Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Let it slide?

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 10
Q. Will God permit
such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not.
He is terribly angry
about the sin we are born with
as well as the sins we personally commit.

As a just judge
he punishes them now and in eternity.1
He has declared:
“Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do
everything written in the Book of the Law.”2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

God will not let sin slide, because he cannot; it would be unjust, it would be against his nature, it would be wrong, and it would be inherently contradictory. At its core, sin is the assertion of our own self-will against God’s will in a declaration of mistrust: it is the insistence that God neither knows nor truly cares what is best for us, and that we’re better off going our own way. That is a defiant falsehood in the eye of the one who is Truth, a falsehood straight from the pit of Hell; he could not simply ignore it without ceasing to be true, nor would he be doing us anything but ill if he could. Nor, in truth, would his doing so be welcomed; having rebelled against God, why would we want him to come crawling to us to take him back?

The leaven of the Pharisees

Posted on by | No Comments

I was reading back through Ray Ortlund’s blog this afternoon, trying to remember where I’d read something, when I came across this post that I’d missed three weeks ago—I have no idea how, because it certainly grabbed my attention this time:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

He’s dead right. I’d actually go a little further and say that what he’s talking about is a combination of moral fervor and spiritual pride—that moral fervor combined with deep humility (as in a man like William Wilberforce) is a very different matter, because that’s a fervor which is rooted in our understanding of our own sin and our own need for grace, and thus is ultimately focused on Jesus Christ; spiritual pride, however, is focused on ourselves, it is self-exalting, and thus when combined with moral fervor puts us in a position which rightly only belongs to God—that of being the defender (which ultimately means the arbiter and the dictator) of the holy. Spiritual pride tells us that we’re already good enough to please God, and that therefore God is on our side as we judge all those people down there who aren’t; when combined with moral fervor, this makes the tyrant and the Inquisitor.

I agree with Dr. Ortlund that moral fervor, if not absolutely directed toward God, if not combined with deep humility and the dedication to “put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit” (as Paul says), is our deepest evil; and that illustrates why, as I’m becoming increasingly convinced, spiritual pride is our most invidious evil, because the subtlest and the most corrupting. It is spiritual pride which turns the greatest desire for holiness into the greatest deeds of darkness, which warps and blights every aspiration of the soul toward sainthood and twists them toward corruption; spiritual pride produces ungodly people who think themselves godly, and there is not much worse than that.

Further links on Obamacare

Posted on by | No Comments

For those who doubt that the purpose of the Democratic health care “reform” is a government takeover of our health-care system—and that the only unsettled issue in their minds is the best way to get there as quickly as possible—watch this:

Those opposed to the expansion of the abortion industry should consider this comment from Ed Morrissey:

On the campaign trail, Obama told Planned Parenthood that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate state restrictions on abortion and repeal the Hyde Amendment ban on federal funding for it, would be his first legislative priority. ObamaCare allows him to pass FOCA without the head-on fight. If the public option remains in the bill and it covers abortion, that will have the de facto effect of repealing the Hyde Amendment. The interstate nature of ObamaCare and the public plan may also allow the Department of Justice to fight state abortion restrictions, such as parental notification, on the grounds that the regulations interfere with interstate commerce. It’s FOCA by other means.

For those still dubious about Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels,” ponder this from Nat Hentoff (no fundamentalist Republican):

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)—as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill—decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law. . . .

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

And if anyone is wondering why all the fuss—is this really that big a deal?—let Andy McCarthy explain:

These last seven months ought to tell us that the usual political rules don’t apply when predicting this president’s behavior. His purpose is revolutionary change in an American society he grew up understanding to be fundamentally unjust, racist, materialist, imperialist, and the agent of global misery. He is in Washington to transform the nation from the top down. Nationalized health care is key for him. If he gets it, sovereignty shifts from the citizen to the state. By law, government will be empowered to manage minute details of our lives. Over time—when, as the American Thinker’s Joseph Ashby observes, a “1,000-page health-care law explodes into many thousands of pages of regulatory codes”—that is precisely what government will do.

Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision. For my money (if I have any left), achieving it is more important to him than is getting reelected. His poll numbers and those of congressional Democrats may keep plunging (for the latter, there must come a point where that is statistically impossible), but they have the votes to Rahm this thing through.

And if it comes to that, they will most certainly try, unless enough Democrats in Congress get cold feet. Sure, that wouldn’t be what the president promised to get elected, but so far, that hasn’t stopped him yet:

Initial returns on Obamanomics

Posted on by | No Comments

Mark Steyn has a good piece up on “Why the Stimulus Flopped” which dissects the president’s economic approach with his usual panache (Steyn’s, that is; the president’s not bad on panache himself, but he’s no match for Mark Steyn):

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects—every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop. . . .

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted—and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

As Steyn sums it up,

The “stimulus” . . . didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about—and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that.

Read the whole thing—it’s vintage Steyn. The only point he doesn’t make is that we shouldn’t have expected the “stimulus” to work, because we had immediate prior evidence that it wouldn’t: namely, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out a while back, the effect of similar political and economic approaches in New York, New Jersey, and California.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

If “high tax rates on the rich, lots of government ‘investments,’ heavy unionization and a large government role in health care” haven’t worked for these states, why would we expect them to work for the country as a whole?

A dissenting view on health-care spending

Posted on by | 2 Comments

There is general agreement that our country spends too much on health care. I’m not so sure that’s actually true.

Why? The key here is recognizing the truth of David Goldhill’s distinction: “Health insurance isn’t health care.” This points us to another distinction, that of spending on care vs. spending on insurance. We tend to run them together, and I would certainly agree that we spend too much on these two things in combination; but we need to understand that in fact they’re two very different things—and I would argue that we should view spending money on them very, very differently.

Money spent on health care proper is money that goes to local businesses, perhaps a local non-profit organization (that would be, perhaps, your local hospital), and to other businesses that employ people to make things and to design new things to make. Money spent on healthinsurance is spent on bureaucrats who generate paper; indirectly, it also goes to subsidize trial lawyers and their campaign contributions to Democratic politicians. A good chunk of what you pay for health care also goes to this purpose, of course, in the percentage of your bill that is used to defray insurance costs for your doctor, your hospital, and so on.

Do we spend too much money on health care? No, what we spend too much money on—far too much money—is bureaucrats and trial lawyers. This is what needs to change most of all if we’re going to bring down the combined cost of health care and health insurance; and if we focus instead on reducing the cost of health care, we’re going to reduce the quality of our care without ever addressing the real problem and the real inefficiency of the current system.

This is, I think, what has happened to health care in Britain under the National Health Service. British cyberfriend David Riddick defends the NHS, in part, on the grounds that the UK spends less on health care than the US, and certainly the share of GDP spent on the combination of health care and health insurance is lower there; but given that they spend a higher percentage of that on bureaucrats, I don’t think that’s actually a good thing. That doesn’t drive good care, because the money isn’t being spent on care, and it doesn’t help the British economy any, either. Bureaucrats aren’t productive for the economy—they don’t create wealth, they don’t create jobs, they don’t create innovation; they just create red tape and paperwork.

The same is not true of much of the rest of the health care sector in modern economies. To take one example, the community where I live is the home of a cluster of orthopedics-products companies that make artificial joints, spinal hardware, and the like—products that relieve people (mainly, but not only, older people) of a great deal of pain and greatly improve their quality of life. These companies employ a lot of people, offering good manufacturing jobs as well as a lot of design and engineering work, and they drive research, as they’re always working on developing new and better products. So far, they’ve weathered the financial storm quite well; people will put off luxuries and elective purchases in tough economic times, but if you’re in pain and you can’t walk right, you’re not going to put off getting a new knee or a new hip if that will solve the problem.

Right now, though, they’re deeply worried about the push to nationalize our health care system, because it’s going to devastate their business. That artificial hip that the president keeps talking about, the one that he thinks might have been a waste to put in his grandmother, didn’t come from nowhere; it probably came from Warsaw, and it employed a number of people. His idea of how to cut health-care costs isn’t going to reduce the amount of money that goes to bureaucrats—it’s going to increase that spending, because we’ll need a lot more bureaucrats to run his program and decide which people are allowed to get new hips and knees. Instead, it’s going to reduce the amount of money that goes to companies like Zimmer and Biomet, which means it’s going to reduce the number of people they employ to design and build their products.

Health care “reform” as envisioned by the Democrats will take money out of their pockets to pay even more bureaucrats; it will shift money from a profitable sector of our economy, one that creates jobs that pay good wages and new products that improve people’s lives, to an unprofitable sector (the government)—and all in the name of spending less money. The contrast with the “stimulus” package is ironic. There we were told, “Spending money is good—increasing spending is good for the economy.” When it comes to health care, though, the government is telling us that spending money is bad, and so we need to hire lots and lots more bureaucrats so that we can cut down on the money we spend on actual health care. In the spirit of the “stimulus” package, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the amount of money going to companies like Biomet and Zimmer so that they can hire more people and help the economy?

We tend to talk about the cost of health care as if cost were the only side of the coin, and it just isn’t; the money we spend doesn’t just vanish into thin air. Instead, that money goes to actual people, and much of it drives good things in our economy. Health care spending creates economic growth; it’s good for our country. We don’t need to spend less money on care; we need to spend less on bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Unfortunately, the president’s plan gets this backwards; we need to put it right way ’round.

 

Morning prayer

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Take, O take me as I am; summon out what I shall be;
set your seal upon my heart and live in me.

—John Bell

This is a simple little musical prayer written by the Iona Community’s John Bell, with a reflective melody that ends on an unresolved chord (the melody ends on re); I’ve seen it used most often as a congregational response, either to Scripture readings or during a time of prayer. For whatever reason, it floated into my mind this past hour, and has been flowing through it ever since. I guess this is the prayer of my heart this morning, for myself and for our congregation.

True Riches

Posted on by | No Comments

(Proverbs 23:4-5, Jeremiah 9:23-24; 1 Timothy 6:3-10, 17-19)

I admit it’s a little odd, chopping up the last chapter of 1 Timothy like this; but we have to in order to keep Paul’s thought together. Remember, he wasn’t sitting at a desk writing these letters—he dictated them; and maybe it’s just projection on my part, but I’ve always imagined him walking up and down the room, waving his arms, talking faster when he got more excited. Though for the letters he sent from prison, he was chained to two Roman soldiers, one on each side, so I have no idea how that worked.

In any case, this gives his letters a certain stream-of-consciousness quality, including Paul remembering he’s forgotten something and doubling back to pick it up. I think he did this in chapter 3, interrupting himself for a moment to add a note on women in leadership, and we see it here as well. Paul makes his comments about the false teachers in Ephesus, then goes on to give a personal charge to Timothy—and then suddenly realizes that his comments in verses 9-10 could be taken as an attack on the rich in general, which isn’t his point at all. To prevent that, he changes course for a minute to add say a few more things to those who are rich about how they should handle their riches.

The key thing here is that money is not the problem, and being rich is not the problem; the problem is one’s attitude toward wealth, and that’s something that can be as much of an issue for the poor and the middle class as for the rich. The issue isn’t having money, but wanting money, desiring riches, until that becomes the most important thing in your life, and the dominant factor in your decision-making. That is the kind of attitude Paul is talking about here; that’s the attitude which was the downfall of the false teachers, which led them to their ruin. Remember, these were people who had earned the respect of the congregation, whom the church had trusted enough to accept as leaders; clearly, they were people of great gifts and considerable wisdom—until they went off the rails.

By the time Paul writes this letter, of course, the false teachers have fallen a long way; their wisdom and understanding have faded to clueless foolishness, they’ve grown conceited, and they’re the sort of people who start arguments for the fun of it, simply because they enjoy making trouble, especially if they can make other people look silly in the process. And what was the root of their fall? Greed. They wanted to use the church to get rich. The irony of it is, they were probably being paid by the church—they were already making money off their position. It would be bad enough if some of our elders and deacons started doing this—not that I can imagine it—when they put a lot of blood, toil, tears and sweat into this church, and we don’t give them a whole lot back; but these folks were drawing a paycheck for being leaders in the church, and that still wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more; they wanted to be rich. And following that desire, following their greed, led them away from Jesus, and to their ruin.

But then, as Paul notes, if the desire to be rich is driving your thinking, if that’s what’s controlling your decisions, you’re going to wreck yourself sooner or later. The proverb he cites in verse 10 has often been misinterpreted, as if he were saying that the love of money is the source of all sin, or as if money were the root of all evil, neither of which is the point; indeed, letting ourselves be captured by any sort of strong desire, whether for wealth, power, praise, sexual pleasure, revenge, or anything else, will lead us into ruin. Paul’s point here is simply that greed falls into that category, and that the love of money doesn’t lead to good things, but only to evil. If we seek true wealth, and a truly good life, we must put aside the desire for money and look elsewhere.

This isn’t always easy for people to believe, especially with the current economy; but last fall’s crash underlines the truth of our text from Proverbs that financial security is really just an illusion, because material wealth is all too likely to disappear before your eyes. It’s simply too vulnerable to the vagaries of this world for us to count on it. Jesus doesn’t promise us that we’ll have a lot of money, or that we’ll be rich in things—instead, he promises that we’ll have enough in this world, and that in him we will find true gain, something this world can’t take away. As Paul defines that here, the true gain offered in Christ is godliness combined with contentment.

That word “contentment” is an interesting one, because in its normal Greek usage it meant “self-sufficiency” of the sternest kind, the ability to rely completely on one’s own internal resources Paul defines it in Philippians 4, where he declares, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” What Paul means by “contentment” is not self-sufficiency but Christ-sufficiency; it’s the power Christ gives us to trust him completely to meet our needs, rather than relying on our own efforts and abilities and possessions. Contentment is living free, emotionally, from our circumstances, whether we’re rich or poor, married or single, powerful or powerless, praised or scorned; it’s depending wholly on Christ, trusting wholly in him that he is with us taking care of us, that he knows where he has led us, and why, and what he is doing in and through our lives.

This, Paul says, is true riches: to be content in Christ, to know that Christ is sufficient for us in all circumstances, and to be living in accordance with his will. Anything else is less, and to spend our lives pursuing anything else is not to enrich our lives, but to impoverish them. Thus in verse 17 Paul turns to those in the church who are rich, and whose help in supporting the church is no doubt of great importance, and applies it specifically to them. There’s nothing wrong with their being rich; indeed, what they have, God has given them to enjoy, and to use to help others, as he gives us all good things. There is no moral status either to wealth or to poverty; but both create certain responsibilities and challenges. The rich must be careful not to look down on others, and they must be careful not to put their trust in money instead of in God. They must remember the words of Jeremiah, who warned us not to take pride, or put our stock, in earthly things: “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, nor the strong boast in their might, nor the rich boast in their riches; but let them boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the LORD.” That’s the only thing, really, that matters; the rest are just tools God has given us to use in his service, nothing more.

And so, to the rich, Paul says, be diligent to use your riches in that way—do good works with your money, and be generous to others, and in that way, store up treasure for yourselves in heaven, which is the only treasure that will last. They need, as we all need, to be able to say to God—and mean it!—“Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold. Take my life—take all of me, everything I am—and may it be ever, only, all for you.”

Reflections on John Piper and the tornado

Posted on by | 2 Comments

In case you somehow missed it, there was a tornado in Minneapolis earlier this week—or perhaps we might say, there were two tornadoes in Minneapolis, one of winds and one of words; the original storm inspired a blog post from John Piper, “The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality,” which caused quite a storm of its own.

Piper’s post begins with this description of the circumstances:

A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,

On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected . . . a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.

The tornado happens on a Wednesday . . . during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has set up tents around its building for this purpose.

According to the ELCA’s printed convention schedule, at 2 PM on Wednesday, August 19, the 5th session of the convention was to begin. The main item of the session: “Consideration: Proposed Social Statement on Human Sexuality.” The issue is whether practicing homosexuality is a behavior that should disqualify a person from the pastoral ministry.

The eyewitness of the damage continues:

This curious tornado touches down just south of downtown and follows 35W straight towards the city center. It crosses I94. It is now downtown.

The time: 2PM.

The first buildings on the downtown side of I94 are the Minneapolis Convention Center and Central Lutheran. The tornado severely damages the convention center roof, shreds the tents, breaks off the steeple of Central Lutheran, splits what’s left of the steeple in two . . . and then lifts.

He then proceeds to lay out an argument from Scripture—I won’t quote it all here; you can follow the link—leading to this conclusion:

The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.

Now, as you can probably imagine, a lot of people aren’t very happy with that last paragraph—and not all of them are liberals, by any means. Scot McKnight, in a comment on this post, asked,

The text points us away from the specific sins of some persons or some group and to the fact that we are all sinners. Piper points to the specific sins of the ELCA and only then generalizes. Don’t you see the tension of these two approaches?

My wife, for her part, had a similar reaction, arguing that the concluding paragraph quoted above doesn’t really follow from the preceding five points.

From where I sit, I’m not sure Dr. McKnight is reading Dr. Piper’s post quite correctly, but I do agree with David Sessions that the certainty of Dr. Piper’s final paragraph is overreaching. I’ve pointed out elsewhere (not sure if it’s up on the blog or not) that biblically, whenever God sends a disaster as judgment, he always sends a prophet first so that you don’t have to waste time wondering if the disaster is judgment from God—he’s already told you it is. As far as I’m aware, nobody predicted this; it just happened, which makes me very dubious about efforts to put any sort of specific interpretation on this tornado.

And yet, as uncomfortable as I am with Dr. Piper’s conclusion (and particularly the absolute way in which he presents it), I think his argument has more force than his critics (including my wife) want to admit. If we believe in the sovereignty and the providence of God, then we have to conclude that that tornado did exactly what God wanted it to do—and it couldn’t have been more precisely targeted on the ELCA’s national assembly, and in particular their consideration of that study paper (which they subsequently approved), if it had been a Tomahawk cruise missile. It appeared where no tornado was expected, took a perfectly precise route, hit the target, doing noticeable but (as far as I can tell) superficial damage, and then lifted. Short of actually forming right above Central Lutheran and just yo-yoing down and back up again, I’m not sure how its behavior could possibly have been more suggestive.

But suggestive of what? I think it’s going a step too far to try to answer that question as outsiders. Certainly the passage Dr. Piper quotes from Luke 13 is apt, as the call to repentance is always apt; but I also think Dr. McKnight’s point here is well-taken, if not quite correct: Jesus’ words in that passage point us, not to the fact that we are all sinners, but to the fact that we ourselves are sinners, and that the deaths of those on whom the tower fell should inspire each of us to get right with God. Certainly the Minneapolis tornado, with its reminder that in God’s hands, even the weather is a precision weapon, should similarly inspire us.

Anything more than that, though—anything specific to the ELCA and why God might have hit them, at that particular point in their deliberations, with a tornado—is, it seems to me, between God and the ELCA. He didn’t see fit to tell us what to think in advance, nor does anything in Scripture give us warrant to make any judgments about them from the fact that they were hit with a tornado. There may well be a specific message to the leaders of that denomination in the behavior of this tornado, but if so, it’s for them, not for us. Jesus doesn’t talk to us about others and what they need to do—as Aslan tells Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that’s not part of our story; instead, he talks to us about ourselves and what we need to do.

I agree with Dr. Piper that approval of homosexual behavior by the church is contrary to Scripture and the revealed will of God; but I also note very carefully that in Luke 13, when Jesus referenced those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, he said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No.” This is where I think my wife was right, because if we really consider this tornado in the light of those words, what we would have to say is this: no matter how bad we might think the ELCA is, no matter how bad we might think it was for them to take the step they did, Jesus says to us, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than anyone else—including you? No; you too must repent.”

 

Thought on Christian leadership

Posted on by | 2 Comments

To be a leader in the church—and really, to be a Christian in leadership in any organization—is not to be an independent agent, but rather, to be a leader under God. Unfortunately, too often, we don’t realize that. As human beings, we tend to look at leadership positions as a chance for people to make sure things are done their way, to realize their own vision and make their priorities everyone else’s priorities. That’s certainly how we see things done time after time in our politics—frequently with disastrous results, especially for politicians who are unwilling to listen to those who disagree with them and take their concerns seriously. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you see leadership as a form of self-expression and self-actualization.

In God’s view, being a good leader is first and foremost about being a good follower—specifically, a follower of God. Godly leadership isn’t about imposing our will on our circumstances, but about seeking and following God’s will in our circumstances, and doing so in a way that makes the way clear to others so that they can follow us in turn. It’s the sort of thing Paul’s talking about in 1 Corinthians 11:1 when he says, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” That’s it in a nutshell.

In the Christian view, leadership is mimetic—which is to say, it’s all about imitation. We learn to follow Christ by imitating others who have learned to follow him more closely than we do, who in turn are following others who are yet further along in their Christian walk, who in turn are following others who went before them; and each of us, as we learn to follow Christ more nearly, lead others in turn to do the same. That’s leadership; that’s also discipleship. For the Christian, the two are inseparable.

(Excerpted from “Fitness”)

Mr. Obama goes to Montana

Posted on by | No Comments

and a number of folks in Montana aren’t all that happy about it, or at least about the way it was handled. This letter was written by a resident of Bozeman, Montana; I don’t know them, but I’m confident in the source, especially I’ve had someone else vouch for it as an accurate account as well, so I’m posting it.

Hello All,

By now you have probably heard that President Obama came to Montana last Friday, Aug. 14. However, there are many things that the major news has not covered. I feel that since Bill and I live here and we were at the airport on Friday I should share some facts with you. Whatever you decide to do with the information is up to you. If you chose to share this email with others I do ask that you DELETE my email address before you forward this on.

On Wednesday, August 5th it was announced locally that the President would be coming here. There are many groups here that are against his healthcare and huge spending so those groups began talking and deciding on what they were going to do. The White House would not release ANY details other than the date.

On about Tuesday Bill found out that they would be holding the “Town Hall” at the airport. (This is only because Bill knows EVERYONE at the airport). Our airport is actually located outside of Belgrade (tiny town) in a very remote location. Nothing is around there. They chose to use a hangar that is the most remotely located hangar. You could not pick a more remote location, and you can not get to it easily. It is totally secluded from the public. FYI: We have many areas in Belgrade and Bozeman which could have held a large amount of folks with sufficient parking (gymnasiums/auditoriums). All of which have chairs and tables, and would not have to be SHIPPED IN!! $$$$$. During the week, cargo by the TONS was being shipped in constantly. Airport employees could not believe how it just kept coming. Though it was our President coming several expressed how excessive it was, especially during a recession. $$$$$.

Late Tuesday/early Wednesday Aug. 12th, they said that tickets would be handed out on Thursday 9am at two locations and the president would be arriving around 12:30 Friday. Thursday morning about 600 tickets were passed out. However, 1500 were printed at a Local printing shop per White House request. Hmmmm . . . 900 tickets just DISAPPEARED. This same morning someone called into the radio from the local UPS branch and said that THOUSANDS of Dollars of Lobster were shipped in for Obama. Montana has some of the best beef in the nation!!! And it would have been really wonderful to help out the local economy. Anyone heard of the Recession?? Just think . . . with all of the traveling the White House is doing. $$$$$. One can only imagine what else we are paying for.

On Friday Bill and I got out to the airport about 10:45am. The groups that wanted to protest Obama’s spending and healthcare had gotten a permit to protest and that area was roped off. But that was not to be. A large bus carrying SEIU (Service Employees International Union) members drove up onto the area (illegal) and unloaded right there. It was quite a commotion and there were specifically 2 SEIU men trying to make trouble and start a fight. Police did get involved and arrested the one man but they said they did not have the manpower to remove the SEIU crowd. The SEIU crowd was very organized and young. About 99% were under the age of 30 and they were not locals! They had bullhorns and PROFESSIONALLY made signs. Some even wore preprinted T-shirts. Oh, and Planned Parenthood folks were with them . . . professing abortion rights with their T-shirts and preprinted signs. (BTW, all these folks did have a permit to protest in ANOTHER area)! Those against healthcare/spending moved away from the SEIU crowd to avoid confrontation. They were orderly and respectful. Even though SEIU kept coming over and walking through, continuing to be very intimidating and aggressive at the direction of the one SEIU man.

So we had Montana folks from ALL OVER the state with their homemade signs and their DOGS with homemade signs. We had cowboys, nurses, doctors you name it. There was even a guy from Texas who had been driving through. He found out about the occasion, went to the store, made a sign, and came to protest. If you are wondering about the press . . . Well, all of the major networks were over by that remote hangar I mentioned. They were conveniently parked on the other side of the buildings FAR away. None of these crowds were even visible to them. I have my doubts that they knew anything about the crowds. We did have some local news media around us from this state and Idaho. Speaking of the local media . . . they were invited. However, all questions were to be turned in to the White House in advance of the event. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think off the top of their head! It was very obvious that it was meant to be totally controlled by the White House. Everything was orchestrated down to the last detail to make it appear that Montana is just crazy for Obama and government healthcare. Even those people that talked about their insurance woes . . . the White House called our local HRDC (Human Resource and Development Committee) and asked for names. Then the White House asked those folks to come. Smoke and mirrors . . . EVERYTHING was staged!!!!!!!!!!!

I am very dismayed about what I learned about our current White House. The amount of control and manipulation was unbelievable. I felt I was not living in the United States of America, more like the USSR !! I was physically nauseous. Bill and I have been around when Presidents or Heads of State visit. It has NEVER been like this. I am truly very frightened for our country. America needs your prayers and your voices. If you care about our country please get involved. Know the issues. And let Congress hear your voices again and again!! If they are willing to put forth so much effort to BULLY a small town one can only imagine what is going on in Washington DC. Scary!!