In My Brother's House by John Monday

My family is from the hills, hollers, caves and coal mines of southeast Kentucky, and the unique, rich Appalachian culture of that region has permeated my life, though I’ve never lived there.  Our family moved to Florida when I was just weeks old, and even though we never returned there to live, it has always been considered home.  

The 20-mile stretch of U.S. 27 between Burnside and Stearns was the place where life began and ended.  Like my own children, I loved to return there and play in the caves, creeks, forests, mountains, and lakes of my parents’ youth. Every summer, many Christmases, a few weddings, and too many funerals had our family car heading to Kentucky.  

It was for me an eternal place - the place we could always go, the place that everyone would always come back to, and the place where nothing ever changed.  There were dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and even great grandparents. We spent days on end running, playing, and visiting in the places of our ancestors. It made me feel like I was part of a big family.  

What I didn’t realize as a child was that, with little work or opportunity in the region, our’s wasn't the only family that was drifting away.  People began to see opportunities for a better life, and they left - many with the intention of returning after making their fortune. Some returned . . . briefly. Some stayed . . . for awhile.  But despite the beauty of the mountains and streams and the deep connection to the land, there was less and less family living there and more family returning for visits. As people grew and aged, those visits became more sporadic, and the “eternity” of the place began to fade.

Enter Larry and his cabin. In 1986 my brother, Larry, with the help of my father, built a cabin on Lake Cumberland in the Daniel Boone National Forest. The cabin was located right in the middle of the region that our family had called home for generations. I had no idea at the time how valuable that cabin would be.

My brother loves family, which might be a little incongruous at first given the fact that he’s never had one of his own, meaning he’s never been married and never had any children. But nonetheless, he loves his family. He is the family historian, genealogist, storyteller and connector, and he knows everybody - living and dead. He never tires of studying his people and bringing them together.  

As there were fewer relatives living in the area, his cabin became the place to go and to meet.  Not only did it become a place for those we knew who had been displaced, but it became a place to meet new friends and family.  There were many late nights of old people telling stories. There were grandparents walking in the woods with grandchildren, uncles teaching nephews how to shoot .22s off the porch, cast iron corn bread, and there was singing . . . lots of singing. Larry’s deep conviction that we should all be connected to each other and the place of our heritage meant “family” that I had never met gathered at the cabin. Family that had never spent time in Kentucky came, and the remnant of the family that had never left came.  His construction of that cabin combined with his love of family to enrich the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of us for decades.  Many of my best memories are there.  

In Tim Keller’s book, The Prodigal God, he describes the relationship between two brothers.  The elder brother in the story was not a real elder brother because, while he was a brother in flesh, he never sought the younger brother’s good. He wasn’t interested in redeeming the younger brother, and he had no desire to repair the broken relationship (Luke 15:11-32).  But Keller explains that we have a true elder brother.  One that has given up everything to restore the broken relationship between us, his adopted brothers, and our father, the eternal God.

Our true elder brother tells us:

² In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.  John 14:2-4

While I’m thankful for Larry, his cabin, and the memories and relationships that have been forged there, it’s not eternal. There are only a very few of our family that live in the area today, and it will become harder for Larry and his cabin to draw and preserve those relationships. But it serves as a foreshadowing of another brother. The one Tim Keller describes as our true elder brother, and the place he’s preparing where . . .

 . . . neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Romans 8: 38-39

In much the same way that Kentucky has always felt like a home where I’ve never lived, we are all drawn to a home we’ve never seen. A home where we revel in relationships old and new. A home that seems unattainable yet is prepared by the one who loves us most. A home not just on the horizon, but one we can have today. Our father’s home, prepared by our true elder brother, and closer than our next breath.

John Monday

The Curse of Denominations by Andy McDonald

Richard Niebuhr opens his book, The Social Sources of Denominationalism, with these words: “The Christian Church has often achieved apparent success by denying the precepts of its founder.”   Jesus’ prayer in John 17 is a blatant call to the Father for his followers to be one:  

20 "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23 I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

With every other Christ follower on the planet who is clear that, regardless of theological nuance, our salvation is by and through and because of Jesus only and completely, we share a oneness that was Jesus’ hope.

When we allow other important doctrines, true and valuable as they may be, to divide the Christians within a single denomination, to vilify one another, or to demonize those of other denominations who interpret scripture differently regarding other beliefs, we are not fulfilling Jesus’ prayer. Usually each denomination takes hard, specific, demanding stances on issues to, in their best moments, avoid or counter what they have determined to be heresy.

When we seek, with any group of people, to “be brought into complete unity,” this is more likely to occur when the list of what we must be in “complete unity” about is very short.   A dumb illustration is that nutritionists would all be in “complete unity” that every human being needs to eat a healthy diet.  However, put ten nutritionists in the same room and begin to attempt to create rules about what makes up a “healthy diet,” and the unity becomes disrupted. 

Unity calls for humility and vulnerability:  a humble loose grip on our individual or collective “rightness” and the corresponding vulnerability of acknowledging our potential “wrongness.” The origins of our own Seventh-day Adventist denomination should have better equipped us for a more humble and vulnerable denominationalism.  Our denominational birth pains were very related to an unhealthy sureness of our rightness about the return of Jesus on October 22, 1844, and our potential growth in vulnerability of acknowledging our wrongness, which was muted some by our reinterpretations of meanings.

My point is that our unity as Christians is in Christ. Even our unity within our own denomination must be at this point. Our ability to lay down our interminable need to be right, to admit the limits of our own scope of understanding and to admit that our only hope for life and eternity is in Jesus brings us into a more complete unity with all who share that understanding, even when we disagree on other points of Biblical interpretation.

May you grow in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and may part of that growing make you gracious to all those who might see things a little differently.

Andy McDonald

What's Your Message? by Bill Crofton

Do you remember a few years back when a Russian submarine, Kursk, had a series of explosions and sank?  One hundred and eighteen crewmen died in those explosions.  Twenty-three of the crew survived in an isolated chamber for several hours after the explosion.  The world, including the United States, volunteered to send help.  One of the survivors was 27-year-old Lieutenant Captain, Dimitry Kolesnikov, and he wrote to his wife while he waited to die.  Two words from that note were displayed in a black frame next to his coffin at his funeral service.  He wrote, “Mustn’t despair.” Must not despair.

During the 9/11 attacks, one plane that was diverted from its intended target by brave passengers eventually crashed in a Pennsylvania field.  A side story revealed that many of those on board made last minute phone calls to loved ones.  Remember?

When Jane and I visited Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp outside of Munich, one of the stories told and illustrated by framed “notes” was of people who had been watching the atrocities go on and felt themselves nearing starvation.  They took their last breaths to write notes and store them in crevasses in the wall of the bunkhouses.  They hoped somebody besides the Nazis would read the notes and know their story.

In that final moment, when the scaffolding of life gets stripped away, all the stupid toys we spend our lives chasing—success, reputation, security, wealth, comfort, ease—mean nothing.  You are left with what you really believe, what you really built your life on.  Some of us spend our lives pretending that day will never come, but that final moment will come.   If it were here for you right now, what would you write?   What’s the message you want to leave behind?  What’s your story?

Bill Crofton

Happy New Year! Let Us Feast! by Richard Hickam

If your holiday season was anything like mine, food was involved . . . too much food: food I love, food I crave, food I hate, foods that are strange, and best of all - new foods! The occasions were many: school parties, parties by friends, work parties, church and family gatherings. I know that dieting is on many people’s resolution list, but I say, “Let us feast!” And here is why.

When I hear the word feasting, I think of holidays, wedding receptions, and of course, Renaissance fairs and turkey legs. I was recently reading an article about historic Jewish feasts by Carmine Di Sante, and I learned a few principles that I thought could apply to our modern day feasting as well.

A feast celebrates the positive character of existence. In the face of evil and pain, feasts proclaim the goodness of creation and the freedom to enjoy the world because God made it. It is in this sense that a feast becomes a rejection of the negative of the world around us. Life is full of hardship, poverty, sickness, and death. When we feast, we are renouncing the current state on this planet and celebrating what is to come with our blessed hope.

Feasting is a time for rejoicing and sharing. Deuteronomy 16:14 states, “You shall rejoice in your feast . . . and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns.” Rabbi Elie Munk made this commentary on the passage:

When we eat and drink, it is our duty to provide the necessities for the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, that is, for all who are in need. Those who double-lock their doors and eat only with their own families, without helping the unfortunate, will not experience the joy of the mitzvah (the commandments in the Torah)  but “only the satisfaction given by their meal.”

It seems that the blessing comes when we enjoy the fruits of the earth and then share it with those around us. One is a means of taking, paired with a means of giving. Christ also speaks to us about a wedding feast where we are invited for eternity, and he asks us if we will wear the clothes of his righteousness.

This brings to mind the line from an old hymn, "All Things are Ready," by Charles H. Gabriel, which begins:

“All things are ready,” come to the feast!

Come, for the table now is spread;

Ye famishing, ye weary, come,

And thou shalt be richly fed.

Who will you be feeding this year? Will you accept the invitation to the feast? As we are beginning this new year, and whether you are dieting or not, I say, “Let us feast!”

Richard Hickam