Brown's Daily Word 3/31/17

   This is the day, the new day, that the Lord has made.  Blessed be the Name of the Lord.  It is going to be a blessed day wherever we might be all throughout the land.  The Lord of every day and the Lord of all the days paves before us a way of His peace and His grace.  The Lord blessed us with a brilliant day yesterday. 

    Our town here in Marathon is getting ready for the BIG weekend -- the Central New York Maple Festival.  The Vendors are beginning to set up their booths.  A make-shift amusement park is going up.  Our church is getting ready to prepare the Chicken BBQ.  The "holy locus" for the ministry of  chicken BBQ is the Church Fellowship Hall.  Chicken will be served on Saturday and Sunday.  Bring your family and friends.  It will be a treat.  We praise the Lord for each and every one who invests their talents, time, and treasures.  We will gather for worship at 10:30 AM in the sanctuary.  Come and join us just as you are. 

    The Civil War re-enactment team has already started moving onto the village green, setting their tents where they will encamp over the weekend, and a teepee  has gone up as well.  The High School is gearing up for the Annual Maple Queen Pageant, which will proudly a new Maple Queen on Friday night.  School employees are being recruited to man the griddle for the pancake breakfast.  There will also be the iconic pancake eating contest, many local entertainers (who will perform on the high school stage), and all sorts of vendors, mostly from the Southern Tier.  All of the high school classes have specific booths assigned to them.  (For example, one class sells freshly roasted nuts.  Another sells balloons.  A third vends freshly baked apple dumplings.  Senior always have a prime location where the cook spiedies and Italian sausage for delicious sandwiches.)  All over town you can find maple treats - pancakes with real maple syrup, maple candy, maple sundaes, maple ice cream, maple cotton candy, . . . and the Dairyland Dipper (the local ice cream shop) has also opened for the start of the festivities.

    Alice and I were both born and raised in small villages - Alice on a dairy farm in Central New York and I in eastern India.  We love living in a small town, where people of all ages are beautiful, winsome, down-to-earth, and above average in so many ways.  We remember special events that would draw the whole town out to participate.  For my wife there were such times as the Memorial Day "parade", Old Home Days, the weekly Summertime band concerts where the honking of horns meant appreciation for the music, and the combined Vacation Bible School.  Those of us who are called to small lives, can live lives of great significance. 

    I love to read about the life and legacy Abraham Lincoln.  Abraham Lincoln's incredible significance was not known until the very last years of his life.  He was born in an obscure log cabin, self-taught for many year, a failure as a postmaster and a storekeeper, and in many other tasks that he undertook.  He was a very tall, very homely gentleman with a very great wit and story-telling capability.  His place was small in the legal profession and in the greater American spectrum, until the very, very end.  Many now consider him to have been one of the most outstanding American Presidents.

    Most of us, in our lives and circumstances, can be considered to have only a small role.  Few are the numbers of persons who reach celebrity status or fame on the athletic field.  Most of us are "small".  "Smallness" is everywhere.  I love the wonderful redemptive and the salvation story of Ruth.  In Ruth we see another kind of smallness.  We see a smallness that finds complete significance, but the significance is within the life in God.  Through reading the story our hunger for significance may actually be strengthened.  We should want to be significant.  We have a human desire for significance.   The Book of Ruth is a celebration of smallness in God's greatness.  It involves all kinds of things that are necessary for a great story: tension, conflict, tragedy, comedy, resolution, and wonder, yet it is not a novel, but a true story.  Ruth really lived. There was a guy named Boaz, who truly lived in a small town as a pretty well-to-do farmer.  Naomi really lived.  

    In the Book of Ruth the significance of love and the significance of being loved are revealed.  Both of those really come out of Ruth's words to Naomi,  "Where you go, I will go".  Even more importantly, "Your God will be my God."  The significance of love; the significance of being loved are pre-eminent in these words.  Ruth was acting with a kind of freedom that is actually disconcerting.  She actually created a loyalty and puts her widowhood second to her mother-in-law's widowhood.  She put her own culture as a Moabite, (different than Israelite) second to that of her mother-in-law.  She puts her own religion, the Moabite religion with several "gods" in the household (statues, idols) second to her mother-in-law's religion and living faith.

        In the Book of Ruth we see that Ruth mad a specific choice in regard to a specific person with a specific sacrifice.  It wasn't that Ruth sang a stirring song about love.  She came in and she loved a specific person (Naomi) in a specific situation (poverty and tragedy) with a very specific sacrifice (blind loyalty - "Where you go I will go.")  Ruth converted out of one religion to follow the living God.  Her smallness in that conversion became significant in the story of God.  This is not smallness for smallness sake.  This is smallness for the sake of living in God, where great significance is given. 

    Without Jesus, we will never be satisfied.  It will never come to fruition, even if we are among the miniscule portion who receive worldly significance.  Our guarantee of significance comes in conversion to Jesus Christ.  If we are not yet converted, it's a matter of giving our life to Jesus, receiving the love he has so that we are empowered to love others.

    This is what the church has called heroic virtue.  It's a description of those who live their lives by love.  Heroic virtue is not merely to be doing the right thing, but to do the right thing with the power and presence of Jesus the Risen Savior.  Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me".  It's doing the right thing as Jesus  would do that thing.  In heroic virtue we actually can live lives that are full of love.  It's a life where Jesus' presence is revealed.  This is what the greater world, whether they know it or not, is hoping from us.  They hope that  we will live lives of heroic virtue—sacrificial lives, lives that are profoundly other-centered, lives that are filled with love.

    Blind faith is learning to love as God has loved, learning to love as Jesus has loved, in a series of specific choices toward specific people with specific sacrifices.  We always have choice.  No one can take from us the choice to love another.  We always have that freedom.

        Jesus makes our small lives that appear insignificant deeply significant. We know of Ruth, and her story is written because we find out at the very end of the book that she actually was the great-grandmother to a figure named David, who is the great-great-great-plus grandfather of Jesus himself.  Ruth is essentially Jesus' grandmother several steps removed, directly in his lineage.  Her life literally pointed and led to Jesus, and that's where her significance was utterly and completely derived.  In her own lifetime she was insignificant, but now and in heaven she is known as one who loved and received the deep love of God.

    I love the story by C.S. Lewis.  He wrote a story about a man that goes to heaven. He has a host.  As he and his host are moving around heaven,  he sees a beautiful parade, and at the foot of the parade is a glorious, beautiful, regal woman.  He thinks, Oh, is that a queen?  Is that a monarch?  His host responds, "No, not at all. It's someone you never heard of.  Her name was Sarah Smith, and she lived in the suburbs."  "Well, she seems to be a person of particular importance." T he host says, "Oh yes, she's one of the great ones.  You've heard that theme in your country.  Earth and fame in heaven are two quite different things.  Right?"  The man hadn't heard that.  He says, "Well, who are all these young men and young women at her side?"  To that the host responded, "They're her sons and daughters."  "Oh, she must have had a very large family."  "No," the host says, "every young man or boy that came to her back door with a package of delivery became her son.  Every girl that she met was her daughter."

    Praise the Lord for the way He magnifies that is which is small in the eyes of the world.  At the end, those whose lives are given and lived in Jesus will lead a procession of such beauty and glory you'd think they were monarchs.

In Christ,

Brown

https://youtu.be/n7lvyd1JdQU

Brown's Daily Word 3/29/17

"Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming garb of spring;
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer,
Who makes the woeful heart to sing." 

    Jesus is beautiful.  He is mighty.  He is merciful.  He is purer.  He is fairer.  All honor, glory, and praises be unto Him.  Praise the Lord for the way He imparts to us His abiding peace and He sends upon us His sweet rest and sleep.  I was gazing through our picture window this morning, looking at Eastern sky. . . it looks brilliant.  How the Lord awaken the earth with the gift of a brand new day pregnant with His tender mercies and loving kindness.  We will never lose when we are walking in His light paved with grace.  (Indeed, it is a wonderful life in Christ , because of Christ,  and through Christ).  In our evening walks we have been gazing at crocuses with brilliant purple color in full bloom.  The trees are budding.  The spring birds are driven to unspeakable songs of joy.  People are sapping the maple trees, getting ready for the Maple Festival  that starts this Saturday, April 1, continuing into Sunday.  The Sugar Shack in town is full of activities.  When you walk by it  you will get lost in the sweet aroma of it all. 

    Praise the Lord the way he  takes our bitterness of life and turns it into the sweet, sweeter that honeycomb.  The wonderful and Gracious family with whom we stayed during our last visit to  Boston are committed and zealous Christians involved in the ongoing ministry and mission of the Church.  The woman was raised in a Congregational church in New England. 

    From my readings I had gathered that The New England Congregational churches had no stained glass windows.  Rather, they all had clear glass windows.  Every Congregational church had  a cemetery next door to the church.  On a given Sunday the preacher standing at the pulpit could see vividly the church cemetery through the clear glass windows.  The worshippers also could see the cemetery from the sanctuary through the clear glass windows.  Modern people may find church graveyards disturbing.  A drive through the country is likely to reveal a church building with a graveyard situated uncomfortably close, leaving a feeling of awkwardness or morbidity—giving at least the impression of poor planning.

    The church graveyard, though, was placed there on purpose for church members.  The church graveyard has a way of saying, “Each one buried here was one of us, and they all will be one of us on resurrection day.”  Life together, death together, resurrection together:  the church graveyard is an expression of church membership.

    We don’t think this way anymore, because we don’t think about resurrection anymore, perhaps because we don’t think much about death anymore.  It wasn’t long ago when life expectancy only reached into the forties.  Coming down with a fever was truly frightening; measles and whooping cough killed children; childbearing killed women.  In those days, people thought more about death than we do now.  Now death is a long way off, some time after retirement, the beach house, and the BMW.  So death—and with it resurrection—are pushed to the backs of our minds and then to the back of our theology.

    However, resurrection is our Hope..   Resurrection is our foundation.  There was a nursery rhyme that said, "Ashes, Ashes, we fall down. . .  Easter, Easter we all rise up."  "For all have sinned and have fallen short of the Glory of God. . . For the wages of sin is death (but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord)."  Resurrection is Christianity’s unique, audacious claim—so unique and  bold that it’s dangerous.  Preaching resurrection landed the early church in a lot of hot water.

    Paul was emphatic when he said, “I made known to you, brothers, the gospel I preached to you.”  This gospel is the very reason for the Christian’s existence. John Hick was a  pluralist philosopher.  He embraced the idea that although they disagree on much, the major religions of the world are, in fact, essentially the same.  To make this work, Hick reduced all religious experience to one thing: The essence of religious experience is to be free from selfishness by being grounded in the real—whatever that is.

    Paul claimed to have the real.  He declared that: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with Scripture, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with Scripture, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the 12." Paul pressed the reality of these facts.  In a way, John Hick is right: You must be rooted in reality.  That is where his correct assumptions ended, because that reality is the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.  

    Paul further said, “If Jesus didn’t rise, then pity us like fools, because we have nothing.”  If we have nothing without a resurrection, what do we have with it?  The reality of future resurrection Is the finishing of our salvation.  If Christ was raised from the dead, then all who are in Him also will rise in like manner.  It’s audacious and awesome.  Without the resurrection, we have nothing.  With it, we have everything.

    Praise the Lord for the sure and certain promise of Resurrection.  During a funeral service we declare, "the sure and certain Hope of Resurrection".  Sin, death and hell make it a matter of extreme urgency. Let us not limit ourselves to  walking through a springtime ritual, but go all in with a risen Savior.  He died our death and then conquered our grave.  Let us keep on trusting . Him.  A familiar verse rings so true: "For God so loved that world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

In Jesus our Lord ,

 Brown

https://youtu.be/CYTQ6gpcuYA

Brown's Daily Word 3/27/17

 Praise be to Jesus, the Author and the finisher of our faith, who makes all things glorious in His time and makes all things beautiful in all seasons.  He blessed us with a brilliant week.  This past Wednesday our church hosted a community dinner with some seasonal foods along with amazing desserts followed by a troupe of Irish Dancers who presented Irish dance and songs.  On Saturday the seniors from our local High School had a mega-Auction at the Civic center to raise funds for their senior trip to Disney World.  The seniors labored diligently and with a smile. Our community supports the seniors with much love.  They give to them generously.  The Senior auction is a fun event which draws in people of all ages.  Saturday evening our church hosted another dinner event with special foods with dessert galore.  "Simon Peter", one of the beloved disciples, made an appearance in our church following the dinner reception.  Dr James Geer Ph D personified Simon Peter.  The presentation by Dr Geer on the testimony, faith, struggles, and victories of Simon Peter was stirring and provocative.  The people who attended the presentation were deeply moved and blessed.  Praise the Lord that the Good news of Jesus still has the power to change and transform lives in such way the dead in sin rise up and walk in newness if life.  The Lord blessed us in His house yesterday in worship and celebration.  The Lord blesses us with a celebrative heart and joyful spirit.

    Alice and I walked for over a mile in the afternoon yesterday.  The snow is melting fast and furiously, making room and space for our Annual Maple Festival that will be held this coming Saturday and Sunday.  As we were walking we saw birds flying and cheering, carefree and unafraid. The early Spring flowers that were hidden by the snow are all coming out with a smile. 

    We talked Sunita and her family in Washington, DC.  They spent part of Saturday at the National Arboretum in our Nation's Capital.  The spring flowers are full bloom there.  It is also the season of the Cherry blossoms in Washington, DC.  It is all beautiful.

    Our oldest grand children, Micah and Simeon, were in a swim meet in Boston this past Saturday; they did well. 

    I was gazing at our strawberry patch yesterday.  The plants look vigorous and alive.  Amazing.  One of our friends planted lots of garlic for us last October.  The the garlic is up and luxuriant.  Praise the Lord for the way our Lord makes flowers bloom, plants come to full life, seeds germinate, come to full life again after being dormant during the long and lingering  period of time. 

    We praise the Lord for our friend Al Binder who is celebrating his 90th birthday this week.  Al and his dear wife Evvie accepted Christ while watching Billy Graham preaching from Madison Square Garden over 60 years ago.  Evvie and Al have walked with the Lord, serving Him all these years with much joy and zeal.  Evvie has gone to be with our Lord Jesus.  Al continues the journey.

    During the Lenten Season we walk with Jesus in His humility, Passion, and suffering, culminating in His victory over the grave and death on Resurrection morning.  The famous atheist Frederick Nietzsche, who coined the phrase, “God is dead,” once said, “Assert yourself.  Care for nothing except yourself.  The only vice is weakness and the only virtue is strength.  Be strong.  Be a superman.  The world is yours if you work hard enough for it!”  At some point Hitler read Nietzsche and decided to become that “superman,” and we all know how that turned out. Jesus showed a better way when he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).  These are two very different, juxtaposed ideas. Although the first words are from an atheist, and the last quote from the teaching of Jesus, it often seems that Christians go by Nietzsche’s philosophy rather than Jesus’ teaching.  Many Christians live as though the only virtue is strength.  Jesus never talked about strength, but he often spoke of meekness.

    I looked up the definition of meekness in the dictionary, and one of the definitions was: “deficient in spirit and courage.”  That is not Jesus’ idea of meekness.  It is not about being weak, but it is about not reacting with aggressiveness and malice.  The other definition I found comes closer.  It was, “enduring injury with patience and without resentment.”  Patience is not something I am very good at, but I really came up short when I looked up the definition in a Greek-English lexicon which defined meekness as, “gentleness of attitude and behavior, in contrast with harshness in one’s dealings with others.” I’ve never been good at the gentle thing either.  That’s not an excuse, but it is a confession.

    It is very difficult to imitate the Way of the Cross and the Way of the Lord, but this is also what makes Him so attractive to me.  What a challenge to work toward being transformed into the image of Christ.  It takes humility and surrender to the will and heart of God on a moment by moment basis.  Although we in our humanness tend to value strength and dignity, Jesus values meekness and humility.

    I love to read about some the  beautiful, winsome traditions of Great Britain.  Many Christian Rituals and traditions are so powerful that they transcend time.  On Thursday of Holy Week  the queen of England presides over the Royal Maundy Thursday Service at Guildford Cathedral.  It is a service held each year on the Thursday before Easter, and the British monarch presents gifts of money to the poor.  The royal web site says, “The tradition of the Sovereign giving money to the poor dates from the 13th century.  The Sovereign also used to give food and clothing (later changed to a gift of money), and even washed the recipients’ feet — this varied from Sovereign to Sovereign, the last Monarch to do so was James II.”  It must have been quite a site to see royalty in the humbling posture of foot washing.  It is not surprising that this element of the ceremony was dropped several hundred years ago.  Although now the Queen would not risk much except her dignity by washing the feet of the poor, in more politically charged times even the smallest display of meekness and humility could place one’s political power in jeopardy.  It is unfortunate that we sometimes see meekness as weakness and consider it a disposable quality, but we seldom see power as disposable.  The Bible says, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience”  (Colossians 3:12). This is to be a character quality of Christians because we follow the model of Christ.  Jesus said, “I am gentle and humble in heart.”

    Meekness means living without fear.  I am amazed at Jesus’ ability to live without fear.  The Bible says, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).  Meekness comes with a blessing.  Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).  It is not the strong and powerful or wealthy and famous who inherit the earth; it is the meek.  The world knows comparatively little about the life of Herod the Great or Pilate, but it knows a great deal about the life of Jesus, and millions throughout the ages have ordered their lives by his teaching and given him their devotion.  Dorothy Sayers, in a book of her essays entitled "The Whimsical Christian", has one essay called “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” where she writes, “The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore — on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe.  It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium.  We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

    The Bible says, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9).  This lesson from the life of Jesus says that the meek win and the arrogant and powerful lose.  This is heavenly wisdom, but not the worldly way.  Meekness is the quiet confidence that God is in control, and there are great rewards in that confidence.  We are rewarded with peace.

In Christ our Lord,

 Brown.

https://youtu.be/qXggFYQQTJ0