A question in this year's political campaign in America that was never ask:
"Do you have more personal liberty today or eight years ago?" That
should be the primary underlying question in discussing workings of the American
republic. But the fact of the matter is that this election has proved that the
turkeys have come home to roost. To use the thoughts of Wendell Berry in "The Unsettling of America." America
has become a land of specialized consuming machines, in which people are no
more important than the machines which they operate, all are used and abused to
produce money for consumption. Put in another way, has anyone of you ever
really seen a wild turkey? What value does it have? Turkeys after all come
frozen or fresh, shrink wrapped in thick plastic bags. The cheapest I saw
during the Thanksgiving sales was at Safeway @ $0.27 per pound. Everyone, I'm
sure gobbled up one of those!
Adam and Eve sat on the brushy hill side watching a flock of turkeys eating
nuts, berries and grubs. "Adam,"
said Eve, "I can hardly wait until our
descendants many thousands of years from now have the opportunity to eat a
plastic tasting turkey, artificially injected with water, or butter flavored
juices, really just to add weight and inflate the selling price, with a plastic
pop out timer, because they have evolved to such a state that they can't read a
cook book and tell when it is done cooking. They probably will call such a day
Thanksgiving, you guys will watch football on television, belch, laugh at
stupid men jokes, and we women will act like your slaves and gossip in the
kitchen."
"Sounds like a great day to me, I am
anticipating that opportunity also, it makes me feel warm and loving inside! I
need more male bonding." Responds Adam.
How have we gotten to this point, where we must put a value on a flock of
wild turkeys, or the opportunity of just to see one? Essentially as did Esau,
(Genesis 25:29-34) those few thousand years hence from Adam and Eve. For a bowl
of red lentil stew, we have given up our birthright to be called covenant
children of God.
But the neat thing about America is that if we package it right someone
surely will buy any stew we might decide to create. Bibles come in hundreds of
ways, for study, for students, men, women, kids,hard cover, leather cover, soft
cover, cheap Bibles for giving away. The Ministry follows along that same
consumer line. Package it right and it will sell. "God forbid that any one
should read that good book. If they did, they might not buy into all that slick
packaging that we use to sell religious consumption to those consuming American
sheep. Sheep or turkey its all available at the store, fresh or frozen in the
meat department.
The prophet Isaiah has something to say to us today, as he did to Old
Testament Israel. It fits so well with contemporary Christianity, for we take,
pick and choose,for the most part, a false heritage, not the one true
opportunity to understand the concept of personal liberty only a few of our
founding fathers understood. American Evangelical Christianity traces its roots
mostly to English Calvinism and English Arminianism, floured liberally with
revivalism, deep fried in hydrogenated grease of contemporary affluence, so
that we are left with a religion without doctrine and also without works. We
have created a religion with a selling or sale price, for it is truly the only
thing we want to understand. Isaiah speaks to us today from the Bible's ancient
pages in Chapter 58:
"Cry aloud, spare not;
Lift up your trumpet;
Tell my people of their transgression,
And the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet they seek Me daily,
And they delight to know My ways,
As a nation that did righteousness,
And did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
They ask of Me the ordinances of justice;
They delight in approaching God.
'Why have we fasted,' they say, 'and You have not seen?
Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?'
"In fact, in the day of your fast you
find pleasure,
And exploit all your laborers.
Indeed you fast for strife and debate,
And to strike with the fist of wickedness.
You will not fast as you do this day,
To make your voice heard on high.
Is it a fast I have chosen,
A day for man to afflict his soul?
Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush,
And to spread out sackcloth and ashes?
Would you call this a fast,
And an acceptable day to the Lord?
"Is this not the fast that I have
chosen:
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
To undo heavy burdens,
To let the oppressed go free,
And that you break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;
When you see the naked,that you cover him,
And not hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light shall break for like the morning,
Your healing shall spring forth speedily.
And your righteousness shall go before you;
The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
You shall cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.'
"If you take away the yoke from your
midst,
The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
If you satisfy the afflicted soul,
Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,
And your darkness shall be as noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
And satisfy your soul in drought,
And strengthen your bones;
And you shall be like a watered garden,
And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.
Those from among you
Shall build the old waste places;
You shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach,
The Restorer of Streets to Dwell in.
"If you turn away your foot from the
Sabbath,
From doing your pleasure on My holy day.
And call the Sabbath a delight
The holy day of the Lord honorable,
And shall honor Him, not doing your own ways,
Nor finding your own pleasure,
Nor speaking your own words,
Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord;
And I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth,
And feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.
The mouth of the Lord has spoken.
The mouth of the Lord has spoken in a way we machines of personal
consumption may not be able to understand, but at least we can relate to.
"If you do this, then I (God) will do this." We say it to others all
the time, except we put ourselves in the place of God. But we really like the
statement much more, "If I do this, I will then do this." The
difference is that in the first instance, God is out side man, speaking to the
created. In the second instance, god is within and I am conversing with my own
self and my own concept of godliness. Only one instance can be true. The other
must be a lie. If the truth is not in me, where then can truth be found? We
like living in the Old Testament religion because we like to think we can pay
the price, the price that God rejects here in this Chapter. What then shall we
do, how then shall we live?
That answer is found in the New Testament in many places, but we will use a
quotation from Romans, the Book that has brought personal liberty to Martin
Luther, the Reformation and countless millions within and without the
floundering and dividing American republic. Beginning in verse twenty one of
Chapter three Paul writes:
But now the righteousness of God apart from
the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness
of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe. For there is no
difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being
justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus
whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood through faith, to demonstrate
His righteousness,because in His forbearance God passed over the sins that were
previously committed to demonstrate at the present time His Righteousness, that
He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By
what law? Of works? No, by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man
is justified by faith apart from deeds of the law. Or is He the God of the Jews
only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since
there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the
uncircumcised through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith?
Certainly not!. On the contrary we establish the law.
Paul then goes on in Chapter 4 to more fully explain this last remark. No
where in this passage do you have any standing with the works of God
established through Jesus Christ. It is not you and God and Jesus, you being
the consuming machine of holiness. It is all God, apart from your own attempts
at law keeping. What good news, our free gift of righteousness, is a gift we
cannot pay for. Therefore, through that personal liberty offered in Jesus
Christ alone we are allowed to fully complete the works that God requires us to
perform to receive the blessings promised by Isaiah. The healing and
integration of the divisions that is required in this nation and this world
therefore flows from the personal liberty to be not some machine of
consumption, but as a child redeemed through propitiation, and justified by the
blood of Jesus Christ. A much different gospel than you hear in most Christian
ministry and contemporary commentary today. For theirs is a gospel without
life, without liberty. Only through the gift of God described in Romans are we
able to achieve by faith the righteousness we seek, but can not find as
consuming machines in a Godless society. Let us therefore move forward through
faith in Jesus Christ alone and allow Him to sanctify our works making them
just in the eyes of God and man.
Amen.
Miraculously from my understanding, there sits
either on my desk or in my computer storage, solutions to all the problems that
have vexed me when I began writing these messages on a monthly basis about two
years ago. Actually, it all goes back many years before that. They just sort of
appeared from different sources within the week. With what I have learned this
week by doing and going in Christ where Isaiah tells me to go, I shall endeavor
to move forward as God provides. The unifying point of all these solutions or
projects is that they all seek to serve as the true works that God proposes
through Isaiah. One by one or added together they are impossible for me to
achieve by my own merit and ability. So I have decided why not try to do it all
together in some way and see what God might do. One step at a time, one day at
a time, for today has more than I can handle on my own. As Rob Dingman,
missionary in London, quoting the movie "A field of Dreams" said last Tuesday evening concerning advise he was given
about starting a new church in a southwest London area,"Build it and they
will come." What is there really to lose? Especially, when nothing has
worked until now.
This Thanksgiving I am truly thankful for having
been moved well beyond my understanding as a consuming machine. And I believe
that is what is lacking within the contemporary church today. Most of you that
I have met personally are very willing to move on beyond where we now are, but
we just don't know where, or how to go, and we are afraid to go it alone. In a
way we have not been as gifted as some of our Russian brothers and sisters and
seen the atheistic communist state fall and understand that free market
corporate capitalism as just another atheistic horse painted a different color.
(Both similar to our political Democrats and Republicans views of the American
state.) We all seek the liberty that seeks to give humans worth not through our
provisions of consumption, but what I presently call some sort of total
investment in God's provision of today. Our consumption is really based upon an
illusionary worldly perception of man's ability to control or at least forecast
the future, the illusion of the pursuit of happiness. It would be much better if
we put our first fruits (not our surplus or our recyclables and castoffs) into
God's Kingdom work today, believing that our God of the present is sufficient
for our present as well as for our future, let God provide the increase, or
fruit. We shall endeavor to move toward that goal providing ministry
opportunities to all who desire to receive that full measure of God's love each
and every day. Please intercede for that present provision and also so that I
can pay the present bills.