Cpt. Bud's Devotionals, 7-12-15: "Zephyrinus Blues"

Though not Catholic, my parents considered naming me Zephyrinus, who was bishop of Rome from A.D. 199-217. My mother was moved by his suffering and persistence in battling many heresies that were growing within the Church, specifically the "adoptionism" heresy. But, my parents settled on Bud, as St. Bud of Macedonia was known for his hygiene.

This led me to read about Zephyrinus, and his devotion to keeping the Gospel from the mire and manipulation of men. His experience is a testament to the fact that anyone who proclaims the truth of Christ will not have an easy time of it. After all, if everyone likes what you're preaching, you're probably not preaching the truth. Jesus never promises us cushy lives as His disciples - He promises the opposite. I thank God that He does not shelter us from the hard facts of life.

The Bible tells us we are Christ's "ambassadors," quite an important office. Like Zephyrinus, who himself had a high office but didn't resign to complacency concerning the Gospel, so should we, in our undeserved but awesome job as heralds of Christ, always expect and embrace suffering, and trust God to mold it into a testament to the beautiful truth we proclaim.
OHMS,
Cpt. Bud Sturguess

PS Though he did not die a martyr's death, Zephyrinus was for a long time listed in the Catholic canon of martyrs (and is still acknowledged by some), for the spiritual and emotional anguish he endured in combating heresy. The word "martyr" means "witness." And though not all of us in Christ's flock will be literally put to death for our belief in Him, if we suffer with the same meekness and faith as Zephyrinus, we are witnesses indeed, and provide a stirring testimony for the God who gives us such strength.

"Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented—of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us." -Hebrews 11:36-40

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." -Winston Churchill

My Vietnam Mom

Today marks forty years since the fall of Saigon and the "official" end of the Vietnam War, and I'm glad to have had a mother who openly talked about it. We were taught nothing about it in school; the most it was mentioned was in a junior high science class, when our teacher described why soldiers in Vietnam were careful to take such good care of their feet (we were learning about fungus).
But in a way I'm glad my school didn't bother to teach us about the Vietnam War - my mother brought to life this ominous thing that would have been dull history otherwise.
I heard what her friends and family went through, both in Vietnam, and when they came back. Men who were spat on and called "baby killers," her cousin, Bob Wayne Ford whose helicopter went down in Cambodia, her uncle Glen Oliver Lane who was declared missing in action, but was later proven to be alive, unable to return to the States presumably due to the mental effects of all he did and saw in Southeast Asia.
Because of her, I had a deeper desire to know the motives behind heroes and villains like Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, William Westmoreland, Michael Davis O'Donnell, John McCain, Ernest Medina, Michael Bernhardt, and Jane Fonda
I understood what songs like "Fortunate Son" and "Born in the USA" really meant. I understood the weight of movies like Hamburger Hill and Good Morning, Vietnam.
Because of my mother, I understood a little more about this thing I didn't have to care about. It could have been distant history, despite ending only eleven years before I was born, but my mother carried a certain sorrow from her generation that others forgot when they founded Microsoft or became yuppies on Wall Street.
Because of her, I know it's important.

"You have left too much of yourself in this land for it not to be yours. I, too, will always be yours, for you have left too much of yourself with me for it to be otherwise." -Nicholas Proffitt

Bud's "Easter" Sermon: God, or Jesus?

Note: I don't like to call Easter by that name, because it was named after a false god by certain Christians with anti-Semitic intents who wanted to distance themselves from the Jews and Passover. Then again, I still call Thursday "Thursday," despite its being named for Thor, and I still call Mars "Mars," and so on, yet God in His rich mercy does not hold it against me. Not withstanding, I prefer "Resurrection Sunday." Anyway...

Whether intentionally or not, we often perceive God and Jesus as not only two different Characters of history and creation, but two different Gods. We see God (the Father) as the angry One who grants wishes, and Jesus (the Son) as the nice One who did nice things and commanded us to do likewise.
The problem is not that we prefer One over the Other, but that we go to One depending on our specific needs. When we cry out for vengeance and justice, for wrath to come upon those who do wrong, we pray to the One we call "God." When we want to remember and teach kindness and love, we cite the One we call "Jesus."
But what is often missing in our perception of the Creator is the fact that the Two cannot be separated. The same God who destroyed Pharaoh's army, who rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, who struck many a wicked man with blindness and leprosy, became flesh and bone, grew inside and exited a womb - a Son. God, the Son. The feet of the Almighty wore sandals, were covered in dust and sweat, and were cleansed with the tears of the same kind of sinner on whom He had executed wrath at Sodom.
This was not two different Gods, but a different covenant the one God made with His creations. But this New Covenant, sealed by His blood on a cross, was not a "plan B" - He told us from the beginning, from the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, and through His prophet Moses, that for years man would strive under Law and punishment, but a time would come when He would do away with the rigorous and fearful tastes of this Law, and open our hearts and eyes to the love and mercy with which it was written, so that the Law would taste sweet as honeycomb.
The angry invisible God cannot be set apart as a different Being than the meek and gentle Jesus. It was after all this precious Lamb of Nazareth who, on a cross, became the very object of the wrath of that distant, gloomy, stormy God, so that we would now see Him as He is and always truly was - present, close, abundant in love and the desire to know we who consider Him so baffling, so far away.

John 8:37-58

Flags of Defeat

Last month, the Dallas Cowboys lost a controversial game to the Green Bay Packers, eliminating them from the playoffs. Later in the same day, I was in the grocery store and saw several people doing their casual Sunday shopping, wearing Cowboys jerseys. Being a Buccaneers fan, I'm quite used to this feeling and frankly don't have this problem anymore because I've grown used to their chronic losing, but I felt bad for those Cowboys fans. I thought to myself that, with the rabidness that football brings out in people, being seen in public in a Romo jersey after a stunning defeat must hurt one's pride.

But it goes beyond those things. "I had a brother at Khe Sanh, fightin' off the Viet Cong - they're still there, he's all gone." When the communists stormed the US embassy in Saigon, effectively ending the twenty-year-long Vietnam War, it must have cut deep to the heart of a Vietnamese soldier, who'd fought for his own freedom, to see the flag of the Republic of South Vietnam become an obsolete novelty, some collectors item as far as the communists were concerned.

When thinking of South Africa, the aged and dying members of the former apartheid government, that "angry race of fallen kings," must feel the same when they see the flag that was flown before right prevailed, before Mandela was freed, before hope shed a color.

But today, thinking of the twenty-one Egyptian Christians slain by ISIS, I don't feel that way. I don't have the embarrassment of the sports jersey, the bitter tears of freedom crushed, or the trace of regret of the power I once had. I only feel victory, that which was given to believers through the cross on which our Christ suffered and died. I take comfort in the fact that suffering is a part of following Christ with boldness, with solidarity. "For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation also abounds through Christ," (2 Corinthians 1:5), and "rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy" (1 Peter 4:13).

I know that with every saint's life taken because of his or her faith in Jesus Christ, the Gospel is only spoken by those who hate, and proven true by those who kill. I know that with every scathing criticism of the Christian, every cold and apathetic remark like "what about the crusades?", Christ's prophecy is illuminated, His foretelling that we who desire to follow Him will me mocked, spat upon, and worse.

Thank God for the testimonies to Jesus Christ, stamped in history even by those who despised Him and His church! Tacitus, one of the most revered historians of ancient times, in recording the events after the great fire of Rome, wrote, "Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular."
In spitting on the church of Jesus, though his aim was to smear Nero, of whom Tacitus was no admirer, this historian of old verifies and testifies what is confirmed in the Gospels. I thank the Lord for using this instrument. Likewise, second century Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote, as part of an acerbic sendup of Christianity, "The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day—the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account. … You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains their contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws. All this they take quite on faith, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike, regarding them merely as common property."
Thank God for these harsh words aimed at His disciples! For without them, there would be slightly less indisputable historical validity of the Christian claims. These scathing words are not to our shame or disgrace - they are for God's glory. Peter writes, "If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. On their part He is blasphemed, but on your part He is glorified" (1 Peter 4:14).

And I know that though the Christian dies, the cross he or she bears does not become a symbol of defeat, because “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25-26).
Jesus took the very instrument of His execution, and turned it into the symbol of His victory, the victory we share in Him. What was once an ugly and ominous symbol of capital punishment is now the symbol of salvation, of God's love for the world, and for eternal life.

The Levite's Concubine: Superstitious Barbarians of the 21st Century

Being that every "trending" news story on my Facebook feed deals with someone killing someone else, I was moved to write this a couple of weeks ago.

One of the most disturbing villains in the Bible is often overlooked, despite the heinous nature of his deed. He doesn't have the notorious reputation of Jezebel or Herod - his name isn't even recorded - but he obviously possessed a mind as sadistic. To summarize a long story, in the nineteenth chapter of the stark and often troubling book of Judges, we're told of an unnamed Levite who, while traveling with his concubine, stayed in the village of Gibeah. There, certain men echoing the depravity of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, surrounded the house where the Levite and his concubine were staying, and demanded to have sex with him. The Levite refused, and forced his concubine outside with the men, who "ravished her so that she died."

The woman later stumbled back to the house and collapsed dead at the doorstep. When the Levite found her, his words of anguish and lament (sarcasm) were, "Get up, let's go." So, seeing that she was dead, he placed her body on his donkey, and when he returned home, he cut her corpse into twelve pieces, and sent a piece of her to each territory of Israel. In the next chapter, he gave his reason for his hideous actions, claiming he did it to make the nation of Israel aware of the rape the men in Gibeah had committed (though it was he who had given her up to them).
All of this wickedness eventually led to a war in Israel.
The final words of the startling book of Judges perfectly sum up why so many atrocities happened in Israel during this period: "everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25).

Today, cozy with Snuggies and Netflix, we look back on such things and want to throw up in disgust, and rightfully so. "Barbaric," we say with disdain. But we, as if we were anthropologists of morality, separate ourselves and our own time from wickedness such as this; we attribute it to a lack of common sense and an abundance of ancient religious superstition. We muse in our minds that today's society, safe in the embrace of the legacies of Steve Jobs and Stephen Hawking, is above such depravity.

But, a look at a few of this year's (2014) news headlines suggests otherwise:
"Body of missing 4-year-old autistic boy found in South Carolina pond."
"8 children stabbed to death in the Cairns suburb of Manoora."
"Boko Haram insurgents kidnap at least 185 women and children in Nigeria."
"Edmonton mass murder: bodies of 7 adults, 2 children found in 3 places."
"Pakistan: Taliban school attack kills 141, including 132 children."
"Dover, NH: Man shoots wife, self in hospital; sister says he did it 'out of love.'"

We gloss over the fact that it wasn't even one hundred years ago that many in the nation of Germany followed a madman named Adolf Hitler and gleefully supported the Nazis' quest to annihilate the Jews from the face of the planet. And we forget there is no shortage of groups today that mold their ideals and charters after these monsters. And we forge that just fifty years ago, these groups in our own country were lynching men for the color of their skin, as racist mayors were unleashing vicious dogs.

Yet we have the nerve to assert that faith in God is out of place in this modern, "civilized" age of reason and carbon dating.

The most strident of atheists looks at the roots of religion - any religion - as a blithering group of bumpkins and jumpy, guilty simpletons attributing good and bad to an object, some stone monolith perhaps, and bowing down to it with caveman-like grunts and Pentecostal-like hooting. But I see the exact same thing happening in the unbelieving world today, in reverse: those who curse the notion of faith in disgust bowing down to the accelerator mass spectrometer, with proud announcements that carbon dating and the humor of Seth MacFarlane have come to save us from religion, and if we only believe in the words of Christopher Hitchens, we can be saved from ghastly superstitions of old, and everything will be alright - and explained.

Before and after the Flood, God describes, as a whole and without exception, the natural hearts of man as continually evil. We need a Savior. We need a Power not of our own making. We are wretched by nature, and would never tell ourselves so. We exalt ourselves like the Pharisees who plotted to kill Jesus, that we are above the barbaric nature of men of old. But an hour spent watching the news proves otherwise.

We need Jesus Christ, the Son of God who was given as an atonement for our sins, so that our hearts may be open to true love, to the knowledge of the mercy and grace of God, the zealous desire He has to cleanse us of sin and give us everlasting life.
We today are no better than the marauders and rapists of ancient days. The ability to Skype has not made the hearts of man any less prone to fanaticism, racism, or barbarianism.

"Therefore hear this now, you who are given to pleasures, who dwell securely, who say in your heart, 'I am, and there is no one else besides me; I shall not sit as a widow, nor shall I know the loss of children'; But these two things shall come to you in a moment, in one day: the loss of children, and widowhood. They shall come upon you in their fullness because of the multitude of your sorceries, for the great abundance of your enchantments. For you have trusted in your wickedness; you have said, 'No one sees me'; your wisdom and your knowledge have warped you; and you have said in your heart, 'I am, and there is no one else besides me.' Therefore evil shall come upon you; you shall not know from where it arises. And trouble shall fall upon you; you will not be able to put it off. And desolation shall come upon you suddenly, which you shall not know" (Isaiah 47:8-11).

Hashtags and ribbons for awareness don't make us better than killers, thieves, and rapists of eras gone by. Only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ can deliver us from our evil selves. Dismissing this God we call a superstition, an ignorant crutch, has not made our hands less bloody, our minds less warped, our wisdom less hollow. In denying the need to be more like the repentant thief on the cross, we remain the brute, barbaric Levite. And what's more, we are Pharisees of time: we exalt ourselves as better than the dregs of days past because we can read On the Origin of Species and watch Religulous on our tablets, with a handful of Starbucks, and a mouthful of gluten-free pretzel puffs.

"There were present at that season some who told Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answered and said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”
-Luke 13:1-9

God's Job

I've been judged by many people in many hypocritical ways, but I suspect nothing compares to being judged like God is judged - by an inaccurate description we've created of Him, by the cramped box we've tried to fit Him in, rather than by His true nature, character, and by the very words He's spoken.

Among the most irksome reasons one can hear for a disbelief in God is, "Bad things happen." Which of course holds no philosophical water, as God's job has never been to keep us happy, or to keep the world healthy and clean. It's not even a Scriptural truth. In fact, before sin entered the world, and we people began turning the planet into, literally, a world of hurt, it was still not God's job to make everything comfortable - it was man to whom He gave the directive to tend the Garden and keep out lying intruders. And we all know how man did with that task.

Nor is God's job to, in a matter of will over will, change the already-made-up mind of the public shooter or the power hungry dictator. It is however among His sovereign duties to judge them for their actions and choices with divine and holy judgment. I realized long ago that if God did not allow bad things into the world - or, rather, allow people to choose to do bad things to each other - He wouldn't be able to give you and I the beautiful and glorious task of doing good things. And if He, in some trump of will, made us all do good all the time, would our good really be good? Wouldn't it be as fleeting as a blink or a breath?

It is not God's job to make people treat each other fairly, or to make sure every exchange and transaction between people is fair - don't tell God, who sent His sinless Son to die for my sins, about what's "fair."

One of God's chores is, I suppose, to keep things running; the weather, biology, time, all of those vast things we humans can't control, try as we might.
But even more vast than those things too lofty for me to comprehend is something even more puzzling to me and my bitterness - love. And God did His job, kept every promise in every prophecy He ever gave the prophets to utter, when He came to this earth in the flesh. He did His job to the fullest when He gave a Savior to be the perfect Atonement, the punishment for the sins of all who would be willing to accept that this Messiah took on Himself the very literal wrath of God, so that we who bemoan the injustices in this world without doing a thing to cure them, would be free from that wrath and given to a life under His grace - even the shooter and the dictator could have the gift of grace and cleansing of evil.

That's God's job. To love us, though we have turned His creation into a smoking, fuming globe of waste. But this job was certainly not something owed to us, definitely not something we deserved. It is a job He gave Himself, because no one else could. And He exemplified His job when He, in human flesh, let His hands be stretched out and nailed to an ugly stake of capital punishment. A part of love is keeping promises - He's promised to return someday, and that you and I who believe will spend eternity with Him, where this love is never approached by the darkness of doubt, of prejudice, of bitterness. 

A Message of Love to Fast Food Workers

I recently saw a post borne of the minimum wage debate that deeply offended me. I'm not sure I'm qualified, either intellectually or as it pertains to common sense, to take a stance on the issue of raising the minimum wage, as my math skills are abysmal. But I know about common decency (even if I often fail to practice it), and that's why the post I saw infuriated me.

The post read, "If you've chosen flipping burgers as a career, you have failed."

Snobbish, elitist statements like this have offended me since I was a child. The reason the bitterness stems from my childhood is because my mother, Ann Gowdey, fed and provided for four obnoxious, homely sons - and me - with a career in fast food that lasted from 1969 to 2005, give or take a hiatus or two.

Glory days.

Though I don't know that my mom stepped into a Dairy Queen in high school and said, "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life," I do know that she often looked back at her life and said she wouldn't have wanted any other job, despite the physical toll it took on her over thirty-plus years (in those days, burgers were not yet synthesized holograms as they are now). She eventually became the longtime manager of both Dairy Queens in Seminole, Texas. When she went into a temporary retirement when my father died in 1996, the local DQs so declined in quality that one was shut down.
I'm immensely proud of my mother and her "mcjob" she loved so much, the same mcjob that paid for by mcbrother's contact mclenses, our mcschool supplies, the mcjob that paid for my mcpsychiatric care as a teenager, and the mcjob that taught me a person doesn't have to wear a suit or have college training to make a difference. (I probably shouldn't use the "mcjob" term, since she worked at Dairy Queen and not McDonald's, and that could be a huge conflict of interests.)

I'm a preacher, so I know nothing about work. I don't even work the two hours a week since I'm not allowed to preach out of an actual church building. But I do have enough good instilled in me by Christ that tells me if you go to your place of work every day and do your job with commitment, without indifference or bitterness, and with care for your customers, you have done something nothing short of amazing.
The Holy Spirit tells us through the apostle Paul: "And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ" (Colossians 3:23-24).

And, even if you despise your job, and drag your hungover carcass in there every day anyway, to feed your kids or just to get your transmission fixed, you've still done something awesome.

Fast food employees of America and elsewhere, don't let anyone belittle you or look down on you. You don't deserve such snobbish treatment - you're in food service, not congress. You are not an embarrassment, should not be embarrassed, you are not the shame of the work force, and should never be ashamed of your hard work.

Let's be honest. If every fast food worker in America accepted and believed the shame and scorn that's thrown their way, and walked out of their job today, this country would spiral into chaos and anarchy. Endless lines of cars would line up at McDonald's, Burger Kings, Taco Bells all across the land, full of angry Hyundai-jockeys who demand you fix them up a quick lunch, so they can get back to the job that requires two college degrees so they can sit in their cubicle and deride you on the internet some more for working in fast food. Soccer moms who smile with self-assured glee that they don't have to work in grease would be dismayed that no one is at Wendy's to take their order for their children's dinner. Entire high school football teams across the country, students given scholarships to college because they can execute an Earl Campbell-like tackle, would sit in their buses outside Sonic, perplexed at how they'll celebrate their 21-10 victory over the Permian Panthers without a chili cheese coney...until someone has the bright idea to celebrate with booze, and now look - we've got underage drinking.

You fast food employees are the glue that holds America together. Never be ashamed of your work.

"...the worker is worthy of his wages." -our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Luke 10:7