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Tigers by the Tails

Good morning church family,

When someone starts talking about technological advances being made, he is most likely thinking about those advancements in terms of the material world. He’s thinking of better surgical instruments, greater fuel efficiency, faster download speeds, and smarter operating systems. He’s likely not thinking in terms of soul and spirit. For, if he was, he wouldn’t be speaking of advancements then; but of dangers.

All sin is deadly but certain sins are surely deadlier than others. A man who commits a crime of passion, for instance, will certainly be closer to confession and repentance than one who commits a crime in cold blood. Envy is a far more perilous condition of the soul than discontentment happens to be and treachery is more fatal than rebellion. I’ve read of fire ants killing people and so, in that sense I suppose they should be classified as deadly. But, even with that knowledge, should I happen upon a colony of fire ants in a field somewhere, I wouldn’t recoil in fright. But, if in that same field a fierce lion stood opposite me taking stealthy steps as his hungry eyes were locked on mine – I would be positively terrified. Well, if there’s any sin prowling my head and heart that’s as dangerous and deadly as a wild lion, it’s the sin of pride. And just as a stalking lion is aided by tall, tawny grasses, so pride is aided by divining technologies.

Pause and consider for a moment how modern technology has served to grant to its owners, superhuman, almost godlike powers and capabilities. Imagine a busy highway for a moment and further imagine that all you could see were the passengers; the cars being invisible. Hundreds of seated humans moving effortlessly across the landscape at high speeds is surely a superhuman thing. Do the same with people traveling from New York City to London on an airplane. If you imagine away the fuselage, all you’d see are hundreds of people flying five-hundred miles-an-hour at thirty-thousand feet while eating foie gras and drinking white wine. With hydraulic technologies, a human being is able to lift huge rocks, rip tall trees out of the ground, and move his home from one hill to another. Voice activation technology gives us the power to speak all manner of things into existence. One word to the digital butler in our pockets and – voilà! – information is provided, lights come on, food appears, and complex problems are solved. Modern technologies have made us faster, smarter, stronger, and far more able than any other humans who’ve ever walked the earth. They’ve also made us so woefully prideful and independent that we now rival those wicked tower-builders who populated the Plain of Shinar long ago.

So, what should our response be to these technological dangers we’ve allowed to become so integral to our modern way of life? Do the Amish have the answer? Should we unplug from the grid in order to be tied in again to the group? Might we find inspiration in the violence the Luddites once inflicted on the machinery of the Industrial Revolution and smash our smartphones to smithereens? Ought we to adopt a Lenten way of life; subjecting ourselves to various forms of religious denial? Well, I don’t know about you but none of these options seem particularly realistic or in keeping with the biblical mandate to live in freedom; being mastered by nothing. Sin management doesn’t sound like righteousness to me and containment is no victory.

No, it seems to me that we ought to look to the Rod of Moses for insight and instruction. When God called Moses to go to Egypt and win the deliverance of the Hebrew slaves, Moses was shepherding his father-in-law’s flocks out in the Midian desert. Shepherds needed a good sturdy stick for directing the flock through narrow mountain passes, for checking straying animals, and to possibly fend off would-be predators. A shepherd’s rod also made a good walking stick. So, when Moses traveled to Egypt, he happened to take his staff with him. And then, if you read the account, a curious thing happened in the presence of Pharaoh. God gave that rod a marvelous technological upgrade. That simple walking stick became a scepter of great power and provision. Over the next forty years Moses, with that rod, bested Pharaoh’s magicians, drew fresh water out of a rock, parted the Red Sea, and performed many other superhuman miracles. With that upgraded stick, Moses had in his hand something that made him able to do godlike things. And while that was a wonderful blessing when Moses was using his staff as a means of glorifying God and leading His people; it became a deadly thing when it proved an instrument that served Moses’s anger, frustration, and resentment. Had Moses not been given a rod endowed with heavenly power, he may not have died in the wilderness and been forbidden from crossing over the Jordan.

When our Medieval forbears set about to rank sins on a scale of the least to the most deadly, it’s interesting that they reserved the top spot for pride. In fact, pride was put in a category all its own and regarded as mankind’s primary sin; that principal depravity from which all other sins flowed as tributaries. Whether we like it or not, the smartphones that most of us have in our hands are similar to Moses’s rod in many ways – scepters of great power and provision in our lives. We would all do well to recognize, that while we may be able to use modern technology’s inherent powers to glorify God and advance His will, it’s just as likely that we might allow it to be an instrument that serves our selfish pride.

Over the last few years, the Lord has made me wise to this concern and I’m committed to letting Him guide my use of these technologies. I would love to see technology be used to help lead God’s people out of the wilderness and I would hate to see it leave me buried in it.

What a blessing it will be to gather together tomorrow morning and to lay our lives, crowns, and phones at the feet of our King. What joy and strength comes in surrender and worship! I’m so thankful to have been shown the way. May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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Hanging Heaven’s Picture

January 19, 2025

Acts 15:36-41

And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.” Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp disagreement, so that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and departed, having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

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Look It Up

Suppose you don’t know what a “jenny” is. You heard the word used in casual conversation, let’s say, and didn’t want to admit your ignorance of its meaning and so you simply nodded along. Or perhaps the word showed up in a story you were reading to your grandchild and the meaning didn’t seem to matter as much as its happening to rhyme with “penny” and so you just kissed the child on the head and turned the page. But whatever your introduction to the word, you put a pin in your ignorance and purposed to look up the meaning another time.

Well, one day the office of your subconscious decided to put the “jenny” file at the top of the stack. Somewhere in the recesses, a desire to learn the definition must have flickered to life in the coal bed of your mind. Looking around, your smartphone sat about ten paces away, lying flat on the end table beside the couch; alert, idling at 57% battery life, and eagerly awaiting your command. But not far from the phone, also at a distance of roughly ten paces, stood the lone bookcase in the house. The narrow case had but four shelves and only two of those had any books on them; the other two sporting framed pictures, knick-knacks, and assorted board games. But of the dozen-or-so books on the two shelves, there stood a Webster’s New World Dictionary. The big, blue tome was more decoration than reference tool. It was an antique or sorts – an art piece to go with the old gentry estate motif you were shooting for. You’d moved that dusty dictionary around the country with you; shelving and reshelving it on every little bookcase you’d ever owned. But you couldn’t remember having actually opened it.

In that moment, a voice within began calling out; asking you to leave your phone dark for once and to pull the dictionary from its dock instead. It’s the same voice you hear sometimes when you see a bundle of firewood for sale or when you happen upon a piano with its fallboard up and the keys open for the striking or when you see a bag of flour on a shelf in the grocery store. It’s the voice of the Analog crying out for you to forego push-button heat, canned music, and packaged food for something more genuine and real. It’s a cry to produce and create; to enjoy having something that’s tethered to your own head and hands.

You step past your phone and pull the book from the shelf. Carrying it back to the couch with both hands, it’s heavier than you remember. Sitting down, you reach under the shade and feel for the switch to turn on the lamp. Opening the book to somewhere in the middle, “Neanderthal” happens to be the first guide word you see at the top of the page. You pause for more than a moment as you try and get your bearings. “Does ‘j’ come before or after ‘n’?” you wonder to yourself. Singing the alphabet song under your breath for a moment, you begin flipping back toward the cover. An odd sense of excitement and adventure begins to dawn in your benighted soul. It’s just a simple little word, but suddenly you can imagine the definition for “jenny” to be the secret code that will unlock some mysterious passage to immense medieval treasure. Your heartbeat quickens. The sound and feel of the thin paper, the exercise of your eyes, and the flurry of information running through the processes of your mind livens your soul somehow.

Whether it was a distant childhood reflex or an aping of something you saw in a movie once, believing you’d finally flipped to the right page, you began sliding your pointing finger down the columns of words. “Jazz”, “jealous”, “jejune”, “jelly” and then – you see it. You eagerly read the entry: “jenny \ `jen-ē \ n {fr. the name Jenny} 1a : a female bird [ ~ wren ] b : a female donkey 2 : SPINNING JENNY”

“Huh,” you think to yourself. “That’s interesting. When Craig said he was looking to sell his jenny this winter, he must have been talking about some donkey of his. How funny – I’m sure I must have looked confused.”

You close the big book with a sigh, sad that you don’t have any more words to investigate. Hearing your phone chirp, you obediently stand up to heed its call. Checking your notification, you lay the dictionary where your phone had been; deciding not to reshelve it in hopes of using it again sometime soon. The tone had alerted you to an email from Amazon informing you that your latest order had shipped. You slavishly clear the screen and slip the phone in your pocket. Looking up, your eye falls on the polished brass fireplace screen still covered in garland and holly. “A fire,” you say to yourself. “Yes – a fire. I’m going to go gather some wood. I’m going to sit by a fire tonight and read the dictionary. Let the digital gods be ignored!”

We’re looking forward to bidding the world goodbye for a bit tomorrow as we gather together to bid God’s Kingdom come. And in our fellowship, worship, and study of His Word – it will indeed come and what a blessing it will be! Our return to the world will come all too soon but we’ll be much stronger for the time away. Much stronger and more ready to make a difference! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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The Cologne of Christ

Good morning church family,

To a twelve-year-old boy like Ethan Carmichael, a $25 gift card to Macy’s was about as valuable as a $25 gift card to the grocery store, the power company, or the water and sewer department. To Ethan, Macy’s was a store you walked through to get to the food court and on to the rest of the mall. It was a place where fancy ladies shopped for fancy clothes and tried on cosmetics in front of brightly lit, glittery mirrors. It was a store where older men in dress shoes, charcoal slacks, and cashmere sweaters looked through racks of grown-up clothes while looking glumly at the salesmen sidling up to them. Macy’s was a not a store for a boy who was into video games, basketball, and cheeseburgers. But it was Ethan who was in possession of the card; having won it at a Yankee swap gift exchange hosted by his stepfather’s family. And if his prize for the night wasn’t already disappointing enough, his mom wiped all the remaining shine off of it. “Ooh, honey,” she said when it became clear that Ethan was out of swaps and stuck with the card, “that’s wonderful. You could get a new belt.”

The gift card, along with an unopened package of rock candy and a tiny stocking filled with hand warmers, had been sitting on the end of his dresser since back before Christmas; the ruins of a once-great holiday. It was the middle of February now and Ethan was in a mood to clean up his room. He threw the hand warmers in his sock drawer and the candy and the stocking in the trash. Why Ethan’s grandmother gave him rock candy every Christmas, he’d never understood. Ethan thought about throwing the gift card in the trash as well, but instead slid it into the empty credit card sleeve in his wallet; right next to his library card and student ID. “Next time someone goes to the mall,” Ethan thought to himself, “maybe I’ll tag along and see what I can find.”

Ethan would get his chance later that week. His mom was taking his big sister Eliza shopping for a sweet 16 formal that Eliza was planning on attending and, even though such an outing was fraught with grave danger for a tag-along little brother, Ethan was in a mood to gamble. At a bare minimum, he was fairly certain he’d at least get a food court cheeseburger out of it.

Macy’s proved to be about as useless a store as Ethan had feared. The entire upstairs was a complete loss; stocked with acres of women’s unmentionables and rows and rows of other finery for the fairer sex. The lower floor wasn’t much more promising. But Macy’s was still a department store after all and a quarter of the downstairs floor space was devoted to sporting goods, kitchenware, gift items, and tools and such. He spent a little while looking at a dart board but at a price of $34.99, it just wasn’t attractive enough to have to contribute any of his own money. The same was true for a tool kit and a bean bag chair he’d found. The only thing he thought he might like was a lava lamp selling for $19.99. He thought it might be a pretty neat addition to his room and it didn’t hurt that there would be just enough room on the card to throw a candy bar on the counter to go with it. But in the interest of due diligence and because he’d promised his mother that he’d at least look at leather belts, he wandered into the men’s department.

Almost everything for sale in the men’s department was well out of his price range. There were a pair of slippers he kind of liked but they were well beyond what he could afford. The same was true for a jacket that caught his eye, a robe he was somewhat keen on, and a hunting vest with lots of cool little pockets. Ethan’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he saw “$400” printed neatly on the bottom of the tag attached to the vest. He was just about to head back to the lava lamp when his eye caught an image of a cowboy standing tall under a bright blue sky, his jaw set and his dark, steely eyes looking on under the bill of a broad-brimmed hat. At the bottom of the bright, backlit poster the name “Stetson” was written in a strong and sturdy font. Ethan was attracted to the poster and the image of the cowboy. Looking below the poster, he noticed a small display of cologne. His eye wasn’t long transfixed on the rancher before being taken in by the come-hither eyes of a scantily clad, sophisticated beauty draping herself over a bare-chested man who was staring aimlessly off into the distance. “Sauvage by Dior” was written at the bottom of this poster. Both images raked at the coals glowing in his, as yet, unformed chest and Ethan was drawn in to the Macy’s cologne counter.

There were so many different scents to smell and so many different images to wrestle with. Ethan liked the Dior cologne as well as the ones by Calvin Klein and Polo but they were far too expensive. He kind of liked the Stetson cologne and was surprised to find that one of the bottles sold for $24.99. He looked up again at the cowboy and then at the temptress. “Yes,” Ethan thought to himself, “cologne might be what’s missing for me.”

Meeting up with his mom and sister, Ethan felt funny carry the sharp, little, bright red Macy’s bag that his cologne was put in. Both his mom and his sister looked at the bag and then, cocking their heads, stared at Ethan quizzically.

“What did you get there, son?” his mom asked, a kidding smile spreading across her face.

“Cologne,” Ethan replied sheepishly; wishing suddenly that he’d just bought a belt.

His answer elicited broad, excited smiles and giggling laughter from the women in Ethan’s life. “What kind?” his sister wanted to know.

“Stetson,” Ethan said, a little more confidently.

“Stetson?” Eliza said, sneering. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Stetson is a very handsome-smelling cologne, Ethan,” his mom said while nodding approval with a patronizing air. “I think that’s a wonderful use of your gift card.”

It was a long lunch. Ethan endured some additional ribbing from his sister and probing from his mother. When they got up from the table to throw away their lunch items, he stuck the bottle of cologne in his jeans pocket and threw away the little bag.

Riding home, Ethan sat alone in the back seat of his mom’s SUV. He was glad to be mostly by himself and left out of the front-seat conversation. He retreated inside his winter coat and left his hood on for the ride home.

Stopping at a red light near the center of the city, Ethan’s eye was drawn to a large mural painted on the side of an old church building. The image was of a man who appeared to be nailed to a post and crossbeam. Sadness and anger were painted on the faces of the onlookers below but the suffering man’s countenance was that of an angel, full of love. Enraptured, for a moment Ethan seemed to be painted into the scene; one of the onlookers looking up in wonder. As the car began rolling forward, Ethan’s eye shot to the name on the sign in front of the building: “Ecclesia Odorem”.

“Ecclesia Odorem,” Ethan said haltingly; interrupting his mom and sister’s conversation. “What does that mean?”

“Oh, the church there?” his mother replied. “That’s a funny name. It’s strange. It means ‘Church of the Fragrance’ or something like that. We used to take field trips there when I was a kid and look at all the artwork.”

Ethan could suddenly feel the bottle in his pocket. “Hmm,” he thought to himself. “Whatever that was on that wall – I bet that’s what’s missing.”

We’re looking forward to another wonderful morning of worship and fellowship in the Word! We’re glad to gather and for the blessings of the time spent together – but it’s more than that. Just as a ship needs harbor times ahead of the high seas, so we need sanctuary times ahead of the rough and tumble, ensnaring weeks that lie ahead for each of us. Church is such a lifeline and a blessing for our faith! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!

  • Pastor Tate
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A Fair Trial

January 5, 2025

Luke 18:1-8

And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

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