Author Archives: Clark Bunch

Satur-deja Vu

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December 25th is not really Jesus’s birthday. This is not breaking news. Let’s stop pontificating on when sheep are kept in fields, whether or not it snows in Israel (it does) and making arguments for when his actual birthday is. Christmas has been celebrated on December 25th since A.D. 336, during the reign of Emperor Constantine. He made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Setting that date may have been an effort to weaken established pagan traditions, rather than following them. Hanging wreaths, decorating trees and lighting candles (and by extension strings of lights) have pagan origins. Celebrating the birth of Christ – the incarnation – is uniquely Christian. It’s not about a baby in a manger; it’s about the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. It’s about John the Baptist leaping in his mother’s womb and Mary and Elizabeth being filled the Holy Spirit. It’s about the angel appearing to Joseph and Mary and the faith it took for them to travel to Bethlehem. It’s about angels bringing good tidings of great joy and wise men traveling from afar to worship him. It’s about the deity of God being robed in flesh and walking among us. It’s about the point of contact between heaven and earth. It’s about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, the first page of a story that ends at the cross… which for us is only the beginning. So don’t worry about the day. At this point the Julian calendar is off by 13 days and observant Jews probably ignored it anyway.

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Firestarter

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So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

James 3:5-8
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Satur-deja Vu

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Wendel Dan Stockton – There were some celebrity deaths this week. Clarence Gilyard, best known for Walker Texas Ranger but also one of my favorite Christmas movies Die Hard, passed at the age of 66. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac at the age of 79. The pic above is from a senior banquet in 2011. Dan Stockton was my principal when I taught World and U.S. History. I said a lot of personal things that relate to our family in my Facebook post because many former students and other teachers keep in touch that way. For this post let me just say that for a man Dr. Stockton wore his heart on his sleeve and it was apparent that no one cared more than he did. The lives of thousands of students and dozens of educators were changed by his work and passion. I’m reminded of a line describing Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: He’s not a tame lion. Here is an official obituary.

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Satur-deja Vu

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This was me on Black Friday. How did you make out? My week was mostly driving and eating pie but there are a few things worth mentioning.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Pastor, author Tony Evans – I wrote Tuesday morning that I was in Augusta, GA for the bicentennial meeting of the Georgia Baptist Convention. There had already been a missionary sending service on Sunday evening, a preaching conference Monday afternoon and the first session of convention meetings Monday evening. The Tuesday afternoon session features the convention sermon each year, brought this year by pastor, author, orator and radio/television host Tony Evans from Dallas, Texas. I don’t know the official seating capacity of Warren Baptist Church in Augusta but the attendance Tuesday afternoon exceeded that. I did have a seat in the sanctuary, in a row of chairs put out for the overflow crowd. The room was stuffed and I retreated to the lobby where I found a much more comfortable chair parked in front of a flat screen. A small group of us watched together and listened in to the remote broadcast and each time the crowd in the room broke into applause we could hear that for real. I did step into the back of the sanctuary to take part in the standing ovation at the very end. Anyone can stream individual sessions or the entire 3 day meeting from the GBC website.

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GBC #200

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The Southern Baptist Convention began in Augusta, Georgia, 200 years ago. We are celebrating that bicentennial at this year’s Georgia Baptist Convention held in, appropriately and obviously, Augusta.

I always try to make it in time for the Preaching Conference on Monday afternoon. In a three hour meeting we heard four sermons with a little bit of praise & worship in between each speaker. The Preaching Conference featured three pastors from Georgia and one from Florida that I really enjoyed; Brad Whit, Jeff Crook, Dennis Watson and Zach Terry. Then in the evening session of the convention we heard a missional sermon from Josh Smith and a doctrinal sermon (on the doctrine of forgiveness) from Wayne Robertson. Jeff Crook and Zach Terry were my personal favorites from the preaching conference and Pastor Robertson “came to preach” to close out the day.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Welcome to the Satur-deja Vu for the week ending November 12th. I realized about three items in that I have an unusual number of food related bits so we’re just going to look at all of those and then see what’s left. Thanksgiving is coming up and Americans celebrate by eating too much, you know, just like every other day. So unfasten the button on your jeans and let’s get to it.

Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes Ice Cream – I realize this breaks my no Christmas until after Thanksgiving rule. In the case of Christmas Tree Cakes they are available for such a limited time that if you wait until December you might not get any. When I find them, and I haven’t yet by the way, I will buy three boxes and two will go in the freezer*. In the meantime I discovered Christmas Tree Cake ice cream might be a suitable replacement if worse comes to worse. It’s vanilla ice cream with red frosting swirls, green candy sprinkles and bit of yellow cake batter thrown in. It takes exactly like Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes. My wife described the flavor as “way too much sugar” which is exactly what Christmas is supposed to taste like.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Steven Curtis Chapman wins this meme. I don’t know the history of how and when this particular meme got started but I’ve seen dozen of variations in a short period of time. Props to Chapman for either being social media savvy or listening to the young whipper snappers that coached him.

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Satur-deja Vu

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Elon Musk has purchased Twitter. The on again, off again deal stayed on this time until it went through. Then hours later tweets like this began to appear, denouncing the platform and announcing departures like a commercial airlines flight. I don’t like cancel culture. I don’t like it when conservatives or liberals either one do it. The first time I ate at Chick-fil-A, in the fall of 1990, I didn’t know who owned it nor anything about their family. The politics of the founders had nothing to do with my decision going forward of which chicken restaurant to eat at. Marina Sirtis, Counselor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation if you don’t know, says she cannot “be a part of anything owned by Elon Musk.” Twitter is a platform we use to reach followers. Leaving a social media platform silencing your own voice, not anyone else’s. Who buys and sells the company is or should be a non-issue, imho. The irony is the reversal that has taken place just in the past 20 or 30 years in our culture. In the late 80’s Clorox pulled their ads from the 30 minute sitcom Cheers. They didn’t want to support (and purchasing commercial time really is support) the attitudes and behaviors prevalent among characters of the show. Similar protests and boycotts happened when The Simpsons premiered. I had an 8th grade teacher that practically ground his teeth while telling us about a Bart Simpson t-shirt he saw that simply said “Underachiever.” We probably all remember the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney in the mid 90’s. Maybe now there is something worth avoiding but it was hard back then for families looking for kid friendly shows and movies to avoid all things Disney across the board. The irony is that today it’s liberals who seek to avoid or silence anyone that doesn’t think, act and speak like they do. The people who used to tell us if it feels good do it and the same people that claim to want the freedom of choice for everyone will turn around and limit your choices if you choose wrongly, by their double standards anyway. Alright, that’s my soapbox for the day. On to other stuff.

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