Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-2-20

God’s message for the time of plagues, lockdowns, economic distress, international strife, riots in the streets.

I tell you I am going to do what is best for you. This is why I am going away. The Holy Spirit cannot come to help you until I leave. But after I am gone, I will send the Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, to you.

We think we are going through strange times, rapidly changing events of great magnitude. Prosperity. Then suddenly the world stops spinning and millions are out of work; schools and shops are empty. The stock market breaks records; commerce is humming. Then suddenly a plague threatens to kill millions. The world’s major trading partners are at odds, then break relations; exchange deadly threats. Hong Kong, reveling in tastes of freedom… waving American flags… singing Christian hymns in the streets… brutally is suppressed and taken over by the Communists. In America, peace in (weirdly empty) streets, then suddenly major cities and towns are in violence, its (savagely crowded) streets aflame.

All within a few months; some things changing overnight.

Jerusalem once was like that. Jesus, that street preacher with a healing ministry, enters the city amidst celebrations and hosannas. Suddenly, in less than a week, He is framed, accused, jailed, tortured, sentenced, and killed. All in five days. The government is repressive, the religious leaders defensive. This Jesus is dead and His followers weep, also fearing for their lives. Earthquakes; the temple veil spontaneously rips in two; the environment is dark. Suddenly Jesus comes back to life. His broken body is perfect. Thousands see him, even skeptical Romans confirm the events.

All within a few days; some things changing overnight.

Jesus did return. He communed. He preached. He explained. People saw. People understood. People believed.

After a whirlwind 40 days – that frequent Biblical number – another change. Jesus left again… lifted up not on a cross but bodily into the heavens. From the Mount Of Olives this Ascension, as we discussed last week here, was the final, supernatural, confirmation that He was God; returning to the throne to sit at the right hand of the Father.

Father? Son? One God? Ah, the mystery of the “Godhead.” God chose to reveal Himself in three ways to His children. He could have chosen two, or two dozen. The Trinity is His choice, all God in three natures. (If we could fully understand, we would be Gods.) Like water, ice, and steam.

The third “person” of the Trinity? That is the Holy Spirit. Present and referred to in the Old Testament. But specifically promised and explained by Jesus before the Ascension. “It is best for you that I depart… The Holy Spirit cannot come until I leave. But after I am gone, I will send the Spirit, the Comforter, the Helper, to you.”

Who is this Holy Ghost?

The world still asks this. The Holy Spirit is the most misunderstood, and the least accessed, member of the Trinity. When Jesus left this earth in order to send us the Holy Spirit… it is almost like disobedience that we do not welcome the Holy Spirit more, seek its wisdom and guidance and power and comfort.

Fifty days after the Resurrection, Jesus’s followers, men and women, met for the celebration of Pentecost in Jerusalem. They were praying, and as recorded in the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles, something like a mighty wind came through the room. What appeared to be flames rested on peoples’ heads. They all began to speak… in unknown languages. Foreign tongues, unknown words, unbidden.

They ran to the streets. People heard; some understood; some thought they were drunk.

But “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”; that is what was going on.

And this has been “going on” ever since.

Given the broad expanse of time, this Holy-Ghost experience that has occurred again in these last days – perhaps close to the End of Time – is also a relatively brief and crowded time. In only a century, marked from 1906, Pentecostalism counts a half-billion people around the world, second in numbers only to Roman Catholicism among Christians.

It is a movement that adheres not only to the Bible, in literal terms, but to the practices, power, mystery, ecstatic worship and closeness to Jesus, and miraculous gifts that all Christians experienced on the First Century churches.

Of those “gifts” there are nine listed in the Bible, available to us. Pentecostals (and Charismatics) seek and accept them, and they change lives. I will finish this three-part discussion in the next message – not to be as a schoolmarm lecturing about history, but to share what I have joyfully come to experience.

However, in these troubled times – these very days, these troubled and confusing and dangerous and evil days – I think the Holy Spirit holds more help, and hope, that we can know. And what better time to know that we are not alone. I will share practical Biblical truths. For times such as these, the Holy Spirit was sent to us.

+ + +

Click: Sweet, Sweet Spirit

5-25-20

The Pandemic, or as most of us have come to know it in our daily lives, the Pandemonium, even in relative slow motion, has been absorbing seemingly every conversation, every newscast, every blog message.

It is difficult to believe that Easter was only a couple of months ago. Harder still, perhaps, to address the fact that the meaning of Easter seems light-years away. We can note, we do note, that except for a few exceptions the Church has been almost silent on the plague and the reactions to it.

Are church leaders “rendering unto Caesar” and dutifully following rules? Are faith leaders being cowardly? Are they at least stepping forward in their communities, in newspapers, on television, and offering… help? Prayers? Shelter? Alternatives to church meetings?

Mostly, no. Franklin Graham plans a tent hospital in Central Park, in fact in response to a request from Mt Sinai Hospital across the street. The city rejoices. Until he prays when it opens, and dozens of volunteers are in place. Then a successful move begins to force him out of the city. Those New York types hate Christ more than they hate Covid.

Believers have begun to rise up, and now churches are nervously – and occasionally boldly – joining the brave move to exercise First Amendment rights. It is about time! It was getting to be that I thought, if I ever find myself in a foxhole, I would want hairdressers and barbers at my sides.

Yes, we can worship in our living rooms; we can kneel at a stump in our back yards. Yes, we can, but we tend not to; and there is something about worshiping God in a place of God with the people of God.

Since Easter, among the Biblical things that might have been eclipsed is a holiday in the Church calendar that was already fading in importance anyway; a shame. Ascension Day for centuries was a major observance, more important than Christmas.

It falls 40 days after Easter, after the Resurrection. The day is always, therefore, on a Thursday, and most often celebrated on the next Sunday in churches. It marks the event, after Jesus’s final visits and ministering, being seem by multitudes, when He invited the Disciples and others to the Mount of Olives… announced another fulfillment of prophecy… and ascended into Heaven, into the clouds. Bodily. Witnessed by many.

And in that manner, He promised, He would return some day.

In many churches and much of public life today, Ascension Day is scarcely noted. In some countries it still is a national holiday, with schools, banks, and businesses closed… whether it is celebrated in peoples’ hearts or not. I do not know.

But Ascension Day is a holiday in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia(!), Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

Ascension Day should really be the most important celebration on the Christian calendar. My argument here is theological but certainly not dogmatic; I want to address how apologetics – explaining the Gospel – works.

The Annunciation? The world had to take Mary’s account of her pregnancy by her word. Christmas? A beautiful picture, fulfilling prophecy in ancient books. Jesus’s miracles? Coincidences or persuasions, perhaps. The Passion of the Christ? Foretold, too, but… His death? Did that prove Jesus was the Savior – and skeptics asked about the Resurrection.

And so forth. I flirt with blasphemy, forgive me, to make a point. We are told that with the heart one believes and is justified; and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. What do we believe, what do we confess? That Jesus is the Son of God, and God raised Him from the Dead. The final confirmation of Christ’s divinity is when He rose to be again at the right hand of the Father.

A bodily Ascension, witnessed by many, was the final thing that could not be cast into doubt by a skeptical world.

Of course I believe in fulfilled prophecy, the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, powerful miracles, the Passion and substitutionary death of Jesus, and the Resurrection. But until he rejoined the father He was not fully God again.

Jesus did ascend into the clouds; He was witnessed; and He promised to return to redeem His saints, where we will be caught in the clouds with Him. If you wonder whether you would still be in confusion – as, frankly, the Disciples were – after such a unique scene… note, on the linked video, that Jesus directed them to go to Jerusalem and wait. For what?

It was about a week away, and we shall visit ourselves in about a week.

+ + +

Click: Ascension Day

5-18-20

Occasionally things happen in history – I mean catastrophic turns – where the old saying about inability to see the forest because of trees, is taken a step further. These rare moments are not events like an invasion; neither a slow evolution, say, from serfdom to democracy; nor the relentless spread of an epidemic across the globe. A creeping four weeks is no different than a speedy month, is it? – and that is not the type of catastrophic turn I address.

When I was in college I had a professor who taught World History not by chronology nor region, but by category topics. They all were fascinating. One class looked at world history – different eras, different societies – through the lens of epidemiology. How did diseases, plagues, and pandemics change history and the course of civilizations? They certainly did, and often. In the 1600s a plague killed one-third of some European lands; the Spanish flu a century ago reportedly killed 100-million souls around the world. More American soldiers died of the flu in World War I than died in battle.

In those times, all through history, plagues were plagues and influenza was influenza. I want us to consider the possibility that our current situation might be a “virus-plus.” Is there an invisible enemy, a coronavirus? It sure seems so, and many have died of diagnosed conditions; I am not a flat-earther.

But this might be the world’s first plague where the fear of it causes more serious problems than the infection itself. Yes, deaths. But our spinning globe has virtually ground to a halt. The harm represented in that metaphor will be seen by future generations, if we survive, as perhaps worse than simple, cold death statistics. Families, careers, livelihoods, social disruptions, international anarchy, countries losing their freedoms, even wars might be the next chapters.

All this we know. And death vs disaster arguments must yield to logic and a larger sympathy. Many people are gripped by the belief that mere citizens of various nations are not threatened as much as the actual human species is threatened. Really?

I have become convinced that over-reaction has replaced caution among our leaders; and that panic has replaced prudence among our neighbors. Scratch a liberal official with rule-making power and a totalitarian pops out. In my state the governor decreed that DIY stores can sell hammers but cannot sell paint. In many states you can openly operate a marijuana shop, but are forbidden to hold church services. Neighborhood clinics have to restrict services medical exams, but abortions are allowed in those types of clinics.

This is the first epidemic in history with an agenda.

That is not the fault of the fuzzy little virus.

Your mind is not affected if you can wonder at the implausible and changing stories about the origin and the rotating lies as the virus spread across the earth.

You may well wonder at the timing, the US in a healthy and dominant position, dropped to its knees… as an election approaches. How – and why – we went from the healthiest economy in world history, to 1930s-depth depression. In weeks.

You should wonder why politicians welcome illegal immigrants, untested; and tolerate feces-covered vagrants by the thousands, yet you and I, law-abiding hermits, have to mask-up, stand in lines, submit to testing and testing.

You should question, as my friend Sarah Phillips recently did, about the massive imposition of imminent DNA collections, retinal and finger scans, cell-phone tracking, and smiling assurances from Bill Gates and other leaders (elected by whom?) that every detail of our activities – plus that of our bloodstreams through mandatory vaccinations – will soon be seen by people we don’t know. Calm down.

It is very possible – I am persuaded very likely – that we are under attack. Not by guns or bombs. Nor even by those furry viruses.

Am I being paranoid? That is not my style, usually… but even paranoiacs can indeed have people conspiring against them. Ah: conspiracy theories. I have a friend who recently ridiculed skeptics as being “conspiracy theorists.” In the same message – I kid you not – he floated his belief that President Trump is signaling an army of goons (?) by the colors and directions of the stripes on his ties every day.

I have a happy suggestion, if you have read this far and think I am crazy. There are some things that may safely distract you from deadly coronas:

* If you are alarmed by death tolls, spend some your precious emotional energy on ending the drug epidemic – yes, epidemic – in this country. That, you can affect. Straighten up the kids under your roof. Maybe drug cartels will dry up, too, with no customers – what a concept.

* If you are concerned about death tolls, think about the fact that hospitals are restricting, or forbidding, “elective” matters like cancer operations, mastectomies, scans, and other procedures — or patients are encouraged to self-deny — and people die. The stats about fewer cancer diagnoses, screenings, and diabetes complications these recent months are nothing to celebrate. Our masters decree that we shuffle morbidities, a fake-numbers game. Because the side-effects of shuttered businesses and lockdowns include more domestic violence and suicides.

* Stop acting like pickpockets, larding corona laws and regulations with back-door funding for abortions and legal weed and gun confiscation. Be honest, and lose in the courts of public opinion, if you dare.

* Resist freeing convicted felons from prisons and arresting hair dressers, pastors, and barbers, throwing them in jail.

* Show some outrage – if you feel any – about policies that leave hospital ships empty but pour infected people into nursing home beds. Wake up to the fact that in some areas, 80 per cent of “virus” deaths are in nursing homes.

* Realize that hospitals are encouraged to check COVID-19 on death forms, even when primary causes were other, and prior, conditions.

* Google a copy of the Constitution. Read it, and the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments. Check off the rights that have been violated recently, and violated with coercion. There will be many… and there will not be fine-print exclusions for influenza. Remind yourself that reportedly more people die in a normal “flu season” than have yet died from COVID-19. Remind yourself a second time of this fact. We don’t stop the world every flu season.

Finally, among those rights that have been violated – and politicians continue to ramp it up – are Freedom of Assembly (allowing crowds of… how many???); Freedom of Speech (social media routinely censors us at increasing rates); the Right to Bear Arms (laws are proposed to restrict gun ownership – because of a virus???)…

And. Freedom of Religion. Christians, People of the Book, are not dopes. We don’t sneeze on each other, even in normal times. We render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s – like respecting suggestions from experts and elected officials. Sure. We also live with consequences. We trust the Lord; we trust our God-given intelligence.

And we cherish our God-given rights.

Churches ordered to close? Worshipers drive to parking lots, listen in cars with closed windows to their church’s radio services, hungry for a minimal sense of community – and are arrested?

If the British Redcoats, those civilized gents 250+ years ago, had tried any such thing, Americans would have said three words: Lock and Load.

Yes, holding our Bibles and guns, Christians and patriots have to keep their spines from being infected by this “virus-plus”; we have to be discerning and consider whether this is all just a “Plandemic,” as I recently wrote; we must calculate the risks of responsible activities – as with a thousand other daily activities in life – and maybe we should regard the incessant and absurd carping of visible, not invisible, enemies in our midst…

And take our country back. The current epidemic is bad enough. A second pandemic — infecting our spirit — would be catastrophic.

+ + +

Click: I Know Who Holds Tomorrow

5-11-20

Sometimes, life’s circumstances can be like viruses. Appearing suddenly… not foreseeable… hard to pinpoint, harder to fight, often impossible to overcome – an invisible enemy.

My daughter Emily (yes, in whom I am well pleased!) in Ireland, with her family, has been a victim of life’s circumstances. Except that she has never fully seen the situation that way.

Onslaught? Oh, no question. She was a missionary, went to the “troubled” streets of Derry / Londonderry on the border of Ireland and Northern Ireland… lost her missions support… fell in love with a local lad in church, Norman McCorkell… married… went to Bible School together… jobs in church and running a retreat center near Dublin… setbacks… Norman’s epilepsy… with two great children, helpless but not hopeless for a spell, virtually homeless but for friends… returned to the Derry area.

Mr and Mrs Job, eh?

Don’t shed tears. Emily merely has pivoted, and pivoted again, starting an American-style food business (BBQ!) that has been well accepted in the city, her jars and bottles selling to stores and homes; her smoked meats selling via food truck to fans and to groups via catering. Emily has been on radio, in newspapers, magazine covers, billboards. She and Norman, a great team in the prep, production, and deliveries, were about to open a storefront… and then, you guessed it, the pandemic hit like a storm. The city is closed down.

What to do, especially with the insane PP rules? One thing not to do was retreat or moan or wait for things to resolve themselves. While making small batches of BBQ specialties to loyal (and hungry) customers, for non-contact pickups, she pivoted again. With sympathy for healthcare workers in hospitals and clinics, thinking the patients and the doctors should have other “angels,” she inaugurated a program for people to donate food – mostly packaged and easy-to-prepare – for the kitchen spaces in hospitals and clinics. For the workers and the over-worked on shifts, tired when they get home, to make their meals faster and special, and their days easier.

The response was immediate and enormous, after a little publicity and word-of-mouth. Individuals, cafes, stores, opened their cupboards; her garage was filled each day with donations. (As I write this, Emily reported that a man she doesn’t know heard about her “Pantry” campaign and ordered 87 Pounds, about $100, of foods from a shop to be delivered straight to her center.) She and Norman, and little Elsie and Lewis, pivoted to encouragement, thanks, deliveries. People were blessed – both givers and recipients. In interviews, again, Emily explained it all: “It’s what Jesus would do.”

All of these activities, pivoting to new activities, is what businesses call Entrepreneurship. It is what Jesus called “Doing unto the least of these.” The least? Taking care of one’s family is proper, prioritized. Then serving others. Good value and good taste and good service when times are good; good discernment of people’s needs and good organization and good charity – many untold stories, the time spent, the generosity of so many – when times are tight.

All in the space of a couple months. Emily will continue to serve the sometimes-forgotten workers. She is taking orders for no-touch BBQ orders for fans of her meats every Friday. She and Norman are looking again at a food truck with which – lockdown or no – they can deliver foods and be alongside events. Lo+Slo, her little operation, is not little, really, and cannot be suppressed!

How, in the face of health and job and housing and now pandemic opposition, does she thrive? She has a saying – maybe not original? Too good to think others have not used it too. It has become her slogan during lockdowns and isolation:

I Can’t; We Can.

Brilliant, really. An inspirational rallying-cry. As I thought of my daughter, admiring her from afar but talking daily on the phone, I thought of Jesus too – but not only of His admonition that we be charitable; He fed the hungry and said that we should exercise love to the needy.

No, let us think of the larger Christian meaning, a lesson, really, inherent in that phrase I Can’t; We Can.

God has reached down through history via the inspired Word and prophets and given us guidance and wisdom. Jesus came that we might have life and life more abundant; He taught, and offered salvation. The Holy Spirit was sent that we can have spiritual encouragement, gifts, power.

With all this spiritual help, we are blessed. Surely we cannot fail to be good servants – serving God, serving each other…

Yet. Consider I Can’t; We Can. Not only in the context of the fellowship of the saints and the priesthood of all believers, as important as are those truths. No, the “We” I think God would have us remember – and too many Christians tend to forget – is the We of the Godhead. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

How many of us have faced a challenge or gone through a severe crisis, and we pray to God, with confidence (and I hope not pride) – “OK, God, I’ve got it from here.”

That is wrong. The more we know of Him and His ways, the more we need Him, and know that we need Him. The more mature our faith becomes, the more we realize how dependent we are on the Lord. In every aspect of our lives.

Our livelihoods, our families, our homes, our businesses, our health, our budgets. Our patience, our sanity, our resourcefulness. Our future.

I Can’t; We Can. I can’t do these things on my own. We – family, friends, fellowships – are important; thanks. But the We who will see us through is waiting for us to lean on the Everlasting Arms.

I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13).

+ + +

Click: I Believe; Help Thou My Unbelief

5-4-20

“Where Is Jesus?”

Some people in these troubled times call this out to the heavens, to God, to Jesus Himself as they deal with challenges to health, family, income, sanity.

“Where is your Jesus now?”

That is a question that friends – skeptics, cynics, and non-believers, especially – ask in times like these. To certain people in this post-Christian culture, it is a rhetorical question, a taunt.

This causes me to remember a challenging time of my own, and my family’s: years ago my wife was listed for a heart and kidney transplant. Both organs were failing, and she was wasting away in hospital. My mother was near death in Florida, and I simply had to be there with my father. Driving to the Amtrak station, my car was T-boned and totaled at a Philadelphia intersection. My kids were staying with friends, but other challenges, including financial ones, loomed.

Mercifully, a family of friends was watching my children; neighbors helped with food and bills. My pastor loaned us his SUV until we could get back on our wheels.

And so forth. I could not be there for my mother’s actual passing – which was hours after I left Florida to come home for Christmas. Nancy received her transplants on Valentine’s Day, and lived another 16 years. Things worked out, in unexpected ways.

When things returned to “normal,” I gave thanks to Jesus in a conversation with a writer friend who was one of those skeptics. He said, “Why do you thank Jesus? Listen to yourself! It was friends who took your children in. It was relatives who helped with meals. It was your pastor guy who loaned you the car… Not your Jesus.”

I never had articulated the perspective properly before; but I quickly answered, “Those things were Jesus. He was just working through friends.”

+ + +

We are grateful, always, for gifts and givers. And we bless and thank recipients too, because they provide us opportunities to exercise charity. Not only to do love, but to be love.

That is what God desires for His children, even if “getting there” seems awkward to our little selves and our expectations.

Let God run His world. He doesn’t  always require that we understand everything; just that we be obedient.

+ + +

“Where is your Jesus now?” skeptics ask now in these troubled days.

Of course a single death is grievous; and if it could have been prevented, tragic. But in the long view, I think this pandemic has caused more trauma, anxiety, dislocation, and grief, from fear than from deaths; or possibly more than negative aspects of plagues in the past. Apart from things we cannot now know, like possible manipulation and skewed statistics and overreactions, we suddenly live in a dystopia, the opposite of a utopia. This revolving planet has come to a standstill!

Where is our Jesus? Of course He is still present. Behind the black storm clouds, the sun still shines. The One who created the entire universe is greater than microscopic viruses. Of course. Is there sin (and therefore death and disease) in the world? Yes.

Is a tiny virus, sweeping across continents, much different, really, than giant tornadoes, or massive floods, or unexpected earthquakes? No. Can plagues be prayed away? Sometimes, but mostly our duty is to cleave to the Word of God and trust Him.

“Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil, for I will be with you.” He does not promise a detour from that valley; or avoidance of what lies in the shadows… but for me, trusting that He is with us is a real and present help in time of trouble.

+ + +

“Where is Jesus?”

There was a poignant time in history when that question was cried with intense emotion.

Actually, back to back: after Crucifixion, Christ was in the tomb for three days. Jews mocked. Romans dismissed. The followers of Jesus, despite having seen Him perform miracles and manifest the Incarnation, despaired. Even His mother grieved.

“Where is Jesus?”

Then He rose. Came back to life. In a restored body. As by a speedy miracle, as the word spread and people saw Him, the hundreds of prophecies became clear. He had foretold of His Resurrection, and by rising proved His divinity.

“Where is Jesus???”

Then for 40 days He roamed the land preaching. People saw Him; listened and believed. The skeptic called Thomas doubted, and was invited touch the wound that still graced His side.

Where is Jesus? WHERE IS JESUS? “Let’s go down to the river and see the man who conquered death!!!” Until the Ascension, Jesus spoke, ministered, and encouraged multitudes, as historical accounts affirm.

Between those appearances and rallies, He must have had quiet moments. He had to go from place to place. It was His practice during His earthly ministry to seek solitude at moments, and commune with the Father.

I have a little idea that during the quiet moments, maybe in dark nights between towns, He roamed alone… looking, perhaps, for individuals. Not crowds, but solitary souls wandering, maybe spiritually lost, who needed a touch of the Master’s Hand.

In fact He is still doing that – seeking out lost souls who need the touch of the Master’s Hand.

You might be one of those. In fact, we all are, at least at one time or another.

Where is Jesus? Closer than you think.

+ + +

Click: God Walks the Dark Hills