CYPRESSWOOD CHURCH OF CHRIST

January 1, 2006

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

LIFT UP IN PRAYER THE FOLLOWING:

Our congregation and moving to the end of the             Our nation, military and leaders

strip center

Various relatives, friends and co-workers                        David and James in the military

The Stehlik’s are recovering from illness                         Thanks to Mel for picking up the new chairs

OUR LITTLE CORNER OF THE WORLD

"He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.  Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him" (Psalm 40:3).

Can you believe it?  Another year has gone by.  We can look back and see what happened last year, often a theme of news shows.  We remember some good and bad events, friends who are gone or moved on.  We are thankful for the positive and saddened by loss.  That's why the song "Old Lang Syne"  is sung at this time; it captures our feelings.

Of course, today is the day of resolutions.  Most are trivial; lose weight, exercise, spend less.  Tomorrow we will be back in the usual routine.  Resolution making has become a joke.  Our lives will continue; we will go to work, to school, travel the same roads, take the usual vacation, shop in the same places, sing the same songs, and go through the same routines because as humans we are most comfortable with this.  And even when the routine is broken, we are anxious to return to it as quickly as possible. 

How do we see the coming year?  I can see some preachers emphasizing things that people can do to begin the year right.  Start reading your Bible through (four chapters a day will get one through in a year).  Commit ourselves to prayer everyday.  Let's start attending every service of the church beginning today.  But that really becomes those resolutions that sound good until we get back into the normal routine.

When we think about it, there is not much difference between us and the peoples of the Bible.  The nation of Israel had its year routine and settled into it quite nicely, and along the way lost focus on God (see Isaiah 1, 57).  The people of Jesus' day came and went in the usual ways.  It was Jesus who disturbed the status quo.  The apostles in the Gentile world stirred up things for a while but then the church developed its routine and settled down, not disturbing anyone too much.  Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan in response to his order to kill Christians.  In it he said that they were no threat to the Empire, a little weird in the things they did and believed, but good citizens.  Maybe routine isn't so bad after all.

The problem, even danger, is losing focus.  When we become complacent, then we stop thinking about what we are doing and why we are doing it.  One example that we have talked about in the past is meeting on Sunday nights.  Why did it begin and what are we trying to accomplish?  Some see those questions as a challenge to authority, Bible or leadership, and will not confront them.  I was told by an elder once that the elders were concern about people coming on Wednesday night but not Sunday, and that they could not understand why.  I told him that maybe there was something more for those people on Wednesdays.  We forget why we do things but are afraid to look at the routine to see if it is best.  I always liked the story of the young bride who cut off the tip of a roast and put it in the oven.  Her husband asked her why she did it.  She didn't know but that is how her mother did it.  So she called mom and asked her.  Mom said that that was how her mother had done it.  The bride called grandma and asked her why she did it.  Grandma said that she cut off the tip of the roast because the oven was too small to put the whole roast in.  The reason was lost over the years but the routine stayed the same.

While I think it is a good idea to read scripture, to pray, and to be with the family every week, I want to make a different challenge for all of us.  I have a couple of ideas of how to approach this.  The theme is going to be radical living in our little corner of the world.  This isn't the first time I've suggested this but I want to look more closely to what that idea and ideal is in living radically.

Soren Kierragaard was a Danish philosopher in the middle of the 19th Century.  He looked at his society and saw the routine.  People went to church on Sunday, and unaffected by what was said, went back to the daily routines.  He saw no radical living and was disgusted by the situation.  So he wrote from a Christian perspective about that.  Unfortunately his followers developed his philosophy into what we call existentialism.  That means simply that we live for the moment; the past means nothing and the future is unimportant.  This is a common philosophy of our society.  Eat, drink and be merry not thinking about the consequences of such actions.  Many consider former President Clinton the first existential president.  Hollywood is filled with an existential attitude as well as many politicians and sports figures.  I remember an interview of a aging basketball player for the Washington D.C. team.  The interviewer asked him what he was going to do after his career ended.  He said that he had not thought about it, basketball was all he knew. That interview revealed the sadness of this man because it appeared he had no hope beyond his current moment.

Fredrick Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the second half of the 19th Century, likewise looked at his society and saw the routine.  He too became angry at what he saw, but being an atheist, he developed another and more dominant philosophy, the will to power.  He saw Pilate as the strongest person in scripture and Jesus as the most pitiable, one because of His humility and death and two because people would not live His way.  Nietzsche's philosophy became the dominant philosophy of the 20th Century and lead to two world wars and countless deaths under communism and other totalitarian regimes.  One author called it "death by government." 

Today we live in a developing post-modern society.  The truth is difficult if impossible to know.  What is good for you might not be good for me.  How I feel is more important than what I think.  Rational thought and logic give way to feelings and doing it my way, and that all religions lead to the same place.  On the positive side, postmodernism has challenged the coldness of the modern age; science can develop many things that will help humanity and some that will destroy it; that politics is not the answer to social problems or even to preventing war, that education may be good but still lacks something, that family is more important than the free love of the sixties.  There is a spiritual hunger involved here and that is where we can have an influence.

Radical living is the answer to the above.  It is living differently from society, from the routine of life.  It is looking through the eyes of Jesus and seeing people as He saw them.  It is speaking in a way that our words and lives match.  It isn't coming to a church where there are power struggles, selfishness, complaining, and condemning because many see that every day at work, in the media, and at home.  Rather church is a place of healing, of lament, of encouragement, of working together and working things out.  When we say we love, then we are saying and practicing that we are willing to lay down our lives for those we love, brother, neighbor, and enemy.  Now that is radical living!  And that is the challenge that we will look at this year. 

So come and join us on our travels in and our lives of radical living in our little corner of the world.

                                                                                                                                George B. Mearns