By Dr. Lani Wilson

Happy first week of the New Year, prayer and fasting partners! Just writing “2016” is mind-boggling, isn’t it? As we pray and fast for the evolution of God’s church and our little Deep East Outpost, let’s also pray for a calming of world tensions as well as unrivaled compassion in America: It seems to have lost its way, again.

The word shared this week is “show.” Yes, it is another general term with so many possible meanings (told y’all this ain’t my party). We remember when the Risen Christ comes to the male disciples to prove He has done what He said He would (we know, of course, that apparently the female disciples had never had any trouble believing Jesus).

After he said this, he showed his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
John 20:20 (NRSV)

During His ministry and before His resurrection, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the disciples asked Jesus to show them who He was: The former for treachery and trickery and the latter for confirmation and consolation. They all wanted signs.

The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test Jesus they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” Then he left them and went away.
Mathew 16:1-4 (NRSV)

Listen to this passage from The Message Bible/Remix:

Some Pharisees and Sadducees were on him again, pressing Him to prove himself to them. He told them, “You have a saying that goes, ‘Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’ You find it easy enough to forecast the weather --- why can’t you read the signs of the times? An evil and wanton generation is always wanting signs and wonders. The only sign you’ll get is the Jonah sign.” Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
Mathew 16:1-4 (TMB/Remix)

Later Jesus was going about his business in Galilee. He didn’t want to travel in Judea because the Jews there were looking for a chance to kill him. It was near the time of Tabernacles, a feast observed annually by the Jews. His brothers said, “Why don’t you leave here and go up to the Feast so your disciples can get a good look at the works you do. No one who intends to be publicly known does everything behind the scenes. If you’re serious about what you are doing, come out in the open and show the world.” His brothers were pushing him like this because they didn’t believe in him either. Jesus came back at them, “Don’t crowd me. This isn’t my time. It’s your time --- it’s always your time; you have nothing to lose. The world has nothing against you, but it’s up in arms against me. It’s against me because I expose the evil behind its pretensions. You go ahead, go up to the Feast. Don’t wait for me. I’m not ready. It’s not the right time for me.”
John 7:1-8 (TMB/Remix)

Philip said, “Master, show us the Father; then we’ll be content.” “You’ve been with me all this time, Philip, and you still don’t understand? To see me is to see the Father. So how can you ask, ‘Where is the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. I don’t just make them up on my own. The Father who resides in me crafts each word into a divine act.”
John 14:8-10 (TMB/Remix)

In these three passages we could say that we see Jesus responding to all of His constituents’ plots, plans, and questions about the need for Him to prove, show, reveal Himself. In the first passage Jesus is responding to His enemies. In the second He is responding to his earthly family-of-origin, His brothers. And in the third passage He is responding to His disciples who struggle with belief that He is who He says He is, even though they have seen the miracles and heard the teaching.

• In Mathew 16:1-4, Jesus defines who His enemies are, “an evil and adulterous generation” (verse 4a) and what they will or will not get from Him, “no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (verse 4b). He decides that they are not going to get any other sign: Three days in the grave (like Jonah in the belly of the whale) and then He rises. The Christ clearly establishes His historic scriptural authority and His coming Messianic character.
• In John 7:1-8 He peremptorily dismisses His own brothers because of their guileful attempts to snare Him through vanity: “No one who intends to be publicly known does everything behind the scenes. If you’re serious about what you are doing, come out in the open and show the world” (verse 4). The Christ clearly defines for eternity who He is and what the stakes are. "The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil” (verse 7). Here, the Christ establishes His position against injustice in the world (see The Politics of Jesus, Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. 2006).
• And in John 14:8-10, Jesus again declares who He is to His perplexed yet loyal male disciples. This time He clarifies how God who is in Him works through Him and the powerful words echo across millennia in mystery: “The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. I don’t just make them up on my own. The Father who resides in me crafts each word into a divine act” (verse 10b). Finally, in this interchange the Christ establishes the presence of God-in-the-flesh in Himself and the mechanism by which God works.

Jesus defined, dismissed, and declared humanity’s plans versus God’s plans when pushed to show who He was…and who He is.

Trust doesn’t come easy in today’s world. Everything and everyone seems to be moving so fast that life often feels like a blurry movie. Scene-after-scene of all the things we do and who we are in different situations shift almost on a daily basis. This obviously strains how we relate to one another. So it’s common for the standard gauge of the sincerity of a friendship, a love relationship, a personal connection is “show me.” But in a technically demanding, global culture punctuated by increasingly indiscriminate violence and fluid economic stability, the question might be “show me what?” Loyalty, companionship, compatibility, common interests, discretion, consistency are some examples of the invisible proofs that someone is worthy of our trust. And trust in a personal friendship is different from trust in a workplace relationship and is different from trust in a familial relationship. So as we think back to Jesus’ responses to his enemies, his brothers, and his disciples about showing them who He was, the question for us might be, “what do we show the world as Christians and why should they trust us?” Did Jesus’ disciples trust Him? Did Jesus’ enemies believe He was the Messiah more than His followers and that’s why they had to kill Him? Exactly what is trust in a Christian community like a church? Is there a different standard for trust in the church than “in the world?” And as Christians if we trust in God like we say we do ad nauseam at least on Sundays, how do we show it?

This chart is from a September 13, 2013 article published by the Pew Research Center, Fact Tank -“What surveys say about church attendance – and why some stay home” by Michael Lipka. We already know that among Millennials the number who do not identify with any religion is growing. But among the “already in,” the number is at the very least steady.

Among the growing share of religiously unaffiliated adults in the U.S., the vast majority say they are not looking for a religion, and relatively few (5%) say they go to services weekly or more often. But what keeps people who have a religious affiliation – that is, who identify with a particular religious group – out of the pews? A 2012 Pew Research poll asked respondents to answer this question in their own words. Among religiously affiliated Americans who say that religion is at least somewhat important in their lives, but who attend worship services no more than a few times a year, 24% cite personal priorities – including 16% who say they are too busy – as reasons they do not attend more often. Another 24% mention practical difficulties, including work conflicts, health problems or transportation difficulties.
“U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious”
Pew Research Center, November 3, 2015

So it’s kind of a good news-bad news scenario…except for the last part of that paragraph:

Nearly four-in-ten (37%) point to an issue directly related to religion or church itself. The most common religion-related responses include disagreements with the beliefs of the religion or their church leaders, or beliefs that attending worship services is not important. Meanwhile, almost one-in-ten (9%) do not attribute their lack of attendance at religious services to anything in particular.
Ibid.

And there’s more.

As older cohorts of adults (comprised mainly of self-identified Christians) pass away, they are being replaced by a new cohort of young adults who display far lower levels of attachment to organized religion than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations did when they were the same age. The same dynamic helps explain the declines in traditional measures of religious belief and practice. Millennials – especially the youngest Millennials, who have entered adulthood since the first Landscape Study was conducted – are far less religious than their elders. For example, only 27% of Millennials say they attend religious services on a weekly basis, compared with 51% of adults in the Silent generation. Four-in-ten of the youngest Millennials say they pray every day, compared with six-in-ten Baby Boomers and two-thirds of members of the Silent generation. Only about half of Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty, compared with seven-in-ten Americans in the Silent and Baby Boom cohorts. And only about four-in-ten Millennials say religion is very important in their lives, compared with more than half in the older generational cohorts.
Ibid.

Oh, and just one more thing …

Did you happen to notice the Historically Black Protestant trend in the above chart? The percentage of those who say that homosexuality should be accepted in society went from 39% to 51% from 2007-2014 of those surveyed in this category (that would be “us”). But in the January 3, 2016, eleven o’clock service this past Sunday in our little outpost for God, there was an immobilizing silence in response to Senior Pastor’s foray into this topic, the entire sermon lining out our focus statement for the New Year: "Commanded to Love: Beyond Barriers, Borders, Boundaries and Beliefs" (Leviticus 19:33-34, Matthew 5:43-48, Romans 8:38-39). This is just one area of many in which there might be a somber silence: The undocumented alien (for us, probably Mexican); pro-women/pro-life/pro-choice; the rise in qualified women clergy in leadership. And if Americans are leaving the church, does it mean that they are leaving God or that God is leaving them? It just means that as our populations grows, those of us who consider religion important remains the same and ergo, we are a smaller percentage of the overall population.

These changes are happening even though the absolute number of Americans who are highly religiously engaged has not changed very much. In other words, the United States is growing less religious (in percentage terms) not because there are fewer highly religious people but rather because, as the overall U.S. population has grown, there are now many more nonreligious people than was the case just a few years ago.
Ibid.

This study also stated that Americans are feeling more “spiritual” as opposed to feeling attached to a religious organization.

Roughly six-in-ten adults now say they feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and well-being at least once a week, up 7 percentage points since 2007. And 46% of adults say they feel a deep sense of wonder about the universe on a weekly basis, also up sharply since 2007.
Ibid.

The serious rift within our communities of faith is between generations.

Within the Historically Black Church we love to send our children off to college - just as long as they don’t “lose their faith.” Jesus defined, dismissed, and declared Himself to the ancient First Century world as One who showed who He was even before he submitted Himself to physical death and rising from the dead. But as Jesus showed who He was in response to those queries, can’t we trust Him to show Himself in the 21st Century to our young adults? And although we know God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, do we presume to know who God is in Her entirety? Could God be bigger than our religious rules and requirements? Can our “religious doctrine” withstand Jesus’ definition, dismissal, and declaration to show Himself to us…really? Are we transposing “culture” with who we think we know God is instead of refining culture and worshiping God? And what is it do we feel we have to prove, to show, in order for us to be called “Christians?” Should we be more concerned about how we show ourselves to be Christians as opposed to how we live as Christians? Exactly what are we afraid of?

Jesus answered them, "Do you finally believe? In fact, you’re about to make a run for it-saving your own skins and abandoning me. But I’m not abandoned. The Father is with me. I’ve told you all this so that trusting me, you will be unshakable and assured, deeply at peace. In this godless world you will continue to experience difficulties. But take heart! I’ve conquered the world."
John 16:31-33 (TMB/Remix)

On President John F. Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office was a plaque that Admiral Hyman Rickover gave him. Admiral Rickover gave each new submarine captain one and President Kennedy used this quotation, an anonymous Breton Prayer, in the dedication of the East Coast Memorial to the Missing at Sea on May 23, 1963, six days before his 46th birthday and six months and a day before his death by assassination (www.jfklibrary.org).

http://fisherslasercarvers.com/

 

Here is the poem in its entirety:

Thy sea, O God, so great,
My boat so small,
It cannot be that any happy fate,
Will me befall.
Save as thy goodness opens paths for me,
Through the consuming vastness of the sea.

Thy winds, O God so strong,
So slight my sail.
How could I cub and bit them on the long
and salty trail,
Unless Thy love were mightier than the wrath
Of all the tempests that beset my path?

Thy world, O God, so fierce,
And I so frail.
Yet, though its arrows threaten oft to pierce
My fragile mail,
Cities of refuge rise where dangers cease,
Sweet silences abound, and all is peace.

"Storm at the Sea of Galilee"- Rembrandt
http://nuslegion.blogspot.com/2008/06/o-god-thy-sea-is-so-great-and-my-boat.html

Show me, Lord Jesus, Who You are.
Show me, Lord Jesus, how to love.
Show me, Lord Jesus, the deep wounds You suffered for me.
Show me, Lord Jesus, where You are because that’s the only place I want to be Because…

O, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.

Amen.