Pastor's Notes

Has anyone ever become a Christian before they were a Christian? Some may, as adults or adolescents, consent to becoming a Christian, but the becoming then takes a lifetime. Author and speaker, the late Maya Angelou, was once asked if she was a Christian. Her response: “Not yet!” Indeed.

One of the things I share in pre-marital counseling especially with those whose parents have not yet had the experience of being in-laws, is that it is the couple’s job to break them in. Their parents have never been here before. Their little girl/boy has really grown up and become independent. How to act and relate? It is a learning process for both newlyweds and newly made in-laws. The newlyweds will have to let the in-laws know what they consider proper and improper behavior in their relationship. It is all new ground. How to handle holidays? Visits? Are they to be drop by anytime or call first? As time moves on with children and aging, the issues become larger.

So far you, dear reader, are most likely nodding in agreement at such profundity. Well, maybe not. However, most likely I have not said anything feather-ruffling. Okay, here I go. Be ready for your plume to be ruffled. If the above is true, why then do we seem to think immigrants new to America should arrive as Americans? That is, they should have the same language, culture, values, and belief systems as do we. What if we viewed becoming an American as also a process? The culture by its warm embrace of new arrivals can establish both American value #1 and American culture # 1. We believe our history is one of immigrants and that over all immigrants…those arriving NOT as Americans…are a large part of what makes this a great country.

I remember my 5th or 6th generation American and great-grandfather. The last of his family arrived in 1740. He was born shortly after the Civil War. English was still his second language. Pennsylvania Dutch was his primary form of verbal communication. Yet the nation had been patient with him and the ancestors who bore him. He worked on the railroad and lost his leg in an accident with a caboose. He was a truant officer in his township. Two histories of the town list him and his family as “a prominent family in our town”. Thick accent and all, someone seen as very much one of them…an American.

As Christians, much less as Americans, we get into great trouble whenever we think someone ought to begin as already accomplished at whatever it is they might be starting. Do we really think Babe Ruth hit a home run the first time he grabbed a bat as a child? As Christians we begin as a child of God claimed by God in baptism. We have yet to be molded by beliefs, values, and morals held dear by Christianity and Christians. But we were and have been held by a community of believers. Such is a process and it takes time. I know for me, it continues to take time. Like Maya Angelou, I am not quite there yet. I will have to wait for after this life when God takes me there.

Such an insight ought to give us all a little patience with any on a journey to becoming. I confess to being as impatient as any on such matters. Living in the West there are always so many new people. Often they are also new at their jobs and need time and more experience to better learn their tasks. As someone who still wonders how my first congregation put up with all my greenhorn mistakes, I should be more patient with those new to their craft. I wish I could say I always am, but alas, too many times, not so. But take heart…God is patient. Can we take from God’s great store of patience and use it toward others on their various journeys? Can we be part of the journey of others on their way to becoming?

Passwords! How many do you have? We need them for email, our phones, too many websites and businesses to even count, and so much more. Even our doctor needs one, not to mention our car, the electronic devices controlling our locks, alarm, door bell and other such devices at home. Oh, and don’t forget to change them frequently and make certain you do not ever use the same password in more than one account/device.

My experience with passwords is that they can be absolutely exhausting some times. Too numerous, too complicated, and too necessary. Without them we have no access to much of our modern day life.

Sometimes it seems to me that many of us Christians see Jesus as our password to God. Aha! I have a relationship with Jesus! I have an access to God that many others lack. I just fold those hands and Jesus belongs to me alone. It reminds me of many sibling rivalries that seem to end with, “Mom/Dad loves me best!”

With Jesus we do have a very special access into God. But unlike passwords, this access is not secret and is not the sole possession of any one person or group. We have insight into God that those without Jesus may not have. We can indeed be grateful for that insight. Yet such insight, such access is not like many of our passwords a privilege that we have either earned or been granted just for us.

It seems to me one of the insights Jesus gives us into God is that God is God of all; God is a god who loves and cares for all with no special persons or groups. With God, as we see in Jesus, all, not just us, are special.

The insight we have into God through Jesus is not for exclusivity, privilege, or status. It is so that knowing this all-embracing God whom we worship and follow, we can be those all-inclusive children of God reaching out in demonstration of this wide embrace of God for all.

Passwords by definition must be kept to ourselves. We hide them in secure places on our computers or in small password books cleverly hidden in our home or office. Some we even commit to memory. In Jesus we see a God who is not secret and not hidden.
We see a God who reaches out to those whom many would rather avoid; a God who embraces those who make us and others uncomfortable. We see a God who works to hack our password codes to get through to us so that we might in turn get through to some others.

Jesus. We might want to know more about God, but Jesus is all we need to know about God. Even those without such a password can have access. And God can’t be hacked or disrupted.

“If grace is true, you must bear a true and not fictitious sin”. So said Martin Luther. Luther went on to say God does not save only fictitious sinners, but those who are real sinners; bold sinners. This is why he could also say, “Sin boldly, and believe all the more.” In other words, perhaps our worst sinning occurs when we “sit on our hands”, failing to act instead of plunging in with the hope we are serving.

We are pretty good at this, are we not? How often have you heard (or said?), “I know that I am a sinner, but……” and then go on to make someone else a worse sinner than the one speaking (or us)? Too often! Ours, after all, seem to be trivial or lesser sins compared to someone else. Therein lies both the problem and the theological misunderstanding.

With such talk covering up or making less of our sinful deeds, we allow our faith response to the life, death, and Jesus to morph into a simple moralism. Our sin, along with the sin of others simply becomes a description of right or wrong, good or bad. People, then, become divided into similar categories. There are good people and bad people.

This is a complete misunderstanding of sin. There may be good or bad deeds, but if sin infects us all, that is if all are truly sinners, how does one label a person good or bad?
Does God? Where do you see that in scripture? Where does Jesus say such a thing?

It would seem sin in its most original state achieves its best work at controlling us and leading in those times it works to deny our sinfulness. It pretends to allow us to admit certain sinful deeds almost as a boast, but fails then to convict us on such evidence as sinners. We become good people, after all.

Certainly some sinful actions are worse than others. Some cause more harm. I would much rather have someone hate me than kill me, though both are sinful. Yet both flow from the same source….a deep wrongness within us; a bubbling, churning “Me first” that brews deep inside us all.

“If grace is true…..” If grace is true, we can be honest and open to each other and especially to God. No band aids, camouflage, crutches, or make-up necessary. We can be that very plain person we are when we awake each morning for that initial glance in the mirror. Eyelids may droop, hair can be askew, and eyes glazed. That is who we can be before God, the very person we work hard to cover up and not allow the world to see. Grace is more powerful than our rationalizations, cover ups, and denial. At times the world may buy our disguise, but God does not. Grace does not.

Occasionally we may feel as though our life could be more real, our joy deeper, and our purpose stronger. Perhaps it is because we are putting too much energy into being someone and something other than who we are. To play a role is one thing; to live a life that is true and deep quite another.

Sin boldly. Be aware and admit from where that sin flows. Own our sin! Hold on to the grace that frees us, yes, fees us to even sin again. Bear a true sin. In Jesus Christ, God has already borne a true grace.

Over the years the question has been posed, “Is the book of Jonah a tale of a whale or a whale of a tale?” Something tells me if it was simply one of the above, it would have been forgotten a couple millennia ago and not in either Jewish or Christian scripture.

There is another tale of a great whale: Moby Dick. This story has been read and re-read, told and re-told countless times since its publication in 1851. It seems fans of the novel are in disagreement as to the meaning of “Moby Dick”, but are in solid agreement that it means something and that the something is very important.

Jonah actually does not mention a whale, instead it simply calls Jonah’s temporary home under the sea a big fish. The locale of Jonah is in the Mediterranean, a sea in which there are no whales. Regardless, the book of Jonah is neither tale of a whale nor whale of a tale.

Jonah is a story of humanity that knows what God wants, it has a pretty good idea of what God wills and what God does not will, but for very self-centered reasons humanity fails to do what God wills. Too often it lives out its own personal desires instead.

How many times have you said or heard someone say, “What’s wrong with the world today…..” Never do we or other say what is wrong with the world today is us or something about us. What could be said is what is wrong with the world today (and yesterday and tomorrow) is we too often follow our own will, not God’s. You and I have a very limited perspective of life and the world that cannot see far beyond our own personal world and personal world view. God, the creator, has a much grander view that can see how even small infractions of God’s desire for all the world can harm that world. God sees clearly how what happens in Tempe Arizona can affect people in Africa, and those living in Uruguay can make decisions that somehow can effect people in Tempe.

There is more to Jonah’s story then simple, human narcissism, that seemingly innate drive for self-preservation that too often shifts into overdrive. There is also a story here that says when we overcome our self-indulgent ways, God’s will works! The wicked Ninevites repented right down to their dogs, cats, hamsters and cattle.

True to the Biblical record, the story of Jonah also has a very persistent God. Jonah was, it seems, rather creative in his methods to escape God and God’s will for him. God did not give up. God’s creativity far exceeded that of Jonah. I mean, C’mon…a fish??
I wonder what creative idea God might have in store to bring you or me back to the fold when we go our own way. In Moby Dick, the narrator was called Ishmael. In Jonah, the reluctant prophet may be called us. Certainly the God in Jonah is called ours.