After the collective gasp had subsided, I explained myself:

I noted that there has never been a time in the entire history of the Seventh-day Adventist Church when one couldn’t look at what was transpiring in the world around us and quite easily fit it into some plausible end-time scenario.

In my own lifetime, I’ve seen a rather long line of events that whipped up our enthusiasm for and certainty about the soon coming of Jesus. These include the launch of Sputnik in 1957; the election in 1960 of our first Roman Catholic U.S. President, John F. Kennedy; the year 1964 (120 years since 1844––and didn’t the Bible say that the end would be like the time of Noah, who preached his sermons of warning for 120 years?); the 1967 Middle East War; the 1973 Middle East War and subsequent energy crisis; the election in 1976 of an overtly religious Protestant as U.S. President, Jimmy Carter; Y-2K and the anticipated global computer "meltdowns" in 2000; the terrorist attacks in 2001; the crash/recession/depression of 2008; and the list goes on.

The reality is, I don’t know whether Jesus will come before the end of 2009, or whether I’ll die an old man. I don’t know whether Barack Obama will become an instrument of the antichrist and play a major role in ushering in earth’s final events––as I’ve heard Adventists and non-Adventists alike speculating.

I don’t know whether our most recent recession/depression is the worst society will experience before Jesus returns. I don’t know how bad crime might become. I don’t know any of these things. But what I do know is this:

If I read my Bible correctly, having the right relationship with God is a life-and-death issue––and has been for every human since the creation of Adam and Eve. Furthermore, the coming of Jesus is, effectively, never more than a lifetime away––as has been the case for everyone since the creation of Adam and Eve (so it has always been "soon"). I also know that for every day that passes in which I don’t have the right relationship with God, I’m deprived of the abundant life that Jesus came to give in the here and now––and it has been that way for everyone since the creation of Adam and Eve.

So to be motivated to "be ready," I don’t need to be scared by the uncertainties around me. There are far greater reasons than fickle current events to push me to seek "readiness" and the right relationship with God. In fact, I’d suggest that using current events as our main spiritual motivation is doomed to failure. When the crisis recedes, so does our reason for commitment.

It’s a little like the boy who perpetually cried "Wolf!" Rather than truly creating a state of readiness to deal with a wolf, the false alarms led to cynicism and lethargy.

Christ’s coming is too important to be diminished in that way.

A couple of nights ago I had a strange dream. I was talking to a Missouri farmer, a man named Les Prowant, whose farm was one mile south and one mile east of the farm we lived on when I was a kid.

In my dream, Les appeared to be more or less the way he’d looked when I last saw him. He’d have been about 80 at that time, give or take. Although elderly, he was a big-framed man. Not fat at all, but definitely broad-shouldered and well-muscled.
In my dream—and it was a short one—Les was walking past me, and I said, "Les, have you always been stout? Or were you skinny as a youth and thickened up with age?"

Before he could answer, I woke up. Maybe it was the very impertinence of my question that jolted me into full consciousness. But impertinence—or even dreams—isn’t what I really want to discuss.

Les was a farmer. And farming is more dangerous than people realize. It was dangerous when done with horses, and it probably got worse with the advent of tractors. One of the hazards of a tractor is something called the "power take off"—or PTO.

Not only do tractors pull implements, they also provide the rotary power necessary to operate farm implements. Should a farmer happen to get an article of clothing caught in the spinning PTO shaft that runs from the tractor to the implement, the results can be fatal. And often are.

In Les Prowant’s case, I don’t know the exact details. But he was in his field one day, and his foot must have slipped. His pant leg got caught by the spinning PTO shaft. Fortunately for Les, he was able to grab some protruding part of his tractor and hung on for dear life—as the PTO shaft wound up his trousers, ripping them off and shattering the bones in one leg.

There was Les out in his field. Unable to stand. His leg mangled. No pants on. Knowing he would go into shock soon. He had to get help. Or die.

This was back in the days before cell phones. So Les began to crawl the quarter-mile or so (I don’t recall the exact distance) back to his house, dragging his mangled leg. It was a slow painful ordeal, caused by a tractor’s PTO, one of the occupational hazards of farming. But the danger of farming isn’t what I really want to discuss.

Now it just so happened that across the road from Les Prowant’s house lived an exceptionally handsome young man who’d had a brain tumor. It was a big, bad brain tumor that had nearly killed him. He was fortunate to have survived the surgery to remove it. This was back in the late 1950s, and surgical techniques weren’t as sophisticated as today.

The tumor and its removal left the young man with deficits. In many ways he functioned perfectly. But his overall performance wasn’t commensurate with his exceptional good looks.

But the impact of brain tumors isn’t what I really want to discuss.

So tune in next week, and I’ll get to get the point I really want to discuss!

Jim Coffin, Senior Pastor

Too Narrow a Perception--2

Last week I started telling about a farmer neighbor named Les Prowant, who was caught in the power take off (PTO) of his tractor one day. Not only did the accident rip off his pants, it also shattered the bone in his leg. Unable to walk, he crawled a quarter of a mile or so back to his house.

Now it just so happened that the young man who lived across the road had suffered a brain tumor that, although surgically removed, had left him with deficits. And when the young man saw Les crawling across the yard partially naked, it struck him as the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

The young man entered his house, laughing uproariously. He just couldn’t stop. When his parents asked what was so funny, he said: "I just saw the craziest sight I’ve ever seen. Old Man Prowant is out there crawling around in his front yard naked!"

His parents needed to hear no more. They immediately recognized that something was badly amiss. That definitely wasn’t normal behavior for their neighbor. So they raced to Les’s aid.

By this point, Les had reached his car, which was parked in the driveway. Totally exhausted, and too weak to crawl even the rest of the way to the house, he opened the car door (most farmers in rural Missouri left their cars unlocked back in those days) and reached up to honk the horn to alert his wife.

She and the neighbors arrived where he lay about the same time. They rushed Les to the hospital, and he survived. But his recovery, which left him with a limp, took several months. Neighboring farmers did the rest of his farm work for him that year.

Now, let me make the point I really want to make in writing this story: To the young man who saw his neighbor crawling semi-naked across the yard, it seemed like a big joke. It seemed that way because, due to the unfortunate circumstance of a brain tumor and the damage caused by removing it, the young man’s powers of perception were limited. He was incapable of grasping the full picture and all the implications and ramifications. At best he saw things only superficially. He had too narrow a perception.

Granted that we as humans have succeeded in putting a man on the moon and creating the internet, we feel that, collectively, we’re pretty smart. But I suggest that, due to the unfortunate circumstance of the ravages of something called sin—by which we’ve all been both affected and infected—we all face deficits. Major deficits. Our powers of perception are limited in a manner not altogether different from the young man in this story.

We get things really distorted. In fact, the Bible says that it’s so bad that we may look at some way of behaving and think it’s the way to go, not realizing that such behavior is actually fatal (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25). Which is why we’re told that we need to buy eye salve (figurative language, of course) that we may see. Because our spiritual deficits—"nakedness," among other things—though very real, aren’t something to laugh about (Revelation 3:18).

Jim Coffin, Senior Pastor

Earthquake, Holocaust, MLK--A Jewish Perspective

The following was adapted from a letter written to the members of Congregation Beth Am by Rabbi Rick and Elissa Sherwin.

Fundamentalists and atheists alike (and some insurance companies) tend to define a natural disaster as "an act of God."

On one end of the spectrum, fundamentalists believe that hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes are manifestations of God’s judgment. On the other end of the spectrum, atheists look upon natural upheaval and deny that God exists––for a compassionate God would never allow such devastation to exist.

Ironically both ends of the spectrum agree that destruction, devastation, disaster and disease come from God. Conservative Judaism vehemently disagrees.

The Rabbis of the Talmud teach us that God empowers humanity to transform the world from the way it is to the way it needs to be with the divine gifts of wisdom, compassion and spiritual strength. Jewish tradition posits that we perform an "act of God" each time we fulfill our religious responsibility to create harmony in the world.

The horrific earthquake that struck Haiti left a poverty-stricken population in desperate conditions. Three million displaced Haitians are in need of water, food, shelter, the basic necessities of life and medical assistance. God acts not in the devastation, but within the U.S. troops now being deployed to Haiti, through the teen volunteers already in the Dominican Republic and in the massive effort of collection centers to gather relief supplies.

"Acts of God" are not confined to our response to natural disasters. Miep Gies, who died January 11 at the age of 100, was the last survivor of those who risked death to hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis during World War II. Anne Frank’s diary has allowed post-Holocaust generations to see the world through the eyes of a teenager who was hopeful that one day the tortuous chaos would end and order restored.

As the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, Miep Gies––who worked at the complaint desk in Otto Frank’s office––recognized the danger facing the Jews. When Otto Frank asked her to hide his family and take care of them and those hiding with them, her immediate response was, "Of course!" She was confronted daily with choices of self-preservation or altruism, fear or courage. In an era that revealed the deepest hell of humanity, Miep Gies––along with other righteous gentiles––acted as God’s agent.

Last weekend we honored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who understood that God does not create situations, but rather creates within us the capacity to respond to them with wisdom, compassion, and spiritual strength. He rallied the American soul and stirred the American conscience as it had never before been moved.

Dr. King spoke out, then acted in such a way as to inspire Americans to follow his example. He taught us to perform "acts of God": to rededicate ourselves to the cause of justice and compassion; to sacrifice our money, our time, and our physical energy to elevate the human spirit; and to transcend the narrow boundaries of personal priority by extending our hearts and our hands to bring the broken pieces of the world together into one peace, the true essence of shalom.