Sermon Video: Live According to the Spirit - Romans 8:5-13

What is the difference between living according to the flesh (the fallen human nature we were born with) and according to the Spirit?  Death vs. Life.  The contrast could not be more stark.  As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to live according to the Spirit, a transformative process that begins with "putting to death" the actions, attitudes, and thoughts of our old selves.  Christ has set us free, therefore we can live by the Spirit.

Sermon Video: The Gospel in a nutshell - Romans 6:23

The Gospel in one sentence.  Think about that for a moment.  God's plan to redeem humanity from sin and death, to turn humanity history from a tragedy into a triumph, can be summed up in one sentence.  Romans 6:23 does this beautifully, and in it virtually word is worth our pondering.

Sermon Video: Death and Life, from the one to the many: Adam and Jesus, Romans 5:12-19

Paul compares how death spread from Adam to all of humanity, with all of humanity joining Adam in sin, to how life can spread from Jesus to all who put their trust in him, sharing in his righteousness.

Listen to the Word of God: 62 Scripture passages that refute 'Christian' Nationalism - #13: Matthew 16:25

Matthew 16:25     New International Version

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

In 1519, Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes, facing attempts by some from his expedition to abandon their mission and sail back to Cuba, ordered his entire fleet to be scuttled {The popular story is that the ships were burned, but given how costly they were, Cortes would have only put holes in the ships, making sailing them impossible in the short-term so they could be salvaged at least for the wood later on}.  Having eliminated the possibility of retreat, Cortes then led his men onward in the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

An illustration from a conquest carried out, at least on paper, in the name of Christ is not something one would normally use when writing against 'Christian' Nationalism since that's the attitude we need to avoid, but the well known actions of Cortes, in an unjust cause, still serve as a reminder of how differently people act when they have passed the Point of No Return.

Every single legitimate follower of Jesus Christ throughout history was past the Point of No Return from the moment he/she became committed to Jesus until death.  What does this mean?  This world is not our home, this life is not ours to do with as we please.  We are here on a mission from God, called to serve a purpose, we cannot do that and try to live for wealth, power, or fame in this world too.  

'Christian' Nationalists certainly have a sense of purpose and mission, that's not the problem, the problem is that they've turned the focus of our calling as Christians toward this world and not the next, toward the physical and not the spiritual.  Toward power and control here and now, not the service and sacrifice that Jesus demands of us.  In the end, they're still trying to save their lives (and/or country) here rather than give them over to the Gospel.

As the Steven Curtis Chapman song, Burn the Ships, inspired by Cortes' bold move says,

"Burn the ships we're here to stay

There's no way we could go back

Now that we've come this far by faith

Burn the ships we've passed the point of no return

Our life is here so let the ships burn and burn"

Sermon Video: Make use of what God has given - Mark 4:21-25

 In a series of 4 connected sayings, Jesus explains the nature of the world that God created, emphasizing that the Truth is intended to be disclosed and that both the righteous path toward God and the wicked path away from God are self-reinforcing.  Why?  Because that's the nature of reality.  The universe has a moral law just as much as it has a natural one.  Moving toward God is light and life, moving away is darkness and death; it cannot be otherwise because apart from God there is nothing.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

A Moral Hierarchy: A refutation of William Barr's, "Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history."

Speaking at Hillsdale College on September 16th, Attorney General Willaim Barr responded to a question about religious freedom and COVID-19 restrictions with the following, "Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history." {Barr under fire over comparison of virus lock-in to slavery - by Eric Tucker, AP}  I will not evaluate the legal aspects of that statement, which would require examining the COVID-19 restrictions put in place by 50 governors, hundreds of mayors, and thousands of municipalities, each operating under 50 separate state constitutions.  The vast majority of challenges to the restrictions have been denied in court, so let the lawyers argue that point. {In 5-4 Split, US Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to California's COVID-19 Restrictions on Religious Services - by Cheryl Miller of Law.com}  I will also not examine the restrictions from a medical standpoint, preferring to take my medical advice from the likes of Dr. Fauci, Dr. Redfield, Dr. Birx and the collective wisdom of the medical profession, rather than that of a lawyer like William Barr.  Instead, I will examine William Barr's statement from a moral perspective.

The Christian moral hierarchy is reflected in Jesus' response to the question of which of the commandments in the Law of Moses (the rabbis counted 613 of them) was the greatest? 

Matthew 22:36-40 (NIV)  36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”  37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Christianity is not alone in considering the question of moral hierarchy, virtually every philosophy and religion contains inherent within it (stated in a variety of ways) a moral hierarchy.  How we define Good and Evil, and how we view relative grades of both, is a question of utmost importance.  For the United States, our national moral hierarchy is reflected in the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The order of the unalienable Rights in the Declaration is no accident, Life comes before Liberty, which comes before the pursuit of Happiness.  The reason is simple: Life is more valuable than Liberty which is more valuable than Happiness (a catch all for things such as property rights, workers' rights, etc).  As such, if a government were to deprive its citizens (or anyone within its power) of Life, that would by necessity be a more egregious violation than if that same government were to deprive those same people of Liberty (for example through imprisonment), which would in turn be more egregious than if that same government were to deprive those same people of the pursuit of Happiness.  It would thus follow that in order for a government to be acting in a morally acceptable way, it would need a more compelling reason to take a life than it would to take liberty than it would to take property.  This basic understanding of morality is enshrined in American jurisprudence and is reflected in our laws at every level.

Thus we see a government could be morally at fault on three ascending levels.  It is on this basis that the actions of a government should be evaluated when comparing one (potential) violation against another (and also when weighing the cost vs. benefits of laws and policies).

The COVID-19 restrictions were designed to protect Life (a highest order) at the expense of Liberty (home 'confinement') and Happiness (loss of business, loss of work, loss of entertainment).  On the surface, this is what we want from our government, protecting Life above other concerns.  But let us for a moment concede {although I certainly do not} that William Barr is correct and that the COVID-19 restrictions (he didn't specify which ones from which governors, cities, etc) were unconstitutional and an 'intrusion on civil liberties'.  Even if we concede William Barr's assertion, from a historical perspective, there have been many examples, other than slavery, of the American government (federal, state, or local) violating rights that would be more morally significant than the pandemic response.

The following are offered as examples, it is sadly far from an exhaustive list:

The Trail of Tears

The Sand Creek Massacre

The Wounded Knee Massacre

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Japanese-American internment during WWII

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

4,743 Lynchings between 1882 and 1968

100 Years of Jim Crow Laws

The denial of GI Bill benefits to a million Black WWII veterans

Decades of deliberate federal housing racial discrimination

Police Brutality during the Civil Rights Movement

The exoneration of 172 former death-row inmates since 1973

For a more comprehensive list of massacres in American History: Massacres in US History

It would not do each of the examples I've listed justice if I tried to summarize them in a few sentences.  The links provide the horrific details of each of them, all of which were morally far more significant than any restrictions that have been put in place in response to COVID-19.  In case you're wondering, similar restrictions were put in place during the Spanish Flu pandemic, these also were not mentioned by William Barr.

I don't know why William Barr ignored these far more significant examples of 'intrusion on civil liberties', only allowing that Slavery was more significant than the COVID-19 restrictions, but in doing so he made an assertion that is demonstrably morally false.

When we elevate deprivations of property above purposeful and deliberate massacres we not only weaken our moral compass, but denigrate those who lost their lives. (Scale matters to an extent, taking property from a million people weighed against taking liberty from a thousand, versus taking life from one, for example.)  This same principle holds true with Holocaust Denial, the refusal to call the killings of Armenians during WWI a genocide, or the downplaying of the horror of South African Apartheid, to highlight a few examples.  The way in which we morally evaluate history impacts the way in which we act in the present.  No matter how unnecessary or unconstitutional a person may view the restrictions put in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic {again, conceding a point that has not been proven}, there is no morally justifiable way to view these as more significant than a long list of times when the government of the United States deprived large numbers of people of life, nor of the times that it deprived a large number of people of liberty, nor indeed even above many other instances of the government depriving people of property.  William Bar is wrong.

Sermon Video: In Christ all will be made alive - 1 Corinthians 15:20-22

The fear of death is common to all of humanity, and in the present COVID-19 crisis, it is being felt keenly by millions. But death is not the natural state of humanity, it is an aberration, one that God has provided the solution to. Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical fact we can place our hope for life beyond death in Jesus. Those who are in Christ, that is, those who have repented of their sins and chosen to live by faith in this world according to God's Word, have not only received a promise of full live in the world to come, but a more abundant life here and now as well. This is the blessing that God offers to all who believe.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Deals with the Devil don't get any better

When caught between a rock and a hard place, the former smuggler/gambler/scoundrel Lando Calrissian (played by Billy Dee Williams) in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back makes what he thinks is an acceptable, albeit costly, deal with the Evil Empire's enforcer, Darth Vader.  Unfortunately for Lando, the colony he administers (Cloud City), and the 'guests' he bargained to save, Princess Leia and Chewbacca, Darth Vader quickly decides to alter the deal.  In addition to the original cost of giving Lando's friend, Han Solo, over to a bounty hunter, Vader now demands that Leia and Chewbacca be given to his custody as well.  When Lando objects, Vader responds with the infamous line, "I am altering the deal.  Pray I don't alter it any further."  Aside from a chilling moment in a movie masterpiece (Yes, Empire is the best SW movie, although A New Hope is right behind it), this interaction demonstrates an unalterable truth about deals and bargains made with evil: they only get worse.
This is not a new dramatic theme, the playwright Christopher Marlowe said much the same thing in his classic 1592 play, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, wherein the title character makes a literal deal with the devil, only to have it predictably unravel to his final damnation.  To the Christian (or Jewish) theologian, the notion that any pact/deal made with an evil entity, or any path laid out that will utilize evil as a means to an end, will inevitably end in one's own corruption and destruction is no surprise at all.  What else could the outcome be?  The reason for this is simple, rebellion against God only has one outcome: self-destruction.

Proverbs 10:16 New International Version (NIV)
16 The wages of the righteous is life,
    but the earnings of the wicked are sin and death.
James 1:15 New International Version (NIV)
Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
Romans 6:16 New International Version (NIV)

16 Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?

Why is there no other outcome?  Once again the answer is straightforward: God is the sole source of holiness, goodness, and life.  All those who turn from that source, who choose instead to strike out on their own, and who offer God no gratitude or allegiance, will in turn reap the true nature of what that cry for independence has earned.  This is not a question of God's mercy, for God has offered salvation to humanity, a way to be redeemed and not perish, but rather a question of reality.  Apart from God, there is no life.  How could God make it otherwise?  And more importantly, God could not do such an act of evil as to make a path 'work out' that leads those he has created away from him.
What is true in the grand scheme, that is the direction and outcome of our lives, is true along the way as well.  If we cannot end a journey away from God with anything but self-destruction, nor can we hope to have success when choosing to live against the Law of God between here and there.  The standard by which our whole lives are judged (the holiness and righteousness of God), is the same standard by which each episode within those lives are judged.  What is true for the whole is true for the parts as well.  To make a 'deal with the devil', even if one considers it to be only a short-term deal, is to embrace folly.  Deals with evil are always worse than they present themselves to be, and they only go downhill from there, inevitably.

The moral question of Avengers: Infinity War (Spoiler Free)

There is a central moral question at work in Avengers: Infinity War between the protagonist, the villain Thanos, and the multitude of antagonists, the Avengers, Guardians, and various other Marvel heroes.  The goal of Thanos (no spoiler here as the trailers explained it months ago) is to wipe out half of the life in the universe in order to "balance" life and usher in an age of abundance and peace.  At the root of the motivation of Thanos is the fear of overpopulation (and with it environmental degradation) leading to suffering and strife over limited resources.  In other words, in order to significantly decrease suffering and increase happiness, countless sentient lives have to be snuffed out.  Thanos believes that the ends justify the means (his goal is worth killing over), conversely the various heroes reject this moral equivalence, maintaining the sanctity of all life.

Fear of overpopulation is nothing new for humanity, in 1798 the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population which predicted that population would double every 25 years but agricultural increases could only be incremental, thus resulting in widespread famine and war unless significant birth control measures were to be taken.  Malthus' warnings influenced many, among them the German imperialists who contended that Germany needed Lebensraum ("living space") to accommodate its growing population, inevitably at the expense of Germany's Slavic neighbors to the east who would need to be eliminated or turned into serfs.  The unforeseen agricultural revolution that followed after Malthus' dire predictions made the billions of human beings living in the 20th century possible, although fear of overpopulation remained, typified by the sci-fi movie in 1973, Soylent Green.  With the population of the world in 2018 at 7.6 billion and rising, that fear isn't likely to go away anytime soon, thus the question remains: How much of a problem is rising population, and what is the moral response to it?

 As stated earlier, the response of Thanos to the fear of overpopulation is genocide, a willingness to kill in war, planet by planet, half of the population, and the hope that he can obtain all six of the infinity stones for his gauntlet and then finish his task across the universe with a "snap of his fingers".  The heroes in Infinity War are faced with the question of the value of life on a much smaller scale as they must contemplate self-sacrifice in order to attempt to stop Thanos.  While Thanos was willing to kill on an epic scale to achieve his goal, the heroes must be willing to risk their own lives, a question whose consequences they face multiple times in the movie.

The self-sacrifice of an individual to save many is certainly a theme embraced by Christianity, it is after all what Jesus Christ did when he accepted the task of dying upon the cross as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity.  In order to save billions, Jesus willingly carried the cross upon which he died.  Thankfully, that sacrifice was not in vain, for with his resurrection he obtained victory over both sin and death for all those who would believe in him.

It will not be known until after Avengers 4 (set to release in 2019) what the final cost of confronting and possibly defeating Thanos will be for the Marvel heroes, but the principle established by their decision to oppose him is one in which life is considered a precious thing, and while self-sacrifice may prove necessary to stop great evil, it is not a decision to be made casually precisely because life is precious.  

Apes, children, and the value of life.

There was a recent incident at the zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio, involving a three-year-old child falling into the gorilla enclosure and the subsequent killing of a male gorilla named Harambe by zoo officials who was either threatening or protecting the child, depending upon who you ask.  Setting aside the question of whether or not Harambe would have harmed the child if the zoo had instead tried to use a tranquilizer on him, for that ought to be a question answered by gorilla experts, we all ought to be able to agree that Harambe could have easily killed the child he was holding on to, whether intentionally or not.  Thus the question should not be about the intentions of the gorilla, but instead about the value of the two lives involved.  One of the two was a endangered gorilla, the other a human child.  How can these two lives be weighed, how can one decide their relative value?
For those who do not believe in God, and thus have no concept of humanity as having an immortal soul, nor of humanity created in the image of God, the question is a much more difficult one to answer.  If you don't believe in God, humanity is simply on step above primates, higher, but only relatively so.  If we are only the product of evolution, and our place at the top of this planet's food chain is only the outcome of chance, and not the design of a Creator, there will be little separating humanity from other life in terms of value.  For those who don't believe in God, the idea that a human life could have less value than an animal's life becomes a possibility.
To those who do believe in God as Creator, who see humanity as a reflection of the divine image, every human life must have an inherent value qualitatively different than any animal life.  Without God, human life is greater in a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.  But for those who see the hand of God in the face of every child, the gap between human life and animal life is, and must be, vast.
I would choose to save a human life, at the cost of any animal's life, even a great number of animal lives.  I would choose a 90-year-old with Alzheimers disease over an endangered baby animal.  I would choose a severely handicapped human life, mentally or physically, over any animal's life.  Why, because that human being has a soul, that life is a gift from God, and it is our duty to protect it in any way that we can.  In case this implication isn't clear too, I would also certainly choose the life of an unborn child over an animal's life as well.
Do I love animals?  I certainly do, some of my best memories and interactions have been with my dogs, and we've taken our one-year-old daughter to the zoo twice already.  My wife is obsessed with hiking in the woods out West to look for moose.  We've done this many times, and will undoubtedly do so again soon when our daughter is old enough to trek along.  I think moose are awesome, and would oppose cruelty or senseless killing of them or any other animals.  But don't think for a second that I would hesitate to protect my wife or child, or any other human life, if it was threatened by an animal.
This recent controversy over the killing of an ape to save a child has been greatly inflated by a significant number of people who have erroneously concluded that the life of the child and the life of the ape have a similar value.  Such belief is wrong, dangerous, and not connected to the teaching of the Word of God.  Perhaps the zoo could have used a tranquilizer, but to do so they would have put the life of a child at a greater risk in order to save the life of an animal, and that decision would have been not only unacceptable, but immoral.  They chose human life because they valued it as they should have.