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Published: 16 July 2015

One of the “requirements” for becoming an International Training Specialist with LIFE International is to watch a movie that exemplifies cultural differences.  If you have ever seen “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” you know that the movie meets the requirements!  Most people have “been through a wedding” even if they are not married.  The drama, emotion and interplay between families and family members ranges from horrific to comic.   Our text for this coming Sunday once again portrays the brilliance of Jesus as a story teller to illustrate core human truths.  His story is about a royal wedding.  All the components are there.  Invitations, menus, guest lists and servants are mentioned in the unfolding drama.  This wedding story has a rather strange twist.  The people who had received the first “save the date” invitation decided to reject the king’s invitation on the day of the wedding.  Everything was already prepared!  Enter the story, imagine the scene—a royal wedding with no guests!  To make matters worse, some of the servants who delivered the invitations were killed in the line of duty.  The king did not tolerate that kind of behavior and on the day of his son’s wedding he sent his army to carry out swift retribution and burned down their city.  Since the king had a prepared place, a prepared son and a prepared banquet, he followed through and sent his remaining servants back out to find guests…any guests!  Imagine the surprise of the common laborer when he learned that a feast was waiting for him in the king’s palace.  Eventually the party started and the banquet venue was full!  There are stories of punishment in the parable but William Barclay points out that which is most sad in this story…people who could have had a “fat feast and celebration” missed it for indifference and rebellion.  We too often focus on the suffering of those who reject the king’s invitation.  Maybe the worst thing is to miss out on what we have always truly and deeply longed for in the complex recesses of our soul.  What if all the romance, celebration, love, beauty, friendship and royal ambiance that we long for is actually available through Jesus Christ our Lord?  Wouldn’t it be awful to miss the deepest longings of our soul for all of eternity?  To crave and search and long without resolve for all eternity sounds like hell to me.  The stories of Jesus were not intended to be the foundations for dogmatic theology; they are better than that.  These stories describe realities that are beyond words.  Are you ready for a big, fat, royal wedding feast?

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Published: 09 July 2015

A few years ago someone owed me money.  I had earned it legitimately.  The person had promised to send it.  I became a bit obsessed about it, checking the mailbox regularly and growing more upset in my inner life as the weeks went by.  I wasn’t going hungry, my children were clothed and fed but I wanted the money.  One day, I don’t know why, I remembered that I owed someone money that I had never paid.  I felt terrible about it, wrote out a check right away and sent it in the mail with an apology.  I began to wonder how often I was doing that about other things.  While driving, I noticed I was getting agitated with people who didn’t use their blinkers, but I was planning to turn and didn’t have mine on either.  I would get upset over people not answering emails and then notice several that I had not responded to for too long a time.   I would get annoyed if the boys didn’t thank Diane for all she did for them and then remember that I hadn’t expressed my appreciation to them for mowing the lawn or taking out the trash.  This is an affliction of mankind.  We can all too easily see the faults in others while having glaring errors of our own that we cannot see.   Jesus said that we can even have a beam in our own eye and be concerned about getting a piece of sawdust out of somebody else’s eye!  There are some classic stories about this in the Bible.  I think of David and Nathan the prophet in 2 Samuel 12 and the text in Matthew 21 we plan to study on Sunday.  Paul approached this malady from a didactic standpoint in Romans 2.  He asked the reader, “You therefore who teach another, do you not teach yourself?”  Ouch.  We humans may be “at the top of the food chain” but we’re not very quick about noticing our own flaws.  I really had to chuckle the first time I understood the beginning and end of Psalm 139.  In the beginning of the Psalm David wrote, “O Lord You have searched me and known me…”  He went on to include all the minutiae that God knows.  The Psalm ends with a prayer, this is how one translation states it,  “O God, let the secrets of my heart be uncovered, and let my wandering thoughts be tested” AND, the NIV translates the next verse, “See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”  In other words, “God you know me better than I know me, please show me me and help me on to life.”  I think you’ll see on Sunday why a prayer like that is so very important.  Oh, and the check finally arrived…J