Hosken-News Blog: August 2018

Sunday, August 26, 2018

The Foolishness of Preaching

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:18-21 - "For the preaching of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, I will bring the discernment of the discerning to nothing.' Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the lawyer of this world? Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom didn't know God, it was God's good pleasure through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe."

People tend to understand what you're trying to communicate by interpreting it through the lens of their own experiences. When Paul preached his famous sermon on Mars Hill in Athens, standing near the statues of Greek gods and goddesses, "some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also were conversing with him. Some said, 'What does this babbler want to say?' Others said, 'He seems to be advocating foreign deities," because he preached Jesus and the resurrection'" (Acts 17:18). They thought that "Jesus" and "Anastasia" (Resurrection) were the names of some deities hitherto unknown to them. They got it half right, the "Jesus" part!

Among Protestants, the sermon is the main thing in church, but among Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, the sacraments and holy tradition are most important. I'd like to affirm that both are equally important. When a Protestant visits a Catholic mass or an Orthodox liturgy for the first time, he may hear just a five-minute homily or none at all and think - "Where was the sermon? Did I miss it when my mind was wandering?" And when a Catholic or Orthodox person visits a Protestant service, she wonders - "How could they leave out the most important thing, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ?" Again, the words of St. Paul:

"The cup of blessing which we bless, isn't it a partaking of the Blood of Christ? The bread which we break, isn't it a partaking of the Body of Christ? Because we, who are many, are one bread, one body; for we all partake of the one bread. ... For I received from the Lord that which also I delivered ["traditioned" in Greek] to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed took bread. When he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, 'Take, eat. This is My Body, which is broken for you. Do this in memory of Me.' In the same way he also took the cup, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My Blood. Do this, as often as you drink, in memory of Me. For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, if he doesn't discern the Lord's Body" (1 Corinthians 10:16-17 & 11:23-25, 29).

... and ...

"Now I declare to you, brothers, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which you also stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold firmly the word which I preached to you -- unless you believed in vain. For I delivered ["traditioned" in Greek] to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:1-4).

So you see, both are true. It's not "either-or" - it's "both-and" - both the sermon and the sacraments are vitally important. The sermon without the sacraments is just words without power. And the sacraments without the sermon can degenerate into a meaningless ritual. Both are necessary! Why do the sacraments have saving power? Because Christ said so! For example -

If I were to become upset about people who speed in their cars in front of my home where there are little children in the neighborhood, and I would make a nice, white, recangular sign with the lettering "SPEED LIMIT 15 MPH" and put it on a post with flashing yellow lights next to the street, what will happen? In a day or two, a policeman will knock on my door and ask, "Are you the person who put up that sign out there? You don't have the authority to do that: you must pay a fine and take it down! Only the city council has the authority to have traffic signs put up." In the same way, only Christ and His appointed representatives have the power, the authority, to make those material elements - bread and wine - into the real Body and Blood of Christ.

But isn't simply believing in Christ enough? Again, St. Paul wrote - "For with the heart, one believes unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, 'Whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.' For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich to all who call on Him. For, 'Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.' How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher? And how will they preach unless they are sent? (Romans 10:10-15a). The Greek word "send" is "apostello" - to be commissioned by an apostle, to be vested with the authority to preach the Gospel. So believing is tied to preaching and preaching is tied to being granted apostolic authority to do so. It's not "either-or" - it's "both-and."

St. Paul felt compelled to preach without pay - "For if I preach the gospel, I have nothing to boast about; for necessity is laid on me; but woe is to me, if I don't preach the gospel" (1 Corinthians 9:16). He even wrote to his young disciple Timothy - "Preach the word; be urgent in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with all patience and teaching" (2 Tim. 4:2). Some modern translations put it - "Preach the word when you feel like it and when you don't!" Sometimes we might be tired to the bone or just not feeling up to it. But JUST DO IT!

In my Hosken-News issues Ministry as Proclamation (kerygma / kerusso) - Part 1 and Ministry as Proclamation (kerygma / kerusso) - Part 2, I delve deeper into the meaning of the Greek verb "kerusso" - "preach" and "kerygma" - "proclamation." If you have time, give your attention to these words: we must not downplay either sermonizing or the sacraments!

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!

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Sunday, August 12, 2018

Getting to Pi

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

Getting to Pi In recent weeks the news has been over-full of reports about sexual scandals in the Roman Catholic Church and in a prominent Midwest Evangelical mega-church: a leading Catholic cardinal was deposed and the head pastor of that Evangelical mega-church was forced to resign along with the entire church board. What's going on here?

Nowadays people will say - "Everything's relative, there aren't any absolutes anymore" (except for the statement "everything's relative" - that's absolute)! "You can do whatever you want and there are no consequences because today we have the Pill and abortion!" Remember "Pi" - the letter in the Greek alphabet that represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter? In 1 Kings 7:23 it tells when Solomon built the Temple - "Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference." The ratio of 30 cubits circumference to 10 cubits diameter is 3.0 - not a very accurate measurement by today's standards, certainly not "verbally inerrant," but close enough in those days to build a big bronze wash-basin.

Remember when they introduced problems in your high school algebra class that had multiple variables? They contained strange letters like "a" and "b" and "x" and "y" in a bunch of fractions: you stared at the problem and probably thought - "This is impossible to solve! Everything's relative to everything else!" Then you saw the letter Pi - "I know what that is: it's 3.1416! Now I can start solving for those other variables that all seemed relative to each other!" This is how life is - we grab hold onto some standards that work rather well in day-to-day life. Some people will object to our standards by using the "lifeboat" analogy or "adultery is allowable if one's spouse is mortally ill or frigid or this or that" or "abortion is moral in cases of rape and incest" in order to drive a wedge into standard morality defenses.

This is like saying that Pi isn't simply 3.0 or 3.14 or 3.1416: those numbers are woefully inadequate in today's technology that requires auto and airplane parts to be machined to a tolerance of at least ten-thousandths of a millimeter. In one of the major jetliner crashes in which hundreds of people died, it was discovered that the fault was in tiny tubes carrying cooling oil to the jet engines that had been wrongly machined by a couple ten-thousandths of a millimeter. When I was in high school someone told me to remember the phrase - "May I have a large container of coffee" - the number of letters in each word represent Pi: 3.1415926. That's down to the ten-millionth part in tolerance or accuracy: certainly good enough for today's technology, even if not quite perfect.

In the Catholic Church they hold to the doctrine of "papal infallibility" that teaches everything the pope says "ex cathedra" (from the throne) is totally perfect and infallible. In most conservative Evangelical churches they hold to the similar doctrine of "verbal inerrancy of the Bible" that teaches every word in the Bible is divinely inspired and inerrant - without error. Some call this the "Protestant Paper Pope" ...except for the fact that almost every Evangelical believer who thinks he is guided by the Holy Spirit therefore thinks he is inerrant or infallible - a pope unto himself. Having so many millions of popes explains why there are tens of thousands of Protestant denominations.

Coupled with these doctrines of infallibility and inerrancy is the Augustinian-Calvinist doctrine of predestination which teaches that God has chosen in eternity past those who will be saved and those who will be damned. So if God drew for you the lucky number, you're in like Flynn - you've got a non-cancellable ticket to heaven. Standard Catholic and most Evangelical dotrinal statements hold to this doctrine of predestination, which is very convenient when it comes to sinning: if you're one of God's chosen, nothing you will ever do can cause you to lose your salvation, your winning ticket to heaven, because when God chooses you, especially someone "called to serve God," He never changes His mind. Therefore sins aren't really, seriously sinful: they just say "Sorry!" - maybe spend six months or so on a therapy "sabbatical" - and they're good to go, transferred to another church in a faraway state, and back on track again... often to repeat the same offenses.

So evils such as misuse of church finances, secret homosexual lifestyles and and male-female fornication among the clergy creep in and get swept under the carpet. It's the same sort of thing King David described in Psalm 106:9-35. I won't quote the entire passage here: click on the link to read the whole text. But think of the parallels between the way God delivered the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, parted the Red Sea, fed them in the wilderness, etc., but then the Israelites fell into pagan idolatry - compared to the way He established the United States as a fairly God-fearing country, but it now has become post-Christian, even anti-Christian and neo-pagan: "But [they] mixed themselves with the nations, and learned their works" (verse 35). Just as the pagan nations around ancient Israel practiced temple prostitution and human sacrifice of the babies produced by this fornication, today we have creeping into churches the normalization of adultery, fornication and homosexuality, no-fault divorce, "hookups," gay and lesbian clergy, and abortion on demand.

Famous people: sports heros, movie stars, and leading politicians often flaunt their immorality by saying - "I haven't done anything wrong!" By saying this, they confuse what is legal with what is immoral: It is now legal to have homosexual relations, commit fornication and adultery, but these acts violate traditional and Biblical Christian morality. It is legal to smoke tobacco products but it is a sin against our bodies and shortens our lifespan by several years, even decades. It is now legal in several states to smoke marijuana but it has a very real intoxicating effect that is quite difficult for police to detect using current breathalyzer equipment, it does long-term damage to one's mental ability and often is a "gateway drug" into more dangerous and deadly narcotics. It is legal to drink to excess and become drunk (unless one drives drunk) but it ruins one's health, finances and family relationships. Gluttony is legal but it's immoral and can kill you. Should I go on, or do you get the idea?

Then in my daily Bible reading I came across these verses, Psalm 119:123-128 -

"My eyes fail looking for Your salvation, for Your righteous word.
Deal with Your servant according to Your loving kindness. Teach me Your statutes.
I am Your servant. Give me understanding, that I may know Your testimonies.
It is time to act, O Lord, for they break Your law.
Therefore I love Your commandments more than gold, yes, more than pure gold.
Therefore I consider all of Your precepts to be right. I hate every false way."

Some translations read - "It is time for the Lord to act!" God must be "getting really ticked off" (to use an anthropomorphism) at mankind's moral shenanigans. Perhaps that's Him allowing the worst wildfires in recorded history out on the Left Coast of the U.S. and terribly destructive hurricanes and tornados all around the country. Some may say that it isn't God causing these natural events, but I would advise those people to read both the Old and New Testament stories about God sending such disasters. We can't continue scoffing at God and His moral laws without suffering some serious consequences.

We must abandon the illusion of human infallibility and inerrancy. Yes, we are called to holiness. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ taught: "Therefore be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). Remember that, even though we may get quite close to Pi (3.1415926...), it is an infinite number that just goes on and on in its decimal places without any pattern of repetition to the billionth and trillionth and quadrillionth part and beyond without end. "Close is good enough for government work," as the saying goes, but still not perfect or infinite or infallible or inerrant. But "tolerance" doesn't mean that anything goes; rather, it actually means accuracy as applied to real, day-to-day life.

It's an established scientific fact that the real number of people who were "born that way" - hermaphrodites - is a tiny fraction of one percent. It's like the difference between Pi = 3.1416 and Pi = 3.1415926. But if we accept the current gender ideology that around one-third of the population are born gay or lesbian or have indeterminate gender, it's like saying Pi = 2.0 -- this just won't work, it will cause the jet plane of society's demographics to crash. We must use the tools we have, the moral instruments that define Christian morality, even though they're not totally accurate to the billionth decimal point. Recall the words St. Paul -

"So then, my beloved, even as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure. Do all things without murmurings and disputes, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you are seen as lights in the world" (Philippians 2:12-15) - and -

"Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect; but I press on, if it is so that I may take hold of that for which also I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus. Brothers, I don't regard myself as yet having taken hold, but one thing I do. Forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Let us therefore, as many as are mature, think this way. If in anything you think otherwise, God will also reveal that to you" (Philippians 3:12-15).

Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner! In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!

(Linked to www.Hosken-News.info of 12 Aug. 2018.)