A Fresh Perspective

We should never assume that other Christians or even non-Christians familiar with Christianity have the same ideas or mean the same thing when we talk about salvation. I think most Christians, regardless of their background, tend to think of salvation as being delivered or rescued from some great peril. Now granted, Christians may have very different ideas about what that peril is we need to be rescued from, but most conceive of salvation in terms of rescue or deliverance. I think of the old hymn, “Rescue the perishing” as capturing for many the main stay of God’s salvation. Rescue from peril is certainly one image of salvation in our sacred scriptures, but only one. There are many images of salvation in our Bible. Other images include return from exile, making whole that which is broken, reconciling the alienated and estranged, being enlightened out of spiritual and moral blindness, experiencing spiritual life in place of death, experiencing liberation from oppression and bondage, m...

As far as my memories go back I remember being in the church house on Sundays. It did not always go well for me on Sundays. I can vaguely remember one Sunday when my parents and my best friend’s parents let us sit together during Sunday worship by ourselves. We decided to take the foil wrapper of a piece of chewing gum and make a little paper football. We had a whole side pew to ourselves so Keith slid over to one side and I to the other. We made goal posts with our hands and thumbs and kicked field goals. One of my kicks deviated from its intended path and landed inside a curl of the lady sitting in the pew directly in front of us. She was hard of hearing so we didn’t worry too much, but Keith got tickled and I got tickled, enough that our parents took note. Well, that was the last time we got to sit together for a very long time. I also remember as a kid sitting in worship as the preacher seemed to drone on and on thinking, “What person in their right mind would want to do this eve...

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...

In the opening chapters of Genesis there are two creation stories arising out of different times and contexts in Israel’s history. The story from which I am reading today extends from 1:1 to 2:4a. Most likely this story emerged around the sixth century BCE and was originally addressed to a community of exiles. Just as the Gospel of John begins with a poem about the Word made flesh, Genesis begins with a poem about creation. This is not history or science; it’s what some scholars call “metaphorical narrative.” It’s parable and poetry. I am not going to read the whole story. Our OT reading for this Sunday, which is my sermon text, is from the opening part of this story. I am reading 1:1-5. In a Gary Larson cartoon a wagon train is under siege by Indians. A couple of fiery arrows hit the wagons, and they burst into flames. One cowboy turns to another and says, “Hey! They’re lighting their arrows! Can they do that?” Sometimes when life shoots fiery arrows at us and the wagons in which...

The sacred storywriter tells us that Moses prays, “Show me your ways, so that I may know you.” This is, I believe, the universal longing of the human heart. One ancient interpreter of the faith said, “The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in God.”   Of course, not everyone would identify this existential angst, this missing element in our lives as a longing for God. In fact, it’s usually disguised as something else. We might think that the something that is missing is something in our marriage or our vocational career or in our friendships. We might think of something physical or material or emotional – rather than spiritual. And I’m sure there are things missing in those areas of our lives, because none of us have it all together do we? So I am not suggesting that every need, every longing, every bit of angst we experience is spiritual. But all these other longings and needs are echoes of our greatest need of all, which is spiritual. It is the need to consciously c...

See what you see. This is the meaning of a Jesus saying in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.” Not long ago I went into the kitchen to fix a piece of toast for breakfast. I opened the pantry door and looked in the basket where we keep the bread. No bread. So I looked around in the pantry. Couldn’t find it. I opened the cabinet where we keep the cereal. It wasn’t there. So I did what many people do. I blamed someone. I’m thinking, “Ok, where did my wife put the bread?” In the meanwhile I cracked my boiled egg, peeled it, and as I tossed the last piece of shell in the trash, I glanced around in the pantry one more time and guess what? There was the bread. Guess where it was? In the basket where it was supposed to be. So how did I miss it? How did I not see what I was obviously looking at it? While this may be a rare kind of experien...