hen Jesus returned to Nazareth early on in his teaching, familiarity caused the people in his hometown to treat him much less warmly than the crowds elsewhere, where his past was an unknown commodity.
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” and they took offense at Him. (Mark 6:3, NAS)
As a result, there were no big miracles recorded in Nazareth at a time when Jesus was using miracles to establish his identity as the Son of God. In the previous chapter, a bleeding woman was healed simply by having faith and touching the hem of His robe as He walked to the home of a synagogue official, where He raised the official’s daughter from the dead. Yet in Nazareth:
And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. (Mark 6:5)
Could?In my years as a Christian, I’ve read this verse at least three or four times and I’ve probably heard it preached even more often, but I never noticed it said “could,” not “would” or simply, “He performed no miracles there.” I checked a half dozen other translations this morning (thanks to a very handy YouVersion Holy Bible app on my iPhone) and all said “could” or “was not able.” The Message it was “because He couldn’t get over their stubborness.”
It wasn’t a matter of choice, then, it was a matter of power. Imagine that, the Son of God, the Trinity, powerful enough to create life or call down legions of angels, stopped in His tracks by a simple lack of faith, a bit of too much smarty-pants, know-it-all knowledge. C.S. Lewis wrote:
The disease that will certainly end our species … if it is not crushed, (is) the fatal superstition that men can create values; that a community can choose its “ideology” as men choose their clothes.
The people of Nazareth chose their ideology, going with the familiar and comforting – Jesus is just that carpenter’s kid – instead of forcing themselves to alter their reality and acknowledge something beyond their power of simple comprehension. As a result, lives there were not transformed.
All around our world, people are doing the same. They worship knowledge and become too familiar with explanations for everything that leave out Everything: God. Even Christians can become too familiar with Jesus and lose His power in their hearts, remembering that they once gave themselves to Him, but not realizing that His role has slipped and self-created values have gained prominence.
Could Jesus work a miracle in your life, even if He wanted to? I’m not sure I can answer “Yes!” in all truthfulness. Can you?
slam, the religion of peace, showed off itself today on the streets of Kabul when believers killed an infidel for no other reason than their intolerance.
Gayle Williams, a 34-year-old missionary with dual British-South African citizenship, was gunned down by Taliban assassins on a motorbike. A Taliban spokesman later confirmed that Williams’ hit was ordered because she was spreading Christianity.
Here’s the AP story, complete with complaints from Afghan religious leaders about attempts to spread the Christian faith in their nation, and denials from the group sponsoring Williams that they engage in proselytizing.
What do Islamic leaders know about Christianity that has them too scared to allow it to reach the believers they hold in subjugation? Could it be a simple path to salvation? Could it be a God of love instead of Allah? Could it be less money in their coffers? Could it be plain old hatred?
Could it be all of the above?
Missionaries throughout the Islamic world live high-risk lives and know what they’re getting into before they leave for their posts. They need our continuing prayer.
oes anyone else think it’s positively biblical that the bottom dwelling Tampa Bay Devil Rays – a 200-to-1 longshot to win the World Season before the start of the season – cut the “Devil” from their name with this year’s season and … voila! … went from the cellar to the World Series?
he radical left has found its answer to Rev. Wright’s ranting, anti-American, anti-Jew sermons, the sermons Obama listened to for twenty years, but denies ever hearing. (Did he sleep in the pews or did he lie?)
The morally trashed left lucked out because their video shows Sarah Palin being prayed for, so we know she was there; no question about it. And to the leftists, the prayer of the guest speaker at her former Wasilla Community Church, Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee, sounds just as threatening as Wright’s sounded to us:
He wants grace and favor for Sarah Palin. He wants God’s presence felt in politics, in education, in government. He wants the 10 Commandments to be taught in school again, rather than Buddhism and Islam. The horror! He wants politicians who love God to be elected to office. The shame! He wants government officials, even presidents and Secretaries of State, to be believers. Secularist apostasy!
And he prays all this in the name of Jesus, as Palin’s pastors have their hands on her shoulders. It’s funky charismatic Christianity on display, ripe for hip, metro ridicule.
Here’s the long version of the prayer with the warm-up and handy subtexts decrying the foulness of it all:
And here’s a shorter version, which starts with the hands-on prayer, after the warm-up. It’s called “Sarah Palin, Thomas Muthee and witchcraft.”
What you’re seeing here may not happen in a Methodist or Episcopalian church every Sunday – heck, it doesn’t happen in most evangelical churches every Sunday. This was a visiting pastor from Kenya, where there is a very robust and charismatic Christianity, a type of Christianity lived by millions of Christians around the world, including our own charismatics, like my very good lifetime friend Peter. Outside our Eurocentric, refined Christianity, the faith often takes on a more spirited application with prayers against evil spirits – because on the other side there are witch doctors and shamen who work to summon those spirits up.
One would think the rules of political correctness would protect these folks, representative as they are of an older society, more pure and primitive. Think again.
Muthee, at the end of his prayer, prays for protection for Sarah Palin against witchcraft. The actual words are garbled, but it immediately follows a prayer for protection from “the enemy,” Satan, so it is a biblical prayer of protection against those – the radical American Left comes to mind – who would work actively to stymie the work of God, whether it’s done in the name of Satan or enlightened secularism. But it’s that mention of witchcraft that gives the Left it’s hook.
You all remember Mark Morford, author of an entry in this year’s Most Ridiculous Story competition, Is Obama an Enlightened Being? In that story, Morford is very comfortable with tying spirituality to the president … as long as it’s his kind of spirituality.
Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.
This is what I find myself offering up more and more in response to the whiners and the frowners and to those with broken or sadly dysfunctional karmic antennae – or no antennae at all – to all those who just don’t understand and maybe even actively recoil against all this chatter about Obama’s aura and feel and MLK/JFK-like vibe.
To them I say, all right, you want to know what it is? The appeal, the pull, the ethereal and magical thing that seems to enthrall millions of people from all over the world, that keeps opening up and firing into new channels of the culture normally completely unaffected by politics?
No, it’s not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. …
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare.
Did you see the infamous grainy YouTube video? Did you read the disquieting little sidebar story about Muthee and his now-infamous witch huntin’ treks down to Kenya, like that time he stormed into a village and formed an angry mob to drive out an old woman by the name of “Mama Jane” who was supposedly causing illness and traffic accidents and really crappy Wi-Fi connections at the local Starbucks? Charming.
Have you read, furthermore, about Palin’s adorable Pentecostal church where Muthee preached, where they like to speak in tongues and lick the skins of serpents and watch NASCAR while shooting moose from the backs of animatronic dinosaurs adorned with “Jesus is My Co-Pilot” bumper stickers? (Note: possible slight exaggeration. But not by much.) It’s all sorts of Disney-on-acid fun. [Hey, Morford, just for fun, why do you try to write this kind of demeaning "possible slight exaggeration" about what goes on in your local mosque. C'mon, Morf! I dare you!]
As for Palin, turns out Muthee laid on some hands, delivered a garbled serpents n’ brimstone prayer designed not merely to help her leap from Mayor of Nowheresville to perky gubernatorial fireplug, only to later become, thanks to McCain’s appalling judgment, the most insulting caricature of female empowerment in modern history who, as the VP debate painfully revealed, still knows not a single substantive thing about American domestic or foreign policy, but also to protect her from that same silly/terrifying witchcraft I imagined in my youth.
This is what passes for witticism in San Francisco. Attack religion, unless it’s your hip, New Age religion. Attack any woman who strays from the narrow path of feminist orthodoxy, and do it all in a sneering tone that ridicules all the rest of America.
Morford’s a punk, a little man in a dirty city, easy to dismiss as meaningless. Then there’s Keith Olbermann, who views the video clip and pronounces, “This is starting to sound startling enough to be terrifying.” He also says of Muthee, “He makes Father Flannigan of Boy’s Town look like Jeremiah Wright.” Here’s the clip, which ridicules a lot of standard evangelical beliefs, and which Olbermann tries mightily to make Muthee into a modern-day Salem-creator and spiritual good buddy of Palin:
Mock, mock, mock. Maybe we Christians look silly when we pray against evil. But does Olbermann mock the death penalty foes when they’re praying outside the prison for God to stop the execution? Of course not! Those are his Christians, to be praised. Does he mock the anti-war Christians who pray at the munitions plants and Army induction centers? Of course not; they are above reproach.
But when the same belief in prayer is applied to a Republican, oh my! We see the vile hypocrisy of the American Left in all it’s glory.
By the way, even as Olbermann dresses it up, Muthee’s witch-hunting is hardly the stuff of Salem legend. He offered the spiritualist an out: leave town, or we’ll pray against you. She stayed. They prayed. Then the police – not the church – raided her shop and shot a snake – not her – and she left town.
Let us pray. God, save us from them and all they would do to our country.
n its latest fit of palinating (my earlier post on that new word mysteriously disappeared; it means “to research with extreme bias”), the media appears ready to pounce on Sarah Palin’s pastors. Says Washington Monthly’s Political Journal:
Barack Obama’s connection to the former pastor of his former church has been, fairly or unfairly, one of the more scrutinized aspects of the presidential campaign. But if the political world considers Jeremiah Wright a legitimate issue, then it’s inevitable, I suppose, that Sarah Palin’s pastors get a closer look.
The only problem with this is that what Palin’s pastors preach is mainstream (if slightly amped on brimstone) Christian orthodoxy – Christians do believe in Hell and salvation, after all. It may sound intense to a non-believer (i.e., most of the MSM), but it definitely lacks the … er … color of Rev. Wright’s anti-American rantings. As you’ll see in the examples that follow, any effort by the media to beat this drum will only serve to alienate most Americans.
Let’s start with Political Journal’s take on Palin’s long-time hometown pastor, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Note that the Assembly of God is a large denomination with lots of churches in the US and around the world and clear doctrine. But when viewed through secular liberal eyes, it sounds like this:
A review of recorded sermons by Ed Kalnins, the senior pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God since 1999, offers a provocative and, for some, eyebrow-raising sketch of Palin’s longtime spiritual home.
The church runs a number of ministries providing help to poor neighborhoods, care for children in need, and general community services. But Pastor Kalnins has also preached that critics of President Bush will be banished to hell; questioned whether people who voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 would be accepted to heaven; charged that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and war in Iraq were part of a war “contending for your faith;” and said that Jesus “operated from that position of war mode.”
It is impossible to determine how much Wasilla Assembly of God has shaped Palin’s thinking. She was baptized there at the age of 12 and attended the church for most of her adult life.
Palin no longer attends this church, but let’s remember that these paraphrases of Pastor Kalnins’ teachings are provided by a secularist who is obviously not fond of Christianity. Let’s wait for the tapes. “Critics of President Bush” probably meant people critical of his religious beliefs, and people who voted for Kerry probably meant people who held Kerry’s religious beliefs – which, depending on your interpretation, may fall short of an honest and true acceptance of Christ as savior and Son of God.
Harpers joins the fray by looking at two other churches Palin has attended. First, from Palin’s current pastor, Pastor Mike Rose from the Juneau Christian Center, who they quoteth thusly:
From an April 27, 2008 sermon: “If you really want to know where you came from and happen to believe the word of God that you are not a descendant of a chimpanzee, this is what the word of God says. I believe this version.”
From a July 8, 2007 sermon: “Those that die without Christ have a horrible, horrible surprise.”
From a July 28, 2007 sermon: “Do you believe we’re in the last days? After listening to Newt Gingrich and the prime minister of Israel and a number of others at our gathering, I became convinced, and I have been convinced for some time. We are living in the last days. These are incredible times to live in.”
That might sound bizarre to the damned elitist snobs, but its taught from thousands of pulpits every Sunday and met with millions of “Amens!”
Before finding the Juneau Christian Center, the Palins attended church at Juneau’s Church on the Rock. Behold, thus sayeth Pastor David Pepper:
From an November 25, 2007 sermon: “The purpose for the United States is… to glorify God. This nation is a Christian nation.”
From an October 28, 2007 sermon: “God will not be mocked. I don’t care what the ACLU says. God will not be mocked. I don’t care what atheists say. God will not be mocked. I don’t care what’s going on in the nation today with so much horrific rebellion and sin and things that take place. God will not be mocked. Judgment Day is coming. Where do you stand?”
From an October 28, 2007 sermon: “Just giving in a little bit is a disastrous thing…You can’t serve both man and God. It is one or the other.”
Holy cow. Next to Jeremiah Wright, that’s a real barn-burner, eh? 9/11 was our fault vs. grace. AmeriKKKa vs. end times. God damn America vs. America is a Christian nation.
Where do you think the people will fall on this latest palination? In its efforts to turn on McCain’s nominee, the media are turning on the majority of American voters, making the wisdom of McCain’s choice all the more apparent.
new poll from Pew’s Forum on Religion and Public Life tells us 21% of American atheists believe in God or a “universal spirit,” 12% believe in heaven and 10% pray at least once a week. Interestingly, about 20 percent of Jews don’t believe in God, according to the same poll, so we have an anti-religion that’s somewhat God-fearing, and a religion that’s got a lot of non-believers.
The non-religious Jew stat doesn’t surprise, since being a Jew is as much an ethnic and social identifier as a religious identifier – more akin to a square dancer who doesn’t believe in God than a Catholic who doesn’t. Besides, the Jewish tradition of denying God has been well established for 4,000 years.
But what of these atheists? Part of it is due, as you should expect by now, to the structure of the poll itself. If it’s hard to construct an honest poll (or easy to construct a dishonest one, depending on your motivation) on political issues, imagine the challenges of creating a fair poll on religion and God. Here’s a brief section of a comment by “Jeff D.” posted to WaPo’s coverage of the poll that details some of the weaknesses of this poll: Continue Reading »
The Obama administration told us that not only would they be very good at spending unfathomable sums of money, but they’d also be maestros at turning that cash into jobs for a job-hungry America. Like so many White House words, the Big Job Promise is turning out to be nothing more than hype-fuel for the [...]
With Obama winning the presidency by seven percent, we can't blame the media. Their laudatory coverage and refusal to extensively probe into Obama's background and [lack of] experience was at best responsible for five percent of his vote, the pundits tell us. Here is a compilation of over 100 significant instances of pro-Obama/anti-McCain bias during the 2008 campaign.
"Thank you for the Voice of the Victims films. The students really liked it, and it means so much to them to hear real stories and not watch a cheesy drama like so many other videos."
— a high school teacher.
From an April 27, 2008 sermon: “If you really want to know where you came from and happen to believe the word of God that you are not a descendant of a chimpanzee, this is what the word of God says. I believe this version.”
