Praying for Grandma's Gravy

Spirituality Column #263
November 22, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Praying for Grandma’s Gravy
By Bob Walters

Thanksgiving dinner can be one of the spiritually richest and most comforting gatherings of the year – God’s bounty on our plates, loving family and dear friends at our reverently bent elbows.

Or, it can be a prickly, uneasy theatre of differing and generally incompatible intra-family opinions on relationships, culture, government, and God … simmering like grandma’s gravy that everyone hopes doesn’t get scorched by excessive heat or fractured by inattentive stirring.

Scenario One will likely have a rich pre-meal prayer of thanks for overflowing goodness and fellowship and abundance. It may or may not be a specifically religious prayer because not everyone’s spirit is connected, in an aware way, to a specific faith system. But don’t most of us just know, deep inside, that saying “Thanks” on Thanksgiving isn’t just an expression of appreciation? It’s an affirmation of the existence of God … whatever we understand that God to be. We look around the table, with love, and know that truth exists. God must be here somewhere. We are thankful.

Scenario Two can lead to the guests primarily being thankful when the meal is over and the ride home has begun. Even if family squabbles and political dissonance can be laid aside, the issue of whether God has a proper place at the table is a significant bellwether of enjoyable fellowship. This much I know from my own experience as a non-believer – it feels real weird to pray to a God you truly do not know.

During the 30 years of my life I didn’t go to church, I wasn’t mad at God; I simply didn’t know him and didn’t really care. I know many people today who gave up their faith “for cause.” It might have been a church scandal, the personal sleight or transgression of an insensitive Christian, or the feeling of abandonment by God. To some people, the whole “God” thing just seems stupid. Often, non-believers are simply ambivalent.

I would urge my Christian brothers and sisters to gird up for Scenario Two by praying deeply for understanding, wisdom, courage and patience. We can never argue our faith into another soul; we can only be an example another soul could choose to emulate. And remember … most people don’t have a problem with Jesus; they have a problem with Christians, the church, or “religion.” You’re an ambassador for all four.

Keep “grace” – the pre-meal prayer – simple, but pray clearly with the conviction that thanks is something truly worthy to give to God. It’s the sincerity and the love that you show to God and to others that will rub off on the souls of lost loved ones.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) advises praying for people by name. It works.

WWJD? - No Ifs, Ands or Buts

Spirituality Column #262
November 15, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

WWJD? – No Ifs, Ands or Buts
By Bob Walters

Christians ask “What Would Jesus Do?”

A better question is “What DOES Jesus Do?” An even better question is “What does Jesus do that is a model for my life?” And an even better question than that is “What IS Jesus doing in my life right now?”

Asking what Jesus “would” do splits a couple of linguistically problematic hairs.

A common critique of “WWJD” is that it comes dangerously close to putting “me” in the place of Jesus. Becoming “like” Christ (Philippians 3:10), and actually being Christ, are two vastly, massively and dramatically different things. Jesus commands us to love God, not to be God (thanks to Satan, Adam and Eve learned that one the hard way). Jesus said, “Remember me,” not “Be me.” Be careful.

Also, the word “would” signifies what grammar class calls a subjunctive mood or “conditional” phrase; it implies “if” and introduces doubt. Jesus is not an “if,” He is eternally God and human. Sectarians debate the “nature” and personhood of Jesus after the resurrection but the Bible says He is eternally fully God and fully man.

That’s the final answer, mystery and all. “Jesus is,” not “Jesus if.”

Certainly our earthly, human lives are full of subjunctives, contradictions, ifs, ands, buts and maybes. I project my worldly pride and fight for my “rights” yet often realize later, I’m not in the right. Other people see my failings, which robs my integrity, and I hate when that happens.

Jesus had perfect integrity and never wavered in his responsibility. Not one thing about Jesus was “proud” but everything about Jesus had integrity. Jesus came as a servant (in Greek, dulos, “slave”) without pride or rights, only responsibility to God. He was steadfast in that integrity, and the prideful Pharisees and many others hated Him for it.

If we are shooting for “like Christ,” the starting line is to emulate the integrity of Christ’s commitment to God.

On the up-side, “WWJD” very importantly puts Jesus in our lives today, as in … “What Would Jesus Do … right now?” We don’t “carry that old rugged Cross” because of what happened, like the hymn says, “On a hill far away.” We carry our cross today because Christ is alive today, and because what Jesus did “once for all” with grace and passion on the Cross perpetually restores our eternal human relationship with God the Father … a relationship that perpetually renews with our ongoing faith in Christ.

Jesus is never past tense, and is never woulda’, shoulda’, coulda’.

Jesus is “I am.” Right now, and forever.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) observes that pride and rights are almost always about “me,” and that integrity and responsibility are almost always about God.

© 2011 North Faith Publishing

Dividing Politics and Religion

Spirituality Column #261
November 8, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Dividing Politics and Religion
By Bob Walters

On this off-year Election Day, let’s take an off-beat tour of America’s mix of church and state. The Bible gets first “ups.”

Jesus separated church and state long before the eighteenth century secular humanists identified and attached the inalienable rights of man to modernity. Rights, by the way, are not in the Bible; responsibilities are.

One can consider the entirety of the New Testament and understand the unique moral and creative wholeness of Christian freedom in Jesus Christ.

Or, one can take the common Gospel verse “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:12:17, Luke 20:25), and see that Caesar (specifically here “Caesar’s money” or euphemistically “Rome’s man-made government”) and God play on different teams.

The apostle Paul declares the primacy of our “citizenship in Heaven” (Philippians 3:17, 20), but also invokes his own Roman citizenship in order to be heard (Acts 21:39) and then not to be executed (Acts 22:22ff). In Romans 13 Paul says government is ordained by God and that if we “owe taxes, [then] pay taxes” (verse 7).

While Paul seems to indicate the scary proposition that “Government is God,” he doesn’t, and it’s not. Jesus Christ is God, and Jesus plainly says that while both He (Jesus) and we (Christians) are “in the world,” neither He nor we are “of the world” (John 15:19, 17:14, 16). Christ commands that God is first, and that we are to love God and our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 19:19), and even to love our enemies (5:44).

What the United State Constitution and all it amendments describe is a political context within which the creative freedom of man and the God-ordained morality of “love others as we love ourselves” can prosper and thrive. Over 224 years they have mostly – though not always – thrived, but it is only in the Christian moral context that this kind of document is possible.

Democracy demands moral responsibility, which is different from the “fair” (read “blind”) application of “religious freedom” the secular modern world mistakenly equates and jingoistically describes as “all religions are the same.” They, um, aren’t.

Moral discernment is the first casualty of secularism, which replaces God’s moral truth – Jesus Christ – with man’s moral relativism.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Under God” we enjoy freedom and defend a “government of, by, and for the People.” It certainly can and will “perish from the earth” lest we understand, and understand soon, the indivisible equation of our citizenship both in Heaven and as Americans.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recently read about and laments Europe’s cultural disestablishment of Christianity. He is sure we’ll either learn from Europe’s example, or die the same spiritual death.