Stan...

Friday, November 4, 2022

No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you:  to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.  Micah 6:8

On Wednesday we said goodbye to Stan Bingham, a friend and church member.  Only time and the unfolding of life’s mystery and purposes of God will tell the total of Stan’s doing right, loving mercy, and walking humbly with his God.  However, I strongly suspect the talley of all that will not do his memory any harm in his new home, a place not made with hands, where he sees clearly what he has meant to the countless people his life and kindness touched, as well as the love with which his Savior, Jesus Christ, embraced him.

I’m writing this on Thursday (the day before you read it, and the day after the gathering of saints and sinners to say that goodbye…and I am as exhausted as I’ve ever been – maybe more).  Being in a sizeable crowd, and responsible to lead a service for someone who is a legend in North Carolina’s legislative chronicles, well…my supply of energy isn’t grand to begin-with…yesterday ran the tank dry.    I feel a little like one of Stan’s dogs from a story posted in Lexington’s Dispatch, about the VW Stan had converted to run on used cooking oil.  

Whenever the Senator would arrive home from an event where he drove the Bug, the hounds would come running to the scent of french fries.  Stan said he feared he’d not get to them in time to keep them from killing themselves on fry-fumes.

From saving his old dogs from themselves, to more than 170 bills passed in the legislature over 16 years, Stan was always shooting for doing right, loving mercy, and being humble enough to not care who gets the credit.

One of the speakers at the service[1], Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, shared that story in his eulogy, and it helped continue the theme of a joy-fillled homegoing for a much-loved, larger-than-life, prank-loving legislator, who was taken home so suddenly.  It was a grand send-off.

As a personal note of observation, tempered by 75 years of watching people, more than 40 of those years being a people-watching pastor, I can say I was most impressed by a mother and her four daughters, Stan’s closest family, long used to the press, and the fishbowl of public life, but less-mindful of the presence of all the trappings of that life, rather focused on celebrating the joy of a man who loved, and lived his life working for justice and mercy, all the while walking humbly with his God.

For You Today ,

You might be a good-sized cog in the wheel of life, or, like me, a rather smallish cog, who gets worn-down easily amongst the bigger cogs; either way, remember this:  you’re a cog that God loves, and has you in the right place on His wheel. 

So take that as seriously as my friend, Stan, by loving God with your whole heart, poured-into doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with He who gave you that first, and every breath you take on this planet.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions libraryI.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

       Do What?   and   Resetting the Compass

[1] Images: Title image courtesy of The Denton Orator, Used with permission by Bingham family   

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] You can watch the entire homegoing service for Stan Bingham on YouTube HERE

Of Righteousness and Ritual

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Yes, the day of the Lord will be dark and hopeless, without a ray of joy or hope.  “I hate all your show and pretense—the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies.  I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings.  I won’t even notice all your choice peace offerings.  Away with your noisy hymns of praise!  I will not listen to the music of your harps.  Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living.  Amos 5:20-24

Those really “old” and trite sayings that used to fall from your grandma’s lips (you remember those, don’t you?), a stitch in time saves nine, waste not, want not, and so-on…these survived because they’re true; even the funny ones.  I may have split my side laughing the first time I someone who was trying to help me understand, dressing-up a failed project to look like a winner won’t amount to more than a caricature of what was reality. 

The image he used to illustrate was about lifting a pig from the muck of the pen, and dressing it to the nines.  In the end it was still a pig, bound to return to the muck.  That old expression, you can put lipstick on a pig, but you still ain’t gonna kiss him, makes hilarious sense! 

Now, as funny as that may be, even about the cutest of pigs, when the speaker’s voice is coming from the throne in Heaven, the imagery fades, and we are the ones who must put on the lipstick and quietly, solemnly look in the mirror.

The prophet, Amos, was a farm boy from Israel’s sticks.  Visiting the temple in Jerusalem must have been an eye-opening, jaw-dropping experience.  The ritual of sacrifice was impressive, bloody, and totally without concern for the kind of life God wanted for His people.  Talk about old sayings and truth, Amos must have been thinking:  Man, you can dot all the i’s, and cross all the t’s, and still misspell the word…don’t these people get it?

It is told about Martin Luther, the great reformer of the 16^th-century, when he was still a Roman Catholic priest, he would go to confession…often…sometimes multiple times in a day, re-confessing the same old sins.  His confessor, an older priest, would patiently hear the young priest, give him pennance to do, and ritually assure the guilt-driven Martin Luther his sin was absolved.  The forgiveness after breakfast might last till lunch, and then it was back to the confessional.  When the elder priest decided this routine had gone-on long enough, he stopped Luther mid-way through his litany of the forgiven, unforgiven, and reforgiven sins,  once-again being confessed, and said:  Martin, you either need to accept forgiveness for these same old sins, or get some new ones.  It seems the futility of the same old ritual had been swamped by Martin’s trust in the nursery of his priest’s protective absolution, instead of Luther’s call to the wild field of God’s vineyard.  It’s safer to slip into easy forgiveness, and forget the purpose of what we do…spreading the word, and ministering healing to the lost and marginalized of our brethren.

For You Today ,

The church services, with its rituals and routines serve God’s purpose, of keeping our eyes on His holiness, and developing a doctrinal understanding of our responsibility to serve others.  But if the ritual and routine, and our comfort zone of being forgiven is all we seek, we have done worse than putting lipstick on the old pig…we’ve begun to enjoy kissing him.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions libraryI.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

       The Elephant in the Room Has Sharp Teeth   and   When It's God's Move

[1] Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

Of Penicillin and Fruit

 

Thursday, January 27, 2022

God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts.  Use them well to serve one another.  Do you have the gift of speaking?  Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you.  Do you have the gift of helping others?  Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies.  Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ.  All glory and power to him forever and ever!  Amen.  1 Peter 4:10-11

Everything God created is a gift in some distinct way.  “Special” is a word that is usually reserved for something that is a cut-above the expected.  And anything God gives falls in that cut-above category.  That includes you, me, and everyone else in creation.  It is my belief that each of us is born with spiritual possibilities which God has given, and we are to develop, in accord with whatever God places in our pathway. 

The first of these gifts is love.  As we begin cooperating with God’s plans and promises, we first accept His offer of salvation, or, as John Wesley often reminded the troops, rescue from the wrath to come.  Past that, we are to put our spiritual gifts to work serving the One who loved and saved us.  As we do this there is a progression of working in God’s vineyard with differing gifts of prophesying (preaching), faith, healing, discernment, and the fruit which the Holy Spirit brings to the body of Christ:  love, joy, peace, gentleness, patience, and more.[1]

But what happens if we fail to cooperate with the gifts, and the spiritual fruit God expects?  Just like with the analogy Peter and Paul use of spiritual gifts producing spiritual fruit, unengaged gifts make for spiritual fruit mold.  Mold is like spiritual gifts unused…the fruit possibilities dry-up on the vine and become mold.

I met a man early in ministry when I served as pastor in North Central Florida.  He was serving on the grounds committee of the church.  The first time I met Henry[2] was at the back door of the parsonage in which our family would live the following years.  In the conversation I found he’d been a pastor…for a few months.  He was now earning a living with his carpenter skills.  I inquired why he was not pastoring any more.  His reply was just three words:  Couldn’t live it!  To his credit, I will say that Henry didn’t just walk away from the church, he found ways to serve God, even though the gifts and calling of pastoral ministry were there.  I never learned the details of “couldn’t live it” but over the years I knew him, it was sadly-clear something had happened to interrupt the development of fruit-production, as his spiritual gifts were left like unused tools on a workbench.

Apostle Peter’s admonishment to us in today’s Scripture lesson is to use them well to serve one another.  We are to use our spiritual gifts to produce fruit in the life of the body of Christ…and be a blessing to the entire world. 

For You Today

You are breathing!  And that is all the sign you need that God gave you spiritual gifts to be used in cultivating spiritual fruit, that which God uses to bless His creation.  If your fruit is a little moldy because you’ve been neglecting time in the vineyard, it isn’t too late to get busy.  You do know that God can take mold and make healing penicillin.  So, what will you do with the time you have left? 

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title and Other Images:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

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[1] Study these passages for a deeper understanding:  Romans 12, Galatians 5:16-25, 1 Corinthians 12

[2] OK…so he wasn’t really named Henry…but he’s a real person, and so was the conversation.