I have come to the conclusion that a lot of things they say about Jesus Christ are not true. Especially hearing all that Jesus-stuff around Easter, you know? Enough! What bothers me, really, is that we’re not hearing about that other Jesus, as I call Him.
Oh, He was serene and holy, like the peaceful face we see in stories about the Shroud. And I’m sure He smiled a lot, and sometimes wore perfectly starched robes, and went around patting children on the head, like I saw on the covers of all those Sunday-School pamphlets.
And if I remember correctly we have stories of Him preaching and dispensing wisdom and then moving on to the next town, other river banks. Like in the Chosen TV series. Yes, He was misunderstood; people were jealous of Him or threatened by Him; and He was an innocent victim of persecution. I understand all that.
But why can’t He just leave me alone with those images? Messiah, I get it. Died for my sins, fine. Shouldn’t that be enough, like at Christmas and Easter? A lot of people think that’s the whole package… but it turns out that’s not the case.
Which is what makes me annoyed, drives me crazy.
A Jesus who smiles all the time? No… I see Him otherwise. Sometimes He is angry. Sometimes He is disappointed and looks sad. Sometimes I see tears in His eyes. In those moments He confronts me. He reminds me that I make mistakes and even sin, that I am lost in this crazy world. He pleads with me to make a choice. To change. To believe in Him. To replace the junk in my heart with the goodness He promises. I’ve heard it. I hear it.
The annoying thing: He never shuts up. I wish there were a fishing village down the road, or some little group of followers that He would move on to. He persists. He won’t let me go, leave me alone. Those paintings of Jesus standing at the door and knocking? Don’t let that kid you. He knocks at the front door. The back door. He scratches at the windows. He is like an alarm clock; like virtual phone calls and texts. “Why do you ignore Me, reject Me?” is what He seems to be saying. “I love you! Don’t you understand? Ilove you! Let me in!”
And how annoying is this? – I’m getting the feeling that Christmas and Easter are not enough for Him. Or church once in a while. Or even every Sunday morning. He wants me, not my schedule or my habits or my family’s customs. But don’t I pray… or think about praying… or tell people I will pray… when someone is sick, or I’m having another crisis? What does He want from me, anyhow???
Why, why can’t Jesus be like the guys in those other religions? A wise man, a powerful teacher, a prophet, a role model… those are good enough gods for all those other followers, and their lives are OK. Well, maybe not, but at least those religions are sensible. I mean, Buddha and Mohamed and Confucius and the rest didn’t ever claim they were sons of God, or “God With Us.”
Isn’t it just like Jesus, though, to be the only One claiming that this is exactly who He is? That accepting Him is the way, the only way, to experience forgiveness, to have eternal life? It gets annoying, doesn’t it?
Because if it’s true… I’m fried. If that persistent, sincere, earnest, holy, logical, annoying Person called Jesus is telling the truth, I should be scared crazy. I heard that Bono recently said, “Jesus isn’t lettin’ you off the hook… When people say, you know, ‘Good teacher,’ ‘Prophet,’ ‘Really nice guy’… this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge: either Jesus was who He said He was, or He’s a complete and utter nutcase… You have to make a choice about that.”
Annoying! “Make a choice!” First Jesus says it; and then all those people who died as martyrs, embracing Him; and then these guys like C S Lewis and Bono, laying it out so logically; and then… then… then I know I do have to make a choice. Annoying!
Everything else in life these days frees us from having to make choices. Or, if we make bad choices, someone is right there to say “No worries” and “It’s OK” and “No problem.” That’s what is great about modern life, right? But… “Make a choice, make a choice!”
It’s not like my life depended on it. Can’t you see how annoying this Jesus is? Why? WHY?
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The simplest Sunday-School song, maybe the very first hymn a lot us remember hearing, answers the question of Why Jesus is so… well, annoying, sometimes. But Jesus loves me, this I know.
America once was called the Land of Many Churches. In many places, it still looks like that.
Whether it is the Land of Many Christians, compared to the past, however, is an open question. I will not count or recite statistics about how previous standards have fallen, or that fewer people believe in God these days. But the dissolution of traditional faith among the general population is one matter. That traditional faith has declined in many churches and denominations is something to note with alarm.
Whether the decline in faith has brought societal decay, or vice versa, is open to question. It ultimately is a silly question… or I should say frightening, because it is a condition, not a riddle, that confronts us. Nevertheless it is interesting, especially considering the historical sweep of Christianity, that the Christian faith might be retreating in Europe, the UK, and America; but it is growing and thriving south of the Equator. Contrary to common belief, it is, for instance, growing faster in Africa than Islam is.
Further, it is the case that African churches are sending missionaries to Europe, the UK, and America – the opposite of centuries-old paradigms – seeing mission-fields needing to learn about Christ.
This situation in America occurs to me when I receive letters or when people talk to me, usually in response to blog essays I write. I am eager to talk to people who have fallen away from their faith; reaching such people is one of my goals. Sometimes when people have spiritual crises, it is not because of intellectual debate, or other varieties of belief, or the siren-calls of the world’s temptations. It grieves me that there are people, and I’m afraid a lot of people, who have been turned off by… churches themselves, and other Christians.
Many churches, and whole denominations, have abandoned the essentials of the faith. Relativism, secular values, and the denial of Biblical truths – even the Virgin birth and Christ’s divinity – have crept into pulpits. Many churches conform to the world instead of trying to redeem the world. Of course people will begin to wonder, “What’s the point?” and children will ask, “What’s so special about Christianity?”
Is this not everywhere? No, it is not. But it should be nowhere.
Worst of all, however, is an age-old cancer on the church that is virulent today. Its adherents think they are defending orthodoxy and spiritual purity – and sometimes they do – but very often they show themselves as judgmental, censorious, exclusionary, and hateful. In our midst as Christians, we have today some very learned and influential leaders who argue – yes, sometimes, hatefully – about fine points of theology.
Quickly, I say that matters of faith – regarding salvation, sin, sacraments – are essential. But angels dance on the heads of pins when Christian leaders thunderously intone against “wayward” beliefs about when the Tribulation will take place… whether History unfolds as literal Dispensation we can discern from Bible study… whether the Gifts of the Spirit were valid only in Apostolic days. None of these things – or, more pertinent to many people, social policies and current events – affects anyone’s salvation. That is, knowing Christ, and knowing that your eternal home will be in Heaven.
A letter I received, responding to a recent Easter essay here, illustrates how these malignant attitudes are repelling people, not drawing them, to Jesus. I summarize the heartfelt letter:
The Old Testament followers rejected him because they were expecting a military-type leader, not a forgiving, all-inclusive loving teacher. I’m afraid many so-called Christians today have reverted to the earlier kind of thinking. They say Jesus of the New Testament is too wimpy and “woke”. They are not following Christ. I realize I am opening myself up to angry criticism. So, bring it on, Haters. I hope, rather, that you may immerse yourself in serious introspective thought with the utmost of humility and God’s Grace.
I was compelled to respond. Summary:
My own experience through all the years is that there are probably roughly equal percentages of people who love Jesus but can be “mean,” even haters, and those who hate Jesus and can be “nice,” each by the world’s definitions.
One problem with religion is that people frequently use it as a tool – or a weapon – to attack others according to their settled prejudices. As if they know, or really care, about what Christ said, or taught, or died for, or Who He was. One-tenth of the effort to criticize the “other” side in such arguments, if channeled instead to love, would lead to a better world and better people, more harmony. More forgiveness, more understanding.
But life (literally) is about more than peace and understanding. It is “all about,” or should be, what Jesus said, and Who He is: not what people want to weaponize, even friendly tools like social harmony. Another Easter comes and goes with so many people using Jesus… instead of surrendering themselves to be used BY Him.
There are Christian haters, sure. As with the religious leaders in Jesus’s day, they can be as vipers. Whited sepulchers. I have often stated that organized religion, not only self-righteous leaders, might have sent more people to hell than half of Satan’s demons. Hypocrites abound in our churches.
But… there is always room for one more. It is a tragedy when it becomes easier to hear the Haters than to see the Loving Savior.
Do not reject Christ because some of His followers are flawed. Do not avoid faith when some people practice their faith badly. Do not cheat yourself of the blessings of walking with the Savior when you might feel so empty… and He is opening His loving arms
Remember the words of Jesus, who still suffers abuse in His name:
A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all people know that you are my followers (John 13: 34,35).
Every Christmas, Handel’s Messiah is Top-Ten in peoples’ lives. In concert halls, churches, and community sings; on radio and TV we hear the oratorio, or at least the familiar “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” and the “Hallelujah” Chorus. Even if only once a year, this is a good thing, culturally and spiritually.
Handel’s masterpiece encompasses, as its simple title proclaims, the entire life of the Savior, from prophesy to Resurrection. Handel lived his life in Germany, in Italy, and thence to England where he generally is embraced as a British composer. Messiah actually was first performed in Dublin. I was privileged to see his writing desk on display in the Writers Museum in the Irish capital.
More provincial than Handel was his landsman Johann Sebastian Bach, born the same year, 1685, only a few miles away, although the two musical titans never met. Bach’s musical reach, however, arguably is greater than Handel’s geographical realms; as great as that of any mortal who ever hummed a tune or wrote a melody.
They may be compared – just as Christmas and Easter may be compared in the business of our lives – but if their works may be compared, it is unfortunate that Bach’s supernal religious works probably are less celebrated than Handel’s Messiah. Anyway, less “familiar” to the ears of average folks, especially during holidays. This is regrettable, because Bach wrote music of astonishing power, musically and of deep emotional import. The B minor Mass; Magnificat; more than 200 cantatas; motets; and two Passions, St John’s and St Matthew’s.
It might seem like I have begun with a predictable tangent before I have even begun this Easter message. But, no; I want to draw attention to the amazing way the human race’s greatest composer presented the Easter story. I wish it were better known to people: more familiar.
For Holy Week vespers services in Leipzig, Germany, Bach wrote the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion, which were each performed in the St Thomas and St Nicholas churches on alternate years for decades. Three other Passions apparently have been lost. Bach wrote about 1800 pieces of music in his lifetime, and about 1200 are extant. Approximately half of his output was Christian music.
His Passions were series of cantatas to be performed during Holy Week, and in parts during services. They were similar to oratorios or operas but without costumes or drama – singers were assigned roles, and there was a musical “narrator.” The straight biblical narrative was distributed among soloists (evangelists and individual figures including Jesus, Peter, and Pilate) and choirs (various crowds, high priests, Roman soldiers, and Jews). We can appreciate the spectacle that the congregation beheld: a combination of church and theater, Greek-style drama and opera, music and voice, emotive performances.
Two broad categories commend Bach’s favored Passion (possibly the work of which he was proudest of all his compositions), The Passion According to St Matthew.
Musically, it is a succession of amazing melodies, alternating gentle beauty, then tense drama, then profound emotion. It has musical motifs and phrases interlaced, reflecting the underlying themes and meanings of events during Holy Week. The combinations of solo instruments and voices; unique combinations and harmonies; and grand choruses of voices and full orchestral power are impressive.
All is outpaced, of course, by the spiritual message, the meaning of every scene and biblical phrase, and the skill of dramatization – the masterful presentation of the events – and the spiritual significance of every element. This is not a mere recitation of happenings, or a reading of Bible verses. The “Narrator” guides us, but Bach’s composition is a stunning re-creation of the agony and ecstasy of the Crucifixion story. By the verses and voices, the St Matthew Passion provides the points of view of all the participants and observers – including God, by quoted Bible prophesies; Jesus, by His words; and even us, dramatically through the eyes of the crowds in Jerusalem.
History came to call Bach “The Fifth Evangelist,” the accolade bypassing even his spiritual mentor Martin Luther, because of his clarity of spiritual understanding and the power of his musical talent. Some 15 years ago I wrote a major biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, and with every fact I researched, every work I listened to (and listened again and again) my awe increased. He was, in the end, a theologian who could write music, the greatest that humankind has produced or heard. It will be savored as long as men have ears, in the words of H L Mencken.
My friend the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris wrote me a note wherein he called my Bach biography superior to his own study of Beethoven, if you will permit me a little boast (well, I don’t give you a choice). However, he averred that I painted a portrait of Bach as being too much of a Christian; that spirituality was not a major component of Bach’s character. I am afraid that this opinion reflected more of Edmund than it did of Johann. For all of the old German’s success, Bach confessed that he was proudest of being a follower of Christ; then, a husband and father in his community; then, a music-maker.
And here we meet the Easter theme. We must all be proudest – first importance in our lives; the focus of all we do – of “knowing Christ and Him crucified.” The Easter story, the dramatic Passions, should be read and listened to and meditated upon, every week of the year, not only during Holy Week.
Indeed, the message of the cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, should be the themes of our lives. Church “days” are useful to help us focus, motivating our faith and devotion, reminding us of how the Savior of our souls suffered on our behalf. His sorrows and pain were endured to fully identify with broken humanity. His death was a substitute for the punishment we deserve as sinners.
God became flesh and dwelt among us, a sublime mystery. And – you know the story – His Incarnate Son’s resurrection from the dead is to show the promise of our eternal life. Unspeakable glory awaits us.
You can experience the story in what may be a new way. I recommend that you set apart a couple hours, open the link to the music video below, and let the story of Passion Week, the genius of J S Bach, and the mastery of conductor Karl Richter bathe your soul. The artistry of the performance matches the innovative music of Bach. Orchestra and choir are in a stark setting here. A giant cross above and behind the musicians changes its position amid bright and dark lighting, reflecting the tones of the unfolding Biblical text. I pray that you find the time to savor this.
Mama, I just don’t understand the things in Jerusalem this week. There are strange things happening every day. I am scared, very scared. And just a week ago, on the Sabbath, I was wild with joy, as I wrote you afterward. I write to you now about more recent events.
Maybe you have heard all these things. Or maybe not; maybe it will all be forgotten in a fortnight. I don’t know.
You remember how I wrote about this man called Jesus, the preacher and healer everybody talked about – some called the Messiah, including himself – how he finally entered Jerusalem. I wrote how the people, almost the whole city it seemed, welcomed him and cheered him.
Yes, I was in that happy crowd. I called his name. I put my cloak on the ground before him. I waved palms to honor him. Maybe you heard – he rode on a donkey. Some thought it strange, but you and I talked about how many ancient words and prophecies were fulfilled in his life and the things he did. Too many to number! And this was one of them, the humble king choosing to come as a servant.
Then. Day after day, it was like a nightmare. The Jewish elders accused him of blasphemy. Some people started to doubt who Jesus said he was, and made up stories about the miracles. The religious leaders made demands that the Roman rulers arrest Jesus. They threatened a revolt in the streets.
Pontius Pilate went along with their demands, and the people became a mob, convinced of all the lies being told. The Romans arrested Jesus, but that was not enough. Pilate offered the mob to pardon Jesus, but that was not enough. Jesus was thrown in jail, but that was not enough. In the public square, Jesus was stripped and whipped until the skin on his back was like bloody ribbons, but that was not enough. Usually, for the Romans, that is a virtual substitute for the death penalty, but that was not enough. The religious leaders and the mob screamed that Jesus be nailed to a cross until dead.
Pilate made a show, washing his hands of responsibility… but that was not enough.
No one spoke for Jesus. His mother wept, but all his friends scattered and claimed they never knew him. I am ashamed to say that I hid, too, and was silent. You know who else was silent? Jesus himself – he just quietly suffered. Mama, I just don’t understand.
I did watch as he carried that heavy cross to the Hill of the Skull outside Jerusalem. I watched as they nailed his wrists and his ankles to the wooden cross and raised it. I watched for three hours as he writhed in pain. He finally spoke a few words. You will be interested in things he said – he prayed to God that his tormentors be forgiven, for they know not what they do.
There were two other crosses, one on each side – condemned men. One mocked Jesus; the other called him Messiah, and begged forgiveness. Jesus uttered that the man would be with him in Paradise.
Jesus looked down on his mother, and said “Behold, your son.” Her sorrow was wrenching. Then he looked, it seemed, into my eyes too! And it was like he saw into my soul. It was like he saw all humanity. It was like he looked toward eternity.
Just before he died, he said, “It is finished,” and I wondered whether he meant his life… or his mission, his purpose. Maybe we will never know. Will this all be forgotten? It looks like the religious leaders, the government, maybe Satan himself, have won.
Mama, I don’t understand any of this. A week ago, the only things that many of us could think of were his teachings, his miracles, his healing. His love. And now… this. Please don’t condemn me. I went along with the crowd. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they? I went along with the government rulers. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they? I went along with the religious leaders. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they?
I must go to you, and let us search the scriptures together. For I seem to remember that he foretold that he would overcome death. And we have been taught that the Messiah would suffer the punishments for sin that we deserve. And he said he would rise again.
But, Mama, I have to tell you that he did die. I saw it. The skies turned dark and the earth trembled. It felt like all of creation groaned. A Roman centurion looked up and called him the Son of God. But they took his dead body from the cross. They prepared it for burial. They put him in a tomb, and they sealed it.
Mama, two days have passed, and he has not come back to life.
There are strange things happening every day, but Jesus rising from the dead is not one of them. Mama, I just don’t understand.
Saint Augustine’s Church in Derry, Northern Ireland, where my daughter Emily chose to be wed. It is one of the sites believed to be where Saint Patrick established his first gathering of Christian believers in the Fifth century.
There is an “Irish Shop” a few towns away from where I live. It sells imported items and offers annual tours to the Ould Sod. The American-born woman who operates the shop with her husband always seemed to appreciate our visits, and, like my late wife, is a kidney transplant recipient, so there was never a shortage of conversation.
Once my daughter Emily, who has lived in Northern Ireland for 20 years, visited with us. She shared the reasons she move there – visits as a missionary to street kids in the “troubled” neighborhoods wracked by sectarian violence and the well-documented ancient hatreds; how her ministry was scrupulous about being “Christian,” not Protestant or Catholic in its outreach; about the many severe dangers in neighborhoods they entered with hot coffee and warm words. And how, soul by soul, hatred is dying and love is rising. Her heart is with those people – so is mine, especially now that I have two Irish-American grandchildren.
One time I entered the shop alone, and by way of introduction – for she has many customers – I said, “I’m the guy with the daughter who works with the street kids of Derry…” She remembered and said, matter-of-factly, “Oh, yes. Teaching the Protestant kids to hate Catholics.” No tongue-in-cheek. She was not kidding. Automatic reaction. Despite having heard testimonies, even having talked with Emily.
That remark, that attitude, knee-jerk prejudice, taught me anew about the lingering presence and power of hate.
I am sadly reminded that hatred and prejudice persist in this world. Some people seem happy only when they hate. Some people are virtual professional haters about causes and issues halfway around the world, even when they have never been to those places. These tendencies are in the news every day. For me, I still nervously listen to short-wave radio newscasts from Londonderry/Derry, on the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where, yes, bombs still explode.
St Patrick knew about hatred. He was not a legend; that is, he really existed, unlike some other “saints” who nevertheless are celebrated. He lived in the late 400s, born in western England and kidnapped by Irish marauders when he was a teenager. As a slave he worked as a shepherd, during which time, somehow never despondent, his faith in God grew. He escaped to Britain, became learned in the Christian faith, and felt called to return to Ireland. On that soil he converted thousands, he encouraged men and women to serve as pastors, he worked against slavery, and helped quash Druid paganism and heresies. Among his surviving colorful lessons is using the shamrock to explain the mystery of the Trinity to converts.
He left Ireland on occasion… to travel through European lands, preaching, sharing Christ, explaining the Gospel, establishing church communities. Four hundred years after Christ, it is notable that even when the mighty Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion, it was Patrick who first preached to alien and hostile tribes and barbarians. Roughly contemporaneous with St Augustine in Northern Africa, he was the first great missionary since Saint Paul himself.
Today, almost 1600 years later, in an odd way St Patrick is more of an American saint than Irish or universal. Why do I have that opinion? In America, not Ireland, cities hold massive parades, dye entire rivers green, and festoon homes and schoolrooms, even those of Blacks and Jews and Hispanics, in green. I once was in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, and in the Temple Bar section of the city there were uncountable drunks in funny green hats, green vests, and “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons. To a person, they were all… American tourists.
The Irish, north and south (and in the Anglican Communion too) revere St Patrick in a more proper and reasonable manner. My son-in-law Norman McCorkell, Emily’s husband, shares some thoughts here. He is a BA (Hons) graduate of the Irish Bible Institute in Dublin, and is passionate about discipleship and mission.
Patrick passionately embraced the best of Irish culture, redeeming it for the Gospel by firmly standing against elements that were incompatible – ending the slave trade; reducing tribal warfare and murder. His life was an example of a new and different kind of courage – one that lived fearlessly and peaceably through God’s promises in an atmosphere containing daily threats of those horrors: murder, betrayal, and enslavement.
Despite the violent, and even magical, opposition from locals (Druids and chieftains), and criticism from church leaders (conventional bishops in Britain), Patrick used his lack of formal church training to work creatively within his context. Instead of employing church structures used by the civilized Roman Empire – based in cities, where bishops were supreme – Patrick formed an ecclesiastical model more like the Irish, who were rural and tribal. The inhabitants of Ireland had no settled towns, roads, currency, written law, government bureaucracy, or taxation. Society was decentralized, and organized around tribes led by local “kings.”
With Patrick’s influence, monasteries were established and developed as places of spiritual devotion and learning. Young men who had once given their lives to clan feuds were now transformed by the good news of Jesus Christ. Monasteries became “sending centers,” noted church scholar Steve Addison: “the Irish church took on the character of a missionary movement.” And thus Ireland became a glowing spiritual base for sending out monks into western and northern Europe to “be pilgrims for Christ.” This made Celtic monasticism “highly flexible, adaptable, and able to be transplanted – everything that the Roman Empire was not.”
“Sending Monasteries” grew rapidly throughout Ireland and Europe, bringing with them unprecedented prosperity, art, and learning. These population centers on the continent would eventually develop and become cities.
And by the way, Monasticism became bastions of civilization and Christianity during the long “Dark Ages.” I thank Norman for these words from “the Ould Sod” itself. These are lessons for today: what we can do, too, even by ourselves and against great odds, to bring the revolutionary message of Christ’s Good News to others. Love, not hatred.
Patrick was a saint for all, and is a Saint for today. He taught us not to drink green beer, but how to overcome challenges, hear the Holy Spirit, formulate a vision, and change the world. Not just his land but the world; and the world ever after.
As Christmas celebrations draw closer, people tend to think more about Jesus than they do at most other times of year. … or, anyway, what He might have looked like and acted like during His earthly ministry.
Speaking personally, I am grateful to movies like Passion of the Christ and TV series like The Chosen because, if nothing else, their producers dared show a Jesus who was realistic (as we must assume) – laughing, crying, feeling pain, experiencing betrayal and suffering.
In the Year of our Lord (giving credit where credit is due) 2023, however, the impressions of our childhoods persist. People can be forgiven, to coin a phrase, if their conception of Jesus is of a fair-haired, well-groomed, moon-faced, smiley guy with children always nearby to sit on His lap. Artwork on Sunday-school pamphlets told me so.
Throughout my life I have heard Christians and skeptics alike ask why Jesus “had” to come to earth 2000 years ago – so far back in time, so far away. Believers say their faith would intensify if they could just see Him. Non-believers and agnostics have a similar desire – that if they could just see Jesus, they would believe.
Well, we should remember that the Apostles who lived and ate and walked and talked with Jesus for three years, hearing His teaching, and witnessing miracles… if they betrayed and denied Him, and scattered when things got a little tough, would we be much different? Get real. Remember what Jesus said to Doubting Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.”
But Christmas displays have got me to thinking. Not that Jesus is a plastic Savior-figure for sale at the Dollar Store; nor a blow-up plastic baby-in-the-manger for a lawn display; nor a face on T-shirts of the worship band at the new church down the street. But I wonder what Christianity would be like if Jesus had come to earth in our lifetimes. How would Jesus present Himself?
We don’t have many “Lords” and “Ladies” any more, so those terms might have to be altered. What is the modern-day equivalent of Lord? It would sound strange – “President God”? Would we be told to address Jesus as “Boss”?
Very few guilty criminals are put to death these days, and when they are, the Cross is virtually obsolete. Would Christian gift shops sell trinkets of syringes, if that is how Jesus would be put to death, by lethal injection, today?
Would people wear necklaces with little electric chairs instead of crosses?
The Great Commission – “Go into all the world and preach the Good News” – would be the same. But today, the spread of communications (and, I’ll admit, employing some 20-20 hindsight in my scenario here) might alter the message of the Apostles and evangelists.
Today the Disciples would be seen as recruiters and motivational speakers. But if they could know what becoming a follower of Christ entails, even modern sales techniques would present some challenges. Consider:
– Become a Christian! When you commit to follow Jesus, your family might resent you, friends might leave you, strangers might persecute you!
– Become a Christian! Share what you believe and you might lose a job! Neighbors will regard you as nuts!
– Become a Christian! If you heed His call and perhaps go into missions work, you can be harassed, even martyred, like so many Christians in history… and still, today!
– Become a Christian! Among the perks – not certain, but very common – you will be misunderstood, criticized, ridiculed… sometimes by those you love the most!
Those are some of the “perks” of being a Christian. They are not much different than any time in the past 2000 years. But I would suggest, if you think about “Lord” versus “Boss,” and symbols of crosses versus electric chairs, that today’s evangelistic “sales pitch” might be more challenging than in times past.
In fact, everything is more challenging than in times past. As we slouch toward Gomorrah – in the words of the William Butler Yeats poem and the book by the great Robert H Bork – as our culture is ever more engulfed by moral relativism and secularism, the challenges of being a Christ-follower are increasingly stark.
Generally, we live in a post-Christian age. Thank God, literally, the DNA of the twenty-first century church seems to be healthier in the southern hemisphere. Christianity, as it always has, thrives in lands of persecution; believers, that is, one by one, refined by fire. Africa, once the destination of missionaries, now sends missionaries to apostate societies in Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America.
There is hope.
And by the way, regarding the premise I posed at the beginning – “If Jesus were alive today…” Here’s the dirty little secret, which is not so dirty; not so little; not so secret –
Jesus is alive today.
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What does it cost to be a Christian? What DID it cost 2000 years ago, when Jesus was born? Remember the “Slaughter of the Innocents” – the command to slay all baby boys under the age of two; the Establishment’s effort to deny the coming King. Hostility threatened Christianity then… today its stark enemy is indifference.
Friends have asked me for my opinions on the violence and bloodletting in the Middle East, and I know people are asking each other the same question. I have realized an anomaly in the situation – in the Christian and conservative communities in America there seems to be near unanimity on the “issues” – Israel is right on every aspect of the conflict; Palestinians are wrong. Yet many ask their friends, earnestly, what their opinions are, as if doubts are nagging them.
Of course, the repeated questions might not indicate doubts, although facts are elusive things. And we must all realize, even subliminally, the wisdom in the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s dictum that in any war, the first casualty is truth. Yet conservatives and Christians largely hew to the Israeli versions of events, not always exercising discernment, nor caring to.
As I am asked for my opinions, I do have some. I am persuaded that so-called Replacement Theology might be valid – that Jews were the Chosen People because they were chosen to be the bloodline of the Savior. I believe the prophetic words that Jews who have rejected the Savior will, in the End Times, be reconciled with their Messiah. (More systematized than Replacement Theology, without getting too much into weeds, is Dispensationalism, whose Supersessionist origins are not recent theories but can be traced back to St Augustine.) I find nothing in Scripture that persuades me that in these in-between times those who reject Jesus and even persecute Christians “get a pass” in this life or the next. “All who believe and are baptized shall be saved… oh, also, Jews who deny Christ and denigrate Christians…” Not saith the Lord.
Christians who think that Jews do not need to know Christ tacitly approve of consigning them to hell – which is, in its way, the most bigoted act of hatred we can imagine. When this attitude extends to other “free passes,” on national platforms, greater misery follows.
Naturally I will say what I should not have to say – except to knee-jerk folks who are myopic. The nightmarish atrocities described in the October Seventh attacks are repellent and to be rejected and condemned. Period. American TV news anchors occasionally have shown videos of devastation and mangled bodies in Gaza after Israeli raids – “unless these are faked videos.” Never are Israeli videos similarly questioned.
As a student of history I remember the Irgun and Stern Gang terror movements that bombed the King David Hotel and school buses; who carried out the “Night of the Beatings” where British soldiers were kidnaped, beaten in public. Or other incidents where people were hanged and their bodies booby-trapped; or the Deir Yassin massacre of a Palestinian refugee camp where children and the elderly were mutilated and women violated. But (?) those Israeli gangs were on a crusade to drive the British from Palestine so Israel could be established. Closer to our time, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and (with the assistance of Lebanese Christian gangs, the Phalange) massacred as many as 3,300 refugees who had been driven from their homes in Israel. I remember videos of children strapped to the fronts of IDF jeeps – “human shields,” like we hear about today.
Many of these terrorists in these gangs, by the way, became “statesmen” and prime ministers – Yitzhak Shamir; Menachim Begin; Ariel Sharon – some even received Nobel Peace Prizes years later. In Egypt, a terrorist named Anwar Sadat who was twice jailed (and escaped) as a terrorist opposing the king, also won a Nobel Prize years later, as President.
Yet among common citizens – those “fortunate” to survive these endless acts – the tears of mothers are the same, no matter who cries, from either “side” of the conflict. But mourners do more than cry. I recall that Jewish leaders like Albert Einstein compared the Irgun terrorists to Nazis; I recall that Osama bin Laden wrote that Sharon’s atrocities in the Shatila refugee camps “inspired” him.
I am aware that some Jewish sects, some Orthodox scholars, do not believe that the present “state” of Israel is the Zion promised in Scripture. I am aware that, at the other side of that discussion, there are contemporary Zionists who believe that Israel should extend from the Nile to the Euphrates or beyond. I am aware that multitudes of people would be happy if the nation of Israel would be “pushed into the sea,” and all the murderous implications thereof. God forbid; God forbid; God forbid. Such matters manage to make the current crisis fade in significance: they have historic, apocalyptic implications.
My opinions? I wonder about “equivalency,” a word we often hear. Responding to the brutality of 1400 murders on October Seventh, and those kidnaped – by killing 13,000 civilian citizens of Gaza, so far? I wonder whether years of Israel letting only 11 per cent of Gazans to leave the Strip; rationing clean water; and limiting electric power to several hours a day can be considered not an excuse but an explanation for violence.
I don’t wonder, however, that any of this can be filed under WWJD – What would Jesus do?
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This year, any observance of Christmas has been canceled in Bethlehem. Despite, at this writing, the indiscriminate bombings occurring mainly to the north and south of Bethlehem – which is not in Israel but in that “no man’s land” of the Occupied West Bank, just as Gaza is not a country or a part of another country – leaders fear that bombs might explode in Manger Square or other areas.
There also is a desire among Christian leaders in Bethlehem to make a statement about the situation in Gaza. “Madness,” Pastor Munther Isaac, of Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, called it. “This has become a genocide with 1.7 million people displaced.” Speaking for leaders of other Christian denominations in Bethlehem including Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Armenian, he challenged American politicians: “God has placed political leaders in a position of power so that they can bring justice, support those who suffer, and be instruments of God’s peace.”
Speaking of opinions, the president of Bethlehem Bible College, Jack Sara, noted the opinions of many American Christians who conflate Israeli politics with Biblical eschatology. He quoted an American church leader who called for Israel to “reduce Gaza to a parking lot.” Among the damaged buildings in Gaza, by the way, were some of the oldest Christian churches in the world, dating back to the days after the Resurrection.
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Concerning Manger Square in Bethlehem, there is a powerful song about a heart-wrenching story that was in the news a few years ago. Britain’s Independent newspaper reported then: “For 30 years, Samir Ibrahim Salman had made his way dutifully to his task as bell ringer and caretaker at the fortress-like stone and wooden church revered by millions as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.”
Samir “crossed Manger Square to get to the church to climb the steps to the fourth-century bell tower” as he did every day of the year. One day, “Samir was struck by a bullet in the chest. It was an hour before an ambulance could reach him but by then, he was already dead. The Palestinians claim he was killed by an Israeli – the Israeli army says they did not fire a shot near the church. Samir, who was mentally disabled, may have been unaware of the danger.” Medical crews feared an ambush.
Another death. Should our opinion be altered? Whether 1400 die, or 13,000 – or one – are mothers’ tears any different? Was there anyone who even wept over Samir? He was a Palestinian, but not Islamic; he was a Christian. Does it matter, Christians? He had been beloved of the town, and special to the church, because he rang those bells as a volunteer every day of the year for decades, different bells for different occasions, serving Christ and his neighbors.
Who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed the simple Christian Bell Ringer of Bethlehem? To those of us who are ignorant of the issues, who blindly perpetuate stereotypes, who support missions we don’t understand – and don’t support missions we ought to – those of us who have opinions not based on knowledge or facts – we can shudder at the thought that we might have been closer, in commitment of spirit, to the triggerman than to the Bell Ringer that awful day in Manger Square.
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A note. A friend who sometimes reviews my essays made a “hit me like a ton bricks” comment. She pointed out something we all know but need to know better: Neither “side,” for the most part, in this eternal conflict, knows Jesus. Yes, Christians have been involved in wars, many wars we may judge as unrighteous. Yes, we remember Jesus’s words: How can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite! But where is Jesus these days? As neglected as His bell-ringer? Reminders need to be… re-minded.
Please listen to the song about that Bethlehem Bell Ringer:
An ancient church in Bethlehem, A target in a battle of men, Stands on the ground where Christ was born Trapped inside the eye of a storm…
Soldiers move from door to door; Mortar fire, it’s all-out war. Army tanks patrol the street, They treat civilians with conceit.
Samir Ibrahim Salman fulfills his task the best he can. Each day at dawn he tolls the bells, While all around the army shells.
He walks across the Manger Square; For thirty years he’s lived near there, A simple man who spends his time In quiet prayer at Jesus’ shrine
Upon the roof a sniper aims His bitter heart with hate inflames Samir walks slow, his back bent low And is struck down by the bullet’s blow….
An ancient church in Bethlehem, The bells of peace won’t chime again. The people now all live in fear, Grieving wails are all you hear.
Oh Jesus, please, help Palestine. Turn all that blood back into wine. Oh Turning Wheel, Divine Design, Please bring peace to Palestine.
Our post-Christian culture has become, rather, so anti-Christian that it sometimes has to distort the past to justify the brave new world. Here are examples of notable figures from history whose relationships to Christ have been suppressed, and will surprise some people.
Vincent van Gogh is generally regarded as the greatest of artists, or among the few supernal geniuses who put brush to canvas. His works are respected and valued, yet his private life often is viewed as sad and twisted; that he was a disturbed figure to be pitied; that cutting his ear and committing suicide are evidences of an unbalanced mind.
Vincent’s life was troubled, certainly. Of many hundreds of paintings, he sold only two in his lifetime. He continually relied on friends and his brother for money. Once when especially despondent, he drank too much and was almost institutionalized.
Yet. Vincent was the son of a pastor, and brother of another. He aspired to be a minister himself, but was turned down by a seminary. He visited missions and charity halls, even once traveling to London to minister to the poor. He was almost as beset by what he felt as his inadequate service to Christ, as by his paintings’ lack of acceptance. I have just finished his Complete Letters – three massive volumes; how did he find time to write so much and paint so much? – and they are filled with Christian references. Until recently his Biblical-themed paintings were sublimated, but there are many, and they reveal his profound faith.
His brother Theo was the recipient of most of Vincent’s letters. In one typical example he wrote of his heart and his art: to paint men and women with that something of the Eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring. Among Biblical scenes he painted, many people see allegorical compositions in paintings like “Cafe Terrace at Night,” elements of which echo the Last Supper.
To much of the world today, van Gogh is thought of as a crazy man who cut off his ear. Modern studies have concluded that he did not commit suicide but was killed by a stray bullet. But a genius who was passionate about Jesus and wanted to reflect God’s glory in his art? Our age does not want to know that van Gogh!
Another figure from history whose persona is firmly established is Oscar Wilde. Playwright, poet, aesthete, epigramist, he also shocked Victorian England as a homosexual and proud pedophile. Only after the father of Wilde’s most consistent lover grew enraged, was the writer lambasted in public and convicted under Victorian statutes against immorality. Subsequent to a colorful public prosecution, Wilde was thrown in jail.
There (in Reading Jail, or Gaol as the Brits spell it) he might have rotted. Well, in fact he very nearly did rot. But he did not buck the system nor shake his fist at the bench or the heavens. In books like The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis he reflected a recognition of his sins – personal and social – and evinced a respect for Jesus Christ. He sought out clergy; he expressed his need for absolution.
Wilde wrote, near the end of his life: That is the charm about Christ, when all is said: He is just like a work of art…The little supper with His companions, one of whom has already sold Him for a price; the anguish in the quiet moon-lit garden; the false friend coming close to Him so as to betray Him with a kiss; the friend who still believed in Him, and on whom as on a rock he had hoped to build a house of refuge for Man, denying Him as the bird cried to the dawn; His own utter loneliness, His submission, His acceptance of everything… the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of His mother… the terrible death by which He gave the world its most eternal symbol; and His final burial in the tomb of the rich man, His body swathed in Egyptian linen with costly spices and perfumes as though He had been a king’s son.
Oscar spent his last days in exile in Paris, destitute and sick. He had not lost his trademark wit, even self-deprecatory. He complained of the cheap boarding-house room in which he lived: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Modern studies have focused on Wilde’s earlier aggressive iconoclasm and flamboyant homosexuality, but not much on his embrace of the Savior. Oh, not in these times.
I nominate a third person, or people, who can be in the category of “those we didn’t know were Christians.” Myself. I will explain:
I was at a party a number of years ago. Cartoonists and writers, folks I knew fairly well, but I was chatting with a friend’s wife I barely knew. The subject of a recent project was raised, and she said, startled, “Oh! You’re a Christian? I didn’t know!” Now: she was a committed believer too; and the statement was in the mode of “Oh! You’re left-handed?” or “You’re a vegetarian? I didn’t know that!”
I am neither one of those people; however the point is relevant – I immediately was “convicted,” a truth brought home to me. She knew the professional-Rick but not the Christian-Rick… and there should be no difference. Van Gogh and Oscar were, respectively, celebrities wrapped in eccentricities or end-of-life controversies; and whose reputations were “protected” by those who cared little about publicizing their spiritual rebirths.
You and I, on the other hand, are – I hope and assume – alive and kicking. If we are Christians, that fact should not take anybody by surprise. “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” a song goes. We don’t wear signs around our necks, and should not have to wear jewelry or lapel pins to announce or prove our faith-commitments to anyone.
We must not be ashamed of the Gospel. We can show love. We can forgive. We can share the words of Christ. We can serve the needy and the sick, the broken and hurting. We can – first of all – confess Jesus as the Son of God; believe that He rose from the dead after sacrificing Himself, taking our sins upon Him. The Holy Spirit will then see that we bear fruit as Jesus intended.
… And soon we will be saying to each other: “Oh! You’re a Christian too? I knew it!”
I was talking with a new friend this week about worship – how it has changed in the church; radically changed, even in our lifetimes, but also radically through the centuries. Does worship follow the culture… and should it? should it readily conform to contemporary trends? There is the legitimate caution that if a worship style slavishly follows styles of music and communication and – dare I say it? – entertainment, then a church risks alienating as many people as it attracts.
Is the function of worship music to attract worshipers? Or is it the role of worshipers to gather, and seek God, and praise Him, and celebrate His worth-ship (a theory about the word-origin)?
I have long been tempted to wonder if contemporary worship music is scarcely neither worship nor music. That extreme view can be found in the virtual book, Rick’s Epistle to the Curmudgeons. But I am far from alone. My late wife and I were… well, literally late for a service at a church we attended in San Diego. As we passed through the lobby, we saw an elderly lady sitting alone on a bench with her walker. We asked if she need assistance to enter the service, which was loud enough to indicate it had begun.
“No,” she said. “Every week I wait out here until the music is finished. It is too loud; I can’t understand the words; and the leader always insists we clap and jump. I cannot manage.”
This poor lady was robbed of a worship experience because she was, frankly, made to feel unwelcome for a part of the service. Alone, in fact. And she was alone. Was she, in a way, outnumbered, or out-voted? I began to notice that many people in the congregation (there and at many churches I subsequently visited) seem uncomfortable with reading from screens, jumping on cue, smiling when the worship leader says, “Good morning! Say it louder, like you mean it!!!”
There was a time in church history when people gathered to worship in diverse ways. Sometimes believers gather to “be still and know that I am God.” Sometimes to bow heads, or lie prostrate before the Lord, and not jump or wave. Sometimes to cry; not always to laugh.
How many people, in churches today, are more focused on the worship than the One who should be worshiped? Or respond to the music – the instrumental riffs, the drum beats – more than the message? Or who regard the entire service as entertainment? – how many leaders, not only the “audience” – feel that way?
I think what is at play is that the contemporary church recognizes a pervasive problem in modern life – let us categorize it as alienation – but reacts in a completely inappropriate way. Megachurches, “big box” churches, mass worship are superficial attempts to draw people together… have them share experiences… bond with each other. Yet, largely, these types of gatherings merely assemble strangers as at a pep rally – prompted to cheer, respond in unison, be audiences and not congregations, and applaud when the show is over.
Contemporary worship accelerates the problem, instead of solving it. And it is a problem. The church should resist these tendencies, not perpetuate them. These church services often can be gatherings of people who gather “as one”; but many of them are rooms full of people who feel terribly alone, even sandwiched in the seats. Worse: feeling as alone when they leave, as when they arrived.
Alone. Ironic in busy churches. Ironic in a mass culture. Ironic in crowded cities and neighborhoods, schools and offices. It is recorded and reflected in statistics: More and more people seek counseling because they feel unconnected. Murderers and criminals invariably are ID’d in press reports and police statements as “loners.” We jostle people on city sidewalks and packed lunchrooms, yet unprecedented numbers of folks desperately turn to internet dating sites, or “virtual” web friends, looking for fellow strangers… other lonely people.
The answers surely are explained by psychoses, not demographics. When the landscapes were sparsely settled, and before towns became teeming cities, people are recorded in history as being relatively alone, but not lonely. Folks dealt well with distant neighbors. It was only in the Twentieth century that social scientists began to recognize the “Lost Generation” and “Disillusioned Youth”; pervasive cynicism, ennui, and resignation. Then, the “Beat Generation”; radicalization; the secularization of society. How many people today really know their close neighbors? Or want to?
I think it is all a symptom of the condition that Contemporary Man simply does not like himself. And the church neither recognizes it, nor tries to solve it, except by superficial and futile means.
My friend told me about her church which institutionally encourages neighborhood groups that meet for fellowship, study, and… worship. Meeting regularly, in small groups, arranged by interests, professions, personal challenges, geography, whatever. But common care is visceral; bonding happens, and fellowship is genuine.
This was a paradigm of the First Century church. It was real. It was precious. Did it “work,” as church leaders today would calculate the numbers of “people in the pews”? Oh, yes. Christianity grew and spread, People wanted what it had.
Let’s pray, church friends, for common sense. If feeling alone is today’s deep-seated cultural problem – how is that best overcome? In a mass setting where people are instructed to worship like robots… or in circles of friends who develop authentic, intimate relationships?
Christianity was berthed in Jerusalem as a vibrant, living body of believers. It moved to Greece and became a philosophy. It moved to Rome and became an institution. It moved to Europe and became a culture. It moved to America and became a business.
Somewhere in there, Christianity the Religion was corrupted and became synonymous with the Established Order. “Be ye in the world, but not of the world,” a command of Jesus Christ, has become obsolete in the post-Christian West. This week was the observance – scarcely observed any more, actually – of Reformation Day. It has caused me to wonder how many steps forward Christianity has made since Martin Luther’s day… and how many steps back.
In his times, Luther was not the first Christian to dissent from practices, corruption, and wayward theology in the Church. For more than a hundred years, believers had been tortured, imprisoned, and burned alive for questioning doctrinal inventions of Rome, and daring to translate Scripture into languages of the people. Luther, a monk, nailed a list of his complaints to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. He too was persecuted, excommunicated, chased, went into hiding… and translated the Bible into the language of his people, the Germans.
“Reform” became the Reformation. “Protest” became Protestantism. But what have the movements since become?
Luther sought reform, not revolution, yet revolution occurred: half of Europe caught fire with the belief that faith alone, by God’s grace, actuated salvation; and that people needed no intercessor with God except Christ; not saints (many of whom were fictional inventions), not Marys, not purchased “indulgences.” As doctrines, “Faith Alone,” “Scripture Alone,” “Christ Alone,” and “Grace Alone” were themselves resurrected.
The Reformation finally caught fire after the accumulation of martyrs. Other Reform denominations were founded. Luther, who never intended to break with the Church much less see a denomination established with his name, had to rein in his followers, the radical among whom had begun to destroy statues and Christian art. At the other extreme, Luther rode the wave, often manifested in secular art, of the Renaissance. Because his Reformation respected literacy and inquiry, local ecclesiastical and political control, and the dignity of the individual, the whirlwind he unleashed effectively led to the printing press, the Enlightenment, and Western democracy.
(For another essay we must examine the seeming contradictions in Luther’s rejection of Modernism – he can be seen as the last of the Medievalists – and remember his dictum that “Reason is the enemy of faith.”)
But, for those of us who commemorate the “birth” of the Reformation, let us think about the denominational movements, collectively called Protestant. Historians know what was protested 500 years ago. What do they protest against today? “Christendom” – the Western Church, certainly the American church in virtually all its corners — is in dire need of reformation again.
Many Protestant churches have become as secularized, money-oriented, and social, as the offending Roman churches were 500 years ago.
Many Protestant churches emphasize “works” – rewards, incentives, trying to please God through good deeds – no less than the Papacy did when Luther was disgusted by it all.
Many Protestant churches ignore the tenets of the faith, deny the Divinity of Christ, and question essential doctrines of the faith… to an extent worse than Luther beheld in Rome.
Christians must live in this world protesting – that is, not accepting the world’s standards, not conforming to the ways of the world. We must either offend the world-system or be a sweet savor; but NOT become like the world. Jesus did not “go along”! What does Protestantism protest against any more?
The Reformation succeeded in part because the larger culture enthusiastically embraced, for a time, the melding of Christian and social, civic lifestyles. But now, upon the altars of inclusion, pluralism, and multi-culturalism, Western societies increasingly eschew even mentions of Christianity and its standards, much less respect them.
Martin Luther accepted martyrdom for his beliefs, even to the point of his rescue. A letter on display at the Museum of the Bible, written the night before his trial, displays how accepting he was of his fate… and how ready to defend his conscience, to die for His Lord. He said when he was called on trial to recant his beliefs and writings (under the threat of death), Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can not and will not retract [my writings]. For it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.
The time is coming in this contemporary world when Christians will have it demanded of them to renounce their faith; in fact, it has begun. That this is already a time of anti-Christian persecution is abundantly clear. Not only in pagan and Communist lands, but our own. Believers daily suffer indignities and are asked to compromise their principles and forced to sublimate their voices.
Some day soon Christians will have to suffer no longer in silence, and will lose the luxury of withdrawing into small groups and communities of believers. The Bible does not merely warn… prophets did not just threaten… but God foretold and promised this holy challenge to the saints of God in the End Times.
We must, like Martin Luther, embrace our faith and moral integrity, at all costs; and find the spiritual strength to say:
It is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other.
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A clip of Niall MacGinnis’s iconic portrayal of Martin Luther:
I recently have had cause to “describe what I do.” Because of a flurry of interviews and articles, I am being asked to list the activities and high points, such as they might be, of my career.
Some books, various jobs, a few awards, and lengthy prison terms (= three truths and a lie) routinely have been accepted, but I have had “pushback,” occasionally, about activities I label as “Christian apologetics.” Apologetics is something that has been exercised since the Resurrection of Jesus, and this blog site’s fare – my 14 years or so of sharing these thoughts every week – is an example of the form.
Some people evidently misunderstand the term, which infrequently is used except in the religious context; and less often even in that case. Because of similarity to “apology,” the word can carry the connotation of being defensive about our faith. Or whining about elements of theology. Or making excuses for Christians who commit offenses. No.
Christian apologetics is derived from the Greek word apologia, which simply means offering an explanation or a defense. In other words, it is a method of presenting the Gospel. One might think that all sermons or religious writing does that, yet that is hardly the case. Since the Disciples’ time (“the Apostolic Age”) and down through the centuries, writers and speakers also (or alternatively) have concentrated on teaching, or exhortations, or correction, or evangelism, or social action, or…
I have chosen in several books and these blog messages to know Christ and to make Him known, in the words of the motto of a church in which I worshiped years ago in Connecticut. This “calling” motivates me perhaps because that is what I needed most at points in my life – and still, often today. That is why in these essays I share my thoughts more than preach from a platform. I sometimes am encouraged to collect some of these essays in a book, and I would title that book Eavesdropping on God, because I have learned His truths by paying attention when He acts; and then sharing (“experiential apologetics,” to be precise).
Beyond the basics, no form of sharing the Gospel (“Good News”) is superior to the others – their utility and efficacy depend more upon the hearer than the speaker. Yet some of the great giants of the faith over 2000 years have been apologists: St Paul at times; early saints of the church, cited by the amazing historian Eusebius, who defended the faith during days of Roman persecution; Justin Martyr; Origen; Augustine of course; Anselm. History tends to persuade people today that philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment were “enlightened” because they developed intellectual arguments against Christianity, but the opposite was true: they largely discovered scientific proofs and arguments for the truth of the Gospel.
The philosopher, scientist, and essayist Blaise Pascal was one who defended the form of apologetics when he wrote: Men despise religion; they hate it [because they] fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true.
In our day, perhaps because the world is desperate for it, many have chosen to help people know Jesus by adopting methods of apologetics. C S Lewis, most powerfully; G K Chesterton; Francis Schaeffer; my old friend Mike Yaconelli; Josh McDowell; John MacArthur; R C Sproul; Father Robert Barron; Jimmy Swaggart; and of course Billy and Franklin Graham.
Having explained the explainers and explanation, however, there are some who wonder why God Almighty does not make Himself known more directly. I have a friend who is a fervent Christian, but going through some personal crises. She cries out – as we all have in certain moments – why God does not make Himself appear to us, perhaps physically or audibly. Why faith is required when, for instance, the Disciples could see and talk to Jesus. “The Gospel of Jesus is easy to understand; but the person of Jesus sometimes is hard to know…”
Sharing the Gospel, employing apologetics, is the challenge and the privilege afforded to those of us who serve Him when dealing with such “assignments.”
One reason I cherish story is because we can only “explain” and “defend” so much; ultimately the person of Christ, has to be met, not only described. We try, but there is no substitution.
Do you yearn to see a physical Jesus? His Disciples walked with Him for three and a half years, yet when things got dicey, they denied knowing Him, and scattered. Would we be any different, in the midst of our problems?
Thomas literally could not believe his eyes when the risen Savior approached him. When he beheld the wounds, Jesus said, “You believe because you see. But blessed are those who believe in me but who have not seen.”
I employ apologetics when I bypass theological arguments and fire-and-brimstone, and simply explain to people that “I know that I know that I know.” We all can identify with such inner assurances. I have met Him – no; He has met me – in times of trouble and crisis. And no less in times of confusion and anguish. And joy. A difference between head-knowledge and heart-knowledge.
I have witnessed miracles. And for all the glorious physical mysteries I cannot explain, least of all can I explain what He brings – “the peace that passeth all understanding.” The world can’t give that; the world can’t take it away.
So I bring no apologies for bringing apologetics to you. I can attempt the methods of historicity and theology and teleology and familiar threats of eternal damnation and promises of eternal life in Paradise – all courses of the same meal, as it were. But I have chosen to know Jesus and make Him known by sharing what He shows me, and what He has done in my life, and what I see He does in the lives of others.
Can I introduce you to my best friend? I’ve got a story or two to tell you…
The Holy Bible is comprised of many books written by many hands over many centuries in many locations. Most of the writers did not know each other; neither did they dream of how their texts would be joined or bequeathed through subsequent history.
In fact some of the books were written frankly to record events; some were written to inform and instruct other believers; some were written in the clear belief of writers that they were transcribing God’s words and warnings and commandments.
All the writers, however, were inspired. Consider that word literally: in-spired; as per respiration and other words, the root is “breathing.” So the Holy Spirit of God, by common belief of all the scribes, believed that the Lord “breathed in” to their hearts. As our Creator-God, He did such things. In these later times and by other ways, He still whispers His truths to us… He speaks to us in answered prayer, and inspired thoughts. Like no other deity in other “religions,” His words are confirmed multiplied times over, through the ages.
The “harmony of Scripture” and “unity of the Gospel” are therefore truths that reassure believers, and astonish mathematicians, among others. Think about the probabilities of disparate people agreeing with others whom they did not know; or confirming facts about which they had no tangible clues; or sharing predictions and prophecies that happened, as it turned out, “to the letter.”
These people “recorded” as the Spirit of God dictated to their hearts, things that sometimes made no sense, or seemed irrelevant at the times… but of course have powerful relevance to humankind. Scientists and archaeologists today are discovering places and persons in ancient Scripture that were recently thought to be poetry or fantasy or fiction… but – we discover that those kings, those battles, those cities were real.
The Bible tells us so.
So, despite the stubborn secularists and agnostics who regard it all as a fable or insider-conspiracy or poetic nonsense, we stand in awe of the Holy Bible as history (“His story”); as wisdom and guidance; as a Love Letter from God Almighty. Between its covers are not random contents and disputes and admonitions, but exceedingly precise, intentional words for our comings-and-goings. And for our lives.
There are nit-pickers, some of whom seem sincere, and some of whom have huff-and-puff scholarly manners, who tell of minute differences between, say, accounts in the Gospels – just how many things did Jesus say when hanging on the cross? Or renewed skepticism when their “proofs” against, say, a Great Flood or the actual existence of an ancient Biblical kingdom, have been upended. If they spent one one-thousandth of the time studying the truths in God’s Word, as they do searching for contradictions…
They, and the world, might be better off.
If we look hard enough, anyone can see what they want to see, or miss what they want to miss. I was on the editorial team of the republication of the 1599 Geneva Bible, which was in fact the translation of John Calvin that (among other significance) Pilgrims brought to the colonies; not the King James version. It lives in history as the “Breeches” Bible because translators handled the account in Genesis 3:7, where Adam sewed fig leaves together to cover his nakedness, and called the garment “breeches.” Somehow mankind seemed to pay as much attention to that, as to the entirety of Scripture.
There are other tempests in teapots – or angels dancing on heads of pins. The Apocrypha is, or is not, regarded as canon; and portions of Daniel and Esther are regarded by some Christians as “Deuterocanonical” – added or discovered at dates later than “accepted” Scripture. Martin Luther doubted the authority of the Book of James. I recently have been studying the movement of the early church father Marcion, who held unorthodox views on the relevance of the Old Testament, and establishment of the Apostolic church, to Christ’s mission and message. Some view him as heretical, but without his movement, we might not have some of New Testament Scripture and traditions.
Again, my point – and my willingness to raise such issues – is that we as humankind are face-to-face with God’s existence, Jesus’s reality, and the Holy Spirit’s essential role in our lives. Yes… the devil can be in details, sometimes.
We need to keep our eyes on Heaven, and our feet on the ground.
I know Jesus is real because I have met Him. He mightily has intervened in my life, and that of my family. He has worked miracles that no other person, no other power, could do. Can I explain this to skeptics. No, not really… it is for everyone to experience. And I would say that it is not so important that we love Him – it is to our salvation; yes, but what is most important to grasp is that He loves us.
If we had to order a priority (and it is not really a priority: both things are true and essential), but I would plead to those who have not yet accepted Salvation to grasp the fact that God so loved the world that He allowed His Son to take our sins upon Him… that we may be one with the Father. That makes the Bible – however else the world debates it – a thousand translations; the source of debates; the essence of holy wisdom; a handbook for conducting one’s life; a record of miracles; prophecies of end times – when all is said and done, a love story.
I think we cannot fall in love with God fully until we are aware of the awesome fact that the Creator of the Universe knows and loves you and me. The Bible is God’s love letter to us; love is in every word, every verse, every chapter, every book.
My good friend Gordon Pennington, a remarkable and accomplished man, has moved on in his life from several successful careers — not abandoned but “graduated” — and today is a motivational speaker, conference guest, lecturer, organizer… and evangelist. In his latter role he is not connected to a ministry, nor associated with a movement – other than the movement to witness to people who have not yet accepted Christ. He is a recruit, a volunteer, and a worker in the pursuit Jesus would have us all to fulfill, the “Great Commission.” Winning souls.
Gordon has a remarkable gift for engaging people on sidewalks or waiting rooms or over coffee; comfortably making friendships; discussing their “situations”; and sharing the Gospel. Uncountable people have accepted Jesus – and most importantly have changed their lives and “stuck” with their Christian walk – because he exercises that gift. He does as all believers should do, in our own ways of course. The opportunities are always there.
How many of us respond to that prompting of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, to act on the command of the Great Commission? How many readers are yourselves in a good place because someone shared the Good News with you? How often do you feel that spiritual revolution in your soul that is as “new” today as when you first experienced it?
Have you had a “religious experience”? Experiential events are important in life, and often are vital parts of emotional, even intellectual, breakthroughs; but they also can be seductive. They can prove temporary. Life changes need to put down roots in our minds, hearts, and souls; not be mere refreshing breezes.
A challenge is the oft-stated and dispositive distinction drawn between Religion and Relationship. Christian denominations – and there are hundreds – can be caught up in divisions and disagreements, interpretations and inclusions (and exclusions!), rituals and rules. On the other hand, true Christianity (or “Mere Christianity” as the reliably brilliant C S Lewis defined it) is no more and no less than a relationship with Jesus.
That relationship – friendship, intimacy, trust – is all that is asked. A question posed not only by C S Lewis, but by Jesus Himself. No frills, no conditions, no membership requirements or quizzes! Belief that He is the Son of God, that He rose from the dead, that He loves you ineffably, beyond our ability to understand… but not beyond our ability to accept. And to embrace.
There are skeptics, or examples we know, of people whose faith wavered. Folks who have had bad experiences with religion (there’s that word again). Cynics because of religious experiences proven hollow, or religious people proven flawed. And there are hypocrites aplenty in, probably, every church we can visit.
But there’s always room for one more.
On the other hand, it is refreshing to discover new-born Christians (oh, yes: “Born-again Christians”) whose conversions and new lives, while genuine, did not change every single aspect of their old selves. It does frighten some converts – “Do I have to start wearing bow ties, mow a suburban lawn, and go to Sunday School picnics once a week?” Converts like Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Chuck Norris, and Robert Duvall looked the same and remained in their professions, even while the great Interior Decorator worked on the inside aspects of their lives.
Let us remember that Jesus “hung around” with some unsavory types — the people He most needed to reach. And remember that St Paul was determined to “be all things to all people” in order to interact with those who would not otherwise be in a place to hear the Gospel.
If you, or someone you know, has been curious to know Christ; or tempted to yield to cynicism about following Him – I invite you to think a little harder about the question, Have you had a religious experience?
And then I would remind you that Jesus Himself had a religious experience:
It was religious people who rejected, accused, tortured, condemned, and killed Him.
Keep in your mind the wide difference between joining a religion and becoming a follower of Jesus. Respect tradition, but always be open to questioning traditions and rules and social pressures that are empty or misleading.
We are well reminded to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. But never forget to yield to God the things that are God’s… and that includes your very soul.
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An example of a Christian’s change of heart being sui generis – important unto itself, not relying on arbitrary sets of external rules, or other peoples’ opinions – is the German punk queen Nina Hagen. After a life of drugs, rebellion, artistic experimentation, political extremes, and wild performance art… she met Jesus. She was baptized. She reads the Bible to audiences while on stage. Little changed in her outward self; she is however evidently much changed inside, where – after all – her Savior lives. Here is a clip from her Personal Jesus tour, singing an American Southern Gospel song.
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!
The followers of Christ were frightened and confused. Their Jesus had been tortured, killed, and buried. On the third day He rose from the dead. He was with them for 40 days, then left them again. He ascended bodily to Heaven. But among the words He left were two specific things. He said it was “better” that He leave them, because “One would come” who would give them each, individually, “power from on high.” None of them understood. He also told them to “wait.”
In the meantime, for the harvest commemoration called Pentecost, Jews from “every nation on earth” were gathered in Jerusalem, many with the Apostles. They waited… for what? They were confused, nervous, choosing a replacement for Judas, anxious, wondering…
… until, suddenly, in an upper room of a house where they waited, a “mighty rushing wind” blew through. On their foreheads were strange sights – “tongues as of fire” appeared on those gathered. Then (some began to remember) as Old Testament prophesies and words of John the Baptist had foretold, the men and women were “filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
So this is what they were told to wait for. Was it merely a strange occurrence, a bizarre one-time event, with incomprehensible meaning? Some people, in subsequent generations, have attempted to obscure this event, but it was crystal-clear.
This was Jesus’s Promise fulfilled. The Holy Spirit – the next manifestation of God on earth; the third member of the Trinity – had come to reside in the hearts of believers in Christ. For that day, and for the rest of humankind’s history.
Many things changed, profoundly, that Day. The fear and confusion among the Disciples evaporated. Peter, who had always been an impulsive and sometimes foolish Follower, was suddenly mature in faith and leadership. He became the head of the newly organized church.
Yes, this was the birth of the Church.
Those who had gathered from other lands likewise were filled with Truth and Power, and returned home to spread the Gospel. Members of the Twelve became missionaries who visited them, and other lands, to establish groups of believers. So the acceptance of Jesus as Savior, and His Church, spread. Before the year 70 A.D., there were even Christian fellowships as far away as England.
The second chapter of the Book of Acts recorded these events of Pentecost; and so did secular reporters of the day, and contemporary historians like Josephus. But in ancient Scripture, it had been foretold. And in the last days, God says, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh; your sons and your daughters will prophesy; your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.
All through the New Testament are accounts of how God subsequently poured out His gifts. St Paul listed them succinctly in his first letter to the Church at Corinth: Words of wisdom; Words of knowledge; the Gift of supernatural faith; Gifts of healing; the working of miracles; the Gift of prophecy; the ability to discern spirits; speaking in tongues; and the interpretation of tongues.
After two thousand years, these Gifts still sound strange to some people, but scarcely are stranger than Jesus, and His followers, making the blind to see; raising people from the dead; and – perhaps most audaciously – forgiving people of their sins in the Name of Jesus. Oh, that’s not for today? Then the Savior Who promised these things is a liar.
Further than that – if you might be someone to whom these things sound like fairy tales or delusional rants – I have experienced many of these Gifts. I have seen them exercised by others. I have seen healings; I have been at exorcisms; I have found myself praying over people things that I had no way of knowing – not in a trance; nothing like that, but just aware what God wanted me to share. My daughter prayed over my wife who was diagnosed with three types of cancer, somehow aware that God had healed her. Indeed the doctors found no cancers the next day. It was not my daughter’s prayer that healed, but she had an inspiration to share what God had done at that moment. That is a Gift.
Manifestations of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit – Pentecostalism; the Charismatic Movement; Holy-Ghost Revival – never died, but since around 1900 have exploded around the world. There are major denominations in America. The Underground Church in China is largely Pentecostal. There are more Pentecostals than Catholics in Africa and South America. The Assemblies of God has more adherents in Brazil than in the United States and Europe combined. Think of news stories you have recently heard of “revival” breaking out in Kentucky and elsewhere…
Readers, you might know and be already at home with many of these things. Or maybe they are foreign to you. Or are rumors you have heard; or perhaps are unknown to you. Your salvation does not depend at all on whether you accept or reject the Gifts. You might respond – or not – with ecstatic worship. There are no rules! My own “prayer language,” when exercised, is in private.
But just think about the Gifts of God He offers you through the experience of the Holy Spirit. I invite you think back on any Christmas morning, or birthday. How many wonderful gifts were given to you by your loving parents; how many times that you said… “No… not for me.”
Really?
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In the chance any of this intrigues you, please contact me and I can offer you information, and will prayerfully answer your questions.
Ashes marked on the forehead in Ash Wednesday services, marking the beginning of Lent’s 40 days before Easter, is not mentioned in the Bible. It was not practiced during the first Holy Week, nor for the first thousand years of Christianity. It is an ordinance observed by Catholics and some other denominations, a tradition meant to focus on sacrifice.
For many centuries – indeed, back into earliest Old Testament times – the wearing of sackcloth (a coarse, uncomfortable fabric made of hemp or flax) and imposition of ashes (the modest reminder of dust, as in “dust to dust”) were symbols of humility, repentance, and willingness to do penance for sins.
When an association was drawn with the Message of the Cross, the mark on the forehead as a visible statement of sorrow and repenting of sins (in the manner that believers’ water baptism is regarded as an outward sign of spiritual cleansing) became a custom at the beginning of the Lenten season.
Soon the further practice of “giving something up” as Easter approached also became a custom, a sacrifice, reflecting the sacrifice of Jesus giving Himself up unto death. In time, the taking of sackcloth and ashes became the liturgical tradition of receiving ashes on the forehead as a symbol of absolution and forgiveness.
As many elements of liturgy and rituals can morph from rite to rote, so can the man-made tradition of “giving something up” for Lent morph, sometimes, into hollow customs. And too often a habit that is honored “in the breach.”
Not always, of course, but all too often such Holy Intentions dwindle into simple jokes. Contests of sorts – “who held out the longest?” or silly, insincere pledges to start with – like chocolates (when the person has been trying to diet, anyway) or smoking (what?… again?) having little to do with the suffering and crucifixion of Christ on the cross.
Too often, Lenten “sacrifices” are mere churchy versions of New Year’s resolutions – and just as meaningful.
A proposal: Why don’t we TAKE UP something up for Lent?
Perform, instead, some extra deed for 40 days.
Determine to help someone in a new way.
Reach out to a stranger… or a friend. Intentionally, daily.
Such actions, likely involving thought and effort, are as “sacrificial” as denying bad habits, giving up chocolates, or quitting smokes. The actions would lead to contemplation of what the Cross is all about – caring, serving, true sacrifice.
Instead of stopping something… we can start something.
And it might indeed start something… in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods, our nation, our world.
Some people of recent times have torn down statues and monuments of American history’s great figures, including those of presidents. I am not only condemning vandals armed with paint balls and ropes, who were widely videotaped but never so much as arrested or fined. I refer instead to government officials and descendants of those leaders who scurried and hurried to align themselves with PC mobs, and support the desecration.
Those despicable anti-patriots in their suits and from their offices might be the virtual vandals, but they can never subtract from the greatness of many historical figures, including two whose birthdays we observe this month, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. Theodore Roosevelt said of them, “There have been other men as great and other men as good; but in all the history of mankind there are no other two great men as good as these.”
I want to linger a moment before Lincoln. From his roots in crushing poverty and absence of schooling, he rose to be the savior of the Union, his wisdom equaled only by his humanity. It seems a miracle that that this unlikely person was the perfect leader at a unique time. I believe it was God’s working.
I also want to linger on the misconception that Lincoln was an atheist, or an agnostic. Yes, he was unchurched and seldom attended formal services. But his Bible was well-worn; he quoted Scripture extensively; and indeed by the end of his presidency, his messages and speeches were as much sermons as civic documents.
His humanity? We remember his reading the stack of requests for soldiers’ pardons he considered one day, each with testimonials from influential people… except one plea from a soldier who left his ranks to return home to a sick mother. “Does this man have no ‘friend’?” Lincoln asked. He was told No. The President said, “Well, he does now,” and pardoned him.
His faith? We remember his clear and powerful statement of theology, when he said in effect, “I am not so much concerned that ‘God is on our side,’ but that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay testified to Lincoln’s spiritual struggles, and his reliance on prayer in the White House. It is inspiring to read of Lincoln’s steadily increasing faith… the progression of his appeals to God… invocations of Providence… seeking the Lord’s guidance… Biblical quotations… allusions to Bible history… setting aside national days of prayer, fasting, humiliation, and thanksgiving.
Lincoln’s first inaugural address acknowledges his “firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land.” In the second address: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” And of course his reference in the Gettysburg Address that this “nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom.”
A proclamation: It is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the Supreme Government of God; to bow in humble submission to His chastisement; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and to pray, with all fervency and contrition, for the pardon of their past offenses, and for a blessing upon their present and prospective action. And whereas when our own beloved country, once, by the blessings of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him and to pray for His mercy.
In private communication, 1862: We are indeed going through a great trial – a fiery trial. In the very responsible position in which I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the Hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will, and that it might be so I have sought His aid.
About his dark moments when Lee’s army invaded Pennsylvania, Lincoln wrote: When everyone seemed panic-stricken… I went to my room… and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed… Soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul that God Almighty had taken the whole business into His own hands….
Lincoln said about the Bible: In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say I believe the Bible is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Savior gave to the world was communicated through this Book.
And other reflections: I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.
God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way. I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.
We do not need to contrast these confessions of a sitting President, whom ignorant secularists like to portray as an unbeliever, with the actions of the current sitting President who recalls his days as a choir boy but supports the murder of babies and other policies in contradiction to his Church’s teachings. But the temptation is strong to draw contrasts.
Yet Abraham Lincoln, as a Christian Patriot, can stand on his own, without human contrasts. And he compares well with standards laid out by God Almighty, His Son Jesus, and the Holy Bible. Let us stand in that manner, too, on this President’s Day; and all days.
There are many names of God in Scripture; and many names of Jesus. Similarly, names of the Holy Ghost.
Casual students of the Bible know these. Some of names are titles; some are descriptive; some are prophetic; some are virtual codes that communicate the attributes of members of the Trinity; some are poetic. Among scores are, for instance, God as “the great ‘I Am’”; Jesus as the “Bright and Morning Star”; the Holy Spirit as the “Comforter.”
One of my names for the Father is God of the If-Thens. It’s an odd phrase, so I will explain. It is based on my recognition that God loves us unconditionally, but many of His promises are conditional. We, His children, do not always recognize this, because we don’t want to.
Many Christians in these days of national turmoil and societal distress quote a passage from II Chronicles, Chapter 7. We hear it in sermons, speeches, and prayers:
If My people, who are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Now, maybe God has many names for His people – us – too. Perhaps, if we think about the number of times Christians invoke this verse, one of those names could be: Lazy.
Lazy? When we hear those prayers often, even in anguish? But start thinking about all the times in the Bible that revival was needed among His people, in their lands, in His promised places. Many times! In fact, the need for spiritual revival is a repeated theme. People who are “called by God,” the blessed chosen who nevertheless exercise human nature, not God’s nature; and who inevitably (as per human nature) stray, rebel, grow apostate, reject God – the Bible record is populated by such people. And they, generally, are like you and me.
Whether God sends prophets who warn; or floods, famines, conquerors, or even a Savior, He provides ways out. He has ways to remind us of His love. He invites us to return. He issues promises. He offers forgiveness. Yet (to cite an aphorism from the Book of Proverbs) “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.”
“Revival!” preachers yell. “Revival!” Christians call down from Heaven. “Revival!” believers pray for.
But in their yelling, calling down, and praying, very few Christians cite the whole passage from II Chronicles, Chapter 7, verses 12-15, when the Lord appeared to Solomon after a Temple had been built to honor God:
I have heard your prayer, and have chosen this place for Myself as a house of sacrifice. If I shut up Heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people; if My people, who are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. Now Mine eyes shall be open, and Mine ears attentive unto the prayer that is made in this place.
There’s the God of the If-Then. In language, “if” should always, and logically, be followed by “then.” That is the function of the “if.” And the prerequisite of the “then.” Cause and effect.
God can, but never has, brought revival to a person, a people, or a land – a country – without the prerequisite of repentance. Nor should He, in my view. The plea would be lazy; and the holy answer would be cheap.
America, in so many ways, places, and times, was dedicated to Christ. It has been the land of “Great Awakenings,” evangelistic outreach, learned theology, but has turned into a culture of death, apostasy, secularism, hedonism, and materialism. There was wisdom in a bumper strip I recently saw: “If God does not destroy America, maybe Sodom and Gomorrah deserve an apology.”
Why would God “send” revival if His people do not bother to desire it more earnestly? Why do we merely preach it to each other? How arrogant to think that, amid our manifold sins, we can order God to fix things?
Christians, all moral patriots, need to work for revival ourselves!
Just as we surely deserve God’s holy judgment, so does God deserve our heartfelt repentance. To “humble ourselves and turn from our wicked ways.”
THEN will He will hear the reports ringing through Heaven… and heal our land. But not, I’m afraid, before.
A Friend came around, Tried to clean up this town; His ideas made some people mad. He trusted His crowd, So He spoke right out loud; And they lost the best Friend they had.
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This popular song from the late 1960s has strong spiritual implications. It was written by the influential Gram Parsons, whose work inspired a generation of singers and groups. It is performed here in the room where he died at age 26, Room 8 of the very humble Joshua Tree Inn motel. I have been there, now a very accessible, informal shrine to Gram Parsons.
New Years is a sort of anti-Lent. We resolve to do things as New Year resolutions; and many people vow to give things up for Lent. There is a similarity, however: very few of us carry through on either category of intentions. The more interesting survey would be to track the average number of days people “keep” such pledges.
I have a new idea for New Years resolutions.
It involves neither self-sacrifice nor a “self-help” box to check, although you will feel good for having done it. But you will make others feel better – a pretty good way to start the year. Of course it does not have to be on the first of the year… but many of us need some “hook” to hang our good intentions on. (I think that is the justification for a lot of holidays on the calendar.)
There is not one among us who does not know, or know of, an “angel.” Not a literal, sent-from-Heaven angel (maybe), but friends who do good deeds. People who reach out to folks in need, even in mere moments of loneliness. They encourage. They involve themselves in local causes, perhaps with no fanfare. They sacrifice or volunteer. They smile when smiles are hard to come by; they weep with you when nobody else understands.
Praise God, every family, every neighborhood, has these people. Sometimes they never know how they are appreciated, because they go through life without being thanked… but they do not bless others in order to garner praise.
I suggest bringing a few of those people you know – because surely you do – to mind. One of them; three of them; whatever. And let them know they are appreciated, sincerely. Arrange to see them… write an anonymous thank-you note… send a non-anonymous, personal, thank-you note or e-mail… express your appreciation over coffee… whatever.
The form is not as important as the will to do it; and the will is not as important as the deed. I will name three or four such people I know. I will decline to use their names here, although that would honor them. But angels like this do not operate for glory or honor, and I want to inspire similar outreaches among you.
One friend has been a teacher in Texas, also is an author, a church worker, a selfless volunteer at conferences. She has managed difficult family situations, and may never get over the loss of her husband to cancer. She is chiefly, however, an encourager of others. She has blessed uncountable other people, not the least with her famous sense of humor; but some of us know she cries as many tears as she causes smiles. In all, an angel – a saint – and the type of friend who deserves the type of note I suggest for a New Year resolution.
No less spiritual, but active in other realms important to Christians these days, is a friend whose faith motivated her to be active in local, then state, politics. School curricula, mask and vaccine mandates, governmental intrusion, moved her to attend school board and legislative hearings. Often stonewalled, she climbed the ladder of activism, only to be frustrated further. Even at her state capital, deliberate snubs. She and other “moms” banded together and ran for offices. She challenged her state’s senate majority leader. She lost but, again, was frustrated when she requested to see vote totals. Time, trouble, and expenses racked up. She and her fellow moms – Christian Patriots all – are now primed for future crusades. Our whole nation should be filled with selfless angels like her. Her children are out of school, but she battles for the Kingdom.
I have another friend who similarly believes that Christians must be active in the public sphere – that we are seeing the heritage of our faith slip away. He had been brand-manager for a well-known international fashion company, jet-setting around the world doing consequential work. He gave it up, returned to his family’s fifth-generation home in rural Michigan… and still is a jet-setter of sorts, but now he attends conferences, speaks at events, organizes large meetings. His two spheres, now, are Christianity and the political crisis we face. As the previous angel is doing, my friend does not merely complain or advocate; he has rolled up his sleeves as a poll-watcher and attends meetings from the local to the highest levels. And his greatest joy – I have seen this over and over – is sharing Christ, witnessing to others. Baristas, handymen in town, celebrities he knows. It is what angels do.
Another friend is an angel in work overalls. He was an assembly-line worker who was obliged to retire when he developed a disease that made it unsafe to continue on his shifts. In his wonderful family he has a wife and two beautiful daughters who have debilitating, degenerative afflictions. I have never heard any of them complain or display anything but smiles and good cheer, goodwill. My friend uses his skills to manufacture or retrofit lifts for people’s vans, or stair lifts for their homes… and many of these folks are virtual strangers to him. Angels come in all forms.
In situations like these I have described, the “angels among us” do not have to be old friends from their address books… but are, after all, the best friends many folks could want.
Or need.
You surely know some Angels Among Us. Bless them with a warm reminder that you know about, and appreciate, their ministrations.
Revolutions come and revolutions go. Thomas Jefferson noted – and implicitly advocated – that political and social revolutions need happen every generation, and their Trees of Liberty be watered by the blood of patriots.
It was an extreme prescription, but his was an era of extreme distress; of discontents, panaceas, and actions in the New World, in France and other boiling pots across Europe. Oftentimes revolutions are followed by counter-revolutions, as in France but mercifully not in the United States; and those counter-revolutions often are as bloody as the initial revolts.
When historians look back in the “come and go” mode a cynicism may be inferred; or a discounting of the issues and import of violent revolts. But in truth we must avoid such attitudes, not the least because we might become inured to the legitimate urgency of imminent revolts in our own day.
There are two main reasons we tend to dismiss the earthquake-aspects of earlier revolutions. One, the passage of time dilutes the details of history-bending events: we tend to classify them in the same way we record floods and plagues and migrations. More important, the changes wrought by revolutions, good and bad, settle into the reality of subsequent eras. Old complaints seem less legitimate when revolutions succeed.
When revolutions succeed in varying degrees, when the contending forces do battle and either claim victory or lick their wounds, revolutions routinely are reclassified by history as Revolts. Another truth about history’s revolutions and revolts is that they never occur spontaneously, nor without a host of factors long fermenting and brewing.
But what we call these days “perfect storms” summon the inevitable flash-points. Such was the case in Martin Luther’s time (as we recently marked Reformation Sunday, the anniversary of his nailing 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Church)… and is the case today. Let us be aware.
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Some people think that the Protestant Reformation began when the monk Martin Luther, upset with the corruption of the Papacy and the heretical selling of indulgences (in effect, paying a priest to elevate the dead into Heaven) aimed his challenges at the entire structure of the Church. And that Germany, and much of Europe, spontaneously erupted in flames.
In fact it was no such thing, and Luther meant no such thing… but, given time, it was close to what happened. Theological opposition to Roman (Catholic) authoritarianism was at least 200 years old when Luther acted. Rebellion – sometimes as innocent as wanting the Bible to be translated into the language of their people – stamped out clerics like John Wycliffe in England. Jan Hus in Bohemia, and William Tyndale in England. By “stamped out” I mean excommunicated. But so rabid was the hatred of the Catholic Church that Wycliffe’s body was exhumed and burned; Hus was merely burned alive; and Tyndale was strangled to death and then burned.
As often happens in revolutions, those sorts of flames of immolation result in firing up further rebellion.
So Luther had the examples before him: of ecclesiastical dilemmas, an intransigent establishment, and examples of protest – and martyrdom. But those Theses he announced were meant as a call to debate. An agenda for meetings. Topics for discussion. Posting such notices was one of the traditional purposes of that church door.
On the other hand, Luther courted disaster by alleging (with increasing fervor) the sins of the papacy (popes and their edicts and their mistresses and such), and the corruption of the Bible (man-made rules that supplanted Scripture). The Vatican and the Holy Roman Emperor dug in their heels.
Finally, the eye of Perfect Storm settled over the city of Worms in Germany, on the occasion of a Diet (an assembly of religious and secular leaders). Luther was detained; called before it; and, with his many books and sermons spread on a table before him, was ordered to denounce and renounce all he had written.
A Perfect Storm? With the Trees of religious liberty, freedom of thought, and the rights of citizens and Christian individuals watered by the blood of martyrs, Luther’s defense was a thunderclap, a nexus of history:
Since your most serene majesty and your highnesses require of me a simple, clear, and direct answer, I will give one, and it is this:
I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is clear that they have fallen into error and even into inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am not convinced by proof from Holy Scripture, or by cogent reasons… I neither can not nor will not retract anything; for it cannot be either safe nor honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience.
Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.
Luther assumed he would be tortured and burned to death. In Washington’s Museum of the Bible is a letter he wrote the night before his defense, calmly commending his soul to God and discussing the disposition of his worldly belongings. But instead, that Perfect Storm swept him away, “kidnapped” by friendly princes, hidden for a time (during which he translated the Bible – horrors! – into the everyday language of the German people), and finally emerging as the putative leader of many things.
Those things, across the landscape of Western Civilization, included personal relationships with Jesus; access to Scripture; literacy; the respect for individual liberty; political empowerment; the Enlightenment. Assisted by the invention of printing and a political revolt of princes against the Holy Roman Empire, Protestantism (Protest-antism) spread. To some things Luther disagreed, or would have. He chose to reestablish, not tear down. The Modern Age began with the Reformation, and Luther rejected Modernism. In fact he characterized Reason as the enemy of Faith.
Yet – contrary to many of history’s evolutionary moments – his Reforms, the Reform-ation, had truly revolutionary effects.
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I referred to “today” above. How is our time like Luther’s?
We are at an inflection-point in history. Viewed large, there has been a conflict brewing – across many “hot” and “cold” battlefields – between the Individual and the Establishment. Since the Reformation and then the American Revolution, it has been the Individual on one side, and the power of the State on the other. The State has taken many forms: the Church; “royalty”; finance capitalism (as opposed to Free Enterprise); dictators; Communism behind many masks.
“Macro,” the Individual has fought and survived by the devices of Republican Democracy in civic life… through the Free Market in social life… through fundamental Christianity (whose center of gravity increasing moves south of the Equator). And the oppressive Establishment has with relentless acuity and insidious subterfuge waged war upon us through seductive appeals to sinfulness and selfishness… through attacks on traditional values and standards… through arguments in favor of secularism.
“Micro”? The great storms and tides of history are mirrored in the lives of each of us individuals. The sanctity of our families and the protection of our children are the battlegrounds of today – they are not separate, but essential to, the preservation of our Republic. Our culture turns more rotten by the day.
No battlefield – no squall of that storm – is too little or too local. Martin Luther, after all, when he made that history-bending defense, still saw himself as a lonely monk wanting to register some complaints, hoping that the Establishment might mend its ways. He had little realization that he stood atop a volcano, much less called down that Perfect Storm.
In our own “assemblies,” even with few people watching (except angels of Heaven and God Himself, remember) we must see clearly… decide to fight… act with integrity… and embrace truth.
Here we stand. We can do no other. So help us, God. Amen.
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I never fail to weep at the power of Luther’s words in his “Battle Hymn of the Reformation”:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still –
Grace is something that has a special meaning for me.
It was my mother’s first name, and is my granddaughter’s middle name. More than that, and to be serious for a moment, grace is something we should practice more than we do, and that can be addressed to anyone in the world who has a pulse. Because Christians are the recipients of grace – as special a gift as any God bestows.
For by grace we are saved through faith, the gift of God; and not by works, lest anyone boast.
It is that passage from Ephesians that hit the monk Martin Luther like a thunderclap, and which understanding – and expository viewpoint, through sermons and writings – that changed the course of Western Civilization.
“Grace” routinely and properly is defined as “unmerited favor.” We sin against a holy God, and cannot redeem ourselves or “earn” our way to Heaven, even by good deeds or spiritual merit badges. The only “work” required of us is to believe that Jesus is the Son of God; that He died to take our punishment on Himself; that He rose from the dead and is One with the Father. If we believe in our hearts, and confess with our words, God’s Grace is upon us.
Salvation cannot be bought – it was paid for by Jesus at a great cost – but therefore is free to us.
That is amazing grace.
I read a story this week that explains Grace better than my poor words can. It appeared in the e-mail newsletter Mikey’s Funnies, a free and wholesome source of chuckles by my old friend Mike Atkinson. He shares one-liners, several-liners, and shelf-liners… no, no, I mean sometimes poignant messages. And wisdom. Great stuff to impress your friends; or slip into your own e-mails so you can pretend to be as funny as Mikey. Sometimes, however, you’ll need a Kleenex or two… as the story he passed on from another source:
[This is a true story that happened to one of our readers years ago in a Youth Ministry college course. — Mikey]
I left work early so I could have some uninterrupted study time right before the final in my Youth Issues class. When I got to class, everybody was doing their last-minute studying. The teacher came in and said he would review with us for just a little bit before the test. We went through the review, most of it right out of the study guide, but there were some things he was reviewing that I had never heard. When questioned about it, he said that they were in the book and we were responsible for everything in the book. We couldn’t really argue with that.
Finally it was time to take the test.
“Leave them face down on the desk until everyone has one and I’ll tell you to start,” our prof instructed.
When we turned them over, every answer on the test was filled in! The bottom of the last page said the following:
“This is the end of the Final Exam. All the answers on your test are correct. You will receive an ‘A’ on the final exam. The reason you passed the test is because the creator of the test took it for you. All the work you did in preparation for this test did not help you get the A. You have just experienced… grAce.”
He then went around the room and asked each student individually, “What is your grade? Do you deserve the grade you are receiving? How much did all your studying for this exam help you achieve your final grade?”
Now I am not a crier by any stretch of the imagination, but I had to fight back tears when answering those questions and thinking about how the Creator has passed the test for me.
Discussion afterward went like this: “I have tried to teach you all semester that you are a recipient of grace. I’ve tried to communicate to you that you need to demonstrate this gift as you work with young people. Don’t hammer them; they are not the enemy. Help them, for they will carry on your ministry if it is full of GRACE!”
Talking about how some of us had probably studied hours and some just a few minutes but had all received the same grade, he pointed to a story Jesus told in Matthew 20. The owner of a vineyard hired people to work in his field and agreed to pay them a certain amount. Several different times during the day, he hired more workers. When it was time to pay them, they all received the same amount. When the ones who had been hired first thing in the morning began complaining, the boss said, “Should you be angry because I am kind?” (Matthew 20:15)
The teacher said he had never done this kind of final before and probably would never do it again, but because of the content of many of our class discussions, he felt like we needed to experience grace.
Have you thanked your Creator today because of the Grace you’ve experienced?
There are many Holy Bibles “in the market,” in stores and online. It seems there are new translations every year. Actually there are, certainly if you count the world’s many languages and dialects. It is hard to comprehend, but the number of languages including sign-languages, and distinct dialects are more than 3300 that have translations of the Bible, in whole or in part.
There are approximately 1700 versions of the Holy Bible available online alone. Christians rejoice at this evidence of evangelism. Skeptics will suggest that the message of Gospel likely is diluted or manufactured during such processes. Are Bible translations like the parlor game of “telephone,” where mistakes are rife and misunderstandings endemic?
It is an odd word, “translation,” when I focus on new (and ever newer) versions in English. A very incomplete list of English-language “versions” of the Bible available today include:
King James Version, New King James Version, New American Standard Bible, American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, The Holy Bible in Modern English, Young’s Literal Translation, Douay, The Geneva Bible (“Breeches”), Knox Translation, Today’s English Version, The New English Bible, The Moffatt Bible, New International Version, The English Standard Version, New American Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, Revised English Bible, Contemporary English Version, Good News Bible, The Living Bible, The Amplified Bible, Phillips Translation, The Message…
I am not including the plethora of Commentaries and Concordances like time-honored, multi-volume Strongs, or excellent study Bibles like Ryrie and the Expositor’s Study Bible.
For centuries the Roman church forbad any translation of Scripture from Latin; indeed it frequently opposed the personal reading or ownership of the Bible, even in Latin, to anyone but clergy. These policies were enforced under penalty of death, and the list of martyrs, both famous in history and anonymous, is long.
The honor roll of those who believed God wanted every believer to have access to God’s Word (and were cruelly persecuted) is long: Wycliffe, Tyndale, Hus; Luther’s offense was not only criticizing the corruption of the papacy, but daring to translate the Bible into German. He escaped the death sentence.
One of the first English translations followed Luther’s, that of the Frenchman living in Switzerland, John Calvin. It was his “Geneva Bible” that was standard in English and was relied upon by the King James translators – and was the Bible carried by the Pilgrims and read by the Colonists in North America; those who designed our government
I was honored to be on the editorial team that produced, after centuries, the first reprint (changing nothing but thees and thous and grammar) of the 1599 Geneva Bible.
Reverting to the inevitable carping of skeptics, the great number of translations, versions, and updates is not necessarily evidence of a diluted message, but rather the reinforcement of truth and integrity. How the Bible came to be, so to speak, is either a miracle, an implausible coincidence, or proof of Holy Spirit inspiration.
The Bible includes 66 books, written by many different people over different centuries and on different continents. Yet they have common themes and references; prophecies and predictions made and fulfilled; and – when you think about it, maybe the most profound distinction – this Book has affected millions of people. Changed lives. “Spoken” to multitudes from wildly disparate backgrounds, circumstances, and… languages.
It is a Miracle Book, a book of miracles, written in so many ways “under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.” Inspire means to “breathe into”; God whispered to the hearts and minds of those who wrote Scripture.
I will confess here that I am not a fan (not quite a rejectionist, but sometimes close) of recent translations. Some projects are so concerned with contemporary readers’ inability to understand big words; or they are so motivated by Political Correctness, that they corrupt Scripture. It is not yet the case that the Ten Commandments are being changed to the Ten Suggestions… but, for instance, “gender neutral” translations are dangerously close to claiming that “In the beginning, He, She or It created heaven and earth…”
No, the message is simple. The Eternal God created everything; His children incline toward sin and rebellion; we cannot be reconciled with a perfect and a just God without a remedy; He provided means of forgiveness, redemption, and sanctification by offering His Son as a sacrifice to put the punishments we deserve upon Himself; and by believing that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died for our sins, rose from death, and ascended to Heaven… we are assured of eternal life with Him.
Yes, that is pretty simple. Humankind – those darn intellects and pride and jealousies – make it complicated. Denominations get in the way. Publishers need product.
In the 1930s, the Limited Editions Club published, unbelievably after several centuries, the first major Holy Bible in the original King James format – that is, without verse numbers, citations, notes, and superscripts. I read “that” Bible (there have been others since) and was thunderstruck. Study-formats can help us, yes; and bless us. But reading only the texts – God’s story; His conversations; in many places reading like a novel – was like reading some familiar passages for the first time. I recommend it!
I was a little snarky above about the motivations of Bible-revisionists. As with the Geneva Bible reprint project, it can be useful to have access to contemporary language and grammar. Of course. I have a set of Shakespeare’s folios, and the spelling and language of those times make them virtually inaccessible, requiring modernization. But, again, that is the language, not the message.
So. People try to change the Bible for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad; some sensible, some questionable. But I pray that we never lose sight of the very pertinent issue.
We are not meant to change the Bible. The Bible is meant to change us.
If a poll were to be taken, for instance at ComiCon International, whose annual fest just concluded in San Diego; and let’s say especially in such a control-group sample of geeks and nerds (take it easy, I spent a portion of my career serving them) – and the question was about superheroes…
Let’s say, Who is the greatest superhero of them all? or Who has the greatest powers? Whose conflicts, challenges, victories are the most impactful? Who can endure anything, from bombs to betrayal, and maybe come back stronger? …The answers would be many, and even cosplay attendees might start shoving each other around.
The questions do not arise from preconceived habits or childhood favorites, but rather the intricate premises of the Marvel and DC (etc) “universes,” and the passionate investment that young fans (and older college students) (and adults) make in the worlds of these characters and the consistently maintained cocoons of comics and movies.
When I was an editor at Marvel Comics (and generally regarded as someone who was always bewildered by such things) there were periodic bullpen, or bull, sessions, brainstorming new ideas, directions, stories, and costumes. More than once I proposed a concept and was shot down. “That’s not logical!” “That could never happen!” – as the editors returned to discuss piercing the Sixth Dimension or stealing the appearance of a villain after drugging some interplanetary potion.
“OK, I understand,” I said. But I didn’t. When I left Marvel I spent a few years writing comic-book stories for Disney. Somehow, talking mice and half-naked ducks seemed closer to reality.
Stan Lee used to talk to us about comic books and superheroes being reliant on the “suspension of disbelief.” That basic formula (actually promulgated centuries ago by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, not Stan Lee!) has provided an appeal to young readers since the 1930s. As I wrote last week, it seems to me that the well has been a bit poisoned. In comics and spun-off movies, good versus evil is obsolete, or at least superseded and made somewhat nuanced by political correctness, a desperation for newer premises, and the culture’s general decline in values that I think propels the increase in sex and violence.
All while art imitates life imitates art in society. But in one corner, there is a growing active and fertile group of creators staking a claim – not only for traditional values and wholesome storylines… but for Biblical Christianity. Good guys who are good guys, and who win.
I call this new corps of Christian cartoonists “disciples,” maybe more numerous than Jesus’s original gang, but spreading the Good News nonetheless. Al Nickerson (The Sword Of Eden) is one of the best, and a favorite of mine. Daniel Hancock is part of the creative ferment at Terminus Media (https://www.terminusmedia.com ) where he collaborated with Daryl Peninton and Matt Baker as editor on “Samson: Rise,” and works closely with Dr. Barron Bell as story/scriptwriter of the sci-fantasy graphic novel series Dominion: Fall of the House of Saul. He is also founder and director of Bible Actors Productions, creator of End Of Darkness, a full-cast audio drama on the life of Jesus.
Daniel shared a statement from Terminus: “We want everything we do to honor the Creator who has authored the greatest true story of love and redemption that the world has ever seen. We want to love our neighbors (all our neighbors) by using our gifts and talents to entertain and equip them to live abundant lives.”
Outside the traditional comic-book realm everyone remembers the ubiquitous Veggie Tales, all Bible-based. Tom and Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, and Jeff Keane, are superb animators and committed Christians. There are groups and studios of creators but probably the largest – a fellowship of very professional business minds – is the Christian Comic Arts Society (https://my.christiancomicarts.com )
This group deserves a careful look, at least at their website with its impressive mission statement; and the roster of member cartoonists, including aspirants. The members produce all sorts of stories – yes, also serving kids who were weaned on gritted-teeth fights and explosions and breathless rescues – but it is refreshing to read the creators’ testimonies and visions; their commitment to Christ; and – my view, speaking from the outside – their efforts to redeem the culture.
I will mention other Christian cartoonists of the day, wanting to give honor to those who honor God through their work. They additionally include Eric Jansen, Chivas Davis, Art Ayris, Doug TenNapel, Scott McDaniel, Steve Crespo, and Paul Castiglia.
Al Nickerson (The Sword Of Eden – www.theswordofeden.com ), was an artist for DC Comics, Archie Comic Publications, Marvel Comics, and Warp Graphics. He has been a designer and animator for Sesame Street, MTV Animation, and Nickelodeon. The Sword Of Eden is an inventive series, arrestingly drawn, and revolving around retrieving the legendary sword used by angels to keep Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. The speculative adventures includes demons (which, of course, do exist in Bible narratives), villains, and a possible detour to locate Noah’s Ark.
“Comics, sequential art, is a powerful literary art form,” Nickerson said; “a wonderful medium through which to share the Gospel message…. I have the opportunity to create Christian comics that Christian readers can enjoy without feeling attacked.
“There is a bias [against Christianity] in entertainment. Modern Western culture promotes a godless woke agenda. The world hates Jesus, Christianity, and Christians. Therefore, it is vital to support true Christian entertainment. Don’t let the liars and people who are filled with hate influence your work or what you have to say. We live in a broken and sinful world in need of the Savior. The message of repentance and belief in Jesus the Messiah unto salvation should always be shared.”
My new best friend, introduced by the amazing facilitator Gordon Pennington, is Jim Krueger. He wrote the story script for Midway Games’ Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks video game, which won the Satellite Award for Best Action/Adventure Video Game. In the comics field, his main focus, Jim wrote the 12-issue miniseries Justice with Alex Ross for DC Comics. It was a New York Times Bestseller, and won an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Novel. About a decade after I left Marvel, Jim became its Creative Director.
His original works include The Foot Soldiers; Alphabet Supes; The Clock Maker; The Runner; The High Cost of Happily Ever After: and The Last Straw Man. Jim’s other work for Marvel Comics includes the Earth X trilogy with Alex Ross; Avengers; X-Men; and Avengers/Invaders. His comics work for other publishers includes Star Wars; The Matrix Comics; Micronauts; Galactic; and Batman. Jim’s company is “26 Soldiers,” where he serves as president and publisher.
Jim is a committed Christian, even now working on new projects, and will guest on this blog soon.
Good and evil, in mainstream commercial comics and movies, have become tokens, not gems nor compasses. I was invited to write for the animated TV series ThunderCats years ago, and the creator emphasized that there were to be “lessons” at the end of every episode. In fact he called them “morals,” but they were neither (to my emerging conscience) – the template sounded good, but the “story bible” forbade spiritual messages or, certainly, Biblical values even sanitized. Empty clichés: the way of contemporary society.
Christians must realize and act on the premise that any values divorced from Biblical truth are counterfeit. Viewers and readers being presented, say, “New Gods” while the old God was ignored, dismissed, and, most tellingly, disbelieved are enabling evil. Innocent people are encouraged to find comfort in the saying that believing something… is enough. A false choice when Revealed Truth is available to us.
A society with no core beliefs cannot, by definition, operate on any positive standards or values. A culture that does not recognize right and wrong; practices Relativism; and rejects Absolute Truth… will die at the hands of forces that create their own rules. If you doubt me, check out the nightly news.
People who follow horoscopes and read tarot cards usually dismiss the Bible as mumbo-jumbo. Kids who are obsessed with superheroes don’t want to think about the Jesus Who walked on water and through walls, made the blind see and could read minds, and conquered death. Victims of terminal illnesses will grasp at copper bracelets and expensive herbal remedies and the Power of Wishful Thinking… but too often reject documented cases of real miracles by the “Lord Who Healeth Thee.” Tragic.
In the parlance of today’s comics culture, Jesus was the greatest superhero of them all. He was sent to earth; He knew the past of prehistory and could foretell the future; He turned water into wine; He fed a multitude by praying an increase over a basket of fish and bread; He raised people from the dead, and rose Himself despite agonizing torture and putrefaction in a tomb. He changes lives like mine, maybe the grandest miracle I know.
His costume was a simple robe, except for the holy Blood that covered Him in line with uncountable prophesies and predictions. And He did this all for us sinners while we were yet in our sins.
And Jesus was not a fictional character, but indisputably a historical figure.
I knew Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who invented Superman as teenagers in Cleveland. “It seemed like a fun character, a fun story to think about.” I asked Bob Kane how he came to create Batman. A similar story – at least no high-culture or pop-culture babble about cosmic forces of evil and revenge. “A fun idea,” he claimed.
Christianity is nothing if not about the supernatural. Welcome to Reality, not Fantasy!
It is almost impossible lately, during at least one week in July or August, not be aware of costumed heroes, red-carpet interviews, breathless announcements of new video games, and outrageous prices being paid for ancient, fragile comic books. It is the week of “ComiCon,” the San Diego International Comic Convention.
Even if you are not (in order) a fan of superheroes, celebrities, new movies and games, or collectible comic books… it is difficult to avoid cable-TV coverage, entertainment-show stories, news packages, and internet views of scholars and nerds, 135,000 of them, crowding the aisles of the Convention Center in otherwise placid San Diego.
It holds my interest for several reasons. I was in that world – and of that world – for much of my life. Actually more than one career, for I have been a political cartoonist, scenarist of strips and graphic novels, syndicate comics editor, editor of Marvel Comics magazines, writer for Disney, comics anthologist and historian, etc.
More, I have attended many of the comics festivals around the world, usually as a speaker or guest. Many are larger, and at one time more scholarly, than San Diego. But my first ComiCon was in 1976, and in those days they were small affairs, held in old halls or hotel basements. In fact ComiCon basically was a collectors’ swap meet with celebrity panels. As Editor at Marvel, I arranged for us to be the first major publisher to rent space and display new releases there. (I humbly confess that a strong motivation was to have Stan Lee sign off on 10 fun days with my staff in sunny California…)
Before the Con was largely subsumed by films and games I was kind of tight with board members of SDCC, so I was in its orbit. But these days it takes the James Webb Telescope of the Comics Universe to spot me. My interest in the art form has not waned at all – I am deep in a couple projects about comics history – but, as I said, SDCC is more about movies, games, and toys than strips.
But superheroes still stalk the halls, the representatives of comic books and their Hollywood spin-offs.
I have never fully understood America’s fascination with superheroes – before, during, and after my tenure at Marvel. We are too deep in the forest to see the trees; if the world survives, it will take analysts of the future to explain America’s obsession with violence and sex; protagonists who rely on muscles, weapons, and absurd powers to pursue justice. Other civilizations built the heroes of their myths (commonly agreed standards and values) on integrity, courage, and wisdom. Many of their heroes failed, the source of literal “tragedy,” a term that is, significantly, misused these days. But in contemporary America, every “hero,” every sketch drawn for fans at ComiCon, employs grimaces, knotted brows, bleeding scratches, clenched teeth, and, usually, a ravished buxom woman at his feet.
Why has America developed this conception of a hero, and why has an audience demanded or welcomed such characters, for surely they are synergistic factors.
Having worked in the “forest,” as I said, all my career, I can discern the trees but cannot identify them, nor explain their sustenance. Even my cherished Disney characters, whom I cast in countless scripts as I wrote premises and stories, have been transformed. I no longer recognize the denizens of the Magic Kingdom; No: I do recognize them, and I don’t like them. They don’t like me. Walt must be turning his grave like a rotisserie chicken. (I recently wrote about this for a national magazine.)
There are signs of hope, reasons for optimism, evidence of some redemption. Not only for desperately needed diversity of content, but as push-backs against the troubling vortex of thematic rot. Villains, and even heroes, I knew as a kid and during my time at Marvel, have now engaged in serial excess – demonology, satanism, perversion (“oh, we must give the good guys something to oppose”), rougher violence, and bloodier graphic representations of it all.
But subcultures of Christian cartoonists are creating stories and inventing heroes with positive virtues; self-publishing, when necessary, and with… happy endings. Or, for discerning readers, pointing to the Truth. Among these creators are very talented artists and writers. Many of them are at the ComiCon, and many are exhibiting, offering their work to the public, and… well, evangelizing. Missionaries in a hostile world – America, not only fan conventions.
When I was young I knew Al Hartley, who was permitted to draw a line of Archie comics for the Christian market; Hank Ketcham did the same with a line of Dennis the Menace comic books. Today’s new breed has taken the fight as St Paul did: “all things to all people” — there are series of heroes; fantasy themes; humor; adventure. The creators do not hide their faith, hoping to lure unsuspecting pagans… but rather, they share their witness boldly and cleverly.
Once there was Jack Chick, who published controversial comics as tracts. There was political cartoonist Wayne Stayskal, who also drew for religious publications. There is the Australian pastor Ian Jones, for whose anthology of Christian strips Pearly Gates I wrote an Introduction. I had many conversations with Charles Schulz who, early in his career, evangelized on street corners; he grew weary and wary of organized religions but always discussed Christian faith.
Of the “rising generation” there are many. And many of them are at ComiCon, individually and as members of the Christian Comics Society. This activity might surprise some Christians; but if the work was more widely read and discussed, the whole world might – and should – know of it. In the next blog message I will highlight some of the cartoonists and their work.
In the meantime, I will note that it is inspiring that some cartoonists are working not to impress each other or attract fans by whatever means they can use… but are conscious of the One Reader they seek to please.
I’m not going to go Theological on you here. I will take a moment, however, to invite us all to consider a glaring matter (I believe to be a problem) in today’s churches.
The root of “Theology” literally is “the study of God,” so I might break my promise before I start, but I rather think in this matter we should study not God so much as contemporary worship, the practices of Western churches, and the evolution, yes, of denominations.
Simply: I think significant portions of Christendom – north of the Equator, generally, and in America especially – have sublimated important aspects of Christian doctrine. That is to say, the Church that Jesus inspired and the Apostles established.
Stick with me: Essential elements of Christianity, the accepted teaching over many centuries, and the foundational beliefs of Christians… are often ignored today. In Christian churches themselves.
Many Christians are being taught incomplete Gospels, if taught at all.
An incomplete Gospel is not the Gospel at all. Churches and their traditions and denominations used to proclaim “a full Gospel” and be dedicated to “know Christ and make Him known.” Now it is what has become convenient, or appealing, or uncomplicated. And I am not here referring to obscure debates or fine points of, say, eschatology or, you know, “how many angels can dance on the heads of pins.”
Those challenges are serious enough… and I suppose always will be. My concern actually is more basic, and can be illustrated by two recent days in the church “calendar” that are practically ignored in much of today’s church.
The first is Ascension Day. For centuries the Transfiguration of Christ – His bodily ascension to Heaven, witnessed by Disciples and accompanied by faith-heroes of the Old Testament – was a major event, celebrated by churches in a major way, observed for its major significance.
This Transfiguration of the Christ “closed the circle,” made complete His earthly Ministry. The fulfillment of a hundred various prophesies… the details of His life and many miracles performed… His suffering and sacrificial death… all were the varieties of signs and wonders that announced who He was. Of course, His miraculous victory over death, and 40 days of being seen, and preaching anew, were further signs that He was – as His followers were now believing – much greater than the prophets of old.
But Jesus’s bodily Ascension to Heaven, lifted to the clouds, welcomed by the Father… this was the final act in His ministry on earth. The Ascension confirmed, finally, that Jesus was Divine; that He was returning to the Father.
This act, this fact, was profoundly important to the early Church. And it remained a major element of teaching and creeds and church observances for centuries. Properly so.
Today (and believe me, I know and honor the pockets of exceptions) the mainstream denominations scarcely mention the event, the Day, its implications. A needless omission; a symptom of post-Modern disrespect for God Almighty and His plan for His church.
You might ask: Would clergy who undergo training, and people who build churches, really abandon the Faith??? The answer is found, sadly, many times throughout Biblical history. At one time (see Samuel II, chapter 6) the Israelites actually let the Ark of Covenant — delivered and designed by God Himself — be abandoned for three months. There is an example. (King David wanted to return it to Jerusalem, but instead consigned it to the household of Obed-Edom, appropriately, a Levite — and this, I believe, was a sign to us: “As for me and my house, we shall serve the Lord!”)
Even more egregious, and more widespread, is what I call the “Duine God” who is worshiped and glorified, to the extent He is, by the contemporary church. (That is, opposed to the “Triune God” – the Trinity.)
Ten days after Jesus’s Ascension, a significant promise of His was fulfilled. As the Disciples and others “waited” as Jesus commanded, “there came a rushing sound as from a mighty wind… over the heads of the assembled crowd there appeared what seemed like tongues of flame… everyone began speaking, but in languages of others, and in unknown talk that sounded like gibberish…” (My paraphrase of the account in the Book of Acts.)
Happening on Pentecost (the “Feast of Weeks” on the Jewish calendar; subsequently known as Whit Day, sometimes Whitsunday) – the events of that day gave rise to the Pentecostal experience of believers.
That Pentecost event was the birth-day of the Church. Jesus had assured the Disciples that it was “better that He leave them, because One will come with power, so they might do all things He had done.” A miracle happened that day… and has not ceased. Nine Spiritual Gifts, as listed in I Corinthians and elsewhere, came upon those people, and are still promised to believers today. They include speaking, and understanding, strange tongues, “the language of angels.” Gifts of miraculous knowledge, and wisdom, and prophetic visions; and healing.
Not all “powers” at all times to all people: they are not magic wands. But they are gifts.
And I am astonished how few Christian churches believe in them today. Or seek them. Or accept them. Or teach them. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever… and so is the equal member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit – God in us. Yet today’s churches are afraid to see the Gifts, and the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, as anything but a 2000-year-old religious relic. Tragic.
Some people today claim that this experience was “emotionalism.” But things changed, forever. Peter, for instance, had been an impulsive and sometimes foolish fan of Jesus. After Pentecost he became a wise, mature, and persuasive leader. Some people today claim that the Pentecostal experience was for that moment only, to “anoint” followers. However, it did not stop. Within decades there were Christian churches as far away as England, and in short centuries, Christianity was the official faith of the Roman Empire. The power of Pentecost!
I have experienced some of the Gifts; and friends have. Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing segment of the church, and south of the Equator is overtaking Catholic and traditional Protestant denominations in numbers. Holy-Spirit Christianity is outstripping Islam in Africa (the massacres you hear about in the news are routinely of Pentecostal communities).
These “holes in the Gospel” today I see as nothing less than a religious “cancel culture” of the post-Modern age, with dead, frightened mainstream skeletons behind pulpits of social clubs and mausoleums posing as churches. Churches that deny the Trinity.
That is harsh, but I think Christians need some spiritual tables overturned in church parking lots and courtyards. Would Jesus know His church if He returned today?
We have just passed through the darkest days of humankind’s history.
I don’t mean the headlines and videos of the war in Ukraine, or the travails and statistics of our contemporary challenges. I don’t mean, in sweeping reference, to the bloody horrors of the last century.
As we recognize events and commemorate moments of history, whether we learn from the past or pretend things did not happen; whether we honor people or invent heroes of distant days; whether we celebrate fictional events or ignore noble events – I think the most horrible… the coldest… the loneliest… the most confusing… the most frightening days of humankind were the days between the death of Jesus and His rise from the grave.
He died.
The life was gone from Him. The Roman guards pierced his side to make sure, and blood flowed from His heart. He was taken from the cross, and His dead body was cleansed, prepared for burial, covered in a shroud and placed in a donated rich man’s tomb, secured with a heavy stone. His mother and others tended to His burial. Officials placed 24-hour guards at the tomb to make sure that zealots, or His enemies, did not steal the Body.
At the moment that Jesus breathed His last breath, there arose stormy skies and winds. The earth shook. A giant veil in the Temple spontaneously ripped, ceiling to floor. Reports of citizens and contemporary historians, not only Scripture, told of these things.
Turbulent nature was reflected in the minds and hearts of His followers. Distraught that their precious Friend was tortured and killed – taken from them – was compounded by confusion. And terror.
Would they be next?
What of their “movement”?
Not remembering the prophecies of Scripture, or Jesus’s predictions – or His comforting promises – they wondered whether the past three years were a bad dream. Or a ruse, a plot, or a fraud.
They scattered in fear.
What to do? Where to go? Hide? Pretend the Man from Nazareth was a mere teacher, a persuader only, unreliable about all the wisdom He shared?
How to explain all the miracles… the healings, the supernatural wisdom, the changed lives – their changed lives???
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Those few days – after Jesus suddenly had been ripped from their lives and hopes and dreams – must have been the emptiest, coldest hours anyone could experience. Women weeping, men crying for blood, authorities threatening, and… His friends huddled, hiding, shivering in fear.
One disciple said that He had believed Jesus was going to start a revolt against the government. Another said He was sure that Jesus was going to strike the religious leaders and the Roman authorities dead. Another must have doubted that Jesus was the Messiah after all, as they had come to believe.
Surely some – certainly His mother Mary, at least – must have remembered Scriptures, like the symbolism of Jonah in the great fish for three days; or what Jesus said, confusing at the time, about the Temple: if destroyed, it would be restored in three days.
Then the women went to the tomb.
The women intended to honor the dead Jesus, leave perfumes and oils if they could.
The women found the guards gone. The women found the tomb empty. The women saw the burial cloths that had covered the Body… but there was no Body there.
The women returned to the cowering Disciples, sharing what they had seen. All ran, entered the tomb, and saw what the women had reported.
They returned to where they had been hiding, and began to discuss, and plan, and remember things Jesus had foretold, and, and… what? Was Jesus in fact alive? Where was He? Is there hope? Was this not a catastrophe, as they had feared? Was this not — God forgive them for their suspicions — all a strange game? Or was God doing something supernatural, again, in their midst?
Mary Magdalene, however, returned to the tomb. While weeping, a man asked why, and she wondered if “they had stolen” the Savior’s body. She assumed the questioner was a gardener… but she turned and recognized the transformed, resurrected, living Jesus.
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She and the women became the church’s first evangelists. The good news was shared with the Disciples, and then the groups of followers, then the city of Jerusalem and countryside of Galilee, then the world.
Supernatural? For the next 40 days, Jesus appeared spontaneously to individuals and crowds. Walking through walls, performing more miracles, dispensing more wisdom. And now He gave His followers “marching orders,” different than advice about merely how to act. He issued “The Great Commission” – that believers in Him should “go into all the world sharing the Gospel [literally, the good news] and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Not that Jesus’s ministry was ever a game, but henceforth being a follower of Christ became a serious life-commitment.
He challenged His followers: Do you love Me?
He commanded His followers: Feed My sheep.
He promised His followers: Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
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Were they ready?
Are we ready today?
Are you ready?
The Life of Jesus is not a mere story. The ministry of Jesus was more than performances to impress crowds. The torture and death of Jesus is more than a lesson. The Resurrection of Jesus was more than proof that He overcomes death. The Ascension of Jesus will be confirmation that He was Divine. That He is one with the Father.
The world might still ignore Him, reject Him, deny Him, explain Him away, persecute Him (and us), in fact hate Him. And us.
The world can be savage against us – because of the Jesus who lives in us – or it can dismiss us; trivialize the Savior. It can call Christianity a game.
Let them do so. We can turn around and call the “game” Jesus played as something He virtually said that Easter morning:
This aphorism has been attributed to, and claimed by, by many people. Likely first written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (550 BC), it strikes a universal chord. Yet for its wisdom, universally acknowledged, it seldom has guided those who could learn from its application, and routinely is shunned until the ashes of wars are sifted.
“Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise at the proper time,” Theodore Roosevelt famously said.
So, in the war raging on our TV and internet screens, and in the hearts and minds of the world, no less, the first and frequent casualties are truth once again. I am not referring to the most blatant examples – phony statistics, videos of carnage from a decade ago being presented as breaking news, the pledges of invaders being violated as the words are spoken.
These “casualties” are too predictable, and might be outright propaganda or the result of well-intentioned confusion. In the “fog of war,” since these factors are common, I suggest – unless we are victims ourselves, in the midst of bombs dropping – that we ought to step back. If the issues and images are compelling (and they are), and if we can somehow influence events (as we must attempt), it is better that we exercise objectivity.
How can we be objective when we see hospitals destroyed and grandmothers – and grandchildren – crying? Choosing objectivity and seeking truth do not obviate concern, passion, sympathy, and grief. There is enough hatred playing out on our screens without choosing to filter every development through hatred of our own; to determine winners, losers, victims, aggressors, the past and the future… before the news report is over; and from 5000 miles away.
My advice hardly will change things on the ground in Ukraine. But it might change things in our midst. Wars rage elsewhere; they do not need to rage in our hearts. If we cannot, by ourselves, immediately affect a war in Ukraine, we surely can, by ourselves indeed, affect wars that might rage in our own hearts. As a beginning, that would be nine-tenths of the proper time.
Perspective.
The brilliant Russian-born soprano Anna Netrebko was removed from the title role in the upcoming Turandot production at the Metropolitan Opera; general manager Peter Gelb announced that it was unlikely that she would ever perform at the Met again. Her crime was failing to sign a statement repudiating her association with Vladimir Putin, despite her public announcement, “I am opposed to this senseless war of aggression and I am calling on Russia to end this war right now, to save all of us. We need peace right now.” Nevertheless she was fired from other engagements, or withdrew from many other opera companies around the world.
I noted this situation, and a friend wrote that Anna was “less than a human being.” She did not raise a bazooka; rather raises her beautiful voice, and millions of dollars for charities, yet American haters can claim a victory.
Remaining in her artistic field, I am reminded that violinist Isaac Stern vowed never to perform in Germany – former Nazi Germany, of course – yet Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich and Vienna; and violinist Itzhak Perlman has performed in Berlin. Are they naive, insensitive, stupid? (Surely they are not secret Nazis!) What is the expiration-date, or other mitigating aspects, on hatred?
Russia seems to be employing cluster-bombs and other instruments of mass destruction: worthy of war-crime prosecution. TV’s red areas on maps of Ukraine spread every hour, like blood on the carpet from a murdered corpse. The scenes we behold make me wonder if we might see incendiary bombs (those that cause widespread fire, sucking the air from peoples’ lungs over wide sections of a city), possibly killing upwards of a hundred thousand people.
… yet that happened, at least once before in history. Two months before World War II ended, the “art city” of Dresden, without defenses because it was a city of museums and no factories or barracks (in fact having become a city of hospital beds for refugees) was ordered fire-bombed by Winston Churchill. If England had lost the war, he would have been regarded as a war criminal, and even so within two decades some his pilots defied their orders never to discuss that atrocity.
Am I playing “Devil’s Advocate”?
Precisely the opposite. What is missing these days – and many of the days when wars rage – is people who will play “God’s Advocate.” Where are those voices? I don’t mean charitable groups like Samaritan’s Purse: God bless the dangerous and heroic and loving work of Christian organizations.
I refer to the consequential players, and, yes, each of us at a distance, if we can pray and act and influence the policymakers. Can we search for perspective first?
There is right and wrong; there is good and bad. There are monsters among us. Some of them might even call themselves Christians. There are reports (I don’t know, yet reports are numerous and long-standing) that Putin, in his public adherence to the Russian Orthodox Church, shares the vision of the Moscow Patriarch that all of “Mother Russia” be restored. No matter the cost?
I (knowing something of history) have a little hope, a little fantasy. In 1905 the forces of the Czar were suppressing protests all throughout Russia. In the port city of Odessa, Ukraine, sailors finally mutinied against their officers in bloody clashes. It was a spark that eventually led to the overthrow of the Czar. There are reports (can we believe the videos?) that anti-war demonstrations are taking place in a hundred Russian cities; that prominent citizens and celebrities have criticized the invasion; that many companies have refused to do conduct any more business with Russia; that Russians overseas have sacrificed some positions and privileges in protest…
Odessa redux? Can we hope? Can we pray? Can we act?
If we see our enemies not as madmen but, perhaps, horribly delusional and even evil human beings, we can find our way to confront this awful world better. We can pray, and seek God, with clarity. We need His wisdom.
God’s wisdom, after all, is reliable ten-tenths of the time.
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if you are using a portable device (phone or pad) then click: this link
We know that the ways of God are mysterious. He works in mysterious ways, we tell each other, but His story, history, also overflows with blessings that surprise people, challenges that somehow bless people, and surprises that challenge humankind – always, mysteriously, drawing us closer to Him.
That He would “empty” Himself and “become flesh” and dwell amongst us is the greatest of mysteries. It was foreordained – prophesied in diverse ways by numerous people through the ages until the Incarnation itself. In Isaiah Chapter 53 Jesus was predicted and described; His place and manner of birth was foretold; His ministry was reported beforehand, as was His eventual suffering and death; the meaning of His life on earth was told, and His resurrection explained.
Yet Immanuel, God-Becomes-Man, is a mystery to us.
Humankind could have confronted its sinful rebellion by obeying laws, but didn’t.
God might have sent a Ruler in a burst of terror to confront the wicked, but didn’t.
Humankind might have understood a Holy warrior, a righteous reformer, a rebel with a cause. But God chose to come as a… baby.
Mysteries. It is useless to confront God for reasons and answers. And more useless to want to question His love.
Let us step back for a moment. Christmas cards and carols and gift wrap and pretty ornaments make us forget some of the truths of Christmas. Shepherds: why shepherds as the first to behold the Savior? A manger: rough straw with livestock spittle? Mysterious scenarios, yet God’s choice of arrangements.
Did the world welcome the Savior? – Of course not. Humankind’s inclination to sin was the reason God acted through the Incarnation. Our hearts are dark; such is humankind’s reaction to free will.
Was the “first Christmas” a time of rejoicing? – Hardly. The innkeepers turned Mary and Joseph away (I am tempted to think it really was because she was a pregnant virgin…). The Roman authorities, knowing Scriptural prophecy too, ordered babies younger than two to be slaughtered in the land. Mary and Joseph and Jesus fled to Egypt to escape a deadly and hostile situation.
And the birth of Jesus: was Mary full of joy? – Not completely, of course. As a mother she was blessed, yet she knew the sorrows, rejections, suffering, and death that lay ahead for her Baby.
Mysteries. These things had to be. Let us remember such truths.
Yes, we want to celebrate a Holy Birthday Party. Yet the seeds of a funeral were sown at His birth – in fact from the earliest events in the Garden. Jesus did not come to us to teach and do good deeds, tra la, before things went wrong for Him, despite His loving ways.
Jesus came to earth to die.
His ministry was to teach; His blessings included healing; He acted to fulfill prophecies; yes. But He came to die. As “fully man and fully God,” He would struggle with betrayals and pain and death – mysteries again, how God “emptied Himself” – yet He knew that is why He was born in human form.
Kids and trees and presents and smiles aside (and I am not saying to be forsaken), we should remember the Easter message, too, at Christmastime. I believe the baby Jesus did. When He first opened His eyes, I believe He looked into the face of His loving mother, and shepherds, and angels, and, yes, some lowly animals.
And I believe He also looked up from His mother’s arms and somehow – mysteriously – saw the cross too. And the (empty) tomb.
Let us rejoice for all these sweet mysteries of our loving God.
It seems like everywhere we turn these days we meet “virtual” things, “bots” (robots and robotic actions), and automated actions. When I was younger, the prospect of such things were called “labor-saving devices,” and promised a future of… saving labor.
Car washes led to driverless vehicles, in a way. Now we can read newspapers when going to work. Of course, when I lived in California, crazy drivers on the freeways read newspapers instead of paying attention to speeding cars in the dozen other lanes. Now, a few years later, there are no such things as newspapers any more. This is all called Progress.
On our computers, the program will finish our sentences. Algorithms predict, with high degrees of accuracy, what we want to buy and where we would like to travel. No matter, because commercials and subliminal messages mold our desires anyway.
So modern life is telling us what to do. Modern life increasingly also dissuades us from pushing back; prevents us from asserting ourselves.
We are at a precipice in history. These things are not momentary fads, but Brave New modes of living. Candy, of sorts, that will cause cavities in our souls, I fear. The Romans lulled the population into subservience by giving them “bread and circuses.” We remember – we should remember – that Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
I have found myself lately wishing that modern life could provide us with virtual Volume Controls. Can’t we all just get along at a quieter level, a slower pace, normal surroundings?
I think it was Patsy Clairmont who said that in her life these days, “Normal” is nothing but a setting on the clothes dryer. In its own way she rivals Franklin’s profundity. There are many dangers in contemporary life, seriously parlous trends and signs. Some who are not alarmed are welcoming of the tremors and coming disruptions (at their peril, I think). And some people merely are distracted by the shiny toys and sweet candies, so to speak, and media propaganda and guilt trips and…
Combined with wars, inflation, crime, corruption and so much else, we might wish we could turn the clock back. Except for Daylight Standard Time, that is something we cannot do. We are being told that we can do almost anything we set our minds to… except to say “No thanks” to some of these rapidly changing elements of contemporary life.
My essays of late have careened from grim to glib and back again. So will this one, all by itself.
I am much worried about the state of affairs in America and the West, in popular culture, in government, and everything in between. I lament, and blame, the institutional churches in large part. And I try to rally Christians to assert their faith, their freedom, and their fates – that is, our civic duties and prerogatives – as our heritage is being erased and our liberties eroded.
But then I tell myself, and remind you of the fact, that we can peek ahead to the final chapters of the Book. There will be travail; trials; and literal tribulation. What we currently endure might only be a shadow of persecution to come. Yet we know that God reigns, Jesus has defeated the enemy, and the Holy Spirit has been given to strengthen and guide us. “Gospel” means “Good News.” There will be a happy ending to all of this.
I was sarcastic about the concept of “Progress” above. Yet I harken to the book I have read many times, The Pilgrim’s Progress, reportedly the second best-selling book in history after the Bible; and deservedly so. We are pilgrims and strangers in this world, but headed somewhere as we all must. But keep to the Road called Straight, enduring twists and turns, and climb upward to the Celestial City. You like “virtual” things? Bunyan’s book is a virtual picture of reality!
This week I have had moments of crying tears of grief, for friends. Both Christians. A friend whose dear husband died, I believe of Covid or symptoms brought on or exacerbated by the virus. Creative people, united in love of Christ and each other. And a friend whose son committed suicide – as is often the case, sudden, surprising, a mystery. My friend is new to me, a “Ted-Head,” devotee of Theodore Roosevelt; our friendship further informed by a common love of Jesus. The Lord gives my friend the strength to bear up and share a positive witness in these days following. I cannot pretend to think I could be able to do so, as he is doing.
So. What’s important in life?
Yes, these controversies threaten us, and when evils attack us, maybe we turn the other cheek. When they attack our families… or when they attack the Savior… Well, we remember to pray; we ask the Spirit’s wisdom. Sometimes we turn down the volume, if we can. Sometimes we may answer in kind. The Bible does lay out the “whole armor of God.”
But something else came to my mind this week, and it was not an accident to “find” it. It has centered me, and ministered to me. I pray it does for you too.
Another new friend, Daryl Coats, is the grandson of the composer of Gospel songs J B Coats. J B wrote some of the greatest songs of the past couple of generations. You might know “Where Could I Go But To the Lord” and “Winging My Way Back Home.” And many scores of others.
He also wrote one of the most beautiful, sentimental Gospel songs ever – “The Sweetest Gift, a Mother’s Smile.” Do you know it?
One day a mother went to a prison To see an erring but precious son;
She told the warden how much she loved him; It did not matter what he had done.
Her boy had drifted far from the fireside Though she had pleaded with him each night,
Yet not a word did she ever utter And though her heart ached, her smile was bright.
She left a smile, son, you can remember; She’s gone to heaven, from heartaches free.
Those walls around you, could never change her. You were her baby and e’er will be.
She did not bring to him parole or pardon, She brought no silver, no pomp or style;
It was a halo sent down from heaven, The sweetest gift, a mother’s smile.
Can we remind ourselves that amidst the fears and fights and threats and hate and dangers, that we have our heavenly faith, the love of Jesus, the promises of God… and each other?
Cherish your family members, and your dear friends in Christ. This simple song reminds us of, yes, a mother’s smile… and God’s unconditional love.
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Click either (or both!) versions of this song. One by an elderly mother on a mountain cottage porch; one by the great Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt.
Christian Patriots in America increasingly seek a figurative wishbone. But it is a backbone, not a wishbone, that we need, faced as we are by contemporary challenges.
The end of October has been appropriated as a secular holiday despite its origin as Hallowe’en, the holy evening before All Saints’ Day. It is not a national or a legal holiday, of course, but it rivals the others – I believe every month but May has a “legal” holiday that allows for three-day weekends and used-car sales; and most have been shoved to Mondays for such reasons.
Reverence and reflection are no longer justifications for these holidays. Easter and Thanksgiving have been sanitized and renamed on school calendars. The birthdays of Washington and Lincoln have been subsumed by a “presidents’ day” that equally honors Millard Fillmore and Warren Gameliel Harding. And October’s real bank holiday is being changed from remembrance of Christopher Columbus to any ethnic group with a pulse except White people.
The national neutering of meaningful observances has not quite reached the other significant event related to the last weekend in October: Reformation Day. It has been reduced to a relatively obscure celebration in America, although October 31 is indeed a national holiday in many European countries.
Reformation Day is associated, of course, with Martin Luther. October 31 was not his birthday, nor the day he cited as having a revelation that the Christian Church had become corrupted in certain ways that required reforms consistent with Bible tenets. It was the day, rather, that the professor and monk finally was motivated to list his critiques – there were 95 of them he called “theses” – and affix them to a cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany. It was a common practice to post announcements and invitations to public debates.
Most people know the outlines of his story. He was not the first devout Catholic to dissent from some Vatican practices. Popes had mistresses and children; political intrigues and nepotism were rife; and the sales of “indulgences” promised alleviation from punishment for souls not quite good enough to enter Heaven.
Holy hucksters actually used the slogan, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
Such things appalled the theological student Luther. He was informed by Bible passages that faith alone, not works or devices of humans; and that Scripture alone, not added rules and schemes, assured people of their standing with God. As a monk he could read the Bible (in Latin, the only language the Church allowed), and everyday worshipers were forbidden to read it.
For a hundred years other reformers had similar observations, but people like Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, Thomas A Kempis, Peter Waldo, and Geert Groote spoke their minds, and were routinely excommunicated, persecuted, and often tortured and burned at the stake or dismembered.
Luther wanted to reform the Church, not start a revolution. He wanted Roman Catholicism to be purified, and did not intend to start a denomination. But his cause was taken up by other clergy members, and by princes who wanted to be free of Rome’s political control.
I desire here to do more than honor the beneficial spiritual and cultural revolutions Luther indeed inspired, which included translating the Bible into the language of the people, writing memorable hymns, and animating the movements that spread literacy and promoted democracy – for the responsibilities of the Individual were seeds he planted that sprouted in Enlightenment thinkers and republican governments.
What I want to recognize, honor, and emulate is the towering figure of Martin Luther, the example he set as a man of conscience who exercised integrity when he was threatened.
When he was a called before ecclesiastic judges in the city of Worms, he was aware of his lost position as a priest and a professor; his excommunication form the Church; and the likely sentence of death. In Washington’s Museum of the Bible is a letter he wrote the previous night, addressing his impending execution. He had been chased, accused, condemned, and charged with heresy and causing civil unrest.
Luther was given a “lifeline”: to retract his writings, withdraw his complaints, recant his beliefs… renounce his conscience and the truths of the Bible. Like Galileo, he could have acceded to ignorant lords and fallible fools, and continued his life and work. But… “I can not, and I will not, recant. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
At that moment uncountable forces of Christianity and Western civilization were in a crucible. The course of history would have been very different if that brave man had compromised.
His example, his answer, “Here I stand. I can do no other,” should be a watchword in the battles we face today. That example, that answer, must be our response… no matter what issues confront us, threats we face, sacrifices we risk, or costs we must pay.
You refuse to compromise your position on racist trash in schools? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
You deny the government’s demand that it asserts control over your body? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
You oppose new standards of sexual morality and threats to our children? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
You dare believe that abortion is murder?” “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
You are willing to risk the criticism of family and neighbors, to be called a “hater,” to hurt peoples’ feelings? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
You will speak out against churches that are “accepting” of new religion or no religion, bending its message to excuse sin? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
Some brave protesters – “protestants” – lost their jobs and friends and sometimes their lives. Some, like Luther, were protected by people inspired by his integrity. Some lived to take his message to the arts and philosophy and governments as they formed themselves.
… and some, today, lament that Luther’s integrity – his examples, his answer – is a thing of the past. Have people of faith, parents, citizens, patriots, given up?
Would you renounce the things you believe, the things you once thought were true? Would there be enough evidence of your beliefs that would even let the world accuse you in matters of right and wrong? What is worth losing your integrity for – in the end, what do you stand for? Or will Christian Patriots learn to say:
“Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
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Please watch this clip of Luther’s answer, from the powerful 1953 movie:
A message from your friendly neighborhood Christian Curmudgeon. Actually, I am risible about some aspects, many aspects, of corporate worship these days, but it is not related to my being a reactionary about many other things. “Reactionary” might be too strong; but I have been called a moon-calf, a fuddy-duddy, a jabbernowl. Perhaps with justice, but I must first grab a dictionary.
I honestly (and earnestly) think that many forms of contemporary worship divert the focus from God and the Christian message, all in the name of – here we go – “relevance,” “inclusion,” “being welcoming,” “attracting youth,” and so forth.
The Italians have a phrase that I remember hearing, or rather I remember the meaning which is very wise. I think it was something like “Per andare avanti, guarda indietro,” and its meaning is, “Before moving forward, one needs to look back.” That is: remember; build on the past; respect your heritage. Further, using another Italian word, “ritorno” can be a palliative. That is: return to values before you lose what is valuable; preserve what carried you to a good place.
Can these stern prescriptions apply to worship and music in the contemporary church? Yes, and applicable to many, many larger aspects of life these days.
You don’t have to be a mossback to recognize that our world is spinning out of control. Specifically I mean “our” world of Western Civilization — Post-Christianity, secularized and hedonist, materialist and moral-relativist. Whether virtually worshiping “science” or finding value in no-values, our world thinks it has found the formula for success in the pursuit of happiness.
We seem to believe that every generation, every society, every belief system in all of human history had it wrong. Contemporary society has figured it out, it tells us: the best religion is no religion; the best standards are no standards. “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man.” The theme song for a generation was really a funeral dirge of self-deception.
Somewhere along the way, their karma ran over our dogma.
Our puppet-masters dance more madly with each other, inspiring the suicidal, incestuous, relentlessly aimless “life” we are forced to live amidst the ruins of religion, order, respect, reverence, law, and learning.
And what of my original choleric indictment of church worship? A minor factor? I don’t believe the trends and modes in Christendom today are peripheral, but are squarely indicative of a rudderless society. Indeed, the general drift in contemporary churches – thank God, not all: I acknowledge that – are mirrors of what afflicts our “civilization.”
So I will address my thoughts to malignant trends in many churches today.
*The mad rush to “run” more and more people into pews is an admission that churches don’t believe the sweet Salvation message is sufficient.
*The transformation of music and “doing” church to be “contemporary” and “relevant” tells those who hunger for Eternal Truth that fads of the moment are what really matter to the clergy.
*Many churches act as if traditional hymns are illegal and printed hymnbooks and prayer books are toxic. Except for the (rare) great old hymns, who knows the words or can sing more than those new songs’ seven words repeated 11 times?
*Performances on stages, with worshipers as mere audiences, now are substitutes for congregational participation.
*Hosts challenge people to smile and grin and yell Good Morning – “Louder! I can’t hear you!” – when in fact some people seek church in order to weep and seek God and listen for Him.
*I am not against instruments other than organs and pianos, but many people leave church services more in love with guitar riffs than with Jesus Christ.
*I have seen uncountable youth pastors, in their 30s and 40s, wearing cargo pants, sporting tattoos, and dying their hair in order to relate to their Middle Schoolers. Kids today don’t need idiot adults pretending to be kids who have classmates and friends already. What kids need are Christian adults to be role models.
*Sin frequently is not addressed in many contemporary Christian churches. To ignore our sin nature and the stain of sin in our life is to deny what Jesus came to defeat, and the Holy Spirit sent to empower our resistance.
*Do we know the prayers of the church any more? The Commandments? The Creeds that summarize our faith? Do we know the distinctives of our denominations, or do differences make no difference? Really?
*Finally, how many American Christians are taught about the history of the church, about the defense of the faith – from schisms within, or from periodic Muslim invasions over 1500 years? How many of us know about, and take inspiration from, the martyrs who died for their faith?
… I believe if we don’t know about all the martyrs who died for the Faith, we surely will die for our lack of faith.
I have been reading, and re-reading, classic novels and old books lately. I don’t really live in the past, although these days I find myself wishing I could.
But as I get older I realize how much I have missed of life, and in life. Rather than regret this, I make up for that lost time – reading, as I say, the classics. And I discover music of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Classical periods of music; and even have been enjoying music of the early Romantic period that I previously disdained. How odd that music of the 1840s can be “new.”
I know that not everyone will have the same tastes that I do, but my point is that we have a vast heritage that most of us never explore and appreciate, much less know. There is an old Italian saying that we cannot move forward without looking back. Truth in irony. “What’s past is prologue.” The greatest application of this view is that it is difficult to know the Savior, and gain Heaven, without a grounding in ancient scripture.
Well. A few of the old books I lately have read have surprised me in startling ways. Two were by Oscar Wilde. In a Christian essay, yes, I will mention them.
First, a true story about him. Near the end of his life, after surviving two brutal years in prison (for morals offenses) he encountered a friend on the sidewalk. The friend knew of Oscar’s impoverished state and the shabby room he rented. He asked how Oscar was doing, and the reply was, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”
Ever ready with an epigram, Wilde suggested that he was near death, and knew it; and the comment was a stereotypical remark of a fastidious homosexual. It was his flouting of Victorian sensibilities in the 1890s, and affairs with famous men, and libel suits, and public scandals, that resulted in his two-year sentence at hard labor.
Some day, here, I shall write more, but pertinent to my topic are the two books he wrote while in prison. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (that is, the Jail near Reading Town) and De Profundis (“From the Depths”) are extremely moving short works. They are introspective confessions, not of his acts, but of larger matters of the soul and God’s loving justice – not what one might expect. He dwells upon the Savior, and understands Scripture, and speaks with clarity through the moral fog and fetid world to which he presumed he justly was consigned.
In his philosophical anguish we finds his lines that Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.
There are some people yet today who debate whether Oscar Wilde’s last days and last writings were searching for Christ and forgiveness. Yet his earlier fairy tales clearly were Christian allegories; and indeed on his deathbed he had a friend summon clergy that he be baptized, and made confession.
Not the impression history has of Oscar Wilde. Similarly, I have just finished reading three very thick, and fascinating, volumes, the complete letters of Vincent van Gogh. How he produced such an abundance of paintings in his short life, much less the massive amount of letters, is astonishing. History tries to tell us that he was a tortured, odd man, hermit-like and obsessive.
The van Gogh of his letters has constant money troubles, but chats with his brother, encourages other artists, comments on illustrators and cartoonists (!) in England and America, dwells on artistic scenes and painter’s tools… and he talks about God. In his youth he considered becoming a minister; he visited a rescue mission in London; and he was a Christian. Doubters today search for evidence of his occasional doubts, sigh, but once again, history paints a distorted picture.
My theme here is that there was a time not so long ago when Western Civilization – and I mean the arts; not only “common people” – believed in God, belonged to the church, accepted Christ. Of other recent “reads,” probably more than half of Hans Christian Andersen’s many tales have Christian themes. Robinson Crusoe as a character constantly dwells on Christ’s mercy and the ways of God. Mozart’s letters, to his father, and to his wife, frequently referred to God in the most natural way.
And so forth. Not Sunday-School lessons, not religious tracts, but much of popular literature and the arts, and “common” life, revolved around God and the Bible and Jesus Christ. Once upon a time.
Is it like that that today? Remotely? Speaking of “remote,” just take TV, for example. Condense the plots or jokes, the “situations” of situation-comedies, the premises of dramas and… realize how far we have fallen.
We can use another barometer. The man serving as president promised to appoint a cabinet that represents America, but has more transsexuals than professing Christians. An avowed Catholic, on his first day in office he directed that taxpayer funds be used to promote the killing of babies in foreign countries.
And this week’s “National Day of Prayer” proclamation did not mention God once.
We may expect God to respond accordingly.
Even the contemporary culture’s perfunctory “God bless,” uttered as if to say, “Have a nice day,” and unfortunately common with Christians, was not tossed into the proclamation when read to cameras.
In the West, we once devoted ourselves, even in the arts, to seeking, knowing, and explaining God. Today we seem to work hard at avoiding, ignoring, defying, insulting, and denying God. We have crossed the line of even pretending to be Christians any more.
God, You are real. God help us. Forgive us. Help Thou our unbelief.
There is something about the life of Jesus that especially attracts my interest, partly because the church at large – indeed, the world – has neglected. It is, specifically, the life of Jesus after he rose from death. His life after Resurrection. He lives today, of course; but I mean the 40 days that the Bible records (as did many witnesses and contemporary writers like the Jewish historian Josephus) when the Savior walked and talked and preached and healed and was was seen by multitudes.
We have very few records of that, compared to the details of His ministry and the events of Holy Week. That is what is intriguing to me, and why I keep returning to it. Further, Ascension Day, at the end of those 40 post-Easter days, when Jesus rose bodily to Heaven, finally affirmed His Divinity. Once a major day on the church calendar, it is observed far less today.
The last verse of the last Gospel’s last chapter (John 21:25) tells us, Jesus also did many other things. If they were all written down, I suppose the whole world could not contain the books that would be written.
Let us imagine Palestine in those days, similarly mysterious because we have been told so little. For 40 days Jesus showed the world that He lived again. The Sanhedrin had called Jesus a blasphemer, and others claimed His miracles were of the devil… but His 40 days in Jerusalem and surrounding areas, being seen by multitudes, was scarcely disputed at the time and afterward. A few generations later, the writer Eusebius interviewed many people who had known people who saw Jesus during these days, told of miracles, even cited sermons and letters of the risen Jesus.
In other words, some people might not have joined the Christ-followers – although believers multiplied rapidly, even in the face of persecution soon thereafter – but very few people disputed that He rose from the dead. They certainly were active days.
Yet as busy as He must have been, I have a picture in my mind of Jesus alone, also; maybe when darkness fell, down lonely paths, maybe through storms and cold silences, walking the dark hills, not always responding to the curious crowds, but sometimes seeking out the troubled and the hurting individuals.
This is a plausible picture, because Jesus still does this today.
It was in His nature: Remember the “ninety and nine,” and the one lost sheep the shepherd sought. Remember Christ’s words, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock”… and how often do we think of how patiently He waits and knocks and waits and knocks? Remember His story of the father rejoicing over the prodigal son who repents and returns and is restored. Remember His admonition to be “fishers of men.” Remember Him weeping over Jerusalem. Remember the promise that “Whosoever” believes should not perish but have eternal life.
He walks the dark hills, looking for us – piercing the gloom with a joyful hope that may be ours. He seeks us out.
And, continuing to reconstruct an image of what Jerusalem and surrounding areas must have been like those 40 days, abuzz with talk of the Miracle Man, let us also remember that we don’t have to respond to a shout from the street – “Come! They say that Jesus is down by the river! Let’s see Him!” No… He will come to us.
And it is especially the case, I believe, if you are one of those people who is skeptical, or has “heard enough,” or cannot crack the shell of hurt or pain or resentment or rebellion or fear, or all the other hindrances that prevent you from experiencing the love of Christ. Know this, He is closer than a shadow, no matter what you think, or what you might prefer to believe. He will not leave you, even though you ignore Him.
“God walks the dark hills, To guide our footsteps. He walks everywhere, By night and by day. He walks in the silence, On down the highway; God walks the dark hills, To show us the way.”
The risen Savior, Lord of Creation, walks the dark hills, seeking out… me? and you? where we are? in our hurts, in our messes? That’s the real miracle of the Miracle Man, to me, still –- that He loves you and me. Looking for us; finding us; hugging us; loving us; healing us; teaching us; saving us.
Those 40 days were a practice run for eternity – His and ours.
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A favorite gospel song is the haunting “God Walks the Dark Hills,” embodying mystery even in its own origin. It was written by a lady named Audra Czarnikow, who lived in Liberty, OK. Little is known about her; she apparently wrote no other hymns or songs. Small groups sang her song, and others recorded it; eventually it became a signature song of the Happy Goodman Family; here it is sung by the appropriately haunting voice of Iris DeMent.
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Please listen to this message’s reflection in this song and video:
It is sad and tragic – it “stinks” is the word I am searching for – that people who are alone on Christmas feel alone on Christmas. Yes, we know the associations of the holiday, and they must be real because we read the gruesome statistics every year about melancholy and even increased cases of suicides. Other words are “useless” and “ironic.”
If anyone pays attention to the meaning of the Incarnation – Jehovah, Messiah, Emmanuel, “God with us” – they should be reassured to know that Jesus is the Friend of all. When the world fails, Jesus is true. He is loyal, an ever-present help in time of trouble, and Someone Who clings to us closer than a shadow.
More, He came to minister to the lost and lonely. In fact nearly every aspect of His life as a human was… lonely. His parents were rejected all over the city, and my guess is that it was not really a challenge of overbooked inns. Do you doubt the Christmas story? King Herod didn’t: he had all young boys in his realm slaughtered to prevent a Savior’s arrival.
Seven hundred years earlier the Prophet Isaiah (Chapter 53) predicted in astonishing detail the facts of Christ’s birth, ministry, death… and loneliness. He was not handsome… He was called a Man who had no place to lay His head… He was “rejected, despised”… At the end of His life – after wise teaching, miracles, and uncountable healings – He was alone again. Unjustly accused, imprisoned, tortured, and put to painful death. I have always thought the worst hurts were the abandonment, betrayal, and disappearance of his friends and followers.
Jesus knew these things were coming, not just the days before, but as per Isaiah’s prophesies, just as others could have connected the dots.
He came into the world naked and alone; He left this world naked and alone. For those who feel alone at Christmastime, take a moment to imagine that the Holy Child looking up from the lowly manger – or the Man of Sorrows hanging from the cross – might have been looking for YOU… and looking AT you.
Are you there, looking at Him? Were you looking for a friend when you felt friendless? Others left Him, but He will never leave you.
For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste:
God Walks the Dark Hills – Iris Dement – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=0OGq4EXaXTM
(There is a “download spammer” that sometimes interferes with music and video downloads. It is not malicious or harmful; but it is annoying, Please just “refresh” a couple times to get our video download.)
Christmas should not be confined to one day, or one season, a year. This is not an anti-commercialism rant, or not only that. Of course the “spirit” of Christmas should be with us all year long, but that veers to the sloganeering: Peace On Earth and other sentiments, as important as they are.
But anything that diverts us, even nobly, from the realization of the Incarnation – the astonishing, crazy, illogical, radical, loving invasion of our lives by the Creator of the Universe, should make us laugh and weep and sing every of of the year.
Jesus didn’t come for Christmas.
Jesus didn’t come for Christians.
Jesus came that all might become Christians – believers in Him.
Jesus didn’t come for a lot of the things we associate with Christmas… because those associations persuade us to unwrap them, and then put them away with other decorations, for another year.
God’s goodness and mercy are not meant to be commemorated and call down more in one “relevant” season, more than in the rest of the year. Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection should not be contemplated during Easter alone. I wonder if there has ever been a church that has celebrated Christmas and Easter on each others’ dates! Odd? No merely rare, but perfectly appropriate contemplation, veneration, and truths.
OK – I’ll tell you what’s out of place in this idea. Santa Claus, overweight, that full head of hair and whiskers, in that head-to-toe flannel outfit. Sleighs, snowmen, all those things on Christmas cards – in Springtime? Or… hunting for colored eggs; bunnies; fancy hats – in the middle of Winter?
The trappings of these holidays – holy days – are actually just that: Traps.
Jesus has been born into your life every day of your life; not on December 25. God chose to become human to bear witness, to remind us that He knows of our sorrows and dreams and hurts and joys. He came to fill the need we all have for a Savior… which is the case every day, not one day.
And Jesus took our sins, and takes our sins, upon Himself… not on one Springtime weekend, but every moment of our lives. Not only that, but while we were yet sinners. He suffered rejection, torture, death. Good Friday is today. He rose from the dead. That is still true, not an ancient tradition. He ascended to Heaven, and He still reigns.
I do not condemn Christmas trees because they had a pagan origin; nor colored eggs as symbols of fertility in some peoples’ rites. All things are made new. But let us not condemn ourselves to mechanical celebrations and misguided holidays, either. When we are Children of the King, wherever we stand is Holy Ground. Whenever we acknowledge Him is a Holy Day.
Maybe we need to give a new meaning to that nickname of Christmas and Easter Christians, “Chreasters”! Let’s take it back!
Oh, we need peace on earth, and we need goodwill toward men on whom God shows favor. We are compassed about by fears and dangers – some imagined; some very real. But our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; not Santas and bunnies.
Lest I drift into even more clichés, I challenge you to call to mind “other” Christian observances, every time one greets you – especially at Christmas and Easter. Our Savior was, after all, the Alpha and the Omega.
The Beginning and the End. Jesus came to die. That we might live. The Lord of all, come as a baby. The Lord Almighty, surrendering to suffering and death.
A country singer named Joey Feek can give birth to a Downs’ Syndrome baby and then learn she has terminal cancer… and sings Jesus Loves Me. The blind opera singer Andrea Bocelli can sing Amazing Grace – “I was blind, but now I see,” and mean it.
You figure it out. I’ll just worship Him. Every day is a holy day.
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For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpXwOSHTwsY
(There is a “download spammer” that sometimes interferes with music and video downloads. It is not malicious or harmful; but it is annoying, Please just “refresh” a couple times to get our video download.)
Today’s message is a guest essay by Bridgette Ehly, a journalist and author of the science-fiction thriller, Smiling Ghosts.
How has the Body of Christ – the church, representing God on this side of Heaven – in our day come to lose the moral high ground in so many realms? To relativists, secularists, and liberals who talk about kindness, but routinely have supported the violent murder of babies in the womb, erosion of God-given rights, and destructive social policies? It was, after all, righteous Christians who normalized the concept of universal human dignity, the idea that all lives, all people, are precious.
How did we drop the ball? I think it has to do with action vs complacency, and the spread of what we may call Communist Christianity. Communist in the context of enforced uniformity, a godless suppression of individual initiative, a denial of the need to obey and please God.
I once read that in His three-year ministry, Jesus Christ traveled over 3000 miles. He was constantly on the move on foot or by sea, and went from town to town revealing God’s loving nature. He healed the sick and showed humankind how to love our neighbors as God commands us.
Jesus was a man of action. And the Holy Spirit literally flows through the Father and the Son and through us as Christ-followers. God is a God of action – as we see from the opening of a rose, the change of the seasons, cycles of birth and death, and the stories of a hundred billion lives.
When Jesus talks about faith, it always is associated with action.
Whoever does the will of God is brother and sister and mother to me. (Mark 4:35)
Why do you call me, Lord, Lord, and not put into practice what I teach you? (Luke 6:46)
Are we failing to answer Christ’s call to action? We are the Body of Christ in this world… but sitting idle as our culture and traditions die; are we a body whose legs no longer work? Instead of walking upright, do we now drag our useless limbs behind us? What is the verdict to those charges?
Lack of action on the part of the Church is rooted in what I call Communist Christianity, the descriptive notion that all believers are literally the same.
But if this were true, why does God refer to some people as righteous? If we are all equal, why even have the word righteous? There would be only “saved” and “condemned.” Salvation is instantaneous, but sanctification is a process. Really, what would be the point of living if we do not strive to improve ourselves and become more perfect children of God? St. Paul tells us to “walk as children of Light (for the fruit of the Light consists of all goodness and righteousness and truth), trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”
By faith alone through grace we are saved, but what is faith? Is it a thing, a magical trinket in a box that guarantees a Christian entrance to heaven regardless of whether he loves his fellow man or strives to do what Jesus tells us to do? Or do works follow from faith – is faith a manifestation of God in the physical world, a series of actions that turn a belief into a living force for good; that is, God’s will be done on Earth?
Jesus ties faith and action so closely and consistently that we must act, cherishing them as one impulse.
In the Seventh chapter of Luke we read, Then turning towards the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has bathed My feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she has anointed My feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” But those who were at the table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
The woman’s actions and her faith are interchangeable. Jesus says her sins are forgiven because she showed great love, and then says that her faith saved her. We are forgiven in proportion to our love, and love is expressed in a million different ways, the hands and feet of God alive on this earth!
I believe evil people have taught us to think of faith as a “thing” for two reasons. One is to cause fights about theology among Christians and thereby weaken the Church by fracturing our unity. The other motive is to destroy the powerful force of “love in action.” Communist Christianity tells us that a simple prayer, a 10-second pledge to the Will of God, is all that is required from us in this life.
Communist Christianity corrodes the Church just as Communism destroys economies and societies by crushing a people’s desire to achieve excellence. People who are saved and believe they need to do nothing more, or can do nothing more, to improve their standing before God lack the motivation to please the Father. Jesus told us to visit the sick and spread His Word, but Communist Christianity says it isn’t mandatory, so why do it? (Besides, the government “releases” us from that moral impulse.)
The moment in time that we commit our lives to Christ is the beginning, not the completion, of our spiritual journey. Certainly, many Christians do answer Jesus’ call to visit the sick and those in prison, but many, many people drop a 20 into the collection plate and call it a week. God forbid!
Faith is God’s love in action. Now more than ever, we need to live our faith by speaking up for Christian beliefs at city council meetings; by volunteering with kids so that they have a Christian influence in their lives; by showing the poor that the helping hand in their neighborhoods is a Christian hand.
We all need to get involved, even a couple of hours a week, not to earn salvation but to exercise faith! We can’t improve the world together, or preserve what is precious about our society, if we don’t act.
Jesus’ life was a series of actions that led to the greatest act of love, His death on the cross. Our Savior said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Jesus’ giving His life freely remains the ultimate expression of faith in God, a standard for us and His revealed plan for our salvation.
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(For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy & paste: https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=itgTjU5toz0
10-12-20
There is a bit in an old Laurel and Hardy comedy where the boys are caught in a situation, Ollie impersonating a rich guy and Stan his servant. “Call me a cab,” Ollie commands, thinking of a way they can escape.
“What?” asks the typically bewildered Stan.
“Call. Me. A. Cab,” Ollie patiently orders.
Stan says, “All right. You’re a cab!”
Fast-forward 90 years or so to this election season. In fact to many aspects of life today, and politics, and in the church. Labels have become virtually meaningless. They have not become obsolete, because everybody is quick to proudly adopt a label, or to smear someone with another label. But labels are now fungible, malleable, chameleon-like.
In the same way, statistics don’t lie; but statisticians do.
President Trump identified himself as a very stable genius, a manner of self-description people usually leave to others than themselves, and usually to posterity. Today, critics immediately challenged one, two, or all three of those words. Kamala Harris is described, by Democrat handlers, as a “moderate,” but she would have considered that an insult during the primaries. We recently were told that Antifa is not an organization but an idea… the distinction holds no difference to shop owners seeing their life-dreams torched street by street, city by city by thugs in identical costumes.
The irony is most bitter in religion of the 21st century. Joe Biden calls himself a “man of faith” (faith in what?) but bristles when priests and cardinals deny him the Eucharist because he denies Catholic Church teaching, for instance on abortion.
If the church, the Bible, Jesus’ teachings do not mean anything – if your opinion is superior to the Revealed Word – what is the point of adopting certain labels, claiming to be a Catholic? Some pastors deny the divinity Of Christ, and the Virgin Birth. Are their salaries the same as taking money under false pretenses?
We all evolve, change opinions, and learn. President Trump used to be accepting of abortion, as was I at one point; and a lot people I know. But science, experience, and conscience “spoke” to us. When politicians who also are aware of science, hear of experiences, and have consciences – when they switch “sides” or switch parties — they cannot fail to know where they fight life’s battles now: Who their new friends are. And what effects their defections will have. I refer to conservatives and Catholics who support the party of abortion-on-demand.
This is not in a vacuum; these new rules – or lack of rules – are a microcosm of life today. Heresy is as old as human nature; its first appearance was in the Garden.
“Relativism,” it is called: What’s OK for me is all that matters; There is no right and wrong; You are free to make up your own rules…
I wonder why many people today rebel against Christianity, democracy, capitalism, when the fruits of our civilization have advanced, refined, and are blessings to so many. To ignore our heritage, to decline to defend our values, and surrender to the enemies of our souls… seems like a crime in itself.
If America does not undergo a spiritual awakening, it does not deserve to continue as the Republic we inherited.
Returning here to the political context, and to shifting labels: Politicians and pollsters do not even know what they mean when they profile and predict about the “evangelical” community. Ah, the “faith-based.” Yes, “family values voters.” Some “evangelicals” have enormous differences between them.
Just as Jesus did not die for denominations or missions organizations or charities or movements or committees, but for individuals – you and me – so will the redemption of America not depend upon parties, movements, organizations.
America will be redeemed, revived, and resuscitated by citizens. Individuals. You and me.
If someone wants to know our label, we can use the one that was a perfect description when this noble project of a Constitutional Republic began – Citizen Patriots.
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Click: Who Am I
I write this as the third part of an informal tracking of a neglected but essential part of church history – the period after Jesus’s crucifixion and death; Resurrection and 40 days of preaching and witnessing; His bodily Ascension into Heaven, confirming His divine nature; then came the day of Pentecost.
It was the promise of Pentecost – what we have come to call the Pentecostal experience – and Jesus’s careful explanation that it was good that He leave earth, because He would then send to believers the Helper, the Healer, the Comforter: One who would empower and instruct. The Holy Spirit, third manifestation, the third Person, of the Trinity. We shared how the Spirit first fell on worshipers in the upper room, how they received a strange gift of speaking in unknown languages, but understood or interpreted.
This was the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit,” this spiritual joy and maturity. It was not a one-day event in history. It was merely the first time.
I write this in the midst, whew, of the worldwide pandemic’s fears, afflictions, and social disruption; and in the equally chaotic riots following a police suspect’s death. And… what’s next? People are right to be unsure if not unsafe. Or vice-versa.
As a natural skeptic, I wonder whether we will look back on the shutdowns, this virus, and feel blessed, feel relieved, or feel scammed. And these riots – will we look back and see an explosion of righteousness, or a period of anarchy and looting?
I will keep to my promised theme. I can write about things we see and don’t know are true; or I can write about things we cannot see, but know are true.
Things were different, once the Holy Spirit came. Peter, for instance, had been a bumbling and impulsive disciple who denied knowing Jesus three times when things were dicey – scarcely less an offense than Judas’s betrayal. Yet after the Spirit came upon him in the upper room, Peter became the mature leader of the new church that formed, and a powerful preacher.
What happened to Peter 2000 years ago can happen to believers today, and does happen to believers today. Can you have salvation without the “baptism” of the Holy Spirit? Yes. The gifts are… extra. But who would reject gifts, especially from Almighty God? Would children at birthday parties reject gifts?
Yet, some Christians do. If God chose to express Himself in three ways, we need to remember they were equal manifestations. Jesus was all God and all man; and so is the Spirit.
This same Spirit was explained by this same Peter after he was blessed with gifts of wisdom. He recalled, and shared, the passage from Joel chapter 28 (500-800 years earlier) – And it shall come to pass… says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams…. I will pour out My Spirit in those days…
Now it became clear. “Greater is He that is within you [the Holy Spirit], than he who is in the world [Satan].”
Some Christians claim that the gifts of the Holy Spirit were only for that first crowd. But that is to doubt Jesus and limit the Father, not to mention denying the subsequent evidence. I know because I have experienced the Baptism, and I have witnessed miracles; I have received the gifts. Many people have.
Other Christians believe that sudden outbreaks of tongues, ecstatic worship, and miracles broke out in Wichita around 1900 and in a black church on Asuza Street, Los Angeles, in 1906 is where it started. And then, as we shared, Pentecostalism spread to half a billion people around the world, second only to Roman Catholicism among Christians. Not for now? How would that explain miracles, church growth, healings, and blessings over the following 2000 years?
There are accounts (described by no less a person than Theodore Roosevelt in his classic book The Winning of West) of pioneer camp-meetings and revivals where worshipers would gather for several days, overtaken by ecstatic worship and strange tongues. In the 1700s, similar responses in Philadelphia to public sermons of Charles Whitefield; Benjamin Franklin recorded these. In the 1800s, a similar reaction among lunchtime worshipers on Wall Street, of all places. The blind hymn-writer Fanny Crosby prayed in “the language of angels” only she and her Lord knew. And so forth, all before Azusa Street.
After that, however, there were spontaneous and simultaneous “eruptions” of Holy Spirit preaching, singing, worship, healings, Words of prophecy, and such, all over the world. Two decades ago I twice attended a famous such revival in Pensacola, Florida – a visiting evangelist was used by God to spark ecstatic worship that was not extinguished – 24/7, for month after month; people attracted from all over the world.
If the Holy Spirit is the equal of Jesus… but you don’t have to receive this “Spirit baptism” to enter heaven… why do some of us consider it so important? But as I implied before, if God offers a spiritual gift and we decline it, we are spiritual fools.
What are the Gifts of the Spirit? They listed several times in the New Testament. Any can be prayed for; they can be-one-time gifts – for self-edification, or ministering to a situation – or occasionally are specialized lifetime ministering gifts, for instance to evangelists with healing ministries. They are wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues.
As I said, I have experienced some (blessing others when needed, or to communicate with God when I felt helpless) and I have witnessed healings, emotional breakthroughs, astonishing revelations.
Listen: Christianity is nothing if not a system of faith and belief and miracles. Plain and simple. How have Christians become so blasé about a Man who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and rose from the dead? “Oh, well, that was God, 2000 years ago.” How can there be so many people who go to church (if at all) out of dull habit; who never feel joyful when “Hallelujah” is read from the same old prayer book; who have “forms of godliness, but deny the power thereof”?
They quench the Holy Spirit, embarrassed to seek… reluctant to accept gifts… afraid to exercise the power it enables.
Instead – bringing it today – Christians complain about current events in the news. They feel helpless to do anything about them. They are lost, spiritually, in these uncertain times. In this time of threats and potential disasters facing us, they might even wish for some miracles.
You know what? It is as easy to pray for miracles, as to wish for them. And you have a loving Father who has stored up gifts you can access. Why, oh why, do people neglect the third Person of the Trinity?
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Since the Pentecostal movement is spread across the world, with no one denomination or pope – the Bible is sole authority – it is joyful to see the workings of the Holy Ghost everywhere… and especially, in these day of persecution, how the Spirit empowers traditional Christians, new believers, and persecuted Christians. Here, a group of Iranians who support underground Christians churches in Iran, singing of the sweet Spirit of God.
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.
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).
The late pianist Anthony Burger used to tell a story about his son Austin, at five years old, in his church’s Easter pageant. He was cast as Jesus, dressed in sandals and one of his dad’s old T-shirts.
The other kids in their little costumes beheld the empty cardboard tomb. The little girls acted sad, and when little Jesus appeared he told them not to be afraid, or to be sad. “I died, but now I am alive! I will never leave you!” Parents in the church audience were moved, and proud.
All of a sudden, Austin ran back into the tomb – not in the script! But right away he popped out and yelled, “Ready or not – here I come!!!”
Somewhere between parents’ embarrassment and the church’s laughter we might find – “out of the mouths of babes!” – some decent theology.
Ready or not, Jesus did leave that tomb. He conquered sin and death. He returned. To live among us.
He actually never did go back into that tomb. He just needed it for the weekend. He lives; He lives; Christ Jesus lives today. He walks with us and He talks with us, along life’s narrow way… We sing it, but are we ready… or not?
Jesus was ready, but are we?
We have to be ready. When a Savior dies – for us; and lives – for us, we cannot be indifferent. Life on earth was never the same again, and when we meet the Incarnate Lord, the Risen Savior… we cannot be the same again. Ever.
If you are not changed, you need some serious time with Jesus… but with yourself too.
Despite being shrouded in religious symbolism and tradition, Lent also is a part of Christianity that largely has no Biblical sanction nor institution. That is to say, the holidays and succession of observances were not established by Jesus, the Disciples, St Paul, nor the churches of the early evangelists.
In fact, there are myriad definitions of Lent, numbers of days of Lent, whether Sundays are counted or not, what constitutes holy fasts, what meats can be eaten, what colors of church vestments and displays should be assigned, what parts of the liturgy should be sung or suppressed, even when Lent ends. As many definitions as there are Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox traditions… and of course different views within Protestantism and Orthodox churches. Denominations like the Mennonite church, for instance, traditionally did not observe Lent at all.
Is the observance of Lent a corruption of Christian teaching? No! It is not even obliquely related to anything pagan, as can be deduced from Christmas, Easter, and other holidays. And Lenten practices are informed by the suffering and death of Jesus; the Passion; the meanings behind the largest aspects of Easter (the atonement) to the smallest (reminders of the significance of every “station” of the cross that Jesus carried to Golgotha).
If Lent is not a corruption of the holy aspects of the period preceding Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and the horrible events of Holy Week, certain observances of Lent can be corrupt. When people “give up” broccoli, or even chocolate – perhaps things they already hate, or things they might indeed love; you have heard them all – it trivializes the acts of the Savior.
“How can self-sacrifice, or discipline, be bad?” we are asked. “And if we lose weight, or spend time in better ways than going to the movies…” is a sentence that does not need to be finished. Dieting, better use of your free time, less video-gaming, can all be done any time (or all times) during the year.
Jesus Christ did not suffer and die for your chocolates or your video games.
I am going to suggest something in place of sacrificing something for Lent. Since the precise details of Lenten observances are not in the Bible, I might feel secure to propose a different way to recall, even “imitate” (in the view of Thomas à Kempis) Christ’s Passion.
Instead of giving something up for Lent, can we take something up for Lent?
Jesus sacrificed His life, but He also gave us something very real: salvation. He renounced earthly pleasures, but He also gave us a supreme picture of service. He endured rejection, betrayal, and torture – which can remind us of how much He loved us, even while we were yet sinners – yet are we only to dwell on these things… or be inspired to lives of fellowship, reconciliation, and love?
He died… that we may live.
Should we think of taking up things – not only the cross, which after all we are commanded to do – and not merely sacrificing this or that for 40 days?
In the spirit of the Lenten season, and Christ’s Passion of which we are mindful, forget the chocolates and video games, and take up something.
These might be word games, of course: To take up something might be seen as a sacrifice; fine. And, as with New Years resolutions, or Lenten sacrifices, we can also “take up” something all the year ‘round. Also fine! In a sense, the life of faith is to see things, and act, in upside-down manners sometime. We need new perspectives. Do we really belong in a life of the world’s old ways of seeing and doing? We should yearn for a place where dead men live, and rich men give.
Take up charity work. And do it as privately as possible. Share something about Jesus to someone. Especially if you are uncomfortable doing so. Think of someone you have resented, and write a note saying you forgive them. And then… forgive them.
Take up something, not because it’s traditional when the calendar says so. Take up something out of passion – your passion – and not automatically.
Religion is one of the poisons in contemporary life.
Sometimes – a lot of times – we have trouble because we really don’t care to avoid trouble. Counter-intuitive? It is a human tendency, emotional inertia; unreasonable fear of change. When it comes to matters of the spirit, too many Christians get stuck in Neutral.
Yet life goes on. Every Sunday – or every Christmas and Easter – there will be church, and we will see the same old friends. It is easy for weeks to turn into months and months turn into years this way. A sort of spiritual comfort zone, without getting serious about faith.
We know, or ought to know or remember, that God hates this condition. When we sense that we have needs, maybe even empty holes in our spiritual hearts, how often do we turn to God? To ask Him to open our eyes, to shake some sense in to us? Or how often do we complain, or sigh and move on, or moan about bad luck, or “suffer in silence”?
This is no mystery or great revelation. In the book of James we are told, plainly, that we “have not because we ask not.” God’s plan… sitting there, gathering dust in our lives?
You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:2-3).
Are we surprised that God has figured us out? Why do we act surprised that He has given us many solutions, many answers… when and if we realize that He does?
Am I making an argument for religion – that we are not religious enough? No, my opening line here, and the lines since, identify religion as a problem. Let us understand that religion – any and all religions – are human constructs. As inventions of humankind, religions are systems. Religions are what we invent and even innovate or evolve, for various reasons.
At the best, religions are attempts to worship and systematize beliefs and behaviors. At the other end – there always is the other extreme – religions are man-made counterfeits, salves for the conscience, efforts to be exclusive and exclusionary.
To address the criticisms of the professional skeptics through the centuries, religions have committed many sins and even atrocities. In the case of those who follow Christ, it is religion – which Christianity is not – that has offended, not Christ nor His teachings.
People have corrupted Christianity, and still do. But Christ never preached hate nor prejudice nor offense. Those who do malign things in His name are the transgressors.
To reduce to bumper-strip dimensions: Christianity is not about religion, but a relationship.
Added to the acknowledgment that Christ is the sole means to eternal life; the only One who offers salvation; belief in Whom dispels other systems of faith and effective works, we have the Son of the Living God who died and rose again, as no other “god” has claimed.
It is the Person of Jesus, not the rites and rituals and customs and rules and saints and holidays and popes and evangelists and rabbis and priests and relics and temples and cathedrals that get you one inch closer to God. Those are things of religion.
Do I say we should quit our local churches or family traditions? No, but work to see they are pure… and that your faith is pure, and focused.
I leave you with one more thought: Who sent Jesus to the cross, who demanded of Pilate that He be put to death? Not cheats, thieves, whores, and adulterers to whom He ministered.
Mary, you are a little teenage girl. Can you believe that it was an angel who talked to you, or was that a mad dream?
You find yourself pregnant, even without a husband… even without a man. How can this be? And if so, what will your family say? What will Joseph, your intended, say? You wonder these things.
You know your scriptures. You know that God promised to send the Messiah in the form of a humble baby, born of a virgin. But… you? You know these things, but can you believe God has chosen you?
You are asking: “Me? Blessed among women? Of all generations?” You humbly fall to your knees and weep. Yes, you are blessed. But you know scripture well enough to know that your baby will grow to heal, and teach, and love, and… be rejected of men. Be persecuted, tortured, despised, and die. Why? Because he loved.
Mary, can you know?
I think you do know, because you know what the scriptures foretold; you heard from angels.
You know that when your baby’s ministry is finished – after you give birth in a lowly place, after your baby grows in wisdom, sinless, even does mighty miracles – you will be helpless as you watch him suffer and die. At the moment when a mother should protect her son, you will be unable.
On that day in the future, you will be in a small group at the foot of a cross, and maybe the only friend or family member who has remained loyal.
Because you are a mother. Because you listened to an angel. Because you know scripture. Mary, can you know that at that moment your baby Jesus will look down into your eyes and say, “Mother, behold your son”?
Can you know these things?
All these events – prophesied in great detail 700 years earlier in the Book of Isaiah, or looking forward to the end of days – Mary knew. And if she did not… she believed; she trusted; and she was obedient.
You and I should bring such gifts, ourselves – belief and trust and obedience – to the Babe in the manger.
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The amazing song Mary, Did You Know is here performed by its writer, Mark Lowry, and its composer Buddy Greene.
This title does not refer to the interesting traditions and separate observances, including dates, of the various Eastern and Orthodox rites. But I always reflect during Advent about the “other” aspects of the Christmas holiday that most of us in Western civilization, the familiar European and American Christmas, have come to know.
I am frequently tempted to think, with some sadness, that we have been hijacked by Coca Cola ads and Hallmark cards. They are only problems when they take our eyes from Christ – not just the plastic one in manger sets – but the warm and memories and, we hope, spiritual prompts cannot be bad.
We cannot disdain Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup as comfort food, but we can have regrets when it keeps us from enjoying grandma’s homemade soup and the genuine thing.
So At Christmas, as I will share, it is interesting and maybe beneficial to remember “counter-intuitive” things.
For instance, many of us have mental images of snowy villages and evergreens at Christmastide. But we know that Jesus was born, most probably, in the Spring. And in a part of the world where pine trees do not grow. However, Jesus was born.
Yes, Jesus was born, and that is the reason for the season, to coin a phrase. For most of Christendom’s 2000 years, Christmas was a very minor holiday. Odd? Maybe. To make very broad generalizations, and theological essentials aside, Christmas is a bundle of coincidences – prophesies fulfilled. Good Friday, more prophecies fulfilled, and the self-sacrifice of the Willing Servant. Easter, the greatest of the Christ’s miracles. Ascension Day, ultimate proof of Jesus’ Divinity, rising to the right hand of the Father.
Stick with me: my point is not to ignore the Virgin Birth or the uncountable other parts of the Incarnation. But the ancient church placed more emphasis on the later parts of Jesus’ story, not to denigrate His birth, but, perhaps, to apply more reverence to His ministry, His suffering, His atonement, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension. And that cannot be bad, at all, if we must choose focus.
I think that the best Christmas carols, therefore, are ones that remind us the holiest aspects of the Birth and Incarnation. It summons the artistry and talents of poets and composers to do so.
One of the very oldest surviving Christmas carols, maybe the oldest, is the Wexford carol. In Celtic, Carúl Loch Garman. It can be traced to County Wexford in Ireland, and that is the surest thing about its origin. It was recorded about a century ago; written down about a century before that, its lines seemed to have existed in the 1600s and 1700s, and its Celtic tune, maybe a thousand years ago. Perhaps… like all good legends.
It has blessed people, from little villages and small chapels, to cathedrals and on CDs. But its ancient flavor is haunting. True and beautiful. Just as its core, the Christmas story itself, should be to us – true, and beautiful.
Good people all, this Christmas time, Consider well and bear in mind / What our good God for us has done / In sending his beloved son
With Mary holy we should pray, / To God with love this Christmas Day/ In Bethlehem upon that morn, / There was a blessed Messiah born.
The night before that happy tide, / The noble Virgin and her guide / Were long time seeking up and down / To find a lodging in the town.
But mark how all things came to pass / From every door repelled, alas, / As was foretold, their refuge all / Was but a humble ox’s stall.
Near Bethlehem did shepherds keep / Their flocks of lambs and feeding sheep / To whom God’s angels did appear / Which put the shepherds in great fear.
Prepare and go, the angels said / To Bethlehem, be not afraid /
For there you’ll find, this happy morn / A princely babe, sweet Jesus, born.
With thankful heart and joyful mind / The shepherds went the babe to find / And as God’s angel had foretold / They did our Savior Christ behold.
Within a manger he was laid / And by his side the virgin maid /
Attending on the Lord of Life / Who came on earth to end all strife.
There were three wise men from afar / Directed by a glorious star / And on they wandered night and day / Until they came where Jesus lay.
And when they came unto that place / Where our beloved Messiah lay /
They humbly cast them at his feet / With gifts of gold and incense sweet.
I have been blessed to be in some of the world’s great places of worship. I mean Christian churches, mostly – cavernous cathedrals; ancient basilicas; rough-hewn Gothic, grand Renaissance, and gaudy Baroque; story-telling tapestries, stunning mosaics, stained glass windows that are miracles of art. Many small side-chapels, or the seemingly endless nave and chancel and ambulatory expanses themselves, crossed by mighty transepts.
They inspire awe, and wonder, and worship because they were designed to do just that.
A profound experience of mine was in France almost 20 years ago. Near Angoulême it was, in the Charentes. I was taken as a guest to the Abbaye of St-Marie de Maumont, I think it was, a Benedictine abbey of sisters devoted to worship, prayer, service, and outreach. Mostly, however, it is what a Protestant American expected of a monastery or nunnery – an ancient site of worship; silence and reverence; modesty, sisters in cowls going about their business. And that business was, indeed, largely prayer – almost constant prayer, private and public – and worship in song.
My friend sped that evening along narrow rural roads between Bordeaux and Angoulême, on winding roads without lights on a moonless evenings… perhaps I was already in a prayerful mood. In truth I was not at all prepared. In an old candle-lit chapel, the sisters sang worship, hymns, and liturgy for four hours; in Latin, French, and Old French. Words I seldom recognized but did understand. Free to sit – observe – in the pews, what is left for the visitor? To worship. Pray. Reflect.
In this setting, enveloped by all that heritage, the sense of God’s presence, and His manifestation in the art and lives of that place; the essence of what it means to surrender and serve; to dig deep into self and reach high unto God; to feel – and be – a million miles from the world’s distractions… that is the kind of worship and contemplation, allowing the purest of Christ-centered meditation, that we seldom know in contemporary life.
I was visited, during those four hours, by past sins. I knew afresh the forgiveness of God. I met again my Savior Jesus. I was lost in the forests of a forgotten corner of Christendom, yet felt at home as if in Heaven, already.
There were no steeples, no mighty organs, no golden chalices. On the other hand – speaking as an American evangelical – there were no drums and electric guitars; no words projected on a screen; no clapping; no Starbucks in the lobby; no announcements of Holy Jazzercize on Tuesday night.
There were perhaps 60 souls there that evening, but, really, one heart beating. As I cried and as I laughed in my pew, I realized something about Christianity in the centuries since the Early Church – past the Age of Cathedrals – to our Age of Praise and Worship shows.
God touches us – or, perhaps differently said, we feel better able to touch Him – when worship experiences are at variance with the worlds we inhabit. In the “Dark” Ages, when poverty and disease were common, Christians devoted every ounce of their talents, ambitions, and resources into building astonishing cathedrals that reached up, up, up to Heaven and sought to reflect His glory.
In our day, when our multi-media world bombards us with every sensation; when celebrities have replaced heroes and sinners are elevated over saints; when the consumer culture insists on telling us what to like abd what to hate, what to believe and what not to believe… maybe people need to reject the hype by simply getting lost in Christian glitz and entertainment.
Holy bling is not my cup of tea. But, then, even tea is not my cup of tea.
Perhaps our souls need to find God by realizing that He is different than we are, and our worlds. And He speaks to us in different ways, at different times, in different places. I have heard something like that somewhere.
I just wish that people in our time can discover what used to be profound in the earlier phases of human history. “Get thee to a nunnery”? I have heard that, somewhere, too. All of us should at least taste of those experiences. After all, they were what eventually brought civilization to where we are now.
Back around 1970 I was on the staff of New Guard Magazine, the monthly journal of Young Americans for Freedom, the national student organization founded by William F Buckley. At the height of the hippie culture and anti-war protests, we were, perhaps the original “resistance” movement against the political status quo.
YAF had 55,000 members across America, and more than 700 chapters in high schools, colleges, and in communities. I was state chairman for a while in DC and New Jersey, and, as I say, on the staff of their magazine, and editor of The Free Campus News Service, syndicating news and cartoons and opinions to college papers.
I cut more than a few eye teeth at YAF, but concurrent with these activities I was still a student at American University, and worked a part-time job in YAF’s mail room. Always look on the back of everyone’s business card.
Some of those “eye teeth” I cut were opportunities to meet and work with many of the leaders of our time. One seems unlikely today, and is an example of how much our nation has changed in one generation.
West Virginia Senator Robert C Byrd, Democrat, was a conservative. He wrote an article on tradition, conservative principles, and religion in America for New Guard. I was asked to illustrate it. I was a budding cartoonist, but this assignment I handled with realistic drawings. A patriot next to the flag; a student praying; etc.
Robert Byrd eventually became Majority Leader in the Senate (beating Ted Kennedy in the caucus) and when he died he was the longest-serving senator in American history.
In this period of his life he was a fierce defender of conservative values and the role of Christianity in our national life. He defended his own values, too; a country boy, he liked mountain music… and often played fiddle tunes and hoedown-music at festivals, rallies, and… well just about anywhere.
“Anywhere” included the Grand Ole Opry and the hit TV show Hee Haw. The music video to click below is one of his guest appearances on the CBS network show. More than his service in the Senate, more than his article that I illustrated, I ask you to watch Sen. Byrd, in his trademark red vest, playing and singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the old Carter Family standard.
Watch and listen… and think about how much America has changed.
Today, a United States senator singing hillbilly music on a cornpone TV show? (More: CBS carrying a hillbilly-music show???)
Today, the Majority Leader of the U S Senate singing a gospel song on network TV? Can you imagine Chuck Schumer pickin’ and grinnin’?
Today, a politician of either party enthusiastically singing about Jesus, smiling and raising his arms in joy at every mention of the Savior’s name?
We all know that – somehow – we have arrived at a place where senators, not only local jerks, would threaten to sue TV networks or shut down TV stations for daring to mention the name of Jesus. A lot of senators spend their time and efforts working to legalize drugs and decriminalize criminals these days. Mentions of personal faith or faith-based policies, like defending the unborn, have to be done in carefully chosen places, speaking carefully selected words.
We sang the songs of childhood, Hymns of faith that made us strong…
I’m gonna sit down besides my Jesus When I lay my burdens down…
Will the circle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by?
There’s a better home a-waiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
The song has lived in several versions since it was written in 1907 by Ada R Habershon and Charles H Gabriel; the most familiar is a funeral theme by the Carter Family.
When you see the joyful and unembarrassed performance of this old time Gospel classic, on national television, by the Majority Leader of the United States Senate – not too many years ago, really – you might think it is, after all, kind of a funeral theme for America.
Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Meet Times, They are A-Changin’.
One of the confirmations of Christ’s divinity is the number of times He is mentioned, and was prophesied and predicted, in the Old Testament. And not just vague associations: the Bible overflows with specific references, made previous to His incarnation, regarding Jesus’s life, ministry, and activities. Every one was fulfilled.
So the names and attributes of Jesus are interesting. And they are instructive to our Biblical understanding, and to our mature faith. Jesus was His given name; Christ was His title… but there were, and are, many other names by which He can be known, and which explain His numerous facets and roles.
You know them, from the Old Testament and New Testament both. Among them are: Almighty; Alpha and Omega; Author of Salvation; Bread of Life; Chief Cornerstone; Creator of All Things; Deliverer; Faithful Witness; Firstborn From the Dead; Good Shepherd; High Priest; Horn of Salvation; Image of God; King of Kings; Lamb of God; Last Adam; Light of the World; Lion of the Tribe of Judah; Living Stone; Lord of All; Morning Star; Only Begotten Son of God; Passover Lamb; Precious Cornerstone; Prince of Peace; Rock; Savior; Son of David; Son of God; Son of Man; The Stone the Builders Rejected; Truth; The Way; Wonderful Counselor; The Word…
The great evangelist R W Schambach frequently referred to the Savior in a unique (and correctly theological) way – “My elder Brother Jesus.” This not only delineates a sweet fellowship with Jesus; it explains the precise relationship of our New Life after the Born-Again experience.
When Jesus walked out of that tomb, He greeted the world as the risen Son of God, yes, but in effect He said to all of humanity: “I was God-with-you, and now you are with Me – my brothers and sisters.” If Jesus reigns in your heart, God sees Him when He looks at you. Hallelujah!
So. Should this make us happy? Yes! But I wonder why many church services resemble funerals and not celebrations. I have got to thinking about how people refer to God and Jesus these days, especially when we have so many options. A list of some:
God d*** and Jesus Christ! (when uttered as curses). Of course these are not what I am seeking as examples. But I wonder whether “taking Names in vain” are spoken more frequently among us, if we could count, than in prayers or spiritual respects. For shame. And it strikes me, even, how many people who are not even nominal Christians use “Jesus” and “Jesus Christ” or “Christ,” as curses. I have rebuked friends and strangers, sometimes asking them to be more polite about my Best Friend.
Jesus H Christ and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – as “antiseptic” curses. As if the humorous (?) twist will not offend the One who suffered and died for our sins. Or offend us, when in their midst.
The Man Upstairs. Really? The Man upstairs?? This is usually a coward’s way of appearing spiritual without (gasp) actually mentioning God. Also shameful. Would you refer to your spouse as “that dark-haired person who lives down the hall and watches TV in the evening”?
“I’m sorry, but religion is too personal for me to discuss.” How about that? The most important thing in your life – or should be – is something to avoid talking about? Not all of us are evangelists, OK; but to hide Jesus from view likely indicates a fateful unfamiliarity with Him… a fatal lack of knowledge of God’s ways… and an insecure realization of what Jesus requires of believers.
If you had a cure for cancer, would sharing that knowledge be “too personal” to talk about? Those who have no knowledge of the basic tenets of being a Christ-follower, frankly, condemn themselves. Jesus’s own Entrance Exam, so to speak, was easy – To believe in your heart that He is the Son of God; and confess with your mouth that He rose from the dead.
Yes, that simple. But “confess with your mouth” precludes “too personal for me to discuss.” Can’t do both. If parents are followers of Christ but let their children “decide for themselves” matters of faith… it means they are comfortable with the chance their children will go to Hell. Don’t believe in Hell? Well… Jesus did; and you believe in Him, right?
You can see the many implications and responsibilities that attend the use of “mere” words and proper titles. They are the markers on the meter of your soul.
Your everlasting soul, as a child of God, a brother or sister of Jesus, seeking to do His will and, more, desiring to share Him.
To know Christ and to make Him known. That is not a task: We should love to be doing it.
I have told this story before. Like a couple weeks ago, a reprint by request; I have gotten a lot of comments on this memory I share. It is about a holiday far away from my home… but very close to my heart. It happened on a Summer holiday years ago.
A number of years ago I was working on a book, a three-part biography of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis; evangelist Jimmy Swaggart; and country-music superstar Mickey Gilley, all first cousins to each other. My good friend Maury Forman offered me his unused condo in Montgomery, Texas to get away for a bit of a personal research and writing one summer. Since Lewis lived in Mississippi, Swaggart in Louisiana, and Gilley in nearby Pasadena Texas, it made geographical sense.
Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages (remember them?) to chart the location of Assembly of God churches, intent on visiting as many as I could through the summer. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could.
Well, the first one I visited was in Cut and Shoot, Texas. That’s a town’s name; you can look it up. A small, white frame AG church was my first stop that summer… and I never visited another. For one thing – coincidence? – I learned that a member of the tiny congregation was the widow of a man who had pastored the AG church in Ferriday, Louisiana, the small town FOUR HOURS AWAY where, and when, those three cousins grew up in its pews. She knew them all, and their families, and had great stories. Beyond that, the pastor of the church in Cut and Shoot, Charles Wigley, had gone to Bible College with Jerry Lee Lewis and played in a band with him, until Jerry Lee got kicked out. Some more great stories.
But there was more than that kept me there for that summer. In that white-frame church and that tiny congregation, it was, um, obvious in three minutes that I was not from East Texas. I was born in New York City. Yet I was treated like family as if the folks had known me three decades. A fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for the holiday where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”
I bought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the pot-luck. Well, there were dozens and dozens of folks. I couldn’t tell which was family and who were friends, because everybody acted like family. When folks from East Texas ask, “How are you?” they really mean it. There were several monstrous barrel BBQ smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll fight anyone who doesn’t admit low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas BBQ the best) There was visitin,’ surely; there were delicious side dishes; there was softball and volleyball and kids dirt-biking; and breaks for sweet tea and spontaneous singing of patriotic songs.
I sat back in a folding chair, and I thought, “This is America.”
As the sun set, the same food came out again — smoked brisket galore; all the side dishes; and desserts of all sorts. Better than the first time. Then the Gilberts cleared the porch of their house. People brought instruments out of their cars and trucks. Folks tuned their guitars; some microphones and amps were set up; chairs and blankets dotted the lawn. Dave Gilbert and his brothers, I learned, sang gospel music semi-professionally in the area. Pastor Wigley, during the summer, had opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert, playing gospel music on the saxophone. But everyone else sang, too.
In some churches, in some parts of America, you are just expected to sing solo every once in a while. You’re not expected to – you want to. So into the evening, as the sun went down and the moon came up over those farms and fields, everyone at that picnic sang, together or solo or in duets or quartets. Spontaneously, mostly. Far into the night, exuberantly with smiles, or heartfelt with tears, singing unto the Lord.
I sat back in the folding chair, and I thought, “This is Heaven.”
I have grown sad for people who have not experienced the type of worship where singers and people who pray do so spontaneously. From the congregation. Moving to the front. Sharing their hearts. Crying tears of joy or conviction. Loving the Lord, freely. If you have not… visit a church where this is commonplace; even witnessing it is an uplifting balm to the soul., where there is freedom and joy in singing spontaneously.
I attach a video that very closely captures the music, and the feeling – the fellowship – of that evening. A wooden ranch house, a barbecue picnic just ended, a campfire, and singers spontaneously worshiping, joining in, clapping, and “taking choruses.” There were cameras at this Gaither get-together, but it took this city boy back to that holiday weekend, finding himself amongst a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.
... Rick Marschall is the author of 74 books and hundreds of magazine articles in many fields, from popular culture (Bostonia magazine called him "perhaps America's foremost authority on popular culture") to history and criticism; country music; television history; biography; and children's books. He is a former political cartoonist, editor of Marvel Comics, and writer for Disney comics.
For 20 years he has been active in the Christian field, writing devotionals and magazine articles; he was co-author of "The Secret Revealed" with Dr Jim Garlow. His biography of Johann Sebastian Bach for the “Christian Encounters” series was published by Thomas Nelson. He currently is writing a biography of the Rev Jimmy Swaggart and his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis. Read More
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