When the struggles and disappointments of life pile one upon another our minds can wander easily into the territory of “where is God?” Not being naive, we all know that He has not promised a life of ease, with all of the bumps and dips smoothed out before use. Rather, a life of trouble lies before us, sometimes growing greater the closer we draw to God and away from the world. How we react as we face the travails is indicative of how our maturity is proceeding and perhaps, how much further it needs to go.

David offers a valuable scriptural lesson in this arena. Faced with unprovoked attacks he pleads with the Lord for a greater understanding in Psalm 22. He begins with this lamenting cry to the heavens:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

so far from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

by night, and am not silent.

Does David truly believe God has forsaken him after all that he had seen and experienced? He recalls the Patriarchal and nation history that both precedes and includes his own:

Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;

you are the praise of Israel.

In you our fathers put their trust;

they trusted and you delivered them.

They cried to you and were saved;

in you they trusted and were not disappointed.

Especially mindful of the fact that that trust in the Lord  was always properly placed, David appropriately praises God despite his immediate troubles, knowing that God so willed it, he too could be saved. This pattern continues as David openly pours out his troubled heart while never blaming God for his condition or situation. Each struggle in David’s mind is countered by an infinitely superior trust in the goodness of God and faith, that good or bad, the events and challenges in our lives deserve nothing but praise to the God who oversees it all. Even if his personal situation were not to improve, David knows that the overarching good of all the world will be seen to be the Lord, and for this He is to praised through the groans and tears.

Posterity will serve him;

future generations will be told about the Lord.

They will proclaim his righteousness

to a people yet unborn—

for he has done it.

Amen.

An odd event occurred last night as enjoyed a family meal together; out of nowhere, we heard the long building wail of the surrounding emergency warning sirens. Unlike the jarring, ever shifting emergency tones used by the police and fire department which immediately grab your attention and move you to some rapid response, the public warning doesn’t move us quite as quickly. How many people even notice the sound every Tuesday at 11:00 AM?

Why the slow reaction to the warning tones? Much of the passivity comes from two factors that creep into our lives and cultures. First, we become deaf to the sound, like a rattle in our cars that we have heard so often that we have tuned it out. Surrounded by constant noise and other distractions, the odd siren blends into the cacophony of life and doesn’t grab our immediate attention. The second reason that the siren has such little effect is that it tells us nothing without interpretation. Last night, as the siren reached its second crescendo, we followed the people on the surrounding streets out into the backyard. We looked at the thunderheads that had built through the day, scanning in all directions for anything unusual. No hail, no rain, no lightning – nothing but dark clouds and temperatures that had dipped into the pleasant 70s. We turned on the television to a local channel to see if there were any crawls and the talk radio stations continued the lead up to the baseball game. False alarm, who knows, maybe stars were going to fall from the sky.

So, why this observation? Our spiritual lives can become some cluttered by busyness or lack of attention that we can miss the warnings the Spirit springs within us. More importantly, when we do notice the sirens we need to be prepared to interpret the message rather than looking blankly about. Our time in the Bible and in prayer, and the wisdom that we attain by ingesting the teaching of others all contributes to the growth in our interpretive abilities. Our goal is to get the point where the leading edge of the wail causes us to move into action immediately, searching our thoughts and actions to determine exactly why the warning has come at this exact moment. Instead of running blindly outside only find mammoth hailstones falling from the sky, we can make life corrections without suffering the pain that comes from being soul-blind.

How easy it is to start well but finish in disgrace because we take our eyes off of the ultimate objective. Such is the story of Uzziah, one of the kings of Judah. He became king at the age of sixteen and in humility, did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. The Chronicler tells us of Uzziah’s early devotion to seeking the word and ways of the Lord for which he was duly blessed. Successful in conquest, construction, and provision for his people, Uzziah gained fame and power.

Ultimately, it proved too much…

But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the Lord his God, and entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. Azariah the priest with eighty other courageous priests of the Lord followed him in. They confronted him and said, “It is not right for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord. That is for the priests, the descendants of Aaron, who have been consecrated to burn incense. Leave the sanctuary, for you have been unfaithful; and you will not be honored by the Lord God.” (2 Ch 26:16-1

It is so easy for our hearts to turn inward and see ourselves as the source of our own blessings, looking away from the true source in the Lord. The depraved core of our souls tells us to “look at what we did!” and begins the subtle musings of our own greatness. Gradually, our initial dependence on the Lord is replaced by thoughts of our own greatness; look at the church I built, the book I wrote, the number of speaking engagements I’ve had - the list is endless. As our hearts go, so go our eyes and soon we have lost sight of the purpose in the successes we are allowed, that is, the greater glory of our God.

When we peer into this vignette of Uzziah’s life we see that his prideful heart has placed his own desires above the glory of God. The desecration of the standards for temple worship are clear to us and spelled out in the passage. Only the priests were to handle the sacred objects and conduct this aspect of worship. Uzziah, his pride on full display, felt that his blessings had moved him into a far more rarified strata in God’s eyes, allowing him to assume the unction necessary to parallel the priesthood. From a distance, we might see him swinging the censer in an act of worship but God, who searches all hearts and knows our true motives, saw it differently. He saw Uzziah’s usurping of his Law as a challenge to His Glory.

And God shares His glory with no one…

There’s a telling vignette in 2 Kings that should cause many of us to pause and reflect:

“Open the east window,” he said, and he opened it. “Shoot!” Elisha said, and he shot. “The Lord’s arrow of victory, the arrow of victory over Aram!” Elisha declared. “You will completely destroy the Arameans at Aphek.”

Then he said, “Take the arrows,” and the king took them. Elisha told him, “Strike the ground.” He struck it three times and stopped. The man of God was angry with him and said, “You should have struck the ground five or six times; then you would have defeated Aram and completely destroyed it. But now you will defeat it only three times.”  (2 Ki 13:17-19)

How easy it is to lose our enthusiasm for the hard work that God blesses us with. When have we served enough or loved enough or prayed enough?

In a foreordained universe, where every act is according to God’s plan, why does he become angry when His actors fulfill their roles?

Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” (2 Sam 24:1)

We ask why God would be angry with Israel since they were acting according to His will and then, why would he cause David to sin (via the census) and bring further wrath upon the people?

Print this out and tuck it inside of your Bible. Now pray it…

Last night as our family gathered to study the word we looked at one of my favorite passages of encouragement, Philippians 3. There are many verses that are especially meaningful in this passage but the two that really caught my attention last night were 3:13 – 14:

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

I am confronted by Paul’s model (and I’m sure I’m not alone) in forgetting what is behind, good or bad. Putting the past behind in return for the newly generated hope in what lies ahead should be an easy thing given the overwhelming greatness of our destination. A newly reborn heart that holds nothing but promise can be stubborn though. I don’t have a problem trading what I thought was really great about my life before Christ renewed me for a different but greater life now. My struggle lies in releasing old injuries, real or supposed, and moving forward.

Why is this such a challenge? Do we hang on to a grudge because we still lack sufficient faith to trust that God works all challenges for good? This might be a partial explanation. Some human notion of fairness pervades our lives and if we interpret an action to have wronged us, our hearts cry out for reprisal in some form. Our souls are turned inside out though and we being forgiven creations are to be forgiving creations. Do we hold on to hurts because it gives us an excuse for our own hurtful behavior? This could also be a remnant of our old being, something to be gotten rid of as we mature. The trouble is the difficulty in doing so.

Perhaps today, as the sun begins to brighten the eastern horizon, I can leave the past behind and commit fully to moving on towards the prize for which God redeemed me. I can only pray.

By now, Pastor Jeremiah Wright and his thoughts about America and her people and culture are well known. Excerpts from sermons have been repeated over and over, both in context and by themselves. He has been interviewed and given an opportunity to explain how the more pejorative statements have been misinterpreted only to stand by them and claim any criticism of his words as “an attack on the Black church.” His most recent speech, opening a multi-day seminar, expanded his victimhood and in the the question and answer session that followed, he was given an opportunity to step back from ideas such as the government created AIDS epidemic but refused to do so. Such is the mind of Jeremiah Wright.

Pastor Wright’s words sound out of place here in the year 2008 since we are to exercise a fair amount of historical reflection and see exactly how much things have changed. The Black Power sentiments echo the demands of a pre Civil rights legislation era and the visions he projects of a corrupt nation run solely by the White Man harken back even further to a time in which those in power might have been rightfully called oppressors. The anger and hatred of America that colors the Reverend’s sermons demands that we stop for a moment to analyze the woes and struggles that have befallen him so that, even if we do not sympathize with him, we are able to have empathy. The trouble is, the more we look at his life, we find that he has led a rather idyllic life growing up unmolested and unable to recount a struggle in the inner city or the hatred of whites.

The media have correctly attributed Pastor Wright’s roots in Black Liberation Theology but have provided little context as to what this might mean. We could turn to Wikipedia as most Googlers will do but to gain a more in-depth foundation we can turn to one of the seminal works on the topic, Black Theology and Black Power by James M. Cone. Published in 1969, this book practically screams with the anger of the times as it looks at an America on the verge of monumental changes in race relations but with many of her citizens still clinging to old hierarchical notions and a history of attributing second class status to its people of color. It is a difficult book to read, not only because of the humility that non-black readers must bring to the words, but because buried in the paragraphs in the message that in order to restore the image of God within them, Blacks must fundamentally separate themselves from White Americans. Rather than integrate with the ‘oppressor’, they must segregate and do for each other.

It is not easy to come to this message as Cone never writes in one paragraph what he can take ten to do (similar to reading more modern works by Cornel West). He comes immediately to terms with a definition of Black Power which will lay the cornerstone of his theology to follow. He says that Black Power means “black people taking the dominant role in determining the black-white relationship in American society.” Cone warns against seeing black theology as antithetical to the Gospel insisting that it is, in fact, “Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America.” This, he asserts, comes from Jesus’ total identification with the poor and oppressed peoples against the ruling authorities.

Coined by Stokely Carmichael, Black Power is in essence a direct response to White racism which negatively created in the Black population an inconsistency in their image of themselves as men and women and the society’s insistence that they were nothing but ‘things’. This disconnection as it was culturally embedded and passed forward through succeeding generations of black citizens, regardless of their free status, creates the chasm that runs through Cone’s vision of Black-White relations (and possibility). Black Power holds to a position that sees the White vision of the Black man as never changing; he (the black man) will forever be but a thing in the eyes of the White (oppressor). The Black man must fight back against this with all of will and power and insist that the White man see him as he is, as a  man. It is this key tenet that often draws the mistaken label of black racism. Advocates are careful to distinguish between racism ( the assumption of differences between racial groups and the inherent superiority of one over the other), the hatred of whites by blacks fueled by the previous years of oppression, slavery, and domination, and Black Power, which is the insistence that Blacks be restored in their fundamental humanity in the eyes of whites.

What makes Black Power and the theology that supports it so difficult for whites to accept is that it is anathematic to the pursuit of integration. Black power insists that there be no integration if the terms of such are defined by the dominant white culture and values. It insists instead on a restoration of the relationship defined by the Kingdom of God where all men of all races approach one another cognizant of the divine image within each and on equal footing. Though there is verbal assent to this concept, the challenge to see the inherent beauty and strength in Blackness is a challenge that Cone says whites are unwilling to meet. Only when whites are willing to see and treat the Black man for who and what he is as a man can there be a further discussion. The response to accusations that this is simply black racism and is therefore an inappropriate response to the endemic white racism that Cone sees is rebuffed by the statement “It is time for whites to realize that the oppressor is in no position whatever to define the proper response to enslavement.” This reasoned supposition is rooted in the fact that Whites in America cannot know the extent of black suffering, they can only speak from their perspective.

Finally, Black power draws no differentiation between the white liberal do-gooder who seeks to assuage his guilt by trying to integrate the black and white experience and George Wallaces of this older era. Cone states bluntly that all whites are responsible for white oppression. He makes this statement based on his furtherance of Carmichael’s notion of institutional racism wherein every aspect of society with which black men, women, and children must interact is wholly infected with white racism. Until the society changes, Cone states that Black Power is the only way in which a positive image can be restored in a people unfairly oppressed for a good part of their history.

(Next: Black Theology)

Our Lenten exercise this year is to put off those things that keep us from Holiness and one of the greatest practices of our hearts is the art of deceit. You and I can so easily convince ourselves of our righteousness, justifying every one of our actions and thoughts and saying that God understands, that he overlooks our subtle sinfulness since he has clothed us in His grace. We refuse to call on the Holy Spirit to convict us of our God-dishonoring behaviors and so further deceive ourselves. As we see in the story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing, deceit that we might think minor can have long term consequences.

One of the first steps in growing in a life of holiness is to restore the voice of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The internal dialog that He will hold with us will remind us, gently or not, of our misguided thoughts and deeds and give us the opportunity to shift our course back toward the light. All we have to do is listen.