Joshua 24:14-15

"A finale is not always the best song but it is always the last." – Calvin Miller, The Singer

The rugged old general stood before what amounted to a joint session of congress. The chest which once breathed easily under plate armor now labored beneath the massive bunting of medals and ribbons. The voice whose orders roared clearly above the cacophony of battle now piped shrilly. The sacred historian remorselessly anatomizes the wasted sheath whose sword-soul has outworn its scabbard: "And Joshua was old, and advanced in years." – Joshua 23:1.

When Douglas MacArthur, under somewhat similar circumstances, rose to speak to the U. S. House and Senate, he quoted and old barracks ballad which proclaimed, "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." It’s a poetic sentiment, but a silly one, of course. Joshua, who in his time had dealt too much death to harbor such illusions, put it plainly: "Now behold, today I am going the way of all earth." (Joshua 23:14) He would die; he had no intention of fading away. He would cut one last set of orders before he took terminal leave.

I am less than half Joshua’s age, and have led Second Baptist for a far shorter time than he directed the armies of Israel. Still, I can’t help thinking that I arrived thirteen years ago with more hair, younger children, and less inclination to nap in the afternoon. Actuary tables argue that I probably won’t die anytime soon, but my body insists that I am indeed fading away. As the Lord leads me into a new area of ministry, and Second Baptist forward into a great future, we will take one last time together to hear from God.

The message in either case is the same. Scholars note that, in the first dozen or so verses of Joshua’s address, pronouns referring to God appear seventeen times. The old dogface makes his point well: a change in human leadership is secondary as long as we follow the same Lord. This Sunday, Christ will be preached from the pulpit at Second Baptist. Next Sunday, Christ will be preached from the pulpit at Second Baptist. Who does the preaching makes a difference, but ultimately does not matter.

Ten-hut!

Sermon 5 – Richard Jackson

You can bet on hurricanes. I don’t mean you can be certain that they’ll come; the experts tell us that’s a sure thing. I mean you can literally place a bet on how many, how strong, and where they’ll hit. It’s on the internet, of course. The odds aren’t very good. The going rate for a Category 3 or better is one-to-five, meaning a sawbuck bet would pay only two greenbacks.

Sounds kind of ghoulish, I suppose. Still, putting money on one’s own town could be seen as a form of insurance. Maybe you could put a grand on Corpus Christi across the board and another K on the nose, planning to use the payoff to replace your roof. And it wouldn’t be like you were wishing bad luck on another city; sort of like a professional athlete gambling on his own team – there’s no chance he’d shave points.

Bottom line: it strikes us as frivolous to worry about wagers with disaster roaring onshore. How much more foolish, then, to distract ourselves with the slot machine pursuits of getting and spending when the lead pipe cinch certainty of eternal doom rushes toward us. No bookie in Vegas would make odds on the likelihood of someone’s death; there’s no gamble where the outcome is already known. Yet every day men and women go about their business as if they had a chance of lucking out in some sort of lotto that would make them the exception to mortality. But the cough of dice in a leather cup can’t drown out the ominous roar of the storm that sweeps toward Golgotha.

If it is dumb to bet against death, it is dumber still when God offers a solution that is just as certain. Jesus declares that those who trust in him receive an irrevocable promise of eternal life, a betting slip for redemption written with his own nail-scarred hand and signed in his spear-syphoned blood. Shall not perish, promises the fine print: the only "sure thing" worthy of the name.

This Sunday, my dad, Richard Jackson, will preach for us from the text that has sustained us for five Sundays now, John 3:16. It is also a text that has nourished him through fifty-odd years of ministry. And it is a text which will shine unfading through all the ageless ages of eternity. Take time to attend; you won’t run the risk of not being blessed.

You Bet,

Sermon 4 – Justin Horton

The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. – John 1:14, The Message

That’s not a bad translation. In his book, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson speaks of the summer when an upscale city family downsized into his rural community. The neighborhood kids gawked as the trappings of wealth and sophistication lumbered off the truck: skis, a motorcycle, expensive furniture. Bumpkin hearts thudded at the opportunity to upgrade through association with such lives.

Reality, however, failed to live up to sample. The newcomers proved to be carpetbagging snobs who sneered at the locals, invited no one to share their expensive toys, and guarded the threshold of their home like a religious shrine.

The incarnate Christ, by contrast, was neither a squatter nor a squire, neither a drifter wandering by nor a snob towering above. He entered our experience; he showed us who he was and invited us in. He defied the gnostic nightmare of a God who gives without really giving, a God who moves fast enough and stays long enough only to dazzle with charm, sell some spiritual snake oil, and abscond with our money like a traveling medicine man in the Old West.

For God so loved that he gave – came, stayed, settled in. Jesus didn’t simply parade a few chrome-plated miracles then withdraw into his holiness and leave us gaping on the sidewalk. He gave us all that he was, and took on himself all that we were. That’s a message worth more than a single sermon, so we have devoted the entire month of July to John 3:16. This week, our youth pastor, Justin Horton, will fill the pulpit to unpack a little more of the moving van and uncrate some of the riches of Christ. You should take a personal interest in this sermon, because you’re invited to use anything it contains.

Happy Moving Day,

Doug

Sermon 3 – Doug Jackson

Wuthering Heights contains one of the funniest scenes you’re likely to find in the collected writings of the Bronte sisters; maybe the only funny scene in the collected writings of the Bronte sisters.

The narrator, Mr. Lockwood, finds himself benighted and snowbound in the inhospitable confines of Heathcliff’s farmhouse on a bleak English moor. In the stark guest room, he discovers a few musty volumes of divinity. He begins to read one, a sermon on Matthew 18:22 entitled, "Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First. A Pious Discourse delivered by the Reverend Jabez Branderham, in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough." Like any good Victorian churchman, the astringent Jabez cares little for the seventy-squared mass of forgivable transgressions and concentrates instead on the one which crosses the line.

Lockwood falls asleep over this text and, in a nightmare, finds himself sitting under the ministry of this very clergyman preaching this very sermon. Finally, unable to endure the sheer length of the homily, he dreams that, "a sudden inspiration descended on me; I was moved to rise and denounce Jabez Branderham as the sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon."

As the daughter of a dour Church of England vicar, Emily Bronte had no doubt endured more than her share of interminable discourses, so it is not surprising that, to her, the unpardonable sin was an over-long sermon!

Jesus, by contrast, was able to pack the knockout punch of the gospel’s good news into a single sentence so short that most of our children memorize it before they can read, and few of our adults forget it even long after they can read no more. It has been called "Luther’s Little Gospel," the verse with which a defrocked monk rocked Rome to her gaudy foundations.

John 3:16 insists that "seventy times seven" is about mercy, not math, and that no transgression lies beyond the reach of saving grace. The stopping-point of forgiveness fascinates the Pharisees; Jesus’ fixation is with where redemption begins. Legalism says that forgiveness must stop somewhere; Jesus believes it begins everywhere. This Sunday, it will be my privilege to preach, as we once again take up a text which tells us that, since sin seems to be everywhere, forgiveness is just as omnipresent.

Endlessly,

Sermon 2 – Tony Celelli

God’s love invites boldness, like that of the wily old author of The Book of Privy Counseling, as he urges Christians to slap God on their bleeding souls like styptic pencil on a shaving nick, or, more accurately, like a pressure bandage on a severed artery. "Step up stoutly, then," he admonishes, "and try that remedy; lift up your sick self as you are to gracious God as he is."

But God isn’t that kind of Father. Because Trinity is ultimate truth, John 3.16 insists that he shoves himself directly into the sucking chest wound of the human soul. Like counter-cultural graffiti spray-painted across the august edifice of religious bureaucracy, this verse sweeps away the nanny-state of ecclesiastical machinery and lifts our sick selves up to the One who bore our suffering. The Nicene Creed invites Christians to confess God the Son who, "for us and for our salvation, came down from Heaven." No nannies need apply.

At Second Baptist Church, we have devoted a month of Sundays to this inexhaustible truth. We will change preachers each week, providing a fresh messenger for the ever-fresh message. Up this Sunday is Tony Celelli, a former staff member at 2BC and now president of the South Texas School of Christian Studies. Plan to be blessed as Tony invites us to try the remedy which Our Lord applies with his own wounded hands.

Hurry, Hurry, Step Right Up!

Sermon 1 – Cody McDonald

When Harry Moorehouse, a brash young Englishman, invited himself to preach at D. L. Moody’s church, the famous evangelist reluctantly gave the kid the Thursday and Friday night services. Moorehouse stretched that double-header into a week, preaching seven nights in a row from the same verse: John 3:16. As he announced the passage for his final sermon, he admitted, "I have been trying to find a new text, but I can’t find anything better than the old one."

Among many converts made that week, Moody counted himself. His own preaching, previously marked by an emphasis on God’s righteous wrath, underwent a transformation and began to focus on the Lord’s love. He literally referred to this as his "second conversion."

At Second Baptist Church, we are attempting a similar experiment. For each of the five Sundays in July, a different preacher will take up the same text, John 3:16. Our bet is that we can no more wear it out in a month than Moorehouse could in a week. Our conviction is that these words, which have had power to save for two millennia, can keep that anointing fresh for five more Lord’s Days. Our excitement is also to see how many Moody’s will find new insight into a Lord whose love often gets short shrift.

Leading off this Sunday is Cody McDonald, our youth intern. Cody has impressed us so far with his abilities, and even more with his spirit. This will be the first time that we have had the opportunity to hear him preach. Come to show your love for Cody. Stay to let Cody show you God’s love for you. Leave to love a lonely world, a world which "God so loved."

Lovingly,

Doug

1 Thessalonians 5.18

As he sprints for the finish line of his letter to the church in Thessalonica, Paul whips up a hat trick of present-tense exhortations for Christian living. Rejoice, pray, give thanks – the Greek grammar is the same in each case and implies, "Do this right now." The apostle then follows each exhortation with an open-ended time frame: always. without ceasing, in everything. He realizes that the psychological construct known as "always" exists only as an endless series of freeze-frame "now’s". Christian obedience is like a flip-book in which individual acts form the flow of ongoing Godliness. In context, this encouragement to staccato saintliness comes after a lengthy meditation on Our Lord’s return (4:13-5:11).

It is interesting that the Pauline epistle with the most to say about the end time closes with a call for recollection in the present time. Eugene Peterson, in his introduction to the book in The Message, notes this striking feature. "The practical effect of this belief (in Christ’s second coming) is to charge each moment of the present with hope. For if the future is dominated by the coming again of Jesus, there is little room left on the screen for projecting our anxieties and fantasies. It takes the clutter out of our lives."

Some Thessalonian saints, however, fell in the theological crack between the present time and the end of time and wound up wandering in that bewildering badlands known as "later." Since Jesus might return tomorrow, they procrastinated sanctity today, an act which endangered eternity (2 Thessalonians 3:11-12). Jesus told a story about a guy who tried to live in tomorrow, only to find himself hustled from now into forever without so much vestibule as a single additional sunrise (Luke 12:16-21).

"The present," says C. S. Lewis, "is the point at which time touches eternity." Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson phrased it, "Only he is rich who owns the day."

Christ calls us to live in a permeable present, ever inter-penetrated by the invasion of forever. We must give our full attention to the small act of obedience that lies immediately before us. "Be faithful to the present moment," wrote Francis Fenelon, "doing one thing at a time." It is not that tomorrow doesn’t matter, but that tomorrow doesn’t exist. On the stiletto-thin slice of reality known as "now," I decide my stance toward eternity.

Right Away,

Doug

Genesis 16:1-6, Genesis 21:9-21

Jesus is coming back. Don’t mistake this for good news.

At least, it isn’t good news according to evangelist Tony Alamo of Texarkana. Well, it’s good news for Reverend Alamo and his adherents, but not for the rest of us. "God," thunders the minister in a flyer recently scattered around Corpus Christi, "is mankind’s worst enemy." He goes on to state that the Devil comes in second in this hundred yard dash of hatred. It’s all mixed up with earthquakes somehow.

Hagar may have felt the same way as she fled to the desert, an undocumented alien whose lack of a green card cut her off from legal protection in the face of an abusive employer. She had hoped that her son’s automatic citizenship would boost her status but found that the law loopholed her straight back into servitude. Later, courtesy of no-fault divorce, she winds up in the wilderness once again. Her husband’s high-priced lawyer really took her to the cleaners: she got full custody of the son, but no child support. Alimony consisted of a gallon jug of tap water and a box of saltines.

Have I mentioned that her ex was big on God?

Whatever tune Hagar hummed as she waited to expire of heat stroke, it couldn’t have been, "What a Friend We Have in Yahweh." God must have seemed like her worst enemy.

But that was just when the Lord showed up. Breaking through the cultural crust which sought to harness theology in the service of tyranny, the Almighty appeared to the un-mighty and promised her his presence and provision. The first single mother in Scripture learns that the Lord moves in the margins, redeeming the suffering of the minimized.

If you’ve ever been beaten up with someone’s God-stick, eighty-sixed out of manmade Edens and bounced beyond borders barricaded by the bulldogs of selective Scripture reading, Hagar is your patron saint. The god who is mankind’s worst enemy is a false god, made in man’s own image. The God of the Bible waits in the wasteland, where he lovingly embraces the outcasts.

Wishing You Well,

Doug