10 on the “Big Ten” List

Some legislators want The Ten Commandments posted on walls in Texas schoolrooms.

I have a concern about #10. It lists a man’s wife as one of his possessions.

Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s house, or your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.

Note that the wife is not first on the list. The house comes first.

But she is (we give thanks) above the ox and the donkey. And just above the slaves. Still, the wife is owned, just like the slaves and the ox and the donkey.

This old attitude remains enshrined in the traditional marriage vow. The father says, “I give this woman to be married to this man.”

Dad passed ownership to the husband, usually with a little money or a few sacks of grain to sweeten the deal.

I’m not sure we want to solidify this image of marriage in the minds of our children. There are too many boys and men who think this way already.

The “Big Ten” are a great and ancient moral code, but they don’t belong on classroom walls.

Nor do the teachings of Jesus, for that matter. Keep church and state separate.

But it is interesting that the legislators pushing The Ten Commandments never suggest posting words from The Sermon on the Mount.

And why not?

They don’t believe them.

Jesus told us to seek no revenge, to love our enemies, and to be kind to those who are unkind to us. The Jesus way is not on the Christian Nationalist agenda. +++

Sermon Sunday: The Double-Minded Christian.

Tune in. I may be talking about you. 11:00 a.m.

Just One Savior

You know, there is something seriously wrong with much of the church.

Not with its Founder.

Jesus was right about God. He preached a unique message of God’s love for all people.

He told us to love even our enemies, because God loves “the ungrateful and the wicked.”

He renounced revenge of all sorts.

Jesus got it right.

So why has the church, almost from the start, gotten so much wrong?

How could someone who claimed to follow Jesus write a revenge epic like the Book of Revelation?

And why did a council of Christians not see that this work teaches the opposite of everything Jesus said?

They put it in the Bible!

And now, along with the God we call Father who loves us all, we have that rough God who sends plagues and dumps bowls of wrath upon us.

And we pay the price.

For 2,000 years many in the church have sponsored inquisitions, crusades, and slavery—in God’s name.

John Calvin had a man killed over doctrine.

My great, great, great grandfather, a Baptist preacher, owned slaves.

When I was growing up, nearly all of the folks in the pews on Sundays were loudly and proudly racist.

And now, it is mostly Christians who follow that man who is morally and spiritually bankrupt.

Why?

How could this be?

Here’s the answer:

Many Christians read the Bible as if all of it reflects Jesus.

It doesn’t.

Revelation and a number of passages in the Old Testament give us the very opposite of Jesus.

I just did a quick count. We have only one Savior.

It’s time for the church to listen to him.

The Book of Revelation

The final decision at the Council of Hippo in 397 was to include the Book of Revelation in the canon of the Bible.

It was a mistake.

After that, it has been hard to get Christians to listen to the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels.

Our natural inclination is toward revenge, and the Book of Revelation is a book of vengeance. In it, both God and his Son are rough customers.

God pours out bowls of wrath on the earth and sends fire and earthquakes.

And Jesus rides in on a white horse with a sword in his mouth and cuts off the heads of his enemies.

And that’s it.

That’s the undoing of the image of God we have in the Gospels.

That wipes out the essential teaching of Jesus—that God loves us, even if we are the worst of sinners. For God loves God’s enemies.

Jesus says God is “kind to the ungrateful and to the wicked.”

So, Christians face a choice: They must choose bowls of wrath or grace.

They must choose a Jesus who cuts off heads or dies for us on the cross.

They can’t have both.

And many Christians, particularly evangelicals, choose the image of God from Revelation.

That tells us why a political figure who is all about vengeance has the support of so many people who claim to follow Jesus Christ.

That politician was once asked to name his favorite verse of scripture.

He said, “An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Yes, the very verse Jesus quoted to say that it was wrong.

And so is that “book of vengeance” in the Bible.

It is wrong about God.

Jesus Got It Right

Is theology more like philosophy or math?

There are many different philosophical positions.

But two times two is always four.

So, theology must be like philosophy. Look at the 20,000 denominations of Christianity.

There seems to be no stable truth. No clear single picture of what God is like.

I beg to differ.

God is knowable through experience.

Every experience of God gives us information about God. And that information is always consistent from one experience to another.

Talk to 100 people who have encountered God in an NDE or other form of religious experience.

The God they meet will always be the same:

Entirely loving.

Endlessly forgiving.

Every experience of God gives us information about God.

And that information is consistent and reliable.

Like two plus two.

Theology is a study of available information.

It is not guesswork.

It can be accurate.

And here’s the big news:

Experience gives us the same information about God that we get from Jesus.

Jesus got God right!

Plato didn’t.

Aristotle didn’t.

Not one of the great thinkers of antiquity got God right. But Jesus did. This is the most powerful argument for the claim we make that Jesus is Lord.

Luke 6:27-36 is the best description ever written of the God we know exists.

And how do we know this God exists? We meet God through experience.

Two plus two is always four. And God is always and at all times—love.

Exciting, isn’t it?!!

I’m sure you are all a-twitter with expectation.

January 5, tonight, is Twelfth Night!

Wow!

On second thought—yes, I know. Twelfth Night has lost all of its “wow!”

It is still the last day of the Christmas season, but you may have thrown out the tree days ago.

And it is still the Eve of Epiphany, Jan 6.

But I don’t know anyone sitting on the edge of their seat with expectation.

Epiphany used to be the big day. It was like Christmas Day is now.

And Twelfth Night was like Christmas Eve.

And people gave gifts on all of the 12 days of Christmas.

See what we’re missing out on? When’s the last time you got five golden rings—or a bird of any kind in a pear tree?

Things began to change in the 18th century.

The old ways died out and the “big day” shifted from Jan 5 to Dec 25.

But a memory lingered on in my family.

My grandmother said her mother used to talk about old Christmas, Jan. 6.

And the day was said to be so holy, at midnight on the night before, all the cattle in the barnyard knelt in prayer.

Mother, age nine, wanted to check this out herself.

So, at midnight, as Jan 5 turned to Jan 6, she went to the cattle barn to see the cows in prayer.

Turns out—not a holy cow in the bunch.

But the story of Old Christmas has lived on in our family for 200 years.

And the cows may not know it, but every day is holy. Have a blessed Epiphany.

And join us at the Lord’s Table on the first Sunday of 2024. At 11:00.