Candidates For God's Kingdom

But there are people who go through life laughing at everything, avoiding anything that hurts, anything that is serious, the things that really matter in life. They laugh at those who are serious about God. They laugh at people who are struggling. If you ask them a serious question they deflect it with a joke. They insist on being amused all the time so that serious issues can’t touch their attention. They avoid, ‘getting serious’ like the plague. And that’s an attitude that will make them blind to what God is doing. It’s an attitude that will make them blind to all that is really important in life. Woe to that, watch out!

And there are those who dare to really care about the things that matter, about people who hurt, about things that aren’t the way they should be, people who care deeply enough to weep about them. In God’s eyes, those who dare to care, who dare to love, are the ones who are really blessed.

And if we haven’t been blessed enough with poverty, hunger and weeping, Jesus offers one more, persecution. Our goal is to be like Jesus. Our hope is to be like Jesus. And here’s a test of how you are doing. Jesus was persecuted. If we are like him, we’ll be persecuted, too. It’s really unlikely that we’ll be crucified like Jesus or stoned like Stephen. But if everyone is comfortable with us, then something is wrong.

Christians in the United States have had a pretty easy and comfortable life for a long time. Contractors who were building new housing developments would sometimes plan a spot to build a church for the people who would live there. Pastors were very highly respected in communities. If people quoted the Bible, people would recognize the quote and take it seriously.

But we are seeing a growing opposition to faith in America today. If churches want to build, they often face opposition from neighbors. Vision United Methodist Church has been trying to build in Long Grove for years now and the local government has done everything it can to make it impossible. More and more people are downright ignorant of the Bible and not even interested in learning. We’re had a run of books by atheists, attacking all religions and Christianity in particular.

I play golf (more or less) with the Garden Golf League on Monday evenings through the summer. Maybe a month ago one of the men in our foursome just up and announced that religion was the leading cause of death in the world. I was stunned. How could he say such a thing?

My first answer was that often conflicts that get labeled as religious wars are really battles between cultures or races or nations and they just use religion as an excuse for their fighting.

But then I thought about it some more and said that, for the last century, you just have to say that atheism killed a lot more people than religion. Stalin, Mao Tse Dung, Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh showed us what atheism can do when it gains power without the restraint of submission to God.

CNN ran a series this week with Christiane Amonpour, called “God’s Warriors.” It started with violent Jews who have stolen land from Palestinians and committed terrorist atrocities against them. It moved on to violent Moslems. We all know that story. But the third segment was about God’s Christian warriors. And they didn’t have any examples of violence done by Christians. They interviewed Christians who talked about mobilizing people to vote their convictions and were training young people as attorneys to support Christian causes in the courts. But that’s all fair game. They lumped Christians in with the terrorists and used an ominous tone throughout that communicated that you’d better not get too serious about your faith because religion turns people nasty.