This Week's Sermon: "The Hope"

Acts 5:12 to 16

12 The apostles performed many signs and wonders among the people. They would come together regularly at Solomon’s Porch. 13 No one from outside the church dared to join them, even though the people spoke highly of them. 14 Indeed, more and more believers in the Lord, large numbers of both men and women, were added to the church. 15 As a result, they would even bring the sick out into the main streets and lay them on cots and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow could fall on some of them as he passed by. 16 Even large numbers of persons from towns around Jerusalem would gather, bringing the sick and those harassed by unclean spirits. Everyone was healed. (Common English Bible)

“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,” Week Nine

The video clips on Facebook, Twitter, Vine, etc. are all more or less the same: some oddball in a t shirt and bathing suit stands somewhere, usually outdoors, and talks for a little bit to their friends before proceeding to dump a really giant, huge bucket of ice water all over them.  It is called the Ice Bucket Challenge, and it has taken social media by storm.  Basically, you have to dump said giant, huge bucket of ice water over you or donate $100 to research for Amyotrphoic Lateral Sclerosis.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is, I think, one of the most frightening things ever whose name many of us do not even know…instead, we know it by another name: Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the famous Yankee first baseman whose career and, eventually, life were sacrificed to this illness.

And ALS is frightening for a number of reasons: its difficulty to diagnose, its lack of known causes beyond family history, and its deadly prognosis: while some of its targets end up living long and amazing lives (Steven Hawking celebrated his 72^nd birthday this year after being diagnosed at age 21, with his doctors at the time giving him only two years to live), the average person lives for only a little over three years after diagnosis.  Only 4 percent of patients live longer than 10 years after their diagnosis.  And those who die from ALS usually end up succumbing to either respiratory failure or pneumonia as the disease shuts down their body, beginning with the extremities of hands and arms before ending with the lungs.  It is an incredibly vivid, harrowing way to go out.

With so much of the deck stacked against us, it’s perhaps not surprising that we haven’t found anything remotely close to a cure (or even disease management) yet, but that still hasn’t kept us from trying, and sometimes, with a disease that desperate, you are desperate enough to do utterly ridiculous things, like, say, drench yourself in ice water (and if you’re the CEO of my hometown soccer team, Sporting Kansas City, drenching yourself in ice water from the MLS Cup your team is currently defending this season).  And it has made a difference: according to TIME, the ALS Association took in $32,000 in donations during this particular three week time period last year.

This year?  $5.5 million.  For those of you keeping score at home (or in your pews), that’s an increase of 171 times normal.  Not bad for what ice water with a dash of desperation and hope can do.  And it’s the same desperation and hope, I think, that moved and saved lives for people as far back as this story from Luke in Acts about how people who were so sick and so desperate for a cure would seek out Peter’s shadow, of all things, in order to make themselves whole. 

What a little bit of hope and desperation can do, indeed.

This is a sermon series that has been ongoing now for a while!  We began it several weeks ago for two reasons.  One is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit, but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that follow.  The other is that it’s summer, and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios (depending on just how bad the sequel is!).  The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.  Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name) precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far better than many of the sequels we are used to today!  So this is a sermon series meant to take us through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the early church lived out the faith, which contrasted with the standalone story of Ananias and Sapphira that we studied last week.  This week, we’re back on the move again, as Luke once again zooms out to gives us a more macro view of what the New Testament church is up to now.

And in a lot of ways, it’s the same old tricks as before: they’re on the road, healing people, performing what Luke calls signs and wonders, but this time, a funny thing happens: nobody is joining them anymore.  And we can probably think, well, no wonder after what happened to those two dopes Ananias and Sapphira.  If getting close to the Apostles means giving literally everything you own and a death sentence if you don’t, well, that’s just any marketer’s dream client.

But that doesn’t stop people from joining anyways, they just maybe are keeping a safe distance from Peter and John for a bit.  And it certainly doesn’t stop those who are still seeking healing from the disciples; after all, church membership isn’t a prerequisite to have a miracle happen in your life, it’s that church membership helps you to make sense of it and process it and live accordingly afterwards.  But when you’re desperate enough to seek out a band of itinerant heroes who have a reputation for mysteriously miraculous healings, you don’t care about any of that.  For a lot of us, I think, our health and wholeness comes first, and you’ll worry about all the other stuff whenever that bridge gets crossed.

And the folks coming to the disciples now are so desperate that they will bring out their sick loved ones and friends and neighbors and simply place them out in the street in the hope that Peter’s shadow will cross over them.  Imaginatively, it sort of brings to mind that “bring out your dead” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, only instead of Eric Idle clanging metal together, you have Peter proclaiming the Gospel.  A small but certainly significant difference.

The truly ironic thing, though, is that Peter himself has argued previously in this series, just two chapters ago in Acts 3, that his healing abilities did not, as Bible professor Paul Walaskay says, “come through his (Peter’s) own power or piety, but by the name of Jesus.  In this passage, however, Luke suggests that Peter himself, even his shadow, was the vehicle of healing.”  Walaskay suggests that this may be due to “Luke’s attempt to make a connection with some of his readers who are outside the mainstream of early Judaism and Christianity: Gentiles who needed a display of miracles as an inducement to become believers,” but I’m not entirely sure that is the case here, simply because Jesus likewise used miracles to induce Jewish Israelites to believe in Him as the Messiah: in fact, when Jesus is about to raise Lazarus from the dead in John 11, He says, in effect, “I am doing this so that they may believe that God sent me.”

So what on earth are we to do with Peter and his magical healing shadow?  I mean, if he ever lost that shadow, hopefully he could get it sewn back on, and hopefully whether he sees it doesn’t determine whether or not there are six more weeks of winter (one too many popular cultural references there?  Oops).  No, this can be seen as another consequence of Peter’s piety and faith, and a consequence that has some pretty big symbolic and theological consequences.

Because a shadow is inherently dark.  It offers darkness, shade, and coolness.  None of these things tend to be used as adjectives by the writers of Scripture whenever they try to describe God.  No, God is light and warmth to us; heck, the very first thing God creates when everything was without form and void in Genesis 1 is...light.  God said, “Fiat lux,” let there be light, but that alone was not enough.  He then saw that the light was good.

Here, though, God (and all of us) are seeing that a piece of darkness can be good as well, that it can provide good.  Symbolically, that communicates all the difference in the world.  It means that everything, not just the light, can be used by God for His purposes.  It means that things we might otherwise be afraid of because of darkness we need not be afraid of anymore.

And I am sure that Luke knew that as he was documenting this story.  And I am sure that he knew that what he was documenting was, and would be, and could be, a source of hope for all of his readers.

And, well, this is a world in desperate need of some hope from some unexpected places and some unexpected sources.  It isn’t just the hope that we might have brought ourselves with something as wonderful but limited as the Ice Bucket Challenge, it’s the hope that we need to able to find in places like Gaza.  Places like West Africa in the Ebola epidemic.  Places like Ferguson, Missouri.

And places like here at home, in Longview, in the wake of an attempted murder suicide in town.

These are the places, and these are the people, living under shadows right now…shadows that do not offer healing, only further darkness.  Shadows which do not offer any sense or semblance of hope.  Shadows that need what Peter, through God, was able to offer: a source of wholeness in our fragility, a source of wellness in our sickness, and above all, a sense of hope that in God, no matter how painful your circumstances, no matter how crappy a hand you have been dealt, no matter how much this broken and imperfect world beats you up, that things can and will get better one day simply because God is God, and God does not allow the hurt from sin and wrong to live forever.

That is the hope that Peter is bringing with him in this story.  It is the hope that Jesus not only brought with Him, but that He taught, that He lived, that He incarnated as the Messiah.  And that hope is why Jesus has followers to this day…why we follow Him to this day.  Because of our own hope that God’s love wins out in the end, and that no amount of evil can last forever.  We may be fragile, we may be vulnerable to it, but that does not mean we have to succumb to it.  We may be sick, ill, injured from it, but that does not mean that God will not offer us a way out, that God will not offer us a source of healing from it.

Indeed, God already has.  It is His love, given and poured out and made great for each of you.  Take it.  Place your own hope and faith in it.  For it is God’s gift, offered to you.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

August 17, 2014

Staying the Lightning's Hand: Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams, and My Own Grieving

Trigger word warning: suicide

One of my biggest childhood idols was the actor turned quadriplegic activist Christopher Reeve.  Of course he was known to everybody else long before his horseback riding accident as Superman, but I was only 9 when Reeve broke his C1/C2 vertebrae.  I really only knew him as the actor who suddenly got dealt a really crappy hand and really did amazing things with it before he died nine years later, in 2004.  Physically, we are very similar: he was an inch taller than I am, and about 10 pounds leaner, we both were asthmatics, and we both began losing our hair as teenagers.  And he was an amazing role model: he personally intervened when the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile was prepared to execute 77 actors.  When asked to run for Congress, he declined, famously replying, "And lose my influence in Washington?"  Given a copy of Reeve's 1998 autobiography Still Me, I devoured it in just a couple of sittings.

But perhaps the best story I ever found of Reeve, the one that endeared him to me the most, came from the pages of Eric Schlosser's seminal 2001 expose Fast Food Nation.  In the book's fourth chapter, he relays the experience of a Little Ceasars crew attending a "success" conference in Denver, where, surprisingly enough, Reeve is booked as one of the speakers:

"I've had to leave the physical world," Reeve says.  A stillness falls upon the arena; the place is silent during every pause.  "By the time I was twenty four, I was making millions," he continues.  "I was pretty pleased with myself...I was selfish and neglected my family...since my accident, I've been realizing...that success means something quite different."

Members of the audience start to weep.  "I see people who achieve these conventional goals," he says in a mild, even tone.  "None of it matters."

His words cut through all the snake oil of the last few hours, calmly and with great precision.  Everybody in the arena, no matter how greedy or eager for promotion, all eighteen thousand of them, know deep in their hearts that what Reeve has just said is true, too true.  Their latest schemes, their plans to market and subdivide and franchise their way up, whatever the cost...vanish in an instant.  Men and women up and down the aisles wipe away tears, touched not only by what this famous man has been through but also by a sudden awareness of something hollow about their own lives, something gnawing and unfulfilled.

During some of the darkest moments of my own life, the years of 2000 to 2003, when I was actively contemplating suicide myself, I leaned heavily on the inspiration I could find in abundance in Reeve's life and words.  I had just moved away from home for college a month or two prior to Reeve's sudden death, and I was devastated upon hearing the news.  Someone who I had spent years looking up to was gone.

And that sort of devastation was something I rarely felt, or feel, to this day...but I felt it on Monday when the news broke of Robin Williams' suicide by hanging.  It wasn't just that the guy had starred in a bunch of movies that were hallmarks of my childhood.  It wasn't just that the man had played one of my favorite roles of any movie, ever, as Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting.

It was that I recalled that Reeve had dedicated an entire chapter of Still Me to his time at Juilliard, and his *only* classmate (in a class of two) in Juilliard's Advanced Program at the time was...Robin Williams.  A close friendship between the two was almost inevitable, forged in the crucible of the demanding nature of Juilliard's coursework, and when Reeve broke his C1/C2 vertebrae, it was Williams who stopped by during his rehabilitation (which was, by Reeve's own admission, host to some of his own worst and darkest emotional moments) to try to cheer him up.

I saw a lot of posts on my Facebook and Twitter feeds about how we cannot be so surprised that those who make their living trying to get us to laugh and feel joy end up taking their own life, and I suppose I can empathize with that sentiment.  But what I remember from Reeve is that Williams was not just about making people laugh or helping them find joy, but that he could, and would, try to help people find joy when there was simply no joy to be found.

Hell, this is the guy who was invited by Steven Spielberg to come help bring at least a little bit of laughter for cheering up while Spielberg was filming his intensely dark masterpiece Schindler's List.

And whatever else you might think about the triviality and frivolity of comedy, that has to be a form of ministry.

But now, nearly ten years apart, these two differing ministers of sorts are dead and gone, each by an unexpected means.  The deaths of both, and Reeve's initial accident, came like lightning bolts out of the sky, striking down not only the men themselves but those whose lives were enriched by them and were shocked and stunned to hear about what had happened.  It was as though you were in the middle of a thunderstorm, and each bolt of lightning had found an unwilling target to shock.

So much of my own ministry, I have come to realize, revolves around staying the lightning's terrible hand.  I work to prevent people in poverty from getting their utilities shut off or from being evicted and made homeless.  I provide counsel and care to people as they lay terminal in what will eventually be their deathbeds.  I try to stave off the devastating effects of death and destruction, even though I know damn well that heaven awaits the souls of those who die after a compassionate, loving, and faithful life.

Perhaps I should not be so shocked that men like Reeve and Williams were taken (or took themselves) from us long before they ever should have.  And for all the talk we make of suicide as a selfish choice (and I get that, because my own experience with depression is that it completely and utterly prevents you from being able to see the long game in things.  Through no fault of your own, you become incredibly near sighted.), it is likewise selfish of me to want to keep my heroes here.

And so as I grieve their deaths, I also grieve my own selfishness.  It is the selfishness I feel whenever I see someone I admire, care about,  and appreciate pass on.  It is the selfishness that contributes to that awful feeling of devastation I get whenever that news first hits my ears and my brain registers its reality.

And so while we may be quick to judge the selfishness of Robin Williams' suicide, perhaps it is our own selfishness that we should be equally quick to judge.  Perhaps we should be grieving not only the death, but the brokenness we see from ourselves in its wake.  Perhaps our grieving cannot, should not, and will not be limited simply to the departed.

Hey, I don't know.  I'm just a guy with a blog.  But as I grieve, as I mourn, and as I try to stay the lightning in my own life, it's at least a place for me to start.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

We Are Legion, Reprise II: Robin Williams Remembered

This afternoon, as I was speaking at the graveside interment of the husband of one of my beloved congregants, the news broke that Robin Williams is dead, apparently by taking his own life.  Ever since a weeklong series of blog posts last year entitled, "We are Legion" (after the Gerasene Demoniac in the Gospels), I have been very open both here and in person (when necessary) about my struggling and wrestling with major clinical depression, including occasional suicidal desires.  And those struggles are not something I can or ever will be able to speak of in the past tense: I will live with this for the rest of my life.

This emphatically does not mean that I know or have any way of knowing what was going on in Robin Williams' mind and soul when he took his own life.  But I do believe from my experiences that this sort of darkness from depression can only be understood by someone who has been there.  It is something that you cannot explain because it is not rational, only destructive.  It is not logical, only painful.  And, to paraphrase what one of my Disciples pastor colleagues said, before you reach for judgment and talk of mortal sins, give a thought for trying to walk in a suicidal person's shoes for a mile.

This is the third time in the life of this blog that I am reposting my own personal testimony of depression and mental illness, which I originally wrote when Matthew Warren, the son of Christian pastor Rick Warren, committed suicide.  I continue to want to strive to put a human face on an inhumane illness.  And I want you, if you need it, to feel safe enough and secure enough to seek help.  Even when you feel completely, utterly unloved, God still loves you.  Please, always, always remember that.  It is one of the most fundamental truths upon which our entire lives are built and based.  -E.A.

Trigger word warning: suicide.

Beginning at the age of 14, I began having increasingly frequent thoughts of suicide.  I became socially withdrawn, flunked out of advanced algebra, and by the time I graduated, I had been suspended from school twice for fighting.

After months of refusing, I eventually caved to my parents' wish to take me to see a psychiatrist.  He was able to immediately diagnose me with major clinical depression, and he put me on a regimen of antidepressants that I have continued in some form or fashion to this day.  Today, I am medicated and I am well, but I still remember how much I underachieved during my teenage years.

I remember it because even on medication, those episodes still return in minor forms.  Depression is like any chronic disease--I cannot be cured of it, I can only manage it.  I will likely be medicated for the rest of my life.

And I'm okay with that.  That's the way it has to be in order for me to function.

But it also isn't something that, for obvious reasons, I ordinarily share with people.

I'm writing about it right now, though, because Matthew Warren, the youngest son of Rick Warren (yes, that Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback and Purpose-Driven Life fame, and whom (full disclosure) I have occasionally criticized on the blog) killed himself this weekend after a lifelong battle with mental illness.

Matthew was twenty-seven years old.

It is how old I am.

Believe me, it hit home.  Please pray for Matthew's family, biological and church alike.

I worry that people sometimes rush to judge a suicide because of our own Christian orthodoxy that it constitutes a grave sin.  And I understand the logic behind that--I forget who said it, but suicide is our way of telling God, "Screw you, you can't fire me.  I quit."

We aren't supposed to quit on God.

But if we take a step back, and remember that depression is a mental illness, suicide becomes apparent as the result of terminal depression.  Roughly 3.5% of people in the United States who have depression eventually will commit suicide.  If we were to see depression as the disease that it is, it would be like saying that 3.5% of all cases of this disease become terminal.

Depression is not a moral failing.

It sounds simple, but I'm going to repeat it: Depression. Is. Not. A. Moral. Failing.

It is a disease.

I have always understood why folks might call depression a "demon," as though another's personal demon might be addiction or substance abuse, but I have recently begun to shy away from the urge to do that.  My depression isn't a demon, and the minute I say that it is, I am saying that having it is somehow wrong or somehow a moral weakness of mine.

And it isn't.

Because of how we normally associate demons with evil, saying someone's mental illness is a demon of their's implies an evil within that person which the person may or may not have control over.

And that's harmful.  It puts an unfair burden on the person suffering from mental illness, and it lends an inauthentic identity to the disease itself.

My depression is not a demon I have to be exorcised of, it is a disease I have to live with.

But for however long well-meaning people still put the words "depression" or "mental illness" in the same breath as words like "demon," we're going to have people engaging in extremely private battles with their illnesses and, in some cases, ultimately losing.

Read through the statement Rick Warren made again (in the CNN link above).  He wrote, in part, "But only those closest knew that he (Matthew) struggled from birth with mental illness, dark holes of depression, and even suicidal thoughts."

I'm not suggesting that making personal struggles with mental illness more public is the way to go--as a PK (pastor's kid), Matthew likely already had more burdens growing up than your average boy.  And it is saddening that, based on Rick's statement, Matthew had been receiving treatment and it had ultimately failed.

What I am suggesting, though, is that maybe people might one day feel more free to explain their depression to people if they wish, rather than suffering mostly in private.

After all, a big part of what helps heal a person is the other people around them--medical staff, family, friends, and fellow patients.

In Mark 5, the Gerasene Demoniac confronts Jesus and the demon says, through the possessed man, "We are Legion, for we are many."

Far too often, the inverse is true of the people who suffer from these so-called "demons:" We are depressed, and so we are lonely.  And it is so for this man, the demoniac--he has gone into self-imposed exile in a graveyard, surrounded only by the dead.

We become lonely through a variety of ways, which has been in part the thrust of this weeklong blog series: we divide up one another.  I wrote about how we divide up the church, and then about how we divide up God's word.

We need not, should not, and cannot divide up ourselves.

For depression is, for better and for worse, not a demon.  It is a disease.

And like many other diseases, it can kill.  Even, sometimes, with treatment.

But also like many other diseases, it can be whipped.  It is possible.

If you are depressed, please, please, please do not be afraid to seek help.  Your family practice doctor can almost certainly refer you to a psychiatrist or psychologist, and many churches and pastors should also be able to refer you to mental health specialists.

If you are actively considering suicide, there are hotlines you can call.  The National Suicide Prevent Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.  It is toll-free and staffed 24/7.

We are Legion, sneered the Gerasene Demoniac, for we are many.

But we--the people who see and understand and live with mental illness every day--we are legion too, for we are many.

And with help, we can be the many who control our illnesses, instead of letting them control us.

So do not be afraid to seek help.  It is there for you if you ask for it.

My hope and prayer is that if I, and others like me, can be more open and courageous about mental illness, you--whoever you are--might feel courageous enough to make that life-saving request.

Yours in Christ, from someone who cares for you,
Eric

Dedicated to the men and women I met during my brief time as the intern chaplain of the inpatient psychiatric ward of California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.  I still remember seeing the scars on your wrists and your necks.  I still remember listening to your stories.  I still remember hearing your fear.  And I hope and pray that that fear has, like our time together, receded into the sea of years-ago memories.

This Week's Sermon: "The Writing on the Wall"

Acts 5:1 to 11

However, a man named Ananias, along with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s knowledge, he withheld some of the proceeds from the sale. He brought the rest and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. 3 Peter asked, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has influenced you to lie to the Holy Spirit by withholding some of the proceeds from the sale of your land? 4 Wasn’t that property yours to keep? After you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with whatever you wanted? What made you think of such a thing? You haven’t lied to other people but to God!” 5 When Ananias heard these words, he dropped dead. Everyone who heard this conversation was terrified. 6 Some young men stood up, wrapped up his body, carried him out, and buried him. 7 About three hours later, his wife entered, but she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, did you and your husband receive this price for the field?” She responded, “Yes, that’s the amount.” 9 He replied, “How could you scheme with each other to challenge the Lord’s Spirit? Look! The feet of those who buried your husband are at the door. They will carry you out too.” 10 At that very moment, she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men entered and found her dead, they carried her out and buried her with her husband. 11 Trepidation and dread seized the whole church and all who heard what had happened. (Common English Bible)

“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,” Week Eight

“They pedal.”

That was my dad’s repeated refrain to me every single morning that I got up at a ridiculously early hour every July to watch the Tour de France live on television (ridiculously early because of the time difference between Kansas City and France).  It didn’t matter what would be happening on the screen, the retort was always the same:

“They pedal.”

But then the race would move into the Alps or the Pyrenees, and the mountain climbs would separate the contenders from the pretenders:

“They pedal.”

Or the race could be only a few hundred yards from the finish line for the day, and the entire pack had broken into a mass breakneck sprint for first place:

“Oh, they’re pedaling faster.”  He was utterly nonplussed.  And this is a guy who is a big fan of soccer (wait…I’m a big fan of soccer too…)!

And I envy that utter lack of impression in a way, because I was completely and totally enthralled with the world of the sport: the team tactics that were difficult to see with an untrained eye, the drama of a mountain climb so difficult that it was classified as “beyond category,” and, of course, the myth and legend that surrounded the post cancer comeback of one Lance Armstrong, who in January of 2013 famously confessed on Oprah Winfrey’s television channel in an interview with her to using performance enhancing drugs to win his seven Tour de France titles, and to repeatedly bullying and slandering those who knew and threatened to expose his great secret.

And I remember just thinking, what this guy has withheld from the world is just staggering, solely because he ended up valuing his own myth and money more than the people who walked alongside him throughout the way.  And that is basically what happens here today, in the story of Ananias and Sapphira: two people who decide they value their things more than they value their relationships.

This is a sermon series that has been ongoing now for a while!  We began it several weeks ago for two reasons.  One is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit, but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that follow.  The other is that it’s summer, and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios (depending on just how bad the sequel is!).  The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.  Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name) precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far better than many of the sequels we are used to today!  So this is a sermon series meant to take us through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the early church lived out the faith, which is how chapter 4 ended.  We begin the next chapter today with very much a contrasting tale to the wholehearted generosity of the church: the tale of Ananias and Sapphira.

By itself, this is a story that should cause each of us to recoil.  The punishment for giving to the church is death on the spot?  That’s one hell of a stewardship message if you’re bent on pasturing your church via fear, but that isn’t really what we’re about here.  A dollop of fear may be an inherent part of life, but part of Christianity is the great and sacred task of equipping all of us with boldness and courage in the face of fear.  In other words, it is okay, even inevitable, to be afraid, but we must always be able to respond to it.

So how do we respond to this story of summary execution for a husband and wife couple who withhold some of their assets from the New Testament church?  By taking the entire episode in its context.  If you remember last week’s passage that I preached on (and if not, you can just turn one chapter back in your Bibles!), the social contract was that members of the church, the ekklesia, would give all of their assets to the church so that it could be distributed out according to need.

Ananias and Sapphira, by withholding some of their cash, are saying, effectively, that they value their money more than they value their fellow people, their fellow Jesus followers.   The social contract they elected to follow meant little to them, and Peter consequently sees right through their charade.

And it is purely a charade, because in the end, all of this stuff we have belongs to God anyways.  Bible professor Paul Walaskay puts it perfectly:

The story should remind the reader that his or her “gift” to church, school, and charity already belongs to God.  God claims it all and God’s grace gives us an abundant allowance; even those who tithe keep 90 percent.  Yes, most of us work “by the sweat of our brow,” the hot sweat of physical labor or the cold sweat of anxiety keeping an enterprise viable.  And many of us mistakenly assume that the paycheck is compensation to us for our labors.  Rather, we are being compensated for God’s gracious gifts of life, energy, strength, intellect, creativity, and talent.  That paycheck is God’s.  We take out our living allowance, which is usually quite generous, and share (not “give”) the rest with those in need.  Lying about the source of our resources is self deceit and arrogance, and it puts “the Spirit of the Lord to the test” (verse 9)…the story of Ananias and Sapphira is a tale for our own time, and we dismiss it as an absurd curiosity to our individual and national peril.

It is especially to our peril that we ignore this tale because it is not the first time in Scripture that we will have heard this lesson, for there is a prelude to this entire episode in the Old Testament.  It comes from book of Daniel, the Israelite man who spent his prophetic career in exile, teaching in the court of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II and then Nebuchadnezzar’s heir, Belshazzar.  And one night, Belshazzar throws a banquet for one thousand of his nobles, and he calls for the gold and silver goblets stolen from the Jewish temple when Jerusalem was sacked by Babylon.  It is another example of someone putting things before relationships: in this case, any relationship Belshazzar might have had with the one true God.

And Belshazzar only realizes this when the writing literally appears on his wall, reading MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.  He summons Daniel to translate the writing, and Daniel, after rebuking Belshazzar, begins his translation, and in so doing interprets the word “tekel” to mean, “You have been weighed on the scales and been found lacking.”  Belshazzar was found to be lacking on the scales of God’s justice, and just like Ananias and Sapphira, he was put to death that very day: that night, as Daniel conveys, Belshazzar was murdered.

These twin stories can teach us a couple of things: firstly, never assume that you can simply get away with something that you know in your heart of hearts is wrong.  You will be amazed at what God sees and what eventually comes to light even for us humans to see.  And secondly, there does still come a point in time where God looks at what someone has purportedly done either by their own power (in the case of Belshazzar) or by God’s own power and in God’s own name (in the case of Ananias and Sapphira) and God does indeed eventually and resoundingly say, “NOT IN MY NAME!”

And I want to, have to, need to believe that God can and does still respond with justice to the evils we claim to do in His name.  And there are a great many evils that we have done, and are doing, in God’s holy name.

The conflict between Palestine and Israel isn’t just about land, it’s about THE Holy Land.

The conflict turned ethnic cleansing in Iraq isn’t just between ethnic groups, but between ISIS and Iraqi Christians.

And closer to home, even the so called “culture wars” that we insist on fighting rather than focusing on spreading the Gospel of the Prince of Peace.

We should expect the God in our Scriptures to oppose us, and so we instead build up these elaborate illusions of what God wants based on twisted, horrific interpretations of Scripture by men of evil intent, and we end up worshiping not the God, but the interpretation.  We end up worshiping the ways we justify our wrong deeds instead of worshiping the God who forgives us for them.

I have no doubt that Ananias and Sapphira probably had come up with justifications to themselves for why they did what they did.  I have no doubt Belshazzar did as well, although his might well have been, “I’m the freaking king!”  But one of the best rules of thumb I have ever found to live by is this: the more you have to justify something to yourself, the more likely it is that doing it is wrong.

Ananias and Sapphira had to know what they were doing was wrong.  They did it anyways.

It’s what we do all the time to one another as well.  At least until we stop, and realize what it is we are doing, and remember that God has not, does not, and never will call us to do wrong like that to  one another or to Him.  He will say to us, in the powerful and profound way that only He can, “NOT IN MY NAME!”  And so we in turn can do the same, and say the same, to the evil done around us: Not in my name!  

And today, in this moment, that message may be exactly what we and our world need.

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

August 10, 2014

Princes of the Church

Carrie and I live in a 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment of a little over 1,000 square feet.  Even with the reality that our spare bedroom is still infested with boxes of books that have yet to be unpacked, there is still usually plenty of space for the both of us, even with the reality that I will often work from home one day out of my workweek (in fact, I'm sitting at our kitchen table as I type this).  And the apartment complex has plenty of the same perks that my old bachelor apartment complex had: a small fitness center, a pool, and a hot tub.  It's a nice place to live and we like it very much so far.

It does not, however, hold a candle to any of these digs.

Not one bit.

That CNN article, if I didn't know any better, would have come across as just another piece of real estate porn (admit it, we've all indulged in oohing and aahing over houses we'll never own), but each of the mansions photographed and listed there is occupied by a Roman Catholic bishop/archbishop and is owned by his diocese/archdiocese.

So, um, where do I sign up for that kind of a gig?

Lest this sound like jealousy or envy, I really hope that is not what is actually in my heart right now, because as a fellow preacher of the Gospel of a dirt poor, homeless, itinerant Jewish craftsman, it is difficult not to shudder at how some of the "princes of the church" are living.

(Full disclosure: The church building that my congregation owns and in which it meets, worships, and teaches looks like this.  And this.)

The difference, though, between a church building and a manse (a house for clergy) is that...well, as the sign out on our front lawn says, "Everyone Welcome."  Our big, Gothic revival church building is for everyone, no matter what your socio economic status may be.  Diocesan representatives are quoted in the CNN article as saying that the manses have multiple functions, including use for fundraisers, offices, and that sort of thing.  All of which is great, but that doesn't mean that the property is made open and available to the public at large like a sanctuary is.

And that makes all the difference in the world.  Consider the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus from the Gospel of Luke.  Lazarus had to lay at the gate of the rich man's estate: he was not ever allowed inside.  And here is a church (or diocese, really) holding onto multimillion dollar estates in which the poor will never be allowed in because, let's face it, who throws a successful fundraiser by inviting the poor?

I love our church building: it is beautiful and historic, and it reminds me of the significance and weight of the trust that has been given to me by serving as pastor there.  But with God's help, I hope I never, ever live in a home that equals the sanctuary in scale and grandeur.  I pray that God will keep me humble, even though compared to how poverty and homelessness is often experienced, I know that in my heart of hearts that ship has already sailed.

There is one other dimension of the story that I would be remiss if I did not touch on: that several of these bishops and archbishops have nuns acting as household servants for them.  And considering the Roman Catholic Church's general hostility to the ordination of women, I cannot imagine that is a coincidence.  You can be ordained a priest with the knowledge that one day, you may be later consecrated a bishop.  But you can be made a nun only with the knowledge that one day, you may be cooking the bishop's lunch.

Combined with the American bishops' collected ham fistedness towards contraception and family planning, women's ordination, and their shabby treatment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious...no wonder women aren't exactly lining up to become nuns the way they once were.

(And yes, I realize that there are a myriad of other causes for the decline in the recruitment of nuns, and that the number of men becoming priests has dried up as well.  But I can imagine there is some causation involved: the ordination of women has only been increasing in my own denomination, which has been ordaining women for decades now.  Nor is this, or should be, reflective of the Roman Catholic church rank and file religious...I was taught and ministered to at college and seminary by priests and nuns whom I think the world of to this day.)

To their immense credit, other Catholic archbishops have done away with the trappings of pomp and luxury with their homes, Boston's Fr. Sean O'Malley and Philadelphia's Fr. Charles Chaput chief among them.

And in case you're curious about how this all plays out for the rich man in Jesus's parable (spoiler alert! spoiler alert!), the rich man ends up in hell, begging Lazarus to relieve his suffering.  And Father Abraham, on Lazarus's behalf, declines.

That's not how this is all supposed to end for someone ministering and preaching and teaching in the name of Jesus Christ.  Not at all.

It's a harsh lesson of Jesus's, to be sure, but one that must be said, because by cosseting themselves off from this amazing, flawed, beautiful, messy world that God entrusted to us and to which we pastor, the bishops may well be living now in a hell of their own making.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

Mark Driscoll & Being "Half a Man," the Sequel

My midweek post responding to Mark Driscoll's online forum rants as "William Wallace II" garnered a fair amount (by my standards, anyways) of attention, and understandably so.  But given how much ink I and others have given this story, it is necessary to report and comment on the next step of this saga, which is that on Friday (which is my Sabbath), Driscoll released an apology for his William Wallace II diatribes, which I am reprinting here in its entirety (courtesy of The Christian Post):

In 2000, we had an un-moderated discussion board on the Mars Hill website," Driscoll said. "While the discussion board itself was a bad idea, my decision to attack critics who were posting there (I did so by posting under the character 'William Wallace II') was an even worse idea —indeed, it was plain wrong. I was wrong to respond to people the way I did, using the language I used, and I am sorry for it and remain embarrassed by it.

Consequently, I requested that the site be taken down shortly after it began some 14 years ago," he states. "I have not been silent about this matter or the wrongness of my behavior, writing about it in Confessions of a Reformission Rev (2006) as something I regretted and an example of a wrong I had learned from.

The content of my postings to that discussion board does not reflect how I feel, or how I would conduct myself today. Over the past 14 years I have changed, and, by God's grace, hope to continue to change. I also hope people I have offended and disappointed will forgive me.

There are a couple of things on my heart that I want to say about this apology: first, it's great that he made one.  This isn't one of those nonapology apologies (you know the "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" sorts of things we see all the time now).  Driscoll doesn't make excuses or point fingers, but rather is straightforward: "it was plain wrong."  Making an apology without asterisks or caveats needs to be applauded and encouraged.

But while there may not have been any excuses or caveats, it still wasn't as complete an apology as was likely needed.  I want to look at what it is he says he was wrong for doing: responding the way he did, using the language he used.

Certainly, both of those merited an apology.  Of that, there is no debate.

But the thing that (at least for me) was most bothersome and hurtful about his words wasn't the tone, but the substance, which was not apologized for: only the "way" it was delivered and the language that was used.  And that makes it an incomplete apology.

Now, frankly, cussing doesn't offend me (although I realize it does for many other people), save for swear words that also function as sexist/racist/ethnic/homophobic/etc. slurs.  Mark Driscoll wants to throw words like 'damn' and 'ass' around like party favors in his Internet posting?  I really and truly could not possibly care less.  And if I cared at all, it would make me a giant hypocrite.

But making slurs towards women (and especially women pastors) and gay and lesbian people goes beyond tone, it speaks to a mentality that a person has, which in my experience tends to almost always be the result of one of two things: ignorance (ie, they really don't understand how what they are saying is offensive) or prejudice.

I know that's a loaded word, prejudice, and so I want to break it down before we continue: literally, its a compounding of the prefix "pre" (meaning before or prior) and judicial or judicious, meaning an exercise of judgment.  Often, we say someone is "prejudiced" in terms of being, say, racist or xenophobic, but literally what the word means is someone who judges before they should.  It means that someone has, essentially, rushed to judgment.

And that sentiment perfectly encapsulates Driscoll's William Wallace II words.  He is quick to judge, say, women pastors (by telling them to "quit (their) job and repent"), men like me who are in egalitarian marriages (for being "half a man") and gays and lesbians (the "damn freaks" comment, among others), but how well did he (or does he, for that matter) know folks in any of those demographics?  More to the point, how well did he know their hearts and the souls and their faith in God?

Now, for the record, that applies to me as well.  Like I said earlier in the week, I've never met Mark Driscoll.  All I have to go on is what he says and does publicly.  But that public record is by now so loaded with terrible things that he has said or done and then apologized for (like blaming Ted Haggard's wife for Haggard's own infidelity, plagiarizing content in one of his books, and appropriating literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of church funds to get his latest book on the New York Times bestseller list, among other things) that it is pretty easy to get an at least somewhat informed opinion on the guy's ministry.

And when these words are 14 years old (and controversies like the Haggard quotes are nearly eight years old), it is difficult to characterize any such opinions as rushed.  And it is difficult to think that an apology alone is sufficient to achieve true reconciliation.

I have to admit that there is an awfully big part of me that wants to see Mark Driscoll get his comeuppance that is so richly due to him, but that is where I have to be reminded to reach for grace and pray for him instead (as one of my wisest mentors pointed out to me privately after my midweek post, and for the record, exhorting me to pray for Driscoll is exactly the sort of accountability I need and that, thank God, my mentors provide).  And I want to, I really do, if for no other reason than Scripture tells us to, but also because there are a lot of other people who are most likely pretty great whose livelihoods are at stake here, especially since Mars Hill has already gone through one round of staff layoffs this summer.

And then there is that complete, utter, inescapable need to focus on grace.  And while extending grace and forgiveness is a Biblical imperative ("How many times must I forgive my neighbor? As many as seven times? "Not seven times, but seventy times seven," replied Jesus), accountability has to be a dimension of this as well, especially for a pastor of a church with such a strong reputation for the use of church discipline with its own members.

In 2012, it was reported (in the link immediately above) that for a sexual indiscretion with a woman who was not his fiancee, a Mars Hill member was asked to sign a contract demanding that, among other things, he write out a comprehensive list of all of his emotional and sexual sins as part of a "sexual and emotional history with women" that he was to share with his local pastor.

So...will Mark Driscoll be asked to sign a church discipline contract of any kind, or be asked to write out a comprehensive list of all of his sins as a pastor that he will then share with whoever is meant to keep him accountable at Mars Hill?  (That job, by the way, is an extremely murky one ever since the sacking of a couple of its governing elders in 2007.)

While this might sound gratuitous of me to suggest, I'm quite serious, because speaking as another parish pastor who responsible for the vast majority of preaching and teaching in his congregation: we should not ever be held to a lower standard than our flocks.  That is absolutely not okay.  And if it is, then we need to go find ourselves other gigs far away from the church, immediately, because we have forgotten what we are supposed to be about here as a church.

So is Driscoll really serious when he says "I also hope people I have offended and disappointed will forgive me" purely on the basis of his apology?  Because believe me when I say this as a writer (of sorts): words are cheap.  Prove that you're sorry by your actions.  Driscoll's words of apology, by this point in time, carry a value of near nil to me.

And make no mistake: true repentance is what needs to happen here...not only because it is Scriptural, but because, overwhelmingly, those who have been hurt at Mars Hill or by Driscoll would rather see repentance and the beginning of true accountability rather than outright punishment, and this is profoundly to their credit as Christians and as human beings.

But least so far, his lengthy track record of apologizing and then doing something else he has to apologize for again doesn't give me much to hang my proverbial hat on that he actually is repentant.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

This Week's Sermon: "The Ekklesia"

Acts 4:32 to 37

The community of believers was one in heart and mind. None of them would say, “This is mine!” about any of their possessions, but held everything in common. 33 The apostles continued to bear powerful witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and an abundance of grace was at work among them all. 34 There were no needy persons among them. Those who owned properties or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds from the sales, 35 and place them in the care and under the authority of the apostles. Then it was distributed to anyone who was in need. 36 Joseph, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (that is, “one who encourages”), was a Levite from Cyprus. 37 He owned a field, sold it, brought the money, and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. (Common English Bible)

“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,” Week Seven

The Gap which overlooks the harbor of Sydney, Australia is not a clothing store…it is a series of cliffs that, if you look for it on Google images, is absolutely gorgeous; from a distance, you can see the layers of rock that have formed over millions of years of geologic creation, and the tops of the cliffs are covered in green and trees, and, of course, it is right on the Pacific Ocean.

With all of that beauty, naturally, folks will strive to build homes there.  But with the sheer height that the cliffs afford, folks also come there to, sadly, try to end their lives as well.  And that is where one resident of the Gap, a fellow by the name of Don Ritchie, comes in.  As the journalist Paul Loebe writes:

A local, Don Ritchie, has lived in a house adjacent to “the Gap” for over 40 years and has been deemed a hero.  He is responsible for saving hundreds of people over the years since he first moved there.  Both he and his wife were aware of the reputation of the Gap prior to moving into their house, (and) the main window to Ritchie’s house faces directly to the jumping point for where people jump.  Whenever Ritchie sees someone who lingers too long at the spot, he rushes over to them and invites them over to his house for tea.

His coaxing does not always work, and he has even witnessed people jump being the last person they speak to, but for all his effort over the years, he has been awarded a place in the Order of Australia and a bravery medal.

But what makes this not as much a feel good story for me but a story that really and truly convicts me is the detail that follows:

The government has been looking into installing cameras and high railings but it has stalled due to the enormous cost ($2.1 million American).

If you divide that $2.1 million cost by the 160 lives this one man has saved over the years (that is, over the operational lifetime of a high railing fence), you get a sum of a little over $13,000.  And if you divide the $2.1 million price tag by the 50 people every year he is unable to save, you get a sum of $42,000.

$42,000 is my annual salary and housing stipend here at First Christian.  To the dollar.  And that’s what it would cost, per suicide victim in one year, to ensure there were no more victims of the Gap.

A total giving of my resources, one hundred percent of them, would at least account for one person’s life saved this year, and total giving is the model that is in fact proscribed by the New Testament church ere in Acts 4, because that way, resources can be given in accordance to need: and the preservation of life, I think both now and then, would have been seen as one of the greatest needs of all.

This is a sermon series that has been ongoing now for a while!  We began it several weeks ago for two reasons.  One is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit, but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that follow.  The other is that it’s summer, and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios (depending on just how bad the sequel is!).  The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.  Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name) precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far better than many of the sequels we are used to today!  So this is a sermon series meant to take us through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the early church lived out the faith.

And on its face, this is a passage that should challenge us greatly, because it is just about as much of a polar opposite of what Western, American Christianity does today.  Because of the influence of our nation’s Founding Fathers, the Enlightenment, and a variety of other philosophical influences, we are a nation built upon the altar of individual property.  And so what the early church practices here: the pooling of all resources and then the distribution of them to each according to need, would be anathema to all of us here, in 21^st century America.

And I do not use that word ‘anathema’ lightly, even though I am fully aware that I am calling the Bible anathema to our present context.  Because honestly, sometimes Scripture has to be, needs to be, must be, outright heretical to our way of life for it to be doing its job.  (Uh oh, the pastor just referred to the Bible as heretical…better slip out now before the brimstone starts raining down…)

Scripture must always be challenging us, and at the point it stops challenging us, either we have stopped following it or Jesus has come back as promised and filled in all the gaps for us.  And seeing as how the latter has yet to happen, I’m fairly confident in doubling down on the possibility that the former is what ends up happening.

What does that say about us as a church, as a people, as a community?  Well…the short answer is that we like to follow the stuff in Scripture that is easy for us to follow.  For instance, honestly, it’s pretty straightforward for a heterosexual person to conform to the Levitical laws against same sex intimacy.  And if you’re a man, well, you needn’t worry about Paul’s commands for women to remain silent in church, because there is absolutely zero chance of you breaking that prohibition.

But giving everything you own to the church and allowing it to distribute what you own not as you see fit but as they all see fit?  Well, hold on there for just a cotton picking minute, because that sounds an awful lot like communism!

Well, if the (red) shirt fits (also, insert a joke here if you'd like from Clue about communism as a red herring)…yes, what is being described here with the very early church is, well, a commune.  Only instead of sitting around in a drum circle smoking the peace pipe and growing hemp, they proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

So, does that make it okay?  Does it make it okay for a church...well, not just any church, but the Biblical church, to engage in a model that we clearly have moved past, if not outright rejected?

The entire problem with that question, of course, is the premise that the Biblical church needs our permission to live out its faith.  If anything, it needs to be the other way around: are we comfortable in asking the Biblical church if it is okay that we have strayed so far from their model that an expected tithe isn’t 100 percent, but only 10 percent?  Or where resources are allocated not on the basis of need but on the basis of the annual budget?

Let me put it a different way: the Biblical church was profoundly countercultural and remains profoundly countercultural to this day, because I don’t think we can scare to countenance actually running our church the way the ekklesia in Acts of the Apostles is run.

That’s a funny Greek word, by the way: ekklesia.  It literally means “the assembly,” after the governing assembly of Athens during the Classical era of ancient Greece.  But between Classical Greece and New Testament Israel, the term took on an even more profound meaning as the name for a congregation, an “assembly” of believers.  And an assembly, by definition, is, well, assembled.  It is put together.  And the ekklesia, the assembly, of the Biblical church was assembled by people and all that they both spiritually and materially had to offer.

And if you assemble an assembly with less, do not be surprised when that assembly is not all that you wanted or expected it to be.

On its face, that sounds more like something that would come out of a stewardship sermon, and y’all probably know by now that that’s not really my forte. But I am talking about a wider sense of stewardship here: a stewardship to humanity itself.  Humanity is our assembly.  Humanity is our ekklesia.  And we are called by God to give all, to give our all, on its behalf.

That also entails us giving all to God by accepting His calling for us.  And we are just as bad at that as we are at giving all to one another…and we’ll get to that a bit more with next week’s sermon, but we talk a lot about the need to surrender everything to God, and then selfishly hold something, or an awful lot of somethings, back for ourselves.  We say in one breath, “everything belongs to God,” and in the very next breath to someone else, “Hey, that’s mine!”

I realize you may be thinking, “Well, why can’t something belong to both me and God?”  It can.  But guess who gets dibs on how that thing, whatever it may be, ultimately gets used?  It ain’t you.  And that’s where our selfishness comes into play.  That’s where our greed and self centeredness comes into play.  We want to put our interests ahead of God’s interests, and honestly, I think those two interests are aligned a whole heck of a lot less frequently than we let ourselves believe.

But every so often, they do align.  A retired man in Australia finds a home he wants to live in, and God uses him as a vessel of love to save the lives of literally dozens of dozens of people by sacrificing his home, his privacy, and his day to day life in the name of saving theirs, but his government cannot or will not sacrifice funds to save even more lives that he alone was unable to.

And that’s the difference that we’re talking about here, that Luke is talking about in Acts 4.  It isn’t enough to simply give, you give until the need has been met.  Giving a starving person a lone potato chip doesn’t do one bit of good.  God calls us to more.  God demands of us more.  And He has every right to, because that is what His church has done literally for millennia.  Let us not lose sight of that tradition now.  Especially now.  

May it be so.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

August 3, 2014