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Time Capsule in our Backyard!  

Time capsules—we've all seen these eclectic collections stuffed into cornerstones of new buildings in an attempt to give future generations a cultural snapshot of a previous era. 

My wife and I discovered that we actually own a time capsule—our pop-up camper, also known as a tent trailer.  For the uninitiated, it's a metal box with a roof that cranks up, revealing canvas sides and a set of beds on each end.   It's like a tent—only much nicer.

But more than a decade ago, we upgraded to a hard side trailer known as a fifth wheel.  It's nicer yet.  Thus, for nearly fifteen years, the tent trailer has convalesced behind our garage in what used to be our garden—now a retirement property for aging campers.

This weekend, we got it out, cranked it up, and discovered it was exactly how we'd left it.  Yet oddly enough, it appeared to us both like a time capsule of sorts.

Sifting through the contents, we confirmed that sheets and blankets, zipped up in protective plastic cases, were free of mice or insect infiltration.  Unopened packages of paper plates, cups, and plastic eating utensils were nicely stacked in one cabinet.  In another, a fire starter—affectionately known in our family as a "clicker"—that still sparked to life with flame.

Yet there were also signs of decay.  The latches that hold down the collapsible roof have grown stiff.   The decals on the sides continue to fade with years of exposure to the sun. And looking underneath, there's the ominous presence of rust. 

Ol' Bessie cleaned up nicely, but she's showing signs of age. Like you—and me.

Which takes me to 2 Corinthians 5:1. "Our bodies are like tents that we live in here on earth. But when these tents are destroyed, we know that God will give each of us a place to live. These homes will not be buildings that someone has made, but they are in heaven and will last forever."

Aren't you glad there's a “forever?”

 
Sin  

Sin.

“Everybody” says “nobody” talks about it anymore.

So I’m about to.

Sin is falling short of God’s perfection, His holy standards.  The Bible teaches that “all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory” (Romans 3:23).   No Christian would argue that “the wages (or results) of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

Most of us are comfortable acknowledging the wrongness of sin, its penalty, and the way out of sin God offers through Christ.  But acknowledging our sin in the nitty gritty of life…that’s a different story.

Forgive me for the list I am about to offer.  It almost certainly contains an item or two you would prefer to “discuss” rather than bluntly label as sin.  But I stand by this list.  It is not comprehensive, but is designed to focus on a few sins with which many of us have grown so comfortable, we rarely see them as sins.

  • It is a sin for a man to deliberately take a second look at a beautiful woman and linger.
  • It is a sin when your employer is paying you to work to be checking out the latest sports scores.
  • It is a sin to respond to the loud noise of a slamming door exclaiming, “Jesus Christ!”
  • It is a sin to make the U-turn I sometimes make early in the morning because traffic is so light…and the odds of a cop watching are so slim.
  • It is a sin to say anything mean about someone else.
  • It is a sin to let the sun set with you still being angry at your friend, your co-worker, your spouse.

Each sin in this list has so much Bible condemning it, the very act of our rationalizing is the evidence that we’ve grown soft on sin.

But God has not.

Our unholy accommodation notwithstanding, sin is still sin.

It’s time to confess.

Time to repent.

 

 
Why Is Loud Considered Cool?  

Why do we like our music so loud?

Go to a concert—whether rock, pop, country or Christian—and your ears are almost melted off by the end of the evening.

Go to most restaurants that are considered “in”….and chances are the music is cranked up so loud that you have to yell to carry on a conversation.

Driving an expensive car is not enough to be truly cool.  What you need is a subwoofer that’ll blow out glass.  LOUDNESS.  That’s what makes you cool.

And the question, again, is why?

Well in the restaurant world, there actually are some answers.  Research shows that with the music amped up, we eat more, drink more, and do it in less time.  So restaurants can ring up more sales in less time.

But that still doesn’t explain our cultural welding of loud and music to become a de facto standard of coolness.

Our love for all things loud has even crept into our churches.   Now don’t get me wrong.  As a brass instrument player, I get loud.  I kind of like loud.   But there’s a problem when loud is ALL we love…and loud is ALL we play.

The Old Testament prophet, Zechariah , urged us, “Be still before the LORD, all mankind, because he has roused himself from his holy dwelling."

Job, in his suffering, prayed, “Teach me, and I will be quiet…”

David was a man who knew all about living loud.  From noisy battlefields, to boisterous parades, to joyous worship music.  Yet he wrote in Psalms 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

It might just be that your personal bent is toward loud music, loud living.  But if we are going to connect with the Living God, at some point, we are going to have turn the volume down. Literally.  Spiritually. Regularly.

 
A Gesture She Never Forgot  

Have you heard the story of Irena Sendler from World War II?

When Hitler took over Irena’s beloved Poland, he set up ghetto camps where Jewish families lived before being crammed into cattle cars and hauled off to concentration camps where most died.

But Irena Sendler’s heart was touched by the plight of the Jewish people, especially their young children. She knocked on Jewish doors in the Warsaw ghetto and, in Sendler's own words, "tried to talk the mothers out of their children."   Irena offered an escape from near certain death, offering to take the little ones to Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes where they would be given non-Jewish aliases.  Imagine the parents’ agony.

The children that were released to Irena’s care now had to be carefully removed from the guarded Ghettos.  Some were stolen out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins.  Babies were sedated to quiet their cries, some of them transported in the bottom of a tool box. Irena carefully wrote down the real names of every child taken—in hopes of reuniting them with family members after the war. The names were placed in jars that she buried in a garden.

Ultimately, Irena was caught and tortured by the Nazis who broke both her feet and legs. In the end, though, she saved nearly 3000 Polish Jews.

What is lesser known is that Irena’s father was a physician many years before World War II, at a time when the deadly disease, typhus, was a major problem in Poland.    Fearful of catching the sickness, many doctors refused to treat patients in a region which happened to have a large number of Jews living there. Not Irena’s father.  He faithfully, courageously treated everyone…and died from Typhus in1917.

In profound thanks, Jewish community leaders approached Irena’s mother with financial assistance for Irena’s education.  It was a gesture that Irena never forgot…and a kindness she returned, trip after dangerous trip into the Jewish Ghetto.

Proverbs 24:11 “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.”

That’s Irena’s story.  What’s yours?

 
Worshipping Niceness?  

Do you and I worship “niceness?

I say...quite possibly.

As Americans, we prefer nice churches in nice neighborhoods with nice seats in nice auditoriums.

Gone the days of squawky P.A. Systems, our churches rumble with the latest and greatest in audio gear.  The sound is...pretty nice.  The job of doing PowerPoint and creating video clips is now the domain of a “Pastor of Visual Arts.”   The stuff on the screen, frankly, looks pretty nice. 

Nothing wrong with any of that.  But niceness—as a frame of reference—can go too far.  It comes to a crash up against an old hymn that’s fallen on hard times:

Man of sorrows, what a name.

For the Son of God who came.

Ruined sinners to reclaim.

Hallelujah!  What a Savior.

Wow!  We love Jesus the nice teacher.  We love Jesus the nice healer, Jesus the nice good-deed-doer. But that name, “Man of sorrows”--lacks any of the niceness we crave.

The language is so blunt, even stark.  “Ruined sinners.”  Not the least bit nice.

We want so badly to believe better of ourselves.

So we labor under false notions of a humanity that somehow has a shred of something worth redeeming.  Something nice. But we don't.  Apart from Christ, there is not so much as a single atom within us that is nice.

Quite the contrary assures Isaiah 64:6: “All our righteousness is like filthy rags!”

Which makes the rest of the song so remarkable:

Guilty, vile and helpless, we

Spotless Lamb of God was He.

Full atonement—can it be?

Hallelujah, What a Savior!

The grand gospel story, of course, is more than the ugliness of sin.  Much more.

But it is far too epic to stoop to mere niceness. 

 

 
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Jon GaugerJon Gauger

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