SCRIPTURE:  Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. - Matthew 23: 25

April, 1962.  A small Presbyterian church in New York City, Sundayworship service.  The Rev. Stuart Merriam yielded the pulpit to the church court official who had come to defrock him.  As Rev. Merriam strode undaunted down the center aisle to exit the sanctuary, the people in the front pew filed out behind him.  And then the second row filed out, the third, the fourth, until the final row had filed out in support of their minister, leaving the church official facing an empty church.

I had arrived late for the worship service, sneaking up the back steps to the gallery and wondering why there were newspapers reporters with cameras there.  Once the congregation began filing out, I joined the procession down to the basement assembly hall where Rev. Merriam reconvened his flock and continued the Sunday service, albeit without the blessings of the church hierarchy. 

Time Magazine and the city newspapers followed the saga of Dr. Merriam the next few months, his appeals up through higher layers of church courts to no avail.  He had been charged with "anti-intellectual evangelism" and, most damaging, with "untruthfulness and talebearing" for aiding an Iranian scholar at Columbia in exposing alleged governmental corruption back in Iran.  I was too young-23-and ill-informed to know the merit or fairness of the charges.  But it was my "real world" introduction to the tradition of dissent within church ranks. 

No question but that Jesus riled the ranks of the Jewish hierarchy, the law-abiding scribes and Pharisees who reveled in their legalisms and kept the church cup clean on the outside while allowing rot and corruption on the inside.  I learned that my ancestors were known as Seceders in Scotland-for walking out in protest-and as Dissenters when they later moved to Ireland.  John Wesley ran his own protest movement within the Church of England.  Martin Luther King led a protest movement.  Sounds like a tradition of trouble makers, but Jesus set an example of revolutionary protest against dead and spiritually lifeless formal religion.  He was a rebel with a cause, the holiest one ever.  Yes, many have "Shared His Footsteps," sometimes literally walking out in protest, sometimes silently obeying His commands and examples in purely spiritual ways.  We must each decide what path to follow, but His footsteps are there to guide us.

PRAYER: Lord, guide us in Thy footsteps and help us when we stumble and fall.  Amen.

Jim Burns

P.S.  We are still accepting devotionals in addition to what we have.  Your work will be a blessing to you and others as

well.  Jcook@trinitygnv.org