May I have your attention?

Who hasn’t been in a crowded auditorium, stadium, arena, or other large meeting place filled with people chatting about anything and everything when all of a sudden you hear over the public address system, “May I have your attention?”

Sometimes those kinds of announcements have some element of emergency, sometimes they are simply instructions about the next step. If you’re in a busy airport and the announcement happens to be from your airline, you listen carefully in case of a flight delay, gate change, or in worst case scenario, a flight cancellation.

Those kinds of announcements typically succeed in getting our attention.

Our culture right now is like a large crowd of people in a crowded assembly hall where every surface is a hard one and the sound of our chattering is bouncing back and forth in ways that make it almost impossible to hear with any certainty what others are saying. It’s so noisy that should a critical announcement need to be made, we likely won’t even hear it. And, if we do hear it and don’t like it, we will dismiss it as propaganda or fake news from one side or the other. The noisy gongs and clanging cymbals of our cultural conversations right now are stunningly void of love. 

Perhaps like no other time in my life, I am grateful for the season of Lent that begins today – Ash Wednesday. It seems to me that this is a perfect moment for us to assume that God is saying to us, as we begin this journey toward Easter, “May I have your attention?” That the synoptic gospel writers connect Jesus’ baptism, the forty days of fasting in the wilderness, and the temptations from Satan to be the kind of Messiah religious people wanted rather than the Messiah God sent Him to be as one issue,  seems to me like a very “attention getting” context for Jesus.

He is about to begin His ministry in and among the people of Judea and it won’t be easy. He heard the voice of His father declare “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Immediately He is led into the wilderness (“The Spirit immediately drove him” according to Mark 1:13.) to be tempted by Satan. It was a kind of “razzle, dazzle, a miracle a day will keep the Romans away” approach to getting Jesus off track when it came to mission.

Apparently those forty days of fasting in the wilderness had prepared Jesus in ways that enabled Him, as the authentic human Jesus that He was, to stick to mission. Satan’s first big attempt at winning is met by Jesus’ absolute obedience to what His Father sent Him to do. In Matthew’s words, “then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.” (Matthew 4:11)

God had Jesus’ attention! I hope He has mine – and yours. 

I know that if I faithfully spend the season of Lent – or any time in my life for that matter – clearly focused on Scripture reading, prayer, reflection, repentance, seeking, and a whole host of other verb forms that can describe our relationship with God, I am offering Him my attention which can lead to obedience.

It did for Jesus. It can for us.

There seems to be an awful lot of “razzle, dazzle” stuff going on all around us. Sometimes it is from the politicians. Sometimes it is from religious people who would take us off track when it comes to mission. In either case, if you listen carefully this week, you just might imagine that you are hearing God say “May I have your attention?”

Lent can be a perfect time to stop, listen, and say “Yes, God, I’m listening.”

My Good Friend and Mentor, Jim Evans

I first met Professor Jim Evans my freshman year in college. That was in the fall of 1969 and he was the faculty sponsor for our class. Jim and Ellen welcomed our class into their home on multiple occasions over the next four years and to simply say they were a blessing to our class would fail to describe the godly, Christ-like way Jim and Ellen treated the Class of 1973 at Atlanta Christian College.

I really got to know Professor Evans in my junior and senior years when I took two years of Greek under his oversight. He was a demanding professor in whose classroom you knew to come prepared. My Greek II term paper on Colossians 1:15-20 (which he saved a copy and gave to me 40 years later) was no doubt the best thing I did as an undergraduate student. He taught me more about interpreting Scripture than any single person I could name. Students in my classrooms who think Huxford knows something about how to interpret Scripture should really think “Jim Evan taught him well.”

When I went to graduate school and took an advanced Greek grammar class my first semester, I quickly realized what a blessing all the hard work Jim Evans demanded of his students really was. No one in my class – from a variety a different Christian colleges – came close to knowing what I knew about Greek grammar. It was because of Jim that I became the graduate assistant to Dr. Lewis Foster for the next two and one-half years in graduate school. 

When I eventually came back to Atlanta Christian College as an instructor, no one made me feel more welcomed than Jim Evans. When he left ACC to become the preacher at Westside Christian Church, I became the Greek teacher at ACC. Following in Jim’s huge footsteps would become a pattern for me. I was never the Greek teacher Jim was, but if learning principal parts of verbs was important for Jim, it became important for me and students had to learn the same kind of material in my class that I learned in his!

Like Jim, I eventually left “full-time status” at ACC and became a preacher! By now Jim was executive director for the European Evangelistic Society and he and Ellen occasionally visited First Christian Church. No one made me more nervous by simply being in the audience than Jim Evans, and no one made me feel better about myself as a preacher than Jim Evans as he spoke to me after the service. 

Jim would finally decide that he needed to retire from the daily grind of working for EES and I emailed him and asked him if he thought I might be a good fit. He immediately responded that I would be a good fit and no doubt I was hired to do that job – again following in Jim’s footsteps – because of his influence. As was always true in every context, no one was more encouraging to me than Jim and Ellen. I hope they are in charge of the gates of heaven when I get there!

While working for EES, Vick and I were members at Southwest Christian Church, where Jim Donovan – the neighbor of the Evans, and like me, a student blessed by Jim’s teaching – was the preacher. One Sunday I was asked to preach for Jim Donovan. I will never forget what Jim Evans said going out the door that Sunday morning: “That was a real expository sermon.” Having been the preacher for the same church for 20 years and having preached many, many sermons, I can’t remember a compliment that meant more to me than that. My Greek teacher thought I preached a biblical sermon!

One day Jim asked me to stop by his house and of course I did. Lunch with Jim and Ellen was always a treat. (Best chicken salad ever!) After lunch, Jim took me to his office and gave me a stack of books. He said that he wanted me to have these books and reminded me of what a gift that was by saying, “Books are like your children, you don’t just let anybody have them!” I will die with those books on my shelf.

Late this afternoon I learned that Jim left this world for the one for which he lived his entire life. Ellen, Celeste, Lisa, and Eric and their families have suffered a great loss. So have countless former students whose lives were shaped in kingdom ways by the teaching of Jim Evans. It is not trite to say that our loss is heaven’s gain.

One of the classrooms in the new academic center at Point University is named the “Jim and Ellen Evans Classroom.” I was privileged to help raise the money to name that room in their honor. During that process I received countless letters – with contributions – from former students who said something like “Jim was the one who taught me to study Scripture well.” As I said the day the room was dedicated in their honor – I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that Jim and Ellen know the impact they have had on so many students who were privileged to sit in Jim’s classroom and visit in their home.

May God raise up more people like Jim and Ellen Evans. We need them.

Human Decency

Growing up on a farm has implications. Because it wasn’t one of those huge “industrial farms” owned by corporations who never experience what farming is like, I learned some things about hard work that have stuck with me to this very day.

My mother often said that the garden my father panted for our family could “feed Berkeley County.” Berkeley County, by the way, is the largest county in South Carolina, and according to its own advertising, is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Summer days of picking green beans, butter beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes, and other vegetables made me think she was right!

Fast forward a few decades and I find myself living outside the context of those formative days of my life. My lot in Tyrone is too shady to grow too many vegetables, but I give it a try anyway. There’s nothing like fresh, home grown vegetables!

I have discovered that I like to cook and for the past several years I have made more than a few big pots of homemade vegetable soup. Every time I make such soup, I go by the local Publix or Kroger supermarket and buy “fresh vegetables.” They aren’t quite what I grew up with – but pretty close. They are far better for soup making than the frozen or canned varieties.

The simple fact that I can buy fresh vegetables in the middle of winter means that people somewhere are doing the hard work of farming – planting, cultivating, harvesting – that I grew up in the middle of but don’t depend on now for daily bread. But what I know is that the fresh squash, zucchini, tomatoes, turnips, and other vegetables that I put in my soup did not magically appear on the beautifully displayed vegetable sections of a modern supermarket. 

Migrant workers bless my life. I don’t want to give up my day job to become a farm worker. But I also don’t want to not be able to run down to Publix or Kroger and buy fresh vegetables. Growing up on a farm taught me that every “job” or “any work” can be God honoring. No thoughtful Christian will look down on a person whose place in life is in the area of “menial work” and adopt an attitude of superiority because my place in life has “significance.”

The issue of immigration is complicated and I acknowledge that the federal government has a role to play in this area. But for Christians who love to run down to the local grocery store and load up on fresh vegetables to be the loudest anti-immigrant voices in our culture is embarrassing. And, quite frankly, ungodly. The Old Testament prophets Hosea and Amos would have a field day were they alive and on the scene speaking in behalf of God today.

The church needs a prophetic voice that stands in opposition to the powers of this age that reminds us that migrant workers, just like rich and well-placed politicians, are created in the image of God. If you don’t think that has implications – for both sides of that equation – you simply haven’t read Scripture or paid attention to Jesus. 

I love the availability of fresh vegetables. Mere human decency says I should appreciate the hard work of those who make that possible.  My commitment to be a “kingdom person doing kingdom things” means my “prophetic voice” in behalf of hard working immigrants ought to be heard!