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DOES GOD REMEMBER? #2
HALF-EMPTY CHURCHES — AGAIN
Exactly one year ago today it was a beautiful Monday.
TV networks were running their soaps and sports. People were making money.
Those two great towers defining the New York City skyline were filled
with carefree employees enjoying their prestigious address. And all across
America, many churches were half-empty. We were just too comfortable and
things were going too well.
Twenty-four hours later, it was a completely different world. The World
Trade Center — gone. Part of the Pentagon — gone. Several thousand of
our closest friends — gone. Our innocence — gone. And one thing more was
gone: our careless, casual keeping of God on a dust-covered shelf. Right
after September 11, churches were packed. People were praying. Dust-covered
Bibles were being read. Teenagers who used to just glide past the high
school flagpole now stopped to pray. Even just a couple of months ago,
we as a nation stoutly announced to a Mr. Michael Newbew and the U.S.
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that we WANTED to be one nation under God,
thank you very much.
You would think that most of the world would at last look up at heaven
and say to God: “All right! We see that sin is evil and righteousness
is good. We understand now that Lucifer’s plan is deadly and Yours is
Life eternal, Life abundant. At last we comprehend that the wages of sin
are death, that violence breeds violence, that for mankind to go its own
way is a slow suicide. So God, at long last, why don’t You COME! And rescue
us all! Because after these past 6000 years, at last WE GET IT!”
This is the unspoken anguish behind the Christian’s “Maranatha” prayer.
God, we GET it!! We’re slow and spiritually stupid, but not THAT stupid.
After the Holocaust and then Rwanda and then Kosovo and the impeachment
mess and babies born with AIDS and now this — Pearl Harbor II — it’s painfully
clear, agonizingly clear, that Satan’s agenda for this world is nothing
but mass suicide.
And as the world watched this unfolding drama, “America At War,” it appeared
for a brief spiritual time that we might be slowly learning. Churches
filled up. People stood together in their grief. They reached out for
some shred of faith, some assurance that death is not the end, that these
funerals are not the final chapter.
And yet we have to ask this red-faced question today – 364 days after
the tragedy struck our lives: what happened? The churches are right back
to where they were. Our reading habits have reverted to what they were
before; our prayer lives have drifted down, just like our stock market,
to their pre-9/11 levels. Once again, our religious experience has become
like the mantra on our coins. “In God We Trust” — but it’s stamped by
someone else on bits of paper we keep in our back pocket. In fact, some
surveys indicate that America has reached a new spiritual low: poll numbers
regarding belief in absolute moral truths, in right and wrong, have skidded
to well below where they were before Osama bin Laden unleashed his four
guided bombs.
So friend, that’s the question you and I need to ask ourselves right now:
why do we take so long to learn THE one lesson? Why does the human race
blindly lurch from one crisis to the next one, packing the churches for
a few days or weeks, and then lapsing back into the comfortable life of
before, as soon as the airports once again permit curbside check-in? This
unspeakable tragedy hit . . . and so everyone went to church. With buildings
imploding, and several thousand people simply vaporizing into nothingness,
and with a trillion dollars vanishing out of the Dow Jones near-collapse,
this planet reached out to God on September 11, 2001. But what about on
September 10? The weekend before, as churches opened their doors, many
people were at the beach, or in their backyards, or still in bed. Was
it clear to everyone the weekend before the hijackings that to live in
relationship with God is the best way, the only way? Is it clear to us
NOW, 364 days later? Are we in God’s house weekly NOW? On our knees daily
NOW? Immersing ourselves in His blueprint NOW? Or do we only understand
the goodness of God when the immediacy of this world’s evilness is thrust
into our living rooms on CNN? Does the devil have to shoot right at us,
and keep shooting, before we turn our eyes to heaven and keep them there?
And really, perhaps this is what God is waiting for. Even after New York
City and Auschwitz and Bosnia and Littleton, Colorado, so few people still
seek an abiding relationship with God all the time, not just during a
crisis.
For years preachers have kind of joked about, and also lamented, what
they call “C & E Christians.” People who show up at church just for
Christmas and Easter. They don’t want a daily relationship with God; they
just want to say hello — and goodbye — during the two major “church holidays.”
And now maybe we have “T & S Christianity,” which gets people to church
only following terrorist attacks and shootings. We only enter the house
of our invisible heavenly Father when our hearts are aching from a firefighter’s
funeral. But when the hurts fade, we return to our own lives.
In his book, Disappointment With God, Philip Yancey writes about how the
children of Israel had what we so often seem to demand. God showed Himself
to them! He was real! He was right there! He gave them all the signs and
wonders. They heard His voice booming from the mountaintops. They saw
His manna every morning; they drank from the rock where He provided miracle
water. And yet, they really looked His direction only when they were hungry.
Or when the water ran out. Or when the locusts or the Philistines swooped
down on them. They were agonizingly immature in their faith. So few of
them seemed to want God all the time. Unless there was a shooting or a
tragedy or a falling skyscraper, they went their own way. The relationship
was unendingly shallow, marked just by the little moments of crisis connection.
Tomorrow, as networks air anniversary specials and we see images of prayer,
let’s stop to look inside our souls. These 364 days later, have we learned
that a walk with God needs to be a 365-day-a-year thing, not a crisis-and-catastrophe
thing? Will we not only seek God during bad times, but also during the
good times and the neutral times and the midnight times and the noontimes?
Now that our tears are dry and we’re going to Disney World again, will
we learn that to seek God ALL the time is the only way to lasting wholeness?
In the book of Revelation we find page after page of blood-soaked sorrow.
Earthquakes and famines and death. The seven last plagues, a great tribulation
— and the scarred landscape of New York City is just a foreshadowing of
what might be yet to come. But through it all, we read in chapter 14,
there is a group. Things are bad, but they don’t seek God just when things
are bad. Plagues are raining down, but that’s not the motivation of their
love. No, it says in verse 4: “They follow the Lamb wherever He goes.”
Pastor Morris Venden has a sermon where we all attend, in our imaginations,
that Judgment Day gathering when the “Sheep and the Goats” face their
moment of destiny. And someone outside the kingdom stands up in protest.
“God, You let me get cancer! Nobody ever offered me a break! I wanted
to get well, but no, I didn’t get any help. This is unfair!”
But very quietly, without fanfare, a person inside the New Jerusalem steps
forward and tells a similar story. They had cancer too. The battle was
fierce for them as well. And despite their prayers, God allowed them to
face this unseen foe right to the end. They, too, died after a long battle.
And the rebel’s charge that God is unfair dies away.
Others might protest from the alien camp that their kids were killed in
tragic car crashes. Or in a schoolyard shooting. Or that their husband
needlessly died while faithfully doing his job at the Pentagon. Where
was God? Why didn’t He rescue them? Was heaven picking on them just because
they weren’t born-again Christians who went to church 52 times a year?
And the accusation stands thick in the air.
But again, one of God’s loyal followers stands up. Maybe it’s the Tomlin
family. They went with their son John to Mexico for a mission trip in
1998; they worked side by side with him to build a house for poor people
there. Certainly on Tuesday morning, April 20, 1999, that God-fearing
family knelt at the kitchen table and committed their lives to Jesus.
They placed their destinies in God’s hands, as I’m sure they do every
single day of the year. Just a few hours later, this handsome 16-year-old
Christian was a fallen corpse in the hallways of Columbine High School.
Rachel Scott was dead. Born-again Christian Cassie Bernall, who had been
rescued from an occult lifestyle just two years earlier, was dead. And
the parents of these precious kids stand up to tell their stories. Their
loved ones died too. So many surviving family members will stand up and
testify with great courage that they continue to trust in God. That they
believe in God, even when they can’t understand His purposes.
They follow the Lamb ALL THE TIME, wherever He goes — in the valley of
the shadow of death, and also in the green pastures of sunshine.
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