Thanks to the Internet my horizons have broadened even further. No longer am I limited to a Chicago paper and a couple of weekly news magazines to keep me posted. Surfing the net, an article in one paper can lead me to another newspaper or news service entirely. One minute I’ll be reading something from The New York Times and the next The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post or The Christian Science Monitor. My horizons are broadening markedly.
Facebook friends are also a great source of material when they are not posting pictures of their grandchildren or where they went for dinner. One friend in particular, who is blessed with a dry sense of humour and an ability to find informative pieces along with some that are totally absurd is very helpful with inspirational stuff for sermons.
Those of you who receive our weekly e-mail blast already know what I am talking about. (To those watching who don’t get it but would like to just e-mail the address on the screen and we’ll be happy to send it to you. In light of what I am going to say in the next few minutes I need to underscore that at no time will you be asked for money.)
I have to say that because of the series of YouTube Videos that I stumbled upon this week. There where moments in them when I laughed until my sides hurt and moments is them when I looked at the computer screen in absolute amazement.
A comedian named John Bloom, created a character named Joe Bob Briggs who hosts a program called, " God-stuff: Crazy Television Preachers." The program is a compilation of the silliest and saddest moments of the less than main-stream charlatans whose programs dwell in the stratispherically high numbers on our cable or satellite menus.
The program I shared had some hilarious moments featuring – and I am not making this up – singing and dancing Orthodox Jewish Rabbis on something called the " Shalom" telethon. There were countless guys offering holy trinkets in return for cash, and of course, healing miracles.
While it is bad enough to send somebody holy oil in return for a love gift with the instructions that they should use it to anoint their wallets. What’s the worse that could happen there? You would be out a few bucks and have a grease mark on your back pocket. The quacks who offer healings are frightening.
The segment with an evangelist named Morris Cerullo left me gasping not in faith but in pure terror.
Cerullo gets a vision and calls a man out of the audience who is wearing a neck brace. The man reluctantly comes forward while Cerullo keeps repeating, " Oh ye, of little faith. Why do you doubt?"
Finally the man removes the brace and Cerullo grabs the poor guys head twisting it this way and that. The man looks troubled and for good reason for when he is finally asked why he was wearing the brace he replies, " I had a herniated disk and they fused a bone in there. The bone hasn’t mended yet. So that is why I had to wear the cast. [The Doctor] told me to wear it because if it slips out I’m subject to be paralysed."
The audience gasped and so did I. If you saw the video Cerullo had just twisted the poor fellow head in every way imaginable and in so doing risked permanent injury. " No wonder," I said to myself, " why the church has become so out of favour in our society."
This was our underbelly that always was there but could be seen only in side-shows run by travelling tent evangelists but rarely was experienced by any but a few. For decades now, that I don’t think accidentally coincide with the decline in church membership, this has been the face of the church to the world. Who would want to be a part of that?
Who would want to be a part of anything where no matter what you need it can be had by a donation of a couple of bucks? Who would want to be a part of something where you risk paralysis just by showing up?
Here is the most important thing to remember. The intended audience for the televangelists are not people like you and me who have been coming to church a long time and who watch these programs, if we watch them at all, as if they were a carnival side-show. The people watching are insomniacs who are up all night or pacing the floor all day because they really are desperate for a job, a car, a renewed family, a better life. And, they are being led astray.
Saint Paul might ask: " Is this the way you welcome those who are weak in faith?" And then he tells us what our only message should be: " For if we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s."[1]
Living or dying we follow the Lord. We don’t follow him to get rich as the prosperity gospel preachers would tell us. We don’t follow him so that we might get just the right miracle at just the right time as the healing evangelists would tell us. We don’t even follow him because we are afraid that if we don’t we’ll be consigned to the fires of hell. We follow him because in Jesus we have found something really special. We have found someone who would give his life for us and, in so doing, give us our life back.
Preachers who want to be popular don’t talk much about the cross. Some huge, mega-churches don’t even have crosses in them because market-research has told them that the cross turned people off. It did in Jesus’ day. It does in ours.
We wince when we hear that the Islamic State of Iran and Syria or ISIL, which stands for the Islamic State of Iran and the Levant,2 is back in the business of crucifying Christians.
The cross in Jesus’ day was a symbol of military might and oppression. Step outside of the rules of the Roman government and it just might be the place where you took your final breath.
But we celebrate it this day and some of us wear one around our necks everyday to remind ourselves of God’s love. The cross reminds us that we don’t need God to give us money, or miracles, or the trifles of this world. The cross reminds us that in Jesus God has given us all that we need or will ever need.
In the words of The Rev’d Shannon Johnson Kerschner, the wonderful new Senior Minister at Fourth Presbyterian Church the cross reminds us that:
God is the one who holds your life. God is the one who will walk with you through death. God is the one who will give you new life. God is the one under whose reign and under whose power you live and move and have your being, not the economy, not your addiction, not your wealth, not your poverty, not your security, not your status, and not even your family. God alone is the one to whom you belong. And that means you matter, regardless of what other kinds of things you are told based on your gender or your race or your sexual orientation or the amount you have in the bank.[2]
This gift of belonging to God is the biggest and best miracle we will ever receive.
It’s a gift. Never forget that! It’s a gift! And because it is it means you don’t have to bribe God with a love gift of money. You don’t have coerce God into giving you some gift you don’t want – like healing for something doctors have already taken care of.
The cross may not have the drama and excitement of a highly produced television spectacular featuring crutches thrown away and dancing rabbis. It may not hold the promise of a new car or a new house but it does hold something else.
It holds the power of God to love us. It tells us that " God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again."[2]
What the cross tell us is more simple than even the most simple-minded of the crazy television preachers seem to be able to grasp. It tells us quite simply that " God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."[3]
That is what’s important and it all ours when we take our eyes off the television crazies for a moment and survey in our hearts the wondrous cross.
_____________
Endnotes:
1. Romans 14:8. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible]
2. The Rev'd Shannon Johnson Kerschner, " Take Up Your Cross the Saviour Said" Sermons from Fourth Church. August 31, 2014.
3. St. John 3:17. (MSG) [MSG= The Message]
4. St. John 3:16. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
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