A Fresh Perspective

A little boy was riding home with his parents after church. His parents and new baby brother had just been involved in a parent child dedication. He was very sad on the way home and so finally his parents asked him what was wrong. He said, “The pastor said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, but I want to stay with you guys.” What does it mean for children to be raised, nurtured, and taught in a Christian context? The prophet Micah said: The Lord has told you, what is good and what the Lord requires of you, namely, to do justice (justice here is not punitive or retributive justice, it’s not getting what you deserve justice. It’s restorative justice, it’s standing with and speaking up for the most vulnerable and less fortunate), and it fits hand-in-glove with the next characteristic the prophet names – to love kindness, or to love mercy. The third is to walk humbly with your God . That is what God expects, says the prophet – restorative justice, kindness, and humility. ...

Job’s patience gives way to defiance, which in turn leads to the objections and complaints of Job’s three friends. In his defiance Job questions and even curses God. Job’s friends come to God’s defense and urge Job to repent of his sin. They, like Job in the beginning, are entrenched in a theology of reward and retribution. They believe all this is all happening to Job because he has sinned. That’s how they understand life to work. They assume Job’s misfortune is due to God’s punishment. While this dialogue and argument back and forth between Job and his friends is going on, God is silent. Then, after all is said, God shows up. God speaks. The writers says, “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” Do you find that interesting? Out of a whirlwind, out of a tornado God speaks. Maybe one aspect of God speaking out of a whirlwind is to say that God speaks however God chooses to speak – to anyone and in any way God wants. No one can pin God in or figure God out or claim to k...

Until we face some something that challenges our beliefs and assumptions, we tend to accept and believe what we have been taught, what was handed down to us in the process of being socialized into society by family, friends, peers, teachers, and the people we admire and are drawn to in our culture. Job believed what most everyone else believed in his culture, namely, that God was responsible for the good and bad that happened to people on earth. So after the first series of catastrophes where he loses family and fortune he says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” When Job is afflicted with painful soars all over his body and when his wife questions his loyalty to a God who would do this to him, he says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” He is still locked in to this view of God. When Job’s friends first hear of his troubles the tex...

One of my favorite Fred Craddock stories which most of you have probably heard before, but a few of you haven’t is the story Fred tells about the time he and his wife were vacationing in their favorite place in the Great Smokey Mountains. They ate dinner in a rather new restaurant called the Black Bear Inn, which featured a beautiful view of the mountains. Early into their meal an elderly man approached their table and welcomed them.   He talked to them for a while and it came out that Fred was a minister with the Christian Church of the Disciples of Christ. When the elderly man heard that he was a Disciples of Christ minister he pulled up a chair and said, “I owe a great deal to the Christian church.” Then he told Fred and his wife this story: He said, “I grew up in these mountains. My mother was not married and the whole community knew it. In those days it was a reproach, and the reproach that fell on my mother, fell also on me. When I went into town with her, I could see p...