From Pastor Lee
October 4, 2023
KEEPING THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING
KEEPING THE MAIN THING THE MAIN THING
As a child I remember one of the things I looked forward to about this time of year was being able to watch the Peanuts Halloween Cartoon, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. It was maybe the next best thing to all the candy I would receive after going trick-or-treating. Also, back then our televisions only aired about three or four channels at the most since satellite, cable and internet weren’t developed and marketed yet. Thus, as a child it was exciting to be able to watch a cartoon during prime time, especially since the only time they were available to watch was on Saturday mornings. In looking back, for me, it seems like it was a time when people didn’t lose sight of “keeping the main thing the main thing” as the saying goes. Now, I know that was many years ago, and I was very young and naïve, but using the Halloween tradition as an example, it was not many years later that I heard about churches teaching and preaching about how evil Halloween was. Didn’t they know that the word, Halloween means “All Hallows” that comes from a Scottish phrase, “All hallow-even,” literally meaning, “All Holy Evening.” We went from Halloween carnivals to Harvest Carnivals, daring anyone to call it a Halloween carnival. Beyond celebrating Halloween and thinking about the larger picture, why do we seem to forget, or maybe never learned, the history or the origins of events and rituals? Are we any different than the religious leaders (Pharisees, Scribes, Sadducees) of the New Testament period. Their history started out with God calling Moses to go back to Egypt and to lead them to the Promised Land. God had set the boundaries (10 commandments) around the kind of relationship they (and we) were to have with God and with their neighbors. I am not throwing stones at these leaders of Jesus’ day, nor any who came before or after them, but I do believe that it is human nature to take what God has given us and to mess it up as we seek to dissect it, interpret it from our bias, and so forth. It seems that what started out as a covenant relationship between God and the Hebrew people changed over many years into a religious legal system where God was no longer the Main (thing) object of their worship. The law that God had given them had become their idol. Yet, many were sincere in living this way. Could that happen to us today in the church? Jesus’ ministry in our world involved confronting the long-developed misconceptions people, especially those well versed and studied such as the religious leaders, to teach and show us who God is and who we are in God’s eyes. Today, with many, many channels on our televisions, especially news channels, along with the internet, there is an overwhelming amount of information, most of which may be biased with an agenda at the heart of it. Have we, or are we too losing sight of who God truly is, as much as we can possibly know him, and who we are as His children? Is God at the center of our lives? Or are we so overwhelmed by information and misinformation that we have lost sight of God? Personally, I too have struggled at times in my life with keeping God as the center of my life as I have become distracted by what I think seems to be right or correct or true. Hope to see you in church on Sunday.
