CONTRASTING KINGDOMS

Despite being tired and the hour late, I felt drawn to flipping on the TV and seeing what was on. My attention was caught by a PBS special of a gala event taking place at the Kennedy Center for the granting of the 14^th Mark Twain award.  The applause and the enthusiastic support of the audience for the recipient was evident. The winner of the award was Ellen Degeneres. Ellen came out on stage dressed as a man, was very open about being gay, gave recognition to her “wife” whom the camera caught several times and was often, in keeping with what was evidently the reason for granting her the award, funny.  The audiences’ responses to her remarks, which included several with regard to her being gay, were not only of approval but of celebration.  Were they celebrating that she was funny, or that she was gay?  Or both?  Was the enthusiastic applause and laughter partially motivated also by the audience’s self-approval of their liberality and open acceptance of alternative sexual preference?  Or was being funny the cause for such an award at the illustrious Kennedy Center?

I couldn’t help wonder what President Kennedy himself would have thought of this, or even Jackie whose idea the center was. Didn’t she have more honorable things in mind? Even Mark Twain, who despite his less than believe-in-God perspectives was a man of his own times, and who would likely be shocked and disapproving of this particular award being given in his name. 

 Evidently the event was equally applauded by PBS who aired it and American Airlines that sponsored it. Is this what is considered worthy of funding? What happened to honoring people for character, integrity, courage, benevolence, or generosity of heart?  Have we been reduced to celebrating being funny?  Or being a lesbian?

 I then flipped through a few more channels and happened upon Pastor Mark Chirona telling a very personal story. He spoke with humility and authenticity, telling of how his father had come to him and cried, revealing his vulnerability, something Mark had never seen in his father before. He held his dad and cried with him. This experience opened up for Mark an awareness of how guarded and self-protective he was.  He spoke of how when we are afraid of not being accepted or appreciated, when we’re not loved for who we are, we don’t really know how to let God love us.  Mark told of how this experience led him to time alone with God while he let God take down his walls to allow Him to really love him as only God can love. He spoke with such a tenderness and awe of God, and such a respect and love for Him. I was deeply moved by the transparency he revealed, also on television but to a very different audience than those at the Kennedy Center.  I felt as if I was peering into two different kingdoms, and indeed I was.

I was left with a sense of how important it is for us who are Jesus’s to be speaking the truth in love to those who may not know the ways of God. Perhaps many of those people at the Kennedy Center never opened a Bible, or were taught the Ten Commandments, let alone the verses in Leviticus 18:22 or Deuteronomy 22:5 or Romans 1:26.  It’s not that being gay is a sin worse than any other, thought it does go against God’s initial command to “go forth and multiple.” But a people, let alone a nation, that values what God calls an abomination are either in ignorance or rebellion.  Either way, they are outside of the blessings and favor of God.  And what will that allow to come upon us? 

So what are we to do?  Where do we drop the plumb line? Most will do nothing. But is that what God would have us do, nothing?  Perhaps it’s because we don’t know what to do. I suspect that preaching to people that they should or shouldn’t do anything is pretty useless. Even if they stopped doing “it” whatever “it” is, if they don’t come to and give their lives to following Jesus, they’re still as lost as when they were doing “it”.  What is needed is a revelation of Jesus that will make the appeal of anything else pale in comparison. 

Jesus has gotten such bad press that anyone celebrating such shallowness or corruption of God’s intention for humankind has no idea of who He really is.  To know Him in Spirit and in truth is to know the One who is more attractive than anything else that the world or humankind has to offer.  Do we exude His love?  Do we represent His goodness and forgiveness?  Do we reflect His holiness and purity?  Do we know Him as He can be known?  Are we in touch with the fact that He lives within us so that His “rivers of living water” overflow when we interact with others?  Or do we only know about Him? 

Years ago the Lord told me something that has stayed with me.  He said, “The bride I come for will have eyes for no one and nothing else other than Me.”  We want to be worthy of Him. Jesus as our Bridegroom who will come for a bride who can share His heart in every way, one who is suitable to him in all that matters to Him and will have nothing to do with what is not.  When we spend precious time with Him, being vulnerable to Him, letting Him take down the self-protection that keeps us from letting Him love us as only God can love, we will be people who will be able to reach people for Him with His love.  And, by His grace, many will find that what draws them today will become as filthy rags to them in contrast. 

Revelation 19: 7 says “Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.” As we make ourselves ready, others will be drawn to the glory of God upon us.  Some of those people celebrating uncleanness may well be called to become a part of the bride of Jesus.  Not all, but some. Let’s pray as Abraham did for Sodom, “Lord, if there be thirty righteous, twenty righteous, ten righteous…  save them.”