Daily Lesson for November 30, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Amos chapter 3 verses 4 through 6:

4 Does a lion roar in the forest,

when it has no prey?

Does a young lion cry out from its den,

if it has caught nothing?

5 Does a bird fall into a snare on the earth,

when there is no trap for it?

Does a snare spring up from the ground,

when it has taken nothing?

6 Is a trumpet blown in a city,

and the people are not afraid?

Denial ain't a river in Egypt.

It's right here, right near, anywhere anyone isn't ready to face reality.

But reality can be hard to accept, so a lot of parents pretended their adult children's long stints alone in the bathroom over Thanksgiving weren't that abnormal.

Or, they tell themselves that lump they feel is nothing.

Or, they whistle in the dark, acting like a still ongoing "Stop the Steal" movement isn't an ongoing threat to our democracy.

And I remember Desmond Tutu said, "The hardest person in the world to wake up is the person who's only pretending to be asleep."

Advent is a time for waking up. It's a time for opening the eyes and facing reality.

As the prophet Amos says this morning, "There's lions out there."

Don't act like the sound of their roar isn't saying something.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Daily Lesson for November 29, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 5 through 9:

5For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, 6and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, 7and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love. 8For if these things are yours and are increasing among you, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9For anyone who lacks these things is short-sighted and blind, and is forgetful of the cleansing of past sins.

Peter is giving counsel about how we are to live and treat one another as a community of faith.

Unto faith is added the habit of study, the practice of decency, the discipline of self control, and the commitment of patient endurance in love.

We deepen and we grow. As we do, our patience with and toleration of others should grow also. We mature and become long suffering, thankful that others were once long suffering with us.

The life of faith is a long journey. We don't get there overnight. It takes work. It also takes patience if we're going to get there together.

And that's the whole point.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Daily Lesson for November 26, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Peter chapter 3 verses 18 through 20:

18For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you* to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, 19in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, 20who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water.

There is an old saying -- which some attribute to David Bowie -- "Religion is for those who don't want to go to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there."

Christ descended into hell. More than just a line in the Apostles' Creed, this is a promise for everyone who has been to hell and back, or is in some kind of hell right now, or is raising some hellion of a child who soon will be.

The Christ will be there. Christ will be present there there. Christ will sit and hold hands, and shiver out in the car there.

I've been watching the series Dopesick. That's where the idea of shivering comes from -- from junkies shivering out in cold in the car on some dead end street. Drugs are hell. And anybody who loves somebody on drugs are living it too.

But Christ doesn't give up on anybody. Christ doesn't condemn anybody. We condemn ourselves -- sometimes to hell or to prison. But the Christ has been to both places.

Christ has been to hell and back a million times because a million times is what it took.

He'll go again.

And the soul will know its worth.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Daily Lesson for Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson in observance of Thanksgiving in America is from Matthew chapter 6 verses 25 through 33:

6:25 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

6:26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

6:27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?

6:28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin,

6:29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

6:30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you--you of little faith?

6:31 Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear?'

6:32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.

6:33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

We observe Thanksgiving today in the midst of much worry and troubles and also consolations.

A friend and colleague lost her son to gun violence this week. Another friend was assaulted at gun point.

A friend is awaiting health news about herself and also her mother. Another friend's little child will undergo brain surgery tomorrow.

A verdict of innocent. Three verdicts of guilty. A video released of one man killing another in an altercation on a front porch. Guilty? Innocent? Either way, the gun manufacturers are never held accountable.

But the drug dispensers have been this week.

So much to worry about. So much to fret over. So much still to come. The Insurrection has not ended. As Phillips Brooks said in his eulogy for Lincoln, slavery was the "sacrament" of evil -- an outward and visible sign -- which Michelle Alexander says shape-shifted to Jim Crow, then Mass Incarceration, and now what? Next what?

We can worry and fret. And we will.

But today my folks are alive, my sister is well, my wife and children are a manifold blessing, and the church folks are decent and generous and act in a lot of important ways like real Christians. And a bird is starting a chorus outside my window.

Today is a day for giving thanks. As Lincoln said in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued even amidst all the death and devastation of the Civil War:

"The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God."

The old broken down alcoholic honkey-tonker turned half-decent man played by Robert Duvall in the movie Tender Mercies said, "I don't trust happiness."

I don't trust happiness much either. Providence, however, has pierced the armor.

And I am grateful.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Three Guilty Verdicts

 Three guilty verdicts in the case of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery brings accountability to the court and, hopefully, country as well.

We must cure ourselves of the sickness which prompted our society to grant almost-universal impunity to those who wish to hunt and kill black personhood. 

Today’s decision does not bring justice to Ahmaud — for he was robbed of his life, something which can never be returned. But the verdicts do, I pray, give opportunity to create a safer and more just society for all the rest of us in America — especially those of black and brown skin. 

May God deliver us from evil.

Daily Lesson for November 24, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 1 through 3:

Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. 2Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— 3if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

The Lord is good; and the people of the Lord are supposed to be good also.

We are supposed to be holy and righteous and decent in all our dealings with everyone. This is what Peter elsewhere in this same chapter calls our "spiritual sacrifice". It is simple kindness and humanity.

How so many so-called Christians came to accept malice and cruelty is a travesty. How deceit and slander became okay, and even cheered is a shame.

This is Christianity 101, and the whole class has flunked.

God is good -- all the time. Goodness is a fruit of God's Spirit. Let us ask and strive for it in ourselves; and let us expect it in others -- especially if they profess to call themselves Christians.

We will know them by their fruit.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Daily Lesson for November 23, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Peter chapter 1 verse 22:

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

A word for a our time.

Peter calls upon us to love one another with pure and deep hearts. But this is not possible without first submitting ourselves in "obedience" to the truth.

"Obedience" literally means "to listen". So long as we love falsehood we will tolerate maliciousness and deception and refuse to listen. We will hate others and excuse ourselves for doing so. If we are not people of truth then we will accept lies about others and lies about ourselves. We will not listen to anything counter to what we want to hear, because the truth always demands something from us, primarily change and action.

This is the reason Pilate asked, "What is truth?" So long as he kept himself closed to the truth he could excuse himself for his lack of courage and justice, which is to say his lack of love. It was so much easier for him to sit there unmoved and without action. But it required being blind to the truth.

We know the truth, and the truth sets us free. But it also binds us. It compels us.

"Love rejoices in the truth," Paul says. And the one who wants to love -- really wants to love the other -- puts aside all prejudices, listens, acts, then rejoices in all that the truth has had to say and demand.

What is truth? It's staring us right in the face. But we have to open our ears to listen to what it has to say, and our hearts to act upon what it would have us to do and who it would have us to be.

Are we open? Are we really open to the true love?

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Feast Day for C.S. Lewis

 Today is the Feast Day for C.S. Lewis.  I repost a dispatch I wrote after visiting his gravesite in 2015.  It is lengthy, but I think worth the time.  I don’t know that any Christian thinker has shaped me more.  

https://ryonprice.blogspot.com/2015/08/british-evasion-10-august-8-2015.html?m=1

Daily Lesson for November 19, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Matthew chapter 18 verses 15 through 18:

15 ‘If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.* 16But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. 18Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

"If another member of the church offends you . . ."

I read that and I think, "If"?

How about "When". Or how about, "When it happened today." Or, "When someone steps on your toes, crosses your boundaries, oversteps their authority, offends your sensibilities or personhood THIS MORNING . . ."

My pastor Charlie Johnson used to say, "This ain't heaven, it's church." It is. And it's full of people who will break our hearts and even act a fool -- oftentimes completely unconsciously, and sometimes absolutely maliciously.

The instruction we have from Jesus this morning is step-by-step for conflict resolution.

1. We go to the person directly and in measure, and do not triangulate, or passively-aggressively ignore and then attack.

2. If that doesn't resolve the issue, we bring along others as listening ears, and as witnesses so that what is said is clear and doesn't get twisted.

3. If that doesn't work, we take it to the whole body -- maybe the deacons, or council, or in some places an all-church meeting.

4. If the issue still isn't resolved and the other party is still in the wrong -- we ourselves may be, at least some -- then Jesus says we treat them "like tax collectors and Gentiles", which sounds awful until you think of how Jesus himself treated Gentiles and tax collectors -- as people of human worth and dignity and special belonging in a careful and considered way. Jesus did not give us permission to write anyone off because of offense, though particular and careful concern he said did have to be given to protect the sheep from wolves.

This ain't heaven. Conflict will happen. How we address it says a lot about who we are.

May it say good things.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

Daily Lesson for November 18, 2021

 Today's Daily Lesson comes from Revelation chapter 21 verses 22 through 26:

22 I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. 23And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. 25Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. 26People will bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations.

I drove down I35 from Fort Worth to Austin and back last week. All along the highway I saw signs promoting the building of the wall on our Southern border. Somebody has spent a lot of money to put those signs up; and you can bet there will be more before the primaries.

I thought of those signs this morning as I read the Lesson from Revelation. There will be a wall in God's City the Good Book says. And that is good because almost all of us live within walls. Wall keep us safe, and warm; and they keep the rodents out.

But an interesting thing about God's City -- there's a wall, but there are also gates. And the gates are open every day, all day; and there is no night.

When there is no night to fear, fear is unfounded. People stream in from all nations, but they are not seen automatically as a threat. The gates remain open. It is telling.

God's City is not ruled by fear and fear mongering. It is not ruled by the fear the Other.

It is a vision of something to come. We are not there yet. But it is something to believe in and work towards.

May we never give up the vision.

Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.