Calvin Synod Herald, 2006 (107. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2006-07-01 / 7-8. szám
CALVIN SYNOD HERALD 7 But the promises are all a mirage - all those words evaporate the day after the election. Everyone in this room knows this. The party that 15 years ago was pushing for no less than a constitutional amendment for a federal “balanced budget” is today running up the greatest deficit spending in the history of this country. It was all a political ploy. The promises, the plans, they did not really reflect the beliefs of the politicians. And the opposition party is just as complicit in this action. The traditional European political parties have a philosophy, a platform, a goal, which lives and is an ongoing commitment to the people. The platform, the goals of the party, do not evaporate the day after the election. They are ongoing. There is commitment to them by the party members. There is something much more pure about such a system. The public can believe in what it represented. The Hungarian scouting movement seems to embody the type of lifestyle that the writer of Revelation would approve. It is not a “boy scout” movement, as in the United States. What is the contrast? “Boy Scouts” is a wonderful movement -1 was a scout myself for quite a few years. The life-long dedicated leaders are exemplary community leaders. But in the United States it is still “boy scouts.” We teach “boys” those values which are often idealistic in nature, but as a boy matures to manhood, there is no “adult scouting movement” where these values continue to be strengthened and reinforced. If one continues to live by these values, we praise them as if they were somehow exceptional human beings. The rest of us “graduate” from these idealistic values to the “real world” values, which do not include the scout’s promise to “do my duty to God and my country... to help other people at all times, to keep myself morally straight.” And in contrast, the Hungarian Scouting movement - notice I did not say “boy scouts” or “girls scouts” - the Scouting movement is for all people, for adults who continue to live by and adhere to the values of the scouting movement. Their international jamborees have scouts of all ages, from youth through old age, all living by their commitment to the values of scouting. Their dedication is not “lukewarm,” they will not be “spewed out of the mouth.” They remain faithful to their commitment. The scriptures tell us that we can learn from those in the world. Jesus constantly used examples from real life. By using real life examples, we are, in fact, preaching biblically. We are imitating Jesus’ teaching method. Some would suggest that “biblical preaching” means only using biblical examples. But this is not what Jesus did. He did not solely refer to Old Testament scriptures for his examples. He referred to events and circumstances in daily life so that everyone instantly knew what he was talking about. He would not have to give a 15 minute explanation about his examples, such as explaining about mustard seeds, how it grows, whether it is a bush or a tree, how it was a place for birds to rest - modem day real life examples are Jesus’ teaching method. These modern-day examples can speak to our life as a Christian fellowship. We can leam from them. In our everyday Christian life we go through our sometime ritualistic worship cycle. We go to church on Sunday, we teach all those wonderful values, then as we step out of the doors of the church we put all that behind us. We light a lamp proclaiming Christ, his glory, we declare his mission to be ours, we speak about the tremendous love he has shared with us and we have to give, but at the same time often we don’t practice what we preach even in our house on Sunday morning. After church we walk out the door and cover all these things with our overcoat - we don’t want people to know that we believe all these things. From church we go out to Sunday brunch, but since we don’t see the people around us praying over their meal, we don’t pray over our meal- and this is just one-half hour after we left the Lord’s sanctuary, where we dedicated “our entire life to the Lord”! Already our lamp is hidden. That “entire life dedication” only lasted one-half hour. Suddenly we become CIA Christians: “I’m a Christian, but it’s a secret - don’t tell anybody”! Like the politicians, as soon as the meeting is over, all our promises evaporate until the next meeting. There is an interesting thing about that “light” that we are privileged to proclaim. It is not ours. It is of the Lord, and in spite of times when we are insincere in carrying it out, it does contain the truth. The little ones, the children, the innocents, understand and see its message. And that light illuminates for them the hypocrisies which we perpetuate when our actions go against our own teachings. Over ten years ago at one of the local congregations that left Calvin Synod, a congregation that also deserted its older Hungarian population, six families left one summer, including most of the Sunday school children. I asked one of the parents why they left, where they went. He told me his family wasn’t going anywhere in particular, they simply couldn’t stay there with their children, who saw the hypocrisy of the church leadership and didn’t feel it was Christian. Often when we walk out the front door of the church we leave behind what we have been confessing and affirming. As if it belongs in that place. I have noticed a similar tendency with our involvement on the Synod level also. We come to Synod and hear wonderful speeches, listen to great plans, receive wise reports, and we debate with great enthusiasm about a wide variety of issues. Truth be told, sometimes those issues are well off the mark, considering what our reason for being together is. But that is not always a bad thing. What does concern me a bit more is that next year, or two years from now, we will again hear the same speech, debate the same topic, have heated arguments about the same issues, and perhaps be “off the mark” again in the same direction. And the issue we stood up for and emotionally supported in a lengthy debate, begging for money for a worthy cause, this issue lives only on the pages of the Minutes of the proceedings of the last Annual Meeting. More than once the cause that was so hotly debated is forgotten, and there is no support for it during the 51 weeks our Calvin Synod Annual Meeting is not in session, only to be revived again at the next annual meeting. When choosing how we react to issues, we can choose between a Hungarian saying or an American saying. We prefer to choose the Hungarian saying “életemet, véremet, de zabot nem adok”- or the more modem “nem egy büdös fillért.” (This was a peasant’s response to a military leader during a conflict when the army was looking for supplies for his soldiers: “My life, my blood, but I won’t give you oats,” the more modem saying being “My life, my blood, but not a stinking penny.”) The American
