Scrooge of Easter

I am not a “Scrooge”, contrary to the assertions of many of my closest friends and even a few family members.  I dislike the way Christmas has turned into a hype of spending and commercialism.  Perhaps the holiday ought to be renamed, “Consumer Day”.  Christmas has lost much, if not most, of its worship and reverence.  My rejection of what is happening in Christmas is not because I am a Scrooge type character.  I prefer to be called a Christmas purist.

It is sad, but it appears the same thing has happened to Easter.  I am also an Easter purist.  Easter has been turned into a springtime version of Consumer Day, er…, I mean Christmas.  And the invitation to spend to excess has crept into what ought to be the holiest day of the year.  The camel got his nose into the tent with a few small treats for children, the purchase of gift baskets filled not simply with treats but gifts, to the question, “What do you want the Easter Bunny to bring you?”   Sadly, many churches seem to be leading this charge to secularize Easter and rob it of its beauty and meaning.  It appeared that something backfired this Easter and maybe, just maybe, we can gain a warning. 

Over the last few years, a fad (and I use that in its most derisive sense of the word) has swept into churches’ Easter plans, the helicopter egg drop (HED).  In these events, a church hires a helicopter to fly over tossing out plastic eggs filled with prizes, and, once the bomb run has passed, masses of people rush on to the field to greedily gather the eggs.   An HED is expensive.  One report I read said that for 10,000 eggs and a fairly short flight for the chopper, a church can expect to spend up to $10,000.   We might suspect that only mega churches try this.  Not true, a small church (less than 100 in attendance) near my home did an HED last year.  The rational for an HED is simple: 1) it is wonderful community activity which leads to, 2) positive disposition and popularity in the community for the church which will lead to, 3) better attendance at Sunday services.   (I will resist the urge to talk about how much these three motivations are like the temptations of our Savior in the wilderness.)

Something happened this year that ought to cause us to stop and ask, “Is an HED or other gimmick a good idea?”  Lifepoint Church in Plano, TX, planned an HED.  The resulting crowds and disorderliness made it impossible for the event to take place.  Read the details here: http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2016/03/no-eggs-for-you-helicopter-easter-egg-drop-canceled-after-crowd-overwhelms-plano-church.html/

I do not blame the church or the staff for the behavior of sinful people.  We should not expect that sinful people would behave like good Christian people.  However, when a church appeals to the selfish, fallen human nature we might expect bad behavior.  I applaud the church for its desire to reach the community.  I am sure they do a great many wonderful things.  But it appears that Lifepoint and the church in America, is often willing, for the sake of popularity, to squander the holy and sacred.  In the exchange for a little temporary publicity and press, we lose the ability to speak of eternal things. 

Consider this alternative to next year’s HED.  For a few weeks before Easter call the church to a season of deep, painful, and passionate, fasting, meditation and repentance.  Let the church celebrate the week before Easter with a close review of what our Lord did in His last week.  Mark Lord’s Supper Thursday and Good Friday with special prayer and worship.  Use Saturday before Easter to serve the least, the last, and the lost.  Worship Sunday and if you want to spend $10,000, hold a feast for the hungry, destitute, or homeless.  My hero once said, “Let your light shine before men in such a way, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

Pray for the Lifepoint church, that this fiasco will not inhibit the witness for Christ.  And if we want to look above for a great Easter, let’s look to our resurrected Lord not a Sikorsky!

Cinderella, Walt Disney and the American Church

If you have never read an older version of the Cinderella story you might not know that it has very little resemblance to the Walt Disney retelling of the story.  In the version provided for us by the Brothers Grimm there is no fairy godmother, no helpful mice, or pumpkin carriage.  In this older version Cinderella’s stepsisters are very beautiful, her father is a jerk toward her and her help comes from her dead mother and two birds that tend to hover about Cinderella’s mother’s grave, and the story is violent and bloody.  

This old story was a cautionary fable for children to teach them to be “devout and good”.  The Disney version was an entertainment effort designed to make money for the Disney Corporation.  Disney could not have been true to the original version and get the film to theaters.  Some scenes would not have been palatable for Pollyanna consumers of children’s entertainment.  For example, when the prince arrives with the golden slipper the eldest stepsister tries the shoe on in private, but her foot will not fit.

But her great toe prevented her getting it on.  Her foot was too long.

Then her mother handed her a knife and said, “Cut off the toe. When you are Queen you won’t have to walk any more.”

The girl cut off her toe, forced her foot into the slipper, stifled her pain, and went out to the prince. 

 It was only on the way to the palace, tipped off by the birds, that the prince notices the bloody trail following them and hence he returned the older sister.  The second sister was able to get her toes into the shoe, but her heel was too big and so at the insistence of her mother she cut off her heel.  The results were the same.  On the way to the palace the prince, tipped off by the birds, again noticed the bloody trail.  One wonders how bright this prince was.  He returns the second daughter and then Cinderella tries on the shoe and it fits.  But the story is not done.  The stepsisters come to the church for the wedding hoping to curry favor with Cinderella and as they are going into the church the two birds attack them and each girl has an eye pecked out.  After the ceremony, as they were coming out of the church, the birds attack again and each girl has her remaining eye plucked out. 

The story doesn’t end with the happy married couple riding off in a carriage to live happily ever after.  The ending is not really about Cinderella at all.  It concludes with; “And so for their wickedness and falseness they were punished with blindness for the rest of their days.” This ending seems more Alfred Hitchcock than Walt Disney. 

In order to get parents in 1950 to spend money, and take their children to the theater Disney had to soften the hard, sharp edges of the story.  The optimistic and positive outlook of the 50’s would not be consistent with the self-mutilation and avian savagery of the older version.  To be successful, Disney had to give the people what they wanted, a story that was as hopeful as the American Dream. 

I fear that the church in America in the last generation has done much the same thing as Disney.   We have taken the edge off the message because, we think, people will not respond well to a message that is negative.  People want to hear ‘good news’ at church, but we have miss-defined good news.  We have defined good news down to personal peace and affluence.  I know a preacher that was once told by his leadership team to preach, “sermons that make people feel good”. 

I recently listened to the song “Hold Me” by Jamie Grace.  If the word "Lord" is an interjection, this is simply a love song of a girl for her boyfriend.  If the word "Lord" is a reference to the King of the universe, this song is the religious pabulum that makes up 'contemporary Christian' culture.  We have had to drop some key themes from the message of the Gospel in order to make is sellable to the masses.

I believe the Gospel is good news; it is, in fact, the greatest news.  But the message of the Gospel has no good news until we first explain the bad news.  Until we understand the bad news we have no way to value the good news.  Without hearing the bad news the message we have is little more than, “You are a nice person, but you may have a few little issues and your life is pretty good, but Jesus makes you, and everything else, better.”  If that is truly the message of the Bible, then it is a small wonder that the church in American is in rapid decline. 

But if the bad news is: “You are doomed, dead, lost and hopeless.  Your life on earth is a mere temporary reprieve from a just and fair punishment of utter isolation in a torment that is beyond imagination and is eternal.  At your very best you are vile, dirty, disgusting and as wholesome as a used tampon (Isaiah 64:6).  But the whole account of your evil and wickedness debt has been transferred to Jesus.  On the Cross He has made possible for His perfection and holiness to be transferred to you. It is yours completely free.”  When we hear the good new in light of the bad news, we see it really is the best news.

We do not need a Disney version of Christianity; there is just too much at stake for us to offer anything less than the good news of the Cross. 

A Cycle of Dangerous Prayers

You may have heard or even said something like, “Don’t pray for patience!”  We say that in a sort of joking way.   We believe that if we pray for patience, rather than God supernaturally zapping us with patience, He will instead provide us trying opportunities in which we can exercise patience and there by grow patience.  While we say, “don’t pray for patience” as a joke, behind that joke is a terrible accusation.  We are in an off hand way accusing God of evil, giving us something that is not good for us rather than admitting we are selfish and impatient and want to stay that way. If God gives it to us it is for our good, even if it is difficult, painful or something that we don’t want.  Praying for patience is a ‘hard prayer’.

When we ask God to do nice things for us, or to give us things we want, or take away trouble we are praying what I call “safe prayers”.  There is nothing wrong with these kinds of prayers, but for the most part they require very little from us.  But when we pray the hard prayers we are entering into dangerous territory.  I believe that God will rescue us if our following Him takes us to dangerous places.  But God never promises that we will not go to the dangerous place, and sometimes that rescue may come in the form of death, which takes us to glory. Hard or dangerous prayers are where we ask for change in ourselves, where we ask to die to self, and dying to self is never easy.  It maybe those are the best kinds of prayers, but often they are answered in ways that are far from easy.  They are answered when we meet the living God; they are answered in brokenness, repentance and often in great sorrow.   There are answered in changes in our life, changes we likely would not have undertaken without God’s prompting.  They bring about changes we might not have wanted, at least at first. 

In my work as a church coach I teach church members to pray what I call a cycle of prayers.  They are a cycle because it would be very difficult to put them in any kind of order.  You can’t say, “This prayer follows that prayer as 2 follows 1.  Rather these prayers inform each other and shape each other and, hopefully, enrich each other.  As we pray through these prayers we learn about ourselves and find a need to pray them again and again.

Prayer #1

“Holy Spirit bring your loving judgment on me.  Convict me and make me profoundly uncomfortable where my life does not please you.”

Jesus said in John 16 that, “He ( the Holy Spirit) will convict the world”, there is a lot of worldliness still in me.  On the one hand we are honestly unaware of how sinful we are.  On the other hand we are actually pretty proficient at white washing, managing and soft selling our sin.

We have the problem of wanting God to fix everyone else, but leave us alone.  This first prayer is about asking God to reveal our own personal sinfulness and personal wickedness and bring us under such conviction that we come to repentance. 

As you pray this you might want to read and meditate on John 16:7-11

Prayer #2

“Father I surrender to you my rights, my will, and my control” 

God is a giving God.  He gave us life, He gave us His word, and most dramatically He gave His only begotten Son.  He is a giver!  Jesus is a giver.  He gave his life for us.  He gave His body and blood for us.  He gives us a home in Heaven.  He is a giver!  The Holy Spirit is a giver.  He gives us Himself to live in us and He gives us gifts for the purpose of ministry.  NOW HAVING BEEN ADOPTED INTO THIS FAMILY how can we not give ourselves to God.  I believe the great heresy of the 21 century church will be the teaching that God’s ultimate purpose and will is for us to have abundant financial and physical blessings.   No doubt God does sometimes bless in these ways but his greatest will for us is that we die to self so we can live to him.

As you pray this you might want to read and meditate on Luke 9:22-24

Prayer #3

“Lord what do You want to do through me.” 

There are a lot of people who do a lot or religious stuff that has nothing, whatsoever, to do with God.  We pray for what we want, try to pretend it is God’s will, then we get mad at God if we don’t get our way.  As long as we are making the decisions and calling the shots we will not see the hand of God at work, and we will remain an angry, frustrated, discontent people. 

When we pray “God what should I do” notice who is doing it, and guess who will get the glory.  We are incapable of the heroic changes that God wants to work in our lives if we are doing it in our strength.

As you pray this you might want to read and meditate on Matthew 7:21

Like praying for patience these prayers may not bring about ease and comfort.  They may bring about serious heart ache and struggle.  But God will meet us in these dangerous places and there do His great work of transforming us into the image of His Son.

Note: I didn’t originate any of these prayers they came from three different teachers I have known.

A Heroic Story

In 1897, Heinrich Dreser of the German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, was concerned about the “enfeebling” effect on the heart of the company’s new drug, aspirin.  His concern was that aspirin might be counter-productive to the body that was recovering form an ailment.  Ironically, this is the very drug that many doctors today advise their patients to take daily for heart health. 

Rather than aspirin, Dreser recommended a new drug that he had just developed and tested on himself and a few colleagues.  This drug had a ‘heroic’ effect on the heart. 

The drug was released to the public in 1898 with great expectations. It was marketed as the era’s “wonder drug.”  While it didn’t claim to cure the common cold, it was better than aspirin in treating the cold, and safer than codeine; it also claimed that the drug was better on pain than Morphine.

Within a year the drug was available in various forms, including lozenges.  It became very popular in the United States.  A prestigious Boston medical journal reported, “It possesses many advantages over morphine. It’s not hypnotic and there’s no danger of acquiring a habit.” After 6 years of clinical trials the medical community had reached the conclusion and agreed this medication was wonderful.

Before long some patients were reporting that they were becoming immune to the wonderful effects of this new drug.   They needed larger and larger doses to acquire the desired effect.  Hospitals were beginning to deal with patients that were apparently becoming addicted to the non-habit forming drug.  The evidence of the negative effect of this new derivative began to mount to the point that in 1913 Bayer stopped making their “Heroic” wonder drug.  The name of this drug was taken from the word, “heroic”; it was called heroin. 

When someone comes along and tells me about the greatest thing that happens to be the newest, new thing, I get a little nervous.  I am not opposed to being culturally sensitive. I am not opposed to contemporary worship or music.  I am not actually talking about style at all.  What I am talking about is when the church, in a rush to be cutting edge and thereby hope to gain a growth advantage, fails to be very careful in examining what we are doing and saying.   Let’s balance our creativity and passion for the new with a wisdom that measures every moment by the eternal truth of God’s Word.