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In June of 2020, in the midst of our first serious pandemic scare and resulting lockdown, Jocelyn, my then 4-year-old granddaughter, came up with a statement that prompted someone in the Catch to coin the phrase, Jocelyn for President. The magical statement was: “When the world gets better, we’ll have a pool party, and everyone’s invited.”
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According to James, your faith in Christ has to be evidenced in your attitudes, your treatment of others, and your overall actions or else you are fooling yourself with your faith. No wonder some of the early fathers of the church didn’t want the Book of James to be in the Bible. Read one way, it can read as a book of works. What it is, in fact, is a book that insists that your faith has to reflect itself in your life in some way. You can’t say you have faith in Christ without your faith showing up in your life in some form.
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“So whatever you say and whatever you do, remember that you will be judged by the law that sets you free” (James 2:12).
The law that sets you free? That’s a strange law. Laws don’t normally set us free. They do the opposite. They enslave us. They find us guilty because we are all guilty. The law condemns. But this law James is talking about sets us free? How is that?
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In his book Screwtape Letters where an underling demon learns how to trip up Christians so as to render them useless for the kingdom of God, Lewis introduces the sinister idea of “Christianity and” where one’s faith is bound up in something in addition to their faith, so that one’s faith can be made to support just about anything, even that which would be in conflict to the true nature of following Christ and His teachings.
Examples of this would be:
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If you’re anything like me, you’re having a hard time focusing on anything other than the war in eastern Europe these days. It’s even harder when the first picture you see in the morning is that of three members of a Ukrainian family who met with a mortar shelling while trying to flee their town and the only thing left standing is their suitcase.
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It’s time for this one again. You don’t want to ever forget this!
My wife, Marti, loves to tell the story of a dramatic rescue in which she played a significant role when she was a flight attendant. On a routine done-it-a-hundred-times flight from Chicago to New York, a gentleman on board had a heart attack. Literally keeled over in his seat. This is when you are really grateful for the flight attendant call button the man’s fellow passenger pushed in a panic.
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In a 2017 article in the New York Times Rod Dreher raises an effective argument that American Christianity is actually not true Christianity. Now this is certainly not a new idea, nor is it something we haven’t discussed quite often here at the Catch. In fact, our “Declaration of a Marketplace Christian” is in many ways an attempt to identify and correct what has gone wrong with American Christianity. Dreher holds that American Christianity is not “historical” or “biblical;” it’s spiritually thin; and it has sold its soul to politics.
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When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Matthew 9:36
If we ever needed an example of what it means to stand in some else’s shoes and see what they see, hear what they hear and feel what they feel, we needn’t go any farther than Jesus, Himself, who was continually looking through the eyes of the people around Him. When Jesus saw the crowds, he didn’t see them as a nuisance, or a hassle as we might have; He saw them as confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
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I woke up this morning, took the dogs out, went out front to get the paper, made myself a cup of coffee and wondered, if I lived in Ukraine, would I be doing this? I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in the midst of a modern invasion. What do you do? Do you just carry on and hope the missile doesn’t come your way? I know many have evacuated, but many have not. Men under 60 have been asked to stay and fight. Many who were away from their country have returned to fight for their homeland.
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Today’s Catch comes from a text I received last night from my daughter, Anne, who is an ER doctor in Hawaii and an avid surfer.
John Fischer The Catch 