johnvano.com

Waiting on the Trumpet Blast

Christmas Eve services were absent from my childhood. It's the New Year's Eve service I remember.

Magic dangled over the precipice between today and tomorrow, history about to unfold, with the promise that nothing would never be the same again. I never really cared for change, but I liked staying up late.

The service would have been short, designed so that we'd be on our knees at the stroke of midnight. Though there was no stroke, the hands of the clock ticked silently and far away on the back wall of the sanctuary. I would sneak-a-peek (okay, many peeks), mesmerized by the distant future and determined to see it click alive with my own eyes. I understood being bathed in God's presence as a new year began, but I felt cheated that a year disappear without fanfare, the believers' eyes opening somewhere after 12:05 with a reverent amen.

Fear trapped me there on my knees. I believed God would choose the most obvious time to send His Son back to earth with a trumpet blast. Afraid I wasn't quite ready, I'd worry over my sins, watching and praying. It's silly to think the God who promised an end when we least expected it, would use the nonsynchronized hands of a church clock in Minnesota as his countdown trigger. For goodness sake, we weren't even on eastern standard time.

After a closing song, the faithful watchers were released to the basement for all kinds of sweet goodies. My friends were there, and we filled our bottomless stomachs for a king-of-the-hill match on top of a 15-foot high mound of snow pushed together by city trucks in the parking lot.

All reverance forgotten, we pushed and scraped for supremacy, our mothers calling us to the car before we could ascend the throne. 

Worship Well

I've never done worship well.

Like most of my contemporaries, worship means to sing with others of like mind and heart. But my heart rarely connects the way it should. I find myself straining to get the music right, to hit the notes, to not bleed the ears of the person in front of me. I watch the hand-motions of those leading the music. Sometimes they wave, conducting the voices in the hall (I have no idea what to do with these gestures), sometimes they clack at percussions or hang limply at their side, tapping the thigh on the beat. I'm easily distracted, forgetting the power of the words, the Scripture I'm singing back to God.

I know there's much more to worship. I know this because I have lept from the couch and raised my hands at a 50-yard touchdown pass and because I have leaked tears over my daughter's smile, and went to a far-off place when I smelled the pages of a new book. But in this I worship only the creature, not the Creator who is to be ever praised Amen.

grape juice

I'm staring at a thimble's worth of grape juice, contemplating the lingering, chalky taste of a bread Chiclet. I pray, trying to make sense of this centuries-old ritual. Then, in visualizing threads of thorns, pressed into his head, cutting him and making him bleed, I begin to see the import of what I hold in my hand. 

I dwell on the pain, the excruciating, senseless pain of one who was born perfect, who lived perfectly, whose life was formed in this world so that I could be made perfect.

Blood splashes on the walls of my mind, from the snickering guards who whipped my Savior, weakening him for the sacrifice, to the blood of countless sheep shed for acts of contrition long forgotten.

I take this plastic cup, it's dark red fruit, and I drink in remembrance.

Heady Stuff for the Heart

Wrap this definition of faith around your head a few times...

"Now faith is being sure of what we have hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for" (Hebrews 11:1-2, NIV). 

Sounds like God made the world from nothing... Creation Ex nihilo (Latin: "from nothing")...

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible" (Hebrews 11:3, NIV).

Can it be said that "the world is not worthy" of us? ...

"Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated--the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect" (Hebrews 11:36-40, NIV).

Imagine: These men and women--who held back nothing--are made to depend on our completion for their fulfillment. Heady stuff indeed.

Hell Hath No Fury Like This

This takes the cake--the "church" (I'd put that in double quotation marks if I could) that made the sign "God Hates Fags" famous has racheted it up a knotch with their strategy to go to the funerals of our American soldiers--and picket with their "God Hates Fags" propoganda.

What in tarnation do the war dead and homosexuality have in common??

The parishoners of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, through their warped logic, believe that God is punishing America for our love and endorsement of homosexuality--by killing our soldiers. This makes me livid--the disgrace of these people, parading around with our flag held upside down, dragging it on the ground, disrupting the grief of parents and young brides who are mourning their fallen loved ones--as they broadcast their belief that these fatalities are God's judgment upon homosexuality.

A Christian, consumed by the love of Christ--and determined to demonstrate Christ's love to others--shouldn't act this way toward ANYONE, much less grieving people who are completely unrelated to the focus of their campaign.

Inappropriate, despicable, misguided, out-of-touch, derelict, debased, asinine... these words come to my mind, and yet, they don't seem to do justice to how offensive this practice is to me.