campolo then went on to tell a story about riding the subway in England. While on the subway a man started having an epileptic seizure. His buddy put a newspaper in his mouth and folded his jacket to lay under his head. When the seizure stopped the buddy apologized and explained a little further. You gotta understand, the man said, we were in Vietnam together. Then he explained the horrific story how the two of them were shot, their rescue helicopter was destroyed, and they were left for dead. He explained, how despite unbelievable pain the man who now had the seizure had pulled the two of them out of the jungle. They were so bad off that twice they ran into VietCong and twice they left them alone because they were so bad off. A couple of years ago the man who had pulled the two of them out started having these seizures and he needed somebody to be with him because he never knew when they would happen. So this gentleman sold nearly everything he owned in New York and moved to England to be with his buddy. "What you don't understand," the man concluded, "is that after what he did for me there is nothing I wouldn't do for him."

We through it around so much it almost becomes a brush off statement, that Jesus died for you. Yet it is true. It is powerful. It is incredible. Jesus paid the price for your sins. Jesus turned the whole world on its head. Jesus died so that we might all be saved... by grace.

Now, whatcha gonna do about it?