An Easter to Remember

Happy Easter.  I have to admit those words are hard to say this morning.  Easter is supposed to be time of great joy: a welcoming of new life, new possibilities into the world at spring time.  It is reveling in the triumph of life over death – and I don’t feel it this year.  With everything going on, with the attacks in Belgium that happened earlier this week, with the bombings in turkey and elsewhere that the media failed to report, I just feel … numb.  And that’s just with everything going on over there; over here it isn’t any better.  As Americans we live in the wealthiest nation on the planet, and yet despite this we lead the industrialized world in child poverty, and we use that wealth to have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. Whereas similar countries like Germany incarcerate 76 out of 100,000, Italy 85, and Saudi Arabia 161, the U.S. manages to find ways to imprison a whopping 716  people out of 100,000.  Child sex trafficking continues to rise, making up 40% of all human trafficking cases and the FBI has identified the twin cities as one of 13 US cities with high incidents of child prostitution.  Agencies say you cannot be homeless for 24 hours in the twin cities before you are approached to enter a prostitution ring, and the fact is reports also say they only ask so many times.  Urban food deserts are on the rise, our inner city poor have to travel miles to even get to store that has fresh produce and healthy things to eat, slavery is a real thing on our shores AGAIN, and not only does our elected leadership continuously do nothing about any of it, but as a pastor who also is a law school graduate, it infuriates me that I am continually asked to support one of two parties whose frontrunners are either scandal ridden lawbreakers or people who actively advocate war crimes.  So, no, I must confess I’m not feeling it this Easter season.  Everything we’ve done today feels rote, a ritual done because it is expected, not because it is relevant.

                And so I ask myself, how did we get to this place, how did we end up this way as a nation?  Easter has always been the highest point of the Christian year.  Indeed, from what I can tell about the Earliest Church from the writings and structures they left behind, every Sunday used to be an Easter, every Sunday was a celebration of the continuous renewal of God’s blessings of life and when Easter itself actually came around – THAT was a blowout party.  How can it be that Easter, a day that had so much joyous meaning for our ancestors that they would sooner be put to death than abandon it, how can it be that this day has dwindled down to a mere tale, an hour long service where we sing sunny hymns and act joyously for a little bit, only to go home afterward unchanged?  For the Christian, Easter is not just a holiday, it is not just a day where we dress up nicely and allow our children to ingest copious amounts of sugar to move on to a nice ham dinner afterward, Easter is the celebrated Supreme Reality.  Through the eyes of Easter, Death is an aberration, a disease well on its way to being cured.  Through the Eyes of Easter, this body, this world, this existence, are not a dime-store knock offs.  We in fact would not be better off if we were never born; that this physical life of ours contains blessings that not one other creature in this universe gets to experience.  Through the eyes of Easter, I see that Good wins.  That evil cannot have the day.  That all suffering is fleeting, and that one day cruelty, injustice, hatred, and pain will all be things of the past.

                And so I cried out to my God and my Savior, “What happened?”  Easter is supposed to be the Christian identity, how can we live out the joys of Easter, how can we embody its meaning, how can we make it relevant to people, when we ourselves have never once experienced it?  Where … did Easter … go?

                I remember many an Easter from my own childhood.  We’d wake up that Sunday, my brother and I, and we’d go hunting for our Easter baskets.  The sun was usually up, the air crisp; we’d find our Easter baskets and devour the chocolate rabbit plus a few jelly beans before breakfast.  Mom would make pancakes and sausage, but the end result was always the same on Easter Sunday – The church would swell up as exhausted parents would force their children to sit still on a sugar high for an hour.  The pastor would muddle through a sermon, having already done a Good Friday (and sometimes a Maundy Thursday service), learning to crack a joke when a child’s energy levels exceeded the fear of their parents.

                My parents brought me to church every Sunday, not just Easter, but they didn’t really believe.  Like many today they were agnostics and practical atheists.  They didn’t really believe in Jesus or any of this resurrection stuff.  Like the Greeks and their festivals to Zeus, so was Easter to the Christians – a people thoughtlessly playing out their stories and that was about it.  They didn’t come to church, they didn’t bring me and my brother to church, because they believed they were imparting essential life truths to us; they brought us to church to appease their own parents and the society around them.  In truth, as a pastor I don’t really blame them.

                As the first generation after the 2^nd world war and as the first generation to really go to college, they had questions honestly raised by their education, questions that quite frankly their rural blue-collar parents had no idea how to answer.  A factory or an office worker knows little of history or the historical process and the only archeology a farmer engages in is when the plow happens to dig something up.  Of course, as a man with a law degree who graduated seminary, I now know those questions could have been answered.  The scholarship to answer those basic questions of faith had been around since at least the forties; my parents simply chose not to look for them.  At the end of the day, feeling forced into doing something they didn’t want to do, it was easier to surround themselves with shallow worldly questions than to be honest and seek after deep spiritual answers.

                Of course, I don’t really blame my grandparents for this either.  Times were changing and changing fast.  Their children moved far away into the city, got an education.  They entered into a profession, instead of just finding a job.  As a nation we went from horse drawn buggies to muscle cars and propeller planes to jets that broke the sound barrier.  Computers, smart watches, and phones that most people don’t talk on but just use to take pictures and text.  Gay Marriage, Transgendered people, multiple religions, it was a dizzying array of changes to throw at a people who grew up having their milk delivered by wagon.  To ensure their children didn’t lose their roots, they did what their own parents did to them and what their parents did to them: they used the power of the family to drive their children into their place.  They called, they nagged, they threatened to cut people from their will and at times even exiled their own children to make an example to the rest of the family.  They didn’t foster faith so much as they drove home the words and practices that made themselves feel comfortable.  They didn’t love their children no matter what, if they wanted to do that they would have journeyed with them in their questions instead of insisting they repeat the supposed answers.  When their children asked them if Jesus was real or if the resurrection was myth they could have responded “I believe so, but that’s what I was taught.  Let’s ask our pastor, or let’s see if we can go to a seminary professor and see what they have to say.  In fact, let’s make a project of it this year.  Let’s talk to many pastors and lots of different professors and see if we can’t help.”  To be honest, however, I don’t know that my grandparents ever made their children feel safe enough to ask those questions.  Tradition has been called the “Tyranny of the Dead”, and with every act that my grandparents did to isolate their children, to manipulate family, it was done with exactly one haunted look in their eyes – the look that asked “What would my parents think if they were alive today.”

                Ladies and Gentlemen, I propose to you that we are not achieving the Easter Experience because none of us want to go through Good Friday to get it.  We all want the incredible joy, the freedom, and the triumph that Easter represents, but we refuse to put to death the things that are keeping us from it.  Like a dog with a large stick, we want to hold on to the things we feel entitled to and yet we remain baffled when we can’t seem to get through the door.  Christianity began as a Jewish sect, and to experience the phenomenal life-changing joy of the Resurrection they had to put down everything that they were raised to value.  The Jewish people of the first century commonly believed in a Messiah of War, that violent righteousness and vindication would ever somehow inaugurate God’s kingdom of Peace.  That had to die.  Many Jews dreamed of a Jewish theological state, that tenets of true Jewish religion would become enforceable by law.  That had to be killed.  The Jews of that era also believed that the Jewish way made them better than everybody else and they believed that the gentiles could never be the people of God, too.  That racism had to be put down.  Everything they hoped for, everything they felt entitled to, everything they ever believed in, all of it had to be shattered and the broken pieces of their desires piled up in a heap at the foot of the cross before they could experience the fulfillment of God’s promises to them and before the enduring pieces of their faith would be revealed.  It is no different for us.   Easter, ladies and gentlemen, was the good news no one was looking for or even would have wanted, but once lived it was the joy that could not be stamped out.  We can have that Joy too.  Even in today’s world that seems to create one new nightmare after another, we too can experience victory.  It is not gone, it is not irrelevant.  We too can embody the resurrection reality and when confronted with those nightmares we can know it’s just a dream.  The terrible evils that we encounter are passing, we will one day wake up from them.  But even so, through Easter we are given power and we are reminded that even though we are asleep we can still control the dream.  What makes a nightmare a nightmare is the feeling of our own powerlessness.  Easter tells us that powerlessness IS A LIE.  The world as we experience is not the world as it has to be, it can change!  But it takes us putting down that which makes us a nightmare to others.  It takes us going through our own Good Friday and trusting God to pick up what’s left.  

                So, ladies and gentlemen, what will it be?  Will this Easter be just another themed Sunday, one out of 52 others but with a duck or a bunny motif, one where we sing sunny songs and then return to the world at large; to our businesses, to our homes, to our lives that force us to be fake people eternally hiding behind a shallow mask, serving a world that literally just wants you to pay bills, mop floors and die?  Do we want that or do you want something more?  Because a better life is waiting for you if you do.

Amen and Amen.

Can Lent be Relevant?

Good Morning!  Grace and peace to all of you this 5^th Sunday in the Lenten Season.  Now, I don’t know about all of you but 5 weeks into anything I tend to get pretty philosophical.  Whether its five weeks into a diet or 5 weeks into an exercise routine, we all begin to ask those really deep, introspective questions like  “My God, what did I get myself into?,” and, “Why in heaven’s name am I even doing this?”  Lent, it seems, isn’t really all that different. 

                We all know the rules for Lent, right?  It is a season within the church year that we are supposed to give something up for God, or if we’re feeling particularly medieval we end up lining our Friday meals with fish, but Lent just isn’t something we Protestants tend to do very well.  I think we don’t do it very well because we don’t really understand it.  As a people who tried like the dickens to get away from Roman Catholic tradition, I think Lent ends up being treated like crazy uncle Lew at those family holiday dinners – we all knows he’s there, he only shows up once a year, and we figure if we just ignore him long enough maybe he’ll finally go away.

                As far as church seasons go, I’ll admit it doesn’t have the rock star appeal of either Christmas or Easter, but that doesn’t mean Lent doesn’t have something very meaningful to bestow on now.  Traditionally, Lent is meant to represent the 40 days that Jesus was in the wilderness.  It is a time meant for reflection, of looking deeply inward, and learning to do without so we learn to rely on God.  But you may still ask me, “All that’s fine, Keven, but as you pointed out at the beginning I don’t know why I am doing this and quite frankly year after year, Lent has had no bearing on my life at all, save to make church services more depressing for about a month.  What is Lent’s relevancy for today?

The answer to that, oddly enough, is found within our gospel story.  John tells us that six days before the Jewish Passover Jesus has returned to the house of Lazarus, whom he raised from the dead.  Now that event was of special Jewish significance.  As modern readers of the ancient text we often miss the more subtle hints…no, not subtle, because they aren’t - The more silent hints at Jesus’ Divinity.  In the first century, it was believed that Leprosy was so terrible, so thoroughly deplorable a disease that only God could remove it.  So when our gospel writers have Jesus heal lepers, what are they saying?  When our gospel writers show that Jesus has complete mastery over nature, calming its chaos with but a word – what are they saying?  In the same manner, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead had special Jewish significance because God alone had that power, and now He was coming over for dinner.

Can you imagine?  I mean what do you do?  What food do you put on?  What serving wear do you set out?  Not only is God coming over for an extended brunch, but He’s coming after giving you a gift that literally no ever gets.  After getting your brother back from being four days dead, do you bring out your finest grilled cheese?  I mean, what do you do?  The reality is we would all do exactly what they did – pretend it’s normal.  I love how true to life this story is.  There’s Lazarus just hanging at the table with guys, pretending like nothing’s happened.  Martha’s in the kitchen as she always is, drowning out the awkwardness of the situation with the dishes, but Mary…Mary doesn’t.  Overwhelmed by everything that has gone on, overwhelmed by the gift of her brother back, overwhelmed by the radical forgiveness and love involved in giving that gift to a thoroughly unworthy and sinful family, Mary is the only one who reacts properly.  She brings out the most expensive thing in their house and she takes on the role of a servant, wiping Jesus’ feet with her own hair.  She opens the bottle of perfume and pours it on Jesus’ feet; wiping off the grime, the dirt, the many miles of Judean countryside in this one shocking act of humility.  With every pass over his feet, as her hair becomes caked with the dust of every mile that Jesus walked she is saying, I know who you are, and the dirt of this world does not belong on you.  I am the dirty one, thoroughly unworthy of the tremendous gift that you are given.  I am grateful. 

Yes, out of love, out of tremendous gratitude for having her brother returned to her, Mary shocks everyone in the house and breaks every … possible… Jewish taboo.  A lady of the house acting like a servant, doing the very worst of servant jobs, using expensive perfume rather than olive oil, and daring to even touch a man in a culture that did everything to keep them separate.  But out of the entire family, Mary is the only one who believes that God is to be valued more than custom.  Like any other shocking act, however, it tends to bring out people’s very worst.  When something happens that is sudden and, yes, even offensive, we aren’t given the opportunity to think, to keep up our normal appearance.  All we can do is react and so we see a window into everyone’s soul.  What lurks hidden beneath the surface becomes seen, and a person’s true character is revealed.  

It is here that Judas, the disciple who was about to betray Jesus, speaks.  And of course, of all the things that he would complain about it is about the money.  He does not protest Mary’s actions because she is taking on a task unworthy of her station; he is not objecting that Mary, a woman, is touching a man who is not her husband.  A person’s obsessions are often their undoing, and Judas’ eyes are on the very expensive bottle of perfume…watching as Mary first brings it out and reacting as its seal is broken and its contents wasted when olive oil would have sufficed.  It is this that Judas disputes, it is over this that his ire is raised – a glimpse into his true character that only now, years later, does our gospel writer mourn that he did not see.

John remembers how Judas objected that this expensive object wasn’t sold and given to the poor, but John, as he so often does in his gospel, tells his audience the truth in hindsight.  John says that in the end Judas did not really care about the poor.  He was a thief, obsessed with monetary gain, and  he used to steal from the common purse.  Judas, the namesake of Judah, not only the name born by the faithful kingdom of Israel but also the name of the honest brother amongst Jacob’s sons.  Judas learned that because of his namesake people would trust him.  He knew how to hide behind it, cover up his sin, and John speaks bitterly as a man who fell for it for years.

Now it must be remembered the risk that Mary is taking in doing this; that cannot be overlooked.  Their households are not ours, and it cannot be ignored that Mary has placed herself substantially in harm’s way by doing this.  Judas has rebuked Mary, and in that time and place when a male guest rebukes a female it is the man of houses duty to discipline her.  Women who performed such acts were regularly beaten for doing such things.  Hospitality was a matter of great importance in those days, and if it took punishing a servant or a sister to satisfy a guest, especially a deeply honored one like Jesus and his disciples, the men of the house did not hesitate to do it.  But before anybody can act, Jesus speaks.  Rather than address Mary’s behavior in any way, he calls out his own disciple for his lack of compassion.  “Leave her alone,” Jesus says, “she bought this perfume for the day of my burial, a practice that women regularly participate in.  You have the poor always Judas, but you do not always have me.”  In one swift stroke Jesus not only rebukes Judas but he also saves Mary, showing Lazarus he is not offended by her actions.  But there is something else going on here, something a reader needs to pay special attention to notice.  Whereas the other gospels have Jesus speaking in the future tense when describing this scene, John has Jesus speaking in the present.  Notice that Jesus does not say, “You will always have the poor”, “you will not always have me”, but rather Jesus says that right now you have the poor, Judas, but right now you do not have me.  You have chosen your obsession over me, my disciple; you have willingly chosen that which chains you down over your own Salvation.  Many claim that Jesus is foreshadowing his upcoming death, but that is not all that Jesus is doing here.  He is also giving Judas a dire warning.  Do not think your motives are hidden from me, Judas.  The others here are fooled by you, but I am not.  Everyone here has their sin, but the difference is you love yours and it is going to get you into dire, dire trouble.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason for Lent.  That is why the Church sets aside 40 days every year and asks us to take a hard look at ourselves, to take real and practical steps to not just see our sin but to show our Savior that we want to be free of them.  The Church does this because in her ancient wisdom she realizes any one of us can be the next Judas.  Any one of us can learn to hide our true selves from our brothers and sisters; to nurture our obsessions and learn to love our chains more than we love the God who wants to set us free. 

Sin has been described as spiritual insanity, a state of the human heart that desires the cancer more than the chemo, the love of the sickness to the point that we reject being well.  The Church knows we all suffer from this condition, and it knows it is difficult, but to prevent us from being the next Judas and suffering his terrible fate it recommends we do everything the disciples didn’t – that we enter a time of ugly reflection and that give up the things that chain us down.  Most people think Lent is about misguided notions of purity. I think if the Hebrew Scriptures teach us anything it is that chasing after purity is a fool’s errand - it is God who makes us pure.  Lent is not about getting to Easter as a purified human being.  Lent is about showing my God upon the day of His Resurrection that I have shed the chains that He died to rid me of.  Just like Mary’s Perfume, Lent is my paltry gift to God in response to all that God has done for me.  It is a chance to show the Divine that I do not value my obsessions more than I value Him.

And so now I must ask you, as the elected parish minister of this congregation, what are your obsessions?  What are the things that chain you down that you don’t want to be rid of?  Are you like Judas, do you obsess over money?  Are you afraid of not having enough or do you feel shame at not being able to pay your bills?  Turn those fears over to God, money will never make those fears go away.  Are you like Martha?  Do you obsess over your work?  Do you find that you can avoid awkward social situations by just going off and doing something?  Turn those anxieties over to God, turn them over before all you have is your work and no one to share them with.  Are you like Lazarus?  Do you obsess over propriety?  Do you value acting normal so you don’t feel embarrassed, pretending like nothing has happened so you don’t have to feel you owe somebody something?  Turn them over to God, turn them over before your obsession with propriety turns you into an ingrate, demeaning each and every gift you are given.  Don’t be like those people, don’t be chained down by obsession and fears.  Be like Mary, turn your worries, your fears, and your brokenness over to God.   Be like Mary, Be free.

How Now Shall We Behave?

Good morning!  Grace and peace to you all this 3^rd Sunday in the Lenten season.  It is indeed well into the Season of Lent and as such, I feel compelled to be honest with you: I really wanted to preach another sermon this week.  Oh, I had a number of things floating around in my head and after hearing Craig’s sermon last Sunday I thought I’d just spot off of him.  He brought up a number really excellent points and given our church’s mission to really grow this year I thought they bore repeating.  I still think that, but as so often happens Sunday’s plans wind up in Monday’s garbage can, and so I wound up writing a very different sermon.

                My friends, it is 2016, and in case the incessant ads, the mudslinging and the personal attacks haven’t made it obvious, it is most definitely an election year.  Let’s make no bones about it, a lot is at stake this year.  As a nation we must decide what to do about the so-called Islamic State, the Syrian refugee crisis, there is China and their ecological disasters, there is continued questions of global warming, what to do about Planned Parenthood, America’s Silent Prison dilemma, Marijuana Legalization, and racial tensions the likes we have not seen in decades.  Indeed, if there can be any adjective, any one word that can be used to describe the years 2015 and 2016, it is the word “Unrest”.  People sense that life is coming to a turning point, that we are on the verge of great change either good or bad.  Anxieties are very high and tensions politically, socially, and economically loom like a shadow over everything – neither the dinner table at home nor the water cooler at work is safe from it.  What has become even more evident to me this week, however, is that in light of these great questions we as Americans are taking every opportunity to treat one another like garbage.  In this week alone I have personally witnessed more blatant racism, violence, and self-righteous indignation than I have since my children were born, and I want to entreat you all as fellow Christians to have nothing to do with it.

                I remember looking up our gospel text early this week, and remember being struck with how incredibly apt it is for the times we live in.  You see the 21^st century and the first century were not really all that different.  Political unrest, danger from armed terrorists, failing religious institutions, corrupt people in power, and a culture’s dying way of life - All of these were just as much the terrible realities of 16 AD Judea as they are in 2016 America.  It is almost as if the times might change but people just never do.  And just as we face the same realities as they did so we see the Jews making the same kinds of mistakes we do.  Did the Jews of Jesus’ time sit down as family and truly seek good answers to their problems?  Did they join together across religious and political barriers, reaching across the aisle so to speak to make the world a better place?  No.  No I dare say they were just as prone to splitting into political parties and religious movements as we are, and in a world so full of differing points of view, with so many people with so many competing interests, the humans did then as the humans do now.  They blame.  They point fingers, the find someone, ANYONE, with whom they can say “See how life would be a virtual Eden if these people just…weren’t…here.”

                The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus has an opinion about this kind of behavior, and we find it in our gospel lesson for today.  In the ancient world, calamity and tragedy were often thought to have happened because of the person’s sin.  Even though the Hebrews had in their Scriptures the Book of Job which makes it very clear that sometimes what happens to people has absolutely nothing to do with a person’s own righteousness and relationship to God, people still come up to Jesus to point the finger.  “Jesus,” they say, “did you hear about those Galileans Pilate had executed at the altar, mixing their blood with the sacrifices?  How terrible they must have been!  Can you imagine the sinfulness of those men that they should die in such a way?  Imagine what the rest of the family is like.” 

                This last part is very, very important.  It is the unwritten understanding that would overshadow this entire conversation from front to back.  When we read these ancient texts with modern eyes, we must understand their culture is not ours.  Individualism as we know it does not exist in these ancient cultures. A son or the daughter is not a person unto themselves but they are the extension of their family.  If the son or daughter is evil or is guilty of sin, it is because the entire family is evil and guilty of sin.  You don’t have this kind of conversation with someone just to bring up an interesting anecdote; you bring it up because you are looking for a scapegoat; you are looking for living prey.

                But Jesus will have none of it.  “Do you think these men were worse sinners than all the others because they died in this way?  You think these people were garbage to be burned when the reality is it is your attitude that’s garbage.  This is not how God expects you to treat people and unless you repent you too are going to perish - only in a far worse way.  You think those eighteen random people who died when the tower fell were more guilty, you think those families were more despicable than any other living in Jerusalem?  Unless you all repent of your attitudes, you too are going to perish.  And let me tell you why.  A man had a fig tree you see, planted in his vineyard, and when he came to inspect it he saw that it has failed to yield any fruit for years.  He tells the manager of the vineyard to cut it down, because if it hasn’t born fruit by now it never will and it is just wasting soil.  But the manager pleaded with the owner, sir, let me pay special attention to it.  Let me dig around it and fertilize it.  Let me give it every opportunity to succeed and if by this time next year it still hasn’t yielded a crop then, yes, it deserves to be cut down.  

We are all being watched, Jesus says, we are all trees in a vineyard being inspected and indeed being specially cared for so that we can be as successful for the kingdom as possible.  It is fruitfulness; not purity, not righteousness, nor even being correct, that God is looking for and if we want someone to be worried about, Jesus says, be worried about that person you see in the mirror first.

Ladies and gentlemen, we think we have moved beyond these lessons.  We haven’t.  We think somehow we’ve become better sorts of people these past 2000 years but let me tell you the same issues that plagued them still plague us.  We think we have become the exception rather than the rule.  We aren’t.  We are still a people who would rather be right than be good and there is nothing, there is no one whom we will not grind into the dirt to get that feeling. 

I am Pro-life, like I suspect many of you are.  I do not doubt for an instant that an unborn human life is still a human life with its own rights and protections.  The child deserves to be recognized for the life that it is.  But I was challenged, you see.  I was challenged by my Pro-Choice counterparts and I realized something.  I wasn’t really pro-life.  When it came down to actually saving the lives of unborn children I in fact bore no fruit.  I could not point to one human life that I had saved.  There were no babies alive because of me, I did nothing to alleviate all the social pressures that our women go through when forced into the question of whether to terminate the pregnancy.  I could have stood up for equal pay, I could have stood up for a living wage so having an unwanted child wasn’t an economic death sentence.  I could have lobbied for more affordable adoptions.  Of the nearly 300,000 children in the United States that have no permanent home, only 7000 parents adopted in 2012, leaving a mother choosing between abortion or adoption with the terrible reality that her child might never find a permanent home. Tens of thousands of potential adoptees age out of our foster care systems every year, and with it the very large likelihood of never graduating school, never holding a job, and with roughly half of them falling victim to substance abuse.  I didn’t want to actually save babies, because if I wanted to do that I was given plenty of opportunity.  The end result of my actions was not to reduce the number of abortions in my country but to make young women feel alienated and abandoned when they needed a brother most.        

Now you may say to me, “But Keven, wait just one minute!”  I want you to stop, I want you to stop right there.  That feeling you have, that emotion that is making you uncomfortable right now, I want you to stop and look at it.  All those arguments you are mustering in your head, all those indignations you are feeling right now.  This is what Jesus is talking about, valuing our positions more than we value other people.  Just as ancient peoples valued the belief that a person can be judged by the family they belong to, so we value the belief that a person can be judged by the party they belong to.  We blame them, we turn our nose up at them, we judge them as unworthy because after all it is just so obvious how wrong they really are.  We do this for hours on end but never once do we ask the question, “Am I being fruitful?”

  Now I don’t care what side of any issue that you are on.  Pro-life, Pro-choice, Pro-business, Pro-Earth, less filling or tastes great – Every single issue we as humans side upon is just right enough to win followers and just wrong enough to earn enemies.  None of us is so without sin that we can pretend we don’t taint everything that we touch.  Ladies and gentlemen, it is not about who is right, it is about who is teachable.  It is about who is willing to be challenged into growing into something greater.  If we are so sure, so completely convinced, so thoroughly loyal to our particular understandings that we would sooner lose our soul than admit maybe the other side has a point – that maybe they are just as human, just as right and just as wrong as we are…well, guess what?  Jesus says we might just get our wish.  Unswerving loyalty and Unrepentence are two sides of the same coin.  If we want to be unswervingly loyal to someone, if we want to pour our hearts and souls into a cause that’s right,   Scripture is very clear on Who that is supposed to be and He cares far more about how we act toward each other in our disagreements than what those disagreements actually are.  Let us resolve to better this election season.  Let us stand out amongst the name-calling and the backstabbing.  Let us be an island of refuge from the destructiveness of self-righteousness, because no matter what side we hold or what philosophies we adhere to we realize that above all we are Christians first.      

Amen and Amen