"Jerusalem's Daughters"

Dear Friends,

I continue to have an erratic schedule, including a prolonged bout of The Flu--with a lengthy recovery period (which rendered February as something of a blur) followed by a couple of trips … but maybe things will settle down a bit now after a busy first quarter of this year.

I’m pretty sure I’ve sent the following writing from Os Guinness’s book The Call to one (or more) lists in the past, but I don’t think I’ve sent it to this list. Either way, it contains good things to think upon (and be reminded of…in case you’ve already read it), and I submit it for your consideration. As singer Bob Dylan wrote, “The Times They Are A-changin’”, and quite rapidly, too, these days! The end times ARE coming, maybe sooner than later, and strengthening for the times can be found in making daily choices that define our identities as Christ’s disciples. My prayer for us all is that we make our decisions primarily for “The Audience of One” (another excellent chapter in this excellent book), and be ready and willing to take a stand for Christ in every day (ncluding in possibly difficult days and in present days). The following “history lesson” challenges us to consider where and how we stand now, as well as then.

Yours in Christ,
Elaine

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“A Time To Stand”

From the book The Call, by Os Guinness

“The year was 480 B.C. The East was on the move against the West. A colossal and terrible army, the greatest the world had ever seen, had poured across the Hellespont from Asia into Europe. Led by the all-powerful Persian King Xerxes, the vast host included fish-scale armored Persians, camel-riding Arabs, chariot-driving Libyans, turbaned Cissians, balloon-trousered Scythians, high-heel booted Sarangians, and scores of other tribes and nationalities. Eighty thousand men rode on horseback or in chariots; around them marched foot soldiers and archers beyond counting.

When this Grand Army marched, it was said, the ground trembled. When they ate, it was as if locusts had devoured everything in their path. When they drank, it seemed that whole pools were dried up and entire rivers reduced to a trickle. The imperial Persian war machine was like nothing anyone had seen before. Simply to pass by the king in review took a full week.

The Persian mission was revenge. Xerxes, the thirty-eight-year-old “king of kings,” had set out from Susa, after four years of preparation, to avenge the defeat of his father Darius. In the process he intended to subdue Greece, nip the budding menace of Athens and Sparta, and expand the far-flung empire of Persia. Athens, of course, was not yet the shining city of Pericles, Phidias, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. The marble wonder of the Parthenon and the golden age of science, philosophy, democracy, and theater lay in the future. Athens was merely a fractious little city. If anything, Sparta appeared to have greater military potential. But speculation on the future would have seemed absurd during those sweltering days in mid-August. Even if they united, the Greek city-states would have been no match for Xerxes’ awesome force. But they were divided as well as unprepared. The quarrelsome Greeks were as much at war with each other as with the Persians.

So it was that the Persian super-army of perhaps a quarter of a million soldiers (Herodotus said three million) was opposed by a hastily assembled, ragtag force of seven thousand Greeks from five city-states. But at their core were three hundred Spartans, trained to stand or die. (“Come back with your shield or on it,” a Spartan mother told her son.) They were led by a fifty-five-year-old Spartan prince, Leonidas. And they took their stand in a narrow pass, twenty yards wide, bounded by the sea on one side and the five thousand-foot cliffs of Mt. Kallidromos on the other. Hot sulfurous springs, which the Greeks called Thermopylae, or Hot Gates, bubbled out of these cliffs at the narrowest place.

For the Persians the whole encounter must have looked at first like a simple mopping-up operation, a tiny dust-storm scuffle. But for two days the unstoppables were stopped. Late on the second day, Xerxes, fearing a calamitous panic, sent in his crack division, “the Immortals” – who were repulsed too at tremendous cost. For two long days the Persian horde had attacked and the heroic handful of Greeks had held firm.

Then, disastrously, the Greeks were betrayed. By night a traitor led the Persians over the cliffs so that at daybreak Leonidas and his men were surrounded. The pass had been sold. The game was up. Death was coming as surely as the dawn. Dismissing most of his army, Leonidas led his own three hundred Spartans and a few others to a little mound from which they could make their last desperate stand and hold back the oncoming avalanche. There the little band fought to the last man and died. When their swords were gone, according to Herodotus, they fought on with their hands and teeth. But before they died, they sent home the stirring message that has become their epitaph: “Stranger, tell the Spartans that we have behaved as they would wish us to, and are buried here.”

Brief, laconic, and to the point, these last words came from a little band of Greeks who had no idea what was to come. They could not see how their example would trigger a surge of pride and inspire their fellow countrymen to decisive victories at Salamis and Platae, that never again would the Persians seriously ménace Greece, and that in thirty short years the city of Athens would rise to become the most influential city the world has ever known.

Dedicated and courageous, they did their duty. They stood firm in the line of history, and today all free people enjoy a freedom that flows partly from their stand. As the French philosopher Montaigne said of Thermopylae two thousand years later, “there are triumphant defeats that rival victories.”

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The Greatest Challenge Ever Faced

Will it be said of followers of Jesus Christ across the world, “Passerby, tell our Lord that we have behaved as He would wish us to behave, and are buried here”? For at the threshold of the third millennium of its existence, the church of Jesus Christ confronts the greatest challenge it has ever faced. This challenge touches on behavior every bit as much as belief, yet it requires belief to inspire and stiffen that behavior.

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In the current situation, the church’s deepest challenge is neither political nor ideological. It is spiritual and theological and comes to a head where behavior expresses belief and deeds express words. As Francis of Assisi said well, “Preach the gospel constantly and, if necessary, use words.” As each great civilization, guided and inspired by a different religion, competes to demonstrate its vision of the best way forward for humankind, it is plain that we cannot afford fuzzy thinking and half-hearted living. . . . Beliefs have consequences. What began as theoretically different views of God, the world, humanness, justice, freedom, community, money, and a hundred other issues, end in radically divergent societies and radically divergent ways of living and dying.

Is the church of Christ ready to meet the challenge? Are followers of Jesus sufficiently gripped by the gospel to “behave as He would wish us to behave”? Do we know in reality the great living truths of the faith that have a proven capacity to affect history and transform cultures as well as radically alter individual lives? Calling . . . is indispensable to the integrity and effectiveness of the church in this momentous hour.

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“ . . . A time to stand” is a time to behave as our Lord would wish us to behave. A time to behave is a time to believe as He has taught us to believe. A time to believe is a time to move from small, cozy formulations of faith to knowing what it is to be called by Him as the deepest, most stirring, and most consuming passion of our lives.”

“A Time To Stand” | SBGA | Elaine Housley