Words from WW Blog

“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)

Driving down the road close to our house, I noticed two signs in close proximity to one another (just in case you missed the first one) advertising “Junk Removal.” A phone number was positioned below the two bold-printed words. Removing junk is big business these days.

My wife knows. She has started advertising in our neighborhood chatter group about specific items we no longer need and are free for the taking. You see, there’s Junk, but there’s also Quality Reusable Junk. Truth be told, I recently participated in the Quality Reusable Junk initiative by gifting several boxes of books to our region’s American Baptist Church association to be sent to India, where a new seminary is being established. I parted with some quality theological works that I probably haven’t turned the pages of since I graduated from seminary in 1979. My wife assured me that there were a few other boxes that could have been filled. I stopped too soon. I just couldn’t part with Hans Kung’s memoirs or Latourette’s fourteen-hundred page “A History of Christianity.”

Our junk defines us, which means we are well-defined. We accumulate but rarely do a cleansing. Carol reminds me to delete text messages and voice messages that clog my cell phone like a high cholesterol artery. Sometimes when we’re on a road trip of at least an hour, she goes through emails and asks me the question, “Delete or keep” for each one of them. I’m embarassed to even say how many emails are still bunched together. Let’s just say I could have four volumes of Latourette.

I’m not good at simplifying my life. Most of us aren’t. We pile on or say “What if…” We’re like that at church, also. Recently, our church regional organization gave grants to churches who would use the money for a rollaway dumpster. Our church filled that sucker! Then we realized that a few things that had been given the “Come to Jesus” moment were carried back into the church by someone or someones who thought certain items were too historic to toss. ADVICE: Put a lock on that dumpster.

We’re too often like Christianized “Talmud-ites”! We must precisely define spiritual truth in such detail that the truth becomes lost at the bottom. Perhaps followers of Jesus need a few junk removers as well to take some of the trash off our simple gospel. John 3:16 gets footnoted with “But…” and “However…” If a person cannot believe that it comes down to the grace of God, and love of God, and the atoning natire of Jesus, he/she will be overwhelmed by the accumulating mess.

Perhaps it would be beneficial for us to pray about the junk in our lives that obscures our view of Jesus. Meanwhile, I’m going to receive some personal grace and hold off on Latourette. The book puts a dent in my lap whenever I sit down with it.

 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” (Mark 10:36-38)

It’s intriguing how the seemingly insignificant things we say have a way of standing out more in our minds than the most profound, wise words of great insight. Like when I tried to impress my sixth-grade friend by calling a fifth-grade teacher “an old bag” as she was leaving school on a Friday afternoon. Not long after that I was experiencing an intense heat on a certain part of my body thanks to our principal, a man named Shirley Morton (“Don’t call me Shirley. Yes, Mr. Morton!”) Even though that was almost sixty years ago, I remember the scene, the iron fence that bordered the school playground, and Mr. Morton’s powerful swing, probably made even more painful by the fact that it happened after school on a Friday afternoon.

Our dumb words said or done become like Jeopardy categories in our mind: “I’ll take Dumb Things Said To Girls for $100.” Or, “Let me try Idiotic Pranks Gone Awry for $200.”

Quite frankly, Jesus had a bookload of dumb things said to him. Instead of “Dad Jokes,” they could be called “Dumb Jokes.”

For instance, how about Martha, whining to Jesus about her sister, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself. Tell her, then, to help me.” (Luke 10:40) I’ve known a few church people who have berated others for what doing the work that only they thought was important.

Or there’s James and John, on a mission to impress the Son of God and asking Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Their words came after a Samaritan village did not welcome Jesus. Jesus rebuked them for their words. What must it have felt like to be rebuked by Jesus after saying something that you thought was a good suggestion, and then came to figure out that it was a dumb idea?

The Pharisees and teachers of the law always seemed to have been chomping on chewable dumb tablets. It seems that the only people who are not listed in the dumb book are children and most of the people that Jesus healed, many of them social outcasts.

So I realize that my tendency to “dumb down my words” puts me in a vast company of others. I keep searching my mind for something wise-worthy, but I keep coming up empty. As a result, I keep going to scripture and finding a verse that needs to be underlined or words said by Eugene Peterson or Philip Yancey that resonate in a sweet way like strawberry preserves on a hot homemade biscuit.

On the positive, whenever I get a little too uppity, I remember one of the dumb things I said in the past seven decades, and it humbles me back to reality. And, boy howdy, there’s a lot of material there to be humbled by!