Monday Morning Music Ministry

7-29-13

News, stories, jokes, and gossip have always spread quickly through communities and societies. The same happens today, only slightly faster – at the speed of electrons – but currency of narratives depends less on the means of transmission than the willingness of ears to hear. Uplifting stories and heartbreak. Irony and tragedy. Humor and horror. The Bible says we have “itching ears”… for everything.

This is particularly evident with a familiar component of the internet age we all know, the “Urban Legend.” A recent story going the e-rounds tells of a pastor being introduced to his new congregation. It is emotional and plausible; it sounds authentic and seems genuine. It could be seen as criticism of the American church, or as an observation of human nature. By these descriptions you will have gathered that the story is not true.

But that does not mean it is not truthful.

Storytellers – and truth-tellers – have forever used metaphors, allegories, and capital-s Story to convey meaningful aspects of life’s relevant narratives. Jesus Himself frequently employed parables to explain the truth. “Earthly stories with heavenly meanings.”

The pastor of my youth, C. Alton Roberts, once told me that he was disappointed, not flattered, when he would greet people leaving church, and they would tell him, “I really enjoyed your sermon!” He said his aim – his mission – was more often to discomfit, challenge, prick the consciences of his congregation, not charm them. As the humorist Finley Peter Dunne said, “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Whether genuine, not actually authentic, or pure fiction, how does the following “urban legend” affect you?

Pastor Jeremiah Steepek transformed himself into a homeless person, messy hair and ratty clothes, and went to the 10,000-member church where he was to be introduced as the head pastor that morning.

He walked around his soon-to-be church for 30 minutes while it was filling with people for service. Only three people out of the 7-10,000 people said hello to him. He asked people for change to buy food, but no one in the church gave him change. He went into the sanctuary to sit down in the front of the church and was asked by the ushers if he would please sit in the back. He greeted people, only to be greeted back with stares and dirty looks, some people looking down on him….

As he sat in the back of the church, he listened to the announcements and such. When all that was done, the elders went up and were excited to introduce the new pastor of the church to the congregation. “We would like to introduce to you Pastor Jeremiah Steepek!” The congregation looked around, clapping with joy and anticipation. The homeless man sitting in the back stood up and started walking down the aisle. The clapping stopped with all eyes on him. He walked up to the altar and took the microphone from the elders (who were in on this) and paused for a moment. Then he recited:

“The King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

After he recited these Bible passages, he looked towards the congregation and told them all what he had experienced that morning. Many began to cry and many heads were bowed in shame. He then said, “Today I see a gathering of people, not a church of Jesus Christ. The world has enough people, but not enough disciples. When will YOU decide to become disciples?”

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We might not respond to this story as comforted… but is your soul afflicted at all? Is Christianity something we claim as a title, or live as believers? The fictional Pastor Steepek, and his alter-ego (altar-ego?) of a homeless character, was a man. When I read this I thought, beyond, of the millions of children around the world, not just destitute but even more helpless and vulnerable. Let us not turn blind eyes to them.

Click: Tears Of an Angel

7-22-13

What has happened to American religion in the past generation? The solid rock of the simple gospel, the “good news,” has not changed, but other things have, radically: responses; core beliefs; church attendance; worship practices; new denominations; no denominations; new Bible translations; views of Heaven and hell and sin and salvation.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, as the sports expression goes. That scorecard used to be the Bible itself, but no more.

This is not a mere matter of mature believers finding their way. Is it American consumerism that gives believers the temptation to pick and choose the worship-flavor the week? Or the best concert and show on Sunday mornings? I think so, yes. And, by the way, this has led, in my opinion, to the major uncategorized denomination in America – Pick-and-Choose Theology. But that is for another time.

As a Sunday morning pilgrim and stranger of late, I notice that many churches have been treating hymns and hymnals as if they carry deadly microbes. Every song’s words are projected on big screens now (oddly, never the music, making a challenge for those not in the club, confronted with unfamiliar songs). Churches have Masters of Ceremonies. The music is pop or rock – even if most of the congregation dislikes those forms of music on their car radios. Worship is often a concert, as I say; minimal congregational singing. People are in love with the music, or a soloist, or a multi-media show… but not necessarily with Jesus.

It is significant that where once statues of saints, and meaningful religious symbols, stood behind the pulpits, many churches today have drum sets and Peavy amps. Our adoration finds focus “out of the abundance of the heart…” (Matthew 7:34).

I have been in dozens of churches where the service will be opened by someone like a pitchman in a car commercial: “Good Morning! How ARE you? I can’t hear you!! Turn around and give your neighbor a smile!!!…” Is there no place in the American church for the person who wants to enter, lay before the altar, and cry? Where do the broken-hearted sit? Is there a section for the desperately yearning? (“Oh, didn’t you get last week’s handout, telling you to turn lemons into lemonade?”)

Creeds are seldom recited any more. Tell me it is not because churches don’t believe in anything anymore. Confessions are seldom spoken, or even read. Tell me it is not because churches tell their flocks that there is no such thing – serious, anyway – as sin or hell. I’m OK; you’re OK; but this whole thing sucks. Excuse me.

The church in America is losing souls because, collectively, it has lost its own soul.

Speaking personally, I realized that the hole in my heart was that I have been missing the Liturgy. I was born Lutheran and drifted, hungry, into Pentecost, mega-churches, and other options. But starting in the first generations of the church 2000 years ago, the main tenets of Christianity were codified to answer skeptics and heresies… and Creeds were capsule statements of foundational beliefs. Likewise, the “Lord’s Prayer,” which Jesus gifted as a model prayer. Likewise the catechisms. Likewise again the bedrock hymns that stood the test of numerous generations – as sermons in song.

If the Liturgy became empty, as many of us recognized years ago, it was not the fault of the forms or the words… but in ourselves, that we grew lazy. Every part of the traditional worship service, Catholic and Protestant, represented a different essential fact about Jesus as Lord – from the Introit (entrance) to the Gloria Patria (Glory to God) to the Kyrie (Lord have mercy)… all the way to the Agnus Dei (sacrificial Jesus, the Lamb of God) and Nunc Dimitis (“Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace…”). Beautiful. Meaningful. Cliff’s Notes of the entire Bible message. Liturgy is a rite. But it is right.

I have a vision that the church of Jesus Christ can be revived in America and Europe by being what it was in the First Century. And what it is, I am happy to say, where the church IS expanding, on fire, elsewhere in the world. South of the Equator. In Asia. In persecuted lands, even. House churches, neighborhood groups, families and friends. Not “small groups” that are spinoffs from mega-church franchises; but small groups who don’t need the show biz, who gather because they want to and need to… and because they know they meet Jesus when they do.

One hopeful sign in the Post-Christian West is the Taize Community. It is an ecumenical monastic order that began in Burgundy, France in 1940. Its founder was Brother Roger Schutz, a Swiss Protestant, and its first community, on the border of Occupied and Free France, sheltered people displaced by the war, and Jews. Now its staff is more than a hundred brothers from Protestant and Catholic traditions, drawn from approximately 30 countries. They are not Catholic monks nor pastors of specific Protestant denominations; but they are people who live, and serve, in the manner of age-old monastic practices.

To describe the Taize community (and its work, for it now holds services and events around the world) is difficult, because it is disarmingly simple. It is simplistic in the manner I gave voice to above. It is not a denomination. It is truly ecumenical, asserting basic Bible beliefs. It has been accepted by churches, and former church members, across the board. Two Popes received and endorsed Brother Roger’s work; and he also received the Templeton Award, traditionally a media prize of the contemporary American church.

Every year more than 100,000 young people from around the world make pilgrimages to Taize for prayer, Bible study, and various projects. They commune, and then go back home, refreshed and equipped to worship in intimate group settings where they live.

Sometimes, to discover truths to guide our future, we must look backwards, in a way, to re-discover the truths of the past. Not everything “new” is good; in fact, much of it will be bad. Why have we forgotten that rule of life? Here we have examples before our eyes: youths, and new Christian believers around the world, are embracing Christ, not because of electric guitars or changing-flavor beliefs of the month, but because of the simplicity, the utter simplicity, of the gospel, and of authentic community.

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This video clip is a brief look at a Communion service in Taize (Taizé, actually; pronounced tay-ZAY), displaying the simplicity and what the brothers have been able to achieve as a harmony between foundational beliefs, traditions of the ancients, and contemporary life with its challenges. Worshipers and pilgrims return to their homes around the world, transmitting the simplicity of the gospel, of renewed lives, and of obedience.

Click: Worship at Taizé

7-15-13

One of the severe downsides of living in a prosperous society is… “What? Downsides? Can’t you see the glass as half full?” (I have never really understood that one. Half is half, period.) “We have achieved the greatest material prosperity in world history. America is the Promised Land for millions, and what people throughout history have dreamed about!”

Yes, all true. We are, on the whole, prosperous, well-off. And happy, even joyful. Just look at some of the signs: an epidemic of obesity proves we are well-fed. Divorce rates, suicide rates, infanticide, all at record levels in human history, indicate that were are happily well-adjusted. We are told that prejudice and hatred still run rampant; “hate crimes” are codified to resist those emotions. Even in the church: how many preachers think we are not prosperous ENOUGH, so now the “Prosperity Gospel” is preached.

And meanwhile, large sections of the church, while absorbed in such “theology,” surrenders its former domains of charity and morality, while governments and courts and media decide standards for the culture. A militant Compassion Police, without uniforms.

As I was saying, one of the downsides of living in a prosperous society… well, I have listed several already. But I think the biggest danger is the tendency of prosperity to dehumanize people. It might be ironic, but tends to be true, that the less we THINK we have to worry about sickness, poverty, hatred, and death, the less sensitive we are to those facts of life. Less aware of their implications. Less worried about those effects on other people.

The less we tend to think about eternal rewards and damnation, the less we think about Heaven as a goal of life’s long, hard journey – that is to say, less long and hard than it has been for the majority of humankind – the more irrelevant Heaven becomes.

Not obsolete, just seemingly irrelevant. What about this anomaly? Do we prohibit complacency and prosperity? Of course not. But it becomes more important a job of the church to increase the preaching about righteousness. Just as patriots, from the Founders to Ronald Reagan, recognized that Liberty is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Believers around the world are bearing unbelievable burdens these days. The last century saw more Christians martyred for their faith than in any previous century. Today, persecution, torture, slavery, displacement, ethno-religious cleansing, legal harassment, and spying are added to the deaths. Many churches in prosperous Western and first-world countries like America argue amongst themselves about Absolute Truth vs relational truth; and whether the Bible’s teachings about, say, homosexuality should be silenced, so to encourage new members to stop in; and whether there is a hell or not.

The remnant – today’s People of the Word – in America have a job that is somewhat easier, but also more challenging, than members of the persecuted church in other lands. In China, North Korea, Pakistan, and other societies, Christians risk their lives to worship and fellowship. They meet in secret places, sometimes each member hiding, then exchanging, one page of the Bible to avoid detection of the whole Book by authorities. Believers in America increasingly do battle with powers and principalities of the air; hard to see, hard to fight.

How many of those foreign believers DO those things for their faith? How many of us here AVOID things that would nurture out faith and service?

If it were against the law to be a Christian in America, would there be enough evidence to convict some of us?

Hebrews, Chapter 11, is nicknamed “the Hall of Fame of Faith,” listing many of the Old Testament heroes who were chosen, who were persecuted, who battled, who overcame, for their faith and their God. But, interesting to note, not every man and woman in the list reached the putative goal or version of the Promised Land. Some were rejected and persecuted, even killed for their faith; yet they fought on.

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth” (Hebrews 11:13).

A prosperous America is a fine place, but it can be finer still – as fine as it was in our earlier days – if we keep our eyes on a yet finer place indeed: the life of God’s commands, the Heaven of God’s promises.

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Today’s musical clip is a musical encapsulation of this message. Sung plaintively, solo, by the late Rich Mullins, it sounds like an ancient biblical strain, or a slave song of the primitive church, or the lonesome sound of the Sacred Harp songbooks in America’s past. But it was written about a half-century ago by Albert E Brumley Sr… and has been embraced by the white and black churches, rural and “mainstream,” in church services and concerts alike. It calls to us. If you “can’t feel at home in the world any more”… maybe your spirit is in a good place.

Click: This World Is Not My Home

7-7-13

The man was an “average believer,” or maybe an average non-believer. A lot of people find themselves in spiritual comfort-zones in Post-Christian societies. When we are told that we are born as basically good beings; that sin is a matter of contemporary, and changing, points of view; that “doing good” should guarantee our place in Heaven (if there is a Heaven); that a loving God (if there is a God) would never send one of His children to hell (if there is a hell); and so forth – when people are told such things, they easily can resist appeals to repentance. To deal with their problems.

When churches themselves, over and above the secular media and the community of counselors, hold such ideas, that people can barely navigate the turbulent seas of morality and spirituality is a certainty. And a certainty – as with this man we visit today – to be insecure. More: frequently, if privately, terrified.

He was having a heart-to-heart talk with God. He was not convinced that God existed – through the years he went back and forth on that issue – but it seemed to be a good way to organize his thoughts.

“God, I read Rob Bell’s book ‘Love Wins,’ and I liked it. I know it is criticized for being ‘Universalist,’ arguing that You will keep everyone from hell in the end. Can I confess? I liked it because I thought I found a book that will support my desire to avoid the Hard Questions that You ask. In other words, a loophole.

He thought he heard God answer, “It IS My desire that none should perish. But My Son the Messiah said that no one shall come to Me except through Him.”

The man said, “I know these things; anyway, I have heard them. But this Heaven thing… I don’t know if it exists. Or if it so important. And hell? Sometimes it’s like I’ve already been through hell here on earth. Why is this so important?” He grew agitated. “I once heard Rob Bell speak and he criticized that old hymn I used to love, ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ and he said he wishes he could rip it out of every songbook.”

He continued; “Rob Bell said that we shouldn’t wish for Heaven – we have work to do here on earth. That people who desire Heaven so much are missing the point of being Christ-followers.”

He thought he heard God say, “It is good to hope. Some people cannot identify with the meek and the suffering who seek release. It is well that my Children keep their eyes on Heaven; seek first the Kingdom of God.”

The man felt confused. Does desiring Heaven imply that we should be eager to die? And how much do we do to earn Heaven? “By grace you are saved, not by works,” he heard God say.

He sensed God challenging him, even as he doubled down on his skepticism.

God said: “I have sent a Perfect example to guide you through life, to Heaven.”

The man said: “Perfect? Jesus was arrested, thrown in prison, and executed like a criminal.”

God said: “Look, I have made it such that a strong, loving hand will take yours.”

The man said: “That hand? It is bloody, and has a hole in it.”

God said: “The fullness of the Godhead is in this Guide I have sent you.”

The man said: “I know all the verses, God, but, still, if Jesus ‘died for me,’ why am I still unhappy? Why is there still injustice in the world? Why the sickness, cruelty, hunger? Why should I think about some far-away Heaven?”

For a while he didn’t hear the voice he thought was God’s. Had it all been a dream? Surely He hadn’t stumped the Creator of the Universe!

Presently he thought he heard the same, warm voice as before: “There are already multitudes of angels who know not sin nor sorrow; but neither do they know the joy of overcoming… of salvation. You are not an angel; you are more precious to Me. My children, like you, will be touched by pain and sorrow – that “vale of tears” – because there IS sin in the world. But, accepting My salvation, you can know joy unspeakable in this life. And thereby know that there is a mansion in Heaven, awaiting you.”

And, “This world’s people once knew Me as so holy as to be unapproachable. Works, sacrifice, rituals – humankind tried it all. I wanted My children to know Me through a humbler manifestation. A poor baby, born to despised parents, living as a man, then as a servant and teacher; a healer; a Savior; finally a resurrected and risen Incarnation. If you cannot understand My holy will through this, if you cannot reconcile your duty on earth and your hope of Heaven…”

The man thought the voice trailed off. But he understood things differently. He would walk, and work, and believe, and serve, and be obedient, because he sensed the presence of Guide who would assure him that one day he might “fly away,” but in the meantime – through this “vale of tears” – that Guide would be saying, “Home: Come on home!”

“Home, come on home. Ye who are weary, come home.”
Softly and tenderly calling, “Home, come on home.”

“Home, come on home. Ye who are weary, come home.”
Softly and tenderly calling, “Home, come on home.”

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Today’s musical clip is not “I’ll Fly Away,” nor even the familiar “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is calling,” but the beautiful contemporary song “Tenderly Calling,” quoted in the blog essay. It was a song from John Denver’s next-to-last album. The graphics are by the eternally amazing Beanscot.

Click: Tenderly Calling