The Obedience of Faith.
There is a challenge, a quandary if you will, that affects the people who serve on breakfast teams. They have to make a choice when they cook on Sunday mornings. Do they finish breakfast, clean up and go home and watch the service online knowing they have served Our Lord and his church? Or, do they rush home for a quick shower and change of clothes and return for service. The third option is to simply stay and attend service.
The concern they typically raise about that third option is that they don’t want to smell like bacon. I don’t understand that. Bacon has a beautiful smell. People get excited when they walk into a home and smell bacon. I’d say it’s a favorite smell, even attractive. They should make a cologne of it: Bacon. I can see the ads, featuring Kevin Bacon. He would turn to the camera and say, “You can smell the sizzle.”
I deeply appreciate our breakfast teams and each must decide what to do according to his or her own conscience. But if you do smell bacon, say, “Thank you.” The smell of bacon and bacon itself being a part of our life in the church points to an issue we find in our scriptures today, our release from the law and our call to “the obedience of faith.” If we weren’t released from the law, no bacon.
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Reassurance
When I went back to school now nearly 15 years ago, I had my doubts whether I even belonged there. I hadn’t been in the classroom for more than 35 years. I traveled to Winter Park to take classes with people I had never met. It didn’t take long to see who the smartest person in the room was! (Not me!)
How many of you can relate to the feeling of relief when the smartest person in the class asks your question? Remember sitting in the classroom at school. Do you remember the sense of relief when someone else asked that silly question before you had to? Especially, the question that you wouldn’t have ever expected the expert to ask. For some of us, it’s been a really, long time. However, I’ll bet you can still remember the feeling of reassurance and relief when the one with all the answers doesn’t know!
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What does God want?
On our very last weekend of seminary, Meg asked me to get the kids out of her way while she finalized packing. I decided to we’d go see Lookout Mountain, which was only 45 minutes away yet something we had not done in those three years, despite it being one of the main attractions in the area as it “looks out” over Chattanooga and the Tennessee River and it has a lot of history.
We did and it was fine. And we started home.
Dad wanted to see one other site that day. Covenant College also sits up on Lookout Mountain, which is really just a long sliver of the Cumberland Plateau, as all of the “mountains” in that part of Tennessee are. For years we could see it up on the mountain from I-24 in the valley, and I thought it would be cool to see it up close. It was. We just drove around it for a few minutes, admired the view, no big deal. That’s when the trouble started.
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