No Niños En La Canasta: 99 Weird Devotions for Uncommon Christians

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from:

Dave@PulpitMan.com

www.PulpitMan.com

All Biblical quotations are from the New International Version unless otherwise noted.

The cover art is an original illustration by Tim Hartman.

You can see more of his work at www.TimHartman.com

Copyright © 2018 Dave Zuchelli

All rights reserved.

Print ISBN: 978-0-99643-268-9

eBook ISBN: 978-0-99643-269-6

DEDICATION

To my lovely Bride, Denise,

who puts up with a lot of my weirdness

and yanks me back into line when I wander too far from the ranch.

You’re the best, my Baby!

Contents

Preface

A Horny Moses: Biblical Translation Gone Awry?

All Souls Day: Hallowmas Revisited

Allergic to Church

Anonymity: The Desired Effect?

Are You On Page 65? (Or Dream a Little Dream With Me)

The Back-to-Egypt Committee

Bailing Out the Church

Behaving Badly

The Blood Stained Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Building Our Earthly Kingdom

Can Life Be a Picnic?

Chasing the Wild Goose

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

Coming Alive in the Twenty-First Century

Cross Words From a Crossword

Death and Religion Rarely Stick

Distracted From the Truth: Just Another Snake in the Grass

Divine Interruption

Do I Have to Like the Preacher?

Does God Hate Us?

Don’t Tell Anyone

Drink Lots of Water and Get Plenty of Exercise

Eating Our Way Toward Heaven

Eleanor Rigby

Father McKenzie

Garage Sale Engagement Ring

GODGOTM

Going Topless

Halfway Church

Holy Transcendence: Anarchy by Another Name

How Porky Pig Made My Christmas Bright

How Quickly We Forget: Nigeria Remembered

Hydroponic Churches

I’d Kill for a Nobel Peace Prize

Inside Job

I Think I’ve Become Methuselah

It’s a Dog’s Life

Jesus and the Three and a Half Year Run

Just Call Me Hair

Living in the Book

Lonely Soldier

Loving Your Neighbor

My Dad: The Mayor of Stafford Court

No More Halos

No Niños en la Canasta

On January 10, 1964

One Heart at a Time

One Piece of Toilet Paper

Organic Dry Cleaning

Perichoresis: The Divine Dance

Pet Store Theology

Post-Truth: Are You Kidding Me?

Potty Humor From the Lord

Primitive Worship: The Return of the Seventy-Two

Regret-Me-Not

Respect: Find Out What it Means to Me

Returning to Square One

RooKies

Rub It Off

Rules for the Seventy-Two

Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

See Jesus and Mess Up

She Never Hears No!

Sick as a Dog

Sitting Next to Zacchaeus

Smile: Here Comes a Visitor

Smite Me Friendly

Solomon & the Vanishing Facebook Posts

Spiritual Commuters

Spiritual Free Agents

Spiritual Nudity (or Rated X Marks the Spot)

Staring At the Baby

Sweat Equity

Techno Gods of the Twenty-First Century

The Call to Be the Hired Help

The Christening: What About Murgatroyd?

The Dance

The Death of a Saint

The Empire Strikes Back

The Faster Pastor

The Five Second Rule

The Human Experience: On a Collision Course With God

The Last of the Shakers

The New Pecking Order and the Curse of Eden

The Other Side of Prayer

The Rainbow Dereliction

Thin Places

Three and a Half Years: The Perfect Ministry?

Trying to See Jesus

Virtual Reality: The New Savior?

We’re Just Little Boys Trying to Grow Up (or Not)

Weekend at Davey’s

What Size is Your Grave?

When Friends Go Home

When a Nonagenarian I Become

You Could be Illegal in 53 Countries

You Don’t Have Enough Bandwidth

You Have to Stir Up the Dirt Before You Can Grow the Corn

You Must Accept or Reject the Story

Preface

Writing has become both a discipline and a passion for me. I think it all started in elementary school when I wrote a play in which a few of my classmates and I starred. I’m sure it was a big hit, because the critics didn’t pan it. As I recall, it was a western in which I got shot. I don’t remember if I died in the production, but my playwriting career certainly did.

I never gave up, however, and I graduated to writing satirical essays in high school. Alongside those, I produced a few comedy skits as well. By that time, I was hooked. I moved toward writing sermons as an adult (which was fortuitous since I was a preacher by then).

In retirement, I have posted a blog thrice per week and send out a weekly e-letter. The pages found herein are a sampling of some of those early blogs. If you find them to be helpful, please let me know and I’ll publish a few more of these books. I have the technology (not to mention the material). The hits just keep on coming.

I encourage you to peruse the Scripture references along with these daily readings. If you don’t find a particular day’s missive to be interesting, at least God’s word will be efficacious for you. May the Lord’s blessings be upon you as you plow through these pages. And please remember, You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. (Hebrews 10:36) While that verse might not strictly refer to this book, I’m guessing you could apply it here.

-Dave Zuchelli

A Horny Moses: Biblical Translation Gone Awry?

Exodus 34:29-35

A friend recently asked me if Moses was ever depicted with horns. I wasn’t sure where he was going with that (or why he was asking me), so I looked it up. To my surprise, I quickly found a depiction of the great Moses with two horns on his head. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought it was Beelzebub himself.

As it turns out, there are many representations of Moses in a horned state (the most famous of which was by Michelangelo himself). When I discovered that, I needed to find out why. The answer was a tad unsettling.

To help you get the picture, I need to give you a little background. Today, we have many translations of Holy Scripture in many different languages. The science of Biblical Translation has been refined over the years to the point where we have a strong handle on what the Good Book actually says.

That wasn’t always the case, however. In the fourth century, St. Jerome translated Scripture from the original languages into Latin. That version of the Bible became known as the Vulgate and was the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, it is said he came down from Mt. Sinai with his face radiating the glory of the Lord. The Hebrew language connotes something radiating from Moses’ face (much like horns or rays of light). Jerome chose to use horns as the metaphor to depict this radiation. He understood it as light, and explained it as such in subsequent commentaries. Unfortunately, there were others who didn’t quite get the picture. Hence the horny Moses (see Rabbi Art Levine).

Over the centuries, people have argued as to whether guys like Michelangelo knew what they were doing when they applied horns to Moses. It’s not a huge deal, but it does make for an interesting discussion.

What it points up, however, is how someone can take a sentence in Scripture and turn it into something it was never meant to say. Moses’ face shone like the sun. He didn’t have horns. If we read that in its context, we can derive the proper meaning. But that’s where a lot of folks get into trouble.

It’s like the three laws of real estate—location, location, location. The three laws of Biblical interpretation are context, context, context. We need to read Scripture from the context in which it was written.

We need to ask questions of the text. Who wrote it? To whom did they write it? Why was it written? What was the geographical area, the cultural surrounding, the circumstance of the people who first received it? We can’t just pluck a lone sentence from a book written a thousand years ago and plop it into twenty-first century America without a little context.

Of course, people still do that all the time. If you don’t believe me, just listen to any politician who likes to quote Scripture. It’s a little scary.

All Souls Day: Hallowmas Revisited

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Most of us don’t give it a second thought (or even a first), but November 1 is All Saints Day. It’s also known as All Souls Day, Hallowmas, All Hallows Day, Solemnity of All Saints, and the Feast of All Saints.

Many of us miss this day because of the big deal we make over Halloween. The secular celebration, of course, always trumps the Christian one. (I almost said it trumps the spiritual one, but there is a spiritual aspect to Halloween as well—one I will not get into here).

If I remember correctly, the Feast of All Saints is a holy day of obligation celebrated among the Roman Catholics. In fact, it’s a national holiday (or at least, has been) in many countries that have been historically Catholic.

Like many Christian holidays, the date was chosen to replace a pagan celebration. In this case, November 1 was chosen as All Saints Day to displace the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain. Celebrating Jesus’ birthday during the winter solstice did the same thing. He was undoubtedly born some other time than December 25, but it usually works better when you replace something rather than simply try to forget it.

The great thing about the celebration of All Saints is the fact that it is truly the commemoration of ALL saints. We always recognize the famous ones—St. Francis, St. Joseph, St. Teresa, St. Joan of Arc, etc. In doing so, we often forget the ones who have not been canonized.

If you read the New Testament (especially the letters of Paul), you’ll notice phrases like, All the saints greet you. Biblically, a saint was anyone who believed in Jesus. We’ve somehow lost that definition in some quarters, but it’s still the correct and operative one.

What this means is there are saints who should be remembered on this day (and all days for that matter). They are saints with names like Fred, Ginger, Sally, Hank, and Tonisha. They have titles like Dad, Mom, Nona, and Tio. They did miraculous things like raise up families, work in coal mines, and round up cattle.

In other words, saints are not simply those the church has venerated over the years. The saints, both past and present, are those who live(d) their lives in an attempt to follow the risen Christ. They are/were not perfect, but they are remembered for their stance—a stance that says, Jesus is Lord.

It’s a shame that we seem to have supplanted All Saints Day with something as trivial as Halloween. Don’t get me wrong here. Halloween can be a fun, entertaining night. But the real heroes are not the ghouls, vampires, and living dead. The real heroes are the people who got us to this point in life—those who led the way in faith.

We are the current saints. Let us, each day, celebrate the past, present, and future of God’s church. Let us celebrate all the saints.

Allergic to Church

Philippians 2:1-5

Basic demographics (around the area in which I live) show that about eight percent of the people will head off to a worship service on any given Sunday. Eight percent… I heard someone say recently that people are allergic to church.

I remember years ago living in an area where that figure was fifty-five percent, and I thought that was bad. The other side of that coin, however, was the fact that it presumably left a lot of room for new converts to the faith. As Scripture indicates, the fields are ripe for harvest.

When Jesus sent out his seventy-two advance men, he told them to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the field. The thing that strikes me about these seventy-two was the fact that he sent them in pairs. No one was left to fend for themselves. They always had at least one partner.

One of the problems we face in today’s church is the feeling that we’re all alone. Think about it. If ninety-two percent of your neighbors are non-church-going folks (for whatever reason), it’s pretty easy to feel like the deck is stacked against you. Once that feeling strikes, it’s a short path to despair. Despair can be the crushing blow that makes us think, What’s the use.

If there’s no use in trying, we fall into some very apathetic habits. Some of us actually join the ninety-two percent.

If the church is supposed to be anything, it’s supposed to be a community. The early church demonstrated to the surrounding culture what a real community should look like, how it would act, and why they were like they were. The one striking feature of that early community was their love. Their neighbors were quoted as saying, How they love one another.

If we’ve lost anything in today’s church, it’s that tremendous sense of community. We’ve replaced it with a lot of things—programming, high-tech worship, and modern buildings to name a few. The problem is there’s no replacement for a close-knit, intimate group of folks. It’s what the Holy Spirit uses to bind us together. It’s what speaks to the world around us, giving credence to the words we say.

One of the main reasons we aren’t close to our church family (if we can call it that) is that we choose to be isolated. Many of us don’t even know our next-door neighbors. We’d rather be left alone. That attitude bleeds over into our relationships in the local congregation. We’re cordial enough, but we’d still prefer not to be bothered.

The result of all this is the sad fact that we’re not what we were created to be. The church in such a state is no longer the church. She becomes some sort of service club at best.

Relationships are at the heart of our existence. Ignore them, and we’re lost. Nurture them, and we’ve got a good chance of impacting the harvest.

Anonymity: The Desired Effect?

Acts 4:32-35

An elderly woman walked into the local country church. The friendly usher greeted her at the door and helped her up the flight of steps. Where would you like to sit? he asked politely. The front row, please, she answered. You really don’t want to do that, the usher said. The pastor is really boring. Do you happen to know who I am? the woman inquired. No, he said. I’m the pastor’s mother, she replied indignantly. Do you know who I am? he asked. No, she said. Good, he answered.

There are times when we’d just as soon others not know who we are. It seems, the more time passes, that attitude is becoming the norm. I was involved in a three-way conversation a few years ago in which we were discussing a nearby mega-church. My comment to this small group was, The problem with that church is you can go there and get lost in the crowd. Another person chimed in