Well Treated Slaves

Michelle Obama spoke earlier this week at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.  The speech has been widely praised and if you haven't seen it, it is worth the watch.  One particular line in the speech has gotten me thinking.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. 

This line has made me think about how different American History is for some people.  When I see portraits of the founding fathers, they look similar to me.  I see images of minute men and I can picture myself there.  I imagine that if you are African American, that isn't the same.  When I see the painting of the constitutional convention, I see the founding fathers setting a new nation on its course.  It is easy for me to forget that this group also decided that blacks would only count as 3/5 of a person.

So this is one of the many times in the last few years that I have had the realization, that as a white, middle-class man, I have really no idea what it is like to be black in this country.

One of the responses to the speech was from a pundit who pointed out that the particular slaves that worked on the White House were well fed and had decent housing.  This of course released a fire storm of response.  As if the good treatment of the slaves made it all right.   Now in all fairness to the pundit, I really doubt that his intent was to justify slavery, it was just the way it came out.  But if your job is giving your opinion for a living, you should be more careful about the way you speak.

Of course, a well treated slave is still a slave,  We all know that there is more to life than food and a place to sleep.  It is a little (but only a little) like when we say that criminals like being in jail because they get "three hots and a cot".  Freedom is freedom and bondage is bondage.  While having basic needs met is better than not, it is no substitute for actual self determination.

The message of the gospel is ultimately about freedom from slavery.  But not the slavery and discrimination of American History.  This slavery is internal and afflicts each of us, no matter our race or nationality.  This is the slavery of our souls to the bondage of sin.  

We are each part of the world and as a result, we are not immune to its influences.  To a certain extent the things that we own, own us.  Our social standing, our pride, our wealth, can all be links in the chain that binds us to this world and separates us from God.  These things are enticing and each comes with its own reward.  The things of this world can treat us well, but a well treated slave is still a slave.

These metaphorical chains do not compare to the physical chains that were worn by African Americans.  Those chains were imposed on them by outside powers that they could not resist.  Our modern chains we largely put on ourselves.  And one more thing, we can also remove them any time we want to.

The message of gospel is that freedom, true freedom of the soul is available to everyone at any time, and all we have to do is ask.  

Watch this video from Pastor Chris.

The message of the gospel is that by surrendering to God our bondage to the ways of this world can be broken and each of us can know the sense of true freedom.

The Grand Opening

One thing about living in a small town, any thing new is big news.  And that is doubly true when the new thing is a new business opening up.  When a new business opens there is that period of time when it seems to be the topic on everyone's lips.  For example, a new store just opened up in town.  There was the time when we saw construction and wondered what it was all about.  Then rumors start flying about what it might actually be.  Then the discussions of the impact of this new business on the community, how many will it employ and whose business will it cut into.

And I know that these same conversations happen in the city, but not about EVERY business that opens.  In a small town it is a bit different.  That one new business represents a significant increase in the total number of businesses in the area.  Or think about it like this, you are going out to eat and there is literally ONE restaurant in a 20 mile radius where you have never eaten.  It grabs your attention.

And then there is the Grand Opening.  People show up to check it out and the reviews start pouring in. Well, maybe not pouring, more of a drizzle that slowly soaks the community.   Bur the word definitely gets out, and then the real work begins.

Lately I have been thinking about the entrepreneurs that open these new businesses.  They invest  a lot of them selves financially, professionally and personally on a particular enterprise.  The Grand Opening is both a culmination of all that went into its creation and also a beginning of this future endeavor.  After the ribbon is cut, there is still much to do.  They have a significant investment in this business, but also there are now employees and parts of the community that depend on them, so there is also a great responsibility that they have assumed.

Some places may have another Grand Opening after a major change, a Grand Re-Opening.  They have remodeled of made major changes to the menu or there is new management or a new product line.  The re-Opening is like a fresh start.  It says that we are different now, so check us out.  

As a teacher, the beginning of each school year feels like a Grand Re-Opening.  We get a fresh start.  Everything is set up and ready to go.  There is great anticipation and a sense of responsibility to make the most out of the year to come.

As Christians God created a Grand Re-Opening in our lives.  There was a time when we allowed God in to do a major remodel and then we received a fresh start "Under New Management."  And for many of us, this happens more than once.  As Christians, we go through seasons and each one can begin with another fresh start or re-opening just like the start of a school year.

And just like the opening of a business the blessing comes with responsibility.  We have been given a fresh start so we are responsible to let others see how that fresh start affects our lives.  As we have experienced the love of God, we need to let the world around us see it in our lives.

In the video today, Pastor Chris talks about the blessings and responsibility of the Israelite in the Holy Land.

As Christians we have been given the great blessing of a fresh start.  It is our responsiblity to then make the most of it.

The Unqualified

Over my years as a school teacher, there have been a few times that I have been part of a committee charged with hiring a new teacher.  So there is a process.  The position is posted internally and in the papers and through the various state universities.  Once resumes come in, the committee reviews them and decides on a small number to interview.  And usually from that group the new teacher is chosen.

One part of the process that I find remarkable is the number of people who are not qualified for the position but decide to apply anyway.  In that stack of resumes there will inevitably be several who do not meet the basic requirements for the job that were laid out in the posting.  Some are not certified teachers.  Some are certified teachers in other subjects.  Some were certified teachers at one time, but since have let that expire.  We never contact these people, but I am tempted.  I want to know what their plan is.  I want to ask, "If we gave you the job, what then?  You can't legally do the job,"

In many professions, the problem is not that the person doing the job is unqualified, it is just that there are a lot of unqualified people giving input to the process.  And it gets even worse when those unqualified people are the politicians making laws on subjects they know little about.

I read an article last year involving road construction in Michigan.  The politicians put into their law that they wanted the roads to be built to last longer, so that they would be less expensive in the long run.  The problem is that they would be much more expensive in the short run and their funding did nothing to address THAT.  

As a public school teacher I could go on and on about poorly thought out legislation by people who think that they know about schools because they were once a student, but it isn't necessary.  Most people have a similar experience for their own profession.  It seems that the unqualified rule the world.

For Christians the subject of being qualified for the mission at hand is easy.  We are each completely and uniquely unqualified for the calling that has been laid before us.  From God's perspective we are that person who wants to reduce the speed limit in town but doesn't think of the resulting traffic jams.  We are the person who calls in the IT department when our computer is unplugged.  We are the parent screaming at the coach because our kid isn't starting every game.

That's us.

God has a mission.  God has a plan for each of our lives.  We are called to love one another and let the grace of God shine through us.  And we are unqualified for the task.  We can do our best, but our best is still a completely inadequate version of the love and grace God has shown to us.

Watch this clip from Pastor Chris.

God does not call the qualified, he qualifies the called.  God enables imperfect people to carry out His mission, even when those people spend a great deal of time making suggestions to God on how He could be doing His job better.

Highs and Lows

Have you seen the signs in gift shops?  “A bad day fishing is better than a good day in the office,” or some variation on that.  Maybe it’s not fishing

 but hunting or shopping or skiing.  Name your hobby.  We all have good days and bad days, and going further within our days there are moments to celebrate and moments that we would sooner forget.  That’s just how days go.

There is this activity that people do as part of wrapping up an event called, “High Point – Low Point”.  I have also heard it called, Thumbs up Thumbs down and Loved it – Hated it, but the game is the same.  For whatever event is being discussed, everyone takes a turn describing the part that they liked the best and the part that they liked the least.  For example, one person may say, “My high point was swimming at the beach and my low point was dropping my ice cream in the sand.” Then the next person might say, “My low point was getting that awful sunburn and my high point was when YOU dropped YOUR ice cream in the sand.”

Of course the point of the activity is to spark discussion and reminisce a bit, but I think that there would be value in each of us participating every day.  Think about it.  At the end of each day, whether we do this with someone or on our own or with someone, what if we took a minute to reflect on the day’s highs and lows. 

And then thanked God for them both.

It is easy to get wrapped  up in the drama of our own lives and forget that we are blessed on every level.  If you are reading this, it means that #1 you can read.  #2 You have enough free time to read a blog.  #3 You have access to the internet.  Those things put you and I in a class of wealth beyond much of the world.  It is easy to forget that the worst moments of our day can be way above the best moments of someone else's.

Watch this clip from Pastor Chris.

In all that we do we need to keep our focus on God.  We need to praise God in the good times and bad and the highs and the lows.  We need to remember that in all we do we are serving him.

Defending the Borders

There is a lot of talk in politics these days about securing our national borders.  And the debate really isn't about whether or not it is necessary, but how it is best done.  There is the plan to build a wall being advocated by one political party or the increase in patrols, screening and monitoring advocated by others, but there is no one arguing that the border is too secure or even that the security is adequate.

This priority on border security isn't just an American attitude either.  Polls say that in the recent vote for Great Britain's exit from the European Union, one of the leading issues was control of their borders.  One of the requirements of EU membership was the free movement of people across borders within the Union, and the Brits wanted none of it.  There is no word yet as to whether they will want to build a wall around the island.

One infamous attempt to control a boarder involved the division of Germany during the cold war.  At the end of World War II there was a division of both Germany as a country and the city of Berlin by the allied powers.  Although each was technically divided into four parts, in practice it was divided into two,  There was the art controlled by the communist Soviet Union and the other three parts controlled by the democratic countries of the US, Britain and France.  The result was that the city of West Berlin became an island of democracy in a communist country.  

People from East Germany tried to get to the freedom of West Berlin in any way that they could, so in 1961 they built a wall around it.  The Berlin was was 12 feet tall and almost 100 miles in length and closed off West Berlin from the country around it.  More than that, the wall became a symbol of barring people from the freedom offered in the west.

The thing about walls is that they are ever only so effective.  Between 1961 and 1989 over 5000 people figured out a way to cross.  Some dug tunnels.  Some made balloons.  Some drove through in cars.  Some jumped from apartment windows, Some flew ultralight aircraft.  Some were the guards themselves who left their posts and went to the west.  People find a way.

So what is an appropriate attitude for a Christian regarding the boarder security.  We all want safety, and I think that fear of those who would do us harm is the main motivating factor behind the keep those people out mentality.  But no matter what out motivation, the effect of a border is the message that this is OURS and NO ONE ELSES.  It says that we reserve these things for us, and we won't share.  And I'm not at all sure that this is an attitude that Christ would support if he were here.

As Christians we are called to make disciples of all nations.  We are called to love our neighbors, whether that neighbor looks like us or speaks out language.  I don't really see how saying, "This is ours and we won't share." helps us along that path.  

Watch this video from Pastor Chris.

As Christians we are called to make disciples of all nations.  We are called to show God's love and to the best of our ability we should show that love unconditionally.  Building a wall and hiding behind it doesn't achieve that goal.

Called Out

There is farm in Yorkshire, England called "Slot Hill Farm".  In the 1960's the M62 Motorway was being built in that area, and in stead of moving the farm the built the expressway around it,  The west bound traffic goes on one side of the farm and the east bound traffic goes on the other.  According to local legend, the farmer was too stubborn to sell his land and move his farm, but the family tells a different story.  They say that the farmer, a man named Ken Wild, was a pretty mild mannered fellow.  It turns out that there was a geologic issue in the bedrock under the farm and it was easier to go around it.  But the legend was born.

Here is a picture of the farm.

And here is the aerial view from Google Earth

I have seen interviews with Farmer Wild and his granddaughter describing life on a farm in the middle of an expressway.  Farmer Wild acknowledged the noise from the traffic, but said it was very quiet in the house and mostly you are concerned with the business of running a farm.  His granddaughter, Kimberly said that growing up she was more interested in the sheep.

I think that there is a lesson here for all of us.  The world is a pretty busy place and it is easy to get caught up in the mix.  We can get pulled this way and that by the traffic of life.  But the Slot Hill Farm is a reminder that in the middle of the business that there can be peace.  We can teach ourselves to ignore the distractions of the world and focus on the matters at hand.

In the Bible, in the twelfth chapter of the book of Mark there is a story that on the surface is about paying taxes.  Jesus tells his disciples to "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and Give to God what is God's"  If we think about this story  a bit, we could easily read it as saying, "leave to this world the things of this world and reserve for God the things that are God's."

As Christians we need to be in the world but not of the world.  God has called us out of the world in a way that part of us is always with Him.  And while we will never be fully rid of the distractions of the world, we can still keep our focus in the important matters at hand,

Watch this video from Pastor Chris,

Life can be the farm in the middle of the freeway.  There can be distractions all around us but we must not get caught up in it all.  It is our job to feed the sheep.

Tragedy

Like everyone else, I have been trying to make sense of the numerous high profile shootings this week.  First, there were the shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana.  The story is too familiar.  There is an encounter between a police officer and an African American citizen.  One thing leads to another and one person is dead at the hands of another.  I understand that there are some upsetting videos of these encounters.  I have not seen them and I definitely was not there, so I will not be weighing in on the appropriateness of the citizen's actions or the officer's response.  Others will do that.  But as I think over these events, one word keeps coming to mind.

Tragedy

These shootings are tragedies, no matter what the official reports end up saying.  I didn't know the victims, but I am sure that they were important people to those around them.  Their families grieve the loss and will soon be trying to fathom life without that person in it.  Sudden loss can be the hardest to get over.  There are the things that were left unsaid and the fences that were never mended.

Tragedy.

And these events aren't just tragic for the victims and their families.  They are tragedies for the officers involved as well.  Officers will speak of the personal cost of taking another's life.  I have no idea if the investigations will come back that the shootings were justified by the circumstances, but I do believe that when the officer pulled the trigger, he thought that it was justified at the time.  I imagine that the public outcry, and the fact that much of your city and country have already condemned you, has to make this even harder.

Tragedy.

And then the week was followed up by another mass shooting in Dallas with police officers as the targets. Six dead.  Many more injured.  Each with family, friends and a circle of the Dallas community that was ripped apart.

Tragedy times six.

There seems to be a narrative in the news where we are expected to pick sides on this.  Are we supporting the black community or are we supporting the police.  It's as if these were the two sides in a war and not both citizens of the same country.

Police officers are doing a tough job and deserve our support and African Americans overwhelmingly see the police and the judicial system as working against them.  We can say that both of these are true.  Acknowledging one does not negate the other.

Last week we celebrated our independence.  In the our pledge of allegiance we claim to be "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."   We are a nation under God.  God is god of all.  Christ died for the victims and the officers and the shooters and their families and their communities.  Christ died for all of them.  The redemption offered through His Grace is free for everyone.  It is the acknowledgement that our problems are beyond us and only through that Grace can healing begin.  We accept the Grace and strive to do better in the future.

And we must do better.

We must acknowledge that there are deep racial divisions in our country.  We must acknowledge that in some communities there is significant tension between the police and the citizens, and that tension often exists along racial lines.  We must acknowledge it.  We must be slow to blame and quick to take responsibility.  We must seek forgiveness for our actions and extend forgiveness to others.  We must be willing to extend the grace to others that God has extended to us.

We must be ready to admit that it isn't THEIR problem it is ALL OF OUR problem.  We must accept the forgiveness and grace of God and try to make things better,

And we must do better.

Trophies

For several years in the fall I would help a group of friends put on a Road Rally.  For those of you who are not familiar, a road rally is a game where the participants solve puzzles and riddles whose answers correspond to a certain location.  They then travel to those locations and collect verification that they were there and so on.  It is a lot of fun and for some groups, quite competitive.

As we plan the annual road rally, at some point we think of the awards that we will give out. And often those awards are trophies.  Now the road rally is a low budget operation, so we usually get the trophies from a thrift store for about a dollar each.  And there is usually no shortage of supply.  Go into your local thrift store and you find a shelf full of tall monuments of marble and metallic plastic that were once presented with great fanfare.  I imagine that after we pass  them out at the end of the road rally they will end up back at the thrift store in fairly short order.

Speaking of trophies, a friend of mine tells a story of two plaques hanging on his parent's wall.  The plaques look identical except for the inscriptions.  The first plaque was given to his father by the school district for whom he worked acknowledging 30 years of service as a teacher and congratulating him on a well earned retirement.  The second was awarded to his sister for winning the third grade spelling bee.  

We all know that the size of the trophy is not related to their significance.  Nobel Prizes, Olympic Gold Medals and Academy Awards are not particularly big in size, but they mark a pinnacle of achievement in their respective fields.  On the other hand we sometimes see monster sized trophies given out for events that while they are important to the participants, they are definitely not the Olympics.

Trophies, plaques, certificates, declarations, they are all physical representations of accomplishments or appreciation.  And while the trophy is nice, most people see through it and recognize what it really means.  When we give a child a trophy that they can hardly lift, we all still know that they have made a child sized accomplishment.  

As Christians we need to make sure that we aren't surrounding ourselves with disproportionate trophies.  Here is what I mean.  We can surround ourselves with the trappings of a Christian life.  We can go to church every Sunday, make generous donations to the right causes, we can share Christian Memes on social media, we can go out of our way to display our beliefs to those around us.  But, the true measure of our faith is not these outward trappings, it is the way that we live our lives.

The greatest acknowledgement of God's grace in our life is that we live our life in a way that His will is reflected through our actions and decisions.

Watch this video from Pastor Chris.

We acknowledge God by living our lives for Him.  By allowing the Holy Spirit to direct our lives we become a trophy for God.  We become the physical representation of the grace that is available to all who acknowledge Him.

Consumer Reviews

If you have done much shopping online, you know that customer reviews can be a big thing.  Most places have some sort of a rating system, like one to five stars.  People who are familiar with the product then weigh in, give it a score and provide comments.  Some reviews are good and some reviews are bad but they give insight in to the product that you are considering.

On some sights the review isn't about the product but rather about the business that sells it.  On ebay the sellers are rated.  Sellers who are new and have few positive ratings or worse yet have been given negative ratings tend to have less people bid on their items and take lower prices for their goods.  Similarly the their are sites such as Yelp whose entire purpose is to let us know what you think about a product.  So to sum it all up, we like to express our opinion and we appreciate using the opinions of others.

So these reviews are important.  So important in fact, that some manufacturers and companies will put out fake reviews of their products.  They pay people to log on and write up glowing reviews with that ultimate five star rating.  Which of course has led to other online services such as Fakespot.  This service will review the reviews to vouch for their legitimacy.  Pretty soon there will be a site to review the site that reviews the reviews.

What carries even more weight than the online reviews is good old fashioned word-of-mouth advertising.  We trust the opinions of our friends and when one of them says that a product or service or movie was worth our time and money, we really tend to listen.  So we share our experiences with the new restaurant or tell about our experiences with a local mechanic or what ever.  And this is true of our negative experiences too.   In many ways we are much more likely to share and our friends are much more likely to listen to those.

 

As Christians we are called to be part of the word-of-mouth campaign.  We are called to live a life that the Joy of God is shining through us.  The fact that God is working in our lives should be evident.  And we need to be willing to share.  We live in a world where it is considered impolite to bring up religion and we don't want to put people off.  But it is ok to share our opinions about which local pizza place is the best or if a new movie is worth our time.  

Word of mouth can be effective for good or bad.  And while it is a way to share with friends the hope and love that you have found in following God, it can also be a negative review.  If although you profess to be a Christian, there is no visible change in your life, people will notice that too.

Watch this clip from Pastor Chris.

As Christians we are called to spread the Good News of God's love to those around us.  We need to be sharing our review and live a life so that others will think that they want the love, joy and peace that we have.