Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-26-23

This is the Age of Grievance.

People these days are eager to assert claims about the hurts they suffer, the wrongs committed against them, the compensations they are owed. In this land of plenty. During this period of prosperity, despite blips on the economic graphs. “I know my rights!!!” yell protesters in street riots – even when most them do not know or understand the status of laws and statutes. “Rights” versus “wrongs” they might commit themselves.

People these days are not happy unless they complain. And, too often, about bogus complanints.

In this litigious society, lawyers stand ready to monetize the wrongs you think you have suffered, or have been convinced that you have suffered. Rather than moral palliatives, the “solutions” always translate to money, not explanations or apologies or corrections. Actual, direct damages cease to be legitimate justifications for picking others’ pockets.

The Slavery Reparations movement that first flourished in the Radical ‘60s has blossomed again in our day. Formulas for how much money contemporary Black people should be paid by White people – all non-Blacks, essentially – are calculated. Brazenly, the enormous sums are “due” to brothers and sisters who were not slaves (obviously) but also to those whose ancestors did not live in slave-era America. Or cannot substantiate their bloodlines. Or do not “suffer” any related effects. Proponents in California, with pens poised over other citizens’ checkbooks, dismiss these points as irrelevancies.

Similarly, the “Holocaust,” past which fewer and fewer people are alive, has partly become a Reparations movement. Dr Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived Nazi concentration camps, has written a book, The Holocaust Industry, in which he documents his claims that “a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters” routinely engage in virtual blackmail-by-PR campaigns. He documents the flow of money to “lawyers and institutional actors” instead of putative survivors. Yet TV commercials depict starving Jews today, even supposedly in Israel itself, pleading for money.

So forth and so on. It seems like every group on the landscape is aggrieved; every mendicant may choose a reason to whine — like “Pin the tail on the guilty,” down to virtual blindfolds. It begins with “hurt feelings” of invented groups and genders; and ends with threats of arrest if you do not surrender yourself to the Compassion Police. And it ends with transforming your value system, if you let them; and ponying up money. The paradigm is common these days. Every aggrieved person and every assembled group climbs aboard the bandwagon.

Almost every person and group, that is. It is still safe in America and the post-Christian West, to be prejudiced against Christians.

With increasing rapidity, followers of Jesus are proscribed, ridiculed, sanctioned, silenced, and discriminated against. By governmental laws and regulations and court decisions, Christians are becoming second-class citizens. In popular media they can be criticized as, say, Jews or Muslims or homosexuals cannot be. In government schools and on state media, many perverted ideas once regarded as taboos are endorsed, even encouraged – while Christian ideas, traditions, expressions, even innocent decorations are forbidden.

So forth and so on. Yet – unlike every other group of whiners across the spectrum – Christians are not seeking Reparations. Grievances are not new; for two thousand years Christians have been persecuted. The blood of martyrs has soaked many a soil; and still today there is prejudice and abuse of believers, all around the world. Have Christians committed sins too, through history? Yes, against some groups filing grievances today. But are Christians demanding Reparations for old grievances?

The answer, generally, is no; and the reason, specifically, is this: For all the promises of peace and the assurances of Heaven… the Lord Jesus Christ told His followers – us – that persecution will come. We are to expect resistance, opposition, and tribulation in this world. We should not be surprised by hatred. The world hated Him first, after all.

We have been told that believers might be “trouble” in their households. Friends and family might actually despise us. The Jesus you see in paintings, standing amidst the lilies? That same Jesus told us He comes with a sword. He told us about the things we must be prepared to put aside – to sacrifice, but also to endure – if we follow Him.

Jesus died on the cross to fulfill His mission, taking upon Himself the sin-punishments we deserve. But He did not free us from the rejections and persecutions He experienced. In fact He not only predicted such treatment… He virtually promised it. It will come. If it doesn’t… perhaps we are not doing our job as Christians.

Who will save us? Surely not the government: we are seeing that. The churches? No: remember that it was religious people who demanded that Jesus be crucified; the religious Establishment. Remember that.

The Christian’s “Reparation” will not come in this world, in our lifetimes. It cannot. We should be suspicious if it is offered. Our Reparation – our rewards – can be earned now (and only by His Grace, not our works) but realized only in Glory.

My sin – oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! –
My sin, not in part but the whole
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more!
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, o my soul!

Thus is Reparation paid. In full.

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It Is Well With My Soul

6-19-23

It will not surprise those who know me that I went through a rebellious streak in my younger days. I remember it well – it lasted 15 or 20 minutes back in the…

No – of course, no. Anyone with a pulse experiences certain changes. Winston Churchill supposedly said that anyone in his 20s who is not a liberal has no heart; and anyone older who is not a conservative has no brains. Well, I was never a liberal, but I get his point. We do evolve… because the world around us revolves.

I suppose, if “rebellion” has a cousin, I have always been a contrarian.

Back in my high-school days I did go through a cynical stage. Recently I recalled to a friend that when I was a high-school junior I memorized about a third of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, as beautiful but as cynical, worldly, and secular a group of quatrains one could find under this inverted bowl we call the sky. (Oddly, I then rattled off several dozens of them, despite not having thought of them in decades. “Oddly,” because half the time I go to the supermarket these days I forget what the heck I needed to buy…)

But during that mildly cynical phase of my life, it was time go off to college. I was allowing skepticism to creep into my faith, and I wanted to discuss it with my father. Our conversation is vivid in my “mind” because it was a Saturday afternoon, and he was flat on his back, a captive audience, fixing something under his bathroom sink.

“And why are you telling me this?” he asked.

Now I realize that I really wanted him to talk me out of my doubts, but I shared the other reason: “I have these thoughts on my own. I don’t want you think down the road that college filled my head with these ideas.”

Did he get angry? Did he laugh at my youthful foolishness? Did he sit up and reason with me?

No, no, and no. He hardly moved an inch, except to tighten the valve or something. “Oh, it’s a phase,” said. “You’ll grow out of it.”

I almost felt offended. Years later, I identified with Elaine Benes: “Don’t you care if I go to hell?” But at that moment, I asked, “Dad… Don’t you believe in Jesus?”That’s when he sat up.

“Of course I do. You know that. I believe you do, too, but if you don’t test your faith it won’t grow stronger. I’m not worried. I trust God, and I trust you.”

He asked if anything triggered my doubts. There was one book I recently had read, a disputed Mark Twain book that was anti-God, not funny, and featured a character named Satan. He had begun The Mysterious Stranger three times through his life, its final version (perhaps doctored by someone else after he died) written after his daughter’s death when Twain was more cynical than he routinely was.

I told Dad about the Mark Twain book. Then he chuckled. Despite my processing of its valid challenges to Scripture, Dad said, “I think you’re safe.”

Then he went back to the monkey wrench. And I went back to… my thoughts. I think I was insulted that he didn’t go full-bore and call the Scriptural Rescue Squad. We used to debate everything – politics, philosophy, literature, classical music. Why not this, I thought.

He trusted me.

And he let me know that God trusted me. Now, you might think that was a risky strategy. But it was a winning strategy. I felt respected; honored; trusted. That trust meant more, and stayed with me, than a weekend full of arguments, than a briefcase full of tracts, than weekly calls, tracking my behavior.

When it comes to it, our Heavenly Father trusts us too. He has revealed His Truth; He has sent teachers and prophets; He even sent His Son to die so that we might live.

He loved us first, before we loved Him.

In fact, He trusted us before we trusted Him.

Does that inspire love, and trust, in you?

Remember, on Father’s Day, that we should honor… love… and trust… our Heavenly Father too.

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Click: Like Father, Like Son

6-12-23

Progress. We may conclude after the lessons of history, over uncountable generations, and every civilization that has dedicated itself to the ideal… that Progress is a false god. Perhaps a worthy goal in the abstract, but little more.

The challenge inherent in “progress” is the fact that it is an abstraction. A chimera: literally something honored in the breach, a dream whose precise realization is an illusion; something impossible to define or finally achieve.

If we judge and celebrate Progress by prosperity, we ignore the poverty, starvation, and misery around the world. If we call the triumph of diseases “Progress” we ignore cancers, plagues, epidemics, and self-initiated ways of dying. We think it Progressive that humanity is proving itself more compassionate and welcoming… yet dysfunction, abuse, addictions, suicides, failed marriages, depression, and wars touch every country, family, and household we know.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

We think we know better than all of previous humankind – “we” being contemporary, liberal, secular societies – that we have, progressively, learned lessons from previous cultures; we have built on the discoveries of wise people; that science guides us ever upward. Indeed we are aware of many lessons of history – triumphs and disasters – but that does mean we learn from them.

In infantile fashion, we pick and choose from the annals of history, not to learn and see more clearly and improve our ways, but to craft new justifications for our original, base inclinations. The pattern is called Human Nature; the inclination, theological or otherwise, is called Sin. The result is called Self-Destruction.

Of course, it masquerades as “Progress,” so we congratulate ourselves.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

The West is undergoing a radical transformation of attitudes and codes these days. Under the name of Progress, the roles (and even functions) of the sexes are being redefined. Millennia of foundational spiritual beliefs and attitudes are being denied and even outlawed. Totalitarian practices have permeated national governments and local councils, supplanting authoritarianism, which in its turn had supplanted freedom of thought and expression. Murderous Marxism, tried and failed so often, is being recommended in myriad forms… to be tried one more time. And another, and…

We can look to the French Revolution, among many spasms of Progress, for similar experiments. Discontent led to radicalism so severe that the Church was abolished and its properties confiscated. Members of the monarchy, then the aristocracy, then the middle class, were slaughtered: the revolution “ate its babies” before the factions began slaughtering each other. New governments started foreign wars to distract – and conscript – the public. Fiat currencies were invented; a new calendar was devised; women’s rights were proclaimed and quickly suppressed; and new religions were fabricated to replace Christianity – “The Cult of Reason”; “The Cult of the Supreme Being;” and so forth.

Ultimately, this eruption of Progress, like the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” and myriad others that followed, accumulated its most dispositive statistics by the numbers of people persecuted and slaughtered.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

The 20^th century saw history’s greatest advances in knowledge, discoveries, inventions, medicines… and was by far the bloodiest century of persecution, death, and wars of any century. Innovations dedicated to killing. Progress? We believe ourselves kinder to animals; we no longer kill baby seals or slaughter herds of buffalo. Yet we slaughter babies at rates unprecedented in the history of “humanity.”

As the French say, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – The more things change, the more things stay the same. Really, a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes. So perhaps the millions of aborted babies are merely the “new” version of infant sacrifice practiced by “primitive” societies. But in this Age of Progress, we sacrifice to the gods of self-indulgence, convenience, and a “wiser” form of progressive morality. We know better.

In the post-Christian West, our orgy of selfish delusion lives on borrowed time, existing more and more tenuously on the inertia of expired sanity and fleeting prosperity. Our homes were built on solid foundations, but are crumbling. A few people have vague memories, inchoate awareness, of history’s lessons. But… collectively we are different. We know better. If there is a God, He will forgive us; He always has. Right?

I believe the most serious of all sins, theologically and practically, is the Sin of Pride. It precedes all other sins, and enables all other sins. We know better than our consciences. We know better than history’s examples. We know better than God. But…

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Ultimately the human race and, yes, much of the Christian world, has put itself in this dreadful situation. For individuals, where sin abounds, grace abounds much more; yet surely judgment is coming to this world. I am reminded, if you will indulge an extreme shift of reference, of a 1952 movie, Ma and Pa Kettle At the Fair. It was one of a series of movies about a family of rural nitwits, very popular at the time.

In this movie, Ma and Pa were tossed in the town jail, framed by the village harpy. Even the jailer was sympathetic to their plight, and he repeatedly left the jail cell unlocked or ostentatiously dropped his keys, so that Ma and Pa could escape. More dumb then honest, each time they called, “Oh, Sam! You dropped your keys!”

When Sam sighed in resignation and shuffled away, Pa slowly lamented, “I wish we could figure a way to escape from this old jail…”

We find ourselves in cultural and moral prisons these days. Jesus provides our way to escape; He leaves us the keys; He is the key. And we – deserving the jail cells wherein we find ourselves, often of our own making – nevertheless we wish we could figure a way to escape. The keys are in front of us. But…

There is nothing new under the sun.

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The Contemporary Christian Music singer and songwriter Rich Mullins sang this (caught on amateur video) at the end of a 1992 concert. A few short years later Rich was killed in a highway accident.

Click: Rich Mullins – This World is Not My Home

6-5-23

We know what we want; God knows what we need.

Jesus, your best friend, would ask – not how many friends you have of your own, but how many people cherish you as their friend.

Our society is doomed when Christianity becomes a habit instead of a passion.

God is not dead. He is merely unemployed.

Evil triumphs less when people hate the pure and holy, than when they are indifferent to such ideals.

God does not care that you are successful; He desires that you are obedient,

What matters more to God than your salary or your bank account – is how you acquired your resources, and what you do with them.

Men have forgotten God. That’s why all this has happened.

Equity is not Equality. Uniformity is not unity.

God fervently desires that we talk to Him. If you reach out to Him mostly when hard times come… I’ll let you finish that thought.

If the Lord does not wreak justice on America, does He owe an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah?

“All things work for good to those who love God…” does not mean that all things are good; but surely it means that nothing is good apart from God.

Never be in the position to say with regret, “I never had the chance…” when in fact you never took the chance.

The God of the mountain is still God in the valley.

If it were against the law to be a Christian, would there be enough evidence to charge you?

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Jesus will never barge into your life. He knocks because He requires that we invite Him in.

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Click: When I Get to The End of the Way