Religion

In sum, here’s my problem:  I’ve joined a Baptist Church, but I’m no Baptist.

In detail it goes like this:

• Baptists come from the Calvinist tradition.  

• You may have heard of “free will baptists.”  These are not those.

• Calvinism is a very well reasoned Protestant doctrine based on Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.  It further comes from the sole scrirptura tradition of the Reformation, in that it solely derives from points in the canonical scriptures, especially the New Testament.

I heard a sermon yesterday about “Authenticity.”   The general theme was: “Isn’t it exhausting wearing a mask all the time.  Stop caring about what people think and expect and just be yourself.”

Wow, I wish it were just that simple.

First, we must deal with “The Puck Factor”.  This guy:

Bascially “Puck” was a universally-reviled character from the MTV Reality show “Real World” in the 1990’s.  To sum-up He was unapologetic in his self-centered asshattery.  Looking at Puck and saying, “Just be yourself,” was like an exercise in an Ethics class.  Puck liked hurting other people.  That was genuinely him being him.

Yes, I’m still alive, as my twitter stream would substantiate.

Felt led to share this.

First, some background: I’m a Protestant Christian.  As such, I follow the doctrine of Justfication by Faith (Sola Fide).  Justification by Faith, broadly defined, means that we are ‘justified’, that is, redeemed or saved, by Grace from God alone through Faith,

**For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,**not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:9, ESV).  

This is sort of a follow-up to my On Steve Jobs post.

I write this with myself as the audience, after getting slapped with fish by life for the past 10 days.

No one cares.

You’ve been raised in child-centric America, from 1990 to the present.  You’re behaviorally Millennial; you don’t remember a time before computers, minivans, or helicopter parents.  You’ve always felt entitled to speak your mind, in whatever the situation.

Ecclesiastes is Solomon’s valediction as an old man.  From the purported wisest man that ever lived–gifted with wisdom from God Himself--comes a book that seems a real downer on the hollowness of nearly every pursuit in his hedonistic life.

Sometimes, having worked as a developer for 16 years, I’m reminded off Ecclesiastes.

With apologies to Solomon:

To everything there is a season:
_  A time to build big, and a time to build small,_
_  A time to write, and lots more time to sustain,_
_  A time to break systems apart,_
_  A time to pull systems together._
A time to delete, and a time to merge.
Most telling is the author’s refrain:  “All is vanity! There is nothing new under the sun.”

I imagine this convo someday:

“You really believe there’s some magic guy up in the sky who created the Universe?  Do you also believe in Santa Claus?”

The respondent will be one of my children:

I’ve never believed in Santa Claus.  I would like to tell you about a real guy named Jesus and what He did for me….

Yep, we’re those people.  Santa Claus doesn’t give our children presents, we give each other presents to celebrate the greatest unearned present ever, salvation.   Our kids are the all-too-honest little antichrists who send your little Timmy or Terry home crying from Kindergarten, “MOM!  Maria said Santa Claus isn’t real.”

So, my church is going through Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.  The second item within the 40-day book is “You are not an accident.”  With this as the follow-up.

Your parents may have been good, bad, or indifferent.  It doesn’t matter:  God had a design for you before you were even born, with the combination of DNA inside your body determined.

 Immediately, the reality that soon enough (if some rogue nation hasn’t already) a cloned human being will be created.  No mother, no father, just a sequenced genome injected into a sterilized embryo.  It begins dividing and gestating, with a person resulting 40 weeks later.  Maybe less if we accelerate the process.

So, the family and I have been attending Bedford Acres since July of this year, and I’ve been consistently amazed at what service has been like.   I’ve often wondered what it would be like if revival came through past church homes.   Basically, it’d be like a regular Sunday at BACC.

And today, the curveball.

The minister gets up on stage and announces, “I’m not preaching a sermon today,” and this was the verse on the screen (1 Cor 14:29-31):

1 Cor 13, v1-3

1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge ; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

I sat in this very seat a month ago a broken man, a failure.

I intended to send my pastor a quick note asking him to pray for me.  What actually happened was time disappeared, and what’d been pent up for months spewed out of my heart, down my touch-typing to an email that Scott said was too long to even attempt reading on his smartphone.

The subject line:  “I’m broken…”

In Ecclesiastes 6:3-7, we read:

3If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, “Better the miscarriage than he, 4 for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity ; and its name is covered in obscurity. 5 “It never sees the sun and it never knows anything; it is better off than he. 6 “Even if the other man lives a thousand years twice and does not enjoy good things -do not all go to one place ?” 7All a man’s labor is for his mouth and yet the appetite is not satisfied.  

In working on my small group lesson this week, I’m stuck again in James 1, and there’s this verse (26)

Ifanyonethinks himself to be religious, and yet does not [bb](http://www.biblestudytools.com/nas/james/1.html#fn-descriptionAnchor-bb “Or “control”")bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, thisman’sreligion is worthless.

You could pretty much summarize my last 5 or 6 years right there.  I’ve deceived myself time and again, focusing on what was easy, felt good.  I can rationalize anything, it seems.

This year, I was puzzling over the word ‘Easter’ itself. Doesn’t seem to have any religious connection, does it? All the Latin-derived languages borrow from “Pesach,” the Hebrew word for passover.

Surprise, Easter is named for an Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring. Traditionally the goddess Eoastre saved a frozen bird by turning it into a bunny. A bunny who could lay eggs, like a bird. BANG–“Easter Bunny”

For me, this Easter has been a real bust. Really, the whole Lenten season, too. Usually, I get into everything from Ash Wednesday through Pentecost–purification, focus on religious life, prayer. This year, it’s been a succession of issues: Pregnancy, Mom’s cancer returning, ongoing illness in my wife & kids, work, a car accident, dealing with insurance company. This weekend’s been the exclamation point on that–missed our Good Friday chorale because of shuttling J, then missed Easter because J’s got stomach flu. Three roundtrips to Louisville in 3 days, then I get to look forward to my boy being gone for a week. :-(

As Easter grows near, this particular blog is going to haunt me again, it would seem.

In hopes of staving off another storm of firey, hurt emails, here’s my open letter those whose ire I’ve inspired.

First, I am sorry if I upset you.

If you reread my post, you’ll see that I pointed out good and bad points about the particular night I attended a performance. And I stand by those opinions from one year ago.

So, last night our small group topic was prayer. Not surprisingly, we used Matthew 6 as our text:

9"This, then, is how you should pray:
" ‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
11Give us today our daily bread.
12Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’

Heard a wonderful sermon from Warren French, our missionary-in-residence at Northside on Sunday. It was about how to deal with the relationship you have (or don’t have) with God–this was a sermon aimed at “comfortable” Christians, who’ve let Satan come against them without realizing it.

Full Disclosure: I believe in divine (and infernal) intervention–that God and Satan are in a tug-of-war for people’s soul, and that it’s a battle that continues all one’s life. I understand little of the ‘why’; I just know what I’ve seen with my own eyes.

I’m a member of a Restoratoin Movement Protestant Christian Church. On the face of it the Restoration Movement is a tremendous idea, hearkening to the ideas of both the early Apostolic Churches and the ideas of the Protestant Reformation. Key bullet points of our doctrine are:

• We acknowledge only one authority in church matters–the 66 book Protestant Bible. There is no synod, ecclesial council, catechism, or presbyteroi. The Bible says what it says.

From Daniel 3 (KJV):

16Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.

17"If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.

18But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up."

I was trying to find a way to word something simil…

Jeff Roberts - Oct 2, 2007

I was trying to find a way to word something similar yesterday. Jesus did indeed stand apart from the government - one of the reasons the Jews rejected him was they were looking for a king and that’s not why he came.

He didn’t downplay the fact that there were commandments, rules, laws and consequences, and he didn’t say that right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, or changing at the whim of the culture.

Wow, if I just throw sex in there, we’ll have all three taboo topics in one, n’est-ce pas?

Response to my post yesterday has been overwhelming (well, for me. I’m no Dawn). I think my wife put it best: “Jesus wouldn’t have been [Republican or Democrat]. He was a-political.”

Let me say this right up front–Christianity is tremendous. To me, it is Truth personified, the Creator of the universe reaching out to us as lovingly as He can, trying to reconcile the ultimate divide (sin) between Himself and us.