memorial day

Every culture, society, is built on something. America may be the most unique nation in the world, a nation built upon ideas of freedom and justice for all. But those ideas don’t nor can they stand in a vacuum. The reality is that our nation is built upon the blood and sacrifice of men and women who, since the revolutionary war, gave their lives or their loved ones for those ideas of freedom and justice, ideas built into the fabric of America. For me it is impossible to understand or know the blessings of being an American without understanding and remembering those sacrifices, realizing that this is what an American is, yes one who celebrates freedom, but knows they stand on the lives of those who sacrificed for that freedom. In our Memorial Day celebration today we had a great deal of family with us. We also had our youngest daughter and her two children with us, a daughter who would have loved to have her husband here cooking the bratwurst, sour kraut, and onions he always makes; but he is at camp Victory in Baghdad missing his lovely wife and growing children. We marked his sacrifice and remembered the many others who are and have done the same. The very nature of the Christian faith is sacrifice, Christ’s sacrifice for us and God’s call for us to sacrifice for others. It is as close to holiness as any of us will ever get, meeting Christ at the point of His sacrifice and responding to sacrifice so much for others. Military men and women have been laid to rest in cemeteries around the world having touched that holiness with their own blood. Most of us can’t do much, but we can remember.

Success and Failure

We are not the sum of our failures nor or we the product of our successes. Our worth is instead evaluated by the standard God has chosen, His death on the cross; (for God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son). We are each the value God has placed on us which is the only worth that counts, after all God is the creator and Christ is the Savior, we are the creation and the saved. In a world where value is decided by success and failure, God decides value in His love for us and simply asks for us to love in the same way. We can’t let our culture decide our value by its squirrely definition of success and failure. We are not the sum of our falures nor the sum of our successes, we people who God loves.

The Kingdom

Jesus often taught about the Kingdom of God, but He most clearly showed us what it was by His life, what he lived for, and most importantly what He died for. The book of Romans records these words, “The Kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit”. This sounds simple but when we live in a culture that is overwhelmingly about “Food and Drink”, and more and more stuff that we are told we have to have to be happy, have to achieve to be significant, have to be to be of value; security we can buy if we make enough money, then these verses take on a whole new light. Do we struggle for righteousness and the fellowship with God it opens our lives up to, do we understand that peace with God Himself is the only real peace, and that Joy is in belonging to our creator and loving our savior; do we spend our limited time and energy focusing and growing here; for most of us we really don’t….we live frantic frenzied lives pushed around by the demands of life that we often have placed on ourselves. Why don’t we learn? God saves us with Amazing grace! But the lives we live we create for ourselves and the kingdom we live in and for is up to us. Jesus invited, “Come follow me!”.