Month: May 2024

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On the Back Burner

Sometimes life makes you feel like you’ve been placed on the backburner of the stove in God’s kitchen. Forgotten, whatever is being sauteed in your life is now burning. Smoke rises and sets off the fire alarm, while God does nothing to intervene. At least that is how it feels. You’ve been there. So have I. So has a New York city grandmother.

On a cold winter’s night in 1935, in a New York City courtroom, a tattered old woman stood before the judge, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. The storekeeper was pressing charges. The woman pleaded her case, “My daughter’s husband has deserted her. She is sick and her children are starving.” The shopkeeper refused to back down and drop the charges, saying, “It’s a bad neighborhood, your honor, and she’s got to be punished to teach other people a lesson.”

The judge sighed. He turned to the old woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you; the law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.”

And that is life on the back burner. No one listens, not even God. No one cares as hope evaporates like forgotten boiling water on the back burner of a stove.

Would it surprise you if I told you that Paul carried similar feelings?

By 2 Corinthians 2 Paul is in the midst of defending his decision not to visit this church, and his decision did not sit well with certain members who were influenced by outsiders. Instead, Paul dispatched a letter and began the long wait. Here is Paul’s description.

Now when I went to Troas to preach the gospel of Christ and found that the Lord had opened a door for me, I still had no peace of mind because I did not find my brother Titus there. So I said good-bye to them and went on to Macedonia (2 Cor. 2:13-14).

The situation in Corinth had grown toxic. The church attacked him like a rapid dog, and he was still licking his wounds. Having written a letter, which caused him great distress (2 Cor. 2:4), he outlined expected behavior. Without a reliable mail system, he dispatched Titus with the letter in hand to Corinth. He would meet with the church, read the letter to them, and gather a response to report back to Paul. All of that took time and introduced a waiting game. No email. No texting. No phones. Paul wrote a letter. Gave it to Titus who travels to Corinth. Titus reads the letter and allows the church to absorb the message before assessing their response. Then Titus makes the journey to find Paul.

That is a long time to wait. What happens in the meantime? In the void of unknown information, we tend to fill in the gap. No matter how hard we try, we insert information to complete the void, and it’s usually the worst-case scenario. Someone appears to ignore you; you assume they are angry with you. Your child is late coming home, you presume that there has been an accident. The boss calls you into his office and you start thinking, “What have I done wrong this time?” God won’t answer your prayer and you wonder, “What sin is in my life?” You’re arrested for stealing bread in the wake of the Great Depression and the judge with the law stands against you. So now you find yourself on the backburner of life and everything feels likes it’s about to go up in smoke.

Lloyd C. Douglas might have stumbled upon a solution. You might remember him as a minister and writer whose works included The Robe and Magnificent Obsession. As a university student, Douglas

lived in a boarding house. On the first floor was an elderly, retired music teacher, who was now an invalid and unable to leave the apartment.

Douglas said that every morning they had a ritual they would go through together. He would come down the steps, open the old man’s door and ask, “Well, what’s the good news?” The old man would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair, and say, “That’s Middle C! It was Middle C yesterday; it will be Middle C tomorrow; it will be Middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but my friend, that is Middle C!”

The old man discovered one thing that he could depend, one constant reality in life. He could have felt like he was on the back burner of life, I know I might have felt like that like. Instead of filling in the gaps with anxiety, lies, or fake truth, he chose something that wouldn’t change. He remembered Middle C. That is what he attached to his life too.*

Troas was the meeting place (2:12). Paul ventured to the city and waited for Titus to arrive with news. Titus never arrived. In the meantime, Paul preached in Troas, to which he claims, “the Lord had opened a door for (him).” Good things were happening in Troas. People were receptive to the gospel. Unlike the Corinthians, those in Troas trusted Paul and made course corrections to their lives. God was working. God was saving. But Paul found no resolution. No Titus. No news. No peace.

We’ve experienced the silence. A text is unanswered. A phone call is not returned. In its spot, anxiety.

With a plan in place, the backup was for Paul and Titus to meet in Macedonia, likely Philippi (2:13). With no clear directions from God, Paul was filled with apprehensive. His pot was simmering on the cusp of boiling over. Uneasiness. Worriedness. Anxious. He left a booming and productive ministry in search for answers he may or may not find. In truth, answers he may or may not want to know. And for now, we’re at a cliff-hanger and don’t know how this situation will get resolved. For Paul, he headed for Macedonia to wait for Titus on news of Corinth.

We live in a world where the forgotten backburner is so prevalent. We walk into people’s lives who feel discarded by society and abandoned by God. They live with broken promises to be there to the end. We bring a smile. We confidently step into their lives offering hope in a moment when they feel hopeless. They have filled in the gap with negative messaging, and we have the chance to redirect their thinking to believe again. To hope again. To love again. So, we sit and talk to our patients. We hold their hands. We listen to their stories, or complaints. We act for their good. We walk with them on a path that is difficult to navigate. And soon the pot that looked to be on the verge of boiling starts to simmer. Peace reclaims its place while hope is restored.

Still, sometimes life makes you feel like you’ve been placed on the backburner of the stove in God’s kitchen. Forgotten, whatever is being sauteed in your life is now burning. Smoke rises setting off the fire alarm, while God does nothing to intervene. At least that is how it feels. You’ve been there. So have I. So has a New York city grandmother.

On a cold winter’s night in 1935, in a New York City courtroom, a tattered old woman stood before the judge, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. The storekeeper was pressing charges. The woman pleaded her case, “My daughter’s husband has deserted her. She is sick and her children are starving.” The shopkeeper refused to back down and drop the charges, saying, “It’s a bad neighborhood, your honor, and she’s got to be punished to teach other people a lesson.”

The judge sighed. He turned to the old woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you; the law makes no exceptions. Ten dollars or ten days in jail.”

And that is life on the back burner. No one listens, not even God. No one cares as hope evaporates like forgotten boiling water on the back burner.

However, the judge that evening was no ordinary judge, but the sitting mayor. Having dismissed the judge earlier in the evening, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia – yea, that LaGuardia who has an airport named for him – was the sit-in judge. And while he was pronouncing sentence, LaGuardia reached into his wallet, took out a ten-dollar bill, and threw it into his hat with these words, “Here’s the ten-dollar fine, which I now remit, and furthermore, I’m going to fine everyone in the courthouse fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat. Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.”

The following day, a New York newspaper reported, “Forty-seven dollars and fifty cents were turned over to the bewildered old grandmother who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren. Making forced donations were seventy petty criminals, a few New York policemen, and a red-faced store-keeper.”

It’s a reminder to us that no matter how we feel at the time, to God, we are never a forgotten pot on the back burner.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)

* A story by Max Lucado.

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The Freedom to Play in Grace

Anyone who has been around sports knows that a coach has favorites. Right or wrong, he trusts certain players to play. Those players, who perform under the favor of the coach, play without fear. They know that their coach will not remove them from the game no matter the errors they commit. Other players, who are not under the coach’s grace, play in fear. You can see it in their timidity. You can see it in their eyes after committing an error. They look directly at the bench to see if the coach will send in a substitute. When the coach does substitute, the player steps off the court or field in shame, as their chin rests upon their chest. How much better will a player play knowing the coach will not yank him off the field for making mistakes?

My collegiate coach was the epitome of success. By my senior year our cross-country team had won the conference meet seventeen years in a row and twenty-four out of twenty-five years. Oddly enough, his background was basketball, not running. When he began his coaching career, he coached basketball. As much as he loved to play the game, he hated coaching because he despised taking kids out of the game for committing errors. He hated seeing the fear in their eyes. Loving the value of sports, he shifted to running where each runner could excel on his/her own merit. He taught self-discipline and inner motivation. He encouraged us to keep our moral and spiritual lives as disciplined as our running, for he understood the stranglehold that guilt and shame have on people and its debilitating impact on athletes. He wanted us to run in grace, not guilt.  

In a performance-based environment, success is tenuous. Fear, guilt, and shame tend to hold the upper hand and fuel motivation, a fuel like using diesel to a car needing unleaded gas. Fear gnaws at people believing something dangerous will occur or that failure is around the corner. Guilt, real or imagined, captures the emotional aftermath of failing. Shame is the painful feeling of humiliation. All of these are real, and we’ve all experienced them at one time or another. Fear: ask a child who has seen the anger in a parent about to respond to their defiance. Guilt: ask anyone who has ever been pulled over by a cop. Shame: ask anyone who had to make the amusement park “walk of shame.” Fear, guilt, and shame are interwoven into the fabric of this world, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape those feelings.

Church is supposed to be a different story. Jesus never motivated out of fear, guilt, or shame, instead he motivated people out of freedom and grace. They had a choice. We always have a choice. The younger brother in Luke 15 was allowed to walk away while the father never shamed him for leaving, or for that matter, for returning home. Zaccheus was never guilted into giving away his wealth but did so in freedom and grace. It wasn’t the fear of Jesus that caused Peter to sink into the sea, but the fear of the waves. Still, the church has used fear, guilt, and shame to motivate members to attend services, to participate in ministries, to keep them on the straight and narrow, and to give their lives to Jesus. Let’s be honest, if you provide too much freedom and grace, what’s the end result? Oh, that question in an of itself is rooted in fear.

The Corinthian church needed motivation to change. It was a mess. A big, dirty mess. It’s not the kind of church you want to bring home to meet the family. The church was imploding from division. They divided over their favorite preacher. They divided over spiritual gifts. Their divisiveness exploited the socio-economic tension, of all places, at the Lord’s Table. At least one family was embroiled in a lawsuit against another family. They saw themselves as wise when they acted foolishly. They prided themselves on embracing a man who was sleeping with his stepmother. Idolatry held the church in its clutches. They demanded their rights while claiming to follow a Savior who gave up his rights. That’s just Paul’s first letter. His second letter may be even worse. Idolatry still had its claws clenched into their lives. They had bailed on promises made to Paul to collect monies to send as aid to the Jerusalem church. They allowed a third party to come between them and their preacher, maligning Paul’s character in the process. What I know about the Corinthian Church is that I wouldn’t want to preach for them, much less be a member of that community. And if you were honest, you wouldn’t either.

Paul could have employed fear, guilt, and shame. He could have. If I was in his shoes, I would have. I would have reached deep into the Jonathan Edwards sermon that we are nothing more than being held in the hands of an angry God, standing on the very fringes of hell’s fire. More fear. More guilt. More shame. More control.

But Paul is not me. He confronts the sin in Corinth head on, but always as a pastor who loves his flock. And here, while he is defending himself against the accusation that he breaks his promises, he appeals to a promise-keeping God who himself creates an environment of gracious freedom by removing the fear, shame, and guilt from the equation. He’s not bringing in a substitute, he’s playing the team he’s called. Here is what Paul says,

Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come (2 Cor. 1:21-22).

Paul tells us that God makes us stand firm. We do not secure ourselves, but God makes us secure and steady in Christ. It’s all on God. At our strongest, we are too weak to play or to fight. To underscore this, Paul gives us three descriptions of God’s power. He does so in very strong, definitive wording that is unmovable.

First power: God anoints us. Anointing was common for healing. More importantly, prophets and kings were anointed as being set apart for service under God. The word used here for anointing is the same word for Christ, carrying with it Messianic overtones. One might say, since we are anointed in Christ we are linked to him for his purpose. All of God’s promises are fulfilled in Christ where we are the recipients.

Second power: God puts his seal of ownership on us. A seal is an official emblem by a lord, governor, or king. By placing his seal on us, likely a reference to the Holy Spirit, we now belong to God. We are now in his possession. Remember the Toy Story moment when Woody checks the bottom of his boot to find Andy’s name? Woody knows he belongs to Andy. More importantly, Andy realizes that Woody belongs to him because his name is on his boot. Essentially, God is looking to see if he has sealed us with his Spirit, and those whom he has belong to him. No one else.  

Third power: Paul uses marketing or banking terminology of earnest money. Suppose you are shopping for a car, and you find it. Your dream car. You want it, but don’t have the money. In a bind, you make arrangements to secure the car with a downpayment. The dealer or owner holds the car until you come back with the complete amount. The downpayment guarantees full payment. Similarly, God giving us his Holy Spirit is only a down payment guaranteeing that when he returns, he will make good on his payment, and we will be filled to the full with his Spirit.

All of this effort by God to anoint us, to seal us, and to giving us a deposit guaranteeing what is to come is the means for us to play in grace. If Paul argues to the dysfunctional Corinthian church that God is creating the freedom to succeed, what does that say about you and me? It’s like we can’t fail.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked for a man who owned a gas station about a half a mile from where I lived. His little gas station had a good reputation in the community and for all accounts he was a successful businessman. He was a Korean War vet who ran his business like a min-military unit. He barked orders and made his employees toe the line; mistakes were not tolerated. He had mystery shoppers who came to the station for service just to report back to him. In Oregon self-service pumps were banned and attendants pumped the gas for the customer. We had to wash every windshield and ask to check the oil. The station had to be kept neat and clean, and when it wasn’t he let us know in no uncertain terms his expectations. We kept busy, and if we weren’t busy, we created work to do or looked busy because attendants sitting around was not a look he wanted. When our tills were short, he took it out of our paycheck. I was the recipient of numerous berating’s that summer. I learned a lot from him, I grew to appreciate and respect him, but if truth be known he operated out of fear. His employees, those hired to pump the gas, did not respect the man and often feared losing their jobs at any given moment.

Four years later I spent the summer in Nashville, Tennessee living with my brother to spend more time with Cile. My summer job was working for a small cookie company. The owner discovered his grandmother’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies and began to market them. By the time I was hired they had moved to a small warehouse and made a half-dozen kinds of cookies: chocolate chip, white chocolate, butterscotch, peanut butter, et.al. With convection ovens and industrial mixers, my job was to mix the dough and bake them. The owner of the company expected and anticipated that mistakes would be made. Cookies break and recipes get botched, and the boss would simply say, “I’ve ruined plenty of batches, you know where the garbage can is.” I loved working for this boss and because his work environment was built-in with a freedom to fail, I gave him my best.

As evident from these verses from 2 Corinthians, God is more like the second boss than the first. He has created an environment for us to play with freedom in grace so that we can give him our all without fear of failure. Even when we do fail him.

Soli Deo Gloria!
(i.e., only God is glorified!)