A Year with Easter on my Mind

Anyone who has read any of my blog posts from last year can probably discern that 2012 was a hard and emotionally tring year for me.  Throughout most of my struggles and sorrows of that year, however, the one particular passage of Scripture sustained me more than any other was Psalm 22.  Before 2012, my mind rarely associated that psalm with Easter, but now it's become one of the most important points of reference for when I think about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I suppose I have to credit my newfound appreciation for Psalm 22 to a brief comment made by Russell D. Moore on his Cross & the Jukebox session on Johnny Cash.  Moore referenced the importance of Jesus' quotation of Psalm 22:1 ("my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") as some of his final words upon the Cross (and somehow Moore tied the whole thing together beautifully with Johnny Cash's own life story). As terrible a picture of suffering as Psalm 22 paints in its first twenty verses, it nevertheless concludes with an abundance of praises toward God for His goodness and salvation.  And the pivotal point of the psalm occurs at verse 21, where the psalmist confesses to God that "You have heard me!" (the Hebrew word is often translated as "rescue" but "heard" is the literal sense).  The same concept is again present in verse 24: "He has listened to his cry for help."  David, whose name is attached to this psalm, trusted in God to deliver him out of his afflictions, as did many generations of the people of Israel.  But when Jesus on the Cross identified himself with Psalm 22, He didn't have only verse 1 in mind but verse 21 as well.  Jesus knew that His Father had heard his cries and that, even though God's presence appeared to be far away at the time, the Father would not ultimately abandon His Son to death and decay.  And in the great resurrection event of that first Easter Sunday, God the Father proved that He had heard the cries of God the Son and had answered the Holy One with decisive vindication.

Over the past year, I have realized that the only reason why any of us are able to praise God in spite of whatever tough times we might be going through is because Jesus Christ has identified Himself with us in our sin and suffering.  God the Father gave our Lord the victory that is now reserved for those of us who trust in Christ alone for salvation.  God the Father was pleased to accept righteous suffering of Christ as an all-sufficient substitute for sinners like me.  And in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, those who have trusted in Christ have assurance that God will raise them up from the depths of suffering and the grave (in the words of 1 Corinthians 15:20-21).

On April 11 of last year (three days after Easter Sunday of 2012), I led a Wednesday night Bible study on Psalm 22 with two of our church ladies both in their eighties.  I got pressed for time and only made it through half of the chapter.  A few months later, I got a another opportunity to lead a Wednesday night study, and I again repeated the lesson and made it through the entire psalm.  I don't know how much of a lasting impression it left on the folks at the study, but it the psalm sure did leave a great impact on me.  I began to yearn for the opportunity to transition my study notes into a more proper sermon outline, and when my Granny's health began to fail again during late Spring I began to consider the idea of using Psalm 22 as the biblical anchor for her funeral sermon which my family requested I deliver upon her eventual passing.  Ultimately, the personal burden proved to be too weighty for me to find a way to do full justice to Psalm 22, so I instead choose Hebrews 4:14-16 (Christ being our high priest who is able to sympathize fully with our human weaknesses) to be the biblical centrifuge of my Granny's eulogy.

This year, my home church back in Camden invited me to deliver the sermons for their Easter services.  I only had about a week's time of preparation, but I realized I\it was the perfect opportunity to prepare that much desired sermon on Psalm 22.  I didn't make any personal reference to my Granny's suffering in my actual sermon but that reality has always been on my mind.  Throughout Jesus' earthly ministry, He showed compassion to sinful and suffering people bringing them temporary healing.  But in Jesus' sacrificial death on the Cross, He identified himself absolutely with the very worst of the human condition.  All the terrible pain that my Granny suffered prior to her death last year was nailed to that Cross alongside Jesus. I don't know what sort of tribulation might await me in my future, but all that stuff unknown to me at this time was also nailed to that Cross alongside Jesus.  The consequences of sin will ultimately drag all flesh into the grave, but praise God that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ on that first Easter Sunday, we have blessed assurance that God has heard us, and He has promised to raise us again.

Even though 2012 held a lot of tough times for my family, it's good to know that even when God's presence seems far away and the troubles of the present seem very near, God has promised that He has not hidden His face from his people.  He has proved his faithfulness to us in the cross and the empty tomb.  And that's why I've had Easter on my mind all year long.

I haven't figured out the proper way to stream audio via Blogspot interface, but my Easter 2013 sermon can be downloaded here if anyone is interested:
"The Cross, the God-Forsaken, and the Empty Tomb" Psalm 22

Teaching Kids about Hating Sin (aka, Lessons from a Ten-Year-Old's Testimony)

I've been teaching children's Sunday School at my church for nearly seven years, and that responsibility carries its own unique joys and frustrations.  I've been privileged to serve with four different co-teachers throughout process who helped to compensate for my own shortcomings.  I consider myself blessed to have had an opportunity to influence these kids with the Gospel message for so long, but there are many times when I question my own effectiveness in trying to help these children understand the gravity of what it means to be a sinner in need of salvation in Christ

Almost all of my regular attenders have the remarkable benefit of loving parents who are strong Christian leaders and ensure that the whole family is at the congregational gatherings every week, yet not all of these children have experienced God's saving grace and committed their lives to Christ's service.  Therein lies my greatest challenge as a teacher; how can I plant some spiritual seeds in the hearts and mind of these precious but naive little sinners that God might one day grow into genuine faith?  It's not like God needs my participation in His plans, of course, but I do believe that there's a divine purpose for which I've been given the privilege of teaching these kids for a season of their lives.

One theme that I routinely emphasize to the children is that they need to recognize the fact that they are all sinners who are personally guilty of breaking God's commands.  So I'll often ask each child about their own personal acts of disobedience to parents or sins of that nature.  That's when things usually get interesting.  Lying, theft (from siblings), anger (again, usually directed towards their siblings) or hiding the truth tend to be the most frequent confessions I hear.  The kids can easily recognize the fact that they are sinners and even agree that they deserve punishment when they are caught in their offenses. But very few of the kids ever seem to be visibly upset and sorrowful about their sins and offenses, and that's been one of the causes of my frustration over the years.  I'm not content with the kids merely recognizing that they are sinners; I want them to hate their sin and run to Christ for rescue.  I can't make that change happen, but I hope that I can at least communicate the importance of that message.

There's a lot of spiritual advantages to being a child, as Jesus taught us in Matthew 18:3.  Their minds are usually more adept at having faith and in believing in miracles compared to most adults.  And most children haven't had as much time or opportunity to commit grievous sins that can harden the heart against God.   But there are probably spiritual disadvantages to being a child too. I think the inherent naivety of children can make it difficult for them to truly hate their sin for its own sake.  They might hate the punishment that befalls them because of their sin when their parents discipline them, but that's not the same as hating sin.  In order for them to truly understand their need for Christ as Savior, they need to understand how bad sin is... even the relatively "small" sins that they've committed in their short lives.  And it's at this point that I yield the stage to a remarkable testimony composed by a little girl.

Nearly a year ago, one of the ten-year old girls in my class came to Christ and was baptized.  With the help of her parents, she composed a written account of her testimony and the event that finally made her come to hate her sin and put her trust in Christ.  In my opinion, it's one of the best Christian testimonies I've ever read because it displays that rare recognition of how terrible sin is and why we should despise its existence in our hearts.  And the story all started because she was thirsty and decided to lay claim to the last Gatorade before her brother could get to it.

In her own words:

One day me and my brother had our practices, and there was one Gatorade left. I wanted it so I took the Gatorade and started to write my name and draw pictures on it so that I could have it and so no one else could take it.  After I stuck it in the fridge God showed me my heart and showed me that what I did was wrong and that I was being selfish for wanting and taking the Gatorade.  So then I took a note and I wrote, "I'm sorry for taking the Gatorade I feel so selfish just taking the Gatorade please forgive me."  And after I gave my brother the note and the Gatorade I felt like I loved God more than I ever have and I wanted to learn more about god and his word. 

Nearly a year later, I still read those words with amazement.  That ten-year-old girl didn't commit any great moral offense, and I doubt she even would have been punished by mom & dad for taking possession of that drink.  But she realized that the key issue was her own heart, which was selfish and didn't trust God.  And that's the realization that spurred her spiritual transformation.  After a talk with her mom, she was advised to admit she was a sinner and to trust in Jesus alone for salvation.  And then she wrote:

Then I realized that Jesus changed my heart. When I felt my heart change my dad and I read some scripture. One of them was Ezekiel 36:26: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." When I read this scripture I knew this is what I wanted God to do for me, and he did.

I have read many adult testimonies of how God changed hearts and rescued very sinful people out of some very terrible lifestyles, but I can't think of many that impart the same insight into human nature as this little girl's story does.  If we could all hate the small sins we commit against God and our Neighbor as much as she hated what she thought about doing with that Gatorade bottle, then maybe we could all start recognizing how awesome a work of grace that God does in our hearts when we come to Christ.

When Comforting Others Seems Impossible

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Paul's opening statement in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians has long struck me as one of the most profound and humbling truths in all of Scripture.  In 2 Cor. 1:3-11, Paul explains that the suffering and affliction that he and Timothy had experienced while in Asia occurred for the purpose of teaching them how to better comfort other believers who go through similar afflictions.  God not only subjected Paul and Timothy to affliction, but He comforted them even more abundantly because of their experience.  The benefit of being brought through affliction to share in the spiritual comfort that comes through Christ is that the Christian is able to better empathize and serve his fellow Christians who are in the midst of their own suffering. 

That's a marvelous portion of Scripture, because it teaches the Christian to view their suffering not as a simple question of "why does God allow this bad thing to happen to me?" but a question of "how does God want me to use my suffering to comfort others who might be going through something similar?"  That's quite a revelation; it turns our focus away from ourselves and encourages us to start thinking about others.

On the other hand, the 2 Corinthians text does at least suggest that if God has not chosen to subject us to a particular form of suffering, then we may not be as qualified to comfort others as we might like to be.  Therefore, the experience of affliction becomes a prerequisite for us to learn how to better comfort others with the comfort that Christ first shows to us when we are in the position of the afflicted one.

That's a hard truth that frustrates me.

I don't have the personal experience to empathize fully with a widow who lost her husband young.  Neither can I fully identify with parents who have had to bury their own children, sometimes before those kids have even been born.  And thankfully, I don't yet know the pain of losing a parent.  But I have friends who live with all these burdens.

Another example has weighed heavily on my heart in recent days. This past week marked an important anniversary for people associated with Union University.  Tuesday February 5 was the five-year anniversary of the tornado that destroyed most of the old student dormitories but did not take the lives of any people on campus.  I graduated in 2005, which means I was already long gone when the storm came, but I had many dear friends who were still there when it happened.  I still remembered how terrified I was that night in my Louisville dorm seeing the reports of the devastation on the news and trying to decide if it was wise to try and call my friends in Jackson, TN to see if they were alright.

After all was accounted for, all of my friends were safe, but they were forever changed after that night.  They had experienced something terrible, a sensation of terror that I cannot even imagine.  I have marveled at the Union story for all five of these years.  There is even a strange sense within me that actually wishes I could have been there on campus that night so that I could have suffered in solidarity with my friends and know the depths of what they had to endure.  I wish I could have been there to help them in 2008, but I wasn't.  And I wish I could be better qualified to know how to best comfort them even to this day.  But that's impossible.  I wasn't there, and I can't understand the affliction (and the comfort) that those students and staff came to understand all too well.

I am humbled by the reality that I am unable to comfort my friends with the comfort that can only come from the people who were there and lived that night.  I experienced my fair share of storm warnings while at Union between 2001-2005, but I never lived through anything even comparable to "The Tornado."  And because of what I've seen at Union, I've since tried hard to prepare myself for a worst-case scenario whenever I endure storm warnings in Louisville.  None of this, however, makes me qualified to compare my experiences with my friends who saw the sights and sounds of February 5th.  I haven't warranted that sense of solidarity. And so I'm frustrated, because I know I am helpless to do what I want to do.  In a very real sense, I am incapable of bringing comfort to others.

But where our own strength might fail, the wisdom and mercy of God abounds all the more abundantly.  Thank God that there are other people who lived through that experience who cared for and continue to care for my friends.  Thank the Lord for the church families of all those folks who served the needs of their own.  Praise be to God that in the Body of Christ, there will always be someone who has undergone suffering so that they might be made more adept to bring comfort to others.

In my helplessness to comfort my friends as I would like, I can only offer my prayers to the Father of mercies and God of all comfort (to borrow the words of the 2 Corinthians passage once more).  And though I might lack the requisite understanding that comes through personal experience, I can pray the words of Philippians 4:7 that God might comfort my friends with "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding."

Grieve the Moment

I've spend a good deal of time on the internet over the past few years, and I've noticed a number of trends about how people use their social media accounts.

One thing I've learned is that whenever something tragic happens on a visible and public scale, people will inevitable try to immediately change the tone of the conversation away from a consideration of the present tragedy into a comment about some other issue that is morally significant to their interests.  It's not a matter of "if" someone will act in such a manner, it's only a matter of "when."

I observed this phenomenon after the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre.  Obviously, gun control  laws were and still are the popular subject of discussion, but I noticed another trend among many would-be paragons that bothered me.  There were a few folks who expressed some sentiment along the following lines "The murder of 26 children and school officials at Newtown was terrible but our country has legally aborted over 50 million babies since 1973!" Granted, that's a true statistic, but why does one think it's wise to frame the discussion in that light?  And as atrocious as abortion is, the argument against its legalization is not advanced by diminishing the severity of a mass-scale elementary school shooting.

I don't fully understand why people feel justified in doing this kind of "morality juke."  But I suspect the best explanation might be that the tragedy of the moment doesn't quite connect with their emotions at a truly personal level.  Although nearly two dozen children died (who most of the nation knew not by memory but only by their names and faces), some people immediately wanted to get angry about something else.  Such comments do nothing to console the pain of the grieving families of the slain.  If it were my children, parents, or siblings who were the victims, then I am certain that my soul wouldn't care about being burdened by an additional moral outrage.

As a point of illustration, I recall this same tendency in comments that were made in the context of local news reports about the car accident that claimed the life of my friend Stacy Ellison.

On the news broadcast that aired on television that night, the news reporter narrated the events of the crash and then abruptly changed the subject.  She warned that more automobile fatalities might be in store for Louisville drivers as wintry weather conditions descended upon the city.  Then, as a clip of my friend's crumpled Ford Taurus was displayed on the screen, she issued a morbid warning about the dangers of distracted driving.  I don't know if either Stacy or the truck driver who crossed lanes and collided with him were driving distracted at the time (though based on what I've read, the other driver simply had a medical attack and lost control in an instant), but that question certainly didn't matter to me. I know for certain that wintry weather conditions weren't a factor, but the nightly news nevertheless felt the need to create a narrative where it didn't need to exist.  If I were to ever have the opportunity to have a face-to-face conversation with that reporter, I would feel compelled to ask her why she felt the need to dismiss the immediate tragedy like she did. 

But I suppose I already know what the answer might be.  The fact is that while a fatal automobile accident in a Metro area is both public and newsworthy, it simply doesn't have much emotional power unless one actually knew the victims involved.  It was only newsworthy as a local story, not as a national tragedy.  And the only people who really had to suffer were the victims and the people who knew them and their families.  Those who weren't personally affected by the event could simply divert their minds to other concerns and move on with their life routines.

My hope is we will cease our habits of dismissing the impact of immediate tragedies in order to draw attention to other subjects, however important they might be.  Let us do more to follow the example of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who grieved with their suffering friend for seven days and seven nights without even daring to offer a word, as Scripture recounts in Job 2:11-13.  And let us avoid the imitation of their eventual attempts to shift the narrative from one of grief into irate moral diatribe.  Though there is much evil and suffering in the world that might pain us and remain ever with us, we are often best served to focus on the present crisis of a fresh wound... and grieve in the moment.

Memorable Moments

I haven't have many deep or particularly organized thoughts lately, but I have had a lot of serendipitous moments of epiphany that had the effect of brightening my day in a special way.  So I figured I'd compile them for future reference.

Thanks a Lot for Caring!
A couple of Mondays ago, the checkout girl at Big Lots asked me (totally out of the blue) "you look so sad, what happened today?" It was awkward, but the more I thought about it, I realized that we could use more people like that in the world.

And then I felt totally sheepish in admitting that I was just trying to figure out whether or not I'd be able to make it home in time for the Notre Dame-Alabama BCS National Championship Game. She seemed a bit disappointed after that.

Though what I didn't tell her was that I kinda had to go to the bathroom at the time. That might have been a factor in my somewhat subdued facial expression while waiting in line.

Pay It Forward
I saw this a certain offer going around on some of my friends' Facebook accounts, and it seemed intriguing.  I generally avoid any type of copy-paste style postings because the internet is just full of spam and crazy stuff, but this one was a little different.  This gist of the message was that the first five people to comment on the particular status would receive from the original poster something homemade (not sure if I'll limit myself to that rule or not) as a gift at any random point during the year. But the twist is that each of those five people must return the favor by posting the message on their Facebook pages and make the same offer to five people. 

It's a cool idea, because it makes yourself available to serve some folks in a special way that maybe you wouldn't necessarily think about.  I've got close to 700 Facebook "friends" so any five of them could have had the opportunity to take advantage of it.  Some of the folks who took advantage of my offer are folks with whom I haven't had much contact in the last few years.  It should be a fun and challenging project to try and figure out what might be a cool gift to send them.

The whole thing reminds me of that movie Pay It Forward where the middle-school kid aspires to change the world by doing good for random people he meets and them making them promise to pass along the favor.  It's a pretty cool concept, but of course the poor kid dies at the end trying to break up a school yard fight.  That seemed like a cheap ploy by the movie-people to me.  Oh well, I guess the ghost of Haley Joel Osment's character lives on in spirit...

Granny Always Said I was "Makin' a Preacher"
About a month ago, I agreed to teach the adult Sunday School class for one Sunday in January, which ended up being tomorrow's date, January 20.  A little while later, I volunteered to preach a Sunday night sermon on the same day.  Last week, my pastor asked me if I could substitute for him on the Wednesday night Bible studies for three consecutive weeks, starting with this past Wednesday.  So, yeah, it's been a bit of of a busy week trying to get everything organized.  There would have been a time when I probably would have considered this to be too much commitment and I might have turned some of it down for fear of having my focus divided and not being able to do as good a job as I might like.

But sometime after I began the PhD program at the seminary, I've started to think of myself as a preacher, even if I am still of a work-in-progress and still "in the waiting," so to speak.  Getting opportunities to preach and teach doesn't so much intimidate me as it does excite me (though I still agonize over the preparation and lead-up process).  When I'm up there speaking about the Word, I feel truly alive. To the best of my knowledge, that sense of exhilaration doesn't stem from any kind of vanity or self-serving pride, but from a confidence that it's just where I'm supposed to be.

That doesn't mean I'm ready to start putting out my resumes for salaried church positions. I haven't done that because I'm content to work the job I have so long as I'm still in school, and I don't want to tie up my weekends in case I need to make some quick trips back to Tennessee to visit family.  That day is coming, but I'm not there yet.