The Bungee Cord  2-5-18

Hello,

     I, along with millions of others, and maybe even you, watched the Super Bowl yesterday.  As Super Bowls go, I found it to be quite an entertaining game as well as a game that made a lot of people happy.  I say that because I saw a pie chart posted on Facebook this week with a small black sliver of that pie indicating the number of people who as Eagles fans were hoping that the Philadelphia Eagles would win.  The entire rest of the pie chart was a light green depicting the vast percentage of people who were just hoping that the Patriots would lose.  I know that the pie chart was a joke, but I have a feeling it wasn’t too far from the truth.  For a lot of reasons , the Patriots have become a team to hate.

     This morning as I was in my car with my radio on, the Public Radio station was doing a story on the Super Bowl.  As part of the story, the reporter was interviewing some of those folks that comprised that small black sliver of people who as Eagles fans were hoping that they would win.

     One woman interviewee said this, “Yesterday was the second greatest day in my life.  The first was the day that I married my husband. Yesterday I saw my Eagles finally win the Super Bowl, and that was the second greatest day in my life.”

     “Wow,” I thought to myself, “either that woman’s life is really miserable, really empty, or really shallow.”  After all, it was just a football game.  Now in saying that, you need to know that I am a big fan of sports….any kind of sports.  My wife will vouch for me by informing you of two things: the almost locked-in reception our TV has to ESPN, and the existence of my orange and blue, Oskeewowow Illinois man cave in our basement.  For all the sports that I watch, especially the Fighting Illini of the University of Illinois, I would find myself pretty excited if the Illini ever (and I mean ever…ugh) won a national championship, but I am certain that if they (but they won’t!) ever do win a national championship it would rank far down my list of the greatest days of my life.

     The thing that I like about sports is its ability to be a great diversion in life.  After all, running a ball across a goal line, hitting a home run, scoring a goal, making a basket, sinking a put hardly comprise matters of life and death.  Sure, the discipline and hard work put in by those who do these things best is worthy of admiration and emulation, but the end product is really a piece of entertainment and diversion.  It gives those who watch, and play, a chance to lose themselves in something of limited consequence so that that of greater consequence isn’t quite so overbearing.  And I believe that we all need these sort of diversions in life.

     Thing is, though, that like all diversions, life’s diversions are only temporary.  Sooner or later life hits us smack in the face, and when that happens something deep, not shallow or trivial, needs to be there to keep us from getting crushed or swept away.  And I find myself counting the advent of those things in my life as some of the greatest days in my life….the day that I married my wife, the day that each of my kids was born, the day I graduated from Seminary, the day someone said to me “you saved my life”….. on and on I could go.  Thankfully, unlike my fear for the interviewed Eagle fan, my life has been neither miserable, empty, or shallow.

     But greater than all of these days, one day yet stands out as the best: the day that I got hit with water….water that alerted me that it was me that was being spoken to…spoken to by the one whose power spans the universe, who holds it together, who permeates everything that is and isn’t…who is bound by nothing, not even space or time…..that that one was speaking to me and saying, “Jerry, it was for you that I died and rose, and I won’t let anything…and I mean anything….ever….and I mean ever....take you away from me.

     Now that was the greatest day in my life, a day that makes every day great!

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

The Bungee Cord  1-19-18

Hello,

“There’s probably no God.”  That was the slogan of an “advertising campaign” launched in England in 2009.  Countering a campaign by Christians who plastered the sides of buses with the promise of eternal torment for those who were not Christian (not what I would put on a bus to speak of the Christian faith to the world), a group of people who see no evidence for God’s existence, and also believe that those who promote the existence of God detract people from engaging in the most important things in life, began plastering their message on London buses.  “There’s probably no God.”  The campaign took off, and soon this slogan found itself translated to a variety of languages and posted on buses in a variety of countries.

As odd as it may seem, I find myself agreeing with these folks….not agreeing that there is no God….but agreeing with them in the word “probably”.  Limited in my knowledge of statistical analysis and probabilities, it seems completely reasonable to me that if one examines the existence of God based upon specific criteria, that is, the empirical data collected by day to day human experience, one might well conclude that the data is far from conclusive that there is a God.  Although some may say that they have put God to the test and God has responded to that test to prove God’s existence (I remember in my high school days that one such person asked God to cause the cloths hanging in his closet to flutter to prove God’s existence, to which he said that happened), I find myself, for a variety of reasons, not assured of God’s existence because of such things.  Folks far wiser than I find causes for the happenings in our world that do not mandate the existence of God.

This is no new phenomena.  Even in the Bible, in Psalms 10, 14, and 53, we are told that there were people who said, “There is no god.” 

I don’t know if the number of people who profess that God does not exist is any greater today than in other generations, but it does seem to me that the numbers are not falling.  And my guess is that is happening because as folks look around in hopes of discovering God’s existence, much of what they take in leads them to conclude that the probability of God’s existence is minimal at best.

That doesn’t surprise me, because if indeed, God is one who is so utterly different than human beings, that is, not bound by time and space, than to use the confines of time and space to discover God is not a very probable task.  To me, it is like a blind person seeking to prove the existence of the color orange.  What would give a blind person empirical truth to the existence of the color orange?  Would not a blind person be led to say, “Orange probably doesn’t exist.”?

So, you may be asking of me, why do I believe in God?  My answer lies in what the Apostle Paul wrote centuries ago to the Corinthians,

²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”  (1 Cor. 1:21-25)

For me, it seems very reasonable that God, who is beyond our limits, would take hold of our hearts and minds through something that is likewise beyond empirical proof…..love.  Love so great that God would enter into time and space to reveal God’s self to us.  It is said, and I have found it so for myself, that when one is in love, one sees the world in a whole new way.  Likewise, when I discover that I am in God’s love, I likewise envision things anew…I see God’s presence where empirical eyes do not.  I live with hope when empirical eyes do not.  I find reason for peace and joy when empirical eyes do not.

My tradition of Christianity has long taught that “ I believe that I cannot come to my Lord Jesus Christ by my own intellegence or power. But the Holy Spirit called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with her gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith…”.  This teaching rings true to me, thankfully true.

So, giving credit where credit is due…..those who seek to discover God through human wisdom will probably always conclude that “probably there is no God”, but I have come to see that God’s deepest desire is for me to know him and his love for me, and God will go to unbelievably foolish means until I, and you, abide in his love…..have eyes that see with his love…..and believe in him….not just probably….but certainly!

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

The Bungee Cord  1-22-18

Hello,

     This is a common word of “hope” that we hear when things are tough, a word that even sometimes rolls off my lips when I am speaking with folks who are in the midst of troubles and uncertainty.  But when I say these words I know that they only carry moderate and short term hope.  I know this because I know that even the strongest among us will find our strength waning as time progresses and as the weight of the world doesn’t give in.  Actually, when you, like the cat in the poster, are finding yourself hanging on by only a couple of claws, “hang in there” sounds much more like a word of doom than hope.

     “Hang in there!” is not the Christian message.

Jesus Christ hung in there!  That is the Christian message.

The Christian message places no consolation in human strength, rather the Christian message places every hope in the strength of Christ.  Above everything else that Jesus Christ did when he hung in there on the cross was that he engaged every power that would hope to wrest us away from God in a battle to the death….a death from which only he arose.

The Bible tells us that as Jesus Christ hung on the cross, passers-by and soldiers called upon him to come down from the cross and give up the fight.  But Christ did not.  Jesus Christ hung in there.  He hung in there until he could cry with a final and triumphant shout, “It is finished!”  And with his final breath on the cross, so also breathed any voice that would try and separate us from the love of God (Romans 8).  Therein lies the hope that no one wielding human strength and power could give.  Jesus Christ hung in there!

To me, weak human that I am, my hope in life, when things are good and when things are tough, is not in how tightly I hold onto God, but rather how tightly God is holding on to me.  That also, weak human that I am, is my hope on the day that I will be facing death.

So, when I am with folks who are engaged in life, and seek to give them a hope that will last far longer than the strength of their hands, I say, “The Lord be with you.”….not a word of something that I hope will come true, but as a word of something that is true, and I know that it is because “Jesus Christ hung in there!”

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace,(ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger