Rules
Stories
Contents
“Rules” by C. David McKirachan
“Accepting Reality” by C. David McKirachan
“Not Guilty” by Frank Ramirez
Rules
by C. David McKirachan
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Psalm 1
Children are highly overrated. Sometimes I wonder why my parents didn’t send me to boarding school. One such moment was when I asked why we had rules. If they invariably led to trouble, what good were they?
But it seems people like rules. They like to know if they’re in the win or loss column. Even at Christmas, that time of giving and sentimentality, “You’d better watch out. You’d better not pout. Santa Claus is coming to town.” Understanding who’s naughty and who’s nice helps. In ways that escape me sometimes.
‘…his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in this law does he meditate, day and night.’
That one gave me indigestion, until I found out that ‘the law’ was the torah, and the torah could be summed up in this passage from Leviticus, ‘…love your neighbor as yourself.’ Whether we want a list or not, whether we want to know who’s naughty and who’s nice, the law has to do with creating a community, and a community has to do with relationships, and relationships can’t happen without grace. Rules may be hard to take, but grace is worse. Grace isn’t fair, it makes no sense, it gets us involved in messy situations in messy ways. And if we’re SUPPOSED to meditate in God’s law, day and night no less, we’re stuck with it.
Children teach us many things. But their chief lesson is loving without counting the cost. Two-year old’s may be adorable, but then they wake up. And we, being the adults in the room, have to deal with psychopaths who are interested in seeing what happens when glass hits the floor. Their favorite word is ‘NO!’ And peanut butter is something they like to paint the couch with.
If we don’t love them… You get the idea. Four-year old’s are two-year old’s with language skills. Teenagers… Socrates thought such people were barbaric. Then there are litterers, people with road rage, people in mid-life crisis… There is no reason to love people who blow their leaves onto your lawn. And unless we’ve learned something about grace, neighborhoods are battlegrounds in the making.
But God does love us. All of us. Even that #*++ next door. Even us, when we forget the law of love.
That’s grace.
That’s the law, the core of the law that we’re supposed to meditate on day and night. And that’s the law that allows us to be trees planted beside rivers of water. That’s the law that allows us to bring forth our fruit in our season.
Lists of should’s and shouldn’t are nice. We call them commandments. They keep us out of potholes as we journey down the road of life. But they have grave limitations. None of us are good at living up to such expectations. Because situations rarely fit into hard lines. There’s more gray in life than black and white. And we who are the judges are just as guilty as the perpetrators. Our sins may be different, but… You get the drift.
That’s another thing kids teach us. We’re not perfect. And it’s hard to bring the gavel down on someone when we’re no less guilty, maybe more.
Maybe that’s why God’s so good at forgiving. God’s got a lot of kids.
But there are an awful lot of people who prefer a God that fries people for being naughty. Dante’s Devine Comedy is a best seller. Hell makes sense to us. Especially when we’re judging others. But if you want to get that load off your theological back, think of your kids, (on the rare occasions when they are so adorable, hugging is the only option) and send them to hell. Sometimes, when we’re not in very good shape, we’d like to. But there’s that pesky love getting in the way. They’re not perfect. They’re not even nice sometimes. But that’s beside the point. We love them.
That’s why Jesus called God, Abba, Daddy. God’s stuck with us. Just like we’re stuck with our kids.
Ain’t it great?
* * *
Accepting Reality
by C. David McKirachan
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and Psalm 90
How many times have we heard what a tragedy it was that Moses couldn’t make it into the promised land after leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt, through the desert, brought the law to them, etc. & etc. I’ve heard people say it wasn’t fair. The guy had a resume to trounce all vitae. He’d put up with so much, burning bushes, idiotic pharaohs, ungrateful and cantankerous chosen people. I mean c’mon. Give the guy a break.
But read over this chapter. The job was done. At a hundred and twenty years, did he really want to start again? The promise was assured. ‘The Lord had known him face to face, …’ He’d had conversations with YHWH, which would scramble the brains of anybody, but he had managed to come out of it with an agenda for a community, on the move. And he’d made it work. Moses was not a poor ol’ guy who didn’t get to finish the job. He was a monster, ‘…none like him for all the signs and the wonders which the Lord sent him to do …’
None like him. At our end it wouldn’t be too bad to have such perspective.
Accomplishments don’t make someone’s end peaceful and gracious. It’s perspective. I’ve used Psalm 90 in almost every funeral I’ve done because it provides just that, perspective. It reminds us that God is God. We aren’t. Death, the end of our living is woven into our identity when we are born. “…our years are over in a breath. Our years add up to anxiety and trouble; over in a trice and then we are gone.” The New English Version goes on, “Teach us to count how few days we have and to gain wisdom of heart.”
We’ve known people who have gone to their ends with desperation. Their accomplishments mean less to them than facing the end. Death for them is an enemy, and they are losing their battle. Death wins.
We’ve also known people who accept their lives with humility and grace and so each day, including this, their last day is a gift. They, somewhere along the line, gained wisdom of heart.
I think Moses was a tough guy, a tough guy with a temper. Tough guys are known to get their own way. They are in control of situations. That’s what makes them tough. But somewhere, somehow in his exile, Moses stood face to face with something that was a wonder. It was beyond his understanding or control. He came face to face with the end of his control and his power. Rather than becoming a bitter victim who would strive and be a slave to his desire to never lose again, he accepted reality. He was not God. He was not in control. He learned that his days were not his, they were gifts, given to him to appreciate and use in service of the giver.
We teach winning. We teach control. We yearn for our children to accomplish. I guess it’s natural. But perhaps the aboriginal people had it right when they sent their children out to be by themselves with nature. They could not win such an encounter or control it. They had to fit into the environment as it was. Perhaps such an experience allows learning of wisdom rather than knowledge. Instead of learning how to make or control or win, the experience offers how to be human in the midst of living in the here and now.
Maybe we’d be less likely to clear cut woods to build strip malls, for no other purpose than making money. When David Rockefeller was asked how much money was enough, he simply replied, “One more dollar.” That’s sad.
Whom do we serve? That is probably the central question in our living. And probably in our dying. I think it was for Moses in his living. He was probably happy to look out over the land from Mount Nebo and Pisgah. Being on a mountain can give a wonderful perspective. If we will only look and be grateful for the view.
* * *
Not Guilty
by Frank Ramirez
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
…though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. (1 Thessalonians 2:2)
The apostle Paul seems to have accepted persecution as part of the price he paid for having himself persecuted the followers of Jesus Christ before he himself was knocked off his props and commissioned to the great work of the kingdom. This of course led to his suffering many and diverse trials and tribulations over the course of his ministry. The catalog of these in his second letter to the Corinthians -- floggings, beatings, stoning, shipwreck -- is staggering. And yet, despite all this, he is at pains in this passage from his letter to the Thessalonians, and elsewhere, to make it clear that he is not guilty of the treatment he has deserved. It galls him that some use his trials as proof he must be guilty of something.
There is that same sense of innocence in the face of persecution in the letter written in Germany in 1711 by Alexander Mack (1679-1735). Mack grew up during one of the cruel religious wars of Europe. His family owned the local mill and farmed as well. He attended a local school, showing that his family was at least mildly prosperous. But several times during his early years his family had to hide in the hills, barely escaping ahead of the next army representing any one of the several churches that was hacking its way towards an imagined victory in the name of the Prince of Peace. Such armies routinely murdered those they captured and summarily executed the common folk, regardless of what faith they belonged to. Crops were destroyed. Buildings burnt. Great swaths of Europe were depopulated.
Eventually a sullen peace descended on the towns and villages of the German states. As a compromise, it was decided that all had to belong to one of three churches, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, according to the faith chosen by the local prince. If the prince changed churches everyone in that state was expected to change as well.
Therefore, Mack grew up suspicious of the organized churches. In the early years of the eighteenth century he and his wife Anna Margaretha Kling were attracted to the Pietistm. Pietists believed that inner holiness was essential to true belief, and was more important than the peculiar practices of any particular organized church. Mack and his wife began to hold Bible studies in their home, an illegal activity, and eventually became religious fugitives.
After studying the Bible with other like-minded believers they decided it was necessary to attempt to follow only those practices outlined in the New Testament: feet washing, anointing for healing, the bread and cup, the love feast -- and believer’s baptism, )another term for adult baptism) which they practiced by trine immersion, dunking the new believer three times forward in the river.
Three women and five men took part in that first baptism in August of 1708. Following that moment, the young church was hounded from one German state to the other, yet the group, sometimes called the Neu-Taufers, or New Baptists, grew by leaps and bounds.
The decision to be baptized as adults was considered subversive throughout much of Europe because church and state were one. Baptism was necessary to establish citizenship. To be baptized then as a consenting adult was renouncing one’s political citizenship, even though those who chose believer’s baptism said it meant no such thing.
On August 21, 1711, Mack wrote a letter to Count Charles August, who had provided religious sanctuary to the New Baptists, until Mack baptized the daughter of a widow named Eva Elizabeth Hoffman in the river at Dudelsheim. The count banished the widow, her daughter, as well as Mack. He pleaded his case to the count, reminding him it was God “…who established the authorities to punish the wicked and protect the good.”
Mack protested that the count had taken this action without speaking to him and asking for his defense, which he made in this fashion:
“Now I will freely and publicly confess that my crime is that Jesus Christ, the King oand Lord of lords, desired that we do what we are doing -- that the sinner shall repent and believe in the Lord Jesus and should be baptized in water upon his confession of faith. He should then seek to carry out everything Jesus has commanded and publicly bequeathed in his testament. If we are doing wrong herein against the revealed word of the holy scriptures, be it in teaching, way of life, or conduct, we would gladly receive instruction. If, however, no one can prove this on the basis of the holy scriptures, and yet persecutes us despite this, we would gladly suffer and bear it for the sake of the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Having spent part of his life as a religious refugee Mack pled not for himself, but for these others.
“I do not wish to annoy through writing too much, but rather close herewith, and leave it to the judgment of the lord count. As far as I am concerned, however, I do not complain at all about having to leave the territory, because I had planned to leave anyway. But because of Eva Liz, who is a poor widow, I humbly ask again that a little more consideration be given her.”
By 1729 Mack and all his fellow believers had been hounded out of Europe. They made the dangerous Atlantic crossing, transplanting themselves to Germantown, Pennsylvania, taking part in William Penn experiment in religious freedom. His spiritual descendants were instrumental in founding Heifer International, CROP, Church World Service, and distinguished themselves in alternative service during World War II by helping to inaugurate the practice of smoke jumping and taking part in the starvation experiment in order to teach aid workers how to best treat those starving in Europe in the wake of the second world war.
*****************************************
StoryShare, October 25, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Rules” by C. David McKirachan
“Accepting Reality” by C. David McKirachan
“Not Guilty” by Frank Ramirez
Rules
by C. David McKirachan
Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Psalm 1
Children are highly overrated. Sometimes I wonder why my parents didn’t send me to boarding school. One such moment was when I asked why we had rules. If they invariably led to trouble, what good were they?
But it seems people like rules. They like to know if they’re in the win or loss column. Even at Christmas, that time of giving and sentimentality, “You’d better watch out. You’d better not pout. Santa Claus is coming to town.” Understanding who’s naughty and who’s nice helps. In ways that escape me sometimes.
‘…his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in this law does he meditate, day and night.’
That one gave me indigestion, until I found out that ‘the law’ was the torah, and the torah could be summed up in this passage from Leviticus, ‘…love your neighbor as yourself.’ Whether we want a list or not, whether we want to know who’s naughty and who’s nice, the law has to do with creating a community, and a community has to do with relationships, and relationships can’t happen without grace. Rules may be hard to take, but grace is worse. Grace isn’t fair, it makes no sense, it gets us involved in messy situations in messy ways. And if we’re SUPPOSED to meditate in God’s law, day and night no less, we’re stuck with it.
Children teach us many things. But their chief lesson is loving without counting the cost. Two-year old’s may be adorable, but then they wake up. And we, being the adults in the room, have to deal with psychopaths who are interested in seeing what happens when glass hits the floor. Their favorite word is ‘NO!’ And peanut butter is something they like to paint the couch with.
If we don’t love them… You get the idea. Four-year old’s are two-year old’s with language skills. Teenagers… Socrates thought such people were barbaric. Then there are litterers, people with road rage, people in mid-life crisis… There is no reason to love people who blow their leaves onto your lawn. And unless we’ve learned something about grace, neighborhoods are battlegrounds in the making.
But God does love us. All of us. Even that #*++ next door. Even us, when we forget the law of love.
That’s grace.
That’s the law, the core of the law that we’re supposed to meditate on day and night. And that’s the law that allows us to be trees planted beside rivers of water. That’s the law that allows us to bring forth our fruit in our season.
Lists of should’s and shouldn’t are nice. We call them commandments. They keep us out of potholes as we journey down the road of life. But they have grave limitations. None of us are good at living up to such expectations. Because situations rarely fit into hard lines. There’s more gray in life than black and white. And we who are the judges are just as guilty as the perpetrators. Our sins may be different, but… You get the drift.
That’s another thing kids teach us. We’re not perfect. And it’s hard to bring the gavel down on someone when we’re no less guilty, maybe more.
Maybe that’s why God’s so good at forgiving. God’s got a lot of kids.
But there are an awful lot of people who prefer a God that fries people for being naughty. Dante’s Devine Comedy is a best seller. Hell makes sense to us. Especially when we’re judging others. But if you want to get that load off your theological back, think of your kids, (on the rare occasions when they are so adorable, hugging is the only option) and send them to hell. Sometimes, when we’re not in very good shape, we’d like to. But there’s that pesky love getting in the way. They’re not perfect. They’re not even nice sometimes. But that’s beside the point. We love them.
That’s why Jesus called God, Abba, Daddy. God’s stuck with us. Just like we’re stuck with our kids.
Ain’t it great?
* * *
Accepting Reality
by C. David McKirachan
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and Psalm 90
How many times have we heard what a tragedy it was that Moses couldn’t make it into the promised land after leading the nation of Israel out of Egypt, through the desert, brought the law to them, etc. & etc. I’ve heard people say it wasn’t fair. The guy had a resume to trounce all vitae. He’d put up with so much, burning bushes, idiotic pharaohs, ungrateful and cantankerous chosen people. I mean c’mon. Give the guy a break.
But read over this chapter. The job was done. At a hundred and twenty years, did he really want to start again? The promise was assured. ‘The Lord had known him face to face, …’ He’d had conversations with YHWH, which would scramble the brains of anybody, but he had managed to come out of it with an agenda for a community, on the move. And he’d made it work. Moses was not a poor ol’ guy who didn’t get to finish the job. He was a monster, ‘…none like him for all the signs and the wonders which the Lord sent him to do …’
None like him. At our end it wouldn’t be too bad to have such perspective.
Accomplishments don’t make someone’s end peaceful and gracious. It’s perspective. I’ve used Psalm 90 in almost every funeral I’ve done because it provides just that, perspective. It reminds us that God is God. We aren’t. Death, the end of our living is woven into our identity when we are born. “…our years are over in a breath. Our years add up to anxiety and trouble; over in a trice and then we are gone.” The New English Version goes on, “Teach us to count how few days we have and to gain wisdom of heart.”
We’ve known people who have gone to their ends with desperation. Their accomplishments mean less to them than facing the end. Death for them is an enemy, and they are losing their battle. Death wins.
We’ve also known people who accept their lives with humility and grace and so each day, including this, their last day is a gift. They, somewhere along the line, gained wisdom of heart.
I think Moses was a tough guy, a tough guy with a temper. Tough guys are known to get their own way. They are in control of situations. That’s what makes them tough. But somewhere, somehow in his exile, Moses stood face to face with something that was a wonder. It was beyond his understanding or control. He came face to face with the end of his control and his power. Rather than becoming a bitter victim who would strive and be a slave to his desire to never lose again, he accepted reality. He was not God. He was not in control. He learned that his days were not his, they were gifts, given to him to appreciate and use in service of the giver.
We teach winning. We teach control. We yearn for our children to accomplish. I guess it’s natural. But perhaps the aboriginal people had it right when they sent their children out to be by themselves with nature. They could not win such an encounter or control it. They had to fit into the environment as it was. Perhaps such an experience allows learning of wisdom rather than knowledge. Instead of learning how to make or control or win, the experience offers how to be human in the midst of living in the here and now.
Maybe we’d be less likely to clear cut woods to build strip malls, for no other purpose than making money. When David Rockefeller was asked how much money was enough, he simply replied, “One more dollar.” That’s sad.
Whom do we serve? That is probably the central question in our living. And probably in our dying. I think it was for Moses in his living. He was probably happy to look out over the land from Mount Nebo and Pisgah. Being on a mountain can give a wonderful perspective. If we will only look and be grateful for the view.
* * *
Not Guilty
by Frank Ramirez
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
…though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition. (1 Thessalonians 2:2)
The apostle Paul seems to have accepted persecution as part of the price he paid for having himself persecuted the followers of Jesus Christ before he himself was knocked off his props and commissioned to the great work of the kingdom. This of course led to his suffering many and diverse trials and tribulations over the course of his ministry. The catalog of these in his second letter to the Corinthians -- floggings, beatings, stoning, shipwreck -- is staggering. And yet, despite all this, he is at pains in this passage from his letter to the Thessalonians, and elsewhere, to make it clear that he is not guilty of the treatment he has deserved. It galls him that some use his trials as proof he must be guilty of something.
There is that same sense of innocence in the face of persecution in the letter written in Germany in 1711 by Alexander Mack (1679-1735). Mack grew up during one of the cruel religious wars of Europe. His family owned the local mill and farmed as well. He attended a local school, showing that his family was at least mildly prosperous. But several times during his early years his family had to hide in the hills, barely escaping ahead of the next army representing any one of the several churches that was hacking its way towards an imagined victory in the name of the Prince of Peace. Such armies routinely murdered those they captured and summarily executed the common folk, regardless of what faith they belonged to. Crops were destroyed. Buildings burnt. Great swaths of Europe were depopulated.
Eventually a sullen peace descended on the towns and villages of the German states. As a compromise, it was decided that all had to belong to one of three churches, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, according to the faith chosen by the local prince. If the prince changed churches everyone in that state was expected to change as well.
Therefore, Mack grew up suspicious of the organized churches. In the early years of the eighteenth century he and his wife Anna Margaretha Kling were attracted to the Pietistm. Pietists believed that inner holiness was essential to true belief, and was more important than the peculiar practices of any particular organized church. Mack and his wife began to hold Bible studies in their home, an illegal activity, and eventually became religious fugitives.
After studying the Bible with other like-minded believers they decided it was necessary to attempt to follow only those practices outlined in the New Testament: feet washing, anointing for healing, the bread and cup, the love feast -- and believer’s baptism, )another term for adult baptism) which they practiced by trine immersion, dunking the new believer three times forward in the river.
Three women and five men took part in that first baptism in August of 1708. Following that moment, the young church was hounded from one German state to the other, yet the group, sometimes called the Neu-Taufers, or New Baptists, grew by leaps and bounds.
The decision to be baptized as adults was considered subversive throughout much of Europe because church and state were one. Baptism was necessary to establish citizenship. To be baptized then as a consenting adult was renouncing one’s political citizenship, even though those who chose believer’s baptism said it meant no such thing.
On August 21, 1711, Mack wrote a letter to Count Charles August, who had provided religious sanctuary to the New Baptists, until Mack baptized the daughter of a widow named Eva Elizabeth Hoffman in the river at Dudelsheim. The count banished the widow, her daughter, as well as Mack. He pleaded his case to the count, reminding him it was God “…who established the authorities to punish the wicked and protect the good.”
Mack protested that the count had taken this action without speaking to him and asking for his defense, which he made in this fashion:
“Now I will freely and publicly confess that my crime is that Jesus Christ, the King oand Lord of lords, desired that we do what we are doing -- that the sinner shall repent and believe in the Lord Jesus and should be baptized in water upon his confession of faith. He should then seek to carry out everything Jesus has commanded and publicly bequeathed in his testament. If we are doing wrong herein against the revealed word of the holy scriptures, be it in teaching, way of life, or conduct, we would gladly receive instruction. If, however, no one can prove this on the basis of the holy scriptures, and yet persecutes us despite this, we would gladly suffer and bear it for the sake of the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Having spent part of his life as a religious refugee Mack pled not for himself, but for these others.
“I do not wish to annoy through writing too much, but rather close herewith, and leave it to the judgment of the lord count. As far as I am concerned, however, I do not complain at all about having to leave the territory, because I had planned to leave anyway. But because of Eva Liz, who is a poor widow, I humbly ask again that a little more consideration be given her.”
By 1729 Mack and all his fellow believers had been hounded out of Europe. They made the dangerous Atlantic crossing, transplanting themselves to Germantown, Pennsylvania, taking part in William Penn experiment in religious freedom. His spiritual descendants were instrumental in founding Heifer International, CROP, Church World Service, and distinguished themselves in alternative service during World War II by helping to inaugurate the practice of smoke jumping and taking part in the starvation experiment in order to teach aid workers how to best treat those starving in Europe in the wake of the second world war.
*****************************************
StoryShare, October 25, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
