Thursday, September 27, 2018

Baptism and the Survival of Fish

As I ate my cinnamon biscuit at a fast food restaurant near Nashville, Tennessee recently, I listened to a group of men reminisce. One spoke of growing up in a small Texas town, where new converts for the Church of Christ he attended were baptized in a nearby pond. After hearing that a man with less than stellar reputation would be baptized, he said, a man in the small town had protested that the church must not baptize the convert in the pond. He insisted that all the fish would die if the other man’s body entered the water. Sin corrupts our influence in the world, but rarely does it affect the environment. Although prospective visitors to church services have confessed fears of the church building ceiling cracking when they entered, I have yet to see such happen. I have seen a person’s appearance deteriorate markedly in a five-year period when he abused drugs and engaged in other criminal behavior. Choosing unethical or immoral behavior has destroyed relationships and ended employment. The greatest impact of sin, however, is on the sinner’s soul. “Wickedness burns like a fire,” the prophet Isaiah wrote, “it consumes briers and thorns; it kindles the thickets of the forest, and they roll upward in a column of smoke” (Isaiah 9:18 ESV). The symbolic language of the prophet describes how rebellion against God consumes and destroys. Sin will rarely destroy literal fish (The exception would be if someone intentionally poisoned a lake.); it does destroy dreams and relationships. If we turn from sin and confess our faith through baptism, God cleanses us and equips us for work he has prepared for us to do (Acts 22:16; Ephesians 2:10). No fish die; no roofs collapse. Scars remain, but as we continue to obey God, they too begin to heal. Turn to the Lord today.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Reacting to Tragic News

News stories evoke visceral reactions. Sometimes the headlines intend to provoke attention to or against an agenda and steer us toward a desired reaction. If we read deeply into the article, our reaction may change or become more intense. A police officer shot and killed a black immigrant in Dallas last Thursday night. Your reaction as you read those words would probably differ from what you would have felt if you had read that an accountant who was a great song leader at his church and a graduate of a private Christian university had been killed in his apartment by an intruder. Yet both sentences describe the same event that occurred this past week in Dallas, Texas. Here is a link to an article about that event.As we read or watch news media, as we interact on social media, as we talk with friends, we will react to what we see or hear. Our challenge is to read or listen carefully, and to seek to learn what actually is the case before we react too strongly. As the case described above unfolds, we will learn more about what transpired and why it happened. In the meantime, a Christian family in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia and the Churches of Christ throughout the Caribbean who knew the young man who was killed as one of their own and a song leader at regional lectureships, will cope with their grief. I know how it feels to lose a loved one to death without warning. I don’t know what exactly they feel, but I know how I felt when my son died from an aneurysm three years ago. We need to pray for them as they grieve, for the officer who killed him and for her family (she and they will have to come to terms with what she did, however the investigation ends), and for friends of Botham Jean, our brother in Christ, as they respond to their new reality. We need to pray for ourselves, that we may overcome prejudices and fear as we learn to love one another. Let us seek peace and pursue it. Let us love truth, however harshly it may grate against what we desire. Let us be gentle with one another. Pray hard, my friends. (A previous version of this blog appeared in the bulletin of Leavenworth (KS) Church of Christ on September 9, 2018).s