The Pastor’s Piece – Kevin Cernek – September 1, 2024

By: Kevin Cernek – Chaplain

FCFI

September 1, 2024

Now that Labor Day is past, summer is over. The fields are turning ripe unto harvest and many of the farmers have their corn silage chopped, bunked, bagged, and/or in the silo. School is underway again and time is marching on. On the calendar, the measure of a year is from January 1 to December 31. But in reality, a year is lived out from September to September. This is the time of year when we begin to panic a little because winter is just around the corner and we have so much we haven’t got done. So, we start cramming the leftovers from summer into the few remaining weeks before the frost comes and Old Man Winter is knocking on the door.

As far as church is concerned, as a pastor, this is when I begin to look ahead and plan our courses of study for the sermons and Bible studies we will be undertaking. Things like, what books of the Bible will we be tackling this fall? Where will we be at Christmas? What will make a good master study and what will our church theme be for 2025? (For 2024 it was “Wholly Holy Living.”) There is so much ground to cover and so little time. And through it all, we live life one day at a time and contextualize all of life with, “if the Lord wills,” with the understanding that whatever we accomplish, it is because of the goodness of God.

In the last couple of years at MCC, besides our regular sermons in the books of Acts and James, we’ve studied through the Old Testament books of Genesis, Job, and Jeremiah. Every study is verse by verse, chapter by chapter. I’m not sure I know how to measure the amount of wisdom we have gleaned from these studies, but it’s a lot! It is true what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:11-12: “These things happened to them (Israel) as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.  So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!”

Here is something I read as I was putting one of our studies together: (author unknown) –  One day, students in one of Albert Einstein’s classes were saying they had decided that there was no God. Einstein asked them how much of all the knowledge in the world they had amongst themselves collectively, as a class. The students discussed it for a while and decided they had 5% of all human knowledge amongst themselves. Einstein thought that their estimate was a little generous, but he replied: “Is it possible that God exists in the 95% that you don’t know?” God’s wisdom is not man’s wisdom multiplied to the highest degree. It is wisdom of a different order altogether.

I was reading an article written by John Stonestreet and Timothy D Padgett (at breakpoint.org) that was discussing the Great Fire of Rome which took place on July 18, A.D. 64 that left two-thirds of the city in ashes. According to Roman historian Tacitus, the fire swept through the city so rapidly that people barely escaped with their lives. He described panicked crowds trampling everything before them as they ran from the inferno in search of safety. On the throne at the time was Emperor Nero, a man notorious for his immorality and his hatred of Christians. Rumor had it among the Romans, that Nero started the blaze himself because he was a pyromaniac and then he watched it burn from his balcony. It was said that he “fiddled while Rome burned.” 

So, Nero blamed the Christians because he found them easy to pick on. In the days that followed, the Apostles Peter and Paul met their fates, along with an unknown but great number of other Christians. The article states: “If this was the first time Christians took heat for a public disaster, it certainly would not be the last. Christians have found themselves an unpopular minority in many cultural settings and have been consistently blamed for various disasters in various societies. A century and a half after Nero’s attacks, Tertullian, a North African Christian writer, morbidly quipped, ‘If the Tiber rises too high, or the Nile too low, the remedy is always feeding Christians to the lions.’ In 410, pagan writers suggested that the sacking of Rome by German tribes would not have happened had Rome not abandoned her gods for a supposedly immoral Christianity.”

That accusation led Saint Augustine to respond with his great work, The City of God. In it, Augustine provided an out and out defense to accusations leveled against Christians. He undid the critique that Christians had somehow made life worse. If anything, in fact, the influence of biblical ideals had made things better. Today, Christians aren’t being thrown to the lions, but there is a growing undercurrent of hostility against us. But Jesus said in this world we will have trouble. Expect it. And respond in truth and love.

The article concluded: “Oppression, poverty, military, and natural disasters are the common lot of humanity. They are common in times and places where the Gospel has never gone. However, in those places where Christianity has gone there are hospitals, universities, technological innovation, freedom, and an unusual insistence on human dignity … These … remind us how bad the world was before Christ came, and how much of what we think of as good and valuable has come, not despite Christianity, but because of it … Christianity is just as true and good today as it was then.”

(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin).