Fellowship and Judgment

/ W. Keith Brenton / 4 Comments

This post originally appeared as an article in the February, 2012 edition of New Wineskins.

Let’s cut to the chase.

Fellowship is a choice that we make; we choose whether to extend it or not. And to make that choice, we use our judgment.

Judging people is not acceptable. Jesus teaches this unequivocally in the sermon on the mount:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” ~ Matthew 7:1-2

The verses that follow are clearly relational; they are about relationships with others. We are not to judge others. It is just as apparent in His sermon on the plain:

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” ~ Luke 6:37

These instructions are more specific iterations of the golden rule (Matthew 7:12), if you think about it.

Yet they are monumental challenges to us because …

We all judge.

We live in a culture of judgment. We elect government officials; we root for sports teams; we pull for beauty contestants, bachelors and bachelorettes; we try to guess the next decision by Judge Judy; we hope people will be voted off the island.

It’s been that way for a long time. Paul put it this way:

“You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” ~ Romans 2:1

Some believers – among them, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Greg Boyd who builds on Bonhoeffer in Repenting of Religion – have proposed that a key element of Eden’s original sin was judging: God was judged untrustworthy with His warning about the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s difficult to argue with their logic.

It’s wrong, but we do it anyway. Judgment has become so integral to our culture, we have superimposed it on religion and many are convinced that man’s judgment of others is absolutely essential in order to be righteous and preserve righteousness. To a certain degree, that’s understandable, because ….

In scripture, we’re called to judge and use judgment.

“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.” ~ John 7:24

We are, as was the crowd to whom Jesus spoke in this passage, expected to judge whether He is the Son of God.

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” ~ Matthew 7:15-16

We’re warned to discern when people claim to speak for God and lie.

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?” ~ 1 Corinthians 5:1-2

We are adjured to put immorality out of the assembly.

“If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people?” ~ 1 Corinthians 6:1

We are challenged to adjudicate small claims within the church.

And on and on – to shun indolents and moochers (2 Thessalonians 3:6ff); preachers of gospels that aren’t (Galatians 1:9); deceivers and antichrists (2 John 1:7-11); obstructors and dividers (Romans 16:17, Titus 3:10); those who are guilty of any of whole litanies of sins that stain a church’s reputation (1 Corinthians 5:9-11).

It sounds like there was a whole lot of judging going on in the church of century one.

How do we square that with what Jesus said?

Not all judging is the same.

Stay with me: this is not a matter of semantics, but of grammar. The verb “judge” requires an object. You don’t just judge. You judge something. Or someone.

When Jesus forbids judging as quoted above, He forbids judging people. He said that even He did not walk this earth for the purpose of judging people:

“If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day.” ~ John 12:47-48 (See also Luke 12:13-15; John 5:22-30.)

There will come a time when His words will judge them, but while He walked among men it was not the right time. (Even though He knew their thoughts and the motives of their hearts – see Matthew 9:4 and Luke 9:47 – which we certainly cannot.)

There will come a time when believers will judge the world and angels, too (1 Corinthians 6:2-3) – possibly part of a reign with Him (2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 20:4-6), but not yet. Not in this world.

We, like Christ, walk this world to save others. We do so by leading others closer to Him.

Furthermore, He says that if we do not judge, we will not be judged:

“Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him. Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. ~ John 5:22-24 (emphasis mine)

When He tells people to judge, it is for themselves and to judge what is right (Luke 12:57 – in the context of recommending reconciliation rather than taking a civil court action).

So, may I propose that when we search the epistles and find instructions for us to judge, these are instructions to judge – not people – but their words and actions to determine whether wrong has been done.

In virtually every instance,* the things which are being judged in these cases are, in fact, things and not people. They are sins. They must be judged, weighed, considered, and identified as sin because Christ also did not come to bring law but grace (John 1:17; Romans 6:14; Galatians 2:21; and 5:4).

There was never an intention for the New Testament to be written, collected and regarded as new law. The concept is foreign to scripture entirely. So there was not a pair of stone tablets or even a collection of written scrolls in Jesus’ handwriting filled with commands, exceptions, qualifications, and encryption/decryption codes. Instead, He taught and lived every day what it meant to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. All other applications could be deduced (with the assistance of His present Holy Spirit) and judged from that.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” ~ Matthew 18:18

Jesus isn’t talking just to Peter here. He did say the same thing to Peter a couple of chapters before (16:13-20), but here He is in the middle of a discourse about church discipline. He’s thinking ahead. He’s speaking to us, as well as the disciples around Him at that time.

We are called to judge what is sin in this world and what is righteousness; between wrong and right; between exclusive love for self and love for God and for others as surely as self.

We are not called to judge people. We’re not required to assess others’ moral character; just our own. We do not determine others’ salvation. Judging people is not our job. We’re not good at it. We’re not qualified to do it. We’re not authorized to do it.

Yet we must be competent and willing to discern right from wrong because we have a responsibility to fellow believers and to those who have not a clue about Jesus to help them understand Him better and know what He taught, lived, and died for. It’s not an option. Jesus instructs it.

If we are to judge correctly – make righteous judgments, as we are encouraged to do (Luke 12:57; John 7:24) – then we must judge for ourselves what is right (and therefore, what is also wrong). But Jesus’ instructions in Matthew 18 (above) and Matthew 5:23-24 also burden us with the responsibility to help others judge wisely, too.

How do we judge sin without judging people?

Have you ever heard the expression, “Hate the sin; love the sinner”? Our judgment must be like that; we judge the sin (whether acts and words are wrong) but leave judging the person to the Lord at the proper time.

First of all, be sure that you have judged correctly that what the other person has said or done is, in fact, sin. You can discuss a difference of opinion, but you can’t correct someone about a matter on which scripture is silent. Become overly familiar with Romans 14. Not every person who impresses you as wrong is morally wrong – or even necessarily holds a wrong opinion. Not all churches are Corinth or Sardis.

Investigate thoroughly those scriptures cited above which describe the sins and circumstances that require judgment. If the matter before you is one of those, you have good precedent to proceed. If it isn’t, you may not. If the severity of the matter doesn’t begin to approach the severity of those sins and circumstances, ask for the Spirit’s help in discerning (Luke 11:11-13; 1 Corinthians 2:14).

Is the matter before you a matter of sin? Or a matter of opinion? If it’s a question of words, interpretations and/or opinions, remember 2 Timothy 2:23 and Titus 3:9.

Second: be humble. None of us is perfect. None of us is sinless. Those whom we would lead closer to Christ are keenly aware of that. We need to be constantly conscious of it too: we are saved by grace through faith; forgiven yet still sinners. All of us – those who know Christ and those who don’t – will be judged by what we have done (Matthew 25) and what we have said (James 3:1; 2:12) — with the exception noted above: those who do not judge others.

If you judge a person — rather than the person’s actions or words — then the way you view them and the degree to which you are willing to love them changes. You’ve decided that they’re not good like you anymore; they’re bad. You begin to feel that you have God’s own authority to judge and your heart begins to crave that power for self over others. You begin to feel – in the words of the old Saturday Night Live character “Church Lady” – “a little bit superior.”

If you judge words and actions, leaving the person out of it, you are free to continue loving them as Christ loves. You can correct them in humility and grace — and probably in tears (Acts 20:31; 2 Corinthians 2:4). A different, more effective approach than berating and condemning. It requires a different heart; the heart of Christ.

Third: love others.

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” ~ 1 Peter 4:8

By odd coincidence, so does bringing back someone who has wandered from the truth (James 5:19-20). I can’t help but think that the two belong together. Guiding the errant absolutely must be done – and done gently (Galatians 6:1; 2 Timothy 2:25).

Applying discipline without love rather than correcting others who sin with love is the difference between telling your son he is a bad boy or telling him he is a good boy who did a bad thing. One destroys self-esteem and the other reinforces the child’s awareness of a parent’s deep love.

How do we leave the other person out of it and focus only on the actions and words that are wrong? We have to find a way, and it’s vital to remain loving, supportive and humble.

May I make a few suggestions – examples, really – about doing that?

    • “It’s been said that you (said or did something). Is that true? The only reason I’m asking is – not to judge you – but because I care for your soul. If it’s true, something is coming between you and God.”
  • “You know I love you, brother. And when I see or hear you (doing or saying this sin), I see it killing you a little bit more each time. And it’s killing me to see it.”
  • “I struggle with (the same sin; or a similar one), sis. I know (or “I can only imagine”) it’s hard to deal with. But I’ll make you a deal. I’ll pray for you and you can pray for me.”
  • “I know when people say, ‘Don’t judge me,’ what they really mean is ‘Don’t stop loving me.’ At least, I do! Please trust me: That ain’t a-gonna happen. I am not going to stop loving you. And even if I have a stroke and stop being me and start saying hateful things, God will never stop loving you. His mercies never end.”

These are just a handful of suggestions. You can probably come up with more and better.

No judgment about moral character, human worth, eternal destiny or fellowship in Christ is required to say these things. They are appropriate to say to those who believe and those who do not. And for the believer who loves others (whether they are in Christ or not) and cannot bear to see them hurt by sin, words like these should fall from their lips like gentle rain from clouds too full to contain it.

*The singular exceptions I have found are 1 Corinthians 5:12-13, where Paul is referring to specific people whose sins threatened the reputation of the church, and 1 Corinthians 4:3-5, where Paul has been judged by some at Corinth as an inferior apostle. The latter, obviously, is not something that he encourages.

 

Following – 4

/ W. Keith Brenton / 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I could write a post for this blog. You think the emptiness will diminish, but it doesn’t. You think the confidence will return, but it won’t. You think the words will be there, but they aren’t.

This installment is especially hard to write. Because, to be credible at what you’re writing, you have to be perceived as being knowledgeable about it and good about doing it. I am neither.

This post is about resisting temptation. While Jesus prepared for His ministry with fasting and prayer, He was tempted.

As the last Adam, He resisted temptation in three important ways that the first Adam (and Eve) did not.

When hungry, He turned down food. He was expressing His dependence on God through His fasting, not food, not materiality, not self. Adam and Eve saw the fruit as pleasing to the eye, and consumed it.

When presented with the easy way, Jesus chose the hard way. He could have ruled the earth with Satan and a life of ease. He chose to serve the universe with a death of torture. The first man and woman chose the easy way to learn about good and evil; the quick way; the way that didn’t require walking and talking with God or learning by listening in a garden of grace.

When challenged to verify His identity for His own assurance — to choose fact over faith — Jesus chose faith. He could have thrown Himself down, confident of God’s rescue as His Father. Instead, He chose to believe when fact would have provided certainty. He chose not to tempt God’s interference to prevent a self-destructive act to satisfy a selfish curiosity. The first couple chose to test God’s resolve to introduce them to death that very day; betting that He loved them too much to make good on His word.

There are more temptations in life than these three; but they are foundational.

Will we choose our belly — our self — as our god? Or our God as our God?

Will we choose the easy way to get what we want rather than depend on God’s wisdom and providence for what we need?

Will we gamble that He loves us too much and is too merciful to actually be righteous and just — and therefore to let us see death and destruction as the consequence of what we have done?

I am no expert at resisting temptation. I’ve amassed a lifelong career of failure at the attempt.

But I have a perfect example. So do you.

We just need to understand and keep trying to live out this simple fact:

Following Him means resisting temptation.

Let Me Tell You What I Think

/ W. Keith Brenton / 12 Comments

I don’t know what to think.

I don’t know how to think.

I don’t know how to feel.

Life just seems jumbled-up, shaken around in its puzzle-box, disconnected, senseless and out-of-place.

Very little in that life feels known, dependable, familiar, friendly, solid, in-focus, or colorful.

Blogs are supposed to be the place where you tell everyone what you think, even if you haven’t had a thought worth sharing with your own dog for years.

And I can’t. I feel a need to write. There’s an urgency behind it. There’s a frustration with the way the world is. There’s a sense that I used to have an idea what it was all about, but I’ve either forgotten or never really knew.

Or that I was just plain wrong.

Right now, life is a Piet Mondrian painting rendered by Rene Magritte, an Apple device designed by Salvador Dali, an Alberto Giacometti sculpture done by Fernando Botero, a play by Samuel Beckett enacted by Jonathan Winters, a “Matrix” movie directed by Terry Gilliam.

I can’t even begin to describe what it feels like, and the temptation to just not feel at all. Wall it off. Shut it down. Go Vulcan.

It does not compute.

So I don’t know what to think.

And I don’t know what to feel.

There it is, folks: your messed-up friend Keith, in a nutshell, trying not to become a nut.

What do you do with that?

If you’re me, you write.

Sometimes it helps.

A Few Words About Faith

/ W. Keith Brenton / 4 Comments

We all have it.

Those are my few words about faith.

Some of us have faith in God. Some have faith in God through Jesus Christ. Some have faith in science, in their own abilities, in humanity and in its worthwhileness to be saved and helped to reach its full potential.

Those are good things to have faith in.

I believe God gives us faith, and He gives it in the measure He chooses and that we need because He loves us. If He gave some folks too much faith, they would invest it in themselves and become disappointments and dangers and despots. Like all of the other gifts given to us, through His Spirit or however, God gives as He determines (1 Corinthians 12, especially 7-11).

I don’t imagine that too many of my fellow believers in God would agree with me. Most would say that faith is what each of us generates of herself or himself, to the degree that each of us is willing to have it.

At the center of a very powerful teaching, Paul tells the believers in Ephesians (2:7-8):

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.

Faith is God’s gift to us.

What — or whom — we place it in is our gift to Him … or to ourselves.

How do I know that we all have it? Because we are saved by grace through faith, and there is not a one of us that God wants to be lost (2 Peter 3:9).

So He gives us what we need.

In the measure that we need it.

And He waits.

Patiently.

To see what we will do with it.

Following – 3

/ W. Keith Brenton / 2 Comments

Jesus fasted.

Among the gospel writers, only Matthew (4) and Luke (4) mention it.

After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

It’s one of the few places in scripture that fasting is mentioned apart from prayer.

I think that’s for the same reason that prayer — and God Himself, for that matter — are never mentioned in the book of Esther, though fasting is. If we can’t see them there, we’re not reaching the right conclusions. If Esther and her people fasted without praying, then all they did was go on a diet. If  justice for her people happened without God, then coincidence is king of the universe, because Hamaan was evil and deserved the consequences of his murderous bigotry.

Likewise, if Jesus went out into the wilderness to prepare for His ministry and fasted without praying, then He was simply on a radical weight-loss program, perhaps designed to make Him look like an ascetic shaman. If He withstood even just the temptation to create food for Himself without the strength that comes from communing with God, then prayer has no power and He was not God’s Son — only a starving mystic with extraordinary self-control.

I’ve blogged a little about fasting before. I’m no expert on it. There are right ways to do it. There are wrong ways to do it. Books have been written about it. Some are doubtless more valuable than others.

With or without reading them, I think we can draw the conclusion from scripture that God’s people fasted, and almost without exception, accompanied their fasts with prayer. Sometimes they expressed petitions and desires. Often they simply praised Him. Other times they mourned and/or repented. They expressed the depth of their need for and dependence on God by going without physical nourishment. In this way, they told Him that He was more important to them than food; that their god was not their stomachs; that they hungered and thirsted for His righteousness; that they had tasted and seen that the Lord is good; that their communication with Him was sacred and private and not for the benefit of being seen by others and regarded as somehow holy for what they had done without.

But if we think we can follow Jesus, minister as He did, resist temptation, and do the things He did while regarding this practice as optional — I believe we’re fooling ourselves.

Fasting is not simply a quaint and ancient custom or a passé commandment from a set of laws that have all served their purpose.

Fasting is a recognition of God’s providence.

It is the physical, expressing the spiritual.

It is hunger, declaring desire.

It is emptiness, seeking fulfillment.

It is the way Jesus chose to prepare for His life of ministry, and to build the strength of His character, His self-discipline before facing forty days of temptation from Satan’s seemingly undivided attention.

You see, that’s what the other synoptic gospel writer, Mark (1), does not fail to communicate:

At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

Nor was that likely the last time Satan tried:

When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time. ~ Luke 4:13

If fasting was a source of spiritual strength that could empower Him to journey all the way from the TransJordan to Galilee (see the next verse) … to withstand temptations to satisfy self, seize easy power, trade faith for fact … then why do we ignore, neglect or even reject it?

Following Jesus means fasting and prayer.

Following – 2

/ W. Keith Brenton / 1 Comment

First, you do what’s right.

Then, you speak of the One who makes things right.

Jesus began his life of public ministry by listening to his prophetic cousin John encourage people to repent and submitting Himself to the waters of baptism.

See Matthew 3, Luke 3, and Mark 1.

Why?

It’s not like He needed to repent, because He did not sin (Hebrews 4:15).

I think John the Baptizer gives us one reason: to reveal Jesus to others (John 1:31) — and Jesus gives us another that is equally inarguable: it was the right thing to do (Matthew 3:15).

So among all the other extraordinary qualities communicated in baptism, here are these two reasons as foundational examples. We need to begin our lives of public ministry by revealing Jesus to others, and to do the right things because they’re the right things to do.

I’m not going to get in to a discussion of faith and works. I’m convinced that Paul and James have no argument with each other. We do what we do because we believe. We communicate Whom we believe in by what we do and say.

And you can’t separate doing and saying as powerful tools in communicating the gospel. If what you do doesn’t match what you say — or vice-versa — you have no credibility as a follower of Christ trying to live and speak His life to others.

Don’t forget that not only did John identify Jesus as his Lord; the voice of God Himself and the presence of the dove testify to Who the Christ is, and Whose Son He is, and Whom He pleases by doing the right thing, and Whose Spirit rests upon Him.

If there is a better way to begin a life of ministry to God and to others — bringing them together or even just closer together — then Jesus doesn’t communicate it to us by His words or His example.

Following Him means going with Him into the water, into death to self, into a resurrection to a new life.

Following Him means being immersed in His life.

Following – 1

/ W. Keith Brenton / 3 Comments

I’ve come to a conclusion today. I think I’ve been building toward it for years.

We’ve done ourselves and others and our Lord a disservice by trying to categorize the Christian life.

We’ve split it into categories like good behavior, faith, spiritual discipline, discipleship, evangelism, benevolence, worship, fellowship, and on and on and on.

Convinced that we must master one area, perhaps, before we move on to the next.

Listening in Bible class a couple of weeks ago to what the apostle had to say in 2 Peter 1, I realized that wasn’t what he or his Lord had in mind at all:

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. ~ 2 Peter 1:5-7

You don’t master one before you move on to the next. You keep adding them to each other in an ongoing, lifelong process. How do I know that?

None of us is going to master any of them. I mean, we’ve all read Romans 1, haven’t we?

But we can all grow in each of them:

For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ~ 2 Peter 1:8

So we don’t grow into them for ourselves alone, nor even to glorify God alone — but to become effective and productive.

The Christian life is a life that follows Christ, in every way. Being a disciple means following Him in every way He lived His life. He is our perfect example of a life that IS ministry; He emptied Himself and took the form of a servant and became obedient even to death on a cross, serving as our example of self-sacrifice even to that extreme..

His life was one life; not a series of mastering categories and moving on, but of meeting people who sin — where they are in their sin — and helping them master it. He pointed, not to Himself, but to the Father.

So I’ve tagged this first post in a series of indefinite length with several tags that are new to this blog: “evangelism,” “ministry,” and “following Christ.” They’re new because I’ve never really written much about them before. I’ve never really written much about them before because I don’t really know very much about them.

I’m 58 years old. I may not have that many more years and opportunities to learn. Now is the best time there is.

I’m planning to learn as much as I can from studying Jesus’ life and example from the gospels, prophecy, epistles and any other sources where I can find His journey.

You’re welcome to join me on this journey. I would love to have the company, and the chance to benefit from the wisdom of others who have traveled it before (or have never been on this road) and have come (or are coming) to the same conclusion (or even a different one).

Even if it didn’t take you 58 years to get where you are.

Why War Is So Popular These Days

/ W. Keith Brenton / 12 Comments

Oh, did I shock you?

I’m so sorry to have treaded on your delicate sensitivities.

JesusBearsHisMachineGunBut war is popular these days, and I’m going to tell you why I think it is.

We glorify it. We worship it. Because it’s exactly what we think we want.

Since long before 9/11, we’ve made and gobbled up the movies and television shows and books and video games where might makes right and good guys blow bad guys away and heroes are people who have at least one gun in each hand and a missile launcher in their backpack and a couple of ammo belts crossed over their chests.

What a bunch of crap.

But we buy it and we love to buy it because we believe the world is full of evil and it has nicked us once or twice and we want our revenge and we want to believe that the best way to deal with it is to blow it away.

What incredible bullpuckey.

That’s the easy way to deal with evil. You don’t like something; it’s evil: blow it away. You were right and righteous to do so. Good must always triumph over evil, and you must be the agent of good, so if you blew something away, you must be good to do so and it must be evil.

What a heap of fewmets.

When you gulp them down like they were steak, you don’t have a clue or care to guess how many dollars you are pouring into the coffers of the very, very rich people who fund that propaganda in order to make themselves very, very much richer at the cost of sanity, limbs and lives.

When you buy into that philosophy — when you spend those bucks to see that movie or buy that video game or purchase that gun or gullibly swallow everything that website has to say about your God-given American right to own and use a gun at your discretion so you can blow away the bad guys — you’ve bought shit.

The problem is not that I’m willing to call your closely-held sacred beliefs a bunch of excrement; the problem is, there’s hardly anyone left who’s willing to say so and give you the reasons why. American Christianity is almost totally sold out to might-makes-right religion and God-is-on-our-side theology.

And the secular voices that have been willing to try to stem the tide have been almost totally flooded over as well.

There are no popular movies like Bridge on the River Kwai or television series like M*A*S*H or the original Star Trek around to show episodes that show and tell or even just imply how absolutely devastating, barbaric, and unconscionable the acts of war can be. No documentaries are ever made anymore that hint at criticism of anything that our government and armed forces might be doing that’s questionable.

In fact, journalists and photographers are literally not allowed to even show us what it’s like to prosecute a war or to exterminate entire towns and villages of men, women and children or even photograph the flag-draped caskets of the young men and women we sent to wage those battles as our proxies. No, that might jeopardize the ongoing operation — even if the coverage is years old when it is shown.

Plus, I don’t know of any current high school teachers or even fully-tenured college professors who would, career-wise at the very least, long survive teaching works like Johnny Got His Gun or Mark Twain’s The War Prayer.

There’s no thrill to the seemingly endless talks of a peace table, so you won’t find any video games that feature them. Instead, they feature the virtual unreality of getting to blow away someone that you want to hate — even when you don’t have a clue or care who they might be, or might be working for or toward, or protecting. They just have a uniform of a different color. Or skin of a different color. Or a religion of a different color. So they’re the bad guys, and even though you’re in their territory close to their homes and their families, you go there and blow them away. Glorious. Rah-rah for our side. And if you miss and get blown away yourself, hey — you get a re-do!

I don’t have to tell you that the people we send to do our battles for us do not get a re-do. Just because you don’t see their caskets doesn’t mean some don’t come back in them. Or that others don’t come back severely scarred — physically, mentally, emotionally, socially — because of what they’ve seen and sometimes what they’ve had to do.

And practically no one is willing to say a word against it.

No, we’ll just let our returning patriots burn out and fail at life and go quietly mad and continue to cut funding for their care and rehabilitation.

Utter, unChristian, inhuman insanity.

Well, dammitall, I will say a word against it from time to time. War is hell. It maims people. It poisons people. It drives people insane. It kills people. It kills our people. It kills their people. It kills Gods’ people.

“Thou shalt not kill.”

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

“Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.”

So you are free to disagree with me and my interpretations of the above scriptures (plus many, many, many more) and embrace your closely-held sacred beliefs that this is exactly the way Jesus would handle things in defense of God’s chosen people, Americans — with a machine-gun in each hand and missile launcher on his back and two ammo belts across his chest.

You can defend every one of those beliefs with whatever twist of scripture you wish to quote from your favorite pulpit or website, in absolutely clear conscience because that’s what you’ve heard and read and — by God, literally — that’s what you want to believe and Jesus died so you could believe it. In fact, you are free to take your sacredly-acquired gun and ammo and just shoot me dead for disagreeing with you because you are right and therefore have the right to exterminate me. I’m your bad guy. Shoot away. I won’t stop you. I don’t have a gun.

But I will tell you, while I still live and breathe, that the way things are in the world right now was never what God intended or wanted for us.

Folks, if you think you can make it better by supporting the culture of blow-it-away, you’re not just fooling yourself but you’re bequeathing future generations a heritage of bloodshed and death and madness and conscience-less violence.

That future is a sewer.

If you’re not standing against it for the sake of your kids and their kids, you are just going with the flow and adding to it.

What a thrill for you.

Why is war so popular these days?

Because it’s what we think we want.

And we are dead wrong.

A Farewell, and Thanks

/ W. Keith Brenton / 5 Comments

Dear Friends,

1It gives me no pleasure to write this, but I am no longer going to be publishing the e-zine New Wineskins. As both a print magazine and later an online e-zine, New Wineskins has had a colorful history over the last 20+ years, but I can no longer continue to publish it.

I simply don’t have any of the essential ingredients that it takes: time, money, and heart.

I’m working fulltime now in a university office where two recent departures have left the rest of us shouldering more responsibilities, and I’m raising a teenage daughter on my own — as well as preaching once or twice a month at my small and loving church home — and that is taking all the time and energy I can spare.

The money wasn’t a problem until my family’s income shrank by 80%. And while hosting has always been generously provided free, the e-mail connections are not. Fact is, I just can’t afford them anymore.

But the main ingredient was heart, and I have lost mine. Angi was my partner in this ministry for the past ten years, starting with a simple jointly-written article and progressing to helping editor Greg Taylor move the publication from print to online, and eventually publishing it on our own. With her death on May 8, half my life and heart went with her, and it was simply too much to continue doing this.

100For a while, I could continue the conversation to the best of my ability as a loving brother in Christ … even with angry people, hateful people, bitter people, condemning people, people who could only see the communion cup filled with the blood of vengeance and exclusion for those who did not share their every view — rather than with the grace of Christ.

I don’t have the heart for those arguments anymore. And I was tempted to lose my own measure of His grace beyond what I cared to resist. I am much more interested in exploring new and better ways of sharing the Story, the gospel of Jesus Christ, with those who have not heard it, or who seek to more fully grasp it.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate every person who has ever contributed time, thought, prayer, money, advertising revenue, articles, encouragement, participation on the ZOE board of directors and music ministry which oversaw this ministry for a good long while, offers to assist, technical assistance and free hosting from Alliance Software (which I pray they will continue to provide as the site moves to an archive, at least for a while), leadership and spiritual direction, founding zeal, enthusiasm for resuscitation when energies and resources were running low — all of the vitality that made the New Wineskins conversation worthwhile.

I do, and with a depth of gratitude that mere words can’t express.

I would list the names, from founding Wineskins editors Rubel Shelly and Mike Cope through Greg Taylor and Eric Noah-Wilson to the last person to send me an article proposal just a couple of days ago — but there would be too many. You know who you are, and you know what a difference you have made in opening hearts to the greater grace of our Lord.

If New Wineskins has been as much of a blessing in your life as it has been in mine (and I sincerely doubt that is even possible), then that is all of the gratification that I’ll ever need from having served as her WebServant for all these years.

Thank you for your grace, patience and understanding as I close out that service.

And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the transcendent peace of His Holy Spirit and the love of our God and Father be with you always.

Keith Brenton, WebServant

New Wineskins e-zine
on Facebook

Movies I Can’t Watch Right Now

/ W. Keith Brenton / 4 Comments

Most of ’em. Most of ’em that I own, it seems like.

Certainly not our favorite, Angi’s and mine: Sense and Sensibility. Not because of any great dramatic loss in its story that triggers the pain. No reason other than the fact that it was our favorite.

Not Goodbye, Mr. Chips. We both kind of liked Brit-lit movies.  I never got to share this one with her. It was still in the wrapper when I made the mistake of trying to watch it weeks after I lost her, and completely came apart when Arthur Chipping (Peter O’Toole) said to his bride of twenty-some years, “Will we always be in love this way?” Because I suddenly remembered, from seeing the movie when I was fourteen years old, the scene that came next: the buzz-bomb’s motor cutting out, the shriek of air as it fell, the sound of her voice singing from the USO tent below.

sleeplessI can’t watch Sleepless in Seattle. Can’t handle Tom Hanks as Sam Baldwin telling the D.J.: “Well, I’m gonna get out of bed every morning… breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won’t have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out… and, then after a while, I won’t have to think about how I had it great and perfect for a while.”

I’m not ready to be there, Sam. Not now. If ever.

Won’t be watching What Dreams May Come, even if there’s a reunion in the afterlife painted by widower Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) by his deeply grieving wife Annie (Annabella Sciorra).

No viewings of Love Actually. Don’t want to break down with Liam Neeson’s character Daniel when he remembers his departed Joanna.

Shadowlands is off my viewing list. Not going to put myself through Jack’s (Anthony Hopkins) loss of Joy (Debra Winger), or the unanswerable question her daughter puts to the renowned theologian.

Can’t watch the first five minutes of Up. Not a chance.

Not even the first five minutes of 2009’s Star Trek. No way.

These and a quite a few more are off-limits right now. They may be for quite a while.

It’s hard to imagine a Christmas without Love Actually. But then it’s really hard to imagine a Christmas without Angi.

Seems so easy to tell someone who’s lost half their life to buck up, cheer up, stiff upper lip … when you haven’t experienced a loss that deep yourself; or even haven’t for a long time. It’s easy even when you have. But it’s inconsiderate at the very least.

We all grieve in our own way.

We all mourn at our own pace.

And I think we all deal with it any way we can.

Maybe there will come a time when I can try out one of those banned movies again. Right now, though, just thinking and writing about them is costing me half-a-box of tissues. Still, I write to deal with it, as much as I can deal with it. Maybe I will deal with it better, someday.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to be entertained with brainless comedies and storyless sci-fi and pointless adventures.

Yet even when I do get to the point where I can watch you again, Sam Baldwin, I will still be grateful to be able to think about how I had it great and perfect … for a while.