Walking through a cemetery one early spring evening gave me pause to think. This particular spring had been a dry one, marked with very little rain, yet as I walked all I saw was color. Flowers of every shape and color adorned the tombs. At a casual glance it could have seemed amazing that so much life and abundance could be sustained to remember the dead. Under closer scrutiny nearly every flower was dead. They were fake. They were made from dead things and carefully crafted to mimic alive things. I found it striking that if you kept your distance it was difficult to tell the difference, for mixed in among the dead were a very few living flowers. Every so often a tenderly planted flower was in bloom. I knew the ongoing care that must be required to nurture such a plant. As my walk continued my thoughts stayed to the meaning of all this, and the words of Jesus rang like a cymbal in my ears. "You whitewashed tombs".
At a distance there are subtle differences between a plastic flower and a real one, but when you are up close and personal it is unmistakable. As Christians, how often do we keep people at bay for this very reason. We know our fraudulent faith and are ashamed. Rather than truly give up our old selves, we hold on to them and masquerade as a Christian instead. We pay pastors to tell us what Christians ought to look like and reassure ourselves by meeting together weekly. We are crafty in our plans. We recreate old traditions like having a earthly temple and call it a house of God, because it is so much easier to remain old creation when we can avoid having people in our homes. So many traditions we have allow for this same truth. We expect preachers only to preach so that we never are required to have anything to say. We support missionaries in small ways in far off nations so that we can think that they are the missionaries and not us. We adhere to strict budgets so that we never have to rely on faith for God to provide. We are like plastic flowers in a cemetery. Quietly marking the graves, unconcerned about rain, weeding, or lack of sunshine because the religion we have invented does not require those things. There are a few real flowers planted among us, but they make us uncomfortable so we avoid them. It is so much easier to stay plastic, rather than let the gardener harshly pluck us as a seed and bury us in the ground. If we were to allow that it would require us to trust that God would send rain in its season, and fellow alive people to help pull weeds.
Satan has crafted a fine sounding system. He mixes in enough truth to make it hard to identify reality, but he has "the Church" in this nation precisely where he wants it. So many dead flowers mixed in with few that breathe that we have normalized it and accepted it as pure and faultless
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