Finishing up chapter six

Chapter six continued ....

In verse 27 of this sixth chapter, Luke chronicles one of the foundational beliefs of Christianity, loving our enemies. Of all of the things that Christ calls us to do, loving our enemies defies our basic human logic. We feel so good when we are righteously pissed off and when we can see a mental picture of the face of our enemy... man, we are on a roll. Jesus tells us to do good for those who hate us, pray for the happiness of those who curse you and hurt you. Turn the other cheek if slapped, if they demand our coat we should offer our shirt also. We are to avoid getting back the things that someone steals from us and we are to treat others as we wish to be treated. Regarding the last one, how many sanctimonious, insincere, manure spreading and disingenuous people have quoted that one to you?

One of the greatest living examples that I could find regarding this section of Luke, was a fellow by the name of George Washington Carver. Although he is famous for discovering a ton of uses for the goober or peanut, Mr. Carver is a living example of how we should live a Christian life.

George Washington Carver was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri, on the farm of Moses Carver. When he was a baby, he and his mother were abducted by Confederate night raiders and were believed to have been sent away to Arkansas. Moses Carver, who was the owner of the plantation where George and his family were enslaved, reclaimed George after the Civil War but his mother had disappeared forever. His father was never identified, so Moses and Susan Carver raised George and his brother as their own children. With a natural sense of discovery, George spent a great deal of his childhood keenly interested in plants and rocks. George made every effort to receive a formal education. He worked as a farm hand in the southwest part of Missouri and attended a one -room schoolhouse. Later, he was accepted as the first black student at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he studied piano and art. He transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1891, received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in 1897. He became the first Black faculty member at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics and taught about soil conservation and related agricultural subjects. In 1897, the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, Booker T. Washington, invited him to join the faculty as the school’s Director of Agriculture, where he remained until his death in 1943.

George was prolific in regard to the discoveries he made throughout his career. Many of these discoveries are used everyday and include mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder, wood stain, adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee and linoleum. The biggest impact he made on the world was the "crop rotation" method of farming. The economy of the South was directly related to the farming of soil depleting crops like cotton. He proposed the alternate planting of soil enriching crops like peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potatoes and pecans. His discoveries and theories were directly related to the recovery of Southern agriculture after the Civil War.

Everything that George Washington Carver accomplished was driven by his love for God and his fellow man. He did not patent or profit from most of his inventions and he freely gave his discoveries to mankind. He would say about his ideas and inventions, "God gave them to me, how can I sell them to someone else?" On his grave is the epitaph:

He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world

The great irony of George Washington Carvers life is that he was born during a period of repression and the very people who repressed him benefitted greatly from his ideas and inventions. Imagine the reaction of the first cotton farmer, involved in a business, decimated by soil depleting farming methods and a war and the general chaos of the times. Along comes George Washington Carver with his theories of crop rotation that could save the farming industry across the entire South. Can you imagine that farmer looking at that black man and wondering, What good could come from him and his ideas? Why should I take the advice of a slave who wants to help me and wants nothing in return? As it turns out, it’s a good thing that the agricultural community listened to the advice because their future depended on it.

If you allowed Hollywood to rewrite this great man’s life, He would have gotten revenge over his enemies by selling his inventions, turned his back on the farmer saying good riddance and laughed all the way to the bank. That’s probably how most of us would do it, but this man followed the word of God completely.

Continuing on in this chapter of Luke, it doesn’t get any easier to follow God’s word. Not only has He told us that we have to be generous, humble, tolerant and loving towards mankind and especially so to those that speak badly of us and who are mean to us, now He tells us that we must stop doing the thing we love the most, judging others.

It is said that we make a decision about others within seconds after we meet them. We all think that when it comes to judging others, we have the best instincts. Judging others, even if we keep the judgement to ourselves, is one of life’s greatest pastimes and when it is done in an unjust manner to us, it is a travesty while we reserve our right to judge as a necessary function of life and in our heart of hearts, only we know just how proficient we are at doing it.

I found a nice website that has a variety of quotes under a wide variety of spiritual and uplifting topics at http://www.hobogirl.com/quotes/index.htm . Here are two of them under the topic of judging others.
"If you judge people you have no time to love them."
-- Mother Teresa

"Sweep first before your own door
before you sweep the doorsteps of your neighbors."
-- Swedish Proverb


I like both of them because they illuminate what Jesus is telling us regarding judgement. In regards to Mother Teresa she seems to be a good example of the judgement of others as it seems that those that love her, judge her to be a saint and those that don’t, judge her to be a heretic or worse. God’s word says that He will judge Mother Teresa and us individually and wether we use good judgement or bad judgement, we can expect it to be the standard when applied, in judgement, back to us.

Jesus goes on to point out that when we notice a splinter in the eye of another, we should be willing to see the two by four that is present in our own eye. That’s funny, I don’t care who you are.

Winding up in chapter six, Jesus makes two more valuable points. The first being, that if we live our lives outside of God we cannot expect Godly and good results to come of it. We can’t say that we follow God and not have God evident in our lives. In our very own country we are seeing this on a broad scale. We claim to be a Christian country but we are suffering through the aftermath of the breakdown of the founding Godly values that have been replaced by the tenants of humanism, secularism and the worship of the natural creation, not the creator. As a result these decisions have given us the appearance of that leafy and green tree that is producing bad fruit.

Secondly, He points out that we are calling Him Lord but we won’t obey Him. We, as Christians, want to do things our way and not His. Jesus talks of the importance of building on a strong foundation and how the structure is only as good as it’s foundation. If you think about it, all of your friends and relatives will want to be there to help you pick out the appliances, wallpaper and entertainment equipment but it is unlikely that they will be equally enthused to come out with you to check the depth and width of the trench where the foundation will be poured. No one, even you, will likely care about the type of concrete or the size of the gravel in the pour or the size of the reinforcements used in that same foundation. That foundation, as important as it is, will never be thought of again unless the house start shifting to the left or right. That foundation will be covered up by the structure on top of it and any cracks in it will not be evident until it is too late.