If two or more of my frequently-read blogs seem to be unrelatedly following the same theme, I take special note. There’s probably something to it.

Rusty Peterman notes in his entry this weekend The Apostles’ Teaching that what the early church doubtless heard was the Story of Jesus.

Similarly, Greg Kendall-Ball ponders one of the Unexpected Blessings that he and Sara received at the Global Missions Conference in Arlington: a message from minister Rich Little recommending an emphasis on teaching Christ rather than moral codes, the Bible or a particular church brand.

And finally, on the New Wineskins site, managing editor Greg Taylor recounts how his mission efforts in Uganda some years ago did that very thing: focusing on Christ when asking Questions About the Gospel of Mark.

I commented on Rusty’s blog:

“For I resolved to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified …”

Still a great rule of thumb.

Those who haven’t heard of Him need to, and the rest of us never get tired of hearing more about Him.

Is it really possible to exhaust the subject of Jesus Christ, even in a lifetime of sermons, Bible classes, misson conferences, coffee-shop encounters, or anonymous notes of encouragement?

My second article for New Wineskins opens the July/August issue, themed around the Gospel of Mark.

As the issue “unfolds” in the days to come, a fine article by fellow blogger David Underwood is in queue.

Mark’s gospel is a simple, fast, active read. It’s meant, I think, to be read in one sitting – something I’ve done a few times now, and have really been blessed in doing it.

I watch too much HGTV. I am abnormally curious about other peoples’ home decor. I like visiting tour homes when I’m on vacation. I mail-ordered a video of Hearst Castle as a gift for Angi years ago, but I’ve probably watched it twice as many times as she has.

I like my home. I like living there. I liked working there. I don’t like it when I don’t have time or money to keep it up, fix its plumbing, mow its yard, repaint its trim, clean its gutters.

I am not an alien and a stranger.

I’m talking about I Peter 2:11 here, and Hebrews 11:13, and all the way back to I Chronicles 29:15.

I’m talking about Elijah, and John the Baptist, and Jesus.

And Jesus. And Jesus. And Jesus.

And His disciples, of course. Paul. Many others.

I know Jesus didn’t call everyone to be a homeless person.

But sometimes I am too much “of” this world as well as “in” it.

They had a suspect. They dragged her into the temple courts where Jesus was teaching. She was accused; caught in the act of adultery; condemned by the law. They asked this young Rabbi’s approval. He baffled them. They slunk away, all but her. After a few words with Jesus, she left too.

But He went right on teaching, and baffling – right there close to the place where the cash offerings were thrown in. He still had a crowd, including some Pharisees who said His testimony wasn’t valid because He testified about Himself. He said He was testifying about His Father, whom they did not know. But nobody put a hand on Him, because it wasn’t His time yet.

Yet even some who believed in Him were offended when He said His words would set them free. They countered that they were Abraham’s children and had never been slaves. Pretty funny, when you think about it … as close as the temple was to the Roman garrisons. It wasn’t funny to them. They were ready to kill Him.

Instead of backing off for His own safety, He told them that God should be their Father; that before Abraham existed, He had been with the Father. For that blasphemy, they took up stones to kill Him … but He slipped away. (John 8)

After that, He moved cautiously – but couldn’t help having compassion on a man born blind, and couldn’t help but heal him and teach His followers that physical handicaps aren’t punishments for sin; they are opportunities to glorify God. After the poor man and his parents had been grilled about the healing, Jesus sought him out to leave a few words of teaching with him. But, overheard by some Pharisees, He replied to their retort that they were the blind ones. (John 9)

By the time He finished explaining His role as a shepherd, they were convinced He was possessed by a demon.

Then winter came, and He returned to the temple – to Solomon’s Colonnade – to teach. When pressed to be the kind of Messiah that others wanted, He refused. And once again they picked up stones to throw at Him and kill Him. And once again He escaped their grasp. (John 10)

Right there in the temple. Just the place to kill someone. Not outside the city or camp, as commanded by God in Leviticus 24:14 or Numbers 15:35. No; right there in God’s house … right on the doorstep of God’s sanctuary.

They had probably been incensed when Pilate had mixed the blood of some Galileeans with their sacrifices there (Luke 13:1). But this was different. This was a case of a blasphemer who healed on the Sabbath. The two wrongs made it right, right then and there.

I don’t know how He got away; whether by divine intervention or miraculous transport or swift stealth and strength. I do know He escaped because it wasn’t His time. And it was His place.

We would never think of doing such a thing. We’d never assassinate someone in our sanctuaries. Not literally; not figuratively. Those places are too holy to accuse and condemn another soul who claimed God as Father; to cast aspersions on their character; to consign them to hell and demand their penitence and apology before us. We wouldn’t dare to do it in His place.

Would we?

That’s the phrase that was in my head this morning when my watch awakened me at 6:00 a.m. because I stupidly forgot to turn off its alarm last night.

For a few moments, I wondered what I meant by that – before drifting back to sleep for another hour and half.

“The Holy Grail is half full.”

I don’t blog about the church very much; I’ve resolved not to. Other folks, like my blogging buddies Fajita and Neal and John and Brian cover the territory so well I would feel redundant. Sometimes I’ll comment on their blogs, but usually not.

If the Holy Grail phrase refers to my confidence in the church, then I think it’s accurate. I choose to see the church as blessed by Christ’s blood about half as much as it could be … rather than seeing the cup half-empty, as in the old saw.

The power; the potential is there. We just haven’t imbibed as much as we could. If we drank deeply, we could forgive ourselves as well as others, just as we have been forgiven. We would be free to respond to full forgiveness with full confidence, full hearts, full gratitude. We would give each act of kindness and mercy and love in full measure, not half-heartedly. We would have an unquenchable thirst for the new wine; a hunger to be the new wineskins for it.

We would long to see the Grail – not half-empty – but completely empty because we drank it dry.

Just to see the miracle of it refilling with exactly what we need in the measure we need precisely when we need it.

Somewhere in the wee hours of this morning, I turned 50.

I went to bed regretting a boneheaded thing I did the night before when I was 49 – I forgot that the class I’m teaching at church started at 6:30, showing up at the 7:00 time that is normal for the other 9 months of the year. When I woke up this morning, I was a year older and it was too late to correct the error or let it waste today in regret.

Life is that way, and you don’t have to be 50 to know that. You make choices. Some are good; others aren’t. You remember things. You forget others.

And beyond whatever control you try to exercise over it, life doesn’t seem to turn out the way you expect it to.

When I was a kid, I loved writing; I loved reading the Bible – especially those passages about Christ’s return in the Thessalonian and Corinthian letters, and the colorful imagery of heaven in the Revelation. I didn’t understand it all, but I got the main points:

• Satan loses.
• God wins.
• And Jesus comes to take us home.

When I went to college, I loved reading and writing so much that I tended to overdo it, adding to that mix a good deal of conversation with my roommates about life, resurrection and the universe – and drinking a lot of late-hour coffee. My ticker began acting up around the time of my first freshman finals. I was diagnosed with Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome – an extra pacemaker nerve in the heart which can misfire after too much stress and stimulation (like caffeine).

So I cut out the caffeine, but by the end of my sophomore year the stress caught up with me. My resistance was low and I caught epididymitis, a kind of mumps that doesn’t settle in the throat but in glands farther down. During my two-week hospital stay, my doctor told me I would never sire children of my own.

I recovered. After graduation, I married a young lady to whom that sterility didn’t matter; someone I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. But that marriage ended badly after seven difficult years – including a tense wait for biopsy results on the kind of cancer that bikng champion Lance Armstrong suffered (at a time when there was very poor rate of survival). Fortunately, that tumor was judged to be “benign,” and excision took care of it.

I poured myself into work – which wasn’t the writing I wanted to do – but setting other people’s writing in type. I stopped going to church. Not only did I feel hopelessly tainted by what felt like the unforgivable sin of divorce, I was once again (as I had in college) having a crisis of faith about some of the very passages I had loved to read as a boy. The ones in the gospels made it sound as if Jesus’ return would occur at any moment – during the writers’ lifetimes in the first century. Why hadn’t He returned, then? Was it all a lie? My prayer life fell flat.

Occasionally, I would slink into a church for a visit. Because I had filled out a “guest” attendance card, I was visited by two young single ladies from my home church – one of whom brought a boyfriend who wasn’t a church-goer, just so that no one one would feel uncomfortable with the visit. I could tell that my divorce made no difference to them, and they assured me that I would always be welcome at my home church. They were right.

I made my church home there. I made friends who encouraged me. I started praying again. I went back to those crisis-causing scriptures, and I began to wonder if perhaps Christ’s return was more than a single cataclysmic event; if it was also, perhaps, a process. Perhaps heaven’s eternity, I reasoned, is outside of our notion of time entirely. After all, if no one comes to the Father but by the Son, how else could Jesus have met Moses and Elijah in the transfiguration? He had to be the One who had come to take them home to heaven. How else could God be the “I AM”; who was, and is, and is to come? Maybe – as Job discovered at the end of his dark time of the soul – I didn’t have to understand everything … just believe.

After all the ways that my life seemed to have gone wrong, that seemed right. And I began to experience a sense of peace in the soul again that I hadn’t felt since childhood. Not all at once, of course; and not without some times of doubt. But when I doubted, I had a church home that gathered me in with no prejudice about my marital status or my unorthodox views of eschatology.

I had become a copywriter, and felt groomed for a more advanced creative position where I was working. The job went to someone else, someone who didn’t want to retain the current writers in his stable. I had to take a position doing something other than writing just to stay employed.

But I had met a godly young lady at my home church who inexplicably consented to become my wife; someone who would fast and pray with me that God would give us children by adoption – and He did.

What an extraordinary blessing!

This morning, their three birthday cards were at my breakfast table by my coffee.

These days, I enjoy my coffee as frequently as I like and I rarely stress out – even when I forget what time I should be teaching class.

I know my story is pretty trivial compared to many others I could tell; some from among my church family that would absolutely melt your heart. But I’m convinced that “the peace that surpasses all understanding” is available to all who seek it. Life turns out the way we should expect, in the largest sense.

Because in the end, what I understood as a child will still be true for all time: Satan loses. God wins.

And Jesus comes to take us home.

My preaching minister shared it with his church family this morning as he closed his remarks on the topic “Draw Near To God” that he had chosen many weeks ago, and delivered in the aftermath of Friday morning’s tragic accident that took a dear sister from among us.

He had tried to relate what had happened that morning; how he and his wife had been called and arrived minutes later … how he had pleaded with God from the driveway to intervene, but that Kim was already gone. He told how the day had progressed with ambulance, police, and family arriving … how the gathering of church family on the lawn had meant so much … how difficult it was to accompany a grieving husband through the process of planning a funeral, and then selecting a casket for his beloved ….

Then my minister lost all composure and wept openly with us, able to speak only a few more words of truth from his heart that were angry and defiant and empathetic and pure gospel: “A man should not have to choose a casket for his wife.”

One of our elders shared in that moment of grace as well, coming up to stand behind him and lay hands on his shoulders, silently strengthening our minister so he could complete his simple invitation: “Draw near to God.”

He’s absolutely right. A man should not have to choose a casket for his wife. Nor vice versa, nor a parent for a child, nor a child for a parent, nor a minister for an estranged member, nor a mortician for a penniless complete stranger. There shouldn’t be death anymore; Jesus conquered it once and for all … but there is still sin in the world, and sinleadstodeath sinleadstodeath sinleadstodeath.

Somehow, after all that has transpired since Friday morning, two of our ministers managed to conduct a funeral this afternoon and several elders extemporaneously took responsibility for conducting worship this evening.

I’ve been to churches where pew-warming scorekeepers might grade down a minister for such a moment of grace; they would think him weak in character and profession and faith. I don’t think we have any of them left at our church anymore; judgmental attitudes are never really at home in an environment of loving community, and they don’t tend to stay.

But this morning I saw a servant for whom death is more than an intellectual exercise in scriptural interpretation. I saw someone willing to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn. I saw a shadow of One weeping at the tomb of His dear friend Lazarus.

And in spite of human despair, I saw divine hope.

A young mother – a sister in Christ at the church I attend – perished this morning in what is described as a freak handgun accident.

She was a stunningly lovely and achingly spiritual person.

She was an assistant instructor in gymnastics at the Christian school where my children attend. She leaves behind a husband and two children, the same age and gender as ours.

I’m at home with my kids today because little Laura is sick with a fever. But we’re all sick at heart from this turn of events, and a little empty in the place this sweet young lady uniquely filled in our lives.

Tonight we’ll gather on their lawn with our church family to pray.

Tomorrow we’ll look at each other differently, with renewed love and passion for life, thinking of hers.

Sunday morning I will deliver a call to worship, a call to submission, a call to draw closer to God. I will pray for the words that need to be said to my church family.

But today I mourn.

postscript:
Gun slips, kills Maumelle woman
By Daniel Nasaw, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Saturday, July 9, 2005

A Maumelle woman was killed Friday morning after a shotgun she was retrieving from her attic slipped from her grasp and discharged, police said.
   Kim Evans, 38, was packing items for her nine-year old daughter to go to church camp at about 7 a.m. and was unloading belongings from an attic over the garage at the family’s home at 24 Chicot Dr. when the accident occurred, said Maumelle police spokesman Lt. Mike Wilson.
   Evans had asked her husband, Travis, if he wanted her to bring down a shotgun stored there. He replied that he did, at which point Kim Evans partially removed the gun from the case and began pulling it down, Wilson said.
   Travis Evans told police he then turned around to set down a cup of coffee and heard his wife gasp, suggesting she’d lost her grip on the gun, Wilson said. The gun then discharged a round of birdshot, striking her in the neck at close range, he said.
   No one else was injured, and when police arrived they woke the still-sleeping children and took them outside the house before beginning their investigation, Wilson said.
   The couple moved to Maumelle with their son and daughter about two years ago from College Station, Texas.
   About 200 friends, neighbors and relatives gathered Friday evening for a tearful vigil on the Evanses’ front lawn on a quiet street in the Little Rock suburb.   Wilson said an investigation has turned up nothing that would lead police to suspect foul play, although “we’re certainly not ruling anything out.”
   “It was a very tragic and very horrible scene,” Wilson said. “It was the perfect family and the perfect couple.”

Is life really getting meaner? Are people actually blowing up at each other more often – figuratively as well as literally – and not just in Iraq? Are there more sneers, jeers, snides, asides, derides? More words turning the air bluer than ever before?

Is there more side-choosing and armpit-smelling than there used to be? More lines drawn in the sands and chips knocked off of shoulders? More condemnation and less commendation? Has our country become a condem-nation?

Is it just because there are more people, or that the meanness is getting more air-time? Is there just plainly more meanness?

Or is it just me, getting old?

Also known as Pharisee Syndrome. Patients often express that they have “done it” right; others are “doing it” wrong; specifically, that others have partied all their lives and should not be treated with another party, let alone party clothes and jewelry. They will often express gratitude that they are not like tax collectors.

The condition is more common than has been thought and is persistent. It is generally resistant to treatment and has a tendency to spread and deepen.

Symptoms: General lack of joy and cheer; puffiness around the ego; occasional reddening of the eyes and face.

Prognosis: Invariably leads to serious and sometimes fatal cardiopulmonary complications.

Treatment: Strong dose of gently-applied equilibrium. Difficult, as patients are often convinced that their Physician’s purpose is not to seek out and treat them, but others whose conditions are fatal.

See also “Penitent Prodigal Therapy” and “Kneeling Facedown Regimen.” (Self-applied thoracic compressive thrusts accompanied by verbal pleas for mercy may also be indicated.)