I have been married to Lori for over 35 years. I am dad to three grown children, Daniel, Andrew, and Becca. For over 20 years I was the Senior Pastor of First Church of Christ in Owosso, MI. Prior to that I ministered in the Northwest Indiana. I love to help people take their next steps in their faith and to help clear up the mystery that too often surrounds being a follower of Christ in their minds-"It's a relationship, not a religion."
Several years ago I swore to myself and God above that we would never again purchase a big ticket item on a credit card with “deferred interest.” Maybe you know the concept. It sounds good and I guess it can possibly be not too disastrous. In fact, we had made a few purchases over the years with deferred interest sometimes lasting up to 3 years. The plan is that you won’t get charged interest as long as you have the item paid off in the timeframe you agree to. And as long as you pay it by that date, you will have paid for…let’s say some furniture…over time with no interest. Never mind that the furniture is now broken down and looks like it’s twenty years old! Congrats–you did it! But ,as you might know, the catch is that during those three years the interest on that ratty furniture has been “accruing” at about 26% annual percentage rate. And if you do not pay the card off in its entirety in those three years the accrued interest will be adding right onto your credit card. And it’s usually a lot of money.
And we did that successfully a few times as I was obsessively focused on paying it off on time to avoid the interest. Of course, we were the exception. This is a highly lucrative way for stores and credit card companies to bilk us out of millions of dollars. They know that chances are if a person can’t afford a $1,500 sofa now they won’t be able to in three years. And during those three years, the minimum payments don’t even come close to paying off whatever it is. But we did it, as I said. Boy were we smart. Until we almost got slimed.
Take a look at the picture above. I love this picture. In case you can’t recognize it, the car is a Toyota Prius I believe. Evidently, on a nice July day in 2017 this car was tooling along highway 101 near Depot Bay, Oregon. I don’t know the exact sequence of events, but at some point this Toyota got too close to a flat bed truck that was carrying many tanks of Slime Eels, or Pacific Hagfish. At some point the truck overturned and dumped hundreds of these creatures on the road near this poor Prius and its occupant. Not only are these things a delicacy to eat, but they are also one of the most fascinating creatures in God’s world. These little eels, when they are threatened or whatever, produce this slimy substance at an enormous rate in enormous quantities to immobilize predators–like sharks or Toyota Priuses. This slime actually just keeps multiplying. Isn’t that awesome?!
That’s the picture I get when I think of the interest that accrues on purchases with which we’ll get slimed if we don’t pay the balance off. It just grows and grows and multiplies and multiplies exponentially.
And so after successfully doing this for a few purchases I almost got slimed several years ago.
We had bought some furniture with 2 years no interest. We successfully made the monthly payments and even more than the minimum most months. And I had my eye like a hawk on that date that we needed to have it paid off or else we would get slimed with an accrued interest totaling …are you ready for this…$1,700! That’s just accrued interest! This would be added to the balance still owed of like $1,100. It was no problem to pay that balance we still owed of $1,100. I even had it scheduled to pay 3 days before it was due on June 24. I checked it and rechecked it to make sure that all was well. And yet, somehow, I almost blew it. I checked it one day and somehow I had scheduled the payment 2 days after June 24th. As I said was obsessive about avoiding the accrued interest. And, yet, somehow, I nearly got slimed with interest and would have ended up paying interest on interest probably. And it would have grown and grown and multiplied and multiplied.
That’s the day I decided never again to buy anything with deferred interest. Don’t do this. No matter how tempting or how good of a deal it may seem. It’s a bad deal. Just ask that Prius.
Yesterday in Kroger I passed a table where they were giving samples of paczkis. And though it was “Fat Tuesday” I didn’t take one. In fact, I’ve never had one which is strange because I love donuts—which is essentially what they are just with a weird name. I just really don’t want to observe the whole Lent, fasting for Lent, Ash Wednesday thing. “But you’re a minister! Why don’t you want to fall in line with this biblical tradition preceding Easter?” you may ask. First of all, there is nothing wrong per se with the Lent, fasting, and putting some ash on your forehead thing if that is what leads you to a more meaningful Easter. It’s just that it’s not really a biblical thing. In fact, the origin of Lent is actually kind of unbiblical. Palm Sunday, Holy (Maundy) Thursday, Good Friday, Easter—these are all in the Bible. Lent, paczkis, Ash Wednesday—not so much. Now, to be fair Christmas isn’t something we are told to celebrate in scripture and yet I do celebrate Christmas. Yet, the birth of Christ is in scripture and though we’re not told to have a celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th, I think we’re on much more solid footing with Christmas.
Let me be clear: fasting, denying ourselves something for a period of time for a spiritual purpose, is a biblical thing that, frankly, we should do more of. And if this is done during the 40 days leading up to Easter, great! Yet, the origins of Lent, Fat Tuesday, and Ash Wednesday make me not really want to observe it… as much as I like jelly donuts. I am asked sometimes by folks why our church doesn’t observe these things. And maybe you’ve been asked “What are you giving up for Lent?” So here’s why in our church (as well as the larger body of churches of which we are a part-The Independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ) we don’t talk a whole lot about it.
The short story is that it’s not in the Bible. So where did the whole Lent thing come from? Glad you asked! The history of Lent is really a story of how Christians strayed from the Bible’s teaching about baptism.
The clear teaching and example in the New Testament regarding baptism is that it is done by immersion and done immediately or as soon as possible upon a person’s desire to become a Christ follower. Baptism should be accompanied by one’s confession of Christ as Savior, the Son of God, and repentance for sin. Acts 2:38-41 is the best example of this. This the practice throughout the entire New Testament: Faith, confession, repentance, baptism, indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
And for about the first 150 years after the church first began, baptism by immersion immediately was the practice of the church.
Starting around 150 a.d. there began to be some concessions made in case there wasn’t an available way to baptize by full immersion. And over the next couple hundred years baptism went from being immersed by any Christian (we’re all told to baptize people) immediately upon conversion to being sprinkled by only clergy and only on Easter.
When the church became a legalized religion in 313a.d., thousands wanted to get baptized and so the church began “saving people up” to get baptized on Easter. But the church had a problem now that Christianity was legal. Did people truly want to take up their cross and follow Jesus, or did they want to become a Christian because it was now in vogue? So they asked “How can we make sure these people are sincere in their desire to be Christians?”
At first, the church asked them to fast the day before Easter as a sign of true repentance. But in the mid 4thcentury a monk named Tyrannius Rufinus found an old letter from the 3rd century written by a pastor named Irenaeus which read:
“The dispute is not only about the day, but also about the actual character of the fast. Some think that they ought to fast for one day, some for two, others for still more; some make their ‘day’ last 40 hours on end. Such variation in the observance did not originate in our own day, but very much earlier, in the time of our forefathers.” (Eusebius, History of the Church, V, 24).
Tyrannius liked this idea. The problem was that when he translated that into Latin from Greek, he mistranslated 40 hours as “40 days.” And so began the tradition of 40 days of stringent preparation to get baptized. And this tradition grew over the years into “Lent.” The word Lent is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word lencten, which meant “Spring.”
So Lent has now become a tradition in the Spring over a period of 40 days (excluding Sundays), beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending the Saturday before Easter (or sometimes ending on Thursday).
Now, again, there is nothing inherently bad about Lent. But we should not feel bad in any way about not observing it (or not eating jelly donuts with 12,000 calories). We don’t celebrate it as a church for these reasons:
First, The Bible NEVER mentions Lent. It’s a tradition that started 300 hundred years after the resurrection of Jesus.
Second, Jesus tells us that his followers are meant to fast IN SECRET. A key part of Lent is giving something up to get closer to God. That’s what the Bible calls fasting and it’s a good thing, but it’s meant to be just between you and God and not put out there for display.
The only passage in the entire New Testament which gives us instructions about fasting is Matthew 6:16-18 in which Jesus says:
“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
In this passage Jesus unloads on the Pharisees specifically. They fasted 2 times a week during which time they evidently didn’t practice personal hygiene. In that time people didn’t bathe regularly, so they applied oil on the body to smell better and take care of the skin. The Pharisees stopped that altogether as a display of how religious they were so everyone would be impressed by their awesomeness.
So Jesus comes along and says, “Listen. I don’t know how to put this nicely. You stink. Like really bad. Take a shower.” You’re not more spiritual just because you stink and are hungry. Jesus is like, “I hate that—just doing stuff so people will notice you!” And so he says emphatically “Don’t be like them—don’t do that!”
And so if you fast or give something up during the 40 days before Easter, no one but God is supposed to know about it. It’s between you and God for the purpose of drawing closer to Him. It’s not about announcing it and putting some ashes on your forehead. And partying it up on Fat Tuesday before Lent starts certainly seems to miss the whole point of being a disciple of Jesus. As followers of Jesus our goal is to be radically obedient to everything He taught every day-24/7/365 (or 366 this year). And there is a sense in which Lent is kind of going against what he has told us to do.
A good definition of fasting is simply going without something you like which ends up forcing you to pay attention to your soul and pray
The impact on our lives can be profound. Going without food is most often associated with fasting, but there are many different kinds of fasts you can go on. Probably today, one of the best things you can go on is a fast from social media and smartphones. The research is so clear about all the ways in which we are too dominated by our technology and especially social media. You can fast from TV or any entertainment as well.
The bible only specifically mentions two kinds of fasting: Sex (1 Corinthians 7:5) and food. It was common during Jesus’ time to fast one day a week, and sometime to do it for longer periods of time. Fasting can help us withstand temptation (Matthew 4:1-3). It can help when we have a hard time making a decision (Acts 14:23). And we can fast in relation to evangelistic and mission work (Acts 13:2-3).
The key to fasting for whatever purpose and in whatever form is simple:
Last Sunday at First Church of Christ we began a new series called Screen Time: How to Redeem the Screen. You can check it out on our YouTube channel or Facebook page or our website (www.firstchurchofchrist.org)–and, no, the irony is not lost on me. So I have decided to repost three pieces I wrote on this theme back in 2011. This one recounts something that happened (or didn’t happen) years ago when a guy wrongly predicted the return of Christ and used technology to dupe many others into following his false teaching. I hope that we have learned our lesson about spreading goofy stuff like this!
Over the past several weeks I have been absolutely dumbfounded by all the attention and media coverage given to this man, Harold Camping, who against all biblical mandates to not speculate on dates and times said that Judgment Day would occur last Saturday. It wasn’t just a prediction. He said with absolute certainty that May 21st would be it. “There is no plan B,” he expounded. I hope that I don’t need to get into all the reasons why such speculation is foolish. But, quite simply, we are told in Scripture not to do that. Furthermore, we are told not to listen to such people who claim to have special information about such things. They are wrong. Clear and simple.
When Saturday came and went, there was silence from Camping’s broadcasting offices. I thought that finally he had learned his lesson after his failed 1994 prediction, but now this one. Yet, astonishingly, he now says that he was wrong only partially. For there was a spiritual Judgment Day which occurred last Saturday with the final, visible, real one to occur on October 21st. He is sure of it this time. October 21st is the day. There is no plan B. Most of his followers are somewhat forgiving and willing to give him another chance. But some, mostly those who quit their jobs or blew through their savings to promote the end of the world, are not so understanding. Yet, we should not feel sorry for them or anyone who so blatantly and willfully ignores the clear teaching of Scripture to follow the ramblings of one man.
Proverbs 14:25 says “A truthful witness saves lives, but a false witness is deceitful.” Only God knows this man’s heart. But I believe he will certainly have a lot to account for when that Day does come. He is a false prophet and the Bible has very harsh things to say about such people—especially those who would cause harm to the delicate faith of little ones. Little ones like my ten year old daughter who was terrified Friday night because she heard on the news that the world would be ending on Saturday . . . The News! So because I am so aggravated and incensed by this whole thing, this is the last thing I will say on the subject until I preach or teach on it again.
I use this example to point out one of the most troubling aspects of our technology, internet dominated world: The devastating speed and ease with which all manner of falsehood can be spread. Suffice to say that without the capabilities of technology and the need to fill web pages, blogs, and 24 hour news channels with constant fodder this whole thing would have barely been noticed. It is just so easy for junk to spread and infiltrate our lives. As Christians, we should be the champions of truth and honesty and integrity. But, as we have seen, too often Christians are the easiest and most gullible prey.
We have all received chain emails with some titillating story, bit of gossip, or unbelievable way to make easy money. You can usually spot them because they begin with these words:
“I don’t usually forward emails like this but . . .”
I always want to ask “But what?”
“But, I have had a temporary malfunction in my brain . . .”
“But, this is the juiciest piece of gossip I have ever heard . . .”
“But, this only confirms what I already wanted to believe about how evil (insert your politician of choice) is because it’s what (Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Al Franken, etc.) says . .”
“But, I have decided to neglect what the Word of God says and spread this regardless of how speculative or outrageous it really is . . .”
seriously…but what?! There are few things in the Bible as clear as the fact that we are not to try and set times and dates for His return. We are just to be ready. And to be found not staring up into the sky waiting for Him to come but with our hands to the plow living our lives in faithfulness and readiness for His sudden, unannounced appearance.
Proverbs 18:8 says “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s inmost parts.”
Brothers and sisters, let’s be careful about what we believe and what we spread lest it increasingly becomes who we are and not just what we think.
This Sunday at First Church of Christ I’m beginning a new series of sermons called Screen Time: How to Redeem the Screen. It’s a look at how our screens and devices affect us spiritually, socially, and emotionally. So I have decided to repost three pieces I wrote several years ago on the topic of technology. They are a little dated, but they are more relevant than they were in 2011 when I originally posted them.
I want you to go back in time with me for a few minutes to those wonderful days known as the 70’s. You know the decade—disco, smiley faces, flower power, sunshine, love, and some of the best music ever. Not to mention the best commercial ever—everyone sing along . . . “I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honey bees, and snow white turtle doves. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.” Wow! Someone was smoking something when they penned that little ditty! The sad thing is that I really love that song and that commercial. As I remember, they always seemed to run it on Sunday nights right before Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (another 70’s classic along with Hee-Haw, M*A*S*H, The Carol Burnett Show, All in the Family, and, that Saturday morning staple, Land of the Lost). Land of the Lost was from two guys named Sid and Marty Kroft. They were also responsible for that Saturday morning Psychedelic acid trip of show about the guy playing the magic flute.
Anyway, the other night around the dinner table, I was waxing nostalgic on the virtues of the 70’s. At this my oldest son disagreed referencing things like inflation, Vietnam, the energy crisis. Oh yeah, I forgot about those little things. It’s funny how we tend to remember the things we want to remember.
We have to be careful not to make an idol out of those much loved days of yesteryear. Things are never as great as we remember them in our “misty, watercolor memories.” And, yet, I often reflect on life in the seventies with wistfulness. To be sure, I was just a kid and didn’t have the pressures and stresses of adulthood. I am sure that my parents’ recollection of those days would be very different than mine. But think with me for a moment about life before the age of personal computing. A time long ago before the world was ruled by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Keep in mind that I am a gadget geek. I love me some shiny, lithium powered, computer chip driven stuff. Love it! And for all of my cautionary comments in this blog I think that technology can be a wonderful thing and a great tool. Plus, it’s just neat. But even the best tools, if misused or misappropriated, can have some dire results. That’s all that I am saying. Let’s rethink the role and pervasiveness in our lives of technology.
Back to the 70’s. Do you remember life before the constant pressure of maintaining and keeping current a variety of computers, cell phones, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and something called flikr (is that how you spell it? It doesn’t matter because with computers we don’t have to spell anything correctly anymore)?
What about life before having to keep track of login info for our digital universes? Do you remember a day without the considerable cost of cell phone bills, internet bills, newer and faster equipment, HD TVs, Blu Ray players, video games (or to put it simply, pretty much anything we get at Best Buy)? Do you remember not being utterly overwhelmed by literally unlimited entertainment choices. In the early 90’s a guy named Neil Postman wrote a great book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” That was 20 years ago and things have only gotten worse. We are an entertainment, leisure driven society and technology has fed the beast.
We have hundreds of TV channels between cable and satellite not to mention the infinite number of internet diversions. There is streaming video from Netflix, Hulu, YouTube as well as unlimited sources of music. The job of the advertising industry is to create a need so that we will spend money filling it. And they have done this flawlessly regarding our insatiable desire to be infotained. And let’s be honest, 95% of it is absolute junk.
All of this is to say that I am increasingly becoming convinced that, as neat and helpful as all of this often is, more important things are suffering and our souls are withering. Do you remember when there were maybe three or four TV channels and only two choices at the movie theatre. And so families had to actually talk with each other and agree on what to watch. And, together, they would watch a show and during commercials they would talk or get something to eat (unless it was the Coke commerical which everyone would stay to watch). Except for the occasional phone call (which didn’t last long because of being tethered to a cord) there were no distracting beeps, rings, alerts.
People weren’t in their individual cyber bubbles like the boy in that great 70’s TV movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.” In this classic, John Travolta took a break from being Vinny Barbarino to play a boy whom people could see but not touch. Sometimes I think that is us when we enter into our virtual cocoons to be entertained or connected with virtual people while we grunt at the real people sitting next to us.
During my Facebook phase I had a great time reconnecting with old friends. But that soon ran its course and I began to wonder why I care that a person I barely talked to when our lockers were next to each other for six years had a great time in Hawaii. I became increasingly annoyed at the narcissistic status updates of people trying to get attention. Or with the passive aggressive pot shots of folks with an ax to grind who, rather than dealing with the issue in a constructive way, are content to vent for all the world (or at least their 29 friends) to see. If you are on Facebook and enjoy it and find it a good way to enrich your relationships and friendships, I am not criticizing you. I just think that we all need to think long and hard about the message we send when we immerse ourselves in constant connectivity with everyone except those we are physically with.
I love that Jesus was always fully present wherever He happened to be. There were always people tugging at him to go somewhere else, minister to another person, tend to a more urgent situation. But He didn’t do it. There was a calm and a peace and a focus to His life. He was fully engaged with whomever he was with. I want to be like that.
You may be asking (and you have every right to), “Okay, Chris, you say you love gadgets and technology, so how are you applying your own words to your life?” Well, I will talk more about that next time, but I will say that I haven’t fully figured out all the changes I need to make. But I have made some. And, more importantly, I am asking the questions. And that’s where we all need to start.
When most people think of Vincent van Gogh, they think about a crazy artist who cut his ear off and ended his own life at only 37. He did suffer from mental illness, he did cut off an ear, and he did take his own life. Yet there is so much more to understand about this Christian whose faith as well as disillusionment with institutional Christianity prominently affected his art. Though not successful as an artist during his lifetime, he is now rightly considered a genius whose painting style, use of color, and themes continue to inspire artists well beyond his own “post-impressionist” period of the mid to late 19th century. The above painting, “Starry Night,” is my favorite and is considered a masterpiece. Yet, as author Skye Jethani oints out in his excellent book, “The Divine Commodity,” there was much more going on in van Gogh’s paintings. He was brought up by a Christian family and aspired to be a missionary. His faith was not perfect, but he sincerely desired to follow Christ. However, he became deeply disillusioned by the institutional church of his day, and this is seen in his paintings, especially “Starry Night.”
If you look closely at the painting above you can see that Van Gogh’s use of color is amazing. Particularly the yellow that he uses for the stars and the lights from the buildings below. This yellow color, for him, represented God and goodness and holiness. So the stars and the lights in the village below the night sky are painted with this brilliant yellow light. This yellow light floods out of all the buildings, except for one–the church. If you look closely you’ll see that the windows of the church are all dark. This was Van Gogh’s commentary on the cold, sterile, hypocrisy of the institutional church. The factors in his life that led to this are many and varied but at the bottom of it all was his belief that the church and Christians did not reflect the Christ whose name they claimed. And who of us does not feel that same way at times–about others as well as ourselves. Too often, we are, at best, dim reflections of who Christ calls us to be.
So with this in mind, the painting below is one among many parodies of Starry Night. In this one, Ron English, replaces the French village with the architecture of consumerism with fast food joints and Hollywood icons. The church steeple is crowned with McDonald’s Golden Arches and King Kong straddles the roof. Interestingly, the church in the parody painting below is not dark, but has light coming from its windows. But it’s not the sacred yellow light of the stars. No. The light coming from the church windows is the same electric, fluorescent white light of all the other franchised McStores around it. This is the church of consumerism.
“Starry Night Urban Sprawl” by Ron English
As Skye Jethani states in “The Divine Commodity:” “In 1889 Van Gogh’s struggle was with a church more focused on earthly power than heavenly glory.” English’s painting recognizes the church’s captivity to consumer values. As former chaplain of the United States Senate, Richard Halverson, once put it:
“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on living in Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, [the church] moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”
Richard Halverson
Skye Jethani observes in a recent post in his devotional, With God Daily (withgoddaily.com): “…there is a difference between living in a consumer society and adopting a consumer worldview. Our faithful Christian predecessors lived within the Roman Empire, but their minds and hearts were not beholden to Caesar. Their ultimate citizenship and loyalty were not to Rome. Likewise, we must learn to exist in a consumer culture but not forfeit our souls at its alter.”
So what in the world does all this have to do with our personal finances on Financial Friday?
Simply this: As those who have been born and raised in a deeply consumeristic culture, Christians need to realize that we have been affected by this mentality as have our churches. It’s the air we breath. It’s all most of us have ever known. I love this country and believe that democracy and free market capitalism is capable of the greatest good as far as earthly governments go. But make no mistake-Jesus calls us as believers to be more concerned with a Kingdom economy marked by things like justice, contentment, true needs, generosity, and the like. Think about it: What would happen if every Christian (or every person) in America immediately become content with what we have. And this contentment caused us to reduce our spending by just half? If enough people did this, our economy which is predicated on consumers buying new stuff all the time would come to a screeching halt. All I am saying is that as Christians we need to really discern the difference between our true needs and our perceived wants. Though our advertising driven, consumer culture is all pervasive we need not be constantly seduced by it. Worshipping at the Church of Consumerism will keep us from true contentment and thoughtful, intentional biblical stewardship of what God gives to us.
Chris Higgins 