I have recently returned from a two-week trip to the Philippines. The RCUS sent me and another pastor to explore the possibility of beginning a work there. There are a number of pastors there who are dissatisfied with their present church affiliation and desire to affiliate with us, which is exciting.

The trip itself was quite an experience. Manila is a city of fifteen million, making it one of the largest cities in the world. We were staying in a suburb province, Cavite, and did not spend any time in Manila except to just pass through. But it’s a difficult thing to grasp for me, to be in a place with so many familiar sights and sounds, but which is still so utterly alien. There is a great deal of wealth in Manila, and a great deal of poverty. Huge air-conditioned shopping malls stood right beside shantytowns. People sell cell-phone service out of shacks next to the street.

And it is, unfortunately, a very dirty city, which I think all by itself illustrates their burning need for the Gospel. They burn their trash in the streets; they casually throw garbage into the river. They don’t even think about this. The country is 80% Catholic, 15% Protestant (give or take), and 5% other. But the Christianity which exists there (both Catholic and all too often Protestant as well), as is the case in so many places, is just a thin gloss over the underlying culture which feels, on my short visit, to be some combination of animism / spiritism and hedonistic nihilism.

I am looking forward to see if we can establish a relationship with these pastors, to start a work there.

I’ve been deathly ill ever since I got back. I’m pretty sure it’s just a severe cold bug, exacerbated by my lack of rest due to the jet lag and our very busy schedule there. But just in case, I’m going in to the doctor today to see if I have malaria.

Lots of new sermons posted. We’re getting to the end of Genesis, so the sermons right now cover the end of the story of Joseph. I also posted the sermon I preached on baptism, when my son Titus was baptized two weeks ago.

The link is on the sidebar.

Quote of the year:
“The essence of idolatry is not so much the denial of the reality of God, as it is the denial of the relevance of God.”- Iain Duguid, from the NIV Application Commentary on Ezekiel

I had a friend at work once that, knowing me to be in training for the ministry, asked me some religious questions. I don’t remember how it happened, but we ended up discussing ancient Israel. I explained to him the idea of syncretism as the mixing and matching of religious principles. Someone who, for example, looked to God for moral principles but looked to science for the truth of the natural world is a syncretist, I said.

“Ah, yes, that’s what I am,” my friend said. “A syncretist.”

We have been working through the book of Ezekiel in our Bible study here in Limon. I have been amazed at just how relevant it is. God’s chief complaint against the Jews in Judah is not that they have abandoned His worship, but that they have mixed His worship with the worship of other gods. Archaeological evidence has revealed in many of the places of worship in ancient Israel that priests of Jehovah and priests of other gods would work side by side in the high places and sacred groves in Judah, and Ezekiel claims that they engaged in this practice even in Solomon’s temple (see chapter 8).

The combination of the worship of God with other religions is referred to as syncretism. The Jews thought Jehovah was a great war God, and would call on Him in times of battle (see king Ahab in 1 Kings 22) but Baal and Astaroth had their uses too, if you wanted the crops to grow or if you wanted your wife to give you a son. Why should Jehovah get all the glory?

Of course eventually, if there is a disconnect between what people do on Sunday (or Saturday) and the rest of the week, that disconnect will agitate for a resolution. People are a lot more consistent than they’re often given credit for. And so, eventually, they will begin to complain that Jehovah isn’t “relevant”. Why should they worship the God of Israel one day a week when it’s clear that these other gods are doing so much for them the rest of the time? And so, when the Jews say in chapter 8 that Jehovah does not see and has forsaken the land, they are not saying that they think they can get away with worshiping these other gods (what I used to think they were saying). No, they’re saying Jehovah isn’t relevant. And so the process that begins in the countryside ends in the temple. The idols that began as subordinate gods, gods only for specific uses and purposes, end up being brought into the temple itself, and completely usurping Jehovah’s place.

This is of course the breaking point. Now their iniquity is complete, and God declares that He is ready to demonstrate exactly how relevant He is. Seven times in Ezekiel chapters 5 and 6, God uses the phrase “they will know that I am God”. This is His chief concern- He will not be ignored. He will not be put on the back burner. He will not share His glory with another, any more than a husband would share his wife’s love with another man. And so, in chapter 9, the six men with their pounding weapons are ordered to go through the city, beginning at the temple, and kill everyone who does not bear the mark of covenant faithfulness. Everyone. They are not to pity, their eye is not to spare. Men, women, children, old, young, everyone. And they do.

Often I have looked at this country of ours and thought to myself that with all of our faults and failures there are still a lot of people in this country who name the name of Christ, who go to church and who worship God in at least some sense. But this is really no different than what Judah was doing in the days of Ezekiel. They may have worshiped Jehovah on the Sabbath and during the yearly feasts, but they looked other places for their prosperity and security (the idol of jealousy guarding the north gate in ch. 8). They attributed the natural forces to their gods and not to Jehovah (see the cult of Tammuz referenced in chapter 8) and they even worshiped the sun (ch. 8), a cult which was always associated with the origin of life.

How many Christians in this country do the exact same thing? Maybe they don’t have the idols or use the names. But how many go to church on Sunday but devote the rest of their lives to the service of their idols? How many Christians believe that our military will keep them safe, instead of God? How many Christians believe that our capitalist system will provide prosperity instead of God? And how many look to science and technology to explain and control the natural universe, instead of God? How many Christians believe that God has no place in politics? And not just his name in a pledge or some Scripture on a plaque, but that our functioning in the political world should be ruled at every point by Biblical principles? In practice, most people today making an argument for separation of church and state are making an argument for syncretism.

The name for all such practice of Christianity mixed with the idols of this world is syncretism. It is the essence of idolatry.

And the process for us has been the same as the process for ancient Israel. First the idols intrude into the “secular” world, alongside Jehovah. But then the drug of autonomy is too addicting, and Jehovah is removed from the public sphere, from the secular world, and relegated in people’s minds to Sunday only (and maybe Wednesday nights). And I’m not talking about laws or regulations. I’m talking about what happens in people’s minds. Finally, since God is gone from most of life, His worship on Sunday comes to seem irrelevant. And in the name of “relevance”, the idols are brought into the temple. The idols of money, of power, of self-help, of politics, of pleasure, leisure and fame, all of them are brought into the worship of God.

But that isn’t the final step of the process. The people who do this do it because they believe that Jehovah has abandoned the earth, that He does not see. But they are wrong. He does see. And He is a jealous God, who will not share His glory with another. And so when His great patience is at an end; when He is ready, He will remind the people exactly how relevant He is.

America is not the covenant people of God. And so the lessons of Ezekiel do not directly apply to America as a nation. It is the church which is the covenant people of God, and praise God, the church as a whole has not apostasized, and by the promises of the New Covenant, it never will.

But God is still God, and He never changes. We learn who He is in the book of Ezekiel. We learn about His jealousy for His holy name. And though there is not a direct parallel between the judgment that came on Judah in 587-586 BC and any possible judgment for any particular body today, God is still the judge, and judgment certainly comes on individuals constantly, and may come on all unbelievers and hypocrites at any time. So let us resolve to decide today that the knowledge and worship of the one true God is the most relevant thing we could possibly know.

Good post from Lee on loving discipline. He draws a parallel, an apt one I think, between a refusal to discipline at home and in churches:

This principle does not stop with parenting sadly enough. It infests our church. I have a friend, who is a believer, but attends a conservative Presbyterian Church of the United States (PCUSA) church in Colorado Springs. Try as I might I cannot convince him his church is wrong, and that the denominations refusal to discipline the hundred or so pastors who actively support homosexuality as right is an abomination. He stubbornly holds to the idea that all should remain as it is, and it is better not to stir the pot too much. Somewhere the PCUSA lost the idea of loving discipline and now it treads water until it becomes the Anglican church with active gay men as ministers.

Question: Is it worse to be an active gay man or a passive gay man?

This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. Excerpt:

BMc: I thought I was the one being interviewed. Aren’t you sort of inverting the whole reason we got together?

DC: Yeah, but so what? You’re pomo, you figure it out. Let’s transgress the conventions of interviewing. Or do you believe in some ‘Form of the Interview’ that we must conform to?

BMc: It just seems odd…and perhaps that you lured me here under false pretenses if you’re going to not ask me questions.

DC: I was asking you questions and you interrupted me as I was building up to my big question about your contradiction. You interrupted and said you didn’t want me painting you in a corner and then asked me why I wanted to engage in this sort of silliness. So I’m answering. Now you’re bitching that I’m answering.

BMc: It was rhetorical.

DC: So you don’t really want to engage in a real conversation.

Fantastic! Poking fun at the Postmodernist Christian movement (er, conversation).
See part I too.

Great post from Rusty about the tendency in modern evangelicalism to focus on Jesus exclusively in worship today. This is a fascinating insight. Being in a little bit different worship tradition than a lot of other folks in the Christian world today, I don’t tend to see these things, so I appreciate the perspective here.

I’d argue that if we worship Jesus to the exclusion of the other two persons of the Trinity, then we’re not even really worshiping Jesus. How can we worship the Son without knowing the Father who sends Him? And Jesus said Himself that He must go away, so that the Holy Spirit can come. How do we know Jesus except by the Spirit?

Rusty asks,

What is it about our culture, here in America, that motivates us to emphasize a personal relationship with this Jesus who loves us? Do we tend to overemphasize this aspect and, as a result, the person of Jesus in our worship?

Perhaps our fear of actually dealing with the real God makes dealing with the man Jesus appealing? Perhaps by cutting off two persons of the Trinity, I’m really cutting off all three, and thinking really of Jesus only as a man, and therefore creating a relationship that I can control?

Perhaps our un-confronted rebellion makes us hesitant to accept the need to submit ourselves to the judge and king, and so this romanticized, feminized relationship is appealing for its nonthreatening nature?

We had our baby. Today was actually the due date, but we had Titus Carroll Powell four weeks ago, by emergency c-section. He was six pounds, five ounces, and so his prematurity was not really a problem. Andrea is recovering nicely from her c-section, though she still can’t lift much and has to be careful how she moves.

Thanks for all of your prayers. It was a tough month or so before she was born, but everything has turned out great. God has been gracious to us.

Last night, I attacked my daughter Katie.

She sometimes comes in the middle of the night to get in bed with us. And last night, I woke up in the middle of who knows what dream, thinking that some pint-sized imp was trying to climb into bed with us, and in terror, I pushed her over.

Poor Katie. She cried and cried. I said to Andrea, “It was trying to get us.” Once I figured it out, I was appalled, and hugged poor Katie until we were friends again. She was unhurt, you’ll be glad to hear.

Andrea said she was just glad I didn’t repeat my performance when I dragon-kicked the floor fan in the middle of the night.

As my close friends and enemies will both tell you, I’m not exactly an animal person. I am opposed to animals in the house as a general rule. I believe that one of the purposes of thousands of years of civilization was to keep the animals away from us. I regard other people’s pets with indifference at best. St. Francis I am not.

But I don’t actively pursue cruelty to animals, either. “The righteous man regards the life of his beast”, the Proverbs tell us. And so I find myself disturbed at a rather alarming trend in my life, that of roadkill.

Now I’ve ran over my fair share of animals in my day. I put about 3-400 highway miles a week on my car, and it only takes about that week for my car to develop a fine patina of dead bugs. I’ve killed so many bugs with my car, I feel like I could have wiped out whole subspecies. I have hit a lot of mice and squirrels, and I ran over a pretty big jackrabbit a while back (the rabbits all seem to stare at me now). This morning, I went out to the car and was extremely disturbed to see an entire actual bird in the grill of my car.

So I was already a little bit rattled when I drove down to Rocky Ford on some church business tonight. There was a thunderstorm out, and the wet must have brought the animals out, because I think I hit six mice on the road on the trip. And on the way back, I hit a raccoon.

Stephen King once wrote a horror story about huge vicious rats, but he really needn’t have billed it as a horror story, because such things exist, and they’re called raccoons. This ‘coon was right in the middle of my lane, and I followed my well-honed instinct to never swerve to miss an animal on a rainy night while driving 70 MPH. This particular beast was probably the biggest ‘coon I’ve ever seen. Perhaps the horror of the moment has inflated my memory, but it was two feet tall at the top of his back, and probably weighed over a hundred pounds.

It made quite a revolting wet thud when I hit it, much as a large dog or Paris Hilton might, were you to run into one of them. Actually, the use of the subjunctive in the previous sentence is not entirely accurate. I should have said, “the sound a large dog makes when you hit one.” I did run over a good-sized dog once, and that was in fact the most expensive animal I have ever killed with my car. I speak not of the replacement cost, for I have no idea what a raccoon would cost you to replace, were you so inclined. But hitting the dog cost me a headlight, as well as a half-days work off to go to court to get a completely ridiculous ticket dismissed. I have, for the record, never run over Paris Hilton.

But the raccoon was especially disturbing. The things just look evil, for one thing, and it was staring straight at me when I hit it. It broke some piece of underlayment of some sort under my car, which I hope is either non-essential or cheap to replace. And after the raccoon, I saw a deer standing on the side of the road, looking at me, as if daring me to cross that particular karmic line.

Speaking of karma, I’m glad I don’t believe in reincarnation. Otherwise, I would be terrified that I, Arthur Dent-like, was continually killing the same person, in whatever reincarnated form he took, over and over.

I can’t wait to see the Google hits this post brings. “Paris Hilton karmic roadkill”

Several new sermons have been uploaded. Click on the link on the sidebar to see.