There are holes in the Bible. 

Easy there. I don't mean about the Gospel or about creation or anything like that. The really important stuff is all there and is firmly established. But there are other things we do not know. In my years in the ministry I have probably been asked all of them. Where was Joseph during the ministry of Jesus? Was he dead? When Paul said he had a thorn in the flesh, what did he mean? Was Daniel able to pet the lions or did they just stay on their side of the pit? What happened to the dinosaurs? How many times have you said, "When I get to heaven, I am going to find out"? As Richard Monce once told me, when we get to heaven we won't think to ask. Which is probably true.

But I wonder about these things sometimes. One of the things that bounces around in my head is what was Mary thinking as she watched her Son grow up and then begin His ministry. What did she really know?

The angel came to her and explained the pregnancy and birth, but that was all we have recorded. A few years ago I read an attack on the song "Mary Did You Know?" The writer said that the song intended to cut down the power of God. Of course Mary knew these things! An angel came to her! God's purpose was knowledge to her! Only, that is not what the Bible says. The whole conversation between Mary and the angel was short. She was told what she needed to know. He was to be the Messiah. The Bible says she hid these things in her heart. But how did that affect her?

Mary would have probably known the prophecies of His purpose, but she would probably have known of the prophesies of His coming rejection and death, as well. Was she confused as Jesus learned carpentry? Did she feel inadequate about His simple life she and Joseph were giving Him? Once He started His ministry, was she frustrated because people rejected Him? The Jews had developed a certain way of thinking about the Messiah, and Jesus went against that. Was Mary questioning what she thought she knew? Perhaps the only thing Mary was sure of was that she loved her Son.

Which brings me to the last week of her Son's life. We don't know if she was there when Lazarus was raised from the dead, but she was in the area. A few days later she was at the cross, so she was at least nearby. Was she there for the triumphful entry into Jerusalem? Again, we don't know. She may have been in the crowds that were following Jesus, or she may have gone on ahead with her other children to prepare for Passover. But she would have heard of raising of Lazarus and the entry, at the very least. Perhaps she started to feel the joy. Her Son was finally fulfilling the promise! Now all those naysayers would see!

But then came the arrest. The trial. The sentence. The beating and humiliation. How could this happen? Did Mary's faith in her Son waver? Or did Jesus Himself, at some time, set her down and explain what was to come? We just don't know. All that is not important to the greater story. Still, I would like to know. What we do know is that, even if she was knowing as to what would happen, she had to be in agony to see her Son so horribly treated and killed. 

Wavering faith or not, she became a believer. In his personal notes, Luke recalls how he went and sat with Mary as she told him the story, which wound up in the Book of Luke. In the early church, she was highly respected. Mary saw, firsthand, how joy came into the world, how hope was shattered and then how joy and love won the day. 

However, I still wonder about Mary. I wonder what went through her mind. One day, when I walk the streets of Glory, I intend to look her up and ask her. 

Unless Rich Monce is right and it doesn't matter anymore. We will see, Rich, we will see.                             

It is a little town in south central Kentucky. Russell Springs. Both of my parents were born and raised there. You didn't stray far from Russell Springs. Of course, the kids went to school, but most dropped out after the eighth grade because in Kentucky you could do that, back in the day. There was farming to do, or other jobs related to farming. And there was moonshine to be made, animals to be hunted and fish to be caught. My father had seven brothers and sisters and my mother had ten, so I had a lot of cousins. My father's siblings dispersed some from where they grew up (WWII was mostly the cause of that), but my mother's family mostly stayed close to home. A couple of adventurist types wound up in Ohio and Indiana, but as a rule, they stayed in the hills. When I was a child and we traveled to Kentucky, it seemed my folks knew everyone. Every hill had a story, every creek held a memory, every old barn had some event tied to it.

I used envy those memories. I didn't have my cousins close by. That part of family was missing. I couldn't go down to the swimming hole with my friends (my mother was terrified of water). We weren't hauled off to church every week to hear a rip snorting hell fire and brimstone message. We farmed, but it was never a 'real' farm like a Kentucky farm. What I wanted most in life was to marry a local girl and settle down in my hometown, where I knew everyone and where I 'belonged.'

That didn't happen, of course. The Lord intervened. Following His leading, I have lived in Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Indiana and Ohio. But the Lord has given me experiences and memories to carry me through to the day I die. And most of you are part of those memories. Good memories, too. You are all so precious to me.

I took a drive in the country the other day and saw a cemetery that sparked a memory. Having pastored churches and having worked with a funeral home, I have a lot of cemetery memories, some good, some not so good. Funerals done in all the states listed above, and some other states, as well. Beautiful days and nasty days. On hilltops and on flat ground. Bees, oh my! And a couple of times cicadas swarming those gathered. The extremely old and the extremely young and every age in between. The sadness of feeling the deceased was lost to the Lord and the joy of knowing the deceased was walking the streets of glory. And most of all these deceased buried in a cemetery.

I love to walk cemeteries. To see the headstones and imagine the stories. There are several places purported to be the tomb of Jesus. I would like to go back in time and walk the cemetery where Jesus was truly buried. I like to walk a cemetery before daylight, so I would like to walk that cemetery Early in the morning, on the first day of the week, walking along and admiring the tombs. Then, the earth shakes. Not all that unusual, for the area, but the air feels different. There are sounds of fear. Rushing toward the sounds I find men, guards, lying on the ground. A stone has been rolled away and.....well, you know the rest of the story. But wouldn't that be a great memory? A story to tell! 

My memories of cemeteries are not that awesome. But each of those in those graves I have stood over will one day stand before the Lord. It doesn't matter if you are buried in Arlington National Cemetery or in a cemetery attached to a little church in Russell Springs, Kentucky, you will stand before the Lord. And what will the Lord say to you?

Special Ash Wednesday Blog!

Today, in addition to being Valentine's Day, is Ash Wednesday. This day commences Lent and follows Fat Tuesday. (I feel right at home on Fat Tuesday.) Lent leads us right up to Easter, which is the culmination of our Lord's life. It should be the holiest day of the year, but traditions of candy, eggs and ham for dinner intrude on what should be a sacred day. (Really? Jesus was a true Jew. If He had eaten pork, they would have killed Him for that. So, to celebrate His death, burial and Resurrection, we eat pork?)

When I was growing up, we observed the secular parts of Lent and Easter. Easter was all about Easter baskets and egg hunts and ham for dinner. When I was little, we attended a church and on Easter my sisters got new dresses. I had to wear a tie, which I hated. But that only lasted about three years. Interestingly enough, I do not remember being told of the Resurrection of our Lord until I was a senior in high school. Easter, in our home, was never about that.  

After I had accepted Christ as Savior, I became interested in the details of our little traditions. It was becoming more and more clear to me that the Resurrection and Easter eggs came from two different sources. As I began to study these traditions, it became apparent that the Bible story all by itself was moving and powerful and all the traditions originated from the Catholic church. That seemed inexplicable, so I dug farther.

I have talked of this before, so this will be short. (hahahahahaha) The Roman Empire, from emperor Constantine onward, would defeat a country and then force them to accept Christianity. However, if you discarded the traditions of those countries, the people would rise up in attempted insurrection. It was easier to allow them to keep their traditions but change the wording a little. Ash Wednesday came from such tradition. A particular country honored the local god of fire by sprinkling ashes on the heads of the people. The Roman Catholic church adopted this as a show of penance for their sin. In time it evolved from ashes dumped on the head to ashes on the forehead in the sign of the cross. The entire season of Lent evolved from a pagan system of worship. The church simply moved the 40 days of remembrance to a different 40 days on the calendar to coincide with Easter. Easter itself was a period of celebration in the Spring to honor Estre, the goddess of fertility. This worship of Estre included eggs and rabbits. The practice of giving something up for Lent in order to show God your seriousness, goes back to Pope Gregory (590 AD to 604 AD). The Council of Nicea proclaimed a period of prayer and fasting for 40 days before Easter. Gregory came along 250 years later and changed that a bit. He didn't like the fasting part of it, even though it was daylight fasting. (You fasted during the daylight hours and ate only after dark or before the sun came up.) He made the period 46 days before Easter and excluded Sundays. To this day, Sundays during Lent are not actually a part of Lent. Anyway, instead of fasting, it was decreed that you would just have to eliminate something during Lent to satisfy the church. It was for a long while the absence of meat (except on Sundays, which were not part of Lent), and then it became meatless Fridays and you gave up something else. (Meatless Fridays is where eating fish on Friday originated because fish was not considered real meat. I love a good Friday fish fry, but it has nothing to do with tradition.) Once people began giving up something else to satisfy the Lord, (usually some form of alcohol) the concept of Fat Tuesday took hold, the day before the start of Lent, and was a day of guiltless indulgence. 

I went to get a cup of coffee on Tuesday morning at the coffee bar in my building. Along with coffee, there were several boxes of paczky. For those of you not familiar with Polish traditions, paczky is like a creme filled donut, only it is filled with fruit. Not bad, really. They were giving them away in honor of Fat Tuesday. One final indulgence. "So, what are you giving up for Lent?" "Me? Not a thing." "What? You are a minister and you are not giving something up for Lent? Are you retired from being religious?" "Never was religious. Just a believer of Scripture over traditions. But I will take a paczky, since they're free." 

John 19:28-30---28 After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” 29 A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to His mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, “It is finished,” and He bowed His head and gave up His spirit.  

Do we really need to embellish the greatest act of compassion and grace that ever happened? We tend to cringe at extreme cruelty, so I have always given the Roman Catholic church the benefit of the doubt and have said they were just taking the edge off the horror of that day. But maybe we should be fully aware of what Jesus went through for each of us. Chocolate rabbits and candy filled eggs were not there. The people who witnessed the death of Jesus did not go home to a fine ham. No one breathed a sigh of relief because their six weeks of refusing some pleasure was over. Instead, there were mocking crowds, beatings, gambling soldiers and those who relished torturing Him as He died on the cross. There was a grieving mother watching her Son die the most horrible death possible, a frightened disciple who, despite his fear, stood next to that grieving mother and accepted her as his own, others who had believed His message, now watching as hope seemed to die before them. And there was the God-man, One who had never sinned in word or deed, realizing even in the fog of pain, that all was fulfilled, muttered the words, "It is finished."

Then true name of the day is Resurrection Day, not Easter. Grow in Spirit and in grace and in power, so that when Resurrection finally arrives, you can truly thank Him for finishing the greatest of all gifts.

Blessings.  

 

This past Friday, Miss Mary posted a blog from 2014. She explained why. Nothing was coming to her, her mind was drawing a blank, blah, blah, blah. So, she researched her past blogs and found one that was perfect, so she said. It was so good she has decided to post a month of old blogs. Now, come on! What's the deal?!!? I mean, February 2014 was a long time ago. Very likely none of us ever read it. But still, A RE-BLOG! What is the big deal about writing an article? Sheesh!!!

Actually, it is a big deal. You try writing something relevant and inspiring every week for the last 900+ weeks. Looking for inspiration when the only one whispering ideas into your mind is a stuffed frog. Putting words down in one coherent sentence after another. Checking spelling, checking grammar and trying not to put to many 'buts' in the same paragraph. And then someone helpfully points out that there should be a comma in a certain point. I am thinking most people might have two or three articles in them, and then they would tail off. Each of us should be thanking Mary for being so diligent in her writing. 

Yes, it is hard to come up with something new and fresh. So, what about your pastor. Not only does he come up a sermon every week, he also delivers that sermon. Ah, you say, if he is being led by the Holy Spirit they all should be new and fresh. Only it doesn't work that way. Your pastor is human. He has headaches, backaches, a lawn to mow, a family to tend too, people bringing big problems and small problems and feeling better when they leave while he has to wrestle with those issues. Sunday comes racing along and Satan throws everything at the pastor he can to cause that pastor to veer off, yet everyone expects him to step up on Sunday and be Billy Graham. Does the pastor reuse old sermons? You bet he does! He doesn't want to use an old sermon, but sometimes it is all he has. He reworks it and goes with it.

And then there is the fact that you can use the same passage of Scripture multiple times and preach a completely different message each time, but some wise guy (or wise gal) will catch you after church and proudly say, "I know what you did! You reused an old sermon! In my Bible I mark a passage when you preach and you used an old sermon!" And this is usually said by someone who has no idea what goes into the planning, preparation and presentation of a sermon. 

When I started out in ministry, it was common to have Sunday morning and Sunday evening services as well as a mid-week Bible study and teach a Sunday School class. For two and a half years I pastored two churches on either side of the city. I figured I would just preach the same sermon at both churches. It didn't work that way because some of the people at Church A would jump into their cars and race along behind me to Church B to hear me preach again. (I never understood this, except they had no lives of their own.) Four Sunday services, two mid-week studies and one Sunday School class. One year I spoke at Kent State University five days in a row during Easter week as well as the regular schedule. And everyone wanted new and fresh. Forty eight years in the ministry, forty of those years as a pastor. I think I may have used one or two sermons over.

So, Miss Mary, re-blog and don't feel bad about it. And those of you who walk into the church on Sunday and you 'catch' pastor using an old sermon, give him a break. D.L. Moody, the great 19th century evangelist and the founder of the Moody Bible Institute, preached revivals about forty weeks a year. Six or seven sermons a week for forty weeks for dozens of years. He wrote toward the end of his life that he only preached a couple of hundred different sermons during his life, but he preached them over and over. Amazing that the Lord was able to use that slacker as much as He did.

So here is what I want you to do. If you know Miss Mary, give her a hug and thank her for being awesome. Go to your pastor and offer a firm handshake and throw in some respect. And finally, with everything you have going on in your life, take a month and write an article once a week and see what that takes out of you. Then, send those articles to Miss Mary or me so we can re-use them!  

Blessings.