“O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem….” (Matthew 23:37)

I was 13 years old and riding the schoolbus home. During the nearly hour-long drive, I kept noticing a thin trail of white smoke in the distance. At one point, someone stopped the bus and asked for my older brothers to go with them. Since older brothers seem always to have their own agenda, there was nothing unusual about that, I thought.

Finally, the bus reached our little county highway. The last stop before our place was the home of a cousin. As he stepped off the bus, his mother came out of the house and called, “Joe, y’all’s house burned down.”

That’s how my two sisters and younger brother and I found it out. They started crying. The bus let us off at our stop, but we still had a quarter-mile walk down the unpaved road, up the hill, and around the curve. As we entered the clearing, no one and nothing could have prepared us for the sight. Where our house had stood that morning was now a blackened cemetery, the ebony gravestones poking up, the white trail of smoke still rising. Family members stood around the perimeter, no one doing much of anything, just crying, hugging, and talking in low tones for some reason.

It felt like a wake.

Even though in the aftermath of that fire, our family reaped a hundred wonderful blessings, the day still looms in our collective memory as the death of a loved one.

How to give someone bad news is what this is about.

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This is a good place for a text that speaks to the issue.

There isn’t one.

I’m sorry. (Sorrier than I can tell you. Every preacher would love to have it spelled out in scriptural black and white that the minister can marry certain couples and should decline invitations to join in holy matrimony certain others.)

One of the first eye-openers to hit most beginning pastors is discovering that the Bible does not authorize the minister to marry anyone, much less whom and under what conditions.

I recall my surprise on finding that the Bible contains no wedding ceremonies. None, nada. It is not silent about marriage, but completely mute on weddings (well, other than the fact that Jesus catered the wine for one in Cana of Galilee, but as a card-totin’ Southern Baptist, I am not going there!).

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Let’s consider what follows as simply an honest admission, a confession-is-good-for-the-soul, that sort of thing.  Having highlighted our preferred events at church, it makes sense to give the dark side and say what we don’t like. So, for better or for worse, here goes…

I dislike church fights and arguments.

“Who does?” you say. Apparently, there are people who thrive on them. I’m not a member of that fraternity.

The church fights I have experienced are some of the most painful memories of my half-century of ministry. How do I hate thee, O church fights? Let me count the ways….

–That church business meeting on whether to cancel the Sunday night radio broadcast to save a few dollars, I was merely a spectator, but it was painful to see. The pastor and one group wanted to keep the program as it was drawing people to church; the finance committee and their group insisted the church could not afford it.

–One fight focused on “opening the doors of the church” to members of minority races.  I still grieve at the ugliness some good people demonstrated.

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My favorite place in church is the altar area. Sometimes, when I was pastoring, in the middle of a weekday, I would slip in and kneel there and spend time with the Lord. These days, whether I’m guest-preaching or in our home church in Kenner, I love to kneel at the altar and pray, and I often encourage others to do so.

The question arises as to “Why? What makes that place special?” After all, even though we call it the “altar,” it isn’t, not in the Old Testament sense or even the New Testament sense. Calvary is the ultimate altar for believers. The only answer I can find is: “I don’t know. I just know I need it and love it.”

What I do not understand is believers who never come to the altar and pray. It seems that only the most spiritually sensitive do, and I sure want to be among that number.

I love, love, love those times in church when for reasons unknown the congregational singing comes together like never before and everyone is singing at the top of their voices, the hymns are circulating around the room, bouncing off the ceiling and coming back to fill us, and our souls are lifted. It feels like we have touched the hem of the garment of our Lord, and makes us long for Heaven all that much more.

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