Forty-Six Days of Prayer

Here we go again.  The pageant season is upon us.  For many of us, this is a time of anxiety and frustration.  The rehearsals get longer and the obligations at home and at work don’t seem to grow any lighter.  At the beginning of crunch week, you’ll probably get a cold that will linger around until the final performance.  You’ll find somebody in the cast, orchestra, or crew who will drive you a little bit crazy.  Somebody will hurt your feelings.  Somebody will let you down.

There’s a classic country song called “Night Rider’s Lament” that I’ve known and sung to my family for years. The song describes a cowboy whose life his friends in the city simply don’t understand.  The chorus goes like this:  “Why do you ride for your money?  Why do you rope for short pay?  You ain’t getting nowhere and you’re losing your share.  Boy, you must have gone crazy out there.”

Do you have friends and family who think that way about you committing such a significant chunk of your life to performing in the pageant?  Why would you learn all of this music?  Why would you come to a week of dress rehearsals and then endure ten performances.  You probably didn’t even get a very good role.  Maybe you’re stuck way up in the catwalks aiming a light or helping with costumes.  Who is going to know that you did this?

Those people just don’t get it, do they?  The problem for all of us, though, is that at some point during the pageant experience, we take a turn being one of those people.  We look at our chaotic lives and say “I ain’t getting nowhere and I’m losing my share.  Boy, I must have gone crazy out there.”

While I’m not that kind of doctor, I do have a prescription to prevent you from getting the Pageant Panic Blues and to help you get the most from the next six weeks.  Pray and read the word.  Focus yourself on the task at hand and the person of Jesus Christ.

I offer this prayer guide once again in hopes that we as a pageant team can use it to focus our thoughts and our prayers.  May our dedication bring glory to God and may God use our efforts to bring many souls into the kingdom.  That’s my prayer this year.

--MB

November 1 Read: Romans 1:16-17

He lived a good and full life.  Although he left us this year, at the age of eight-seven, Hans Petersen can be said to have lived his life to the full.  For some sixty-four years he shared that life with Rosella, but marriage does not represent the only lifelong commitment Hans made.  He served his church as a deacon for more than sixty years, receiving the honor of emeritus status just a few years back.  For well over half a century he taught fifth grade boys Sunday School.  Over that same period he regularly served at City Union Mission, taking the word of God to some of the most needy hearts in Kansas City.  His children and grandchildren speak only well of him.  “Some people say that you get grumpier with age,” one of his grandchildren said.  “But that wasn’t his way.”  Those who worked with him at TWA remember him as a terrific craftsman and a man of the highest integrity.

If only for this one season, we who have dedicated ourselves to the Heart of America Christmas Pageant should take a lesson from Hans Petersen.  You see, Hans did not simply do things when the mood struck him or when those things were convenient.  He attached himself to a purpose—family, First Baptist-Raytown, fifth grade boys—and he served it as well as he could for as long as he could.

 By the world’s standards, Hans does not represent a great man.  A father and grandfather, a metal plater, a Sunday School teacher, a deacon—these are not the accomplishments that get your face on Time magazine or on a postage stamp.  Yet no one who attended Hans’ funeral in August, no one who saw that visitation line winding out of the worship center and snaking all over the lobby could doubt that this man touched many lives profoundly.  Hans didn’t do “great” things.  But the things that Hans did, he did great.

 When you look at rehearsal schedules and obligations for this pageant, when you are tempted to give less than your best to this effort, I would urge you to remember the little Danish man who left such a big hole when he departed.

 Pray for the works of Grace that God will do through our pageant.

November 2  Read: Isaiah 7:14

Can you tie a bowline?  I can tie a bowline in my sleep.  “The rabbit comes up through the hole, around the tree, and back down the hole.”  If you’ve ever tied a bowline, you know what I’m talking about.

 As a youth, I spent two summer teaching pioneering—ropes, knots, and lashings—at the Boy Scout camp near Osceola, Missouri.  One of the things that stands out in my mind between those two years is how much more cooperative the Scouts became between the first and second summers.  You see, I know that they had to become more cooperative because of some results.  During that first summer, I fairly often had to ask some unruly boy to leave the area in which I was teaching.  Every two or three days I would encounter such a problem.  During the second summer, I noticed that I never had to send a single boy away from my class.  Obviously the boys had changed.

 Of course in reality the boys had not changed much at all between 1978 and 1979.  What had changed significantly was me.  Although I could not see the change in the mirror or measure it in any way, the results suggested that something had changed.  Apparently, during that second summer, I carried with me a bit more authority—sufficient authority that a stern look or a word of reproof sufficed to set these boys in order.

 I mention this today because in the first scene in our script the voice of authority speaks clearly.  In fact, we hear authoritative speech from two different authorities.  On the dramatic front we hear the voices of Imperial Rome, while in the music, three of our tenors will evoke the prophetic heritage of Israel.  It’s the authority of the world contrasted against the authority of the Living God.

 The question that we should ask ourselves today (and every day for that matter) is which of these voices of authority do we listen too more consistently?  Who is your authority?  Is it God who is the ultimate arbiter of your decisions?  That’s not an unimportant question for us in this season of preparation.

 Pray for Gene Calhoun and Judy Hastings

November 3    Read: Ephesians 4:1-6

 The first pageant I attended, the only one I’ve seen as a spectator, came some fifteen years ago, when we had only two children.  I remember that because Emily was just old enough to have some sense of what was going on as the passion scenes rolled around.

 Last February, Emily, just a few months past her eighteenth birthday, brought home an announcement that I had not quite prepared myself to hear.  “I’m pretty sure I’ve met the guy I’m going to marry,” she announced one evening.  A month later, Emily tightened the screws.  “I think that we should get married this summer rather than next December,” she told me.

Perhaps you’ve met one of those people who sits and carefully weighs everything before making a move.  While you might have met such a person, I guarantee you that it wasn’t Emily you met.  Emily has always been my impulsive kid.  In a hurry to grow up, she couldn’t wait to be done with school, to get a job, and, as it turned out, to get married.  (Thankfully, she hasn’t told me I’m going to be a grandfather.  I’m not quite ready for that.)

 During the months that led up to Emily marrying Christian, I learned that they had both experienced some powerful feelings of God’s intention that they take this step.  This wasn’t a warm-fuzzy attitude.  They had the sorts of experiences that, when you hear about them, make the hair stand up on your neck.  Still, we have spent recent months hearing from people certain that the pair was too young to get married.  Penny and I reminded these people that we had begun our twenty-year marriage at precisely the same ages.

 Mary, on the other hand, had no precedent to stand upon when she let her family know that she would become the virgin mother of the Christ child.  Can you imagine the head-shaking that must have gone on around the neighborhood when that news was circulated.

 Each of us has a call from God, and many times that call is to do something that other people can’t imagine us doing.  Sometimes we can’t even see it ourselves.  To support us in these callings, God gives us the support that we need.  Our job is to keep our eyes and hearts open to the confirmation that God provides.

 Pray for Bruce Rosenbaum and all who work in sound.

November 4       Read: Luke 2

Several years ago, I stood in the church-encased cave that is traditionally identified as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.  You’d never know, upon entering this dank and cramped chapel, that it is in fact a cave.  For centuries a shifting tapestry of church buildings has dominated the site, while literal tapestries drape the walls along with a variety of incense burners and the other accoutrements of our more ritualistic brethren.

Last spring, you will remember, Palestinian militants, fleeing from an Israeli military crackdown, turned the Church of the Nativity into a sort of fortress, assuming that the Israelis would hold out a long time before firing on one of the world’s great historical sites.

After the militants left the building on May 10, the conditions inside must have harkened back to the conditions in that place more than two thousand years ago.  After all, when thirty-nine Palestinians as well as a collection of priests and monks spend five weeks in a building without proper provision for waste removal, the results would simply have to be awful.

All too often, I think, we sanitize and homogenize the birth of Christ until we forget the miracle of it all.  We forget that Mary, Joseph, and Jesus would have been enduring the smells of animals and hay.  They would have been dealing with the flies and the dirt.  But of course the real miracle is the miracle of Immanuel, God with us.  Somehow, in a manner that none of us will ever completely grasp, the fullness of God joined with the fullness of humanity in a single baby.   God could have dropped Jesus onto the earth fully grown and saved him from thirty years of mundane and painful human life.  He could have done that, but he didn’t.  Instead Jesus was born like us.  He grew like us.  He experienced many of the same pains and problems that we experience, living those thirty years in order to provide three years of ministry.

Why?  The squalor in the Church of the Nativity ought to answer that question.  Israelis and Palestinians will never solve their own problems.  No government can tame the hearts of greed and weakness within each of us.  Our only hope grew from Bethlehem’s Child, from Heaven’s Child.

Pray for Gary Crutcher and all who work in lighting and in video.

November 5      Matthew 13:44-46

Several years ago, I went to a garage sale that my father-in-law was holding in conjunction with an old family friend, whom we all affectionately call Mr. Grumpy.  While Penny pored over the various treasures that the two men had spread upon the various tables and out onto the driveway, I sauntered around in that bored-husband gait that you use whenever the wife is shopping.  I sauntered, that is, until my eyes fell on a collection of small, inch-high animal figures.  I knew immediately from their finish and style that these were the “Wades” figures that my parents sold in their antique business.

 Mr. Grumpy wanted a quarter each for these things.  I naturally snatched them all up.  As I handed him two dollars for the eight figures, he offered to make me a deal on the other half-dozen or so non-Wades animals that he had for sale.  “No thanks,” I immediately replied.

Ten minutes later I had driven to my parents’ house and relinquished the Wades to them for a tidy profit.  As I recall, they gave me four bucks for each of them.  This was hardly a sale to hang your retirement on, but it did pay for a nice dinner for the family.  I never told Mr. Grumpy about my little coup, as that would have undoubtedly left him grumpier yet.

One of the keys to success in the antique business is knowing what you’re looking at.  Sometimes an old piece of glass is just an old piece of glass, while other times an old piece of glass might be worth more than a nice car.

 The “wise men” seem to me remarkable men.  It wasn’t that they traveled from far distant lands or that they brought valuable gifts to the Christ child.  What makes these men amazing is that they had some sense of the value of that boy in Bethlehem.

 In America today, you would be hard pressed to find someone who has no knowledge at all of Jesus.  Many people know a great deal about Jesus, yet they do not hold him as valuable.  Like Mr. Grumpy, these people don’t understand what they have before them.  Let’s make sure that we appreciate the value of Jesus Christ today and for always.

 Pray for Larry Jones, Steve Cowart, and Kyle Weldon.

November 6             Read: Matthew 20:17-23

 For Pilate, the position as governor in Judea would have been something of a coup.  A rising star in the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire, I’m sure that Pilate had his eyes not only on doing the job well in Judea, but on earning his way to another posting, a better position.  We see this same behavior today.  A politician steps into a low-level position, but you can see the ambition toward something bigger and better.   “If I play my cards right as a member of Congress, I can shoot for the Governor’s Mansion, and then . . . dare I dream it . . . the White House!”

 Don’t misunderstand me.  I know that we have many people for whom “public service” is more than just a convenient label to put upon their road to power.  But we have also seen plenty of examples of unthinking, grasping ambition from all points on the political compass.

What I find remarkable, as I think of Pilate coming into his new posting in Judea, is that this man, whom we can assume from history’s witness to have been an ambitious climber, entered his new domain only to find the most powerful man to ever live already at work.

Pilate never knew that Jesus held the real power in the world.  For centuries after Pilate died, the world thought of Rome as the source of power and Christianity as a source of irritation.  Yet today, as the mighty works of Rome have turned into ruined tourist sites, Jesus still lives.  Today, the empire of Christ, without the benefit of a single legion, spreads around the world.  On every inhabited continent people know the power of Christ firsthand, while the power that was Rome languishes in books.

 As you think about Pilate in preparation for this pageant, don’t think him a particularly bad guy.  Instead, realize that we all have a little Pilate in us.  There’s a bit of conniving, a bit of greed, and a bit of ambition in the best of us.  Remember how the mother of James and John asked for her sons to sit at the right and left of Jesus.  Remember the posturing and vanity of Peter.  We can’t wholly escape the attitudes of Pilate.  But we can learn to master them by keeping our eyes on the real power in this world.

 Pray for the strings in the orchestra.

November 7             Read: Matthew 3

 I’d like to spend a few minutes today thinking about the Jordan River.  I’ve been to that place twice in my life.  Both times, I was struck by the beauty that runs down that valley.  In the large lake that we know as the Sea of Galilee, we find life teeming.  The waters have for centuries abounded with fish, enough to support a significant troop of fishermen.  Around the lake you’ll find fertile ground, places where crops grow, where palm trees stretch toward the sky.  The agricultural richness stretches down to the south as well as the river spills out of the lake and continues through the valley toward the Judean desert.

 Eventually, however, life comes to an end.  It is almost as if God wrote this truth into the very terrain of the Promised Land.  As green and abundant as the water and the land are in the northern reaches, we find only poison and death once the water makes its way into the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth.

 We see the certainty of death not only in the topography of the Middle East.  The newspaper pages carry obituaries each day.  We think of those we once knew who are gone today.  Eventually, in each of our lives, we reach that day when we fully understand in our hearts that we too will one day bring life to an end.

 It is fitting that Jesus interrupted the flow of Jordan River with his baptism.  In the midst of his earthly life, he demonstrated to us that we have to think beyond mortal days.  Unless the Lord returns within our lifetimes, we will all die and, like the waters that enter the Dead Sea, become as lifeless as the stones of the desert.

 Isn’t that cheery idea to dwell on today?  Of course I am preaching—literally in many cases—to the choir here.  We know the importance of giving ourselves to Christ, the dedication that we symbolize in our ordinance of baptism.

 What we sometimes do not remember, however, is that each day, the waters of the Jordan continue to flow into the Dead Sea.  Each day unsaved people—ones we know—flow downhill and find themselves one day closer to a final destination that no one wants.  Let us prayerfully resolve to be fountains of clear, live-giving waters through this production and throughout our lives.

 Pray for the brass in the orchestra.

November 8              Read: Matthew 10:5-16

 Long, long ago in a church home far, far away, I knew a woman whom everybody took to be an outstanding religious teacher.  I’d say that everyone took her to be an outstanding Bible teacher, but since she didn’t much care to be burdened down with such inconvenient baggage as the Bible, I would not be terribly truthful in calling her that.  Since I can’t recall her name, I’ll call her Joan.

 Regardless of the focus for the lesson or the theme for the service, Joan always managed to turn the topic around to her favorite metaphor:  the spiritual journey.  To give you a sample of her teaching, it might sound somewhat like this:  “When we engage in our spiritual journey, we find that there are obstacles upon the road.  Sometimes the road is difficult, while other times the road is pleasant and smooth.  That’s the nature of our spiritual journey.”  That’s profound stuff!  You can see why she wouldn’t have any use for the Bible, right?

There’s actually nothing wrong with the idea of our spiritual life as a journey.  John Bunyan created a very successful picture of the spiritual journey in the pages of Pilgrim’s Progress, reputedly the second most read book in history, after the Bible itself.  The difference, however, between Joan’s journey and Christian’s journey in Bunyan’s classic is that Joan really had no idea of where she was headed.  It might have been enlightenment, nirvana, or a place of peace.  At times I think that she just enjoyed the journey for the sake of the journey.  Bunyan’s Christian knew where he was headed.  But just knowing where you are going is not enough.  You have to be headed somewhere worthwhile.

 In our pageant script, Pilate’s wife Procula heads out on a journey to Damascus, more for the purpose of getting away from Jerusalem than to really get anywhere.  She knew where she was headed, but didn’t have a good reason to make the journey.

 God has mapped out a worthwhile journey for each of us.  For Jesus, the journey was to a criminal’s death at Calvary.  For Paul, the journey involved preaching the gospel all around the Roman world.  For the near term, our journey is to proclaim the gospel through the medium of drama.  Let’s travel well together.

 Pray for the woodwinds in the orchestra.

November 9              Read:  Matthew 6:9-13

 “Our Father who art in heaven”—those words from the King James Version of Matthew will always be the way in which I will remember the Lord’s Prayer first.  Probably if we were to poll the participants in this year’s pageant, grabbing the people who are climbing around in the rafters and those who are watching the children downstairs along with everybody else, we’d find that most everybody has the Lord’s Prayer committed to memory.  Even people in churches that do not teach and preach the Bible have that prayer memorized.  I’d bet that a lot of older Catholics know it in Latin and in English.

 I don’t remember when I learned these words, but clearly I stuck them somewhere secure in my memory so that they have lingered for better than thirty years now.  Of course there are other things that I remember as well.  I can still sing the baritone line from many of the old glee club songs we sang in high school.  I even remember all of my lines from Hello Dolly.  (Of course, there wasn’t but one line to that part.)  I can still sing a lot of Bruce Springsteen’s songs word-for-word as well.

 While I do not want to put down the idea of memorizing the scripture, there is something sterile and pointless about the way many of us remember the Lord’s Prayer.  We go through the word without ever pausing to consider what those words mean.  These words pause over our lips without much thought, taken together as a unit.  It’s a lot the same with the pledge of allegiance.  Most people might as well be speaking Swahili for all the thought that they give to those words.

 In the last couple of years I have read several things that reminded me of the price that people have paid to put the words of the Lord’s Prayer and the rest of the scripture into our hands.  I’ve read about Tyndale and the other Bible translators who faced oppression, imprisonment, and even death to put the Bible into English.  I’ve read about the Puritans who faced loss of prestige and position to preach a Biblical gospel from the pulpit.  As we listen to the words of the Lord’s Prayer, we owe it to these departed saints to listen carefully and to learn.

 Pray for the percussion and rhythm in the orchestra.

November 10      Read:  Matthew 6: 9-13 (again)

 Olivia drew a marvelous picture one of the last times she spent some time at my office at school.  Sitting at my work table, she carefully penned two horses.  The smaller of the two, its mane caught up into a series of braids, looked up at the larger with warm and loving eyes.  The caption read, “If Dad was a horse.”

 Olivia’s drawing has no value from a worldly standpoint.  I couldn’t go on eBay and get a bid for this lovely bit of childhood art.  It’s just a piece of paper, one of hundreds that this child has covered with her own endless gallery of art.

 I, on the other hand, give Olivia a lot of valuable things.  My salary buys the clothes that she wears.  It pays for the food that she eats and the furnace that keeps her warm at night.  I bought her bed and the house that it sits in.  My insurance covers her health and provides for her should I die.

 Besides what I buy, I protect Olivia.  I make sure that obvious fire hazards don’t threaten our home.  I watch during stormy weather to see if we should head to the basement.  I lock the doors at night.

 This child of mine isn’t aware of most of the things that I do on her behalf.  Some of the ones of which she is aware, she doesn’t really appreciate, but that’s okay.

 That’s a lot the way that we are when it comes to God’s provision for us.  How often do you think to thank God for air to breathe or the gravity that keeps us on the earth.  Still, as we read the Lord’s Prayer, it is usually that part about provision that interests us.  Most of us go on auto-pilot through those opening lines.  It’s when we get to the stuff about daily bread that we really perk up.

 As I read the Lord’s Prayer, I have to wonder if God doesn’t listen to our feeble attempts to bless and glorify him, all the while thinking that we sound rather ridiculous.  Isn’t me saying “Hallowed be thy name” about as meaningful as Olivia saying “If Dad was a horse”?  In reality, though, it is our blessing of God, our willingness to depend on him that is in question from the moment that we say “Our Father.”  God’s ability to provide is never in question.  So we should bless his name at every opportunity.  “For thine is the kingdom and the power and glory forever.  Amen.”

 Pray for the sopranos in the choir.

November 11            Read: Matthew 8

 Alyson has never been in a hurry.  She waited sixteen months after her sixteenth birthday to get a driver’s license.  She walked late and talked late.  There’s nothing wrong with the kid.  She’s just not in a hurry.  When Alyson was born, she wasn’t in a hurry.  In fact, we sat around the hospital through one evening, a full night, and well into the next day before she made an appearance.  She made it clear to the doctor that she was on her way, but she made it equally clear that she would arrive on her own schedule.

 For a reason that I can’t recall today—ask Penny—the doctors determined sometime during that day of May 7, 1985 to deliver Alyson by caesarean section.  I didn’t get to go into the operating room.  Frankly, I don’t think that I could have taken the sight had they allowed me to.

 After waiting for a good long while, a nurse came out to inform me that we had a good, healthy baby girl.  She might have added that Aly wasn’t in a hurry, but I don’t recall.  Only later did I learn the details of that delivery.  It seems that Alyson was in some sort of bizarre yoga position before her birth, a fact which may have been the cause for the c-section.  When the doctor reached her, he found that the umbilical cord was wrapped several times around her neck.  I think she’d managed to tie that thing in a clove hitch or something.  The story that we heard was that if they had tried to deliver Alyson in the normal manner, the loops around her neck would have tightened and cut off blood to her brain.  As Alyson’s current college English teacher, I am pleased to say that she shows no evidence of brain damage at birth or otherwise.

 Was the decision to do a c-section a miracle?  Many would say that it was simply a coincidence or a standard medical decision.  I really don’t care.  To me, it was a miracle.  Not all miracles have to be the sort that Jesus performed.  They don’t have to involve the blind seeing or the lame walking.  They can be simple or dramatic.  They can come in a form that science can explain or in a form that it can’t.  You see, on May 7, 1985, we got just as much of a miracle as we needed.  That’s how most miracles are.  God will us the miracle that we need.

 Pray for the altos in the choir.

November 12            Read: Exodus 20:1-20

 I was probably six years old when I broke the eighth commandment for the first time that I recognized.  My neighbors across the street were having a garage sale.  When my mother went to investigate what treasures they were offering, I tagged along.  That’s when I saw it.  It was a plastic model car kit, partially completed.  The box read, in black magic marker, “$1.00.”

 “Wow,” my little six-year-old mind thought.  “A hundred dollars.  That must be a really cool model car.”

 Later in the day I walked up to the same neighbor’s house and rang the bell to play with their son.  When no one answered—my guess is that they were out spending their garage sale money on a nice dinner—my eyes trailed around toward their garage and my feet followed.  With a look to the left and the right, I turned the doorknob on their garage’s side door.  Once inside, I made a bee-line for the table where that marvelous, half-constructed hundred-dollar model sat.  Snatching the box up, I headed back to the door and dashed over to my house, fully expecting the SWAT team and the FBI to catch me en route.

 Kids can think some of the silliest things.  Somehow it never occurred to me that my mother would notice when this mysterious treasure of a model car appeared in my room.  Of course I hadn’t given any thought to the glue or paint I would need to build the thing.  Basically I was operating on a pretty shaky basis.

 Naturally my mother did notice the new arrival.  With shame in her heart for her youngest child, she sent me over to the neighbors’ house, tail between my legs, to return my ill-gotten spoils and apologize.  As I recall, the neighbors were quite decent about it all.

 I wish I could say that I never did anything worse than stealing from my neighbor’s garage sale in my life.  I’m sure that you wish the same thing.  Of course, if we haven’t sinned, then Jesus’ death wasn’t needed.  On the other hand, even in that garage that day, in full knowledge of my sin, I demonstrated my need for the redemption that could only be offered through Christ.  As we listen to the adulterous woman in scene 10, let’s be sure not to think ourselves any less a sinner than was she.

 Pray for the tenors in the choir.

November 13       Read: Matthew 21:1-17

 If you have been around pageant for a year or more, you have probably seen that we typically handle the triumphal entry in pretty much the same way.  Almost always, the song is a rip-roaring, hand-clapping bouncy thing with lots of repeats and really easy parts to sing.  It’s one of those songs that you can sing without thinking about it very much, so you have plenty of attention left to jump around, smile like a ninny, clap your hands, and generally act absolutely overjoyed to see Jesus and his entourage coming into Jerusalem.

 I say this as if it were a bad thing, but given our goal of reaching the unsaved for Christ, it is fitting that welcome the King of Kings and Lord of Lords to his city with an appropriate measure of enthusiasm.  However, let’s think about this thing from a dramatic and from a realistic standpoint.  On the real Palm Sunday, people responded quite differently to Jesus.  Some of these responses we can find in the Bible.  Some I’m assuming based on human nature.  My question today is “How would you have greeted him?”

 Would you greet him as a threat to your power and position?  That was the response of most of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  They saw the evidence, yet they could not nor would not accept it for fear of losing their positions of power and authority.

 Would you greet him as a sort of benign lunatic, a deranged religious fanatic who might be perhaps good for a laugh or two.  We can be certain that some skeptics saw this in Jesus.

Would you greet him as a bother and a nuisance?  We can be sure that some around Jerusalem saw in Jesus merely an interruption to trade and a hindrance to the workday. 

Would you greet him as a great and welcome leader?  Many of the crowd apparently had no idea who Jesus really was.  They saw in him a political solution, a great hope for a resurgence in Jewish nationalism.

 Would you greet him as Messiah, Savior, and King?  Only a select few of Jesus’ followers had really begun to grasp just who this man was.  Even the twelve hadn’t fully understand this man who walked beside them.  Do you know this man Jesus in this way?

 Pray for the basses in the choir.

November 14       Read: Matthew 26:1-30

 They stood to eat the Passover meal in the early days, regardless of how Cecil B. DeMille portrayed the feast with Charlton Heston as Moses.  They stood, because they ate in a hurry.  On the next day they would depart Egypt, leaving behind generations of bondage and setting out toward a land of promise.  They didn’t understand as they departed that their freedom meant that they could never go back to a condition of slavery.  They simply knew that freedom beat bondage.

 They stood and they ate unleavened bread.  To this day, devout Jews carefully clean their homes before Passover in order to rid the place of any vestige of yeast.  They understood that a little bit of yeast can leaven an entire ball of dough just as a little bit of sin can spread to ruin an entire life.

 They stood and ate bitter herbs and salt water, reminders of the bitterness of their slavery.  The taste of that oppression and bondage would have been fresh in their mouths on that first Passover, but they partook of these symbols nonetheless, so as not to forget what God would deliver them out of.

 They stood and ate of the meat of a lamb, the Passover Lamb.  That lamb did not simply serve to feed them, however.  That lamb’s blood had been smeared over the top and the sides of their door.  Only by the blood of the lamb would the death angel pass over the home and spare the life of the firstborn inside.

 All of that, done some 1,500 years before the birth of Jesus stood as a memorial to the work of God on behalf of the nation of Israel as well as a picture of the work that he would yet do through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for all the nations of the world.

 For the twelve, gathered around that table in scene 12, the Passover Seder is all of our holiday dinners all rolled into one, a time of fellowship and tradition.  But Jesus knew it as a time after which their lives would never be the same again.  That is the attitude with which we should think upon the bread that represents the broken body of Christ and the cup that represents the new covenant poured out for many.  Let us remember this to all generations.

 Pray for the pit choir.

November 15             Read: Isaiah 53: 1-6

 What a marvel is the Garden of Gethsemane.  Jesus knew what was coming that night.  He could have ditched his sleeping disciples and gone into a quick march for Bethany.  Gathering a bit of food and water for the journey, he could have been on the road to Jericho before the lackeys of the religious leaders had any idea he was missing.  From there he might have gone back to Galilee and laid low for a while or made his way to some neighboring province where he could make a good living as a carpenter.  He could have done that.  In Gethsemane, the human Jesus made the choice to give himself.  The God aspect of Jesus still had a choice after the arrest, but without supernatural intervention, the man Jesus essentially made his last choice among those olive trees.

 Have you ever thought about martyrdom.  Frankly, it’s not a very pleasant prospect to consider.  Rarely are martyrs treated as humanely as our lethally injected subjects of executions these days.  Martyrdom has meant, through the ages, crucifixion, burning, disemboweling, hanging, burial alive, attack by wild animals, and other gruesome ends.  It’s one thing to have martyrdom thrust upon you.  The Gestapo kicks in the door and cart you off the concentration camp.  A godly man like Dietrich Bonhoeffer had to know that such an end was possible, but he didn’t select.  Once the boots hits the door, his choices were pretty limited.

 But to have an option, to have to choose death on behalf of the faith—or in Jesus’ case death to establish the faith—seems something far beyond my abilities.  Is there a gift of martyrdom, a spiritual ability that allows a person to choose to die for dearly held beliefs?  If so, it’s not a gift that you can be certain of possessing until the time arrives.  It’s not a gift that you can seek to exercise.

 What would I have done in Gethsemane?  Frankly, the answer is irrelevant.  Perhaps I could or you could have stood by, knowing the mob would arrive soon.  What matters is not what we would do.  What matters is that the only one worthy, the only spotless Lamb of God, chose to wait it out.  He chose the path that led to trial, torture, and the tree.  Think on these things today.

 Pray for Cinda Rosenbaum, Vickie Crisafulli and the costumers.

November 16            Read: Psalm 51:1-9

 During my first pageant year, the last year that we did a production in the old building, I messed up reading the calendar and missed the auditions for acting parts.  At that point I wasn’t able to be in choir, so essentially I found myself on the outside looking in.  A few weeks after all the casting was down, however, the part of Judas came open.  Judy called me, wondering if I would be willing to take that on.  I eagerly consented.

 Through all of the rehearsals and into crunch week, I paid a good deal of attention to trying to get my big scene right.  You know the scene, of course.  While Judas has the pleasure of getting to follow Jesus around and respond to his teaching through the middle scenes of the script, the big one comes at the arrest.  That scene winds up looking a bit like a fire at a barn dance during the early rehearsals.  Everyone—Pharisees, soldiers, slimy disciples—tries to make their way to the garden.  That year the challenge was getting up the steps in the proper order and winding up in the right place to betray Jesus—not too late but not too early.  Each night I planned my steps carefully to make sure that I wound up where I needed to be when I needed to be there.  Then I’d grab the Jesus of the day and let the soldiers do their thing from that point on.

 By the last night of dress rehearsals, I had this little dance down pat.  I knew exactly what sequence we needed to keep and precisely where in the music I needed to be at various key places in the aisle.  As the violins held out a sustained note, I hesitated, as if unsure of my action.  Then I stepped forward, grabbed Greg Griffin by the shoulders, and planted a kiss on his cheek.  A moment later I had pushed Greg past me into the arms of the soldiers, leaving myself standing there watching them take Jesus away.

 That’s when it hit me.  The thought rushed over me, completely unexpected:  “What have I done?”  In that brief moment, I was Judas.  I turned and made my exit, but the feeling didn’t go away easily.  I realized that while I was only playing Judas on the stage, in reality I play Judas in my real life far too often.  I’d like to say that this role broke me of sinning.  I’d like to say it, but I can’t.

 Pray for all of the people with speaking parts.

November 17            Read: Psalm 6

 I read through the dialogue in our script’s 14th scene, “The Witness,” and was struck by how current it seems.  The world in which we live is filled with witnesses, those who would speak on the matter of just who Jesus is and what he has done.

 The two unnamed witnesses evoke images of the uninformed folk who don’t let their ignorance prevent them from forming an opinion on the person of Jesus.  These are the sorts who sit around and say things like “I can’t believe in a God who would . . .” Witness One has taken something that Jesus did say and has misinterpreted it, either out of ignorance or out of malice, to place words into the mouth of God’s Son.

 Caiaphas, on the other hand, reminds me of the scholars, such as those of the Jesus Seminar, who sit around interpreting the words of the gospels and determining what Jesus might truly have said.  He reminds me of the well educated ministers who have heard the truth.  They’ve studied it and seen it.  They ought to know the truth when it stands before them, yet they see it and reject it.  Caiaphas knew enough of the scriptures that he should have recognized the Messiah when he arrived, but he was blinded by his preconceptions or his own thirst for power.  When Jesus finally claims the title that rightly belonged to him, Caiaphas responds by branding the words “blasphemy.”

 In our script, Joseph of Arimathea abstains from the vote to condemn Jesus.  We don’t know that Joseph actually attended the trial, but his actions there remind us of far too many Christians.  How many of us abstain when the opportunity for witness comes around?  I know I have been guilty of that many times.

 Jesus, of course, still witnesses to himself today.  He witnesses, but, to date, he has always witnessed in a quiet and subtle way.  The day will come when the witness of Jesus will no longer be subtle, a day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess.  On that day, it will be too late for millions of people.  The question that I then would urge all of us to meditate upon is how would God call us to witness.  Shall we continue to abstain or bear our testimony with confidence?

 Pray for Donna Baiotto and the prop patrol.

November 18        Read: Psalm 51:10-19

 Clever guy, Pilate.  He condemns Jesus as the King of the Jews. Although he believes Jesus to be nothing worse than a misguided religious nut, Pilate bows to the political pressures of those around him.  Concerned more for his own political career than for the Roman justice that he was supposed to administer, he allows a man whom he believes to be innocent to die a horrible death on a cross.  Clever Pilate does all of that, yet he has the foresight to try to distance himself from the guilt that might be associated with the action.  Like a good worldly politician, Pilate seeks to take credit for anything that goes well and escape the blame for whatever goes badly.  So how does he try to wriggle out of the blame for the execution of Jesus?  We all know the story.  Pilate washes his hands, symbolically washing away the blood upon his hands.

 If you have ever read or seen Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, you might be reminded of the reaction of Lady Macbeth after she takes part in the killing of the king.  Although she had fully approved of the plot to take the king’s life and his crown as well, Lady Macbeth does not cope well with the guilt she encounters afterward.  Instead, she frantically washes her hands, attempting to remove the incriminating stain of blood that marks them and marks her as a killer.

 Pilate had blood on his hands, and no amount of hand washing could remove that stain.  We look at Pilate and at Lady Macbeth in their handwashing rituals, and we shake our heads.  How could they be so foolish as to think that their actions would not have consequences more lasting than a good dose of soap and water could wash away?

 Yet in reality, we also have blood on our hands.  And like Pilate, the blood that we bear is that of Jesus.  I remember reading that some great spiritual thinker of the past suggested that all Christians should spend some time each day thinking on the cross.  We need to look to the cross and realize that there is blood on our hands, but we also need to realize the cross takes that bloody stain away from us, leaving us whiter than snow.  It washes in a way that we, or Lady Macbeth, or Pontius Pilate can never wash ourselves. 

 Pray for all those with solos.

November 19           Read: Isaiah 53:7-10

 You’ve seen the movies.  The convicted killer sits in the shadows of a prison cell.  Footsteps echo down the corridors, and then a couple of guards, perhaps accompanied by a minister, appear outside the bars.

 “It’s time, Haynes,” they tell the condemned man.

 He stands up and makes that long walk to the place of execution.  Of course the drama of the movie is often contained in how he will take that walk.  Will he walk straight and strong toward the gas chamber or electric chair?  Will he fight and resist, although he knows that his efforts cannot succeed?  Will he break down and begin crying, begging for mercy, throwing aside any shred of dignity that he has preserved up until that time.

 In the movies, of course, the condemned man might be completely innocent or at least receiving unjust punishment.  Other times, the condemned is so wicked and unrepentant that he sneers at his executioners, as if they could not possibly do him any harm.

 What would it take for an innocent man to walk calmly to his death?  What sort of mental and emotional resolve would you need to find in order to watch the unjustly convicted go to an early grave?

 Couldn’t it have been different for Jesus?  Couldn’t God have arranged for him to have died a less painful, a less humiliating, a less lengthy death?  Why didn’t God allow Jesus to expire during the thirty-nine lashes?  He could have done that?  Why didn’t God get a hot-headed Roman soldier to become angry with Jesus and deal him a quick and deadly blow?  Wouldn’t that have been more humane and have accomplished the same thing?

 Aside from not agreeing with some of the prophecies about his death, I honestly don’t know why God put Jesus through all of that.  I don’t understand why the Son of God had to walk with all the dignity he had remaining within him and go silently to the brow of Calvary.

I do know, however, that whatever pain I feel when I watch Jesus driven down the aisles of our church, it cannot compare with the mental anguish that my Savior felt in the street that day.

 Pray for all of the angels.

November 20          Read: Galatians 6:12-16

 I am pleased to report that more than a year after completing the work, my barn, which I mentioned in this space last year, is still standing and in good repair.  If you’ve ever seen my carpentry, then you understand that’s no trivial accomplishment.

 Somewhere in their calculations, the nice folks at Sutherland’s gave me some lumber that I didn’t need for the barn.  Included in these leftovers were several long four-by-fours.  One day last year, with a bit too much time on my hands, I conceived of a use for one of those four-by-fours.

 After cutting roughly a third of the length of the wood off, I made some careful measurements.  Then I made a notch, exactly three and a half inches in width and one and three-quarters inches in depth in each piece.  The shorter piece I notched precisely in the middle.  The longer one got its notch a couple of feet from the top.  I then fitted the two notches together to form a cross.  After drilling a couple of holes and pounding heavy nails through them, I found myself with a sturdy replica of the traditional cross of Jesus.  I then dragged my cross down to our pond.

 After digging a posthole eighteen inches into the ground by the edge of the pond, I erected my home-made cross and secured it with concrete.  I even used a level to be sure it was standing upright.

 The cross that I made must have been considerably lighter than the one that Jesus dragged through Jerusalem.  It might be about the same height.  The wood, I would guess, is considerably smoother on mine.  Dragging that thing the fifty yards or so from the barn to the pond wasn’t the hardest thing I have ever done, but it wasn’t easy.  I have to remind myself, though, that I hadn’t been imprisoned and whipped in the hours before I did that job.  Also, I didn’t have to face the prospect of coarse metal nails piercing my flesh and fixing me to that same wood when I reached my destination.  When I survey the wondrous cross on which the prince of glory died, my richest gain I count as loss and pour contempt on all my pride.  May the cross and the nails that killed our Lord never become a commonplace to us.

 Pray for Pamela Smith and all the backstage crew.

November 21      Read:  Matthew 25:31-46

 Their names, traditionally, are Dismas and Gestas.  You’ve seen their pictures.  Perhaps you have even played one of them in the pageant, although you doubtless didn’t know the names.  The names do not appear in the Bible, although the tradition of them goes back to early in the Christian era.  Dismas and Gestas, it is said, were the two thieves crucified with Jesus.

Dismas, on the cross to Jesus’ right, was the thief who repented and who was promised to sup with Jesus in Paradise.  If you look at most paintings of the crucifixion, you’ll find that the thief on our left and Jesus’ right is a brighter looking character and his face is turned toward the Lord.

 Gestas, on the other hand, hung to Jesus’ left.  He did not repent and received no blessing from the Lord.  In the paintings, the thief on our right and Jesus’ left normally has his face or even his entire body twisted away from Christ.  Also, his features normally appear less attractive and more pained.

 When you read the scripture cited above, you might be reminded of the thieves or even think that their positions were meant to reinforce the teachings about the sheep and the goats. Everyone has the opportunity to be either Dismas or Gestas.  In fact, we are all, in important ways, exactly like them.  You might say, “But wait, I’m not a criminal and I’m not being executed.”  This is true, but you are a sinner and you are bound for death.

 You’ll notice that in Matthew 27:44, both thieves insulted Jesus.  Some people see a contradiction, but the explanation is simple.  Just as all of us began our lives rejecting the Lordship of Christ and sinning flagrantly against him, both of the thieves began that horrible day in rebellion.  The difference, recorded in Luke, is that one of them, Gestas, turned from his evil ways and toward Jesus.

 As you take part in the pageant this year, I would hope that you have already aligned yourself on Christ’s right hand as a Gestas.  If not, today is the day.  But if you have, don’t forget that those who will attend our performances might still be deciding whether they will be Gestas or Dismas.  Both our prayers and our performances should be aimed at helping them make the better choice.

 Pray for all those involved in the crucifixion scene.

November 22           Read: Isaiah 6:5-7

 Listen to the words exchanged by Pilate and Procula during scene 19 in this year’s pageant.  In response to Procula’s fear, Pilate offers all manner of explanations for the earthquake, the darkness, and the reports of the dead having risen from their graves.

 Explanations and excuses are familiar territory for most of us.  Who among us hasn’t concocted some sort of reason for an unpleasant event?  Who hasn’t heard the excuse makers in action?  I’m reminded right now of some good-hearted but rather blind folks who attended a church in which I spent fifteen years of my life.  This church, which had once enjoyed healthy attendances that forced them to set up extra chairs at the back of the sanctuary had greyed considerably.  Aside from us, there were virtually no young families there.  In fact, if you excluded the young people who were not there because of their parents or other family members, the church had no young members.

 My good-hearted friends knew why.  “What we need to do is get the realtors to sell some of these houses around here to young people,” I heard this woman say one day.  That was it.  The explanation for our declining attendance lay not in the church’s inability to offer meaningful worship and lack of desire to preach the genuine gospel.  No, the problem was simply in the neighborhood.  Never mind that a church half a mile to the north was packing young families in like a Spam cannery.  Forget the soaring attendance of a church two miles to the south.  The problem here was the realtors.

 Some people will do anything, say anything, believe anything to avoid facing up to the realities of the gospel.  Rather than confessing their sins, they will blame sin on others.  Rather than admitting that they have drifted far from God’s will, they will carp about a church where “I just don’t get fed.”

 God calls us to see ourselves for what we are and to see Him for what He is.  God does not call us to denial and avoidance.  Instead, He wants us to face up to reality.  Pilate and Procula, at least in our play, could not manage to admit that their worldview might be in error.  Let us not follow with that sort of mistake.

 Pray for Doug Dalton and Gary Hardin, our two Jesus’s.

November 23         Read: John 19

Above all powers, above all kings,
Above all nature and all created things,

Above all wisdom and all the ways of man,

You were there before the world began.

Above all kingdoms, above all thrones,

Above all wonders the world has ever known.

Above all wealth and treasures of the earth,

There’s no way to measure what you’re worth.

Crucified, laid behind the stone,

You lived to die, rejected and alone,

Like a rose, trampled on the ground

You took the fall

And thought of me above all.

For three summers during my college years, I worked as a groundskeeper at Mount Washington Cemetery.  During that time, I assisted in digging a lot of graves.  Over those summers, I buried a lot of people.  The funerals varied widely.  Sometimes you’d see a hearse pull in with a family car and no other cars behind.  Other times the line of cars in the procession would seem to stretch forever.  Sometimes we had so many flower arrangements that we completely covered the mounded dirt on the closed grave and had to get creative with the remaining flowers.  Other times only an arrangement or two would grace the dirt.

I always found those ill-attended funerals poignant.  Sometimes the reason for the small numbers lay with the personality of the deceased.  Other times it suggested that they had outlived all of their family and friends or that they were being buried far from those people.  In the end, of course, it really doesn’t matter.

 No one ever had a funeral quite like Jesus.  Loved by many, his burial was rushed and semi-secret.  His best friends did not attend out of fear.  There were no eulogies or flowers.  The beauty of this is that he did not need a funeral.  His death, rather than depriving us of his presence, gave us eternal access.  That rose that was trampled on the ground rose again.  Friday’s dark, but Sunday’s coming!

 Pray for all of the children and students taking part this year.

November 24       Read: Isaiah 53:11-12

 He had seen enough.  Peter had been with Jesus for a good three years.  In the course of that time, Peter had seen Jesus heal countless people.  He had watched five loaves and two small fish turned into a banquet that fed 5,000 men and who knows how many women and children with plenty of food to spare.  He had seen the dead raised.  He had seen Jesus walk on the water.  In fact, Peter had himself walked on the water.  He had seen enough that he proclaimed, “You are the Christ, the son of the Living God.”

 Peter had stood at the top of the Mount of Transfiguration and seen the veil of humanity peeled back from Jesus and all of his glorious divinity allowed to shine forth.  He had seen Jesus attended by Elijah and Moses.  He had heard a voice from heaven say, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.  Hear him”!  Wasn’t that enough?  Hadn’t Peter heard enough?

 This fisherman from Galilee had sat under the teaching and heard the prophecies.  He had witnessed some of these prophecies coming true already.  He’d found a coin in a fish, just as Jesus had predicted.  He’d watched Jesus arrested and killed, just as forecast.  Shouldn’t that have been enough?

 But it wasn’t enough.  On the morning of Sunday, the first day of the Christian Age, Peter still didn’t really get it.  Although he had listened to himself rejecting Jesus three times before the rooster crowed, just as Jesus said he would, he still didn’t understand who this man was.  I know this, because Luke’s gospel tells us that Peter, like the others, didn’t believe the report that the women brought back from the tomb.  Peter heard it and it sounded like nonsense to him.

 Perhaps it was then, though, that Peter got it.  Perhaps it was at the very moment, as the women’s words were still hanging in the room like some alien fragrance, that something clicked within Peter’s mind.  He jumped to his feet and dashed to the tomb.  John ran after him, passed him up, and reached the tomb ahead of him.  They stood there in the door to that hewn-rock tomb, and perhaps right there they got it.  They said, “Oh, so that’s who Jesus was.”  Let’s focus ourselves on understanding fully who this Jesus was.

 Pray for all of the people who provide child care.

November 25      Read: Matthew 24 (and 25 if you’re energetic)

 Did you think like I did?  Did you watch the smoke billowing out of the two World Trade Center towers last year and think, “Oh, I bet this is it!”  I remember awakening to a frantic phone call.  “You have to turn on your TV,” a friend said.  Like you, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

 It was when the image showed fire and smoke rising from the Pentagon that I realized how serious things were.  Surely, I thought, the end must be right around the corner.  Perhaps it’ll just be days before Gog and Magog make an appearance, before the Antichrist is revealed.  That’s what I thought.

 The times in which we live, with Israel restored and the gospel preached virtually everywhere on earth, seem like the right days for the end of time, for the return of Jesus.  But we have to remember something important about the promise of Jesus’ return.  Jesus didn’t promise anything about when he would return.  He simply promised that he would return.  It seems fairly clear when you read through the New Testament that many of the people in the early church were expecting Jesus to come back at any time.  I can imagine that if I had sat under the teaching of Peter and John, I might think that fifty or sixty years was an absurdly long time for Jesus to delay his return.  What might those people have thought had they known that 2002 would be drawing to a close without an appearance from Christ?

 Will Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda play a part in ushering in the catastrophes that are described for the end times at various places in the scriptures?  That seems like a possibility, but I’m sure that at least some people in the past saw Hitler as a sure sign of the end.  Perhaps some Catholics thought that Martin Luther represented the “abomination of desolation.”

Ultimately, we are called to live our lives in a strange sort of paradox.  The Bible’s teachings make it clear that we should set our sights upon heaven but that we should not ignore the things of the world.  In other words, we should live as if Christ is returning today just as surely as we prepare to live to the age of 100.  It’s a tall order, but I don’t doubt God’s promises will be true.

 Pray for the people who provide us with food on show days.

November 26        Read: Psalm 23

 Driving home from school one day during my senior year of high school, I felt once again my constant lack of funds.  Out of the blue, I heard my voice say, “I ought to get a job” to my friend Dan.

 Dan thought for a moment and then suggested, “I think that Taco John’s is hiring.”  That’s where he worked.

 Five minutes later we were parked at Taco John’s ready to talk with the manager.  Ten minutes later I was hired.

 How significant is a minimum-wage job at a crummy fast food place?  I’d like to tell you how significant that one was for me.  The first night that I worked at Taco John’s, I worked with a girl named Penny Lingo.  We hit it off well and started dating.  Two years later we were married.  More significantly, though, during those years of courtship, Penny played a role in me making a genuine profession of faith.

 Had Dan not suggested working at Taco John’s, I might not be saved.  I most likely wouldn’t have met Penny and wouldn’t have had the four kids that I have.  I probably wouldn’t have stopped doing some of the really stupid things that I did as a young person.  Since I showed something of the temperament for it, I wouldn’t be surprised if I would have ended up an alcoholic.  I probably would never have found my way to First Baptist Church of Raytown, to teaching Bible Study, or to sharing the gospel through this pageant.  In short, had Dan not suggested that I seek a job at Taco John’s, I don’t know that I would recognize the man I would have become.

 A little over two years after that day of decision and just a couple of months after Penny and I married, Dan’s life ended, far too young, in a motorcycle accident.  He never accomplished most of the things that he had set out to do, but, in an apparently insignificant suggestion, he changed my life.

 Perhaps I’m wrong, but I sense the hand of God in my life on that day.  A little thing, when motivated by God, can become an enormous thing.  As we do our myriad little things, both in our pageant duties and in our wider lives, we have to remember that God can and will work through those things.  Little things can mean a great deal.

 Pray for the people who will set up and take down our stage.

November 27        Read: Leviticus 22:31-32

 Archaeology has provided us with two bits of evidence that demonstrate the historical reality of Pontius Pilate.  One of these pieces of evidence is a fragmentary inscription that identifies Pilate as the governor of Judea.  The other piece, and the topic on which I would like dwell today, is in the form of coins that Pilate had minted and which bear his name.

 These coins might seem unspectacular upon first inspection.  The first of these three coins carries on one side three ears of barley while the other side portrays something called a simpulum, a pagan sacrificial vessel.  The other two coins, minted in succeeding years of Pilate’s tenure, carry the same design.  On the front they carry a lituus, the crooked staff or wand of an augur.  On the back, these coins show a wreath with berries.  These symbols meant nothing to me.  I learned, however, that the coins are intriguing as they each mix a pagan image on one side with a Jewish image on the other.

 Pilate, apparently, wanted to have it both ways.  He wanted to mix the sacred with the profane, the pagan with the holy.  You can’t much blame a pagan Roman politician for doing something like this.  You can blame the Jewish leaders who, to the best of our knowledge, never said a word against these coins.

 I mention this today, because we are moving into the season of holidays.  This is a time when the values of the world and the values of Christ are perhaps contrasted the most profoundly.  These are the days when we might be reminded of Joshua’s words to the people of Israel:  “Choose you this day who you will serve.”  At the same time we might be reminded of the admonition of Jesus that no one can serve two masters.

 Living in a highly secularized society, it is incredibly difficult to live a life that is holy to the Lord.  We are constantly bombarded with messages that call us to lust and covet, to live lives of acquisition and deceit.  The spirit of the age seems to offer a constant call to compromise, yet the follower of Jesus Christ cannot compromise.  We cannot carry both the image of Caesar and the image of Christ.  Let’s seek to make the coins of our lives a holy offering to the King of Kings.

 Pray for the patrons who provide financial support for us.

November 28—Thanksgiving     Read: Exodus 15

 You’ve heard the story before if you have been around First Baptist Church of Raytown for any time.  You’ve heard about a small group of pioneer families starting a new church, the West Fork of the Little Blue Church.  You’ve heard about how they didn’t dare call their church Baptist until after they had affiliated with the local Baptist association.  You’ve heard about how the church grew over the years.  You’ve seen the pictures of the succeeding worship centers, first on Woodson Road, then on Raytown Road, then on Blue Ridge Boulevard, and finally in a triangle of land between 75^th Street and 350 Highway.

 If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve heard about how we came to possess this land, about how the property acquisition committee went to the Utilicorp offices to make an offer, only to find that the property had just gone on the market.  You’ve heard about how a church, in debt for decades, paid off their debt and banked money for the new building.  You’ve heard about the succeeding capital campaigns and the faithfulness of God along with the bold giving of the people.

 I used to grow impatient when I heard Brother Paul start to run through this litany of the past.  But then one day I remembered how many times the story of the Exodus is repeated throughout the Old Testament.  Let’s repeat the story again and again, so that no one can forget what God has done for us.

 Our story, however, is not just a story of buildings and fundraising.  Our story is one of lives touched, of families mended, of bodies healed, and of ministries launched.  God has indeed blessed our church.  He has blessed us with as good a staff as any church could hope to have.  He has blessed us with outstanding lay leaders—Bible Study leaders, student workers, and the like.  God has been good to First Baptist Church of Raytown.

 What do you thank God for on this Thanksgiving Day?  Besides the corporate hymn of thanks in which we all share, we can all sing our own song.  Were it not for grace, where would you be?  Were it not for God’s surpassing love, what darkness would you face?  Let God be praised on this Thanksgiving Day.  He is good!

 Pray with thanks for all that God has done to bless us.

November 29      Read:  Philippians 4:8-9

 “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

 I sat in my bedroom on Sunday watching my beloved Kansas City Chiefs beat those dastardly Miami Dolphins.  Ask anyone who has ever watched a ballgame with me and you’ll know that I tend to be—how should I say it—a bit demonstrative.  Do you remember a game from a few years back when, on a Monday night, Joe Montana found an open receiver in the closing moments of a game at Mile High Stadium and beat the Broncos?  I remember that game.  I split my pants out in joy when I saw that receiver catch the ball and the refs hands go up.

 The problem with me on Sunday, however, was that I did not keep this scripture in mind well enough.  There is certainly a nobility possible in football.  A football game played well can be lovely and admirable, excellent and praiseworthy.  I exult in those things.  I’ll cheer for the other team when they make a great play, even as it rips my heart out.  I appreciate the good sportsmanship that I see when the truly classy players grace the gridiron.

On the other hand, I do tend to get a bit rude sometimes, yelling rude things at the television.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t start cursing the flickering screen.  I’m just loud and obnoxious.  I’ll tell an offending offensive lineman that he’s fat and slow.  I’ll yell about the stupidity of a defensive player committing a foolish penalty.  And that isn’t noble, pure, or any of the rest of that.

 I’ve seen people who couldn’t watch their home team lose without going into a terrible fit of rage that made life in their home a nightmare for the foreseeable future.  I’ve heard that incidents of domestic violence go up after a disappointing sporting loss.  I can’t imagine reacting like that, but I hear that it happens.

 As you read this, we find ourselves approaching “Crunch Week,” the week of rehearsals leading up to our first weekend of performances.  Let us set our eyes on those things that are worthy of our calling as Christians.  And don’t yell at the Chiefs!

 Pray for Dan Quesenberry who is playing Pilate.

November 30     Read:  Luke 5:29-32

 The strangest thing happened recently.  Kyle Weldon asked me to take part in the September 29 Prayer for Healing service.  When I arrived in the Worship Center, I staked out an aisle seat, as close to the front as I could manage.  After a few minutes, I noticed someone across the room whom I wanted to talk to, so I draped my bulletin over the seat bottom and went for a bit of chit chat.

 When 6:30 rolled around and I returned to my seat, I found it occupied by a man whom I didn’t know.  Not only was he sitting in my seat, but he was reading my bulletin.  After climbing past him and seating myself in a new seat, I noticed him staring intently at my bulletin.  “What’s this healing stuff?” he asked.

 A couple of ladies behind him explained, “We’re having a healing service.  Anyone who wants prayer can receive it.”

 His face looked aghast.  “A healing service.  But we’ve done that already.”  He paused for a moment.  “I wish they’d told us so that I could have gone somewhere else.”

 After resisting the temptation of telling him that the pastor had intended to call him but had lost his number, I focused on the other words he had said.  “We’ve done that already.”

He’s right of course.  We’ve already had prayers for healing, but during the service, as a constant string of people came down to the many teams spread across the front of the worship center, I realized that it didn’t matter if we’d done it already.  People needed the healing that God offers.

 More specifically, though, I thought about the ten pageant performances that we are about to do. There will come a time over the next two weeks when you might be tempted to say, “The Hallelujah Chorus?  But we’ve done that already.”  We repeat the songs and the message because others might respond today who didn’t get a chance to or didn’t take the chance to yesterday.  Every Sunday the pastor offers an invitation to trust Christ, even though we have done it before.

 We are privileged to partner with God as agents of his grace.  We should never take that lightly.  “We’ve done that already” but it’s worth doing again.

 Pray for Lynn Lewallen and all who play a keyboard.

December 1—Dress Rehearsal    Read: Romans 3:21-26

 If he were still with us, my father would be eighty-five today.  He died last December 5, in the week between the two pageant weekends.  Today I want to share with you my testimony regarding my father’s last birthday.

 Last year, December 1 fell on a Saturday.  My dad had already spent better than two weeks, mostly unconscious, in the Liberty Hospital ICU.  That morning, we took my mother some lunch and celebrated dad’s eighty-fourth birthday.  Emily and Alyson sang for him, something he always enjoyed.  Thomas and Olivia drew up a sign reading, “Happy Fifty-Ninth Birthday,” echoing one of dad’s running jokes.  We spent several hours there that day, but he gave no indication that he recognized our presence.  The ventilator kept him breathing regularly.  The IVs dripped, and the monitors kept watch over his vital signs.  For all practical purposes, dad had already departed us.  Everyone knew it, but nobody wanted to say it.

 That afternoon I showed up at church for a pair of pageant performances.  My body and my voice showed up, but my mind lingered in that hospital room twenty miles to the north.  In one of the performances, as Jesus was being removed from the cross, I heard the voice of Carrie Harris, Mary, piercing through the darkness.

 “Why?” she shrieked as a mother looking on her murdered son would.  “Why?”

 It was at that moment that a realization hit me.  I wanted to stand up in the aisle.  I wanted to explain it to her and everyone else in that darkened room.

 “Why?”  I wanted to say.  “I’ll tell you why.  It’s for that old man up there in Liberty.  It’s for you and me, each one of us a sinner and each one bound to face death someday.  It’s so that we do not have to die without hope.  It’s so that we can outlive these frail, imperfect bodies of ours. That’s why.”

 Why did Jesus die?  Let us never forget why.

 Pray for Dan Hurst, who is playing Marcus, and for our endurance and patience as we prepare.

December 2—Dress Rehearsal     Read: Psalm 24

 One of my favorite lines from our play, Uncle Phil’s Diner came as I, appearing as P.J. the D.J., asked Tony Petrelli if he’d remembered to wash his hands before he came to work from the garage.

 “Sure, P.J.,” Tony replied, holding his filthy hands up for a nice laugh.

 I know that I might seem to be fixating on hands this year, but that image of Tony and his dirty hands has stuck with long after the echoes of “Great Balls of Fire” have faded away.

When I read Psalm 24, verses 3 and 4 speak to me with power:  “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? Or who shall stand in his holy place?  He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.”

 Why do I find this passage so powerful?  There are a couple of reasons.  The first reason gets to the heart of why we go to the trouble of putting on this pageant.  “Who shall stand in his holy place?”  The quick answer to that is that, except for the grace of God, nobody would stand in God’s holy place.  The Jews understood that despite their efforts toward cleanness, they all sinned.  That reality lay at the heart of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.  For Christians, the source of clean hands and a pure heart can be traced not to the sacrifice of animals but to the gift of Jesus on the cross.  That is why we tell this story each year.

 The second reason for remembering these verses, however, is more pointed.  The Bible is very clear about the universality of sin.  You probably know the verses as well as I do:  All have sinned.  No one is righteous, no not one.  Our righteousness is like dirty rags.  Many of us bring dirty hands each time that we come to a rehearsal.  Like Tony Petrelli, we have forgotten to wash up.  Amazingly, God uses sinners to bring about his work of grace and salvation.

 I would urge each participant in this production to look inside.  Are your hands clean?  Is your heart pure?  Do not bring unconfessed sin to another rehearsal or performance.

 Pray for the preservation of good and loving attitudes by all.

December 3—Dress Rehearsal      Read: Psalm 134

 The first year that I went to a PromiseKeepers rally at Arrowhead, something bothered me.  It wasn’t the fact that I knew virtually nobody sitting around me or the heat of the August sun.  What bothered me wound up being the thousands of men who sang the songs with their hands lifted to the sky.  If you grew up, like me, in a very traditional Baptist church, then you might have experienced that same queasiness.  In the days since that PromiseKeepers event, I have given a lot of thought to the raising of hands in worship.  I’ve even done a few times, but don’t tell my mother.  I’d like to share with you over the next two days what I have determined about this action, because it speaks to performance as a whole.

 We can raise our hands for wrong reasons.

 Raising your hands could mean, “Look at me.”  That’s a natural thing for a performer.  An actor, an instrumentalist, or a singer usually comes with a built-in inclination toward attracting attention.  Performance as a Christian involves a difficult tight-wire act.  After all, on the one hand we simply have to draw attention to ourselves at the appropriate times.  If we didn’t, then we wouldn’t have a show.  On the other hand, we have to learn to deflect the praise and attention toward Jesus.  This effort is something that our secular counterparts needn’t fuss with.

 Another wrong reason for raising our hands is because everyone else is doing it.  We see this sometimes in morning worship.  Someone near the front of the worship center is moved and stands.  Pretty soon everybody is standing.  I’m pretty sure that not all of those people were equally moved.  Our worship should be our own.  Raising our hands should be our own expression of praise to God and not that of the person two seats over.

 Both of these wrong reasons involve fakery, which is different from acting.  If we fake it on or around the stage, our audience will perceive that.  I’m pretty sure that our pageants have touched the people they have touched not because of our great acting and singing, but because the vast bulk of us gather together in one accord, genuinely worshiping and reflecting the praise toward God.

 Pray for our memory and talent to serve us as we proceed.

December 4—Dress Rehearsal    Read: Psalm 28:1-2

 Yesterday we looked as some negative motives for lifting our hands in worship.  Today, I’d like to explore some positive ones.  Why might you lift your hands?  What might it mean?  Here are the meanings I have discovered.  Raising your hands might mean: Here I am, send me.  As a teacher, I find that a raised hand during a class can be a refreshing and beautiful thing.  What could be a more appropriate response for us in worship than to tell God that we are here and willing to do His will?

 I’m guilty.  On a basketball court, a single raised hand means that the player has been called for a foul.  Some basketball players believe that they have never committed a foul.  They contort their faces and protest wildly when the whistle blows.  Others simply raise their hand and head toward the other end of the floor.  Isn’t that true of us as worshipers.  I am a sinner.  I’m guilty.  But I can stand, full of pride, and refuse to admit that guilt.  Or I can raise my hand and say, “Yes, it’s me.  I’m guilty.”

 I surrender.  Two hands, raised above the head means something around the world.  While surrender might seem a mark of weakness to a soldier, surrender before the living God makes the greatest of sense.  Several years ago I heard Gene say that we need to think more about surrender rather than commitment.  There is great wisdom in that.  After all, the great invitation hymn does not say “I commit all.”

 Pick me up.  This is the one that got me over my phobia about hand-raising that I first experienced at PromiseKeepers.  After I had struggled with this matter for a few months, I had an realization in a moment.  Thomas, three years old at the time, walked up to me and threw his hands up.  He wanted me to pick him up.  What a beautiful expression of childlike faith, love, and reliance that is.  Sometimes, when the going is tough, I want to walk up to my God, Abba Father, and raise up my hands to Him and just say, “Lord, pick me up and hold me!”

 Lift your hands if you will in worship, but lift them for the right reasons, maybe all the right reasons.

 Pray for all of the homes represented by cast and crew.

December 5—Final Dress Rehearsal       Read: 1 Corinthians 3: 10-15

 If you haven’t heard Teri Curp’s testimony, then ask her to relate it to you.  In a nutshell, Teri, after constant badgering from her co-worker Lori Reed, came to one of our pageants several years ago.  In the wake of that evening, she realized an important fact:  she was a sinner in desperate need of the redemption that only Christ can offer.  That testimony is not what this day’s comments are supposed to be about.

 You see, Teri Curp’s testimony did not end on that December day when she trusted Christ.  It didn’t end when she emerged from a baptismal font or when her name was entered on the church rolls at First Baptist-Raytown.

 When you think of Teri, you probably think of her singing.  Before she was saved, Teri had a great voice.  She still has it today.  But today, Teri has a new song to sing.  She takes that glorious gift of song that God gave her and she sings whenever anybody gives her a chance to do it.  She’ll sing in choir, in praise teams, in duets or solos.  She writes her own songs or sings those of other people.  She sings for big crowds and small.  Teri just responds to the call of Christ in her life in the best way that she knows how.

 I don’t write all of this today to brag on Teri.  There are certainly better altos in this world, but that is hardly the point.  The point is this.  God gave Teri a precious gift at a pageant performance several years ago.  That gift of salvation changed Teri’s life for eternity.  But unlock many people who respond to the call of Christ, who accept his gift of salvation, Teri has given herself over to singing a new song—literally.  She has taken the gift of music and the gift of grace, combining them and continuing the work that brought her into the kingdom.

I realize that these words will mostly reach people who have done their own version of what Terri has done.  God might not have given you a voice, but he did give you a means by which to sing his praises and call others to faith.  Sometimes we need a bit of reminding, however.  God used human gifts to draw you toward himself.  He expects you to use yours to return the favor.

 Pray with thanks for the work God is about to do through us.

December 6—Performance     Read: Revelation 4

 Perhaps you weren’t aware of it, but Adam Hodge has developed a minor cult following in the area.  I know the “Live Wires,” the seniors at my mother’s church would be hauling Adam in to sing  every month if they thought he’d show.  And who can blame them?  I doubt that it will surprise Adam to hear me say that he has a terrific voice.  He’s a pleasure to hear.

I suppose that my favorite Hodge standard would have to “I Fell on my Knees and Cried Holy,” or whatever that song is called.  On the surface, this piece might seem to border on the precious and naïve.  Let’s face it, anyone’s vision of heaven today is likely to be far, far removed from the reality we will someday experience.  Despite this fact, though, I have fallen in love with the song, and my favorite part, the part that sends chills up my spine every time comes toward the end of the second verse.  Adam sings:  “I talked to Mark and Timothy, but I said Timothy . . .”  Then his voice sores into a register that I can’t even approach as he sings “I want to see Jesus, ‘cause he’s the one that died for me.”

 That moment stands transcendent in my mind.  At that point, the beauty of the gospel, of the songwriter’s art, and of Adam’s voice come together to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  That’s why what Adam did recently surprised me.

 On September 8, Adam sang that song in an evening service.  I stood in the choir as he approached that magical moment.  And then, just as it arrived, Adam threw me a curve.  “Sing it with me,” he quickly said just before that soaring phrase.

 Sing it with me?  What kind of singer takes his crowning moment and dilutes it by sharing it with the audience?  Adam’s a young guy, but surely he should understand that you don’t get an infinite number of times when you can stand triumphant in the spotlight and show your brilliance.  Surely he should realize that you have to seize those moments and hang on for all you’re worth.

 Or maybe he does understand.  Perhaps he understands that regardless how good your voice or your rapport with the audience, a performer who does point others toward God, who does not make them want to see Jesus, is just a rusty gate in the wind.

 Pray for our pastor as he delivers the invitation each night.

December 7—Performance      Read:  Hebrews 1:1-4

 Have you ever noticed how rarely Hollywood and the television industry get a truly fresh idea.  When Survivor becomes a big hit, they follow it with more reality competition shows than you can shake a remote control at.  Have a couple of successful years with a show like CSI and immediately we’re looking at a spin-off as well as clones on other networks.  Even the apparently original series, new sit-coms for instance, always end up recycling the same worn out jokes.  Let’s face it, most of the stuff that they pass off as new goes back at least to I Love Lucy.  Of course some of the stuff wouldn’t have been allowed on Lucy’s show, but that’s another matter.

 Have you ever talked to somebody who found it amazing that our Christmas Pageant is not the same each and every year.  Most people figure that we do the same material year after year—the same script, the same songs, and the same parts.  I would imagine that some of the people who put in the hardest work, whether they be figuring out lighting cues, mixing the sound, or playing the score, wish that we would repeat things a bit more.  After all, once you get it figured out, it’s pretty easy to do it right over and over again.

 On the other hand, it’s fun getting a new script and new music each year.  I’m sure the technical people, as much as it makes them work, enjoy the challenges and new opportunities that a new production entail.  Novelty can be fun—if only the television executives could learn that.

 As much fun as the new opportunities provide for us, we have to remember the message that is contained in the scripture that I asked you to read today.  You see, each year Judy and her cohorts craft a script that breaks new ground, that frames the story in a new way, yet each year’s script says the same thing.  There is no new revelation that we bring as we present the pageant.  The songs change, but the message remains the same:  Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the exact representation of God’s being.  Salvation can be found in no other name.  That’s our message.  Unlike the TV sitcoms, this message can bear repeating.

 Pray for the unsaved people who are in our auditorium tonight.

December 8—Performance      Read:  Psalm 8

 Chickens, I have learned over the last two years, are not the brightest creatures that God placed on this earth.  In fact, some of them strike me as being as dumb as a rock.  Some twenty-one months ago, I ordered some chicks and raised them through the summer.  About this time last year, the girls starting laying eggs.  We hatched some of those eggs.  Right now, we have about twenty chickens milling about.

 Each afternoon, I peak into a trap door to see how many eggs they have left me.  I’m not much of an egg eater, but the people who buy eggs from me assure me that these big, fresh, brown eggs are better than their store-bought cousins.  I’ll take their word for it.

 When a chicken gets beyond efficient egg-laying age or has the bad sense to be a rooster in a flock that already has sufficient males, that bird is bound, unless the keepers are incredibly kind hearted, for an early death, a plucking, and some time in the freezer.  You might think that meat from one of my birds wouldn’t taste right, but it tastes like chicken.

 When I first killed a bird, I spent some time, basically the time it took to pluck him, thinking over the parallels between chickens and people.  There are certainly some huge differences between us and chickens, but one thing we should never forget.  Chickens, just like humans, don’t properly exist for their own benefit.

 If chickens were raised for their own benefit, if poultry producers sought to assist these birds in self-actualizing and reaching for their dreams, then chickens wouldn’t live in enclosures.  Of course, if they ran free all the time, you’d have fewer chickens and fatter foxes.  If chickens were raised for their own benefit, then you’d allow the broody hens to hatch out the eggs rather than making them into omelets.  That’s not an economical way to raise birds.  Finally, and perhaps most significantly, chickens raised for themselves would never find their way to KFC.

 We have to remember that, like chickens, we do not exist for our own benefit.  We exist to praise, magnify, and serve the living God.  He is good to us, much as I am good to my chickens, but we should never forget where we really rank in this world.

 Pray for strength for all of the tired folks today.

December 9      Read:  Psalm 15

 Somewhere down around the fellowship hall during the first pageant weekend last year, Mary Sinclair grabbed me by the elbow and, in her own meek, timid way, shared what was on her mind.  “I don’t get it.  You write devotionals about all these other people, but I don’t see one in there about me.  I thought we were friends.”

 So here it is, Mary.  I’m pretty sure you were kidding that day, but your words got me to thinking.  There are literally hundreds of people who work together to make the pageant go on.  Mary’s job is not a big-shot job.  For the past two years she has lead the charge on marking and equipping the dressing rooms.  Mary is the person who puts up the signs and positions dividers so that when the door opens you don’t find yourself going more public than you’d ever intended.  She, with the able help of her husband Archie, cleans up after us.

We could get by in pageant without Mary, but, by doing her part, the whole experience is made just a bit richer.  That’s the story with all of us, after all.  Should you ever get to thinking that you are indispensable to this production, God will probably find a way to show you that you aren’t.  Two years ago we learned that we could do it without Gene being present.  We’ve seen leading characters and soloists become ill, and we have adapted.  We’ve missed lighting and sound people, but we overcome.  And for most of us, those of us in the choir and the orchestra, the production simply moves along without us, never missing a beat. 

I don’t say these things to put down what Mary does or what any of us do.  You see, Mary has it pretty well figured out.  She understands that any able bodied person could do her job, but she nonetheless does it to the glory of God.  She knows that her individual effort will almost certainly never lead a person to trust in Christ, yet she realizes that, by being a part of the entire endeavor, she has a part in carrying out the Great Commission.

 We all need to learn that sort of humility.  We all need to understand where we fit into pageant.  “I’m sorry Lord for the thing I’ve made it, for it’s all about you.  All about you, Jesus.”

 Pray for Nancy Horine, who is playing Procula, and for the recovery of voices and health across the board.

December 10       Read: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

 I’m a guy with lots of letters after his name.  I completed my last degree six years ago, the longest period in my life when I’ve been out of school.  Through my studies, especially recently, I have become fascinated by the many people through history who have managed to be incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable both in the ways of the world and in the ways of God.

 The first of these people would be the Apostle Paul.  I remember reading the scriptures above one time and finding for a moment an anti-intellectual theme in Paul.  Then I remembered that Paul was, probably more than anyone else who wrote in the Bible, a guy with a huge amount of formal learning.  We know for sure that Paul attended the first century Jewish equivalent of seminary, where he apparently graduated with honors.  We can be less certain that Paul had studied the great Greek and Roman thinkers—Aristotle, Plato, Cicero—who shaped learning in his era and whose work continues to shape learning today.  Paul demonstrated, even in his writing to the Corinthian church, that he was a smart guy.  He himself was a wise man, a scholar, and a philosopher.

 In the years after Paul, many great Christian thinkers have left a path of work that demonstrates that a person can be brilliant in learning and still remain subject to the wisdom of God.  I think immediately of such people as Augustine, John Milton, John Bunyan and many of the other Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, T.S. Eliot, and scores more whose names don’t come to my mind.

 To some degree, we follow in that tradition as we present our pageant.  We use a great measure of the wisdom of the world.  There is nothing inherently “religious” or “spiritual” about the violins and trumpets or about the playing of them.  Are those “Christian” light fixtures hanging in the catwalks?  Do the costume ladies employ some special spiritual stitching to our clothes?  Much about our pageant draws on the wisdom of the world, but what brings it to life is the wisdom of God, the passion and depth that we have for spiritual matters.  As you prepare for a second weekend of performances, dedicate yourself to both types of wisdom.

 Pray for God’s guidance in responding to his call.

December 11          Read: 1 Corinthians 2

 Yesterday, we looked at some of my heroes, those great Christians of the past (and present) who subordinate their great human wisdom to the wisdom that comes from the Spirit of God.  Today, I would like to take a moment to focus on some anti-heroes.  To some degree, we all fall into these categories now and again.

 Many people in the world exalt human wisdom to the exclusion of God’s wisdom.  Since God does not exist, they argue, His wisdom can have no meaning for me.  These are the scientists who blindly assert that there can be no God just because science cannot perceive it.  These are the secular psychologists who have determined, as the winds of culture have shifted, that homosexuality is no longer a disorder but a normal—even a desirable—part of nature.  These are the artists who believe that art should be made simply for the sake of art, oblivious to its role in shaping society.  These, we would argue, are bad folks, yet we do the same thing sometimes.  We wall off portions of our lives where the wisdom of God need not apply.  Perhaps we believe in the wisdom of God until it comes to matters of giving or business or parenting.  You know the area of your life where this happens.

 On the other side of the equation are those who take Paul’s words to mean that the wisdom of the world has no utility for Christians.  We only need God’s wisdom, they would argue.  These people are correct to a degree, yet they ignore the origin of human wisdom.  Human wisdom, like all else in this world, derives from the hand of God.  I firmly believe that God did not intend for us to be stupid.  Some people in the world suggest that a person has to be an idiot to be a Christian.  You don’t have to talk to many of our pageant leaders for very long to see that these Christians are no idiots.

 I would not argue that we need moderation in all things.  Some things we should avoid completely; others we can glut ourselves upon.  But these two wisdoms should be balanced.  As we ready ourselves to greet another set of audiences, let us balance our minds with plenty of  human wisdom under the oversight of God’s wisdom.

 Pray for positive attitudes as we head back into performance.

December 12—Performance     Read: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31

 You know him, but perhaps you have never spoken with him.  David Perrou has been playing the electric bass for our orchestra for as long as I have been a member of the church.  Other members of orchestra have intriguing sets of talents.  Kevin Hubbard plays the drums, but also serves the sick as an oncologist.  Fred Overton knows his way around the guitar and the financial markets.  Rick Henks is a deacon and others hold other roles of church leadership.  David, however, pretty much just plays the bass.

 Now please don’t take this as saying anything bad about this man.  I’m sure that he’s a dedicated and capable employee at his work.  I know that he’s a good and devoted son to parents who need his help.  My point, however, is that David heard the call of God.  God gifted David with the ability to make music with his bass.  In the years that I played guitar with David, I probably played twenty wrong notes for every one he did.  The guy has a feel for the instrument.  He can read the music quickly and accurately.  Beyond that, though, David has some personality qualities that make him perfect in this role.  He’s a reasonably quiet guy.  You’ll hear Gene talk every once in a while about prima donnas, the people who want the spotlight on them and want everything done their way.  I’ve never known of David to be that way.  He just plays the bass line accurately.  He rarely complains.  He’s almost always present and on time.  Perhaps most of all, he has a passion for the music.  He isn’t just “doing his part.”  He seems to love what he’s doing.

 This year, I auditioned for part of Marcus, as apparently every male over the age of six did.  Immediately after that audition, I realized that I wouldn’t be getting that role.  After all, who would want to hear me sing those songs.  The problem was that I would catch myself wistfully singing them over the next weeks.  Apparently, I wanted to hear me sing them.  I could benefit by taking a page from David Perrou’s book.  He has identified God’s call on his life, so he just does it to the best of his ability.  He isn’t playing the bass with one eye out for better offers.  David’s a servant.  We could do well to copy him on that.

 Pray with thanks for the lives touched last week and those to come.

December 13—Performance     Read: John 4: 4-15

 This summer, I dug three holes.  Into those three holes I placed the three maple saplings that I bought, on sale, at Lowe’s.  I’ve planted a fair number of trees in my day, and, when I don’t run them over with the tractor while mowing, I normally have good luck with them.

Today, as I walked around my house gathering up the refuse that my kids seem to strew around it daily, I took a look at my three new shade trees.  The first tree that I saw, on the northwest of the house, is growing like gangbusters.  This tree has probably added two feet in height and a huge number of new branches.  In fact, as I walked past it, I realized that I needed to prune.  When I reached the other two trees, I saw that they were essentially sticks, six feet in height, protruding from the ground.  Let me explain what happened.

 The first tree had the good fortune of being planted quite close to the pen where we keep our dog.  During those long, hot, dry days that we endured this summer, I would stretch the hose out to the pen to fill up the dog’s water bucket.  With the hose out there and the water running, I found it a really easy thing to remember to lay the hose down near the tree and soak the ground for a few minutes, while I walked off to pick up the water guns and soccer balls that the kids had abandoned.

 The other trees—the ones that are sticks now—had the bad fortune to be planted on the east side of the house.  Over there, I would pass them when I rushed around to feed and water my chickens.  Normally I was eager to get inside when I did that chore, so I didn’t think to water these trees.  Later in the summer, when I noticed how feeble these trees were looking, I began to water them, but it was apparently too late.  I suppose these trees might make a return next summer, but I am expecting to pull these sticks out of the ground next spring.

Hopefully by now, hundreds of people have indicated that they prayed to receive Christ in response to our production.  While that is exciting, we cannot consider our mission done unless these new seedlings are helped to grow to maturity.

 Pray for our ushers who get people to their seats.

December 14—Performance       Read: 2 Timothy 2:1-12

 This is the last entry I’m going to write this year.  I realize that you can turn the page ahead and see that I have two more pages to go, but I have already written those.  This one puts the project to bed.  Allow me to indulge in a bit of history.

 Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these, I found myself replying to a clear call of God.  I knew that I had to write the thing since the year before I had envisioned it.  I never imagined the response that people would have to it.  You people have no idea—and I’m tearing up as I write this—of how much you have meant to me and my family over the last six years.  To know that I had been a blessing to you jump-started my seriousness toward a call to write that I’d heard earlier.

 One year ago, when I produced the second edition, I felt that I had outdone myself.  I got a bit lazy on a few of the entries in the first book.  The second one, I thought, demonstrated a better, more consistent effort.  The responses were still terrific.  Once again, I felt undeservedly blessed by the entire experience.

 This year, though, as I write book number three, I find myself in the midst of a book manuscript and several other writing projects. No sooner did I get done on those stewardship lessons that you had to endure in October than I had to get serious about this.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am pleased to be offering this book, but I can’t say that my heart is as enthusiastic as it was in the past.  I’m busier than I was last year, and I’m finding it harder to come up with new material.  Plus, I’ve done it all before.

 I write this for this day because for many people this day will be the hardest of all of pageant.  We have two performances to offer today.  That makes for a long, tiring day right on the heels of two long workday evenings.  You have a right to be worn out.  Tomorrow, for most of us, will be a cakewalk, a bittersweet time to do this show one last time.  But today is hard.

Friends, just as we need this prayer focus as deeply as we did the last two years, the people sitting in the worship center today need to hear the message of the gospel.  They’re unsaved; they’re backslidden; they’re immature.  Let’s do our best for them today.

 Pray for all the people working in the parking lot.

December 15—Performance      Read: Psalm 107: 1-3

 I’m writing this 6 weeks before you should be reading it.  Today is October 1.  What can happen in 6 weeks?  I look ahead and wonder.  By the time you read this, the U.S. might be at war with Iraq or perhaps the crisis will have been somehow averted.  By the time we reach mid December, the economy might be worse off than it is or showing definite signs of recovery.  The election will have passed and we’ll know which party will control each of the sides of Congress.  We’ll know if the Chiefs, who are now 2-2, will be bringing us heartbreak or elation this season.

 These are the unknowns that we know.  But there are other unknowns we have no reason to wonder about.  In past pageant seasons we’ve seen heart attacks and deaths, things that we had no thought about before they arrived.  For all I know, Christ might return before I finish drafting this sentence.  Okay, he didn’t.

 A year ago, Morris and Brooke Wilson had no way of knowing that either one of them, much less both of them, would lose a job and spend a good chunk of time searching for a new one in 2002.  A year ago, I had not the foggiest notion that I’d be a father-in-law at this point.  A year ago, Larry Jones didn’t know that little Nora would be on the scene at this point.

We don’t even know what a single performance will bring.  If you’ve never made a mistake in pageant, then you’re in the minority.  I’ll never forget the night when my son Thomas and I were running from the soldiers, straight across the stage, and we both tumbled down to the floor.  I’ll hopefully forget the night when my mind froze and David Scott fed me the word “Resurrection” so that I could get my next line out.  You undoubtedly have—or will have—your own stories.

 While a great deal about life and pageant is uncertain, one thing remains certain and secure.  The one who created this world and the universe around it, the one who established the moral and natural law, the one who provided redemption for us when we transgressed that law, has been in this place over the past two weeks.  Lest we grow prideful, let’s remember that the good works were his.

 Pray for our bus drivers.

December 16—Aftermath        Read: Matthew 28:18-20

 Once again the end has come.  You’ve washed off the makeup.  Dutifully following Gene’s instructions, you have destroyed your “convenience” music.  You’ve washed the costume and hung it neatly for return to the church.  All of those tasks that had gone undone over the past two weeks, things that you kept reminding yourself you simply had to get on top of, you have done them.  You even went online last night and finished up your Christmas shopping, right?  Okay, at least I’ll assume you got the makeup off.

 Last year, that music book laid around in my office for a couple of months.  I don’t know why I didn’t spend the two seconds it would take to throw it away earlier.  My costume—oh boy—my costume, as I write these words in mid-September, is still sitting in my closet, cleaned and ready to go back as it has been since this time last year.  The accumulated “honey-do” list stretched into January last year, and the Christmas shopping I finished on December 24.  All I can boast about is getting the makeup off in a timely fashion.

I find myself thinking about unfinished work.  Although we have finished the 2002 pageant—aside from the terrific crew who will tear down the stage, put away the props, and reorganize the costumes—the work is not done.  In fact the work never ends.  If you’re anything like me, you relish completion.  You like the idea of creating a list of tasks that need to be done.  I make such a list just about every week.  Then, with great gusto, I mark off those items as I complete them.  So there we are:  Pageant 2002.  Mark it off.

 Somewhere in the recesses of your past, you should have added another item to your list, however.  At some point you should have written down “Serve God.”  Maybe you used the biblical words:  “Go and make disciples.”  Maybe you used your own words.  It hardly matters.  No less than Peter, James, and John; no less than Billy Graham or Billy Sunday, God has called each one of us to do our part in serving him and helping to push forward the work of “Going and making disciples.”  Although the pageant season is over, our time of service is not over.  Let us resolve to give God a gift befitting his faithfulness toward us this year.

 Pray for the follow-up that will be done on the new believers.