Words from WW Blog

John 11:25-26 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

As a pastor, one of the results of being involved in people’s lives is to be asked to perform marriage ceremonies and be the presider at funerals. It’s that old “marry and bury” thing. Since I’m a retired pastor now, I don’t get asked to do many weddings, which I’m fine with.

But since my pastoring years have brought me into close relationships with people who have grown older and older, sometimes I am asked to conduct the funeral of a person who has passed on.

It’s a bittersweet experience. Knowing the deceased is a person of faith helps in the telling of the journey, but the abyss of loss is still evident. This past week I officiated at the service for a 57-year-old woman whose pastor I had been for sixteen years. I’ve become accustomed to presiding over funerals of people older than me, but the unexpected passing of this lady was gut-wrenching. After all, she was only 33 when I assumed the role of pastor for her. I felt like a “Martha”, crying to Jesus, that if He hadn’t taken so long to the village of Bethany, her brother, Lazarus, would still be alive.

I found myself struggling with this wonderful woman’s rapid advance of an illness, and wondering what could have changed the result. Why would God not step in? Why would the prayers of His people go unanswered?

I find that the comfort in God’s promise of everlasting life sometimes gets overshadowed by my intimacy with this world. My fondness of a morning cup of Pike Place, while sitting on my stool at Starbucks, becomes my measuring stick, my definition of tranquility, instead of the richness of Glory.

And yet, I know that the telling of the Lazarus event in the Gospel of John is a foreshadowing of a time and a place where there will be no tears, no mourning, no remembrance of loss. It’s like moving from a familiar place where I know all the sounds, the cracks in the walls, and the position of the furniture to a new place that I haven’t seen yet but have heard how marvelous it is.

Familiarity breeds apprehension.

The Lazarus story takes the sting and stench out of death. It calms the tension in my soul and tells me there is a better life and way. At my age, I’ve got one Lazarus-foot in the grave, while the other foot is still firmly planted in the here and now. At some point, I’ll lift the firmly-planted foot up and, because of the God of promises, cross on over.

It sounds a bit morbid, and yet also comforting.

^{Matthew 18:2-4 “}He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them.  And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.“

I have a new appreciation for Jesus. He was multi-talented. He could heal people, preach, deal with large crowds and small-minded men, and…understood and reacted to kids, young kids.

My appreciation expanded incredibly this past week as my wife and I spent 7 days (from the beginning to the end!) with our two youngest grandkids, a just-turned four-year-old and a not-quite two-year-old. It was constant involvement and interaction. When there wasn’t face-to-face engagement, it usually meant something bad was happening, some mischief or prohibited activity.

I lost weight! Lunch time would arrive and I’d suddenly realize I hadn’t eaten breakfast. It had slipped right by me as I hustled from building blocks to kicking a ball back and forth to playing chase.

The disciples of Jesus thought of Him as being too important for the youngest folk to crowd around. Jesus’ response: He got angry with the fact that adults were limiting the access that children had to Him. He understood that the kingdom of heaven was not complicated, not sophisticated. It was more about being guided by another than having an impressive resume.

My two-year-old grandson liked to point out things to me…over and over and over, repeating the same one word for the object that has his attention. “Yes, that’s a ball.” “Yes, the sky is up there.”

I wonder if Jesus had kids pointing out the sky to Him?

I wonder if the kids who crowded around Him tried to nudge others out of the way so they could be the ones who crawled into His lap?

I wonder if He made up stories on the spot to engage them in spiritual principles? And when He finished a story, did some of the little ones whine and squirm long enough to convince Him to tell another story?

Did Jesus keep it simple? Did He keep his story to one point, one lesson, instead of multiple plots that flew over the heads of his listeners? Kids were different than adults. Adults got parables that contained the mysteries of the Kingdom and sometimes left the listeners stroking their chins in deep thought.

Jesus was a figure with listening skills of patience and care. He took in questions about why clouds are puffy and why do ants live on a hill and fish in a deep blue sea? When he arose from his seat to face the complications that grown-ups tried to tax Him with, I can envision Him leaving the little ones with the assurance that they were loved, valued, and brought Him joy.

I have a new appreciation for Him, as I think of the two not-stop bundles of energy…and it causes me to consider the possibilities of a nap.

Jesus had a way with words. He was one of the first word masters. Words of wisdom he uttered on hillsides, in temple courts, and walks through the lands have been memorized by generations and generations, sometimes with a “thus saith”, “thou”, or “thine” in the good King James tradition.

I’ve wondered how our view of the grace and love of God would be altered if Jesus had said some of his sayings differently. What would be our belief system if He had altered just a few words?

What if He had reworded Matthew 5:43-44 that says “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” to say “Loving your enemies is overrated. Show them justice, because if you don’t they will persecute you.”

That would put a different spin on the idea of the love of Christ.

What if instead of Jesus saying “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” (Luke 18:16), Jesus would have said, “My time is short and thus I don’t have time for short people.”

How might that affect the theological understanding of how to minister to children?

What if instead of Jesus telling the group of men who bring an adulterous woman to him that the man without sin could cast the first stone at her, He would have said with an absence of mercy, “Such as these do not deserve to enter the kingdom of God!”, and then he bent down and picked up a nice sized throwable stone, instead of drawing something in the dirt?

What if Jesus would have left the house where the paralyzed man had been lowered down through the roof? What if He was more concerned about the size of the crowd, instead of the condition of the man?

What if, instead of spitting in the dirt and putting mud on the eyes of the blind man, He would have said to him, “The sin of your parents has caused this. The effects of sin can not be wiped away.”

What if Jesus would have minimized the mite offering of the widow and applauded the extravagant size of the gifts of the rich?

With each of Jesus’s situations, He had options as to how He was going to respond. Our Christology comes out of what He DID say, as opposed to what He DIDN’T say. Our belief system, thankfully is based on what’s written in the red.

But I need to qualify that last sentence. Sometimes our belief system is trumpeted as coming from what Jesus said, but gets revised in the living out of our actions. I’m not referring to the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, but rather how we melt away the words of Jesus to make them sweeter for our lives. We re-say them to suit us and end up reflecting a Jesus who is judgmental, rigid, and wishy-washy.

As a result, we are vulnerable to creating a Christology that is based on the idea, “What Jesus meant to say was this, instead of how it’s written.”

I still have boxes of baseball cards in my closet that I collected back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The picture of the player would be on the front of the card, a different pictorial display each season. On the backside of the card, I could track the player’s career: biographical information, minor league teams, yearly stats, and usually one brief interesting piece of information. I was always intrigued by seeing how a player progressed from Single-A, to Double-A, to Triple-A, and then the majors.

It would be interesting to see sports cards come out for college athletes, especially in football and basketball, and to see how their college careers have resulted them changing from College-A, to College-B, to College-C. Instead of Daytona, to Dayton, to Chattanooga, to Louisville, to Cincinnati it might read Florida Atlantic, to Boston College, to LSU.

The transfer portal could be a new brand of sports trading cards. As I watched some of the CSU-Colorado football game Saturday night, the commentators, more often than not, would say the name of the tackler or receiver followed by the name of the school he transferred from. It seems that being a player who graduates from the same school he/she started at as a freshman (with the exception of junior college players), is no longer the norm.

During a recent game, the announcers mentioned two things that hit me. One was how the transfer portal was now the quickest way to turn a program around. New Colorado University football coach Deion Sanders had 51 transfers come to CU with him. He also informed a large number of CU players from the previous season’s team that their services were no longer needed. The Buffs have won their first three games and the fan base is happy; and that’s all that matters to most CU followers.

The second thing the announcers mentioned was how many FCS (Football Championship Series) players have transferred into BCS (Bowl Championship Series) schools. In other words, the FCS schools, which are either smaller in size or don’t have massive budgets, have become the minor leagues for the larger, TV-saturated, BCS colleges. Someone does well at North Dakota State, he can look to transfer to CU.

It’s not that there was ever a purity in college athletics, but it does seem that its place in the university environment has become distorted. Receiving an education doesn’t seem to be as high a priority as learning pass-rush techniques on defense and reading zone coverage.

Of course, I’m a dinosaur, still able to remember when freshmen weren’t even eligible to play on the college’s team and an Air Force Academy basketball season ticket-holder, a military academy that never gets transfers in, unless you regard the Air Force Academy Prep School as being a place to transfer in from…down the road.

Maybe it’s why I feel I’m in my place, coaching middle school kids for the past two-and-a-half decades, although there are hints that sometimes even it isn’t a place where the priorities are in proper order.

Maybe I should simply sort through my baseball cards and be fascinated by the journeys of some of the legends, like Johnny Bench. Did you know that he played for Peninsula of the Carolina League back in 1966?

Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.“

I dropped her.

In my last year of seminary at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, we were practicing baptisms (You have to learn somewhere!). Before we were allowed to get in the water tank, we did dry-land baptisms, reciting the words of the special occasion we would say when we began our service as pastors. I was teamed with Bonnie Bell, and as I was beginning to lean her back she hesitated, afraid to bend her knees and fall backwards. I looked at her and said, “Bonnie, trust me!” She nodded her head and I began the process again…and promptly dropped her on the floor like a lead balloon.

She looked up at me and, with a chuckle, said, “Trust me! Trust me!” I would see Bonnie years later and she would always say, “Trust me! trust me!”

It’s a moment that I can still replay in my mind almost 45 years later. Although that time was a lighter experience of failed trust, it’s also symbolic of the failure of trust that most of us have experienced, and the death of trust in our day and age.

It doesn’t take much for a person to see that we live in a society that could be characterized more as “a people that mistrusts” instead of a land populated with trusted folk. Mistrust doesn’t involve risk. It doesn’t require belief in a person, idea, or institution. It won’t disappoint us, but it also won’t move us forward. It entrenches us in a mindset that is certain of the prevalence of dishonesty and suspicious of any claim of honesty.

Trust doesn’t make the headlines. It doesn’t fuel the flames of controversy. When we all get along it looks too much like the long lost days of “Leave It To Beaver”. The thing is Ward, June, and Wally have all passed away, and The Beaver is now 75. Things have changed and become cynical and complicated. “The Beaver” didn’t have to worry about spyware, losing his shirt to crypto-currency, or whacked-out elected officials.

Dare I say that people nowadays are more trusting of the athlete or actor who advertises the wonderland of placing an online gambling bet, than they are of a pastor or priest who urges them to trust in the One Who created them.

Perhaps that’s one reason for the downward slide in church attendance. Sexual scandals involving religious leaders have definitely not helped, that’s for sure. The mirroring of society instead of reflecting Christ has caused religious institutions to look compromised and ungrounded. More than that, however, it seems trusting in a Holy God and believing in Him is too much of a reach for people who reside in the valley of disappointment.

Just as Bonnie Bell was reluctant to chance another dip supported by me, people who have been let down are hesitant to give trust another chance in their lives. It’s easier to lean on their own understanding.

The ultimate downside to that is when I lean on my own understanding and am disappointed by my own personal failure, I have no one to point the finger at. In fact, four of my five fingers are pointing back at me.

When our trust has died, our souls enter into the land of paralysis.

Dear Mr. John’s Son,

Sense you are the prince-apple, I am sending you this litter. It is bout the sub teacher we had in ELA class yesterday. She should be fired and told to never come back into hour school. She was reel mean and unfair and stuff.

At the start of class, we was just talking bout stuff and she made us sit down in our seats…IN OUR ASSIGNED SEATS!!! When she asked Bobby if he’s in his assigned seat, she yelled at him. He weren’t that far away from where he’s suppose to sit, so what was the big deal anyway?

And then she said that all of sale phones should be packed away, and got reelly upset when some of us had our phones in our laps. She woodn’t listen when we told her it was just a suggestion, kinda like a speed limit. Nobody follows it. But she woodn’t listen and started yelling at us and making us feel stooped.

And then, even wurse, she got reelly upset bout some of us helping each other with the thing we was to do. It was answering some questions about a story we had read the day befour. She cused us of copying each other’s answers. Well, the answers to the questions were the same. It didn’t madder who wrote them down. We was just helping each other, kinda like a team.

She took down names of kids who hadn’t done nothing wrong. I, for one, is a great ELA student and she said something that barassed me in front of the hole class. She said I had made a mass on my desk cause of the Cheetos I’d eaten and that we weren’t suppose to eat anything in class. I hadn’t eaten any brakefest so I’d hungry. When she told me to put the rest of my Cheetos away, I told her it was my rite as an American to eat them. She said reelly mean like that it was her right as a sub teacher to send me to the office. That reelly hurt my feelings and everybody was staring at me. If I had fainted in class cause of beun under nurished, it’d been her fault. Mr. John’s Son, I think she reelly hated kids and wanted to make life miserble for us.

And then she made us sit in our seats the hole time and only let one kid at a time go to the restroom. That is unfare! She should be fired and you should call her and tell her that she is mean. If I see her in one of my classes again, I’m gonna puke and run away.

Your Friend,

Billy Bob Baker

P.S. Our school is the best school ever, except for this sub teacher.

I was talking to my sister on the phone last night and she said that my last few blog posts had been more serious, that I needed some humor. I thought to myself, “I’m a Baptist preacher who doesn’t use AI to produce his sermons, and only types using three fingers. Where’s the humor in that?”

And then I considered some of the things that have happened over the past four-and-a-half decades and a chuckle began in my mid-section and burped out on my face.

Like the Advent Season, when I had asked a seasoned saint to light the advent candle on one of the Sundays…and then gave her an empty box of matches! The bewilderment on her face still makes me grin.

Or the Sunday morning I made a pot of coffee for early-arrivers of our Sunday School hour, but forgot to put the coffee pot under the freshly-streaming brew. Oops!

Or the Sunday I had come up with the ingenious idea of doing two children’s messages during the course of the morning worship service. The second children’s message was like a scene of a cat-herder trying to keep the kittens all together, running this and way and that, crawling behind the communion table, knocking one another over.

Or the baptistry problems the last church I pastored seemed to have constantly. In other words, it leaked! For a Christmas Eve service where we had baptisms take place, we put an inflatable kiddie pool inside the baptistry that was shaped like a whale. People sitting in the first few rows on one side of the sanctuary could see the tale sticking up in the air. We joked about the people being baptized in the belly of a whale just like Jonah.

Or perhaps the dumbest thing I ever did as a pastor, when I was waiting in the church parking lot for parents to come and pick up their kids after a youth event. I decided to practice my softball batting swing by using my golf putter. After several powerful swings, the putter suddenly became lighter. Its head had flown off…and sailed right through one of the stained glass windows of the building. Oops!

Or the Sunday when the baptistry heater was broken (Back to that baptistry thing!) and I literally had to pull a boy into the water to get him wet. Hey! My toes were already blue and they weren’t getting any warmer the longer I stood there waiting for him.

Or the Sunday one of the above-eighty ladies kept having her new watch, a gift from her son, go off and play “Santa Claus is Coming To Town.” It’s hard to talk about a demon-possessed man who was known by the name Legion, when Santa Claus is coming to town.

Or the sermon where I erroneously kept referring to Lady Godiva chocolates, instead of Godiva chocolates. Oops!

Or the church potluck where the spoon for the potato salad was missing from the bowl. A young man, a bit lacking in social etiquette, wanted seconds so he simply dipped his hand into the bowl and took a scoop back to his plate. Nobody else felt the urge to get seconds after that.

Or the church custodian at one of the churches I ministered at who would bring in the church’s outdoor sign each Monday so the office staff could change the sermon title for the next week. He always left the same message for the secretary: “The Broad Is In!” The secretary kept looking for that “Broad” for years and could never find her.

And, finally, a bit of personal embarrassing humor. Our church was hosting the annual meeting for our area American Baptist Churches, an event on a Sunday afternoon and evening that drew about 150 people who had nothing better to do but spend most of their Sunday sitting in meetings and be grouchy. I stood at the front of the sanctuary and gave a welcome to the distinguished crowd of delegates…and then walked down the center aisle after I was done, only to discover that I had been unzipped the whole time. I left myself “wide open” for comments about that one.

So, there, Sis! There’s some humor that still makes me smile and blush at the same time…and check to see that I’m all…together!

A couple of months ago, Carol and I took a long road trip back to Michigan and Ohio to see family and friends. As we traveled through southern Illinois on the first Sunday we were on the road, she tapped into the streamed worship service of Colorado Springs First Baptist. The pastor, Dan Schumacher, is an excellent speaker, and I was looking forward to hearing his delivery of the morning message.

Unfortunately, Carol could receive the video of the service, but there was no audio. It was probably the area we were driving through, rural and sparse. Whatever the reason, the picture was clear, but the sound was missing. When Dan began the message, his mouth was moving but he wasn’t saying anything.

It occurred to me that the silence of the moment was a metaphor for the church. Not necessarily Pastor Dan, but there are a lot of times when the church is speaking, but it isn’t saying anything. I suppose I could say the same thing about our politicians, but the communities of Christ-followers were never meant to mirror the tendencies of society and the institutions that hold the power within it.

Sometimes it seems that churches across our country are more focused on selling their program than having the conviction to follow the One who went before them. It is drawn to trends and trinkets, instead of speaking truth and being proclaimers of grace.

And so there is a lot of speaking going on, a lot of words being strung together to create sweet-sounding rhyme, but nothing is being heard. There is a picture, but no message.

For me, I recognize that on too many occasions I was blowing smoke when there was no fire, speaking but not considering, preaching with no purpose.

And now, I recognize that in recent years I have been so saturated with a gospel that has been rolled in glitter that I need to go back and study the core. I’m digging through all of my old theology books from my seminary days (Moltmann, Brunner, Barth, Hans Kung) and beginning to take a self-guided refresher course on the reasons I believe what I believe. I need to blow the dust off the covers and hear the crackling of pages that have not seen the light of day in several decades.

In essence, I want to hear the wise and deep echoes from the past to help me re-understand what I once knew and what is at the core of my belief.

It was a simple conversation that my wife was having with a fifth-grade boy who was watching his brother’s soccer game. When she asked him what middle school he would go to next year, he said that his dad was going to send him to the school where he could have the best soccer experience. It caught my wife by surprise.

In our old traditional ways, we had become accustomed to parents choosing a school or, better yet, a community on the basis of how good the education would be. You know…math, reading, science! However, things have changed. Many parents have changed. Families have changed. Priorities have changed.

Quite honestly, kids are reflections of their parents, and their parents’ priorities. The cynicism Dad has toward life is filtering down into the next family generation. In like manner, the time and energy the parents put into the leisure activities of life are also finding their way into the next generation.

Parents communicate what is important by showing up at every athletic contest, but never at a parent-teacher conference. They show their true colors by keeping track of their seventh-grade son’s football stats, but being disinterested in checking whether he has any missing assignments in any of his classes. They send clear signals of where their priorities lie, when they plead for grace for their daughter whose grades have made her ineligible to play the next week of volleyball matches.

Truth be told, there are many parents who do not believe that education is the vital element for a purpose-filled and productive life. They have been sucked into the lie that colleges will be more interested in their son’s jump shot and their daughter’s spike than their ability to solve a math equation or write a well-thought-out essay.

And so, the ripple effects are middle school kids disinterested in their education and absorbed in the peripherals. Teachers and school administrators get blamed in the media and by their elected officials for test scores that have dipped, but the blame that gets heaped on them is not as great as their frustration trying to teach students who have gotten the impression at home that it’s not important enough to learn.

In writing these words, I recognize that there are a multitude of parents who take seriously their children’s education and have their priorities in order. Their understanding of what their child will need to be successful in life is clear, and they are committed to staying on the course to make it happen.

Sometimes it’s the 20% or even 10% who are unbalanced that leave a sour taste in one’s mouth for the state of our youth and their mentors. We can blame it on the pandemic isolation that has happened, climate change, the price of gas, housing costs, social media, or any of ten thousand other things, but the building wave of troublesome trends has been going on for a while.

Meanwhile, there are more situations of kids basing their lives on being able to “Bend it like Beckham” instead of adding things together that make sense.

“Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die;  and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)

All of us have been fooled from time to time. After all, it’s the highlight of April Fool’s Day for someone to put one over on us, or vice-versa. “Gullible” is a word that some people get labeled with, a chuckle attached to it whenever it is said. And, we can’t contain our laughter when we hear the latest “Blonde Joke.”

Honestly though, we live in a mixed-up age of gullibility and cynicism. There are numerous throngs of people who will believe in the most ludicrous conspiracy theories, but doubt that the world is round. Millions of people buy lottery tickets believing that they will be the mega-million…or billion dollar winner, but are suspicious that any random act of kindness has some catch attached to it.

And what about churches? Thousands of churches in our country have changed their names because of the stereotypes that people have placed on certain denominations. First Baptist Churches have become community churches or simply “First Church”, because a large part of our population envisions a Baptist as being someone who is legalistic in their view of how they relate to God (“Don’t smoke, drink, or chew, or go with girls that do!”).

And yet, in the past (and the present) there are also people who are firm believers in the prosperity gospel that many of the tele-evangelists promoted (“Send me a $100 seed of faith and see how God will multiply it in your life.”) It was kinda the Christian version of a Vegas roulette wheel.

Gullible and cynical.

In our extremely-polarized culture, advocates of one view or the other seek to believe that their side is always right and the other side is always…insane! A closer analysis shows that one side is more focused on convincing people how ludicrous the ideas of the other side are than they are communicating their own ideas. A popular opinion may be more dependent of creatively conveying how unpopular the opposing idea is. Instead of firm in one’s convictions, there’s a displeasure about the opposite view.

I’m sure that followers of Jesus were seen by many as being gullible, led astray by a new false prophet that has come out of Nazareth. Others who felt threatened by Him were cynical to a T. They said things like, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” and “He dines with tax collectors and prostitutes!” There was a real smear campaign about Jesus. He threatened the establishment and the understanding of how God related to His people.

In a time when good news was needed, the gospel arrived. People had been oppressed, stressed, taxed, pushed down, marginalized and minimized, and told what they were to believe and how to believe it. And then Jesus brought good news. The hesitation to believe was understandable. If one of the poor believed in Him and then Jesus was discovered to be a fraud, what would the person have to fall back upon? If he followed Jesus to a dead end, what hope could he still have for his life?

Those in power thought getting rid of Jesus would bring things back to normal, back to how they wanted it to be, but things would never go back to the way they were, even after they crucified Him. For once the gullible that believed in the gospel, found out that their faith was valid and their messiah was the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

In a culture that believes in the idiotic and scoffs at the obvious, the story of Jesus and His purpose hasn’t changed. It is still the good news of the grace of God. If I’m a fool, I’d prefer being a fool for Christ.