Are We Hiding From Reality?

Something seems different this morning. Perhaps related to Sunday; always a time of rest for my wife and I, yet this morning seems a much deeper call.

I find a growing hunger in my heart for more, as I pray and wrestle with "the next", now midway through my 78th year.

Of late, also a sense of breakthrough in my spirit, yet with that a painful requirement to be fully transparent!

That's good news and bad, as not everyone will agree! Yet I'm passed that window of need!

In my reading this a.m., my thoughts carried me again to the obvious reality of the minimal impact of a religion to which I have now given over a half century of my life. This witnessed by our nation's current spiritual condition.

Sure, we have repeatedly offered gatherings on Sunday, churches on almost every major corner across our cities, those attending enjoying a much needed weekly fellowship for sure. With that, varied proclamations of the Word.

Yet, now approacing our nation's 250th year, there seems little evidence beyond our communal emotion, of any depth to our faith that resembles the Early Church.

I recently read these words by Scottsman Edwin Muir, "And the Word made flesh is here made Word again." To me it spoke of a reduction of what the Word in flesh, the Christ in us, was to have become.

Then those thoughts were reinforced as I viewed photos of a church excited about water baptism of its new believers.

Why, John Bost were you not equally excited, one might now ask?

To paraphrase John, the Baptist , "I baptize you with water, but there comes One after me that will baptize you with fire!"

I have to wonder if those walking out of the baptismal pool, would later be offered some future "fire", beyond mere church membership and volunteer assignments, perhaps an Easter egg hunt!

Embarrassed to write these words, as we've done such at our home now for over 30 years. and preparing for another egg hunt next Sunday, after church.

It's become a tradition, family and friends gather for a potluck meal, after which the kids with baskets in hand, hunt for candy filled eggs, the occasional with a small amount of money inside.

It's for the kids; some now adults, who return each year, themselves now hiding the eggs for the next generation. I get that, yet there's more to the Gospel than Easter eggs!

Meanwhile our "Christian nation" is spending over one billion per day bombing another nation to which missionaries have prior been sent. Many of those missionaries likely knowing only John's baptism, their message a mere presentation of the text of the Word, though occasionally we do receive testimony of the miraculous.

I know how this must be sounding, my apolgies!

This hurts even more deeply as I hear Christians' excitement over the possibilities of "religion" being more deeply invited back to our nation this comapologies!

Christian nationalism could offer a frightening moment, if carried to its full potential given our current display of partisan hatred.

Maybe that's all there is! Or perhaps, because we have settled for that, given that all we have to offer is a promise of freedom some day, but for now weapons of war our only gift!

I'll quote once more, Wilber Ree's "Three Dollars Worth of God":

“I would like to buy $3 worth of God please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 dollars worth of God please.”