Everything Happens for the Last Time

 

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For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; (Eccl. 3:1-2)

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THE LAST TIME

Our lives have wonderful recurring moments; they provide the rhythm of our days.

Kissing your life partner good morning and good night are beautiful markers in our daily routine. Having all your children home for Christmas is an annual treat. Sharing the anticipation of a cruise with your travel companion is much of the fun of the repeated holidays. Sharing a regular meal with your friends is a ritual that gives a sense of belonging.

There will, of course, be a last kiss. Your children may someday have families of their own, and there will come a year when they do not return to you for the holidays. There will be a final bon voyage celebration. Friends move away, and the meals will cease.

All these good things will happen for the last time. To realize these beautiful moments will someday come to an end is bittersweet. They orchestrate life with joy; their cessation will come as a loss.

Our lives are also punctuated by difficult, demanding, and tedious experiences that come around time after time.

The drive to work each day in rush hour traffic is nerve wracking. The treatments are uncomfortable and leave us exhausted. The monthly report we must produce is tedious to complete.

The day will come when we drive to work for the last time, have the last treatment, and do that final monthly report. The end of these things will be welcomed with relief.

RETIREMENT

I began vocational ministry in the Spring of 1992. I served as a local church pastor for ten years, then as an ABC overseas missionary for the next ten years, and as Executive Minister of ABCNYS for the final thirteen years. On May 30^th this thirty-three-year vocational journey will end.

These days, I am experiencing some “last times.”

We finished our quarterly ABCNYS Board of Mission meeting several weeks ago. As I packed up after the meeting, I realized this was my last board meeting. I am visiting churches these last few months, each one for the last time. I am having conversations with people, many of them for the last time. Sometimes I say, “I’ll see you” or “talk with you later;” then I realized I may well not. 

I have become aware that things are happening for the last time; most of them are good things I will miss.

I will not miss all these things: installing the window air conditioners at the office; sorting the wheat from the chaff in endless waves of email; and heading out early on dark snowy mornings on my way to another church. I am sensing that even the tiresome parts of ministry have been a part of the reliable rhythm of my life and have given meaning and purpose to my days. I will notice their absence even if I do not long for them.

It is because everything happens for the last time, that life is precious.

LIIFE IS PASSING BUT NOT FUTILE

The writer of Ecclesiastes knows that life is like water under a bridge.  The writer finishes chapter 3 with:

 I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it; God has done this so that all should stand in awe before him (15).

Although everything happens for the last time, none of it is futile. What God does through us is not passing. In the rhythms of our lives God is building lasting things.

 

One season of my life is passing. Things are happening for the last time. What will the next chapter hold? I don’t really know. I will see what comes up and treasure it, for I know it too will pass one day.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister (for now)—American Baptist Churches of New York State

NOTHING WAS SAID THAT SUNDAY

 

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer

good for anything but is thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:13-16)

WHAT HAPPENED

One of my earliest memories of church dates to Sunday, September 4^th, 1966. Three days earlier Lester Mitchell, a 39-year-old African American man, was shot in a drive by shooting as he swept his porch on the West Side of Dayton .  After Mitchell was shot, a crowd formed. That crowd morphed into a community uprising with violence and widespread property destruction. Ohio Governor Rhodes sent in the National Guard to quell the uprising.

A member of the Klu Klux Klan had shot Mitchell. Three days later Mitchell died.

In the mid 60’s, Dayton was the third most segregated city in the nation. The residents living in Mitchell’s community, the West Side, suffered from a lack of policing and what policing did take place often involved violence and the abrogation of citizens’ rights. There was a lack of city services, rampant poverty, no community development by city government, segregated neglected schools, and no enforcement of housing regulations against landlords. One 13-unit apartment building reportedly had only 4 toilets and not a single functioning shower or bathtub. Redlining in Dayton was widespread, preventing families from building wealth that could pay for college or be passed on to children—perpetuating intergenerational poverty and unemployment. (For a more in-depth analysis, go to http://daytonarenahistory.org/project/1966-race-riot/.) 

MY MEMORY

I was nine years old at the time, living in a suburb south of Dayton, and had no understanding of the tragic brew of deprivation that had boiled over that hot summer weekend. I remember seeing news films on our 19-inch Zenith black & white television. I was, quite frankly, scared. I thought the world was coming apart, that life would never be the same. One newscaster said it was rumored that any white person crossing the bridge into West Dayton would be shot. I had no idea why they were so angry at people like me. I could make no sense of any of this.

 

CHURCH

Church was the place where I learned what was loving and what was unloving. They taught me how be a follower of Jesus. It was a place where one could find guidance. I was sure when I went to our Baptist church on Sunday morning, the last day of the uprising, everyone would be talking about this. We would pray for the safety and wellbeing of the people in Dayton. I remember waiting to get there so a way could be found to fix this. I had, as a nine-year-old, no understanding of the history and complexity of the situation; I thought there was a “fix.”

There was nothing but silence at church that Sunday. No one mentioned it, and I was listening. It was as if it were not happening. It was just another Sunday morning at church.

THE LESSON I TOOK HOME THAT SUNDAY

So, what was communicated to me that Sunday? It seemed church was mostly irrelevant to the lives we live, to what is happening in the world around us. Church was a place where you go to see your friends, feel welcome, and pretend the suffering of others did not exist, at least those around us; suffering on other continents certainly deserved the attention of our missionaries. This was the message I got that Sunday morning.

 

THESE DAYS

These days, I am thinking about the place of local churches in our lives. I am finishing up 33 years of ministry invested in local congregations, thirteen of those years walking with churches in upstate New York as they cope with declining membership and resources and with being marginalized by the broader culture. Our churches are caught up in the tide of broad societal shifts over which they have no control. These are churches of faithful people who are doing all they can to sustain the ministries of the congregations they love.

 

But I am, nonetheless, haunted by something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in April of 1963. Dr. King was in Birmingham to participate in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation. In his letter he challenges the white clergy of the city to support this campaign for justice, and King laments their inaction.

King writes about the power of the early church. He observes: “In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” He goes on to say if the church in his day does not become sacrificially engaged in the cause of justice

it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”

That church in Ohio did not engage the world around them in 1966 in any sacrificial or even caring way. They took no notice of the people in the broader community. A lot happened in Dayton that weekend in September. They acted as if nothing important was happening.

A lot is happening around us right now. Would we know it if we walked into our church on a Sunday morning?  Are we salt seasoning our world? Is our light shining in the lives of others as we do good work in difficult times? Is there an active connection between the lives of our churches and what is happening in the world around us? Our future may depend on this sort of thing.

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State

LOUDER AND SLOWER DOES NOT WORK

 

It just seems so intuitive.  If they don’t understand you, say it louder and slower; and they will understand. 

For those of us who have gotten off the beaten tourist path or lived in a foreign country, we have learned that louder and slower does not work.  If we don’t share a common language, it is hopeless regardless of how loudly we shout. (By the way: they do not “all speak English.”)

What is true of asking directions to the bus station is also true of talking about our experience of faith.  If they do not share our vocabulary or know anything about our belief structure, they are not going to understand us.  We can learn as much from the Apostle Paul.

A Shared Language

Paul’s practice in the book of Acts was to go to the local synagogue and argue from the Hebrew scriptures that Jesus was the Messiah (Acts 17:2).  The folks Paul found in the synagogue shared with him a common body of sacred texts, vocabulary, religious history, and worldview.

 

In our day many of us, who have been long in the faith, assume that others are familiar with our religious vocabulary and, even if not accepting it, understand the conceptual architecture of our faith. 

 

I lived in rural Arkansas in the early 80’s. In that era if you asked someone you met on the street if they had been “washed in the blood,” they likely would have understood your meaning.  Understanding this language, and even using this language, in no way was assurance that they were followers of the way of Jesus; but at a minimum they understood and could speak the language when they needed to.

 

I suspect this would no longer be true even in rural Arkansas.

 

Learning a New Language

Sometimes life requires us to learn a new language.  Paul finds himself in Athens waiting for Silas and Timothy to arrive (Acts 17).  While he waits, he begins talking with Jews and God-fearing Greeks.  “God Fearers” were Gentiles who accepted the ethical teachings of Judaism but had not converted and did not follow the ceremonial laws.  Both these groups would have been familiar with the language of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) and the central precepts of the Jewish faith.  They and Paul spoke a common language and drew upon a shared religious universe.

 

Some of the pagan scholars and philosophers, who liked to hang out in Athens and debate new ideas, overhear Paul and call him a “babbler,” one who proclaims some foreign God.  The problem is clear.  Paul is “preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection [17:18].”  These scholars know nothing about any of that.  They likely had little or no awareness of the beliefs of some tiny religious sect of people—the Hebrews—living in the backwaters of the Roman Empire.  These scholars invite Paul with his strange ideas to speak to them in the Areopagus.  The Areopagus was a rocky hilltop where philosophers gathered to debate and criminal trials were held.

 

Paul begins by complimenting them on their passion for truth, saying they are “very religious” (17:22-23).  His use of the word religious is not pejorative as it is sometimes used in our day, as in “Christianity is not a religion; it is a relationship.”  Paul in a winsome way tries to establish some common ground in verse 23 by going on to say, "I am going to declare to you the one you have been seeking.”  Affirming common ground is a constructive way to begin any conversation.

 

Paul then gives an unprecedented sermon.  He quotes no scripture, and he makes only an oblique reference to Jesus in verse 31 by saying judgment will come by a “man whom he (God) has appointed.”  In the place of scripture, he quotes a pagan poet twice (verse 28).  This sermon is quite different from his arguing from the Hebrew scriptures, his normal practice in the Synagogue.

 

He does take a shot at the Athenians' ethnocentric arrogance when he says in verse 26: “He made from one every nation of men to live upon the earth.”  The Athenians believed they were a distinct race, having arisen separately from all the other peoples of the world.  Paul knows of this belief.  He was well versed in the mindset and beliefs of his listeners.  In other words, Paul spoke to them in their own enculturated language of ideas.

 

Paul goes on to talk of resurrection, repentance, and judgment. At this point Paul loses most of his audience.  He does not compromise what he believes to be true as he adopts this new language, of ideas, but he does all he can to build a bridge from his beliefs to their beliefs. Some listeners do believe and join the movement (17:32—34), having heard the message within their own enculturated language.

 

In Our Day

We live in a country where many around us have no awareness of the content of the Bible. They know little or nothing of our faith.  They are clueless about what we do when we gather together.  Sadly, much of what they have heard about us is unattractive to them.  We must learn a new language with new vocabulary and imagery if we want to be heard.  To learn that new language we must be among the people speaking it and listen to what they are saying and how they are saying. 

 

We are spiritual expatriates in our own land; we need to acknowledge this. We must learn the language of our land if we want to be heard. Saying the same old things louder and slower will not work.

 

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State

People Like Us

 

How Can Forgiveness Find a Root in Us?

The Outrages of Life

We read about the Burmese army’s terrorizing of ethnic groups and the tens of thousands of women and children dying in the Holy Land and Ukraine.  We see images of bombed houses and hospitals in war zones and hear the hateful shouts of White Supremacists in Charlottesville.  And we wonder: what do we do with our despair, even outrage?

Then there are the more daily hurts and injustices of our lives, perhaps some coming from decades ago.  We try to leave them behind; but as Timon said in the Lion King: “Just because it’s in the past doesn’t mean it still doesn’t hurt.”

In such a world, we wonder how forgiveness can take root in our hearts.

Jesus talked a lot about forgiveness. Volf points out that Jesus reversed Lamach’s policy for responding to outrage.  Lamach says he will avenge himself seventy-seven fold (Gen. 4:23-24). Yet Jesus turned this dynamic on its head and commanded his fellow Hebrews to forgive seventy-seven fold (Matt 18:21). 

Jesus was talking to people who likely took talk of forgiveness with a grain of salt.  Jesus and his fellow Hebrews lived under an oppressively violent occupying army who acted on behalf of a foreign government who committed daily outrages against the people of Palestine.  Forgiveness was not an academic topic for Jesus or his people. 

Jesus was executed by this occupying force in his homeland.  As he dies, he says “Father forgive them” (Luke 23:34). That is where he stood on the topic.

The Irreversibility of Some Outrages

The problem with many of the outrages of the world is their irreversibility, argues Miroslav Volf (Exclusion & Embrace—A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, pg. 121-23).  The consequences of past wrongs continue to plague us, even passing from generation to generation.  The damage cannot be undone; there is no fixing things.

How can we find the freedom to forgive others in such a world?

People Like Us

Philip Caputo, an American soldier in Vietnam, recounts a day when he and his unit were dropped by helicopter into a swampy jungle southwest of Danang.  They made their way through the difficult terrain encountering Vietnamese fighters, who retreated back into the countryside at the Americans’ advance.  Caputo and his comrades cut their way through the thickets, looking for dead and wounded enemy fighters.  It was a dangerous undertaking.  Wounded soldiers can still fire rifles and toss grenades; ambushes were common as battlefields were “mopped up.”

They came upon a hut that had been used as a base camp by the enemy.  They cautiously made their way up to the structure and finally inside.  Among the military equipment and battle manuals left behind, they found a stack of letters to and from families and girlfriends.  There were photos of mothers and fathers and sweethearts.  Notes were scribbled on the edges of some of the photographs. 

Caputo writes:

I was filled with conflicting emotions.  What we had found gave to the enemy the humanity I wished to deny him. It was comforting to realize that the Viet Cong were flesh and blood instead of the mysterious wraiths I had thought them to be; but this same realization aroused an abiding sense of remorse.  These were men we had helped to kill, men whose deaths would afflict other people with irrevocable loss (A Rumor of War pg. 122). 

Caputo goes on to write that when they were back at their base, a PFC “expressed what may have been a collective emotion. ‘They’re young men,’ he told me.  ‘They are just like us, lieutenant.  It’s always the young men who die.’”

They are just like us.

This the nascent realization that begins the journey to forgiveness. This a taking to heart of Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” We are all created in God’s image. Are not all people, in some way “just like us?”

This is the fertile ground into which the seeds of forgiveness are sown.  It make take years, even a lifetime, for those tender shoots to mature. This may be the work of a lifetime.

A Beginning Place

Jesus will always be an aspirational figure for us.  Few of us are Christ-like enough to bless someone while they are unjustly executing us. A good beginning point in the process is to remember the words of that PFC:  “They are just like us.”  In one way they are all like us.  The criminals and despots, the White Supremacists and the occupying armies—they are all made in the image of God.  In that way they are “just like us.”

The image God lies within each of us.  Sometimes that image is so deeply buried, so marred by the powers and principalities of this world, it is very difficult to see.  We can just assume it is there and act accordingly.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Part Two

PART TWO: ARE WE MAKING DISCIPLES OR MEMBERS?

 

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”  At once they left their nets and followed him.

(Matthew 4:18—20)

 

The Beginning and the End Matter

Previously we looked at Jesus’ final words in Matthew’s Gospel (https://jkelseyem.blogspot.com/2023/08/where-do-we-go-from-here.html). We will return to that passage in the future, but for now we will examine the first conversation Jesus initiates in Matthew’s Gospel. 

 

Remember “the primacy effect” and “the recency effect” from Part One? We remember best the first and last items in a story; writers know this. Thus Jesus’ first initiated conversation as he begins his ministry sets the framework for the rest of his work. We are to remember these words as the story unfolds.

 

This first invitation to Simon Peter and his brother Andrew is critical for understanding how Jesus goes about disciple-making. When at the end of the Gospel Jesus tells us to make disciples, this early story informs what he meant.

 

The Setting Matters

What Jesus does in this first encounter is a bit incongruous with the way Matthew introduces the conversation. We can learn something from this.

 

In the preceding verses, 4:12—17, Matthew tells us that what Isaiah wrote about in 9:1-4 is now being fulfilled in Jesus.

Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan—

The people walking in darkness

    have seen a great light;

on those living in the land of deep darkness

    a light has dawned.

 You have enlarged the nation

    and increased their joy;

they rejoice before you

    as people rejoice at the harvest,

as warriors rejoice

    when dividing the plunder.

For as in the day of Midian’s defeat,

    you have shattered

the yoke that burdens them,

    the bar across their shoulders,

    the rod of their oppressor.

 

Isaiah wrote in the day when the Northern Jewish Kingdom—containing Zebulun, Naphtali, and the way by the sea—had been conquered by a foreign power. The Northern Kingdom had fallen victim to the insatiable greed, devastating weapons, and crushing power of the Assyrian empire. No one questioned the invincibility of the conqueror, no one but Isaiah that is. 

 

Isaiah writes of a King that God will raise up, a savior that will bring possibilities the people could not even dream of. Matthew is saying Jesus is that same type of leader. Jesus is the one who will bring possibilities and deliverance no one can even imagine.

 

So what does Jesus do after this auspicious and majestic introduction to his ministry? He chats up a few fishermen as he takes a walk by the water. Not very dramatic is it? We might expect some thunder and lightning, an earthquake or two. Yet this invitation to these two fishermen prefigures the way God will work through Jesus.

 

A Model for Disciple-Making

Beside the Sea of Galilee we have a model for disciple-making. Jesus’ idea of discipling people is to invite them to travel along with him on a journey he has already begun.  He will teach them what it means to be faithful by showing them his faithfulness in a variety of situations. 

 

He asks them to “follow” him. This inevitably means leaving some things behind. He tells these experienced fishing professionals that they will need to learn a new way of life; they will learn to fish for human beings. This is not a call to a casual endeavor, one new preoccupation among others. “Follow me” is a big ask.

 

Although Jesus takes a rather low-key approach at the beginning, he is not an undercover incognito disciple maker. Admittedly, he asks for no doctrinal declaration or test of orthodoxy; they do not sign any card or undergo any ritual. He will unpack that along the way. He begins simply with an invitation to begin a journey. He is clear, however, that he is inviting them on a journey that will leave them changed.

 

Discipleship is More Than Just Showing Up

Woody Allen once quipped that 90% of life is just showing up. A fellow ABCNYS pastor commented: “Discipleship carries responsibility and accountability. Membership involves just showing up. We need to show up in order to be a disciple - but discipleship requires engagement and action.” Jesus is asking a great deal more than just “showing up” in the right place at the right time. He has a great deal more than member-making in mind.

 

Simon Peter and Andrew brought with them that day a hunger for a grander and deeper way of life and a willingness to leave some things behind to find it. Not everyone is ready for this journey into discipleship. Disciple-making takes into account where people are, where they have been, and what they are looking for. It recognizes they must be ready, hungry for something more than life has provided for them.

 

This is the model of disciple-making Jesus employs. He invites people to travel along with him on a journey that he, himself, has already begun. We call this “impartational disciple-making.”

 

This is a much more ambitious project than simply member-making. It can include member-making, but is a great deal more.

 

Next time, we will think more about “impartational disciple-making.”

 

Blessings,

Jim Kelsey

ABCNYS Executive Minister

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

 July 28, 2023

PART ONE: ARE WE MAKING DISCIPLES OR MEMBERS?

 

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.  And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16—20)

 

 

Make Disciples

 

It is called “the primacy effect” and “the recency effect.” 

 

We remember best the beginning and the ending of a story. Writers know this and often place the most important material at the beginning and the end of a narrative. So Jesus’ departing instructions to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel should garner great attention from us. These are his last spoken words, indeed, the final words of the book.  The author is saying: If you don’t remember anything else Jesus said, remember this: “Make disciples as you go through your life.”

 

Michael Foss, a Lutheran pastor, writes about shifting our churches from a culture of membership to a culture of discipleship (Power Surge: Six Marks of Discipleship for a Changing Church). This might seem a bit unsettling to people like me and many of you who have spent much of our lives seeking to build and then maintain the membership of our churches. Jesus is saying job one for his followers is to be disciples and then make others. Member-making can be seen as a part of that work, but disciple-making is a far more comprehensive project.

 

I believe membership in a congregation reaps rewards in our own lives and in the life of our community and the broader world. I am not badmouthing membership. In the letters of Paul we see that those followers in closest historical proximity to Jesus quickly organized themselves into local communities of believers. Paul wrote in Ephesians 4 about the life of local congregations and the responsibility membership brings. In the midst of this chapter he writes: “So then, putting away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with your neighbor, for we are members of one another [4:25].” We will, in a future piece, look at the nuanced differences between “membership” and “being members of one another;” they are not necessarily the same thing.

 

I wonder if in our attention to membership concerns we have lost sight of the higher calling: making disciples. Member-making and disciple-making are not mutually exclusive. They are not, however, precisely the same thing.

 

Making Disciples—Our Original Task

Thinking about disciple-making—in distinction from member-making—can help us move forward and find renewed vitality and purpose in our congregations.

 

In the next few months, I will be writing more on this. Next time we will look at how Jesus models disciple-making in the first conversation he initiates in Matthew’s telling of the story.

 

I am also interested in what you think. What do you see as the distinctions between member-making and disciple-making? Write me at jkelsey@abc-nys.org. We will sort this out together.

 

Blessings,

Jim

ABCNYS Executive Minister

Resurrection and Mass Shooting in Louisville

 

TRAGEDY CLOSE TO HOME

Tragedy always hits harder when it strikes closer to home. There have been 19 mass shootings in America this year, shootings in which 4 or more people were killed.  All of them are horrific, but some of them feel more personal.

 On April 9^th Christians around the globe celebrated Easter. The next morning, with songs of resurrection still ringing in our ears, we learned of the killing of 5 people at the Old National Bank in Louisville KY.

These killings struck close to home for me.  I spent 11 years living in Louisville.  I grew into young adulthood in that city.  I earned an M.Div. and a PhD in that town, a period of transformative theological growth for me.  I made life-long friends in that place; if you look closely you can still see their fingerprints on my life.  I fell in in love and got married in that place.  A city I cherish and to which I owe a lot has been wounded.

I thought about that woundedness in light of the resurrection.

RECONCILING RESURRECTION WITH REALITY

How do we reconcile the tension between our Easter anthems on Sunday and the bloody killings in a bank in Louisville the next morning?

 The French theologian (with the German-sounding name) Oscar Cullman once made a connection between the final phase of WW II and the victory of Jesus on Calvary.  Cullman observed that on D Day, once the Allied soldiers got across the beaches of Normandy and into the hedgerows, the war was won. From there the Allies would move south and west across France fighting village by village.  They would make their way into Germany and finally on to Berlin.  When they got off the sand onto soil, the war was won.

From the hedgerows of coastal France to Berlin was, nonetheless, a long slog.  More people would die.  The road ahead held headships for sure.  As they got off the beaches and into the villages the war was won, but it was not yet over.  There was still a lot of mopping up to do.

This is where we live, in the mopping up phase of things.  The Enemy is defeated, but the Enemy has not yet yielded. The victory of God in Christ is inevitable, but battles are still to be waged. 

The Apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter 6 admonishes us to put on the whole armor of God. Paul, of all people, affirmed in the victory of God in Jesus. Yet Paul realized there are still some battles to be fought.  He also realized that we wage war not just against random incidental violence.  When a young adult walks into a bank conference room armed with an AR 15 style semi-automatic assault rifle intending to kill, we see we are up against “the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).” We see this is about a great deal more than one disappointed well-armed soon-to-be unemployed worker.

HOW DO WE LIVE IN THE MEANTIME?

How do we live in the meantime, as we proclaim resurrection yet mourn Louisville and her dead and the countless other atrocities in our world? 

Victory is assured, but there are still battles to be fought.  In this time of mopping up, we carry on the work Jesus began:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to set free those who are oppressed,
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)

It is still a battle.  Our world is not in favor of the work of Jesus. 

Jim Kelsey 

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State