Roger Bothwell

Ornithologists are suspicious that birds can count.  Cowbirds create a scenario that gives credence to this unusual ability.  Cowbirds are really lousy parents.  They are the worst.  They have no idea how to change diapers or do any of those essential parental things so they wait for another species of bird to leave their nest.  They quickly swoop in, toss an egg out of that nest, and replace it with their own.  The other bird sees the same number of eggs they had when they left, so they raise the cowbird, which is often bigger, which then eats most of the food brought to the nest often to the fatal determent of the babies that belong in that nest.
 
Spring is definitely here because I saw a returned cowbird at our feeder this morning.  My first inclination was to think, “You lousy so and so. (It most likely really does have lice.)  Go somewhere else. You aren’t welcome here.”   Then I remembered Jesus welcoming me into His family.  How much do I sin?  Let me count the ways!  I am selfish.  I think I’m better than certain groups of people.  I use more than my share of this world’s resources.  My carbon footprint is huge.  I hang up on telemarketers.  I resent people that cut me off in traffic.  Humm.  I better stop before I get to the juicy sins.
 
I love Romans 5, “God demonstrated His love for me while I was a cowbird.”  Well, actually it says, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  But it means the same.
 
By the way, if birds can count why can’t they recognize that big greedy child isn’t theirs?  I guess they aren’t as bright as I thought.   

We awoke this morning to yet more senseless acts of violence instigated by ignorance and hate.  As we listened to news reporters describing the scenes of destruction we heard words and phrases like “sophisticated,” “masterminded by,” “highly trained,” “well coordinated.”   I would like to register my complaint that media glorify these haters with such terms.  It does not take a brilliant mind to destroy, blow-up or shoot.  It does not take training to push a button that ends not only one’s own life but the lives of those around you.  A monkey can press a button.  Anyone with the intelligence of a three-year-old can walk into a workplace where they are known and spray the room with bullets killing one’s colleagues.   Small children push over piles of blocks creating shambles.
 
Building things, designing living spaces, enhancing lives with technology, making communities safe from disease, providing food and clean water to third world countries, developing means by which people can be educated and provided with opportunities to earn a good living for their children, these are the things that take sophistication and high training.
 
For millennia Satan has been ruining this beautiful world God has created for His children.  Let us cease speaking of how clever and brilliant individuals are who destroy and create horror.  God and God’s children create and mastermind good things.  Satan and Satan’s deceived, misguided, mislead and ignorant children bring death.  Any ignoramus can take apart a cell phone.  Only the brilliant can put it back together so that it works.  Let us call sin by its right name and cease puffing up the egos of those who destroy and maim.  Yes God is good and God is great.  Why don’t they listen to their own message?

Have you ever been a dangling participle?  A participle is a modifier much like an adjective.  Often it denotes some form of action that describes the subject of a sentence.  An example is “The flying hawk never flapped its wings.”  Flying is the participle.  If I said, “Flying in the strong wind, the hawk never flapped its wings” I created a participle phrase.  If I said, “While reading a book, the hawk never flapped its wings.”   I forgot to mention while I was reading a book, the hawk never flapped its wings.  The phrase represented or latched on to the nearest subject (the hawk) and became a dangler. It modified the wrong subject.
 
Now back to my beginning thought about our being a dangling participle.  I watched a church deacon upbraid a teen for coming to church with a short skirt.  The teen left and most likely will never return.  The deacon thought he was representing Jesus (who welcomed everyone).  Instead the deacon accomplished Satan’s work by driving the teen from the church.  The deacon represented the wrong subject. 
 
Now if none of this made any sense it is because I slept through grammar class in high school and after many decades probably have it all wrong.  So you can forget the participle thing.  But please do not forget the most important idea here, which is if we are intending to represent Jesus let us make sure we always do it with care and love lest we end up representing the enemy.  My prayer is never for us to be dangling participles.
 
“But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”  Luke 15.

“No” is a favorite word of two-year-olds.  Sometimes parents are alarmed at what appears to be rebellion and the beginning of the road to perdition.  However, child developmentalists assure us it is a healthy sign of the emergence and growth of individuality.  The child is saying, “I’m a person.  I have power.  I can make choices.”  It is the beginning of the journey to adulthood when we want our children to be ready to cope with life without our holding their hands.
 
So the question arises.  If we are God’s children, if He wants us to grow, if we are responsible enough to roam His universe someday, is there ever an occasion for us to tell Him, “No”?   I’m not talking about disobedience to a moral stance, but more in the line of wanting our preference.  When Jesus visited with Abraham on the way to Sodom, Abraham engaged Him in bargaining for the salvation of the city.  In the wilderness Moses protested God’s plan to destroy Israel after the golden calf incident.  This seems unthinkable yet God did not seem to mind.
 
What if God has a plan for our lives and we want to do something else. Will He say, “Okay. I will bless you”?   Isaiah 1:18 says, “Come now, let us reason together.”  Could it be that as we grow God, like any good parent, gives us more and more choices to forge our own way?  I don’t make my sons’ day to day decisions. They are men now.  I trust them to be wise.  If they need my support it’s there with very few if any questions asked.  I’m not thinking we ever want to be separated from God and be totally on our own.  I’m thinking about an eternity of personal choices with our Father’s blessings.

I absolutely love chocolate chip cookies.  I love them small.  I love them large.  I love them with tiny chips.  I love them with chunks.  I love them made by Keebler’s elves.   I love them made by my wife.   I love them baked.  I love them raw.  I love them with a tad of vanilla.  I love them without the tad of vanilla.
 
I don’t love what chocolate chip cookies do to my waist.  I don’t love what they do to my self-control. I don’t love what they do to the number on our bathroom scale. Yesterday I was feeling particularly vulnerable while picking up milk at our grocery store.   As I picked up the milk I felt the cookie urge.  As I walked past the cookie aisle I’m sure I could smell them beckoning.  Visions of sitting in my easy chair with a bagful on my lap filled me with thoughts of paradise.  Surely in heaven there will be a chocolate chip cookie tree in my garden.  There will be no serpent.
 
I am so grateful I learned my weekly memory verses when I was a yet a boy.  On each shoulder sat a convincer.  In my left ear came a voice that said, “Just one.  You’re a man.  You can handle just one.”  In my right ear I heard the whisper, “Remember Psalm 1:1.  Repeat after me.  Blessed is the man who walketh not past the cookies nor standeth in the aisle staring nor sits with a bagful on his lap.”
 
I wish I could tell you I won.  Well, I did – sort of.  Instead I bought a bag of chocolate chips.  Forget the dough, baked or raw.   Sometimes compromise isn’t a bad word.  It has ten letters, not four.

When I was seventeen years old our high school temperance society went, as part of larger trip, to a night court in Baltimore. The atmosphere was seedy, dark and an amazing snapshot of city government at work.  The judge was wearing a robe and did have a gavel.  For a few hours we watched a parade of very scruffy men and women brought in from the drunk tank, being represented (?) by a court appointed attorney.  Two men were brought in still bloodied from bashing on each other.  The highlight for a seventeen year old boy were the ladies of the night. They were not strangers to the court.  The judge called each by name, asked each how she was and then fined each one $10.  I had never seen anything like this.  I grew up in church hearing about Jesus spending time with such people.  But this was all new for a kid who grew up in the sheltered care of a loving father and mother.
 
If Jesus had been running a political campaign these were the last people He should have been seen with.  It was no wonder the religious leadership said this man can’t be our messiah.  Look who he parties with.  To be honest most of us would gasp if such a conglomeration showed up in church.  It is easy for us to sit in our comfortable middle class homes and say, “Oh, no.  We would welcome them.”  No.  No we wouldn’t.  We can say we would while not smelling them and not hearing the language.  The wonder of this is Jesus did welcome them.  He told us He came for them.  And He came for us.  Actually we are the hardest ones for Him to reach because most of us think we are okay. 

When we are very small we have very limited options.  We have to eat what others give us and go wherever the family car takes us.  As we mature the menu expands.  We can decide whether or not to continue to eat the family fare or experiment by tasting new foods and new experiences.  Eventually we can choose to set out on our own or continue to live in the world of our family traditions.  Environment and talents have much to do with what’s on the menu.  Few of us could be concert pianists even if we choose to be.
 
Sometimes life serves us some very unpleasant things.  But we still retain the power of choice.  While we might be forced to “eat” something once we don’t have to continue “eating” it for the rest of our lives.   It’s called forgiveness and moving on.  After a very bad incident I have heard people say they will never forgive the person or organization that hurt them.  That’s a bad choice.  What they are saying is I am going to continue “eating” this day after day for the rest of my life.  When we stop to think about this it is a very stupid decision. 
 
If one hates Brussels sprouts, why continue eating them?  Forgiveness is choosing to not only stop eating Brussels sprouts but to not even think about eating them.  For most people the quality of life is a combination of many decisions.  If life stinks most often it’s because we have made stinky decisions.  Jesus told us to forgive. Paul wrote, “Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report think on these things.”  Life hands us a menu.  The meal we eat is our choice.

One of the many pregnant scenes from Schindler’s List occurs when the camp commandant is drinking with Oskar Schindler and Schindler says to the commandant, “Power is when we have every justification to kill and we don’t.”
 
Paul wrote to the Romans, “For the wages of sin is death.” (6:23)  “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (3:23)   There it is.  It could not be any plainer.  God has every justification to do away with us.  However, there is that aspect of divinity that is omnipotent.  He is all powerful and power according to Oscar Schindler is having the justification but not doing away with us.  Paul goes on and says, “All are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (3:24)
 
Christianity is spectacular. There is not another religion in the world that offers what Jesus offers.  Other religions are moral.  Other religions have ethical standards.  But nothing else offers what Jesus offers. What is distressing is there are groups hiding under the cover of Christianity, claiming to be Christian, but try to add a bunch of dos and don’ts.  If one is wanting a definition of heresy all one has to do is identify one of these groups.  In Galatians Paul goes after such who were claiming one had to be circumcised to be saved.  He begins Galatians by asking them how could they, the Galatians, be so foolish as to even listen to these people.
 
Our God is omnipotent.  Our God is all powerful.  Our God, though justified, has chosen to forgive us.  I was going to say He chose to love us.  But love isn’t a choice.  It is an attribute.  He can’t help Himself any more than any good parent who loves their children.

God is creative. He longs to talk to us. The writer of Hebrews begins, “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways.”  He still does.  It doesn’t have to be a long time ago to other people.  It can be now to us.  Today I heard a song by Joe Cocker, someone not likely to be thought of as a prophet.  He sang,
 
“I Want To Be The One You Run To
I Want To Be The One You Come To
I Just Want To Be There With Someone
When The Night Comes
Let’s Put All Our Cares Behind Us”
 
As I listened I could hear the still small voice of our Heavenly Father saying, “When the night comes, when life goes dark, I want to be the one you run to. I want to be the one you come to.”  God loves us so much he wants to help us put our cares behind us.   So many of us try to do life by ourselves and we end up in trouble. 
 
The truth is it doesn’t matter how we get in the dump.   He’s ready to help.  There isn’t any place we can go where He is not.  “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”  Psalm 139.  David, another person with a troubled past, also wrote, “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.  I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”  Psalm 91
  
So thank you Joe and thank you Dave.

We had a Luke 15 kind of day.  In Luke 15 Jesus tells three lost and found stories and thus it was we had three lost and founds in just a few hours.  When we took our dog for a walk in the forest we came across police cars and fire rescue vehicles.  There was a lost woman in the forest. Just as we were returning from our walk she was found by some of the local children.  When we got home my wife discovered she lost a button off her jacket.  She found a perfect replacement button in her button box.  I then sat down to watch the evening news and promptly fell asleep.  (I have to stay out of that chair.  I lose too many hours in it.)  The woman was found. The button was found but alas my hour in that chair is not recoverable.  I guess it was not a Luke 15 day.  In Luke 15 all three things were recovered.
 
Unfortunately we live in a world of loss and what we lose are more valuable than any button.  Anyone who loves will suffer loss.  It comes with the joy of having someone precious in our lives.  We cannot keep our children. They grow up.  Then they lose us to old age and finally death.   We lose relationships and end up alone.  This is what makes Jesus so necessary.  When I was a child, Jesus was a great idea.  Now He is so much more than that.  When I call Him my Savior it isn’t just a descriptor or a name.   He is now the most important thing I have.  He and He alone will make this a Luke 15 life where everything precious will be found, restored and returned with the surety of never losing a loved one again forever.