Would You Like Flies with That?

One of my first horror movies was "The Fly" starring Vincent Price.  I watched at an overnight birthday party when I was 8 years old on late night television.  It was followed by the Mummy's Hand.  It scared the crap out of me.  I was sure that, if there was a God, he was about to bring it.  This may surprise you, but according to a Public Religion Research Institute opinion poll, 38 percent of Americans believe that God uses nature to bring divine judgment upon humankind. Well, this past week, I became a believer.  The church office and entry way was sated with large black biting flies. It was something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Just saying "fly invasion" straight out like that may sound funny, but it's no joke. These guys were hungry and relentless (and after the Dollar Tree spray they were still breakdancing at 100 mph) .  It was an outbreak, yes, a plague, of biblical proportion. And the ODOR like a circus.  Let's see, there was water to blood, then frogs, lice, and YES, FLIES.  I'm not as stubborn or hard hearted as Pharaoh.  

I was repentant and ready for God to move...yet complained that those flies and that foul odor needed to get out of the church. We are rather sure these guys were blow flies.  Infestations of these guys are more disagreeable than those of other flies, and are associated with a terrible odor in the house (of God) of a decaying animal. But, as one person encouraged,  "consider that if it were not for the flies, the odor would last much longer."  So these blow flies (and other types that dispose of decay, obviously can serve a very useful purpose).  Not sure how encouraging as Sunday morning worship was just around the corner.

Since the late 1970s, more than 20 serious pathogens have emerged, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as "Mad Cow Disease," and three years ago, the Nipah virus appeared in Malaysia. It seems to have jumped from pigs to people, killing both pigs and people. "Some years," say experts, "we barely dodge a global flu pandemic." Rather suddenly, times have changed. Even plagues have changed, but one thing remains constant: We fear contagion, whether terrorists steal it, grow it and then spread it, or it rises out of nature. Pestilence plagues us.

The ancient Hebrews knew all about pestilence and plague. Their very freedom in the wilderness was occasioned by a series of 10 plagues brought upon the Egyptians. Now that they were wandering and wondering in the wilderness, however, they found themselves afflicted with a plague of a different sort, one just as contagious as the Asian flu. There was a germ in the air, a fly in their system, an epidemic among them. 

Like all bad bugs, their disease was hard to see, yet its symptoms were discernible but not desirable; detectable, but not delectable.  The disease? The Israelites had come down with a bad case of complaining. And it was driving God and Moses nuts.  For good reason. At the core, complaining cuts to the heart of one's relationship with God, not to speak of others. God says that complaining "tests" him, and it questions whether God is faithful: "Is the LORD among us or not?" . It also shifts away responsibility from ourselves to others more convenient to blame, and  fails to recognize who our True Provider is.

Complaining (like I did)  is a plague that's more destructive to a church community than spreading a cough at communion. Complaints tear at the soul; they pick apart people; they peel apart communities.  Complain, complain, complain. The Israelites were whining, ungrateful, disappointed and thankless.  And what was their complaint? That God was never good enough. That God never did enough. The pillar of fire, the column of cloud, the defeat of the entire army of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the salvation of the people -- not enough, they complained.

 "Why did you lead us out here? We'll die out here! We're thirsty. It's dry. It's hot. My feet hurt. I need a bath. I've got a blister. My sandals are too tight. Egypt was better. Egypt had water. Egypt had beds. Egypt had security. Our children need water. Even our cows are thirsty. It's not like home!"  So here's Moses, whom God had called to transform a climate of complaint into a culture of change: an overqualified nanny running about with binky at-the-ready for whoever needs to be pacified next -- a truth about which he complained from time to time.

Where does the common complaint come from? Does it fester? Is it catching?  It's catching all right. And it comes from real or imagined wrongs, or simply faulty expectations, or lack of courage, or lack of faith, or the inability to persevere in the face of daunting circumstances. 

The common complainer says, "I don't like it," then offers no solution.

The common complainer says, "It's your fault. You fix it. You change. You do something. I'll just sit here."

The common complainer says, "If you don't do it my way, I'll go home." Or worse, "If you don't do it my way, I'll stay until everyone is infected and miserable."

Complaint is like poison in the belly of a bitter soul that hates to be alone. So it spreads, it infects, it converts, it multiples ... until the community is one bitter belly, full of illness and sour in heart, leaving God little wiggle room.

Their complaining led them to consider murdering Moses. Yikes! Murder is admittedly an unreasonable extreme at one end of the complaint spectrum, yet unreasonableness is often symptomatic of the contagious complaint disease.

What's the prognosis for an uncured complaint epidemic? 

The Colossian Cure: "Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive" (Colossians 3:13). In other words, as leadership gurus Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey,  put it: Turn the language of complaint into the language of commitment. We should agree not to complain about out brothers and sisters, leaders or God, but instead make commitments to them that express our love, forgiveness, understanding and empathy. So don't start the gossip mill. That spreads the complaint disease faster than a sneeze flies. 

Don't spread the disease by word of mouth.  Don't create a SuperPlague in the church, home or community. If it gets strong enough it could wipe out the whole shootin' match. 

Rather than complain, let's turn to the ChristCure, knowing that those in Christ live and forgive like Christ, heal and lift up like Christ, welcome and affirm like Christ, love and forbear like Christ, suffer and endure like Christ, do acts of kindness and mercy like Christ.

Christ is our immunization against soul contagion.

Against him there is no complaint.

     

And...this is a cool fly song. - Enjoy and have a great week!

Google, Alexa, but mostly YouTube

In eight grade math class I was “schooled” on how to pick locks.  Mr. Walters was not the culprit but Ernie and Fred were.  Those two were the notorious duo who enlightened us on everything from picking locks to the “birds and the bees” (that’s another blog story – Ernie and Fred enlightened that after Coach Sorenson brought his goat to gym class to explain those same “birds and bees.”).  Back to the subject at hand.  

In 2018 Ernie and Fred are out of a job.  In a recent conversation with my future son-in-law he explained how he was able to “YouTube” how to pick his home lock safe when he had forgotten the combination.  Yep, we can Google and YouTube anything these days...or just ask Alexa. Take this case scenario for instance: most of us remember learning to drive a car as an arduous process involving swerving around a parking lot with mom , dad, or a grandparent or maybe driving in the hay baling field then heading to the DMV, taking a written test and nervously navigating the road with a state trooper or driving instructor tracking our every move. All of that practice and instruction was rewarded with a driver’s license and its accompanying sense of freedom.

But what if you could skip all that hassle and just “YouTube it” instead? That’s what an 8-year-old boy in Ohio did on one recent Sunday night. Our young innovator had a problem: mom and dad had fallen asleep early, and the boy and his 4-year-old sister were “jonesing” for some McDonald’s. The golden arches were a mile and a half away — too far for a walk in the dark. So the boy did what any self-respecting Gen-Z kid would do when confronted with a conundrum. He looked up “How to drive a car” on YouTube, emptied his piggy bank, then bundled his sister into the car and headed out for a cheeseburger.

 

Police said later that the boy obeyed all the traffic laws, didn’t hit a single thing, and drove “effortlessly” through town as though he had been driving for years — all because he watched a few minutes of video instruction and then did precisely what it said to do.

The pint-sized adventurer seems to have grasped early on what many of us grasped much later in life. That is that, on the internet, someone somewhere has created a video to show you how to do what you’re about to attempt. Whether it’s a repair for your home or your car, how to put on makeup, learning self-defense or making dinner, all you need to do is look it up on the world’s most popular video site and soon you’ll be an expert yourself — even if it’s expertise on the best way to massage your pet opossum (because, apparently, opossums need massages — something else you can only learn on YouTube! And here I am thinking all opossums do is play dead).

There are millions of these tutorial videos, most produced by average people who have learned a skill and simply want to share it. It’s the crowd sourcing of expertise that makes it possible for the most mechanically inept person to fix a faucet, or a maker of microwave mac and cheese to become a gourmet chef. Of course, all this instruction depends on the viewer’s willingness to experiment and put the information into practice. Without that, it’s just another internet time-waster.

Well, when I was growing up (I’m officially talking like my parents and grandparents)  we obviously didn’t have YouTube. Most of my learning was accomplished by watching someone in person teach and  model the activity in question face to face or, at times, receiving instructions my what we now call “snail mail” (which took way longer than even dial-up internet service! Anyone remember that?).  In person driver's ed I think still exists but the challenges are exponentially different.

 My thought for this week is not unlike that of the early church. The problem before the early church in times of uncertainty can be summed up something like this: “How do we remain a faithful Christian community in the midst of this time of trial and temptation?” The New Testament book of James wrote to encourage his brothers and sisters and to give them some instruction on how to navigate in difficult times. Faithfulness must be practiced. The letter reads like a series of random tutorial videos on the Christian life, but in this section James made clear that no amount of instruction matters unless it is put into practice. James wanted the church to become experts not only in hearing the instruction, but doing the instruction as well.

Faithfulness is rooted in the trustworthiness of God. In the Greco-Roman world, many people consulted astrology and the alignment of the stars as a kind of first-century YouTube to help determine their course of action.  Faithfulness puts God’s word (and that, for me, is first and foremost the Bible)  into demonstrable and visible action.  So how does that word get activated in our lives?

James says that you have to practice it. “But be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.". The purpose of receiving instruction, receiving the “word of truth,” is to put the information into practice. If, say, I watch a YouTube video on how to fix a leaky faucet but never pull out the tools and get to work putting what I’ve learned to good use, then I will still be stuck with a constant drip. If I really want to fix the problem, I need to set up my phone next to the sink and follow along step by step with the video.

On the other hand, if I just watch the video and say, “Yeah, I’ll get back to that sometime,” I’ll quickly forget everything I’ve learned. James says the same thing happens when we only hear the word of God and don’t put it into practice. It’s as though we looked at ourselves in a mirror briefly and then walked away, almost instantly forgetting what we looked like. If, on the other hand, we keep our focus on “the perfect law, the law of liberty,” and persevere in the midst of trial, being hearers and doers, we will be “blessed” in our doing. In fact, it’s the “doing” of the word that matters most for James.

Now, to be real, some YouTube tutorials don’t quite convey the information in a way that’s easy to follow. Try tying a tie while watching a video or looking at a chart, for example. It’s extremely difficult because that mirror image forces us to do everything backwards. To tie that bow tie effectively we need someone standing beside us to show you how, guiding our fingers and helping us develop the internal memory of the process until it becomes second nature. It’s one thing to conceptualize the process, and quite another to execute it.

The same is true for real “religion,” says James. It’s not simply about running at the mouth and declaring our faith as a matter of intellectual belief; nor is it about lashing out at those who might be challenging us. " Religion that is “pure and undefiled before God,” on the other hand, is religion that is demonstrated in practice — practice that comes as second nature to those who have internalized the word of truth. It’s religion that cares for the most vulnerable people and keeps oneself “unstained by the world."

It is real religion, in other words, that uses the model of Jesus for both its belief and its practice. Like tying that tie, there are some things YouTube just can’t teach. It can’t teach us how to be a follower of Jesus.  

Well, why not just ask Alexa? She, too,  can teach us the principles of discipleship, but to really learn it we have to have someone live it out in front of us and guide us along the way. Information alone won’t get it; it takes imitation as well.

That’s why we need a community of faith to guide us and give us examples for putting the word into practice. In a culture where there is plenty of social upheaval, we must see the opportunity to be shining stars that reflect God’s glory rather than lash out in fear or join in the culture’s calamity. We shine most brightly when we are doing the Word of God in a way that causes others to see us and want to be instructed in how to do the same.

An 8-year-old learned to drive perfectly by watching a tutorial video and then grabbing the keys. All the motivation he needed was found in the prospect of a Happy Meal.  May we be motivated to take the instruction we have been given by the word of truth, put it into practice and then head out to an even greater destination.

Have a great week.

Stop that Pigeon?

Saturday morning cartoons were as much a mainstay for me as Saturday Matinee Serials were to the silent generation.  Dick Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines was one of my favorites.  The show focused on the efforts of Dick Dastardly and his canine sidekick Muttley to catch Yankee Doodle Pigeon, a carrier pigeon who carries secret messages (hence the name of the show’s theme song "Stop the Pigeon"). The cartoon was a combination of Red Baron-era Snoopy, Wacky Races(which featured Dastardly and Muttley in a series of car races).

I have forever been one to tirelessly seek, find, and attempt to implement truth that transforms life and community. I was not (and am not) a 'dastardly' person seeking to stop the message from getting to its destination.  As a boy I just wanted to know what that pigeon's message was!  He was the "good guy" with "the message."  In my brief life many have professed to me to know "secrets" to life and existence yet kept me at bay as to where they found their truth.  "The Truth" was ultimately found in their obscure resources or they sent me on an "endless" quest to "find truth" and I seemed never to get there until I found the Truth that found me.

My last blog entry was on July, 26, 2013, yes - 5 years ago. But now, as then, this blog spot is committed to not only finding God's truth but letting people know where that truth can be found so that all might draw and drink for themselves. The thoughts are not perfect, nor is the grammar.  But it is from the center of my being.

 A Bible verse from the gospel of Mark 4:22 says, "For everything that is hidden will eventually be brought into the open, and every secret will be brought to light."  Also Luke 8:17 says, "There is nothing hidden that will not become evident nor anything secret that will not be known and come to light."

Where is your well of truth?  I want to go there with you?  I invite you to help me (not follow me) "stop that pigeon" each week to discover God's truth and apply that truth to daily living.  I invite you to follow the One who is "the way, the truth, and the life." (John 14:6).  Let's smile, laugh, cry, and share our questions, comments, and old war stories.

"But I also have a message for the rest of you in Thyatira who have not followed this false teaching ('deeper truths, as they call them - depths of Satan, actually)." Revelation 2:24

"But it was to us  that God revealed these things by His Spirit.  For His Spirit searches out everything and shows us God's deep secrets."  1 Corinthians 2:10

Have a great week!

my twitter feed is @stopthatpigeon too LOL