A pastor called me recently. “I have a fellow in my church who wants to exclude every member who belongs to such-and-such a lodge. What do you think?”

I don’t think much of the idea, I told him.

I know someone else who wants to kick out of the church everyone who takes the occasional beer or glass of wine. Another feels that way toward those who attend movies or dance or smoke. If you’ve had an abortion, heaven help you, you’re out. In fact, if you have committed a sin–the bad kinds, of course, which are on some Pharisees’ list of no-nos–you will not be allowed to remain in their church.

If you start kicking people out of your church because of sins and failures in their lives, I have a few questions:

–where do you start?

–where do you end?

–who’s going to decide?

–how are you going to do it?

–and maybe most of all, how are you going to get anything else done in the Kingdom for spending all your time protecting the purity of your church membership rolls?

“If the Lord should count iniquities, who would stand?” (Psalm 130:3)

Nothing speaks to me on this subject stronger than the second parable of Matthew 13, the one we call “The Parable of the Tares.”

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I saw Jeff Ingram yesterday morning. We were both away from home and overnighting at the Hampton Inn, it turned out, in Ruston, Louisiana. I had spoken at a local church the night before and he had led a conference for Sunday School directors at an associational meeting held in a neighboring community.

He said, “I had 14 directors in my conference. It was great.”

I have never worked for Jeff’s employer–the Louisiana Baptist Convention headquarters in Alexandria, Louisiana–but I know what he is experiencing.

Without asking him or any of his colleagues, I can tell you the high point of his day.

Jeff is sitting in his office and the phone rings. A pastor or church staffer or lay leader from somewhere across this state is on the line.

“I need help,” he says. Jeff’s heart races. “Great,” he thinks to himself. “Someone needs me.”

What he says is, “Well, I’ll be happy to do anything for you I can.”

If it turns out that the caller has a problem of untrained leaders or an anemic organization that needs a shot in the arm or his Sunday School is in disarray and he is desperate for assistance, all the juices start flowing in Jeff Ingram’s veins.

This is great.

This is what a denominational worker lives for. (He even uses the Esther verse of himself: “I’ve come to the kingdom for such a time as this.”)

This is why he’s there.

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In the mid-1990s, the United States Ambassador to France was Pamela Churchill Harriman, an appointee of Bill Clinton. On February 5, 1996, she died. The burial she received was, you will understand the expression, fit for a queen.

She was anything but a queen. Pamela Churchill Harriman was a courtesan, plain and simple.

Webster: “Courtesan: a prostitute; esp. one whose associates are wealthy, aristocratic, or of the nobility.”

A high class prostitute.

Bear with me; I’m going somewhere with this story. (If anyone ever publishes these blogs of mine, the title will probably be: “Bear with me; I’m going somewhere with this.”)

As a resident of this world since 1940 and a history student all my life, I knew who this woman was. She was born into an English family in 1920, the kind of family with an impressive title–her father was Baron Digby–but little money or power. Someone remarked, “Pamela was not born rich, but she was born to be rich.”

At the age of 20–the year I was born–she married the only son of Winston Churchill, Randolph, a weak man given to temper tantrums, self-indulgence, and strong drink. Later that year she gave birth to the prime minister’s namesake, Winston S. Churchill II. The marriage ended within a couple of years, and Pamela was off on her new career, that of courtesan to the high and the mighty.

The Churchill name opened doors for her.

She married twice more, to Broadway producer Leland Hayward and Averell Harriman, a wealthy businessman and political figure who served as ambassador to several countries.

“Reflected Glory” is the biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman. The author is Sally Bedell Smith. I stumbled across the used book recently, the selling price was next to nothing, and so I bought it.

I’m halfway through and probably won’t finish it.

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Jeffrey Toobin is a law professor, a consultant for various news media, and the occasional columnist for The New Yorker. In the July 27, 2009, issue of that magazine he helped me understand something that has puzzled me about Supreme Court justices as they approach the U. S. Constitution.

Toobin is talking about the questioning of Judge Sonia Sotomayor by the Senate Judiciary Committee in the last few days. I watched snippets of it, enough to see she didn’t say a whole lot. But that’s the plan, these days, if you’ve kept up with how these things work. Anything controversial like abortion or same-sex marriages, you just say, “Senator, since there are cases involving that subject before the High Court at the present time, I’m unable to answer your question.”

Anyway, back to Toobin.

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Judge Sotomayor said, “In the past month, many senators have asked me about my judicial philosophy.”

“Simple,” she said. “Fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make law–it is to apply the law.”

Sounds good, right? But it’s too good, says Toobin. “Coming from a jurist of such distinction, this was a disappointing answer.”

And why is that?

“…it suggested that the job of a Supreme Court Justice is merely to identify the correct precedents, apply them rigorously, and thus render appropriate decisions.”

“In fact,” Toobin goes on, “Justices have a great deal of discretion–in which cases they take, in the results they reach, in the opinions they write.”

Then, here is the clincher: “When it comes to interpreting the Constitution–in deciding, say, whether a university admissions office may consider an applicant’s race–there is, frankly, no such thing as ‘law.'”

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A few years ago, a certain televangelist was “outed” by a network news team. All those letters which he promised viewers he would pray over, interceding with the Almighty for the healing requests they contained, were ending up in dumpsters without having been read. Someone slit the envelopes open to remove money or checks, then sent them on their way into oblivion.

The nation–religious and irreligious alike–correctly called this shameful and almost immediately put that preacher out of business.

Contrast the callous attitude of that preacher toward his correspondents with the graciousness and openness of C. S. Lewis.

Among the numerous C. S. Lewis books on my shelves is one titled “Letters To An American Lady.” For over 10 years, Lewis carried on a correspondence with this woman–known to readers only as “Mary”–whom he never met. He had no idea these letters would ever be published. They were published in 1967, four years after Lewis’ death.

Clyde S. Kilby, a Lewis scholar (who incidentally used to worship with us at the First Baptist Church of Columbus, MS, while I was pastor there, during his visits South to see relatives) from Wheaton College, wrote in the introduction to that book that the reason for publishing the letters was “they stand as a fascinating and moving testimony to the remarkable humanity and the even more remarkable Christianity of C. S. Lewis.”

To the modern reader,someone who knows him only through Narnia or a couple of his other books, these letters provide wonderful glimpses of the humanity of the man and his keen insight into matters of God and man.

But what strikes me about them even more is that Lewis took the time to continue this correspondence with someone he never met and to do so for so long. There are over 100 of his letters in the book. (But none of Mary’s. I assume that was because she kept his letters but he did not keep hers.)

Do the famous write letters to their fans today? Why did Lewis write these letters and hundreds more of a similar character?

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Carl Sandburg said, “There is an eagle inside me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus inside me that wants to wallow in the mud.”

We all get to choose–have to choose!–every day of our lives which it shall be.

Chuck Colson once asked a prisoner on death row if he wanted a television in his cell. “No,” he said. “TV wastes too much time.”

We get to choose–have to choose!–what to do with our time each day.

Thomas Merton said, “There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the ass understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today.”

We choose what to do with Jesus.

Someone called our church office the other day inquiring if non-members were allowed to use the sanctuary for weddings. The secretary informed her that the answer was “no.” A few minutes later, the woman called back. This time she wanted to know if the pastor could marry her and her fiance over the phone.

Some people just don’t get it. And others who don’t want to work at their marriage try to “phone it in.”

Speaking of those who don’t get it, Walter Moore is still shaking his head. A student came into his office complaining about his parents. They were controlling his life, making him go to school, telling him what time he had to be in, that sort of thing. He had had taken about all he could stand and had come to a decision.

“What are you going to do?” asked Walter.

“I’m going to run away and join the Army.”

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Occasionally in my reading, I come across something that trips all the wires and pushes all my buttons. Rings all my bells.

An inner alert goes off to notify me a special message from the Holy Spirit is now arriving in control central.

That happened this morning.

The novel I’m reading is “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,” by Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, Annie Barrows. The “Guernsey” in the title refers to the Channel Island off the coast of France. For a thousand years–ever since William the Conqueror brought them with him from France–these islands have been the possession of Britain. During the entire six years of the Second World War, they were occupied by the Nazis, the only area of Britain so “honored.”

The novel is a series of letters to and from Juliet Ashton, a writer, in the early months of 1946, just after the end of the war. She is considering making the Nazi occupation of the islands the subject of her next book.

At one point, she writes to her editor this paragraph:

“For example–yesterday I was reading an article on the liberation. A reporter asked a Guernsey Islander, ‘What was the most difficult experience you had during the Germans’ rule?’ He made fun of the man’s answer, but it made perfect sense to me. The Islander told him, ‘You know they took away all of our wireless sets? If you were caught having a hidden radio, you’d get sent off to prison on the continent. Well, those of us who had secret radios, we heard about the Allies landing in Normandy. Trouble was, we weren’t supposed to know it had happened! Hardest thing I ever did was walk around St. Peter Port on June 7, not grinning, not smiling, not doing anything to let those Germans know that I KNEW their end was coming. If they’d caught on, someone would be in for it–so we had to pretend. It was very hard to pretend not to know D-Day had happened.”

Any minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ–any disciple at all, for that matter–who reads that immediately sees the parallel.

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Sit in a preaching class in any seminary or divinity school in the land and you’ll hear professors stress the importance of context.

Basically, the “context” of a Scripture means “what is the setting for this text?” What was the occasion of the event, who was speaking, who was listening, and what was meant?

A preacher can and will want to apply that text to the world he lives in and the people who sit before him. But before he can do that, he will want to explain the meaning of that Scripture and the setting in which it was presented.

It’s about integrity in scripture interpretation and there is no more serious subject for the would-be preacher.

“A text without the context is a pretext.” That’s one of those cliches we preachers toss around to one another. It’s pretty much the case. But maybe there are exceptions…

To “take a Scripture out of context” means making a verse say something that was not intended. The most famous example is placing Matthew 27:5 (“Judas went out and hanged himself”) alongside Luke 10:37 (“Go thou and do likewise”).

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When we say that when people bring their offerings to God, they’re doing so by faith, we mean two important things.

One: It means there are great reasons to give–such as God’s honor and His commands, God’s people and their needs, our gratitude for His blessing, and the personal benefit we derive from giving.

Two: It also means there are good reasons not to give. (That’s the nature of faith–there are reasons pro and con.)

We pastors are always telling people the first ones–why to give–without telling them the second, that they can find good reasons not to give and what they are.

I know, I know. They don’t need our help to find reasons not to give. They can find plenty on their own.

But still, we may want to offer a few biblical insights on reasons not to give to the Lord’s work.

Take the widow who gave her two mites, for example–a story found in several places in the Gospels, notably Mark 12.

The Lord and His disciples were standing to one side in the Temple watching as a line of contributors snaked through the worship center. One by one, the people dropped their offerings into the huge urns put there for collections.

“Watch this,” said the Lord, nudging the disciples just as a little widow woman dropped her two small coins–the smallest available–into the urn.

“All the rest gave out of their surplus,” Jesus said. “But she has given all she had. Therefore, she gave the most.”

I venture to say there’s not a preacher worth his salt who hasn’t preached that story a number of times. It’s an inspiring and positive lesson on giving.

But there is a negative lesson here, also.

If ever a person had a good reason not to give, that woman did. I’ve thought of four, you may come up with others:

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