Soggy Days

My life behind the levee is all about water.

The rain gauge overflowed this morning for the second time in four days meaning that I have received at least 18 inches of rain at my house in the last eight days. More is on the way. I am catching tiny rivulets in pans in front of the fireplace and have been in the attic and on the roof searching for the leak.

My brother, Jonathan Paul, was born on this day 51 years ago. That also was a blue day for me. I already had three brothers, and I wanted a sister really badly. They tell me I was inconsolable when the sad news came, so they named the little boy “Jonathan” because he was the best friend of David.

I felt a little better, but it greatly distressed my older brother, Timothy, the eldest child, who thought that this fifth sibling should be named in reference to him rather than a noisy five-year-old like me. So Jon’s middle name is “Paul” because Paul was the close friend of Timothy.

You make the best of rainy days. And usually in hindsight they are not as disappointing as they seem at first. Jonathan Paul turned out to be useful to Tim and me in a number of ways. He made an interesting target when we got our new pop guns, and he took the girl’s part in our quartet.

Something good will come of all this rain, I am sure. The storm drains in the parking lots at the church were clogged a few days ago, and the lower parking lot turned into a retention pond. But at least it kept a little water out of the cemetery where caskets are at risk of bobbing when the water rises (a casket was stranded on church property after Hurricane Katrina).

I am in New Orleans, thankfully, where every drop of water that falls inside the levee system is channeled to giant pumps that spew it into the lake. I watched a flooded street once turn into a river running toward the drains, and then two creeks on either side of the street’s crest, and then small streams. You could almost hear the giant sucking sound as every drop disappeared into the storm sewers. It took all of 15 minutes to go from an eight-inch-deep lake to moist asphalt curb to curb.

The water was waist-deep in the baptistery Sunday as I baptized a Jordanian man who placed his faith in Christ as a teenager but waited to be baptized until both his father and mother trusted Christ as well.

Salem grew up in the desert where 18 inches of rain falls over a two-year period. John the Baptist walked into the Jordan River to baptize because half of the fresh water in that part of the world is in that one, not-too-wide, river. Galilee is the water pipeline for the rest of Israel.

I have stood in ancient baptismal pools along the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. The rabbis devised complex systems for capturing rain water and transporting water from nearby wells and streams.

Herod the Great actually built swimming pools at the impregnable mountain fortress of Masada. The water to fill these large pools was carried by slaves and beasts of burden up the precipitous cliffs along hazardous trails. The radical Hebrew sect that later occupied Masada had sufficient water in hand for a thousand people to endure a two-year siege by the Romans.

Baptists immerse new followers of Jesus in pools of water just as John the Baptist did. God’s abundant supply of all good things is strikingly illustrated in this powerful ritual that began in such a parched part of the world.

My father laments that Central Texas always needs rain. The further west, the more pronounced the need.

My yard in New Orleans is green today, and the roses and hibiscus are blooming. Soggy days are now and always have been God’s promise of blossoms and buds to follow.

Commercializing Christmas

My brothers and I were some of the original people to commercialize Christmas. Dad was trying to make ends meet one year, and he decided to sell Christmas candy in the suburbs of El Paso. I was about twelve, I think, and Tim was fourteen, Tom was eleven, Danny was nine, and Jon was almost eight. Our younger siblings waited in the station wagon.

I remember those colorful tin cans we carried from house to house. They had pictures on the outside of the candy on the inside. It was the hard candy that is good to suck but terrible to chew - sticks in your teeth and you have to rub it out with your tongue! I never could resist chewing that candy. It just melted too slow for me.

We thought we were on silver stocking lane in that subdivision. Looking back, I realize it was just an average middle class neighborhood, but I didn't have any idea about socioeconomic classes back then. I figured everybody wore hand me downs and took their lunches to school in grocery sacks.

The people in those houses were very nice to us. I suppose I would have been the same way, it being Christmas and us being young boys trying to make some money for a "needy family." That's what we told them if they asked we were raising money for a needy family. I think some of them guessed that the needy family was us!
So that's how we did our part to commercialize Christmas when I was a boy. I didn't know then that we could count the shopping days until Christmas. It would have helped us sell more candy. It's hard to communicate a sense of urgency about buying candy unless you have some kind of deadline to do it in.

Have a great holiday season, and don't let the pressure get to you. Remember that the time you spend together as a family is more important than what's in the boxes. Have your family in church for the Christmas concerts and the Christmas Eve Service. Sing the songs loudly enough so you can hear each other. Think about the words: "Silent night, holy night, all is calm."

THE EFFECT OF CARING

Caring for another human being has an effect. The effect is felt both by the giver and the recipient of the care.

Caring is an experience. It originates in heart and soul. It occurs in time and space. It affects and connects giver and recipient—I and thou discovered in the moment of caring.

Caring has power—amazing power. It is healing and transformational. No one in the matrix of care remains unchanged. Caring carries us from the inertia of self-absorption into the energy of dynamic relation.

The greatest feeling in the world is not created by illegal drugs. It is experienced through the power of caring.

You have not lived until you have cared for another person with no thought of a return favor. Literally, this statement is true. Life itself unfolds and multiplies only in the process of giving.

Acts of compassion are generally seen as blessings bestowed upon those in need. And they are.

However, Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35). If we describe the blessing of giving accurately, we will first address the greatest blessing—that bestowed upon the giver. This is the primary and most predictable effect of care.

Caring for a person in need is liberty. It is liberation from the black hole of selfishness. Caring for another person wrenches my mind from the prison of self, from the trap of regrets and doubts, into the mysterious and exhilarating journey of concerned relationship.

Caring for a person in need is therapy. The most common sicknesses in the human heart are guilt, sorrow, anger, and shame. They are products of a fixation upon what used to be or could have been or should have been. This orientation backward robs the present of its potential and frustrates the universal longing for meaningful relationships now. The sick of heart are best advised to become care-givers. Meeting the needs of another person is the best way to your own healing.

Caring for a person in need is hilarity. The Apostle Paul wrote, “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). The Greek word translated “cheerful” is hilaros from which we get the English word hilarious. God loves a hilarious giver—a cheerful, joyful, happy giver.

You will be happier and more satisfied with life. Your family will enjoy better emotional and spiritual health. Your church will experience a new unity and greater sense of purpose and mission. The community around you will acknowledge your caring ways, and a new reputation of love and concern will emerge.

Like eagles that mount the lofty heights, people who express their love through practical deeds of kindness soar above and beyond the doldrums of life. Jesus came to give us abundant life. He modeled this abundance in his own giving ways. And he challenged his followers to imitate the servant spirit exemplified in washing the feet of others. Foot-washing, along with his crucifixion, was his premier example of an abundant life lived according to God’s will.

The Care Effect: More Blessed to Give

I checked the street sign one day to see if it said “Skid Row,” craning my neck up and around. Dad always said that the Rescue Mission in El Paso was on Skid Row, and I thought he meant the street outside the doors of the mission. Maybe Skid Row is the side street, I thought, not the main drag.

My father took my brothers and me with him to Skid Row every other Sunday. He preached to the gathered assortment of street people, hitchhikers, alcoholics, and ladies of the night. We boys sang hymns in four-part harmony.

Dad always closed his message with an invitation for the assembled crowd, weary and hungry. He invited them to trust in Jesus Christ for their salvation. When the flush-faced, inebriated middle-aged man fell upon the railing at the front, kneeling to pour out his soul, one of us boys would kneel down beside him and pray with him.

Dinner followed the worship service. The mission had no money to give my father for his message, but they graciously fed his family. We sat down beside the street people and gratefully ate the fare. Often we departed with exotic leftovers, dates expired, from nearby grocery stores—lobster tails and strange cheeses.

This stretch of my childhood, when my father was only marginally employed, was the time when we were most economically deprived as a family. We returned to El Paso from Minnesota after repossessing a home my father built. We had a place to live on Easy Way near Canutillo, but Dad did not have a church to serve.

So trips to the Rescue Mission became our routine when I was 11 or 12 years old. Dad taught his four oldest children—four stair-step boys—to sing a capella in four-part harmony. We sang, Dad preached, and we prayed with those who responded.

I was introduced to the Care Effect at that Rescue Mission. My own soul warmed in the experience of caring. We helped the clients bring in from the sidewalk their possessions, captured in pasteboard boxes. They wore ill-fitting hand-me-downs. I did, too. I learned to care for these people, as my father did, and the caring transformed a time of hardship into an era of wonder and joy that I have never forgotten.

It marked my soul, those months of ministry at the mission. The effect of those days surfaced over and over again through the subsequent years. The vivid memories linger in my mind and heart to this very day. My understanding of life and my self-understanding were shaped by the activities and experience of caring for the down-and-out.

Dad took us to the orphanage across the border in Juarez, Mexico. We met and played with children abandoned by their parents. I held a toddler whose desperately poor mother rubbed hot peppers in her eyes so that, as a blind infant, she would generate greater sympathy and make begging more productive.

These childhood experiences of ministry to the poor were some of the first laboratories in which I learned the desperation of poverty and the power of caring. But they were not the last.

I have been a pastor for 35 years, and the poor have always been with me, just as Jesus said they would be. I find joy in seeking to lift the downtrodden, comfort the broken-hearted, and care for the dying. I mark the moment when I meet a person in need. The contact point is in and of itself sufficient reason for my involvement regardless of any future outcome. I do not justify my ministry by “results.” I attempt to view the moment of service as complete in itself.

The Care Effect is what happens to me if I am able to give myself fully in the moment of need, engaging the other person with sincere love. The act of caring draws my soul outward and upward—an exercise of the heart. I may feel satisfaction later with the results achieved, or I may be disappointed at the apparent futility of my effort.

Regardless, the pure joy of caring for another, the blessedness of giving, is its own reward.

THE END IS COMING!

Nothing sells books and movies like predicting the end of the world. Janet and I saw a new commercial this week for “2012,” yet another cinematic adventure in this literary genre.
Eschatology is the theological study of last things. Much of the excitement about “Bible prophesy” is not actually about Bible prophesy at all. It is the same excitement that comes with the movie “2012.”
The Bible makes it clear that the Lord Jesus will return one day. It also makes it crystal clear that no one knows when this will happen except the Father in heaven.
Eschatology is not about when or how. It is about who and what. Jesus is the end of all things. That is the who. And God wins. That is the what.
Jesus told us about the end of time so that we would live for him in the here and now. His childish disciples pled with him for dates and charts about the end of time. He refused to succumb to their foolish curiosity. They asked him many times. He gave them this answer: “It is not for you to know” (Acts 1:7).
People, it is not for us to know. The prophets of the Bible were generally forth-telling, not fore-telling. They were speaking the word of God to the leaders and the people. That was their task. When they digressed into fore-telling, predicting future events, they always did so in order to challenge the people of the present to live for God and to abandon their sinful practices. That is the purpose of prophetic utterances—to point the people of God to their true source and their true behavior.
The “when and how” boys are opportunistic and entrepreneurial. They sell millions of books generation after generation despite their mistaken and often fraudulent claims. The sheep keep coming back for more.
All the charts are wrong. None of them actually come from the Bible. They are pieced together by humans who write into them their preconceptions, biases, systems, and errors. The true center and purpose of eschatology is not timelines but ethics—how I live here and now. Get that right and you are ready for end whenever and however it comes.

The suicide rate in New Orleans is almost twice the national average, according to a recent survey (The Times-Picayune A-1, Sept. 22, “Area’s mental health getting worse”). At least 219 New Orleanians have tried to take their lives so far this year. According to health care professionals, our city suffers from a level of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder much higher that pre-Katrina and higher than other parts of the country.

One physician guessed that among Lakeview residents “ninety percent are on anti-depressants.” While I am sure that number is exaggerated, I would agree that suicide rates indicate serious and widespread emotional troubles among our post-Katrina population. This is supported by information from health care professionals working with the city’s school children.

I met with a pastor this week who did not see the article cited above but began the conversation talking about the depression plaguing his people.

We are people of faith. We want to speak the positive, joyful word of hope to our friends and neighbors. We have confidence that God will see us through the rebuilding phase of our terrible disaster.

We also wrestle with doubt, anxiety, and despair despite our strong faith in God. Sometimes we berate ourselves for these emotions, but they are honest feelings that affect us mentally, spiritually, and even physically.

King David struggled with doubt, anxiety and despair. He wrote poems about feeling forsaken, abandoned and alone. He cried out to God in those times with an honest heart.

Honesty is the best policy. God already knows that we are afraid and anxious. He knows when we are down in the dumps. Let’s get honest with God in prayer. Let’s talk honestly with other believers about our struggles. Let’s pray for those we know who are fighting depression. And let’s NOT condemn one another or ourselves for lack of faith in the face of these feelings.

David gave his troubles to God, and so must we. David knew how to repent of sin, and so must we. David eventually climbed out of the pit of despair, and so will we.

What 9-11 Means to Me

What 9-11 Means to Me
By David E. Crosby, Pastor
First Baptist New Orleans
September 11, 2009

Three months after the disaster we stood in line for hours to view the wreckage of the Twin Towers. A CNN crew happened to be on site, and my wife and I were interviewed about why we came and what we hoped to learn. That 60-second clip of our comments was aired repeatedly around the world for several days.

Thousands of people died that day as a result of misguided religious zealotry. I felt a need to stand at the site of their deaths to cry out to God and to express in some small way my sorrow for their loss and my solidarity with friends and family members who were grieving.

The Apostle Paul commented on his own murderous religious bent by highlighting it as an illustration of zeal: “as for zeal, persecuting the church” (Philippians 3:6). Later he conceded that his own detractors “are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge” (Romans 10:2).

Zeal is often not based on knowledge but on fear, insecurity, ignorance, flawed cultural and traditional norms, and twisted interpretations of the sacred texts.

9-11 is but one horrific illustration of how religion gets sick. The sickness of 9-11 is not the zeal but the murder. The wholesale slaughter of noncombatants in any war is forbidden by the individual conscience as well as the world religious systems. Hundreds of people from around the world became that day eight years ago, not collateral damage, but targets for destruction.

Any religious thinking which approves and encourages such tactics and behavior is a blight on the planet. We simply cannot continue the awful legacy of settling religious disputes and advancing religious causes through violence.

You may argue that 9-11 is not an illustration of “religious disputes.” I would agree. It is not simply religious disputation that precipitated this disaster. But in the minds of many Muslims as well as Christians, we are waging Holy War in Iraq and Afghanistan and the many other places where Christians and Muslims are perpetrating violence upon each other. Nineteen suicide bombers died on 9-11, and they would declare with one voice that they did this in the name of Allah.

Protection of people and property requires the bearing of arms. That is a sad truth. The power of the sword is given to the mayor, the governor, the president—our elected and legitimate governmental authorities. They wield that sword because evil people must be restrained. They should always take up the sword with a great sense of the final judgment when they will give their account unto God.

Individuals may at times take up arms to protect their person and property with a response proportionate to the threat.

But our faith in Christ does not call us to take up arms to advance Christianity or fight other religions. Our faith demands that we lay the weapons down. The sword—any weapon—is too weak to accomplish what Christ intends to do--changing the hearts of people. That cannot be accomplished by coercion, only persuasion.

So the followers of Jesus do as Christ did. We wield the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. We fight our battles with love and good deeds, with faith and self-sacrifice. At our best, we refuse to use the power of government to advance our religion. We know that such advancement is illusory, that by using government to advance Christianity we are polluting both the true nature of the church and the true purpose of the government.

9-11 is a day when I remember the limitations of weaponry. I give thanks for a Savior who willingly put up the swords and then laid down his life. By such wisdom, faith, and sacrifice, Jesus demonstrated the true nature of faith in God, paid the debt for all our misguided zeal, liberated us from the grip of darkness and destruction, and changed the course of human history.

Now it is our turn to change the apparent course of human history: to insist that government limit its scope to the temporal concerns of humanity, to insist that our faith in Christ (and other faiths as well) cannot and should not be advanced by coercive means, to demonstrate our faith through love and self-sacrifice, and to lay down our lives that others may know the Savior who alone can rescue the wayward heart.

Storms

You cannot fight the fierce gale. All you can do in a whirlwind is seek shelter. The farmers and ranchers in the wide open spaces from Texas north to Nebraska dug storm shelters near their homes like the one you see in “The Wizard of Oz.” When they saw or heard a “twister,” the family piled into the manmade cave and closed the door until the howling wind subsided.

Storms are a part of life wherever you reside. They come upon us suddenly, topple our favorite trees, and damage our homes and businesses.

I grew up listening to a popular gospel tune, “When the Storm Passes By,” published in 1958 by Mosie Lister. The last part of the chorus, sung in four-part harmony by some then-renowned quartet, went around and around in my head: “Hold me fast, let me stand, in the hollow of Thy hand. Keep me safe till the storm passes by.” The voices stopped suddenly on “safe,” just for a second, and then came back to finish the line.

Some things are just gone after the storm. We cannot find them let alone repair them.
Whirlwinds are terrible, but they make good parables. Proverbs 10:25 says, “When the storm (“whirlwind” in KJV) has swept by, the wicked are gone, but the righteous stand firm forever.”

Warren No Hate-Monger

December 30, 2008

President-elect Obama has not betrayed his faithful constituents by selecting Pastor Rick Warren to offer the prayer at his inauguration—he has affirmed them. This would include both my yellow-dog Democrat activist sister-in-law and most of my African-American preacher friends here in New Orleans.

Warren has directed thousands of dollars to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the years since Hurricane Katrina. His work among those afflicted with HIV is well known. These are only two of his many efforts to alleviate suffering in the world.

Warren’s evident concern for the physical suffering of people, together with his purpose-driven approach to Christian spirituality, has earned him the respect of millions of people from all religious and political affiliations, including President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama’s decision to ask Warren to offer the prayer at his inauguration indicates the breadth of Obama’s vision and the depth of his perception of American life and culture.

Protests about this choice by the new president issue, not so much from Warren’s sermons, which are characterized by love, as from a deep-seated bias against religious truth in general and traditional Christianity in particular.

Warren is convinced that the claims of Christianity are true. Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God and the Savior of the world. He seeks to persuade others to follow Jesus as Lord.

Really believing in Jesus as the Savior is Warren’s chief religious conviction and, for his detractors, his fundamental offense. It is no longer politically correct to believe any exclusive religious claims. Faith itself must be seen as guesswork in our brave new world, not something you get worked up about. In the new thinking, “intolerance” is defined as believing anything to the exclusion of anything else.

Religious faith itself is the culprit in this new thinking, and Rick Warren—and the rest of us who believe the exclusive claims of Jesus--are jihadists.

Those who protest Warren’s selection think they have identified the Enemy, but they’ve got the wrong man.

Passionate faith centered in love does not threaten, but actually promotes, a better world, as illustrated by Warren’s behavior. The real enemy is any faith—or no faith—separated from love as its key imperative.

The obligation of true faith in God is not the elimination of other faiths but the love of neighbor, family, and even one’s enemies. True faith loves those who disagree and seeks their good, not their ruin. True faith seeks to make peace, not war, to bind up rather than to wound.

We should not fear passionate faith that is full of conviction and seeks to persuade others to believe. Such faith is the source of our greatest philanthropy and a building block for our finest future on this planet.

The real enemy is the end of faith, the disappearance of religious conviction, when love no longer has compelling force or divine obligation. If you think the secularists will rescue the wounded and hurting, you did not live through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The vast majority of the volunteers who came to our rescue by the thousands were driven by passionate faith focused in love.

We have a new president with deep religious convictions. His inauguration is enhanced, and his vision clarified, by Warren’s offering the prayer.