Wicked Wednesdays and Sinister Sundays

The first church I pastored was a rural church in west Tennessee. You turned off the main road, traveled about three miles and wound up at Latham's Chapel Baptist Church. It was a great church to begin one’s ministry, and I was blessed with a gracious church family. Every Sunday they would say to me, “Pastor, you just keep preaching better and better.” I thought it was a huge compliment – looking back at the notes from those early sermons, I now know the truth. I couldn’t have gotten any worse.

Being removed from the main road made things difficult in the winter. A little bit of snow stopped all traffic in its tracks in rural Tennessee. Most winters not much snow fell, but one winter was extraordinary, a bit like this winter. For seven or eight weeks (I forget exactly which) we had snow every Wednesday and Saturday. A few of those Wednesdays we just canceled church, but after three or four, we moved into town where the roads got cleared off. The Saturdays were more difficult. The snow would wait to come when it was dark on Saturday night, and we would wake up to a few inches of snow on the road in the morning. We canceled every Sunday night during those weeks and half the Sunday mornings. We started calling the days wicked Wednesdays and sinister Sundays.

What is a pastor to do when he doesn’t preach? There were lots of other things to do – we still had funerals, risking our own lives in the process. There were hospital visits to make and counseling needed. I was attending Union University some twenty miles away, and I made it to most classes. Best of all, I found lots of time to study, reflect, and pray. I finally had time to prepare some of my sermons in advance, seek God’s leadership for the journey ahead, read some books, and truly improve my preaching skills. Honestly, I got to the place where I enjoyed those snow-filled Wednesdays and Sundays.

I looked up snow in the Bible and read this verse from Job 38:22, God’s response to Job’s demand that God give him the meaning of all his suffering: “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?” I thought that was a strange verse and a strange response – what kind of battle does God fight with snow and hail? In the context God is simply saying to Job, “You can’t understand most of what I do, how do you think you could understand why suffering comes?” But the reference to snow and hail – I decided to preach a sermon about it during that snowy winter. I entitled the sermon “Snow and God’s Providence.” I indicated the biggest battle God fought with snow was one against human arrogance. I talked about how God used a little thing like a snowflake to stop cars and trucks in their tracks and bring everything to a halt. However strong and mighty we might think we are, a few tiny snow flakes exposed our weakness.

I thought it was a pretty good sermon. The folks at the church said I was getting better and better. To this day I see snow as God battling our arrogance.

Wicked Wednesdays and sinister Sundays – maybe they will do us some good if we pay a little prayerful attention.

Rare Form

After a long day my wife and I were getting ready to watch a little TV before bed when she said to me, “You’re in rare form tonight!”

I can’t tell you exactly what I did to bring that comment from her. I had just made a very sarcastic joke – was that what she reacted to? It was a Monday and Monday’s are not always a pastor’s best day of the week – was it showing? Recently it seems like I have had more plates spinning in the air than I can keep going (you remember that old trick, don’t you) – was my panic showing? Maybe I was jittery because I had too much coffee – I don’t know.

You are in rare form – I can’t even tell you if that was a compliment or a judgment, but as I played with the phrase, it occurred to me that the world around us ought to be able to say that about Christians. “You are in rare form” – meaning that what others see in us is not what you see in everybody.

When I first became a Christian I had a co-worker named Scott. Scott’s language rose from the gutter and so did his personal ethics. Even so, Scott was a likable guy and after awhile he asked me a question: “Are you religious or something? I notice you aren’t like the rest of us – what gives?” I was most pleased that he could tell the difference, even though I was a irritated that it took his nudging to share my faith. Scott didn’t embrace Christ, preferring to, as he put it, "take his chances." Perhaps later on he did – I am just grateful that I was in rare form before Scott.

I think Anne Graham Lotz describes what rare form ought to be manifested in the life of a Christ follower in her book My Heart’s Cry. I want more of Jesus, she says – but what does that mean? Her chapter headings give us insight: I want more of His voice in my ear, more of His tears on my face, more of His praise on my lips, more of His death in my life, more of His dirt on my hands, more of His fruit in my service – you get the idea. More of Jesus in every area of our lives.

My prayer is that these things would not be occasional or fleeting, rare indeed, but normal, natural, a daily thing. Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Simple translation: more of Christ in every area of my life more of the time.

Definitely not rare form.

We are reminded in 2 Corinthians 4:7 that we have the treasure of Christ in jars of clay. My fear is always that what people see the most is the jar of clay. My heart’s desire is that they see the treasure shining forth. My prayer for myself and those Christ followers I journey with is that such a thing would not be rare form but our typical way of life. We will, of course, need God’s surpassing power to pull that off.

Rare form – I wonder what my wife was referring to?

Random

I gave a book to my daughter Alyssa this past Christmas that I got for myself. I did it on purpose – I was interested in the book and thought my daughter might enjoy it. Beyond that, I thought we could talk about our reactions and reflections on what we read. Last year my son Chad did the same for me – he gave me the space trilogy by C. S. Lewis and for the next four months we talked about it. A highlight of the year for me, and I hope for him as well.

Anyway, I gave this book to Alyssa by Don Miller entitled A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. I had read an earlier book by Miller and thought this one might be interesting though I know Miller is not for everyone. I thought the book might be a good read and good discussion for us.

Alyssa and I do not have much experience reading and talking about books together. A few years ago she urged me to read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book The Brother’s Karamazov. I trudged through the book with great effort and then called her to talk about it (about four months later, as I recall). Looking back, I don’t think she believed I would read the Russian novel in the first place. When I finished it and wanted to talk about it, she confessed that it had been years since she read it, that she had read it in a hurry, and she didn’t remember the parts I was asking her about. We talked about her skimming the book again (Ha!) and then we would talk about it. That was three or four years ago now. No discussion yet.

Back to Miller’s book – he starts out with a series of random reflections on life, a bit like this blog. He talks about a friend who wrote down every experience he could remember and came up with five hundred pages of memories. Miller confesses that the narrative of his life would not be near so long – in fact, he even wonders what to make of all the experiences of life. They seem so random, some highs and lows and all sorts of things in-between. The question is, what story do they tell? Where is life going with all of these disconnected experiences?

That idea speaks to me because each day can be somewhat random for me. The one sure thing I face each week is the relentless return of the Sabbath with its sermon preparation, but other than that, any given day can be a smorgasbord of unexpected experiences. It can be so random, and most days I don’t mind it at all. I have learned that ministry takes place in those random moments as much or more than the planned moments, and that God speaks at unexpected times in unusual ways. At the same time, I have to admit that there are moments I look back and realize that I can’t get all the random events to hang together – I am not always sure what story they tell. Miller feels the same and hopes that some day in eternity he might tell God about all his experiences and God will let him in on what it all meant.

What a random blog – is there a point? Yes, of course!

I often return to the narrative in Genesis 37-50 about Joseph precisely because his life was so random and unexpected. You remember, as a teenager he had some pretty brazen dreams and he dared boast about them to his brothers. They hated him for it and did their best to destroy his dreams, which they did for a number of years. And then more than twenty years later it all makes sense – he tells his brothers that, though what they did was a random act of violence, God was at work using whatever randomly came into his life to bring him to the place where he, Joseph, could be the savior of his family.

I like Joseph’s story because it makes me realize God really is able to pull together all these seemingly random moments of life, the good and the bad and the in-between, and accomplish something far greater than we might realize. In my better moments I tell God that I am okay with that, that I don’t need to know the story line yet, that I will simply trust Him on the journey.

And then there are those times when I stare at some random moment and say, “Father, what is that about? Where does that fit in?”

Are you going to try and tell me you don’t do the same thing?