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.

Louisiana Baptist Convention 2008

Louisiana Baptist Convention 2008
Meeting in New Orleans Monday and Tuesday

An employee of the Road Home program will move into his own new home in January, years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the home he lived in for many years. Another family announced last week that they will be returning to their refurbished home in Old Metairie by the end of this year. New Orleans has a long way to go before all displaced families fulfill their desire to get back home. In fact, our community faces years of rebuilding in all dimensions including streets, housing, education, businesses, and healthcare.

“Second Wind” is the theme for this week’s meeting of the Louisiana Baptist Convention here in New Orleans. Baptists descended in force upon our city to help with the initial relief efforts. “Yellow caps” were everywhere preparing and serving millions of meals in the devastated areas.
Baptist volunteers, along with many others, plunged into the work of picking up debris, clearing fallen trees, towing ruined cars, and cleaning flooded homes. LBC President David Hankins has challenged Baptist churches across the state to “get their second wind” in the work of recovery and restoration in the New Orleans area. Some 2,000 messengers from 1,600 churches will gather to take care of this and other business.

The local association of Baptist churches, which includes a hundred congregations, has already reorganized its work to address recovery issues in the city for the next decade. Specialists in recovery and rebuilding will join those involved in more traditional efforts such as church planting and homeless ministry. The state convention and national Southern Baptist entities are focused on the health and well-being of New Orleans for the long term. The local association lost 60 congregations due to the devastating flood. The restoration effort will not be limited to restoring congregations but will attempt to create and restore rehabilitation programs, schools, medical services, housing, and general economic development.

The great flood and its aftermath may have been forgotten in some parts of the country. But Louisiana knows the difficulties of New Orleans, and Louisiana churches understand and have made the long term commitment to restoration of our devastated region.