Treasures in Heaven

Most of you know well Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. (Matthew 6:19-20, NRSV)

While Jesus was here obviously referring to a realm beyond the visible sky above the earth, “heaven” in the Bible often meant simply that: the sky and the clouds and other things visible in it. For example, when Jesus said “until heaven and earth will pass away” (Matt. 5:18), he was talking about the sky above the earth, not what we usually think of as Heaven.

Certainly we humans are wise to heed Jesus’ words about storing treasures in Heaven. But perhaps it is time to think also about storing treasures in heaven—or wherever the digital cloud is. (If it is not in heaven, the sky, why is it called a “cloud”?!)

On May 31, June and I attended “homecoming” at New Hope Church and Cemetery, my father’s home church in Worth County, Missouri. The land for that church and cemetery was donated in 1877 by his grandfather William Seat’s father. And in March 1878 William’s grandmother, Elizabeth Seat, was the first to be buried in the new cemetery.

Just two years later William died while he was still 30 and was buried close to his grandmother. More than 60 years later, his widow, Rachel Clark Seat who never remarried, was buried beside him.

Gravestone of Alexander Clark (1804-1864)

After looking at many ancestors’ gravestones at New Hope, we drove over to Kent Cemetery southwest of the little town of Denver. We went there mainly for the purpose of seeing for the first time the grave marker for my great-grandmother Rachel’s grandfather, Alexander Clark, who was buried there in 1864.

All this got me thinking about the future of small country cemeteries, of which there are several in Worth County and in rural counties all across the country. I wonder what they will be like 40 or 50 years from now. Who will take care of them? Will they most likely be largely forgotten and seldom visited? Perhaps.

So, maybe the wave of the future is digital memorials stored in the “cloud”—and this is being increasingly done. Five years ago already a book was published under the title Your Digital Afterlife, and there is a helpful website called The Digital Beyond.

The latter maintains a list of more than fifty online services designed to help people plan for their digital afterlife and/or to memorialize loved ones. Putting memorials in the digital cloud—or putting treasured memories in heaven, if you will—seems particularly promising, and maybe better now than putting gravestones in a country cemetery (not that it has to be one or the other).

With digital memorials, not only information about the deceased loved one but pictures, voice recordings, and other treasures can also be stored—and accessed from anywhere. And according to the appeals made on some of the websites reviewed in The Digital Beyond, they will be there “forever.”

Really?

I wondered about the future of small, rural cemeteries. GGG-Grandfather Alexander Clark’s stone is still legible after 150 years. But what do you think? Will what we store in the digital cloud be accessible 150 years from now—and even forever?

Maybe—or maybe not.

So if we are looking for lasting treasures/memorials, taking the words of Jesus seriously is the way to go.

What about Those Who Are Trans Formed?

Things used to be so simple when it came to gender issues. Boys/men were males who liked girls/women and girls/women were females who liked boys/men or at least wanted a good one for a husband and breadwinner/caretaker.

In all the “advanced” civilizations of the world that was how things were—in public and on the surface, at least. Those who did not fit the prescribed roles had to keep their real feelings in a “closet.” Those who deviated from the traditional pattern were thought to be, and castigated as, deviants—and often called even more derogatory names.

In several previous blog articles I have written about LGBT issues, focusing mostly on the LGs (lesbians and gays). I am still at a loss to know what to say about the Bs (bisexuals). But now the Ts are being widely discussed. The Ts, of course, refers to transgender persons, now often just calls trans.

A trans man is a female-to-male transgender person who was identified as a female at birth but whose gender identity is that of a man. And a trans woman is, of course, the opposite—and perhaps the best known trans woman in the world this week is Caitlyn Jenner.

The cover story of the June 1 issue of Vanity Fair magazine was “Call Me Caitlyn,” the tale of Olympic gold-medal (decathlon) champion Bruce Jenner’s transformation from the Male Athlete of the Year in 1976 to a female who looks like a model in 2015.

Jenner says that she was trans formed (my words); that is, born as a female in a male body. Therefore, at the age of 65 she was, finally, transformed from a man to a woman. After her transition, Jenner tweeted on June 1, "I'm so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self.”

But there are those, especially some conservative Christians, who do not approve of what Jenner did and do not believe in trans formation or affirm those who are transformed from one gender to the other. One such person is Ronnie Floyd, pastor of a megachurch in northwest Arkansas—and currently the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Among other things that might be said about him, Floyd is the pastor of the Duggar family, about whom many of you know much more than I. Like most of you, though, I have heard that Josh Duggar, the oldest of the “19 Kids,” has admitted to molesting girls when he was a teenager.

Even before the release of the new issue of Vanity Fair, Floyd made reference to the sins of both Duggar and Jenner, saying they were both sinners: the former because of sexual molestation and the latter because of gender transition.  

According to the Christian Post, Floyd stated that “gender is not fluid” and he emphasized that God does not make mistakes. He is also quoted as saying, “Did God make him this way? Absolutely not.” In Floyd’s view, no one is trans formed—and it is wrong (sinful) to transition from one gender to another.

But more and more conservative Christians are admitting that most gays and lesbians are such by birth and not by choice, and that their sexual orientation is due to “nature” not “nurture.” Thus, reparative therapy is largely discounted now.

So why should it be any different for those who are trans? And if they were trans formed, shouldn’t they be supported and affirmed if or when they transition into a trans man or a trans woman?

Blessings on you, Caitlyn Jenner!

Was Jesus Insane?

What a preposterous question: was Jesus insane?! Those who are pious Christians may even be offended that such a question is raised. On the other hand, those who are highly anti-Christian may think the answer is obvious: in most likelihood he was.

This is no new question, though. Early in the Gospels we read, “When his family heard what was happening, they came to take control of him. They were saying, ‘He’s out of his mind!’” (Mark 3:21, CEB).

And repeatedly Jesus was accused by his religious opponents of being possessed by demons. As you know, demon possession was at that time the explanation of what we would call mental illness.

The question of Jesus’ sanity was raised anew in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century. In 1913 Albert Schweitzer wrote his thesis for an M.D. degree. It was titled (in English translation) “The Psychiatric Study of Jesus.”

According to Schweitzer, the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) was the first in modern times to conjecture that Jesus was “psychopathic.” Schweitzer, however, mainly analyzed the works of three contemporary medical writers—a German, a Frenchman, and an American—who between 1905 and 1912 sought to explicate Jesus’ insanity.

Schweitzer’s conclusion, though, was that the efforts of those who claimed Jesus was insane fell “far short of proving the existence of mental illness.”

I started thinking about this topic when reading a book with the unlikely title The Ethiopian Tattoo Shop (1983), a collection of 22 “parables” written by Edward Hays, a Catholic priest in Kansas. (The book was recently mentioned by a friend who knows Hays, and I have heard others also speak highly of him.)

One of Hays’s stories is “The Hired Hand,” a man that was wonderfully good and kind to his employer and his family. But he said his name was Jesus Christ, and before long he was arrested as an escapee from the “State Insane Asylum.”

What would happen, Hays wonders, if Jesus were to reappear among us today? Quite possibly, he would be considered insane or “demon possessed” just as he was when he lived on earth 2,000 years ago.

Then I began reading The Underground Church (2013), an engaging book by UCC Pastor Robin Meyers. The first chapter is titled “Sweet Jesus: Talking His Melancholy Madness.” That thought-provoking chapter is based in part on the poem “Maybe” by Mary Oliver (which is also attractively presented on Vimeo here).

Meyers also refers to Thomas Merton’s reflections on Adolf Eichmann in Raids on the Unspeakable (1964). At Eichmann’s trial, he was found to be “perfectly sane,” and Merton found that disturbing. So he concluded that “in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be . . . totally ‘sane’” (p. 49).

Similarly, in Don Quixote Cervantes wrote, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”

This same sentiment is expressed by the preeminent Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910-98): “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”

According to a former employee of the CIA whom I heard speak earlier this month, the U.S., which during the Cold War implemented the military strategy known as Mutual Assured Destruction (appropriately known as MAD), still supports the same policy increasingly applied to the tense relationship between Israel and Iran.

In this light, perhaps the “madness” of Jesus is sanity, after all.

Doing the Truth

Yesterday, May 24, was celebrated in many Christian churches as Pentecost Sunday. The first Christian celebration of Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, is often, for good reason, called “the birthday of the church.”

Two years ago, on May 19, 2013, I had the privilege of preaching on Pentecost Sunday at the Hirao Baptist Church in Fukuoka, Japan. My blog article posted the following day was about that day and that sermon.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to preach on Pentecost Sunday once again. That was at the Dearborn Christian Church (DCC), in a little town about 40 minutes northwest of where I live. It was a good experience worshipping there again in their well-taken-care-of 19th-century sanctuary.

The title of my sermon was “The Spirit of Truth,” based on the Bible reading that morning, which included John 16:13. There Jesus stated that “when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (NIV).

I went from that verse to emphasize that truth is something that is done. That assertion is based on John 3:21, which I read from the new Common English Bible (rather than from the NIV, the pew Bible at DCC): “Whoever does the truth comes to the light.”

Doing the truth: what an important concept!

It may not have been the first time I was impressed with the meaning of those words, but long ago I read “Doing the Truth,” one of Paul Tillich’s sermons included in his 1948 book “The Shaking of the Foundations.”

Tillich began his sermon by referring to the words “does the truth” in John 3:21 as being “a very surprising combination of words.” Consequently, many English versions of the Bible do not translate them that way. The NIV says, “whoever lives by the truth.”

Finally, I talked about “the fruit of the Spirit” as listed in Galatians 5:22-23a, suggesting that those nine products of the Spirit of truth are indicative of what we do, or should do, rather than just feelings or attitudes.

As needs to be recognized always, Christian love is not just a warm feeling toward people we like. Rather, it is seeking to do things that will be most helpful to our neighbors in need, even those we do not like. That was part of MLKing’s point in his powerful book “Strength to Love.”

It is harder to link joy to action, but the third fruit, peace, is easier. The fruit produced by the Spirit of truth is not just an inner feeling of tranquility, although that might be a part of it. Since Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, the peace that is a fruit of the Spirit is peace made between individuals, families, “tribes,” and nations.

That brings us to think about Memorial Day, which USAmericans celebrate today.

What started soon after the Civil War as Decoration Day, that is, a time to decorate with flowers the graves of those who died in that terrible conflict, and gradually came to known as Memorial Day has now been a federal holiday celebrated on the last Monday of May since 1971.

It is hard to remember the war dead without glorifying war to a certain extent—which is something I do not want to do. So let’s focus on the need to work for peace in order that there will be fewer war dead in the future—in our country and all countries.

I hope you Americans will have a Happy Memorial Day—and that we all will increasingly do the truth, which importantly includes striving to make peace.