All These Things Together

All These Things Together

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I am modern enough to believe that God doesn’t usually speak in our dreams. But sometimes I wake up from a dream asking “what does this mean?” This week in the middle of the Lenten season, near the end of winter, and with gloomy news on my Facebook and Twitter feeds I had a dream. I could not but wake up wondering what the dream meant.

            Early in the week I followed the news of Israel’s election. I am not Israeli but the election drew my attention. I read articles in Israeli newspapers. In my Conservative Christian world, it was all so cut and dried – Netanyahu is an Evangelical hero. The Prime Minister is seen as standing for everything that is good and true. But among Israelis there are questions and concerns of what is happening to their dream of their nation Israel. There is a sense that their great military triumph in 1967 has saddled them with a situation from which they do not know how to extricate themselves. Their democracy is freedom for Israelis and occupation for the Palestinians. There is a sense of a stained conscience that descendants of a people surviving the holocaust are now occupiers of a foreign people. But they fear what will happen if Palestinians are given their freedom. Who can extricate Israel from the burden of its past victories and who can bring reconciliation if peace and freedom are extended to former and present enemies? The fear factor prevailed in Israel's election, but Netanyahu’s Israel can hardly be mistaken as a confident Israel. Perhaps this election had been destined to be one that expressed a sobering gloom for everyone but those that counted themselves the chosen few.

            The day after the Israeli election I received news that a friend of one of the first people I followed on Twitter had died from a long bout with cancer. The friend of my Twitter friend had battled for a long time with the cancer that brought her to the grave this week. I don’t always agree with my Twitter friend. But I read her blog because when we do agree she speaks to my soul as much as anyone whose words I read. When we don’t agree she speaks to my mind and makes me think as few people do. Their friendship had begun in their early teen years and matured through the times when each of them would marry and deepened as it moved to the one friend’s final breath.

            By that evening I received news that a man, my age, a cancer survivor with a wife and three children in their early adult years, was in the hospital. At first it seemed something fairly ordinary for someone who faced difficulties stemming from surgeries removing a colon and some other internal parts. We prayed but the news grew ominous. Sepsis had taken hold of his body. The word sepsis is unrecognizable to many, but for so many others it is understood for how it took someone they loved among the 250,000 Americans it kills each and every year. We prayed even as one posted that they hoped the daughter coming from California would make it in time to see her father. By Thursday morning our prayers were chiefly being expressed for the grieving friends and family members who had lost a dear husband, a wonderful father, a kind and compassionate friend. He had passed away early Thursday morning, near the darkest of the morning hours.

            There was lesser news. A disgruntled Canadian from one of the Atlantic Provinces was growing tired of winter. Her jokes described how she no longer feared that an intruder might break into her house through her windows, because he would tire of shoveling all the snow it would take to get down to her windows. March is the month when winter tries to hang on as spring slowly makes its way to northern lands.

            This is also the season of Lent, when we go out to the Wilderness and face demons and temptations in a season contemplating what we need to sacrifice if we are to walk in nearness to our God and with our Savior. But we do not go into the Wilderness so much to change our lives as we do to capture a glimpse of His life, in whom, we have found life. He came to face down the desires that were natural to him. He was hungry and faced down the temptation to satisfy it with bread alone. He was coming to establish God’s kingdom and he was offered a way to have it without suffering and death. He came to the Wilderness to face every temptation that could somehow deter him from his pathway of obedience that led to death on a cross. This is the season of Lent, the season in the Wilderness.

            With all these things upon my mind I had a dream. My parents passed away many years ago, in 1989. I was closer to my father. I have had a number of dreams of visiting him in the family home where I grew up since his passing, and often my mother is there also sort of in the background but a definite part of our moment together in a dream. But this time he was not a remembrance of his healthy years. My Dad appeared in a ravaged cancerous form, not like I remembered him in those last days, but as if he had become an abstract representation of death and gloom.

            Often when I have had dreams of my father after his passing I would wake up to reality and feel deeply depressed because the joy of seeing him was replaced with the awareness that this was after all just a dream.

            But this day I woke and thought it is winter and spring comes, there is gloom in the Wilderness, death abounding, but soon it will be Easter – and RESURRECTION!

Signs, Wonders, and Jobs

Signs, Wonders, and Jobs.

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Recently I was talking with a younger person about their looking to the Lord for a change in life direction. The person was thinking of trying to find a different job, a different location to live, maybe even a change of cities. Their desire was to seek and to do the will of God. I thought of how on a couple of occasions I had been in such a situation and how on two occasions God seemed to lead me in very different ways. So I am reluctant to put God in a box and tell the person how God will lead on this occasion but I thought the differences between these two times of my seeking God regarding potential job changes might be the sort of testimony that might encourage someone going through such a season at this time.

            I grew up in a family that did not attend church. We really had no determined viewpoint about religion or belief in God. It was neither agnosticism nor atheism that caused us not to go to church. It was simply that our family lifestyle treated religion pretty much as irrelevant to everyday living. My dad was certainly a diligent worker, a provider for his family, a friend to those in the community and he took things in stride whether hardships or blessings. He was in many ways a stoic with a firm set of moral principles. Late in my high school years I began to seek to see if there was a God and by my early years in college I had become a committed believer in Christ. During my college years I studied history as my major and philosophy as a minor and decided when I graduated I would go on to seminary and study theology. But by my senior year in college I was not at all sure about my intended course.

            By that time I was tired of school. I had been going to school for sixteen years and hardly knew anything about life outside of school. I wondered if three more years of school would actually prepare me for the pastoral ministry I imagined myself doing one day. Also my time in Christian groups had been spent almost completely within college groups where the range of humanity was from the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-four. I began to believe I needed to simply be a member of a church with people from the point of being carried in the womb to people being helped in their old age. If I was to be called to the ministry then I would be called to be a member of a church with people of all ages, and I would be called to understand their working lives in blessing and poverty. I decided I needed to get a job, join a church, live in the working class world and then maybe later consider seminary.

            I was living in the Bloomington-Normal area in central Illinois. I started looking for a factory job. I noticed this one factory next to a blue water tower. This thought popped into my mind that I would work there. I thought that was a crazy thought. I drove around putting applications into a number of other places with my application being accepted politely but with little indication that I would be seriously considered. Finally I went to the factory next to the water tower. I filled out my application. As for job experience I had worked one summer in a factory operating a punch press but had done no set ups. The personnel employee looked over my application I gave her without much encouragement and then suddenly she said to someone in the next office, here is an applicant with punch press experience. The voice from the next office said “Send him in.” A moment later I was talking to the plant manager and when the conversation ended he said, “Will you be available for work Monday morning at seven?”

            At that point in my life the whole sensation of having that strange thought that I would work in the factory next to the water tower was a wonderful confirmation to me that this was where God wanted me at this point in time in my life.

            Several years later I had a very different experience. By this time I was living in Oklahoma, where I have lived now for most of my life. I was going through something of a difficult time. I had moved to Oklahoma during oil boom years and was now surviving in oil bust years, working a job doing contract labor with low wages and few benefits. One could live from paycheck to paycheck but it was a no frills life. I was discouraged but was appreciative of my church. I had put in an application for a job at a factory in a town quite a ways away from where I was living. The factory paid good wages and had a good benefits package. After I put the application in, more than a year passed and I had pretty much forgotten about it. Then one day I was called and asked if I would come in for an interview and if the interview went as expected I would probably be hired. I was excited about the possibility. But I wasn’t really ready to leave my church.

            I prayed and asked God to show me what I was supposed to do. I looked over Philippians 4:6-7. I was praying and asking God for direction when I noticed that the promise was not that God would lead me each and every time to make the decision for me, but that as I sought him and submitted myself to him that he would guard me in Christ. It was a moment when instead of being encouraged to make this decision or that decision that God’s promise seemed to be that he would guard me regardless of what decision I made. I felt a sense of there being freedom in Christ. I didn’t have to feel that the whole future of my Christian life would be determined on the basis of my making the absolute best choice in taking or not taking the job being offered to me. I could not know the future of what my decision would bring about, but I could rest assured that God’s decision to guard me in Christ was settled. It was a lesson that has encouraged me often. I decided to stay where I was because I was in a church where the people around me knew me. I felt like I needed that more at the time than I needed a job with good wages and benefits. Bachelors can make such decisions. I asked for guidance about what I should do concerning a job. But God chose instead to imply that it didn’t matter so much as my understanding that he was with me in Christ through thick and thin.

            I still pray for direction, but these days I don’t think the future of the world depends on the decisions I make so much as the decision which God made when he set his love upon us in Christ Jesus. So pray about your job situations, and then know that no matter what is before us that we can never foresee; God has determined to guard us in Christ Jesus. “So be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” –Philippians 4:6-7

 

Honor and Civility in Political Activity

Honor and Civility in Political Activity

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            The other day, John Armstrong wrote one of his briefest blogs. It contained two paragraphs. He expressed frustration regarding political polarization between Conservative and Liberals. The two endlessly debate about the role of government and it is increasingly common that such differences are highlighted with implications that those in the opposing camp are ignorant or evil. Those of us not fitting nicely into such Conservative or Liberal identity politics wonder if there will ever be a workable understanding by which a basic political consensus could be established. It would seem that the observation of H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) sums up the present democracy of our American Republic. He once wrote, “Under Democracy one party always devotes its energies to trying to prove the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed and are right.” That seems to be where we are within today’s social and political landscape.

            A poster once asserted that virtually all the important life lessons are basically learned in Kindergarten. I wonder, based on that insight, if we can’t learn something about honoring others in our political environment by applying the lesson we learn as children to honor our fathers and mothers. To be sure we don’t mean reducing the command to honor father and mother to some sort of command merely calling upon us to obey our parents. A child may observe the command to honor father and mother by obeying their parents; but an adult son or daughter honors their parents in almost wholly other ways than by merely obeying them. The requirement to obey a parent is not an obligation of an adult son or daughter, so for the adult son or daughter honoring father and mother means something different from obeying father and mother. A consideration of how we honor fathers and mothers may well help us to understand how we are meant to honor kings and those in authority.

            It would seem to me that we often fail to see the command to honor father and mother, and in association honoring of king and country in a realistic manner. Why has God commanded us to honor father and mother? What are the reasons for us to honor our parents?

            I suspect that there are three basic reasons for honoring parents, of which the third may be the most important but most often the less contemplated. The first reason is simply biological. We exist by being born of our parents. Clearly it is a reason, but not the most important reason to list the honoring of father and mother in the Ten Words. Secondly, and this is far more important we honor our parents because generally we owe them so much for the values and privileges we possess through their provision and care for us.

            But there is another reason for God to put the commandment to honor father and mother into the Ten Sacred Words commanded on Sinai. A large number of children grow up to become adults with issues inherited from parents. There are too many children who grow up having been abused, having been carelessly reared, having been abandoned or in some ways semi-abandoned by their parents. Most of us have issues where we wish our parents had done this or that or not done that, because certain areas are difficult for us because our parents failed miserably in some manner. Perhaps that is actually an important reason why God included this commandment in the Ten Commandments. It is in fact, a relationship where for most of us in consistently honoring our parents, have had to come to the realization that as God has received us by grace and has thus honored us in his treatment of us, so has he called us to honor others by treating them graciously. This is the only way the keeping of this commandment is kept within the boundaries of sanity. God does not expect us to honor abuse or failure that so often is part of the mixed bag of parenting. Therefore the only way we can consistently honor parents is to recognize that the command is connected to our participation in the loving-kindness, mercy, and honor of God’s grace towards us so that as he extends grace to us we extend honor and graciousness to others.

            This then means as children mature and become responsible for their actions they honor their parents not by unthinkingly copying their parental methods but by being thankful for where their parenting was a means of blessing and moving forward to make changes for the better where parents’ parenting skills proved less than admirable. There must be realism in the way we honor parents. As we learn how to honor our fathers and mothers, we learn how to establish our own households independently of their authority. We can thus honor without agreeing. We can be civil without having full agreement.

            It seems to me that such lessons learned in honoring our parents will apply also in the general command to honor the king and those in authority. We can honor and respect those in authority without necessarily agreeing with every political decision. It does seem to me that such an understanding would promote within us carefulness in how we speak of our leaders and how we disagree in political discourse. Debates regarding public policy matters are essential to a representative democracy. Lampooning others as idiots, evil, or charlatans without just cause is nothing less than a form of character assassination.

            I offer this blog as food for thought. I do not mean it to be an article suggesting that people shouldn’t speak pointedly and passionately in support of or against legislation. I believe it is often essential to speak faithfully concerning social and political concerns. I have no qualms with those who organize protests and demonstrations. We nevertheless have the responsibility to honor those in authority and to be civil to our political opponents.

 

The Father, the Prodigal, and the Good Son

The Father, the Prodigal, and the Good Son

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            The fifteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel is surely one of Christendom’s favorite Bible chapters. The parables of the lost coin, lost sheep, and the prodigal son are all found in this one chapter. I have been reading Maggi Dawn’s Lenten devotional Giving it up and her meditations on this passage within that Lenten devotional have led me to think more about this wonderful passage.

            I think Maggi Dawn pretty much perfectly describes what Jesus was doing in telling these parables to the Pharisees and scribes. She writes; “This is a sequence of stories that takes the Pharisees’ and scribes’ idea of what a religious person ought to be like, and turns it around to ask instead what is God like.”[i] That sums up the chapter perfectly. I think we often have to have our thinking about religion turned around so that instead of focusing on what we ought to be like if we are religious people; that we really need to have our thinking refocused to see what God is truly like toward us. The reality is that there is always more for us to do, to learn, to be, in regards with our seeking to be godly persons. We most need to realize what God is like toward us. He truly is good as our creator. He is also good as the one who desires that all men and women should be redeemed and brought near unto him. A prayer that I once questioned in the Book of Common Prayer is now a prayer that I realize does sum up very well God’s desire for us. The prayer in the Book of Common Prayer says, “We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy:”[ii] That was what Jesus was seeking to teach the Pharisees and the scribes. In their mind, only a certain group of people who had kept the right way of life could expect to be viewed by God as good. But Jesus tells how a woman who has lost a valuable coin will seek it all day long until she finds it, how a good shepherd who has one sheep that gets separated from the flock will seek it. Finally he speaks of how a Father with two sons will not be satisfied with just one son sharing in the life and joy of the family.

            The story of the prodigal son reminds me of a story I once heard when I was a tourist visiting Russia. The story revolved around a man who had lived a sinful life. He then had a near death experience. He was clinically dead. His soul descended downwards because he had lived a bad life. But then much to his surprise instead of being punished, the devil and the demons took him partying. He was realizing this wasn’t at all how he had expected things to be. Then the doctors above revived the man and his soul returned to earth. He now didn’t mind if he was going downward when he died and if anything he lived more selfish than before. He then died, this time for real. This time the Devil turned him over to the demons and they started tormenting him. He protested, crying out, “Hey don’t you remember me how we partied the time I came before.” A demon replied, “Then you were a tourist, now you are an immigrant.” That is what the Prodigal found out about life in the country he went to. When he had money as a tourist he could live it up. But when the money was gone, he was an immigrant living at the bottom rung of existence as an outsider in society. He was feeding the hogs, wishing he could eat as well as the hogs which had their fill of pellets while he went to bed at night without enough to meet his daily needs.

 

Photograph downloaded from Shutterstock.com

 

            It was as he fed those hogs that he remembered how good his father treated his servants. He felt he could not go back to his father expecting to be treated as a son. He was no longer worthy of gathering crumbs beneath his father’s table. But maybe he could be a servant, a hired hand. He began to make his way back towards his father’s house.

As he neared the property his father saw him. One wonders how often his father must have wondered if he would ever see the long lost son again. The father, upon seeing him runs out to greet him, and orders a lavish banquet to celebrate his son’s return.

            The older brother becomes upset. He remains in a field outside of the house and refuses to join the celebration. He complains that his father never threw a lavish banquet for him. He had given up everything to stay with his father, to be the good son. But now the returning prodigal gets special treatment. This is once more, where Maggi Dawn makes a wonderful observation. She points out that upon hearing how the older brother refused to come in, the father went to the field to meet the older brother and to ask him to come in and celebrate; to ask him what was wrong and to encourage him to put away his anger. Just as the father had run to the prodigal son, he now runs also to the field to meet the elder brother who grumbles at his father's kindness to his brother.

            I wonder if the Pharisees realized where Jesus took them in this parable of the older brother and the Prodigal. They were Old Testament experts. They were taken to a field of a story of an older and younger brother. The older brother was angry. His brother’s sacrifice had pleased God, and God said something was missing in regards to his sacrifice. Cain was in the field when God urged him to set aside his anger. The older brother did not feel God’s love. He had complained about what he had given up all these years while being in his father’s presence. Beneath all his self-righteousness there was this feeling that he wished he would not have had to make so many sacrifices for his father. But something else was also wrong. He did not understand his father’s love for his children. He did not understand that his father could not be happy if only one son returned home. If he had understood his father’s love for him, he would have been happy for his father seeing his son return home. He would have understood that one cannot fully love the father, without also realizing his father’s love of his sons. In essence, Jesus was reaching out to the Pharisees and scribes as if God were speaking to them as the older brother and saying, “Won’t you come home also?” In essence, Jesus was showing them and us that he was the true elder brother, the beloved son of his Father. He is the one who had seen his Father’s perfect love and had perfectly reflected that same love in his own being; showing the fullness of the Father’s love for all his sons, and for his daughters and for his very good creation.

 

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[i] Maggi Dawn. Giving it up (The Bible Reading Fellowship, 2009) p. 93.

[ii] 1928 Book of Common Prayer, New York, Oxford University Press. P.82