But the word of God is not chained. - 2 Timothy 2.9

President Donald Trump gathered a covey of prominent Evangelical pastors in the State Dining Room of the White House on Monday, August 20. He used the huddle to tout his temporary suspension of the Johnson Amendment, which forbids churches from endorsing politicians at the peril of losing their tax exempt status. The President expressed the belief that the lack of this license explains the slump in church attendance in America.

"Maybe it's why you are very plateaued," he theorized. "I really believe you're plateaued because you can't speak. They really have silenced you. But now you're not silenced anymore." The President went on to warn his acolytes that they'd better get their flock to the poles in November because "you're one election away from losing everything you've got."

Politics aside, the President's pronouncement amounts to this: Political activism enlivens the church, so only a politician can give it life. 

Paul had a different take. From a windowless dungeon far below the street-level of first century Rome, he urged Timothy not to vote, but to voice the Christian hope: "Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David - that is my gospel." For that gospel, Paul exulted, "I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the gospel is not chained." 

Paul faced execution, not tax exemption; his problem was not losing political headway, but losing his head. Yet Paul boldly declares that the Gospel, not the government, gives life to the church. Shackles jangled at his wrists and ankles as he side-hopped about his cell like a convict on a chain gang even as the message of the risen Christ ran rampant throughout Rome. Paul was imprisoned, but the gospel was not plateaued. He did not need Caesar to set him free in order to proclaim that Jesus makes us free indeed.

Religious liberty matters. Sincere Christians differ about politics and particular candidates. Vote your conscience. Just never make the mistake of letting an earthly leader tell you that the church's future rests in the hands of a political party or partisan agenda. The gospel is not chained, the power of God knows no plateaus, and the only maximum security that matters is the eternity security of a soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose. We are not one election from losing everything we've got; we the elect have got all the riches of God in Christ Jesus, and they can never be lost.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. 

- 1 Corinthians 12.27

Honeybees and blue orchard bees pollinate apples and cherries in different ways. For openers, honeybees won't work in cold weather, while blue orchard bees love it. Honeybees are extroverts who live in big colonies that keepers can move from farm to farm; blue orchard bees dwell in solitude and it's not practical to cart them around. Pollen clings to the honeybees' legs but to the blue orchard bee's belly. The two species opt for different flight patterns, working at separate levels.

For all of these reasons, both together do better than either one alone.

When Jim Freese of Omak, Washington, wanted to up the yield on his crops, he supplemented rented honeybee hives with homegrown blue orchard bees. His cherry production doubled. Some studies say the potential increase could be ten-fold. 

Paul thinks the church works best when we use multiple pollinators. Vision, hearing, and olfactory each performs a vital functions; eyes and hands, heads and feet need one another; apostles, prophets, teachers, and miracle-workers, healers, helpers, leaders, and cheerleaders aim for completion, not competition. 

So bee the bee God made you to be and celebrate the same truth in others. Bee and let bee, and watch the church bear much fruit to the glory of the Sower of the seed.

Making the most of the time, because the days are evil.

- Ephesians 5.16

The Seneca chief Red Jacket once heard a white man complain that he did not have enough time. "Well," he replied, "I suppose you have all there is."

Scholars debate the exact shade of meaning in Paul's verb, "making the most." Translations range from "redeeming" (KJV), to "making the best use" (ESV), to "don't waste your time" (Message). What matters is that Paul employs a marketplace metaphor. Time may not be money, but it is a form of currency and we all get the same amount: all of it. The question is what we will do with it. Because we live in evil days, we must invest wisely. As that great theologian, the country singer Bobby Bear, said in "The Gambler," "Every hand's a winner/Like every hand's a loser." Be careful, Paul admonishes, how you play your hand.

Paul does give a couple of interesting suggestions as to how to go about this. Interestingly enough, neither of them has to do with the latest day planner or efficiency app. First, he suggests sobriety (v.17). This category expands to include any activity that encourages one to "pass" time instead of "spending" it. When we binge-watch Netflix or ramble around the social media scene, we tend to lose track of time - and lose time. Second, he suggests worship, especially worship that involves congregational singing. Musicians speak of "keeping time," which means, not preserving it, but marking its passage in ways that bring one into sync with others. Sober up and sing, Paul urges; mark the moments with the rhythm of praise.

Of course, all of this raises the question of which way of attending to time merits the investment. Benedictine Abbot Philip Lawrence observes, "The early monks often pointed out that when someone knocks at the door, it is Christ. Sometimes when Christ knocks at the door it is an emergency; other times it is something important; sometimes it is just someone wanting to say 'hello.' But it is always Christ." When people want our time, Jesus wants our time; but even with Jesus, we have to ask what kind of time the situation merits.

"We have trained them," gloats C. S. Lewis' arch-tempter Screwtape, "to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes obtain - not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whoever he is, whatever he does." Or as Annie Dillard observes, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days." 

So keep time. Catch your days. Invest well. We all end up time-broke, facing eternity's audit; have something to show for it.

So teach us to number our days,

That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.

- Psalm 90.12

In 1971, health food maven Jerome I. Rodale appeared on the Dick Cavett show. Among other delicacies, he offered his host a dish of asparagus soaked in urine. Cavett declined the snack. (Although, really, how much worse could it have tasted than regular asparagus?) Rodale boasted that he planned to live to be one hundred.

He died on stage just as the program wrapped up. Heart attack at seventy-two, less than three-quarters of the way to his goal.

Moses, the purported author of Psalm 90, did better. He made it all the way to one hundred and twenty. (Just a side note: urine is not kosher.) Yet he begs God for the good sense to know that a long(er) life ends the same way as a short one: in death. The smart move, then, is not to learn how to keep on living, but to learn how to live well. Moses isn't asking the Almighty to run the math and give him a calendar date. He asks instead to live as one who recognizes that he will be dead for a lot longer than he will be alive.

When Mr. Vane, the narrator of George MacDonald's bizarre novel Lilith, inherits his father's estate, he visits the library, "whose growth began before the invention of printing." He observes that, "Nothing surely can impress upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his succeeding to an ancient property!" So teach us to number our days.

In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part II, when a friend warns him to prepare for death, the elderly roisterer Falstaff sneers, "Do not speak like a death's-head; do not bid me remember mine end." His willful amnesia regarding mortality does him no good, of course. He's dead before the curtain comes down.

The Bible has a fair amount to say on this subject. Remember how short my time is! bleats the speaker in Psalm 89.47. Psalm 39.4 comes in on the descant: O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am. The author of Hebrews drives the final nail of reality into the coffin of mortality: It is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgement. (Heb 9.27)

Eat all the organic veggies you want (urine optional); jog or do yoga; give up coffee (which will at least make your life feel a lot longer); we're all travelers on a finite road that dead ends into a headstone. So teach us to number our days.

That we may present to you a heart of wisdom: Ultimate wisdom lies in the heart we present to God on that great and final day when the trumpet sounds. Only faith in Christ can ready our hearts for that moment. Number your days, because your days are numbered. Have a heart whose wisdom leads you to seek salvation.