Holy Something

Eagle Church of the Nazarene

The English language does not have a word that is the opposite of gratitude.  Oh there are words like thankless and ingrate but these have as their root word the very thing we’re trying to deny. Imagine how ungainly our language would be if we had to describe all opposites this way.  Say we had to use unfriend instead of enemy and delove instead of hate or non-aromatic instead of stinking. There’s just no venom in:

“I delove my nonaromatic unfriends!”

I don’t think this is a gap in the English language.  I think it tells us that being ungrateful is not a thing in and of itself but is merely the lack of something.  Just as darkness is not a thing but is the absence of light. No matter how dark the cave the tiniest candle flame defeats it.

A friend and I once took flashlights and explored an abandoned mine shaft in the steep mountains west of Ketchum. We hiked a quarter mile into the mountain and upon reaching the end of the shaft we turned out our flashlights.  Being a city boy I had never experienced such absolute darkness so that even my hand waved in front of my face was invisible.  My mind however was having none of this nothingness.  Colors, blobs, streaks, and flashes of “light” filled my eyes as we stood daring each other to keep our lights off a little longer.

While a floodlight and a glowing ember put out vastly different levels of light both make the nothingness of darkness go away.  I assert that in the same way, flowers with cards and a simple “thanks” both dispel the nothingness that is ingratitude.

This may sound like an excuse to do the bare minimum.  Lazy husbands like me around the world would do happy back flips over this news. My point though is to understand what it means to lack gratitude.  It means you are nothing.

Just because that little candle flame erases darkness hasn’t stopped mankind from developing better and brighter ways to do that. While they say “a little thanks goes a long way” our human desire for perfection– that longing for the lost Eden– should drive us to seek greater and brighter means of saying THANK YOU.

What would praise and worship be without gratitude?  Nothing.  At the very core of our trembling approaches to God is a thankful heart.  We extol our great and infinite God but mixed in with that is the amazed thanks that He has anything to do with little ol’ us at all.  We seek to imitate His goodness and perfection yet we can only be grateful for his mercy and forgiveness at our failures. We need His holiness to power our lives but can only be thankful that He stoops to share it with us at all.

I attended a Nazarene church yesterday which is a denomination that was spawned in the 19th century American Holiness Movement.  This movement came out of a desire among Methodists to recapture the evangelical emotion and spirit of the tent revival meetings that helped grow their church in the first place.  They also sought to reemphasize John Wesley’s teachings on Christian perfection.

Now by “perfection” Wesley did not mean “sinless” rather he meant the state of choosing not to sin. It is not a permanent thing because we are subject to temptation.  The Holiness Movement replaced the word “perfection” with “holiness” and said this “second work of grace” after salvation cleansed us of the tendency to sin.  The Holy Spirit makes it possible to be constantly obedient.  They called it Entire Sanctification and said the saved soul was no longer under the influence of original sin and could lead a holy life without willful sin.

This movement was not popular with the Methodist leadership and so new denominations were born, one of which is the Church of the Nazarene.

The tendency at this point, if you’re from a different faith tradition, is to try to shoot this idea full of holes.  We can call it a works theology or accuse them of legalism or whip out the names of this or that heresy; but if you listen to what they actually say, as opposed to how their unfriends characterize them, we see they are trying to describe the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

If you read the Nazarene website you see that they don’t say anything like: you will know you are saved if you don’t sin. Instead they are very careful to distinguish between this holy perfection worked in us by God as a gift and the up and down lifetime maturing process that is the real experience of most Christians.  What we do to become holy is a response to something God has first done in us.  Which brings us back to thankfulness because it is a response too.

If we look at holiness as an expression of thanks we see it is not a means to an end but is the end God has granted us through Jesus Christ. Holiness is how we participate in the Kingdom of God that is right now. It is not a life of nothingness but a Christian expression of the something called gratitude.

The rousing sermon yesterday was on gratitude and was based on the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:1-42. We were told one response to this story should be gratitude for the promise Christ makes to us when we come to Him: that we will never thirst, our souls will be fed, and our hearts filled. Another response is thankfulness that the Father is actively seeking people to save so like Jesus we should break through the prejudices of our day and associate ourselves with anybody who needs to hear of His saving grace. And finally we should respond with thanks that the Holy Spirit has given us a new purpose: to share the good news of Jesus Christ with the world.  It is amazing that God has given each of us a share in the business of His Kingdom.

What the Nazarene’s say is common to all Christianity really; holiness is not a negative thing: not sinning, but a positive thing: loving God and our neighbors. Holiness is a response to something God has done for us; holiness is an expression of gratitude.

Now that the Thanksgiving holiday is over we can stop talking about gratitude for another year. What a relief.  Or rather, what a year of nothingness that would be, like all those empty pie pans. I delove it when the pie is all gone.

May our lives be filled to overflowing with holy gratitude.

Priceless Words

Eagle United Methodist Church

At a library book sale many years ago I purchased a weighty two volume Websters dictionary set for less than $5 and being giddy with the deal I inflicted a witticism on the cashier.  I looked at her in all seriousness and said,

“I just purchased every book that’s ever been written in English.”

She did not smile nor frown nor ask questions nor argue nor scoff, in fact she barely looked at me which made me wonder if she was even listening so I spoke louder.

“You see, all the words are in the dictionary; it’s just a matter of getting them arranged in the right order and, presto, you have Shakespeare or Spillane or…”

I laughed to show her what was expected but she was unmoved.  I felt like Moses standing before the Pharaoh, Paul among the Greeks, the Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.  I tried again on my wife with the same result.  It seems only I was amused by this neat little arrangement of words.

WORDS… they are the currency of human life.  We dole them out in generous stacks of advice, education, and bad jokes.  We use them to purchase love, agreement, and dominance. We greedily receive them as compliments, attention, and entertainment.  WORDS… without them ideas can’t exist, stories can’t be told, and we could not know God.  The Bible calls Christ “the Word” and we His followers have been referred to as the “People of the Book.

John Wesley is the 18th century Anglican minister who, along with his brother Charles and friend George Whitefield, founded the movement called Methodism.  He was led on this journey by words.

I don’t have time to read whole biographies or in depth theology as I visit different churches week by week; I’m a tourist not a speed reading genius. I admit I am getting only a peek under the vestments you might say; so it came as a surprise to me that in what little I did learn about John Wesley that the two authors mentioned as having an influence on him were men who’s words have had an influence on me also.

Thomas A Kempis was a 14th century monk who wrote “The Imitation of Christ” from which I took the following quote and wrote it large in my notebook years ago as I struggled with the idea of predestination:

“… if you rely on your own reasoning and ability rather than on the virtue of submission to Jesus Christ, you will but seldom and slowly attain wisdom.”

William Law, a contemporary of Wesley, was an Anglican mystic who wrote “A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”.  He egged me on to experiment with “praying the hours” which consists of praying on certain subjects every three hours from 6 am to 6 pm. The times I have practiced this devotion have been an eye opening blessing. So why has my lazy bone let it slip away?  Law has words for me, goads I should heed:

“… how odious we must appear in the sight of Heaven if we are in bed shut up in sleep and darkness, when we should be praising God…”

The words of these writers changed Wesley’s life.  While at Oxford university he and his friends met to study the Bible and learn how to live a godly life in a methodical way.  Of course they were made fun of and the name “Methodist” was attached to them in derision.  He went to America to preach to the indians and experienced some difficulty with a girl’s family and went back to England feeling like he had no faith.  It was the words of Martin Luther read in church one night that reached to his heart.  As Luther was talking about faith and…

“… while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Words that let the Holy Spirit in, words that changed his life, words that pushed him to seek renewal in the Church of England and revival in the souls of all me met.  Note that Wesley never wanted to form a new church, he sought reform and revival only and it wasn’t until after his death that the separation that created the Methodist Church accelerated.

He opposed Calvinism and preached free will instead, saying God has granted us the freedom to resist His will. Like all Protestants he held that it was by faith alone that the guilt and penalty of sin is taken away and we are declared right before God through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross but he emphasized that faith should produce an inward and outward holiness in saved believers.  Wesley called this “scriptural holiness” it is the work of the Holy Spirit to change us and bring us back to the righteousness God created us to have. His teachings on holiness inspired the creation of the Nazarene church and Pentecostalism as well.

John Wesley wasn’t just changed by words, he used words to change others.  He preached tens of thousands of sermons in his life in churches and in fields, wherever a crowd gathered. As it turns out one of these sermons was the basis for the sermon I heard on Sunday.  I caught the tail end of a three week series called “Earn. Save. Give.” which tells me either Wesley’s sermons were really long or our attention span is really short.

Being there for the climax of this series when the congregation was called on to respond with their annual giving pledge was a blessing. I saw young and old alike allow words to move them to make a sacrifice out of love.  Wesley’s ideals are still being practiced in the churches he founded.

What words have moved me?

I cannot forget the spine tingling moment I read John 14:23 and realized for the first time that faith wasn’t just words but an offered relationship with the living God. I use the King James because that’s how I read it that first time so long ago when Jesus said:

“If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

Abode!  Now that’s a word.

Then there is C.S. Lewis whose “Mere Christianity” prepared me for the mess that is the local church by stressing that we shouldn’t expect Christians to be “nice” and church to be full of good people. The world is too complicated for such a simplistic expectation and Christians are individuals all on different stages of the faith journey.  Then Lewis’s devil character, Screwtape, jolted me off my duff and into the pews by comparing us moderns with people of bygone days who:

“… still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.”

Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose “The Cost of Discipleship” opened my eyes to the notion of “cheap grace” and scraped away the childish notion that to be a Protestant meant I was saved just because I said I believe.

“… faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.”

I read Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Story Mountain” whose journey to faith was a radical one and inspired me to focus not on what the world calls good but on God’s good. He exposed the seductive worldly call to niceness as opposed to something else much bigger when he described the good life his parents intended for he and his brother, hoping as so many parents do that they:

“… would have turned into good-mannered and earnest skeptics, polite, intelligent and perhaps even in some sense useful…  The way would have been all smooth and perhaps I would never have ended up a monk.”

A monk?  Now there’s a word!

I’ve been altered by the words of G.K. Chesterton, Phillip Yancey, John Bunyan, St. Therese of Lisieux, Soren Kierkegaard, Mike Yaconelli, Shane Claiborne, Malcolm Muggeridge, Myles Connolly, and on and on and on.

What arrangement of words have strengthened your faith?

What books have deepened your connection to God?

Please share!