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DOES GOD REMEMBER? #3
THANK GOD LIFE IS UNFAIR!
Well, friend, it was a year ago today. September 11,
2001. One calendar year has gone by since that tragic day where the horrors
on our television sets gripped us all day and all night. For many, many
survivors, I’m sure, today is a most painful anniversary. Three hundred
sixty-five days ago, their loved one was still alive. Homes were filled;
double beds had two people in them. Children’s toys had owners. Now, here
on nine-eleven-oh-TWO, we live in a different world. So many of our fellow
citizens have hearts still breaking with the loss they endured.
Many times during this past year, I have felt, with a stab of pain, the
great unfairness of life. On that terrible Tuesday morning I watched the
twin towers of the World Trade Center burning and then collapsing, but
in a city 3000 miles away. There was no smoke in my air. There was such
unimaginable devastation in New York, but I didn’t live in New York. Firefighters
were having horrible, wretched days and nights, but I was not a firefighter.
Thousands were trapped, or homeless, or dead . . . but I was still in
a comfortable house in Moorpark, California, with a job, and a family,
and my heart beating and my lungs taking in air. And it felt so unfair.
And then for the next several days I had to watch on TV as desperate wives
and children and husbands and parents held out their pictures for the
camera. “Has anyone seen my dad?” “Has anybody seen my husband? He’s such
a great guy. He loves our kids so much. He’s a terrific father. He plays
‘horsie’ with all the neighborhood kids. Here’s a video clip at our last
Christmas party. I’m three months pregnant.” And sitting there on the
edge of my bed, watching, I would burst into tears over and over. But
my family was fine. I was fine. My wife was fine. My four brothers and
their families and my mom and my dad . . . all fine. So the way the deck
has been stacked, we Melashenkos all have a tremendous amount to be thankful
for.
But when I take my weekly drive, every Sabbath morning, to the House of
God, and I hold in my hands those two small emblems – the cup and the
cracker – I realize something, friend. I remember that the playing field
is actually level after all. Because those two emblems, given to us by
Jesus, remind me that we all have a sin problem. I am a sinner. Everyone
on our Voice of Prophecy staff is a sinner. Everyone in my church is a
sinner. I hate to say it – but you are a sinner. The people out there
tuned to other stations this Wednesday, and watching the September 11
memorial services on television are sinners. And what that means is that
some people died on September 11, 2001, and some people are going to die
on other days, but the wages of sin is death for everybody. All of us.
Every one of us, in a sense, has a hijacker aboard the plane of our lives.
And we are hurtling toward the graveyard. Everybody.
We all experienced some anger in those first terrible days of Ground Zero
because innocent people died. There were three-year-old babies on those
planes. Little Zoe Falkenberg. There were good people in those buildings.
That priest, Mychal Judge, stopped to give someone last rites, and he
died himself. And even Jesus, the most pure and innocent Person to ever
live on this planet, had religious extremists take Him hostage and kill
Him.
So the followers of Jesus have the bread and the blood put before us every
now and then to remind us that because of sin, life is fragile. We’re
all marching toward the cemetery on a level playing field.
But there’s another side to the coin. We take these symbols, the cup and
the cracker, and we pick them up, and we express our confidence in the
Savior they stand for. And the raw reality is that the playing field is
leveled again . . . and we all can be SAVED.
In Luke 22, which Christians often read during their sacred Communion
moments, Jesus tells us explicitly that the bread and wine are His body
and blood, and that both of them are given for us. “This is My body given
for you. This is My blood, which is poured out for you.” We don’t get
eternal life through these symbols, but through Jesus, whom these symbols
represents.
It’s easy to feel like the New York story is real and that THIS story,
this religious saga about a cross and about thorns and bread and wine
and a dark garden called Gethsemane, comes from Fantasyland. Here on this
planet, if it gets on CNN that somebody died for somebody else, then we
believe it. No one on this planet will ever forget about a man named Tom
Burnett. He was on United Airlines flight 93, going from Newark to San
Francisco. His plane was being hijacked, and he got his wife, Deena, on
the phone in San Ramon, near San Francisco. Jeremy Glick called his wife,
Lyzbath, in the Catskills. Mark Bingham called his mom, Alice, in Saratoga,
Northern California. Todd Beamer of New Jersey tried to call his wife,
Lisa, couldn’t get through, and then called a phone supervisor at GTE.
And even a year later we don’t know the full story – only God knows –
but apparently these four men and others decided to rush the hijackers,
resist them. “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll” has grown into its own heroic
true legend, a profile of courage for this new millennium . . . and somehow
that plane, which was destined for Washington, D.C. and a death rendezvous
with thousands, crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania. They gave their
lives to save others — and that story is terrifyingly real. Ask the 9/11
widows this one year later. Ask little Morgan Beamer, who was born four
months later and will only know her daddy through the pictures.
But I want to tell you that the sacrifice found in Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John is just as real as what those men on Flight #93 did. Jesus took
some bomb blasts Himself; He allowed every fiery dart from Satan to be
taken into Himself. And it’s up to us today to think about that, to believe
it, to embrace it, and to live it.
Now that a year of insulation has come between us and the hurts of THAT
9/11, we need to remind ourselves that life is fragile, and that this
epic spiritual battle is real. Not one of us knows when we will come to
the end of our own opportunity to believe in the bread and the wine and
to choose Jesus Christ as our rescuer.
Every now and then we want to hold these symbols in our hands, the bread
and the wine – like flags or little miniature United Airline jets – and
cling to the reality that Someone died for us. Someone once said: “The
world drinks to forget; the Christian drinks to remember.”
Speaking of level playing fields, clear down at the end of the Word of
God, Revelation 22:17, Jesus tells us: Everybody. In the highways and
the byways. Everybody.
“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him
who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes,
let him take the free gift of the water of life.”
So on the one hand, we have absolute fairness here.
The bread and the wine are the great equalizers. These little symbols
actually loom taller than the World Trade Center used to do. Without them
we are all lost sinners. Our lives have been hijacked; every one of us.
But if we embrace the gift these represent, every single one of us can
be saved. We can all lay claim to Calvary.
But of course, when we talk about fairness or unfairness in a cosmic,
spiritual sense, there’s always another side of the coin. I’ve always
liked the cartoon strip from Calvin and Hobbes where little Calvin, who’s
always so picked on, complains to his dad, “How come I have to go to bed
this early? YOU don’t have to go to bed early. This is so unfair!” And
his dad, reading the newspaper, is just totally cool. “The world isn’t
fair, Calvin.” As if that helped anything. And Calvin goes slinking off
to the bathtub, his shoulders dragging in the dust. And he says, “I know.
But why isn’t it ever unfair IN MY FAVOR?”
Well, friend, you and I are on the nice end of that eternal question.
It’s fair that we all have equal access to the bread and the wine. Which
we do. It’s free for me and it’s free for you. And it could be free for
one Mr. Osama bin Laden, should he repent and make that choice. But it’s
unfair that any of us should get it. This bread is the most unfair thing
I know of. Calvary represents the most stacked deck, the most biased jury,
the most unlevel playing field, the greatest travesty of justice the universe
has ever seen . . . and friend, IT IS ALL IN OUR FAVOR. Don’t you ever
forget that.
There’s a marvelous line in my Adventist Church from the classic volume
about Jesus, entitled The Desire of Ages. Here it is:
“Christ was treated as we deserve, that we might
be treated as He deserves. He was condemned for our sins, in which He
had no share, that we might be justified by His righteousness, in which
we had no share. He suffered the death which was ours, that we might receive
the life which was His. ‘With His stripes we are healed.’”
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