Crusaders –
On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Along the lines of my last post regarding civility I have been thinking about crusaders, and not just the ones from days of yore. Yes the sins of the crusades of the 11th -13th centuries and beyond have be well documented. We moderns scoff and judge the political intrigue and religious manipulation that resulted in some of the most un-Christian acts ever committed on planet earth. But as they say hind sight is 20/20. As one who fancies himself a bit of a historian I have found that it is easy to sit centuries removed and cast judgement on those who lived long ago. Our modern lenses the way we see things. Our lenses sharpen and even hyper focus on certain events, because they are important for us now and other events are less in focus because, well we just don’t think they are as important. So our idea of justice is skewed, our idea of what was important may not be what was important way back when.
Ok… I do have a point some place here…. oh, I think this might be it… Crusaders are not dead. They are alive and well today, and I am not talking about your local Roman Catholic high school team.
Crusaders dwell among us today, and while they no longer ride stallions, nor wear suits of armor, they are all around us and how they go about their quests has changed very little, at least in reputation, over the years.
In our modern debates about just about anything the crusading ones emerge very quickly on their high horses, covered in armor of righteous indignation. These crusaders can take on many forms, some maybe folks from some conservative church someplace in the middle of no place protesting on street corners or at military funerals, hurling invectives and nasty slurs to point to the holiness of their cause and how God is on their side. Ok, that one was easy and pretty obvious, but try having a conversation about what the bible says about our relationships, and you will find people mounting their modern high horses on both sides of the issue pretty darn quickly. No Pope could rouse a legion of crusaders more quickly than any of todays “hot button topics.”
I call these modern folks crusaders because they display many of the same traits. Roland Bainton a reformation scholar pointed out four characteristics of a crusader.
1) the cause is holy
2) the crusaders are godly, the enemy is ungodly
3) God fights for the crusaders and against their opponents
4) the war is prosecuted unsparingly. Take no prisoners.
I believe they are true now as they were for the first crusaders.
Like those crusaders of the past today’s crusaders are no less impassioned, their energy is fueled by a pious fury that holds no quarterfor people with who feel differently for whatever reason. There are folk on both sides of most modern issues that fit this profile, but the ones the baffle me the most are those who are intolerant of intolerance. In this light it seems that when you are a crusader, you have no time for mercy, you leave no room for forgiveness to be requested nor granted, and grace belongs only to you and those who march under your banner.
Much like those early crusaders it isn’t as if there is not some element of “justness” to their cause, there almost always is, but often the cause becomes the end all be all. In such a cause there is no room to grow, no room to see the other side of an issue, no room to see what God may be up to in all of this, because when you are “right”, it becomes your god.
That being said, there are places, and I think I have been fortunate enough to be in one of them where people for the most part are able to climb down off of their high horses and walk together knowing that there will be differences and that God is not done teaching, guiding and blessing us yet. In this space, we may differ on many topics, some of them may even have eternal ramifications but in the grace and mercy of God we can talk, we can learn, we can grow our relationships as children of God and in that relationship we can trust in His salvation and not our own self-righteousness.
Buzzie and flaps are talk’n theology.
Conflict of Interest
One of the great perks of being a parent is that you get to watch children’s’ movies, with no social judgment. Not only do you get to watch the current ones, you get to re-watch the ones you might have seen when you were a kid. I know I watched “The Jungle Book” when I was a kid, most likely on “The Wonderful World of Disney” as I have no idea where the closest movie theater might have been. Anyway… I don’t remember it being particularly funny as a kid, but there are lines in that movie that as an adult, I find a riot! One of those lines is a dialog between the buzzards as they hang out on branch. It
goes like this:
Buzzie: Hey, Flaps, So what are we gonna do?
Flaps: I dunno. What’cha wanna do?
And on and on it goes… It is perhaps only funny, because; as an adult I can’t think of the times when there wasn’t anything on our schedule and my wife has turned and said to me “So David, what’cha wanna do? And I say I dunno. What’cha wanna do? And on and on it would go!
Today we continued the look at the “your will be done” phrase in the Lord’s Prayer. I have found often that it isn’t that we don’t know what God’s will is, it is just usually, we have other ideas. These ideas are not on the surface evil, or even bad, but they are not always God’s will. I mean, how many times have you turned to God in prayer and said, “What’cha wanna do?” Well…
Technically every time we say the Lord’s Prayer that is what we are doing, but do we really mean the words we are saying? Our devotions say we should take a look at Paul’s words in Philippians 2:4-7.
Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was* in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
If God’s will is that we empty ourselves and serve others, to have the same mind as Christ Jesus we may hit re-dial and ask “um… are you sure that’s what you want us to do?” In this world of “look out for Number 1,” and “you deserve a break today,” we are called to care for the other. Every Christian, from the smallest to the tallest, pastors, plumbers, homemakers, the whole lot of us are all in this together.
It seems like a pretty big conflict of interest. Our will vs. God’s will. God’s will seems to be a pretty big challenge, it can seem so much easier to go with our own will and hope that God doesn’t mind too much. But Jesus doesn’t teach us to pray “your will be done, if it isn’t too much of a bother for me.”
The good news is that six verses later Paul writes “It is God, who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure”
Wow! God is at work in us! That is news we all need to hear. We are not doing this on our own, it is not just a human thing, it is a God thing, and that is why we can pray with confidence “your will be done.”
Spiderman and the will of God
I have been slaving away on my sermon for this weekend. Ok, slaving away is an exaggeration, as my daughter said; “and watching Spiderman 3 helped you write your sermon?” The kid has learned well from her parents 
Our devotions today continued to focus on the will of God particularly focused on the loving kindness part. It seems so simple, but I was reminded after watching Spiderman 3 (gotcha!) how often can we look into the face of ugliness of the world; hate, fear, violence, revenge, hunger, injustice, and pain and not curl in on ourselves in self protection? Loving kindness demands vulnerability, it calls for us to step out into this world to do God’s will not necessarily our will. We do ask in this prayer that God’s will becomes ours even as he strengthens us by his life giving spirit each day.
In doing my prep work for the sermon I came upon this next piece. It didn’t really fit the particular direction I was going but it is too good not to use someplace. It was attributed to a Dr. Ted Loder, from his book, GUERRILLAS OF GRACE. I hope it blesses you.
Love as a way of life
I have 12 weddings this summer, not a ton, but a fair number. At some point when I sit down with each couple during the pre-marriage council sessions I will tell them my philosophy on love. That is quite simply, love is not simply an emotion, or a feeling, at its core love is a way of life, love takes effort, love is the hardest work you will ever do and it is worth it!
It’s not that I don’t go in for romance, but we don’t need to go there today. But think about love even in a romantic context. It still takes work. Someone has to prepare a lovely evening on the town; clear the schedule, make the phone call to reserve a spot at the restaurant, by the tickets for the play, call the baby sitter, and the list goes on… even romance is hard work my friends!
In the book of faith Lenten Journey devotions today we continue looking at what life in the kingdom is like. Love is the norm, our devotions say that “the rule of God is the rule of love.” They go on to talk about the scribe who asks what the greatest commandment is and Jesus responds first love God and second to love your neighbor as yourself. The scribe is then gets just bubbly about how great Jesus is… and Jesus replies you are not far from the kingdom of God. (Mark 12:28-34)
I really like what comes next so I will put it here verbatim. “Not far? Why not in? Perhaps because Jesus saw a difference between knowing the right answers and living the right answers. The distance between “not far” and “in” is the distance between talking about love and loving.”
That distance can be huge for us. Loving as a way of life is hard work. As I read these devotions to day a photo I saw on the net someplace came to mind and through the power of Google… I found it.
It reminds me of Paul’s words in Romans 12 “No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ 21Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
To love the co-worker who has stabbed you in the back, to love the family member who over and over and over again has broken your heart is hard work. It is the work of a way of life, it never really ends. Jesus never said life in the kingdom would be easy. In fact he sort of promises the opposite. But as we journey through lent we are reminded that in God loves us so much that he gave his only Son so that we might live in his love.
