Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-19-15

Words matter. They matter to me, as a writer; they matter to me when I teach and mentor; they mattered to me as a father around the dinner table, correcting my kids when they would say “quote” instead of “quotation,” or “may” when they meant “might.” Yes, they did roll their eyes, continually (NOT continuously)… but in later years have thanked me for instilling rules of grammar. My son is a TV news writer and producer, so his skills were honed.

Words matter to God Almighty too. The Holy Bible is His written Word. He WROTE the 10 Commandments. And “in the beginning was the Word, and the was with God, and the Word was God.” These are the very first WORDS of the Gospel of John, and as we soon learn in verse 14, the pre-incarnate Jesus was the Word through which the worlds were called into creation: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

I generally am not a fan of bumper-strip theology or slogans, but they have their place; sometimes a very good place, if people can grasp truth in a phrase or sentence. So I value words highly, yet realize they must be respected. Over-simplification can be as dangerous as contumelious obfuscation. (See? I mean mean-spirited confusion.)

In that spirit of caution, I venture to make good on the promise of this essay’s title, a guaranteed cure for the hopeless. A little play on words – but not a game. Thinking about the words, and considering what they mean, can lead to new ways of thinking about a lot of other words… and attitudes… and directions in your life. Stick with me:

Hopeless. We have all experienced this emotion, whether a fleeting mood or a profound form of grief. But try to act on this: when you are hopeless – when you hope less – resolve to HOPE MORE. Easily said, right? Yes, it is. And usually hard to do. At first. But we can hope, always. There is always that better place. Faith, after all, is the substance of things HOPED for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1); that’s what faith is.

I once had a friend in a men’s Bible study years ago who was having the worst luck, as we call it, in his career, financial situation, family security. Disappointment followed disappointment, and his news was always bad or worse. Finally he passed some hurdles in a job search, and everything seemed sure for him. On an appointed Saturday morning we waited for his arrival so we could hear the good news. He reported that at the very last moment the whole thing fell through, and he was back at the starting-line. We all felt like crying; a few of us did weep for him. But he was virtually cheery. How could this be, we asked. He replied, “For a few weeks there, I experienced hope. Sure I’m disappointed, but it was so sweet to experience that joyful hope the Lord granted me!”

A superhuman faith, I thought. But he let Hope-less turn into Hope-more and it soothed his soul.

Once you think of similar word-surgeries it can change your attitude in uncountable ways – maybe throughout life, not only in a current crisis:

Thankless? Turn it into “Thankful.”

Does “Sorrowful” describe your mood? Trade it in for “Joyful.”

Are you prone to Counteract? Try to Interact.

A buzz-word is “maladjusted.” Tell it to buzz off, and choose to be well-adjusted.

Are you fearful? Remember that Jesus said “Fear not” dozens of times. Fearless you will become.

Is your habit to be tasteless? Be tasteful. Do you always ask, “Why me?” Emphasize correctly when you think how God loves you: “Why… ME!” Do you worry that your boss or friends think you are a “good-for-nothing”? Be good for something!

Being friendly will transform being friendless into being a friend and having friends… and having the most important Friend.

Romans 8:25 explains, “hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Hopeless no more, an attitude of hope – the foundation-stone of faith – can change your life.

My Word!

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Our music video answers a question that some hopeless-feeling readers might ask, “how can I turn things around so easily?” Well, on our own, it CAN be difficult. But God sent the Holy Spirit to be our guide, to instruct us, encourage, grant us supernatural portions of wisdom, knowledge, strength, faith… and hope. Here, the Forbes Family sings a gospel song written just more than 100 years ago by George A Young. Young was an obscure preacher living in poverty. Also a carpenter, he built a modest house for himself and his wife, which village thugs burned down when once he was away preaching. Not trained as a poet or musician, nevertheless he wrote this song in response to his devastating situation:

Click: God Leads His Dear Children Along

Andrae Crouch has died. For the few who don’t know his name, that gap is filled by the fact that all of America and much of the world knows his music. His pop credentials included movie scores (“The Lion King,” “The Color Purple”), producing and working with Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, and many others. But he was a gospel singer, composer, preacher, first. And foremost. His father pastored the New Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ, a Holiness / Pentecostal church in Los Angeles; and he and his sister Sandra succeeded in the pulpit.

His many hymns and gospel songs became hits on gospel radio and especially, at first, in churches of the Jesus Movement and the Charismatic Renewals decades ago. Then they spread, ironically (for Andrae was Black) more and more into the Black church, and into the hymnals of mainstream denominations. The songs God gave him are eternal: if the Lord tarries, people will be moved to tears, and to repentance, by Andrae’s songs for generations to come.

They will hear in his lyrics the same problems they have; the same doubts and overcoming; the same humility and gratitude; the same victories; the same joy.

Andrae did have many problems and challenges. The Holy Spirit gave him spiritual persistence. Because he prayed for that. This man who performed at humble urban missions and at vast Billy Graham crusades, winning seven Grammys along the way, fought throat cancer for a decade, and died at 72 from a heart attack.

His very first composition was “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power,” now a standard Communion hymn in many churches. Other familiar gospels songs are “My Tribute,” whose familiar incipit line is “To God Be the Glory”; “Take Me Back”; “Soon and Very Soon”; “Jesus Is the Answer”; “Let the Church Say Amen”; and “Through It All.”

My old friend Craig Yoe, who knew Andrae before either of them was a household name, is our Guest Essayist today:

What a week! First my cartoonist comrades, their co-workers and others – and freedoms – were murdered by horrible, horrible masked terrorists. And on January 8, I learned that the great Andrae Crouch has passed from this coil that is so mortal. 

I feel for and pray for the musical artist’s family. 

They might find some very small comfort in their great loss to know that in reviewing Andrae’s signature song “Through It All,” after hearing of his demise, that I have found some healing for my own heart troubled by the world’s agony.

Andrae Crouch was such a great human being. I had him sing at the hippie-church in Akron, Ohio in the early 1970s that I pastored. And I engaged him to perform with his musical associates, including his gifted sister Sandra, for a special concert I produced back in the day.

I’ll always remember when he came to my little home. After dinner the smiling Andrae jumped up to scrub the dishes. Jesus set the example of leadership by washing feet; Andrae, in that spirit, washed and dried my rummage sale-bought chipped-up dishes. 

After the concerts of Andrae Crouch and the Disciples, Andrae would jump up from the piano to talk to folks who came forward to shake his hand and offer thanks. And he’d seek out the often forlorn ones of that group suffering from drugs and other abuses of life, and share with them into the wee hours of the night. You know, the people who were the “least of these.” 

Andrae and I disagreed on things, like his belief that faith should bring people wealth, but he certainly was no respecter of persons and generous with his time – and wealth. 

Andrae would always look people straight in the eye with love, leaning in close and call the folks he was conversing with “brother” and “sister.” That wasn’t just some off-hand catch-phrase with the singer/minister. He deeply believed it, and so did the people he talked to as a result. 

Everybody was family. I even remember Andrae generously inviting me and my ex to come stay with him. He told me there were plenty of people there. I got the idea that his home was always open.  

He just couldn’t turn off the love. 

Oh, and, of course, Andrae Crouch was a brilliant, moving, singer filled with the Holy Spirit – that goes without saying.

And he was recognized by the non-brethren and sisters. Andre was the go-to guy when people like Michael Jackson and Madonna wanted a gospel sound for a song they were recording. The dude won seven Grammys – not too shabby! 

I’m sure Andrae wasn’t perfect. But he lived a life that was exemplary. Lord knows we need the likes of more of him in this world. He has left the world and we all now must step up. 

We’ll miss this brother’s example. But, wow, the heavenly choir just got better!

I remember Andrae closing his concerts with “Through It All” and asking the audience at the end to sing along. And this part is still in my head decades later… 

I’ve had many tears and sorrows,
I’ve had questions for tomorrow,
There’s been times I didn’t know right from wrong.
But in every situation,
God gave me blessed consolation,
That my trials come, to only make me strong.

Through it all,
Through it all,
I’ve learned to trust in Jesus,
I’ve learned to trust in God.

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Craig Yoe has been a worker with the blind, a sewer worker, a nightclub owner, a church pastor, a banana salesman, a toy inventor, a creative director for The Muppets, Disney, and Nickelodeon, an author, a book designer, and a cartoonist of sorts. 

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Many Christians have memorized the words, even if not the tune, to an internal verse of “Through It All,” explaining brilliant mysteries of life’s challenges: “I thank God for the mountains, and I thank Him for the valleys; I thank Him for the storms He brought me through. For if I’d never had a problem, I wouldn’t know that God could solve them; I’d never know what faith in God could do.” A sermon in song. I dont’t know if ever made a song of this, but in last painful years, Andrae said he was given a message, and prayed to God: “Lord, heal the wounds, but leave the scars.” A humble, gifted servant. Performing here: CeCe Winans and a room of gospel legends at the Billy Graham Retreat Center, the Cove.

Click: Through It All

12-29-14

One of the most beautiful lullabies anyone has heard or sung is known as the Coventry Carol. A mother’s song to her child, its lyrics from the late Medieval era remind us of Olde English, when the presence of French still sweetened the tongue: “By by, lully, lullay,” its comforting choruses end.

It is soothing but eerily compelling, and even mysterious. Certainly, melancholia is a part of its appeal. Why? A lullaby (note the common roots with the comforting words of the chorus), identified with Christmas? Sad? Its tune, especially its oddly modern harmonies and dissonance, seems to transcend the ages.

In truth, no matter how re-purposed by contemporary performers or loving mothers at children’s bedtimes, the Coventry Carol is indeed melancholy: it was meant to solemnly memorialize an event full of sorrow, dread, and grief. The song imagines the lament of a mother protecting her child about to be slaughtered by soldiers of King Herod. As recorded in the Book of Matthew, the Roman-appointed ruler of Palestine was aware of the Wise Men’s prophecy that the King of the Jews would be born in Bethlehem… and that they had warned Joseph to hide the Child of Mary as a precaution against a cruel ruler’s deadly intentions. All this fulfilled Old Testament prophecies (Jesus’ parents fled with Him to Egypt).

In Herod’s bloodlust, and in fear that another king of the Jews would be his rival, he decreed that male babies under the age of one in Judea should be killed. Precise history or legend, this became known as the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Massacre, or Martyrdom, of the Holy Innocents.

In annual Christmas programs during the Middle Ages, Nativity plays akin to Passion plays of another time in the church calendar were performed in many chapels and towns. In Coventry, England, the Guild of Shearmen and Tailors between the late 1300s and the late 1500s traditionally staged Nativity plays. One Robert Croo is tentatively ascribed as the author; the tune’s origins are unknown. It became a day of observance, an event in the church calendar, of profound significance, a call to introspection – and is similar to many other spiritually momentous holidays (holy days) that our contemporary world scarcely recognizes any more.

But here we are: the “Innocents’ Day,” sometimes called Childermass – following Christmass – was celebrated around this time. December 27 for many of the ancient churches in the Middle East, the ancient rites of the Syriacs, Chaldeans, Maronites, Syrians. December 28 is the traditional observance date of the Roman Catholic church, the Lutheran and Evangelic churches, and the Church of England. Eastern rites, most of the Orthodox churches, celebrate the day on December 29. In a German tradition of that time, youngsters exchanged roles with adult clergy and teachers on Childermass; sometimes students for the priesthood presided over worship services, with clergy in the pews.

My purpose today, however, is not to open our eyes to obscure or neglected history, despite its fascinating features or appealing music (please click the link, below, to a haunting performance). It is to have a look around us, not just back in time.

We are reminded that all the aspects of Christ’s Birth were not unalloyed joy. The birth pangs of Mary were prophesied in Scripture, even from the Garden… but the purport was not solely one mother’s labor. We have the grief of Judean mothers. The Bible addressed the difficulties attendant to the coming Messiah’s birth… and, indeed, His life, ministry, rejection, betrayal, and death. Yes, the Resurrection was foretold, but His life would not be one without pain and suffering, clearly. The same is foretold of believers like you and me: a startling prediction, but also a challenging warning.

Jesus, centuries before His Birth, was identified as a Man of Sorrows.

And many of the sorrows occurred around Him, and because of Him – such as the Slaughter of the Innocents – are a sorrowful side of this King’s incarnation. This truth, infrequently recognized in today’s churches where clapping, hopping, smiling, and colorful banners predominate… is still truth. Joy is ours, and we rejoice at the reality of God-with-us, and the peace that is to come; but we need to remember that there is much that is serious about Christianity.

To be a Christ-follower – to go where He leads today – sometimes obliges us to be grim. Holy, but grim. The stakes are high. His church, our civilization, the heritage we share, our families and children, the well-being of fellow Christians around the world, are in serious jeopardy. I am not being pessimistic; I am being realistic. I read my Bible.

The Slaughter of the Innocents continues today – the evil world’s gift that keeps on taking, to coin a phrase. Yes, we can look to adults who are being persecuted and martyred for their faith, and we can see them as Children of God, which they are. But let us here remember the children. We start (but sadly do not end) with the slaughter that is abortion. Some children can at least protest or cry out, but millions and millions of the innocent unborn are massacred in routine fashion.

The young girls in Nigeria who were kidnapped and violated because they were Christian… schoolchildren who were massacred by Muslims for not following Mohammed… the children in East Asia who are imprisoned or executed when they refuse to renounce Christ. I could detail places and dates, but you see the headlines. Please read the stories, not just the headlines; and pray. May God forgive us as a nation for not condemning our government – our selves – for condoning such atrocities.

Permit me to list a few more latter-day slaughters of innocents in our own land: youngsters reared in a society that virtually outlaws Christian expressions of belief and faith… children no longer allowed publicly to pray or have Bibles in schools… classrooms that discuss bizarre sex and secular scientific theories but ban Christian viewpoints… the bombardment of worldly, even deviant, lifestyles from every corner of the “entertainment” media… the apostasy and heresies of many churches themselves, who ought to be children’s first responders…

I could go on. We all know it. Our children’s minds and souls are threatened with hideous slaughter. And sometimes, for the cause of their consciences and the Kingdom of Christ, they also are physically massacred. In the Year of Our Lord 2014.

Can we sing with the mothers of the Coventry Carol: “Lully lullay, thou little tiny child, By by lully lullay. That woe is me, poor child, for thee; And ever mourn and pray, For thy parting, neither say nor sing, By by lully lullay.” Can we identify? Can we do more, beyond singing and praying?

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A performance of the ancient carol in the ancient chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, England, by a youth choir.

Click: The Coventry Carol

By Leah C. Morgan

He’s only 10. He’s not a threat. He’s rather ordinary, but the girls in eighth grade who ride his bus target him as the object of their ridicule. Day after day, they humiliate and torment him, and there’s no one to care. The school is contacted but nothing changes. The boy cries, inside and out, his agony overtaking him.

Then one day, right about the time people out there are celebrating God’s love come down, talking about Advent, and the visit of an advocate from heaven, a new ninth-grade girl moves to the area and starts riding his bus. She sees the cruelty of her peers. She doesn’t care much about impressing them. But she becomes outraged, incensed with their behavior.

She is moved with compassion for him and comes to sit with him in his misery, right beside him, on his seat on the bus. She associates with him, the outcast. She smiles at him and identifies with his suffering. At Christmas time, the greatest gift appears in the most unlikely forms, the shape of his tormentors.

And the unthinkable happens.

The girls who had picked on him begin to ridicule the new girl and punish her for showing him kindness. They tell her she’s ugly. This one, who is beautiful like an angel. But she is unflinching, unmoving. She stays by his side taking his pain, absorbing the blows. And the faces of the tormentors contort with rage, their mouths spewing out hatred. The angel girl, the one surely sent down, begins to laugh.

She looks on at the ridiculous, outrageous scenario, the mean girls angry at kindness, and she laughs. She laughs and laughs, inflaming the bullies even more until one of the girls grabs the heaven-sent one by her long beautiful hair, and bangs her head against the bus window. Over and over they hurt her for loving him and he is as helpless to save her as he was to help himself. Is there a God anywhere to stop the injustice? Even his savior is subject to this evil?

At this very moment, the principal of the school walks by the school bus window. She sees the abuse and rushes to help.

Finally, the boy is heard. After months of humiliation and scorn, someone listens. In fact, it really does seem that God has listened, as though He heard his cries and sent a representative of Himself to hurt alongside him and bring a rescue. It sounds a great deal like the Christmas story itself.

This encounter happened yesterday in our neighborhood, and is the greatest Advent experience of the season for me. It is the most picturesque. My niece, Eden, is the one putting on the Christmas robe, playing the role of the suffering, humble Savior, loving the outcast, defending the weak. Her example of love has brought Christmas down to me.

UPDATE: 12.23.14 – Christmas keeps coming down, falling like love. The mother of the angel-girl lives with her daughter, and knows too well that she is very human. Mom cheers her compassion for the boy, but is concerned for the hostile relationship between her daughter and the angry girls. She pleads with her daughter to consider their struggles, to see them as needing love every bit as much as the boy.

The daughter considers this as she enters her home after school. She reaches for the door, and hears the taunting girls behind her: “You’d better go home! You better run!” She whirls around to face them. They throw down their backpacks, readying for a fight.

She looks into their angry faces and says, “I want to apologize.”

The girls’ jaws drop so low, they nearly make contact with the backpacks on the sidewalk. “What?”! They demand an explanation.

“I was really mad at what you were doing to that boy on the bus, but that didn’t give me any right to call you animals. You’re people with feelings too,” said the very human, heaven-sent one.

The girls answered, talking together at once. “It’s okay. We’re sorry too. Maybe we could be friends? You seem like a really cool girl.”

And today, the one “giving” Christmas, received a Christmas present from an apparent former enemy, because she “looks like a princess.” Pink lipstick.

This is what Jesus living in us is meant to do. Love the unlovable. Pierce the darkness of hatred with the blinding light of love.

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This tender but powerful guest essay, a true story just days old – no: actually 2000 years old – was written by our friend Leah C. Morgan. She writes about beauty, laughter, and life here and after as witnessed from her home in Western Maryland. Your comments can be directed toleahcharlenemorgan@gmail.com. The music video is by Joy Williams.

Click: Here With Us

12-22-14

A century ago this week, one of the most miraculous of Christmas miracles occurred. It is known today by some people, but largely has been forgotten. At the time it was scarcely acknowledged and, when discussed, was often criticized. Had it been more widely respected and discussed – if its effects had spread in place and time – we would be living in a different world today.

I refer to the “Christmas Truce” of World War I.

The “Great War,” so called at the time, was what I have called in my historical writing the most useless of history’s many useless wars. It had been a ticking time bomb, so to speak, for years. Rival monarchies of Europe, and their growing economies and colonial empires, were increasingly restive and jealous of each other. Germany was late to the game of unified nations (only having become a country in 1871), and asserted its merchant marine, except that England wanted to preserve her own supremacy; and wanted to stretch its borders to include the German-speaking minorities in neighboring countries, which no neighbor was willing to cede.

Also, the war rolled out as a family feud – as ugly as the drunken wedding-reception brawls you see on TV news – since most of Europe’s “royalty” were related and interrelated, swapping titles for land, to the point that hemophilia was almost as common as dusty crowns and musty robes. Royal cupids shot arrows for the sake of trade advantages and national alliances, many of which proved temporary anyway. It was a pile of dry twigs, a bonfire waiting to be set aflame. When the fire was lit – by a crazed anarcho-patriot from Serbia shooting an Austro-Hungarian archduke – the response became a virtual wildfire, then like a forest-fire of Western Civilization, monarchs tripping over each other to declare war left and right. Secret alliances were revealed; new alliances were formed; old alliances were abrogated.

Doddering royals and their overly decorated retinues strutted, waved flags, and called the masses to defend them. It was like a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta except for the bloodthirsty nature of it all. And the gore. And the new inventions of death – “Big Bertha” guns that could land shells six miles away; Zeppelins that could survey and drop bombs from the air; mustard gas that killed soldiers from the inside out; destruction of civilian populations; airplanes that could shoot, drop bombs, and attack each other in the air; submarines that could sink ships from unseen places in the seas.

The war, begun with a burst of patriotic fervor on all sides by the docile masses, was maintained by propagandists and absurd atrocity stories. But after the first few months, the soldiers in the trenches – in Belgium and France, principally, where British and French soldiers squared off against German counterparts – faced each other, sometimes dug in as close as 60 yards apart. And for three years there was virtual stalemate: despite advances and retreats, offenses and repulses, campaigns and campaigns, hardly any land changed hands. Battles made headlines, but the details consisted of tens of millions of the dead, their drained blood and rotting corpses feeding the weary soil.

The first winter of the war heaped cruelty upon cruelty. Cold, wet rain and snow turned battlefields and trenches into flooded swamps. Dysentery, rot, and gangrene visited the soldiers, just as the horrors of snipers and ‘round-the-clock shelling frayed their nerves. The “No Man’s Land,” between sets of trenches, was in fact no land for any living creature, as even trees and bushes were destroyed by the constant withering gunfire.

But a funny thing happened – if you could call Peace breaking out “funny.” It was more Happy than Funny. During Christmas week, a hundred years ago this week, strange things occurred. Strange to the war culture that had been whipped up; strange to the hatred that was force-fed the common soldiers; strange to the history and practice of warfare. Peace sprouted, if not fully “breaking out.”

It became known as “The Christmas Truce,” and there was a danger that it would spread. Danger?

Many legends subsequently arose after the Christmas Truce, such as a soccer game between fraternizing German and English troops (not true), but a lot of facts were documented about those days before Christmas. Evidently German soldiers made the first moves. Accounts say that during a lull in the fighting, Germans under a white flag delivered pastries sent from home, to the English, with a request that the Allies hold fire over Christmas so the Germans could sing and worship. The Brits apparently assented, returned Christmas goodies of their own and, when hearing the singing, joined in from across No Man’s Land.

After that, there was an impromptu Peace Offensive. Undoubtedly spurred by the words of love and peace that permeated Christmas carols, soldiers from each side soon left their lines and met in between. They exchanged cigars and drinks, and they sang Christmas hymns together. This reportedly spread along the entire 27-mile battle line, south of Ypres and east of Armentieres, site of the song about les Mademoiselles.

Superior officers, up the chain of command, tried to prevent this fraternization – the root of the word meaning “brother.” But it was futile. Many of the “enemies” could understand each other, and when they couldn’t, chocolates and cigars and beer and photos of each other’s sweethearts, wives, and children, served as a common language. So were familiar Christmas carols and hymns, no matter what words each man sang. So were prayers, as candles and torches lit the scenes.

A British soldier recalled the Christmas Truce almost two decades later: “On Christmas morning we stuck up a board with ‘A Merry Christmas’ on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. … Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.

“[The Company Commander] rushed into the trench and endeavoured to prevent it, but he was too late: the whole of the Company were now out, and so were the Germans. He had to accept the situation, so soon he and the other company officers climbed out too. We and the Germans met in the middle of no-man’s-land. Their officers was also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them. … One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed up to the neck with this damned war and would be glad when it was all over. We told him that he wasn’t the only one that was fed up with it.” (Frank Richards, “Old Soldiers Never Die,” 1933)

Another history records: “[The British] Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker issued a directive forbidding fraternization: ‘For it discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys offensive spirit in all ranks. … Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.’” (Stanley Weintraub, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce,” 2001)

To the military brass, such fraternizing, these celebrations, even prayers and hymn-singing – maybe ESPECIALLY prayers and hymn-singing – were discouraged. “Discouraged” is too mild a word; historian Weintraub records that “strict orders were issued that any fraternization would result in a court-martial.” Summary executions of soldiers who fraternized with the enemy were also threatened.

It is tempting to think of how the 20th century would have been different if peace had in fact broken out. No more carnage, no harsh “peace terms,” no crushing reparations, no nation-building with resentments, no post-war economic crises; likely no rise of Communism and Lenin and Stalin; or social disruptions and Fascism and Mussolini and Hitler. Probably no seeds of the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War.

Hardly less consequential, the men who dared to stop killing, and to sing hymns and pray with other men – most of whom probably died in short order, themselves – would have rejoined their families and led normal lives. A special moment in history, virtually unprecedented; and I don’t think repeated, anywhere, since.

Such moments should not be rare “miracles.” They are what God intended for us, His children. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

There have been, and still are, many such opportunities. What a concept. Men singing Christmas hymns of love and peace, and actually listening to the words. And acting on them.

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A song written by Garth Brooks was built around the Christmas Truce, moving its location to Belleau Wood, the French site of a mighty battle in 1918. So: slightly fictionalized lyrics, but the powerful memory and message of the Christmas Truce comes forth in this video. I have chosen a cover version for its excellent and powerful graphics and slide show.

Click: Belleau Wood

12-15-14

Many generations ago, in the hazy origins of science and the scientific method, alchemy was a respected pursuit of the learned, the powerful, and the greedy. Turning “base metals” into “noble metals,” after all, was to seek a shortcut to gold; wizards and doctors seldom were invited to turn, say, daffodils into broccoli. In similar distant times, astrologers looked up rather than down, and charted the stars… and tried to reckon what they tell us.

Through the ages, as alchemists became chemists, and astrology gave birth to astronomy, humankind’s primal impulses broadened. But they have not gone away. For instance, although we (that is, the human race) recently have sent our mechanical devices to Mars and small, distant comets, a large percentage of our neighbors still subsists on horoscopes. The putative message in the zodiac consistently is in the first-five items people read in newspapers; on many dating sites it is impossible to cleanse one’s profile of your “sign.”

My friend Dan Rupple once led the Christian comedy troupe Isaac Air Freight, and I have always remembered one of his characters dismissing the zodiac and horoscopes as useless nonsense, mistaken, evil, and warned against by the Bible… “but I’m an Aquarian, and we tend to be skeptical.”

We believe, and we want to believe.

So with alchemy. We might think the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life were rendered obsolete by philosophy, the scientific method, tummy tucks and Botox, but not so. Alchemy continues apace. Maybe not turning iron to gold, except as dross is discovered to have commercial uses.

But I often have wondered just how different the ways and means of old alchemy are from the development of hybrid plants and the genetic modification of our foodstuff. Gregor Mendel and Luther Burbank are regarded as benefactors of humankind. They did, frankly, with plants and animals, what wizards could not do with tin and bronze: a different sort of gold.

There are still geniis, so to speak, and they keep escaping bottles. As we (that is, the human race) hurtle toward the logical extensions – GMOs, transplants, cloning, the “invention” of new species – we bid fair to become helpless spectators, like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The Meyer Lemon is a cross between a true lemon and the mandarin orange. Tasty. The Cockapoo is a hybrid dog, the result of arranged marriages of cocker spaniels and poodles. Cute. (To some.) Pigs have been “bred” to be leaner, but now discriminating cooks and fans of gool ol’ pork fat are growing nostalgic.

So old scientists and new alchemists work at their business still. Having generally given up on gold, they invent things as valuable as gold. To an extent, this is an affirmation that God creates and men fiddle. There are no new elements, apparently even on distant comets, and as the human race transforms things – even, in our minds, ruins or eliminates things – in fact the earth yields, accepts, and yields again.

If the physical realm is intransigent and malleable at best in the face of our efforts at transformation, a certain form of alchemy is still common amongst us. Rife, in fact.

Everyone practices it: we do not need lab coats or college degrees. If the “scientific method” prevailed, we would abandon it, for it has proven over and over and over and over again since the dawn of history to be a failure. Worse – dangerous and deadly. Yet we fool ourselves it is plausible, and has merit. And that we might be the first generation to find success in it; the first people to make it work.

I speak of moral alchemy.

The world, generally – and I am afraid the church itself, lately – has tried to genetically modify the Ways of God. Of all the new theologies and versions of truth that are offered up, we can categorize many of them as the Loophole Gospel. The Word made safe for Modern Man. God created, but in our flawed hearts and misguided souls we try to create a different God. The loving Jesus required of us a modest yet meaningful life-choice, but people’s inclinations are to manufacture a different Christ, and His message modified to comfortably clothe our sins. The 10 Commandments have become 10 Suggestions.

“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil,” it was warned in Isaiah 5:20, “who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

When you have a chance, rush to your Bible and read what God says in the entirety of Isaiah’s fifth chapter. “Woe” is the most extreme form of pity that can be felt toward those who suffer. Read what God says – He has laid out for us, His children, riches and promises of joy, yet we tend toward rejecting Him and toward our self-destruction. And toward His inevitable wrath! Again, do we think we are the first generation in history to turn up the “Get out of jail free” card?

“Therefore, as the fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff,
so their root will be as rottenness… Because they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One…. Therefore the anger of the Lord is aroused against His people; He has stretched out His hand against them and stricken them, and the hills trembled. Their carcasses were as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this His anger is not turned away, But His hand is stretched out still.”

Modern alchemy is a moral experiment, doomed not only to failure but reproach and disaster. Our sophisticated brains subliminally rejoice that we have developed a substitute for justice. New words, new excuses, new rationalizations for sin. An acceptable alternative to obedience… we hope.

In the process, contemporary man has achieved a sort of alchemy the ancient sorcerers never could approach. We have succeeded to transform the shining, precious gold that God offers each of us into cold, dull chunks of common iron that represent the inclinations of our evil hearts.

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Faithful believers, and in end times the remnant, are rooted in Truth and not persuaded, nor dissuaded, in their spiritual walks. Like a tree that’s standing by the waters, they shall not be moved. Those are the words of the favorite Negro spiritual, sung here by Blind Pig and the Acorn, kitchen music from the heart of Appalachia. Paul Wilson, lead, and Jerry Wilson, harmony.

Click: I Shall Not Be Moved

12-8-14

This is awfully secular, but a lot of us have memories from television’s black-and-white days. On Thanksgiving afternoon, before, after, or in-between the turkey and four varieties of carbohydrate side dish meals, a local station would air Laurel and Hardy’s “March Of the Wooden Soldiers,” based on Victor Herbert’s “Babes in Toyland.” The tenuous connection to Christmas was trouble in Santa’s workshop, but it was enough to usher in the Christmas season.

Now, black and white movies are most obsolete. Laurel and Hardy have been banished, too. My friend Jean Shepherd’s classic “A Christmas Story” does make it annual appearance now, usually in a 24-hour cycle on TCM, but closer to Christmas, warning boys everywhere to be careful not to shoot their eye out. But. Thanksgiving is no longer the starting-line for the Christmas race.

After Hallowe’en, these day, stores start festooning aisles and windows with Christmas decorations and merchandise. Some stores before THAT. Observant chambers of commerce start decorating Main Streets with lights and messages while pedestrians underneath often still wear shorts and Ts.

You know the complaints, because you probably complain, as most of us do – and not all from a theological perspective, of course: everyone has internal Tackiness meters and Tawdry antibodies in our systems. I hope. It is all too early… too cheesy… too pushy… too commercial…

… and, of course, even atheists take note, very little about Jesus. And “He is the reason…” etc. Shop owners and greedy legal consultants can say that secularists should not be offended, but in truth merchants, window decorators, chambers of commerce, and many of our neighbors, could not care less about the advent of Jesus, the Incarnation of Jehovah, God-with-us, the Word made flesh, the Savior of humankind. But: Disney characters around a cartoon manger do not cut it, folks.

“Getting ready for Christmas,” it is argued. “All for the kids.” Heaven forbid. Never in the history of ideas has a civilization worked so hard to commemorate a holy event by straining so mightily to deny its holy significance.

Interestingly, “getting ready for Christmas” does not depend on commercial, sanitized fluff, and never did. God does not need our sophisticated understanding to become flesh and dwell among us. He did not, despite the announcement via angels, 2000 years ago. Nor did He, approximately 700 years before those events, when He prophesied through Isaiah the birth of the Savior.

A great teaching of Mark Driscoll laid out many of the prophesies, meanings, and fulfillments concerning Christ’s Incarnation – God becoming human and living amongst humankind:

Jesus will come from the line of Abraham. Prophecy: Genesis 12:3. Fulfilled: Matthew 1:1.

Jesus’ mother will be a virgin. Prophecy: Isaiah 7:14. Fulfilled: Matthew 1:18–23.

Jesus will be a descendent of Isaac and Jacob. Prophecy: Genesis 17:19 and Numbers 24:17. Fulfilled: Matthew 1:2.

Jesus will be born in the town Bethlehem. Prophecy: Micah 5:2. Fulfilled: Luke 2:1–7.

Jesus will be called out of Egypt. Prophecy: Hosea 11:1. Fulfilled: Matthew 2:13–15.

Jesus will be a member of the tribe of Judah. Prophecy: Genesis 49:10. Fulfilled: Luke 3:33. 

Jesus will be from the lineage of King David. Prophecy: Jeremiah 23:5. Fulfilled: Matthew 1:6.

Jesus’ birth will be accompanied with great suffering and sorrow. Prophecy: Jeremiah 31:15. Fulfilled: Matthew 2:16.

Jesus will live a perfect life, die by crucifixion, resurrect from death, ascend into heaven, and sit at the right hand of God. Prophecies: Psalm 22:16; Psalm 16:10; Isaiah 53:10–11; Psalm 68:18; Psalm 110:1. Fulfilled: 1 Peter 2:21–22; Luke 23:33; Acts 2:25–32; Acts 1:9; Hebrews 1:3.

Many Old Testament writings prophesy the coming of the Messiah and His birth. All without snow bunnies and frosty snowmen. No electric lights, no cartoon characters, no commercial jingles. For those who have not read Isaiah (especially) 52-53, many of its themes and words are familiar anyway through the citations of Christ, St Paul, the Book of Revelation, the libretto of Handel’s “Messiah,” which was not a poetic paraphrase but the actual words from the Bible.

God let the world know Christmas was coming. Shame on us: unlike the shepherds in Bethlehem’s hills, we KNOW the tremendous spiritual significance of this humble birth that was also the most life-changing moment in history.

He is coming. He was coming. He died and rose. He will come. He rises every day. “If He be lifted up…” We lift Him up. We are crucified with Christ. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He sits at the right hand of the Father. He comes again with glory. He is forever Mary’s son, the Babe in the manger.

The Resurrection is as real – and is as fresh – as the Incarnation, the birth of the Holy One. They are new every day, or should be to us, and renewable as sources of Truth and Strength and Life.

Actually, Christians could, and perhaps should once in awhile, think of the Easter message on Christmas Day, and celebrate the advent of our Lord, Jesus’s birth and Incarnation, on Easter Sunday.

It is the same Message; He is the same Savior. We could even exchange gifts at random times. After all, the Father’s Gift to a lost humanity was not meant for one day, one season, or one people, or one time.

For ever and for ever, amen: Jesus, the Gift that keeps on giving.

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A relatively new song that has become a commercial standard but also a sacred favorite, sure to find a hymnbook home is “Mary, Did You Know?” by Mark Lowery (lyrics) and Buddy Greene (music). Sung here by the Christ Church Choir to images from “The Passion of the Christ,” all reflecting our message that what was, is; and what is, was, in the providence of God.

Click: Mary, Did You Know?

11-10-14

Families of certain traditional observances pray before every meal. This is probably less common than in the past; I do not know. I migrated from a faith tradition where rote prayers were recited, to an exercise of spontaneous thanks; from leading or corporate prayers, to an individual thanking God. Usually the latter prayer has a correlative effect of letting the meal cool, but God will see that many are cold but few are frozen.

My sisters and I, in unison, recited the sing-song verse (that did not, actually, rhyme perfectly): “God is great, God is good; and we thank Him for this food. Amen.”

As I grew up I understood quite clearly that such thanks were due God even when we had boiled beef tongue, or liver and onions, waiting. It is the principle of the thing; another meaning of “good taste.” In that spirit I never failed to pray, sometimes to myself, when dining at my mother-in-law’s table, years later. If you ever had one of her meals you would understand why most of my silent prayers were lifted AFTER I ate what I could.

Back to topic, which is not so much an early Thanksgiving meditation as to offer some thoughts about “God is great,” as per the childhood prayer.

God, being God, and as much as He reveals of Himself, surely is great. Our understanding is imperfect, partly because He reveals Himself through scripture and in the Person of His Son… and yet we have but the smallest, most fleeting, impression of who He is. We see as through a glass darkly, as with many things. Yet, though we might someday understand Him more – let us say as the angels in Heaven see and understand – that will still fall short. If we were to know Him fully, we would be as God, and that will never be.

His mysteries are to be wondered at, not jealously coveted. I like it that way (which is just as well, because that is cosmic reality). SEEKING to know Him better, wanting new ways to please Him, desiring His will so that I might obey more and more – these are the sweet assignments of the believer.

Can we see these mysteries and sometimes-hidden attributes of God, the continuous revelation of His character, as a definition of Great in the context of that childhood prayer? – “God is great, God is good”?

Indeed we can. And that goes beyond the reminder of very different meanings of “great” and “good.”

That childhood prayer, despite its innocent simplicity, addresses the crux of the contemporary debate about the existence of God. That debate is, I believe, the defining proposition of Western Civilization’s crisis. We are, without doubt, in a post-Christian society. Nietzsche first posited the question, “Is God dead?” not as theological argument, but to observe that when God is no longer the motive force behind a civilization’s standards and judgments; when mankind ceases to acknowledge Him in the arts, in law, in morality, in education, in science… He is, very much in effect, dead to that culture.

Christians must resuscitate God in our culture: not that He needs our assistance, being God; but so that we assert His rightful place in our affairs, so that we properly honor Him again, because it is, as the old liturgies used to say, “truly meet and right so to do.” After all, when we let our foundation-stones crumble… well, you don’t have to be an architect to know how houses can fall.

So, believers, it is our duty to fight back against the creeping (galloping?) secularization of our society.

I ask you notice something, however, that is inherent in that childhood prayer. Remember this as you assay the issues (and, believe me, this issue underlies EVERY worldview topic you can think of) or discuss matters with skeptics and agnostics and atheists and secularists and relativists. Many of those folks begin their arguments with “How can there be a God who…” or “Why would a loving God permit” this or that.

When people begin their arguments about God in those ways, notice that they are not denying the existence of God: they are complaining about His ways, or His attributes, or how He doesn’t follow the scripts that skeptics would lay out. They are not demanding that you admit there is no God, even as they might think that such is their belief (or non-belief)… they are just annoyed that He is not fitting their own job descriptions.

Truly, if people did not believe in God, or a god, at all, they would simply go home to their knitting. What difference would it make? So even if they do not realize it, they basically – deep down in their hearts – acknowledge a God. We should talk to them, and pray for them, with the attitude that these people are already on the road, and just need guiding hands.

A case in point that we should think about is the late skeptic Christopher Hitchens, who made a career in his last years, before cancer claimed him, doing roadshows with Dinesh D’Sousa debating the existence of God. Hitchens’ best-seller at the time was a book titled “God Is Not Good.” Blasphemous? Just short, maybe, but my point is that the title automatically supposes – rather than denies – the existence of God. Skeptics like Hitchens are only lingering at the Suggestion Box, perhaps, we pray, on their way to the sinner’s rail.

A hymn that I think could be the theme-music of this message is reportedly America’s second-favorite hymn after “Amazing Grace.” As such, “How Great Thou Art” often is assumed to be an ancient hymn, but it is barely 125 years old. A poem written by the Swede Carl-Gustav Boberg was translated into English by Stuart K. Hine. Its origin is the account of Boberg walking home and beset by a sudden violent storm. When it cleared he was not only grateful for his safety but impressed by the suffused sunlight, birdsongs, and distant church bells. At home he wrote the familiar words so loved by many.

Its tune was from a Swedish folk tune that is so elemental that it has similarities to later songs like the gospel “Until Then,” and, ironically, the march “Horst Wessel Lied.” But “How Great Thou Art” wended its way from Sweden to Germany to the Baltic states (Estonia, principally), to Russia, England, and America. It was still largely unknown to the church community in the US when it was sung by George Beverly Shea at a Billy Graham crusade in Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1957. Cliff Barrows has reported that it was sung more than a hundred times during that crusade, and possibly was the reason the crusade services were extended and held over.

It has been a standard ever since, not only of the Billy Graham services, but of church meetings, funerals, camp meetings, and concerts.

Attractive tune, certainly. The song’s structure “builds,” and makes an emotional impression. But surely the impact derives from the message – the song says what we cannot otherwise easily put into words. When our hearts burst, when our minds are excited, when our lips fail us… then sing our souls, How Great Thou Art!

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Here is one of the impactful renditions of “How Great Thou Art” you will ever hear (and that would rival Bev Shea and Elvis and Carrie Underwood and hundreds of others). RoseAngela Merritt singing the hymn a cappella in St. Anne’s church that was built next to the Pools of Bethesda in Jerusalem, where Jesus healed the crippled man. The site, and acoustics, the emotional rendering, are outstanding.

Click: How Great Thou Art

10-27-14

This is Reformation Week, commemorating the traditional date of October 31, when the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed 95 theses – point-by-point criticisms of contemporary Roman Catholic practices – onto the wooden door of Wittenberg Cathedral in Germany. All throughout northern Europe, churches were the centers of each town’s social, as well as spiritual, life, and their doors were the precursors of our day’s “postings to your wall.”

Everyone in the town square saw Luther’s manifesto. It was not startling except, perhaps, for its formality and audacity. But Luther had been complaining about practices in the Church for some time: corruption in its operation, committing errors in doctrine. And so had many others complained. In other German cities and states. And in Switzerland. And the Netherlands. In northern Italy. Even a hundred years earlier, when a dissident Moravian priest, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake. I have stood in reverence before his statue in Prague’s Old Town Square. And even before Hus, one who protested the ethical and doctrinal corruption in Rome: John Wycliffe, of England. One of his “crimes” was translating the Bible into English (the “language of the people,” instead of Latin), as Luther later dared to do with his German translation.

For all the brewing opposition to the Vatican, the Reformation, if not Reformed theology, is popularly regarded as having begun with Luther, and specifically on that day in 1517 when he nailed those 95 indictments to the church door. That is because a dam burst, metaphorically, in the Catholic Church, in larger Christendom, in society, in politics, in the arts, on all cultural levels. Half the German princes opposed the Pope’s political and military prerogatives, as well as papal ecclesiastical authority. After Hus’s martyrdom, major social upheavals led to Bohemia soon becoming 90 per cent Hussite (today’s Moravian church) or other variety of Protestant.

So the 95 Theses were the spark that lit a bonfire, but there were burning embers and brushfires aplenty for two centuries previous. Also, the times were right for a revolution like the Reformation. Rome’s corruption was outrageous; extra-biblical doctrines were offending the pious; and, hand-in-hand with the ideas behind the Renaissance, men were learning to think for themselves. And act for themselves; and organize, and trade, and read, for themselves. Literacy: a few centuries earlier, Luther’s manifesto would have a been a paper with meaningless scribbles to passersby. On that Sunday, however, the theses were read, and devoured, and discussed. The Pope was furious when he was told that Luther’s tracts were best-sellers of the day in Germany.

It is frankly the case that the revolution that Luther sparked was not fully intended by him. He did not want to break away from the Catholic Church, least of all have a denomination named for him. He scolded his followers who stormed Catholic churches and knocked over statues (“idols,” to them). But… he was excommunicated. For a time he was hidden by protectors because the Church wanted him dead. He married a former nun, settled into a life of preaching and writing (many volumes!) and preaching “sola Scriptura” (Scripture Alone) as the basis for faith, and for salvation.

His era’s handmaidens, Renaissance thought, humanism, and neo-Classicism, were not particularly welcome movements to Martin Luther. If anything he was closer to Orthodoxy, at least in rejecting “modern” trends in theology. He went so far as to say that “Reason is the enemy of Faith.” Remember, he relied on “Scripture Alone.” Ironically, he was especially venerated during the Enlightenment because (despite some history books claiming the period to be one of liberation from the Bible) Newton and others saw scientific discoveries as explaining God, not marginalizing Him. So Luther, father of the Reformation, was not the first of the Moderns, but the last of the Medievalists.

In spite of Luther – or, rather, an inevitable component of the Protestant Reformation – social and political freedoms were unleashed. Literacy spread, and as people split from the church they increasingly asserted their civil rights too. In a very real sense, we can say for convenience’s sake if not dramatic effect, that Western civilization was one way before Oct 31, 1517; and another way afterward. With Martin Luther, formally, on that day, began the battle of the individual against authority, the primacy of conscience over arbitrary regulations.

Those battles continue, of course. But blessings flowered… and malignant seeds sprouted too. Democracy has led to social disruption and near-anarchic relations between classes and nations. With broken ecclesiastic authority, public morality has degenerated. And as denominations have multiplied, their influence has virtually evaporated in Western culture and in the United States.

It can be said – and has been said, frequently – that the Roman Catholic Church brought the Reformation onto itself. Perhaps (for instance) some of the mistresses and illegitimate children of Popes would have a say in that discussion. The widespread device of selling “indulgences” still stands as a major offense: common people were persuaded to pay money to guarantee that their dead ancestors would be delivered from torture in Purgatory (despite the fact the Bible does not say that we can have influence of the souls of the departed… or even that there is such a place as Purgatory). Yet an enterprising priest, Tetzel, invented a rhyme, “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.” Much of this was a scheme to build and decorate St Peter’s in Rome. Clever venture capitalism, bold entrepreneurial management, perhaps; but rotten theology.

Very specifically, these vile offenses confronted Luther when he travelled on foot from Germany to the Holy See on a mission. He was aghast at the corruption, decadence, sin, money-grubbing, and countless heresies – not in the city of Rome, but in the Vatican itself. A biographer of Luther wrote, “the city, which he had greeted [from afar] as holy, was a sink of iniquity; its very priests were openly infidel and scoffed at the services they performed; the papal courtiers were men of the most shameless lives.”

Let me fast-forward 500 years, and let us ourselves enter the Holy See of Protestantism (as it were) and assess what Reform has brought to the Church of Jesus Christ, those portions of the Body.

Do we see denominations inventing and “discovering” their own doctrines? Do we see churches bending their theology in order to fill the pews? Do we see widespread moral failings in the clergy – everything from pedophilia to homosexual encounters? Do we see story after story in the news about financial shenanigans? How many churches wallow in obscene opulence, as the poor live in their shadows? How many charities are shams; how many mission outreaches, we learn with sad hearts, are looted? How often are “modern” sins excused by the heretical lies of relativism in the church? How have seminaries become breeding-grounds of Progressivism; why are entire denominations denying the divinity of Christ, the existence of Absolute Truth? What is this extra-biblical “Prosperity Gospel”? – when preachers procure “seed-faith” offerings, and offer “prayer hankies” to customers who are assured of God’s blessings – HOW is that different from selling indulgences?

Racing through that list, you will recognize problems that are endemic to this or that denomination; sometimes still the Catholic church; mainstream or evangelical Protestants; Pentecostal or post-modern; “Seeker” or emergent. I believe that the Christian churches of contemporary Europe and America might grieve the Heart of God no less than the corrupt Church of the Popes 500 years ago.

We need a New Reformation. We need “Scripture Alone” as our guide again. We need holy indignation from the remnant of faithful followers of Jesus Christ.

I intend to compose a New 95 Theses (knowing that a list of problems with today’s churches could be a larger number!). I will be writing more, as I compose this, but as I look for hammer and nails to post them, or publish them, I invite readers to nominate some of the practices in today’s churches that need reforming. We ARE Christ’s representatives here on earth; and a royal priesthood of believers. We have a responsibility. And let us be guided by Martin Luther, in one of the greatest moments of human history. Hauled before a court of the Holy Roman Empire, condemned by the Pope himself, threatened with excommunication and death, ordered to renounce his thoughts and denounce his books and sermons… nevertheless he was defiant in opposition: “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”

A mighty fortress is our God.

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Two clips this week. The first is the dramatic confrontation, and Luther’s dramatic defense, at the Council in Worms, Germany, that presumed to judge him. From the classic black-and-white, award-winning biopic starring Niall MacGinnis. The second clip is a signature performance, a cappella, by Steve Green, singing “A Mighty Fortress” before thousands. “Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also; The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still, His Kingdom is forever!”

Click: “Here I stand”: Luther’s defense

Click: The Reformation’s battle hymn, composed by Luther; sung by Steve Green

10-6-14

Some years ago I was a guest on a local program somewhere in New England on a National Public Radio station, “The Man and His Music.” Under today’s politically correct strictures, especially on NPR, I suppose the series would be called, “The Person and His/Her Predilections,” or some such nonsense. (Maybe even “His/Her/Its”) Anyway, the premise of the series was to explore a guest’s personality through discussions of musical taste and favorite pieces, in addition to the standard celebrity-interview fare.

We authors or actors or athletes were, naturally, asked to send our choices in advance of the studio interview, and to provide (ancient history, kiddies) cassette tapes of our favorite songs or snippets of music. The hostess was well-versed in music, and could discuss or at least intelligently explore any style of music from any period of history, from Renaissance to jazz.

True to my catholic tastes, as old friends of this column will know, my choices ranged from Baroque to Bluegrass. And at least half the choices, for the two-hour program, were church pieces. Movements from cantatas and masses; traditional hymns; contemporary gospel. The man and his music, right?

It developed that eclecticism was fine for the show, but only so much. Between discussions of my books and travels and hobbies were the musical cut-aways, followed by chats about them. The hostess was glad to discuss the fact I knew several jazzmen who had played with Bix Beiderbecke; and had heard Mozart performed in Salzburg; and that I had been backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. But when my choices were Christian pieces, the conversation turned cold. Invariably we rushed to a new topic.

Not only did those musical clips carry a gospel message, but my discussion – why these pieces were special to me, the putative theme of the series – perforce touched upon what made them special, too, to the composers, performers, and the intended audiences. The stories behind the songs; the messages in the music.

I don’t think it was a particular prejudice of the hostess. Clearly, it reflected the culture at (taxpayer-supported, we constantly are reminded) National Public Radio. But, more, it reflects the culture of contemporary America. The post-modern, post-Christian world.

There is a reason I tie my weekly messages to music. I believe music is the most imaginative language devised by mankind, and always a pulse-reading of the broader culture. My ideas about music are based on those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They believed that harmony is a somewhat elusive quality that is yet irreducible when achieved: we know it when we hear it. Harmony is to be sought in life as well as in music. Harmony represented the Absolute Truth that Plato knew existed, and whose perfect possession might be impossible for mortals, but whose pursuit is essential for our worthwhile selves. (This philosophical summary three centuries before the birth of Jesus explains why early Christian theologians were called Neo-Platonists.)

Renaissance artists found a “new birth,” artistically, in the arts of the ancients, specifically the Greeks. Sculpture and architecture, principally. Literature followed, though awkwardly; and eventually dance and music, in ideals rather than forms (which were historically obscure until very recently). All through the church age, and finding its apogee in the Renaissance despite an interest in outward Athenian expression, art’s main function was to embody the meanings and purposes of God. Gradually, aided and abetted by political freedoms, the empowerment of the printing press, and a philosophical zeitgeist in the West that morphed from Humanism to Individualism to Selfishness, the rationale for all artistic expression, in all manifestations, changed.

Now, instead of artists striving to please God, they strive to please themselves.

Beginning in music (and speaking very generally) around Beethoven’s time, the artist became more important than his music; the music more important than the One it once served. Beethoven, however, was truly a transitional figure in this discussion; although something of a “tortured soul,” he was a fervent Christian, as were his immediate contemporaries among composers. Hummel, Field, Czerny, and especially Mendelssohn (ironically, a Jew, converted to Lutheran Christianity) were intensely personal in their compositions without rejecting traditional forms, or faith. But the next generation of composers felt it necessary to be rebels in morality as well as in their music. Composers were expected to have troubled personal lives, to bare their souls in their music, and to offer cathartic or excruciating exposures of their selves. Portraits of the artists. Listeners came to assume that artists were tormented. Artistic heroes are encouraged to wallow in personal revelations, the uglier the better.

True in music and painting, it became the norm in all of the arts, and in fact throughout all of society: that the world, our lives, our very civilization, is so rotten and contemptible that we must honor the artists who struggle to express their disdain and their doomed efforts to resist. Honored the most are those who can describe the best what stinks the worst. Of course, then, society honors leaders and politicians who base their programs on similar perceptions of a loathsome society. They can only address the evils (as they see them) of the Old Order with solutions and systems that reject any trace of traditional wisdom.

This explains where we are as a culture, and why we are doomed, I believe. (Really doomed; not the trendy ennui of parlor dyspeptics.) Beyond music, every expression from poetry to politics reflects the fact that we are a people who have cut ourselves off from God. We no longer make decisions – personal or civic, artistic or political – based on God’s Word, on praying for divine guidance, on trusting the faith of our fathers, on seeking to please Him. And – I hope this is obvious – this analysis pertains to all societies and their religions, not only the Christian West. But as a legatee of Western Civilization that crumbles around me, that is what I address today. So should we all.

And I am quite happy to debate which package of factors is the cart and which is the horse. “Art imitates life” is an ancient maxim. Its apposite response (called anti-mimesis) was provided by Oscar Wilde, who maintained that “life imitates art.” But most recently the real challenge – I should say a lucid perception of our world’s post-Christian dilemma – was voiced by the brilliant Russian émigré, the critic Alexander Boot: that among the ruins of Western Civilization that we have come to call home, Art imitates death.

Having ignored, banned, ridiculed, insulted, and rejected God for so long in the post-Christian West, how can we expect otherwise?

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I could choose a hundred thousand musical pieces, few from the past 150 years, to accompany this essay. I have chosen a video that is in itself a work of art, the DeutscheGrammophon production of the supernal Helene Grimaud playing the second movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concert Nr 23 in A, K. 488. Close-ups of her technique, her sensitive expressions, and nature scenes. God is glorified.

Click: Mozart Adagio

9-22-14

People sometimes are more attracted to fantasy than reality, which amuses me. When it doesn’t amuse me it disheartens me. I understand real life can be grim; that our souls seek poetic escape; that fiction often codifies the moral tendencies of a culture, and we thereby create comfort zones. Blah, blah, blah, as literary critics say.

But why is this true, when reality can also be sweeter than any fiction? As a former editor of Marvel Comics, and writer for Disney, I spent a lot of time trafficking in the contemporary versions of civilization’s epic confrontations and traditional fairy tales. But I have to report that I wondered, during my Marvel days, why millions of readers were so invested in superheroes, forever asking “what if?” about characters with super powers, invincibility, the ability to defy nature, fighting life-threatening foes and defeating evil, as good as good guys can be… but how so many of those young (and older) readers could be indifferent about Jesus.

Jesus was the greatest superhero of them all, doing all those things quite easily – and we can add attributes like time travel, walking through walls, and rising from death. Everything but the Spandex, right?

Yet many people prefer fantasy to reality. Speculation to truth. Mythological heroes to men and women of history. Of course, I suspect that a major factor is pride: humans have the tendency to monopolize the truth, or persuade themselves that they can do so. Malleable stories are therefore more comforting than stark reality.

For instance, what about angels in this essay’s title? Well, it struck me a few years ago when the Angel Fad was coursing through the bloodstream of America, that many people equated that with a rise in spirituality.

Yet Angelmania was spiritual only if Hallmark stores are churches, only if costume jewelry is sacramental, only if Della Reese (“Touched By an Angel”) is an ordained minister of the gospel. (In fact she does pastor a church – in Los Angeles, where else? – called the Universal Foundation for Better Living, a non-Christian Unity or New Age sort of church whose pope is someone called The Reverend Doctor Johnnie Colemon.) So she and Rev. Dr. Johnnie are ministers, but not of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But angels did populate the Christian culture for a season. Now they largely populate storage closets and the backs of dresser drawers, along with posters of elves and fairies, garden gnomes, and WWJD bracelets. Odd, no?

I do believe in angels – I mean I believe they exist – just as I believe it is useful to ask myself “What Would Jesus Do?” in daily situations. I am fairly certain He would not have worn angel pins, but that is not my point. These things are not evil, and I might yet seek forgiveness for being spiritually flippant. BUT.

I am quite serious when I regard anything that takes our eyes off the gospel message of salvation can be the essence of sin: missing the mark. Yes, I believe that angels exist, but not the angels of popular culture. The Bible describes them, and that’s enough for me. But we need to understand certain things:

1. There are actually many things we DON’T understand about angels, and cannot understand, because the Bible often is intentionally vague;

2. Their role, as described in the Bible, principally is as messengers and “ministering spirits”;

3. They are not humans in heavenly bodies; they are separate creations; they can appear sometimes as humans (my family had such an encounter), but are spirits;

4. Except for the seraphim, only occasionally are they described as having wings;

5. All angels are not good: Satan attracted one-third of them in his rebellion;

6. They are not omniscient nor can they be omnipresent… or they would be as God;

7. In their perhaps uncountable numbers, they are not anonymous – Michael and Gabriel are two who have central roles in the heavenly realms, and will play mighty parts when prophecies are fulfilled – cherubim, seraphim and others are ministering spirits to us, and comprise worshipful choruses before the throne.

So. No offense to my own guardian angel, if I have one, but I am suspicious of Christianity that lives in jewelry and not necessarily in our hearts. Or expressions that serve as statements of our faith, when our very lives, instead, should show our love – faith in action.

Ultimately, there is, I think, one important thing to remember about angels. And this will prove I am not a spiritual abuser of these mysterious creatures, far from it. Angels, created by God before mankind was created, and not glorified souls of humans, have never known what you and I have experienced.

Never sick? Never feeling loss or betrayal or pain or grief? Never sinning? How can that be a negative? I feel sorry for them precisely for those reasons. No angel knows the shackles of sin, broken by the power of salvation. No angel knows the joy of forgiveness. No angel has experienced bondage and blood-bought redemption. We are more precious in God’s sight even than angels, more than all creation.

All angels can sing “Jesus loves me, this I know.” None can sing, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”

Jesus came to die for human beings, every one of us who will accept His sacrifice. Sorry, angels, He didn’t die for you. Yet the Bible tells me so, that you will be ministering to us, just the same, as we enter Glory. As we gather around the Throne together, that’s when I really will feel the touch of angels’ wings.

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An old American hymn (ca. 1860) is the comforting “Angel Band,” written by Jefferson Hascall with music by William Batchelder Bradbury. It originally was known by its incipit, “My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run.” It has painted a true picture of the heavenly orders for generations of Christians.

Click: Angel Band

9-8-14

History knows two kinds of war, generally: those that are declared, with precise commencements, formalities, and peace treaties; and those that begin from a host of various grievances or jealousies, have hazy – usually multiple – flash-points, and drag on, and on, spreading misery and atrocities over civilian populations no less than enemy forces. Both sorts of war can change the course of history to equal degrees.

The United States – the West; the Christian church – is engaged in the second form of these wars. We are not anticipating it. We are IN it. And we have been for some time. That the “enemy” can be defined in several ways does not diminish the fact that there is one war. And it is not new, although our dim-witted realization, as if awakening from a dream, might be new.

I am writing of Islam, of course. It is instructive, even vital, that we review how we got here. “Past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote.

The hideous barbarism of ISIS / ISIL is the latest. We should call it the Islamic State, as its leaders do, although our own “leaders” believe that would reveal us to be politically incorrect if we call them either Muslims or terrorists. (They are merely “extremists,” you see). We can go back to 9-11; to the various Palestinian terror groups, modeling themselves, by the way, after the Zionist terror groups before 1948. We can go back and back in history.

The history of Islam, or the Mohammedans, as the West used to call them, is as rich in politics and warfare as it is in theology. After the death of Mohammed, probably in 632, Muslim factions started warring, partly as a byproduct of factionalism, but also to spread their religion’s overall influence, expanding in an imperialist mode. Throughout the Levant, to Asia Minor, to north Africa. And to Europe.

Through formal invasions and persistent incursions, Muslims spread into Europe. It was a time after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Civic, military, and social systems had deteriorated, and Islam tried to fill the vacuum. The remnants of the Visigoth Empire were supplanted in modern-day Spain. Pockets in southern France were overrun. Strongholds of the old Byzantine Empire were no longer strong, and Mohammedan armies pushed them back.

For a millennium the Arabs and Islam continued squabbling over men’s minds and men’s land, while over the time also mastering various cultural advances in mathematics, science, poetry, astronomy, medicine, and art. But the doors of Europe and Christianity, whether to knock or kick down, were seldom far from the expansionists’ minds, either.

Around 700 and for roughly a half-century, a fierce battle over the survival and character of Christian Europe was fought on the Iberian peninsula and in southern France. The romanticized legend known as The Song of Roland, a landmark in Western literature, nevertheless tells the facts that Charles Martel, his son Pepin le Bref, and his son Charlemagne, combined through persistent bravery and bloody sacrifice to defend Western civilization.

Not only was militant Islam turned away from Europe, but Charlemagne, in present-day German lands, reestablished the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the inexorable “soft” invasions continued. After a siege on Constantinople roughly contemporaneous with the Battle of Saragossa in Spain, the Bulgarian Emperor Khan Tervel turned back vicious Moslem fighters and earned the title “Savior of Europe.”

Around 900, Moslems attacked the Italian peninsula. Rome was sacked, and an emirate was established in Sicily. Three centuries later a resurgent Mongol empire swept across Eurasia, defeating Moslem strongholds in their path, most notably as far south as in the Battle of Baghdad, 1258… but then its leaders, following the mighty Timur, converted to Islam. The effect was a victory for the consolidation and spread of a militant Islam, from Egypt through Syria to India.

Thereafter, the Islamic Ottoman Empire invaded Western Europe and colonized Greece, all of the Balkans, Romania, Bessarabia, and Hungary, and was stopped only at the outskirts of Vienna. In 1683 a brutal force of militant Islamic soldiers besieged Vienna, which literally, geographically, was a gateway to Europe. Only the fierce rescue by brave Polish, Austrian, and German Hapsburg troops led by the Polish king Jan Sobieski turned back the Muslim invaders.

The Ottoman Empire remained a diminished irritant to European Christianity, and was dispatched after World War I after it chose the wrong side – the defeated Central Powers – and was dismembered. Greece became independent, the British typically gained territories-by-peace-treaties, and Turkey became a constitutionally secular country in 1923.

With that – and buying off Islamic leaders with protected artificial statehoods (Iraq, Iran, Trans-Jordan, etc), trade favors, and other emoluments after both world wars – Western Europe thought that radical Islam was a thing of the past.

But as recent events have shown (including a quiet resurgence of a radically Islamic Turkey), the last century was just a breathing-period. The incessant 1500-year war of Islam against Christianity continues.

I do not apologize to readers for this brief history lesson. As George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Shame on Americans for being generally ignorant about such vital matters. I will go further and wager that most Americans could not fill in the names of many Middle East countries on a blank map of the region. Nor assign the Sunni or Shi’ite loyalties of the players in the current crises, much less Alawite or Ba’athist roles in the conflicts.

(Neither can most Americans identify the role of British and American manipulation of events since the end of World War I, prompted by trade and oil and geopolitical interest, including doing others’ bidding; and usually bungled. But that is another essay.)

The fact – the hard fact – remains: we are engaged in a religious war. And that is very bad news, because America is hardly a religious nation any more.

We are, therefore, losing before we realize we are being attacked. Feeding our lack of conviction is the notion that to recognize Islam’s war on us is to be “unfair.” “Prejudiced.” The political and cultural leaders who feed these concepts are, simply, traitors to the nation, to our culture, and to our faith.

We should recognize them as traitors, and deal with them as traitors. And shame on the American public – traditional Christian patriots – for surrendering. Not just to notions of “Arab extremism” or “Islamic terror,” but surrendering to the traitors who soften or minds and wills.

The United States is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, dedicated to God by countless pilgrims and pioneers in the name of Christ. That does not means we hate or should exclude others, but it traditionally meant that we invited others to live at peace in a Christian nation. Christians like to say “Judeo-Christian” often so they will not be accused of wanting another “Holocaust,” but our values and traditions are Christian.

We are under attack. “We” are not only Americans – Islam does not care so much about our passports. It is not a question of their wanting more real estate.

Christianity is under attack. You can respond by softening your faith. By being “tolerant” of those who wish you dead and happy to help in the effort. Or you can join the historic ranks of forgotten heroes and martyrs like Charles Martel, Pepin le Bref, Charlemagne, Khan Tervel, and Jan Sobieski, willing to die if necessary for Western civilization and for Christianity.

The war, like it or not a real war, is being waged by Islam.

But the real enemy, admit it or not, is our own culture’s loss of faith.

We cannot pretend that — for the first time in history — this condition, a lost foundation of faith, will not be fatal to a culture. We cannot wish this away. We need backbones, not wishbones.

The first battle – or is it our last? – seems to be lost already. How many of us will enlist?

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We are not helpless or clueless if we choose to engage. We have the words of the Bible, and the example of Christ. There is the example of uncountable martyrs and warriors who loved the Word so much – who savored the sacrifices of those who have gone before; and who cherish the dream for the sake of their children – so we might be encouraged. For Christ’s sake, not just our own. An inspiring version of an old hymn of the church, and a rousing video message, by Michael Card.

Click: How Firm a Foundation

9-1-14

How many of us have attended church services where the pastor, or perhaps a WalMart-style greeter (some larger churches today have designated Hospitality Pastors) flashes the salesman-white smile and asks everybody how they “are”? Assisted by throat-microphone and ubiquitous large-screen image confronting the audience, the minister often follows with the robotic demands: “I can’t hear you! Good morning!! I want to see everybody smiling!!!”

It seems to have been forgotten by today’s commercialized and cookie-cutter churches that, sometimes, people go to a church to cry, not to laugh. To be reverent and contemplate, not to be jolly and high-five. To approach the altar-rail and be prostrate before the Lord, not to dance. It is a fact that many pastors will earmark a portion of every sermon for jokes, even trolling the internet for the designated yuks. Hellfire and brimstone have been replaced by face-painting and cotton candy.

As a confirmed class clown, I hasten to specify that I am not a sourpuss. Even in church. But it does bother me that the Joy that is our birthright as Christians – which once, in American Christianity, itself succeeded “hard preaching” and judgmentalism – has been replaced by fluff and counterfeit emotionalism.

Joy, indeed, is our unique blessing; not mere happiness, but spiritual joy. But that cannot mean that life’s other emotions are radioactive. Life’s negative aspects can, at the least, teach us lessons. And other elemental emotions – I nominate Grief in this discussion – are part of life, too. And as we cannot avoid grief, it is best to deal well with it.

Scripture tells us that Christ Himself was “a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). In part we can assume it was so Jesus could identify with us in every particular. But I believe it was also to show us that grief and sorrow are parts of life as common as inhaling and exhaling… and how He dealt with them.

I have recently dealt with sorrow and grief, but claim no special burden over others; whining does not become a Christian. But my ears have tuned in to ministrations of others as Christians deal with grief. Random eavesdropping:

“Me? I have two children here and one in Heaven.”

“Pop, don’t feel bad about not grieving heavily. You grieved for Mom while she was alive.”

“Oh! Mourn, honey; don’t hold back the tears. God’s comfort will be sweeter.”

And a new friend from the Philadelphia Christian Writers Conference, telling me of an unbelievable succession of recent accidents, diseases, and deaths among her family and friends, uttered the wisest words I have heard in many months:

“We must not let anybody steal our grief.”

Of course we are used to being warned against those who would steal our joy. But grief is neither foreign nor malignant. It can be healthy, if we let it. Certain emotions we must release: easily said. But more than that, grief can allow us to appreciate things more, even as we miss them; to love people better, even in their absence; to add to our lives… even when it seems like we have lost pieces of our lives.

To suppress grief, or deny the healthy process it requires of us, is really only to postpone it. I do not say we should invite it – surely it is more bitter than sweet when it visits – but, rather, we should befriend it. It is part of life, which by God’s plan in its totality, we must meet unafraid, without apologies, and with a bold, conquering spirit.

“We share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (I Corinthians 1:5).

The poet Longfellow put his refusal to let anybody steal his grief in these words:

“Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.”

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No offense to the feel-good style of today’s churches, but it has always been true that tears are a language God understands. He sees us when we laugh, but hears us when we cry. I believe our tears are prisms through which He sees into our souls… and we see Him better.

Click: Tears Are a Language God Understands

7-28-14

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly….” (I Cor. 13: 11, NKJV) Although I came to belief in Christianity as inextricably related to Holy-Spirit Christianity as an adult, I can still put myself in this scenario.

But it has become evident to me that portions of the church have corrupted Biblical doctrines, or exaggerated them, even violated them. Can I put it this way? – some preachers, today, have actually made that glass darker, not clearer, for believers.

I have to come to see that God’s power is mightier than the misinterpreted promises shared by some preachers. His miracles are more profound than those recounted by television preachers. His mysteries are more intense AS mysteries, than theologies that explain God as a spiritual butler on hand when we have desires.

I am talking about healing, and abundance, as in the “prosperity gospel” we hear preached.

“By His stripes we are healed.” Some people preach that Christ’s suffering and death, by this verse, means that healing is ours, and we only have to claim it. That physical ailments, when not healed, indicate that our faith must be weak. Yet I have noticed that the most prominent “claim it” preachers wear glasses. Is this their choice – a fashion statement?

My wife had diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, celiac disease, amputated toes, a heart transplant, a kidney transplant, dialysis, and other health problems. Yet her faith was secure, and she was a mighty witness. She was miraculously healed of a cancerous thyroid, yet underwent a heart transplant despite prayers to be spared. She believed she received emotional and spiritual healing, and accepted God’s sovereignty. By Jesus’ stripes, not an evangelist’s, she was healed.

I believe that verse means that when we are healed, it is BECAUSE of Jesus’s “stripes,” that He ordains healing, guides the hands of doctors and nurses… and deserves the glory when healing does come. Spiritual priorities.

Likewise the verse “I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). That’s King James; other translations say “… Christ who strengthens me.” Words are important. “Claim it” preachers will say that God clearly gives us the power that Jesus had… to move mountains , for instance. Yet we do not see mountains moving. “Yes, but ALL things…”

First, we can sense metaphors more than hyperbole in this verse. Spiritual roadblocks, or spiritual mountains, we all have them. But my new understanding of that verse hinges on the emphasis of certain words. Can we not think that we possibly are being taught – return to the King James translation – that whatever we do, we should determine to do in, and through, Christ (to stay in God’s will); and that fact will strengthen us?

Yes, to answer my own question. I can touch on the prosperity gospel, and I remember how one preacher actually printed a chart – how much you would donate to his ministry, and (by the “hundredfold return” of Mark 10:31) how much money you could expect to receive, probably by miraculous surprises, in return. That, and “have life, and that more abundantly,” was answered by my wife with the realization that God can bless us in uncountable ways. If we define Him by cash we are sorry examples of Christ-followers.

Yes, God is a miracle-working God. Yes, we need miracles in our lives, often. But I would suggest that, even in our brokenness and desperation, we chase after miracles, and healing, and prosperity – even just subsistence – when we should be more passionate about chasing after and pleasing God, doing His will, and being obedient.

By the way, concerning miracles: I have seen some that people classify by that term, for instance a withered leg being made whole at a service. But, personally, the greatest miracle I have witnessed is the experience of my sinful life being forgiven, my heart turned from rebellion. I know what a miracle that was.

We will understand it all better farther on, but in the meantime the Holy Spirit can lead us, better than evangelists, in the ways of God: that is why He was sent, and why He dwells in our hearts.

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An ancient American hymn, a frontier hymn whose writer and composer are lost to history, is “It Is Better Farther On,” also known by its incipit, “As We Travel Through the Desert,” first appearing in a hymnal in 1877. (Not to be confused with the standard, “Farther Along.”) It speaks of the proper priorities of life’s journey, meeting our challenges, and trusting the Savior’s leading, as well as our destiny. “Oh my brother, are you weary Of the roughness of the way? Does your strength begin to fail you, And your vigor to decay? Jesus, Jesus will go with you, He will lead you to the throne, He who dyed His garments for you, And the winepress trod alone.” Here it is sung by the Zahasky Family, the Alaska String Band.

Click: Farther On

7-21-14

Christians ought to concede one of the arguments of scoffers. The Bible CAN BE, and sometimes IS, ambiguous. Not on matters of essential doctrine, of course. There enough unambiguous words from Jesus and the Apostles, for instance, about the way to Heaven, the path to Eternal Life: Believing in Jesus as the Son of God, and accepting His atoning sacrifice for our sins. Repentance will follow; as will confessing Him in your life.

The “ambiguous” parts come with issues that have railed or raged through the centuries, in discussions between friends, to the basis of wars between nations. Lack of biblical clarity has caused numerous councils to meet in deep debates, and has led to divisions, schisms, and uncountable splits and new denominations. And wars.

End times – when will the End of the Age come? And will the tribulation be at the beginning, middle, or end of the millennium? Is the Book of Revelation given to John literal or allegorical? Are the letters to seven churches contemporaneous or prophetical? Do they address periods of the future church’s dispensational practices? Did Jesus mean that His sharing of bread and wine was to foreordain consubstantiation or transubstantiation? Is the Body of Christ the New Israel? Can believers lose their salvation? Are the gifts of the Holy Spirit for today, or did they expire in the first century? Infant or “believer baptism”?

I believe these ambiguities of the Bible – the “confusing” parts about which, counter-intuitively, much dogmatism reigns – were purposely put there by God. Many men wrote the scriptures, inspired (literally , “breathed-in”) in every case; that is, not of their own thoughts, as coffers say, but God’s. Therefore, don’t you think that if some things might be interpreted this way or that, it is because God wants to keep His children on their toes, spiritually?

None of those “stumpers” affect our salvation, you’ll note. No, they are “side issues” to our belief in God, our acceptance of Jesus, and (or should be separate from) our service to fellow humans. For instance, “No one shall know the time or the hour” of the Second Coming. Nevertheless, Christians argue. Nevertheless, the question has nothing to do with our salvation. But the ambiguity leads to… keeping us on our spiritual toes.

One of the ambiguities has to do with prayer. The other side of ambiguity’s coin, so to speak, is “mystery.” God cannot contradict Himself, so when we are told things that seem inconsistent, we may be sure that our puny minds are at times insufficient, not that we have not caught God in an “Aha!” moment.

We have “Aha!” moments when we listen to God. We cannot catch God in an “Aha!” moment.

In my baby-Christian days I made myself a victim of what I misunderstood about God’s will, and I still fall prey, as do many believers. When conscious of my sins, or a specific transgression, I would pray. And pray. And seek God. And fall on my face before Him. Don’t we all do this, sometimes?

Yet we know that God answers prayer. “He rewards those who diligently seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6), among many similar verses throughout scripture. Yet what does “diligently” mean, precisely? Among multitudes of examples are stories of mothers who prayed daily for years for the salvation of their children. Surely this cannot contradict scripture; we are taught in Matthew 21:22, “You can pray for anything, and if you have faith, you will receive it (NLT).” Is it against God’s will to pray, and pray, and pray, for something? Does it mean we don’t trust Him to hear?

Sweet mysteries. We stay on our spiritual toes. We pray, we believe, and we seek Him.

However – back to when I was a baby-Christian – one trap into which believers should NEVER fall is this: once we have accepted Jesus, and He lives in our hearts, we must never pray prayers that approach God as “me, a lowly sinner.” Ashamed to lift our faces. How many Christians ruin their “walk” – cripple their faith – pollute their relationship with God – by adopting this attitude? MANY OF US!

Remember God throwing our sins into the Sea of Forgetfulness? This is similar. As God promises, and we cannot do, He both knows and forgets. But don’t you forget this: if Jesus is in your heart… then, when God sees you, He sees His Son. When He looks upon you, He doesn’t see the person who still fights sin and temptation. He sees that you are covered in the Blood Of the Lamb. Stand up, and claim that right standing with God.

The “defeated one,” Satan, also sees the Jesus in your heart, and cannot attack you unless you give him quarter.

Christians are too modest, or least about the wrong things, too often. Jesus lives in you! No matter what your transgressions or burdens, or how you are attacked… how can you keep from singing?

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How can we keep from singing? This is the title of a classic American hymn, its author somewhat obscure, but music by Robert Lowry, and it first appeared in printed hymnals around 1868. Here, performed in a style undoubtedly different than then, is the late Eva Cassidy.

Click: How Can I Keep from Singing?

7-14-14

“Both life and death are part of the same Great Adventure,” Theodore Roosevelt said, through tears but with pride, after he received word that his son Quentin had been shot down and killed in a World War I dogfight. This is no less true, and what I believed TR meant, not just in our lives but in all particulars of the Christian walk.

Jesus Christ was God who chose to live among us; He died to take the punishment for our sins upon Himself, that we might live. We must die to self. We can be Born Again. The cycle of life and death, life and death – with, for God’s children in Christ, eternal life as the final state.

One of the super-logical confirmations of Jesus’s existence, who He was, and what He did – against those say the Gospel accounts are legends, or are ready to believe in “Passover Plots” – is the fact that all but one of the Disciples were murdered for their faith. Believers were scattered after the Resurrection. Rome harassed Christians. Jewish leaders stoned them. The Disciples could have kept quiet, or been secretive. If they had a sliver of a suspicion that Jesus was a fraud, or that their faith was in vain… would they have endured prison, rejection, exile, torture, humiliation, poverty, stoning, and cruel martyrdom?

No. They chose death. Yes, in order to live eternally, but also because they witnessed to the truth.

“Here I stand,” said Martin Luther, threatened with excommunication and death if he did not recant his faith; “I can do no other.”

Early believers in Rome were persecuted by Nero. Murdered Christians were immolated, impaled on stakes, and set afire, lighting streets where citizens, including Christ-followers having to face choices, walked. Christians persisted. And died. Followed by others who persisted.

Stephen, an early follower in Jerusalem, refused to renounce his faith, and was stoned to death; his last words were asking God to forgive his tormenters. The future evangelist, Paul, was in that crowd. Death ironically (to us) led to life.

The story of the church’s first three centuries is the story of uncountable martyrs. The slaughter of Christians in pagan Gaul made Rome’s horrors seem tame, according to the histories of Eusebius.

The cruel sanctions, torture, and murders of reformers in Europe – so many, that their names are now dim to Christians, from Jan Hus in Prague onward for centuries – are mighty testimonies to those who were willing to die for Christ.

The Twentieth Century, withal, contained more martyrdom than the combined deaths in all previous centuries combined. Specifically: those who were persecuted AS CHRISTIANS, for BEING CHRISTIANS, for refusing to refute THEIR FAITH, who paid the price for CONFESSING CHRIST. For choosing – even when given an “out” – to die for Christ.

We remember the stories of students, in the 1999 Columbine massacre, being asked if they believed in God, answering yes or continuing to pray, before being killed.

If you have eyes to read, you know that it is now daily news, not a random story once a decade from some unknown place, not even merely once a month any more, but daily news of Christians around the world being persecuted or killed for their faith. Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistani Minister for Minority Affairs. Asia Bibi, in a Pakistani jail for refusing to convert to Islam. Wenxi Li, owner of a Christian book store in China. Meriam Yahia Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman sentenced to death for apostasy, for confessing Christ. Youcef Nadarkhani, a Christian pastor jailed in Iran for refusing to convert to Islam.

China. India. Pakistan. Burma. North Korea. Iraq today, where Christians, once relatively comfortable even under Saddam, have been slaughtered or exiled; and are now as a church practically an extinct species in the “country the U.S. saved.” Syria, where there had been co-existence with the Allawites, a similar situation – some of the oldest Christian communities, being slaughtered by the ISIL Sunni hordes. Egypt, where, similarly, churches founded a generation after Jesus are, today, being razed and their believers killed. Nigeria, where hundreds of girls have been kidnapped, for being vulnerable girls, but also as hated Christians. Somalia. Afghanistan. Indonesia. Columbia.

Christians are suffering horribly. Christians are dying. People are willing to die for Christ.

And then we might think about attacks on the church, restrictions on believers, prejudice against Christianity, in… the “West.” In Western Europe. In Canada. In the U.S. In our states. In our courts. In our schools. In our theaters and TV shows; in our “entertainment” and in magazines. In politics. In our towns. In our homes. Horribly, sometimes in our denominations and “churches.”

Yes, it must be a glorious burden but a hard, hard thing to die for Jesus.

But is the church in the West, as we react or don’t react, telling the world that it is, somehow, a harder thing to LIVE for Jesus? Think on this. God forbid.

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Click: I Have Decided to Follow Jesus

7-7-14

How many of us serve two gods? Even believers, not excepting born-again Christians, are not immune from the biblical injunction against serving God and Mammon. But this will not be a message about greed, avarice, and covetousness. In Western cultures we are more gaudily materialistic than in poorer societies – but the sin of serving false gods is not a matter of uncommon opportunities before us, but our common and rather dark, unfaithful hearts, the sin nature we all share and must resist.

Today, though, I invite us to think about two Gods that devout Christians unfortunately serve. That is to say, two natures – in our perception – of the same God. Not the “vengeful” Old Testament God vs the “loving” New Testament God. Not the manifestations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the God we know imperfectly, despite His desire that we know Him; despite His plans for us to know Him better. Worst: the God we divide in two – approaching Him one way, in one attitude of prayer; and another God of another nature (in our minds), approaching Him in contrary fashion.

Just in case this starts sounding preachy: none of us are immune to this tendency, least of all, among humanity’s members, me. So you are eavesdropping on my confession.

We all turn to the Lord in bad times, hard times, difficult times, confusing times. Disaster, sickness, crisis – it makes no difference. And we quickly note that there is nothing wrong with this! Scripture fairly drips with the overarching message that God wants to hear from His children. If you are a parent, don’t you want to hear from your children – even more so if they are undergoing trial or, simply, that they NEED you? Even if we approach God in humiliation and shame, remember that “a broken and a contrite heart God will not despise” (Psalm 51:17).

Possibly less often do we approach God when things are going swell. Human nature again. “Praise God” and “Thank you, Jesus,” after we wash out the auto-phrases, likely are lifted heavenward less often than they should be by most of us. And probably less often that those other requests and spiritual shopping lists.

I suggest that the problem – perhaps I should say the solution – is not so much that we lack constancy. I think the matter at hand is that we tend to divide God. Not literally, because He is unified, the One True God; but if we treat Him far differently at different times, we are, in the process, denying His divinity in our own lives. Insulting Him. Cheating ourselves.

The point is, despite what we know in our heads, our hearts – the exercises of our faith – too often see separate Gods whom we access. Bad.

We should pray confidently and in full faith, that is, in the same manner, whether things are “bad” or “good.” Take note of the quotation marks, because our definitions might not be God’s! Give everything to the Lord! When things are “bad,” offer the sacrifices of praise. When things are “good,” still petition Him for mercy and forgiveness.

A great poetic version of this truth is found in the lyrics of the gospel song “God Of the Mountain” written by Tracy Darrt.

“Life is easy when you’re up on the mountain, And you’ve got peace of mind like you’ve never known. But then things change and you’re down in the valley. Don’t lose faith, for you’re never alone.

“You talk of faith when you’re up on the mountain. But the talk comes easy when life’s at its best. But it’s down in the valley of trials and temptation – That’s when faith is really put to the test.

“For the God on the mountain is still God in the valley.
When things go wrong, He’ll make it right.
And the God of the good times is still God in the bad times.
The God of the day is still God in the night.”

The operative words remind us that the God ON the mountain is still God IN the valley. He cares for us the same way; we should approach Him the same way, no matter the circumstances. The God OF the good times is still God IN the bad times.

The God OF the day is still God IN the night.

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A powerful performance of this gospel is a click away. It is associated with many people (Tracy Darrt’s own family band; the McKameys; others) but no one more than Lynda Randle. She is the great contralto gospel singer, the sister of Michael Tait of the DCTalk and the Newsboys. This is a video recorded at a church concert of the Isaacs, the (mostly) Bluegrass group comprised of mother Lilly, daughters Sonya and Becky, and son Ben. You want impromptu? In this concert, they spotted Lynda in their audience, invited her onstage, prodded her to sing; they discussed keys and ranges; they backed her up on a song not in their repertoire – and we have a memorable moment of spiritual music, delivered from the heart to our hearts.

Click: God On the Mountain

6-23-14

A lot of Christians think about Heaven in the same way that agnostics sort of hope about the afterlife, and even as assorted Hottentots of the world’s pagan cults think about appeasing the gods. That is, that good deeds might earn the way to eternal life.

Just act nice, nothing more? Jesus didn’t believe it, and told us so. I have gotten to think about numbers – the numbers of times the Bible tells us that our hearts matter more to God than our deeds. The number of times Jesus and the apostles affirmed it. The number of good deeds we’d have to do to persuade God that unbelief doesn’t matter.

Numbers.

A big number, 2000. Two thousand years since Paul wrote: “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Charities, nice; but they do not equal Heaven. If so, Jesus could have saved Himself some major grief. Or 500. Five hundred years since Christians rediscovered Ephesians 2:8,9 – “For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”

Two thousand years, five hundred years, are a lot years to neglect when thinking about the Bible’s truths. Here are other numbers for Christians to think about. Forget good deeds like charities. Think about sins. We all sin. Yours might be small ones, but let’s count some.

Do you sin once a day? Think an impure thought, or hold onto an unforgiveness? Maybe a white lie? Share a little gossip? Don’t pray when you know you should? Fail to whisper a Christian blessing when someone needs it? Anything you don’t confess?

Let’s say you do any one of these things just once a day – which would make you a virtual saint among all the rest of us, but, anyway… that one sin a day makes for 365 a year. Over 10 years, that’s 3,650. If you have, say, 30 more years to live, that’s more than 10,000 sins.

On the other hand, if you commit these sins, even “little” sins, once an hour during your waking hours – still not an absurd standard – that’s a total of 160,00 sins. For 30 years. Let’s count starting at, say, age 12, and go until the statistical life expectancy of an American female, 82. That would add up to more than 400,000 sins. Careful: transgress a couple times an hour, and you’ll wind up a millionaire… in the sinner’s lottery.

Viewed in that statistical perspective, you’d need a lot of good deeds, a pile of charity receipts, to face eternity fearlessly, right? Well the good news – the Good News – is, we don’t have to pile up numbers of this OR that on scales of justice. Not about this. Confess with your mouth, believe in your heart.

But let’s not put the math books away yet. It is human nature to think we must do good deeds… and don’t get me, or the scriptures, wrong: We SHOULD. And we DO. When Jesus lives in our hearts, we want to do good, we cannot hold back from taking joy in good deeds. Charity becomes our response, not our “meal ticket”!

Final numbers-crunching, for those who want to: on the general basis of the mathematics above:

In your waking hours, each day, you have approximately 250 opportunities to do those good deeds – kind thoughts, helping hands, reassuring words. That’s if you show charity only every five minutes. That’s 1,750 times a week.

Expand those “good deeds” plus the time-frame: if you raise your children aright, if you pray with a hurting soul, if you seek God when He wants to talk to your spirit – added to the others, at the same pace, would approach 100,000 chances to do “good deeds” every year.

You see it coming, math wizards: Live a normal lifespan, have the love of Jesus in your heart, do good deeds because obedient and joyful Christians are good-deed-doers… and your are in the neighborhood of 7-million acts of love. The root meaning of “charity,” they’ll tell you in other classrooms, is “love.”

So, you do the arithmetic. Count the acts of charity, planning for the payoff. Or lose count of the acts of love, knowing you’re already “home,” knowing “all these things shall be added unto you.” We don’t love because we have to. That’s not love! When we act charitably from the overflow of our hearts, God’s showers of blessing will follow.

Numbers. Did you ever count the number of raindrops in a Spring shower? Not too easy, not too practical, not possible! Yet God’s response to our acts of love will be “showers of blessing” – oh, for the showers we plead!

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Speaking of numbers, and “showers of blessing,” here is a choir from churches in Chennai (formerly Madras), Tamil Nadu, India, singing an old favorite, and reassuring, hymn.

Click: Showers of Blessing

5-19-14

A report from Colorado — Estes Park YMCA Conference Center, surrounded by late snows, young deer and elk, hundreds of professional and aspiring writers at the Colorado Christian Writers Conference. I have been on faculty, and critiquing the work of creative people yearning to Write His Answer, in the words of the conference motto.

In keynotes and session speeches, in prayer circles, the topics were many, but — as in other years, and without human direction or agenda — a matter of concern kept asserting itself: children. The crisis with children. Poverty here; AIDS in Africa; child sex trafficking in Asia; schools, orphanages, corruption in Swaziland; forced prostitution of young girls — children — in Thailand.

And when children are not parts of the headlines, they are parts of the story, the subtexts.

To speak about decline in morals and the media… we recognize that children are prime targets.

To speak about human trafficking… children are the victims.

To speak about the AIDs crisis in Africa… children suffer as the infected AND as orphans.

To speak about the persecuted church worldwide… children are the battleground of cultures suppressing Christianity.

In America – drugs: children. Education: children. Pornography: children. Poverty: children. Homelessness: children. Broken homes: children. Abortion: children.

It is a cliché to say that children are our future. But clichés are clichés because they are, first of all, true. However, children do not HAVE to be the first-in-line victims of a culture in decline. But they are. They cannot defend themselves; they believe what the culture tells them; they are the most vulnerable.

When I talk about headlines, it is literally the case. Recently 300-500 girls were kidnapped by a radical Islamist group in Nigeria. The kidnapper’s leader has gone public, blatantly threatening horrific fates, hinting of swaps of the innocent children for his fellow monsters in local jails.

Almost lost in the media coverage, and clearly a subordinate concern of the US government, is the little detail: the children are Christians.

If it is not becoming acceptable in the eyes of our media and government, it is at least a reflection of the frequency — almost to the point of boring triviality — that children, and Christians, and Christian children, are persecuted, brutalized, raped, jailed, and driven from their homelands.

In 1904 an American citizen was kidnapped in Africa. The businessman, Ion Pedecaris, was a pawn in the factional rivalries of the Pasha Raisuli and his Arabian government. A little history lesson: the First Lady of the United States did NOT pose for a photograph with a sign (as Michelle Obama did this week with the handwritten Twitter hashtag and “Bring Back the Children”). No, her husband, President Theodore Roosevelt, sent a message to that African government: “Pedecaris alive or Raisuli dead.”

The man was freed.

I know it is a fantasy, but I got to thinking, this week in Colorado, if Mrs Obama — I would settle for a cartoon of Uncle Sam — could hold a sign that said: #Bring back our sense of proportion… or justice… or honor… or respect for children… or defense of Christianity. As I said, I am afraid this is a fantasy.

Let us remember the children – care for them, protect them, cleanse their environment. If our generation has messed up, maybe the best thing we can do – not the only thing, but surely the FIRST thing – is to beg their forgiveness. And God’s.

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Here is a tender lullaby Slumber My Darling, written more than 150 years ago by a man I am increasingly persuaded was America’s greatest composer, Stephen Foster. It is performed by Alison Kraus, (amazing) vocals; and YoYo Ma; Mark O’Connor; Joshua Bell; and Edgar Meyer. The images are by the amazing Beanscot Channel.

Slumber, My Darling

5-5-14

Judgment Day. The stuff of legends, and lessons, and sermons. Depicted in art from ancient stained-glass windows to the steel engravings of Bibles and tracts, to cartoons of God (or maybe St Peter), looking stern with an enormous white beard and on an august throne, hearing the individual cases of cowering humanity. Some are consigned to hell; some are promoted to heaven.

I had been a Christian – or, rather, a church-goer – for a long time before I became aware of the biblical assurance, indeed the promise of Christ, that we can know whether we will spend eternity in heaven. We can know right now, or any time; we don’t have to hope and die and hope again, nervously awaiting the judgments of a capricious God.

Neither will our citizenship in heaven depend upon a balance of our good and bad deeds during our lives. “Our righteousness is like dirty rags” before a holy God, anyway. None, not one, can “earn” heaven.

To believe otherwise is to deny biblical texts, the words of Christ and the apostles, and would be an insult to the Plan of Salvation; the cross; the resurrection.

There is unbelievable comfort in knowing, not having to guess, about our souls’ status in eternity. Some denominations believe (I do not) that we can lose our salvation by apostasy, but that is one of those matters, while important, that we can leave until that Day to discover.

The Bible is intentionally vague about some matters (for instance, details of End Times) which I regard as God’s wisdom: keeping us, spiritually, on our toes. In similar fashion there ARE aspects of our eternal standing with God that likewise are challenging to our understanding. For instance, we are told that some of the saints (us, not necessarily Vatican conferees alone) will receive treasures and crowns.

Saved is saved, right? No, God will confer crowns to some (we presume to martyrs and defenders of the faith)… and then, it is my own belief, there will not be a hierarchy in heaven. Those saints will lay down their crowns before the throne, by the glassy sea. Some will be given that extra opportunity to praise God.

“Saved is saved”? Yes, but let us look at the different judgments to come. The “Great White Throne Judgment,” pictured in Revelation, is an End Times trial for anyone who has rejected Jesus; has refused to accept God’s plan of redemption from sin. The Bible says that all will acknowledge God and Jesus Christ as Lord. Even too late, but all Creation will acknowledge Him in this scenario.

“And then will [Jesus] profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity (Matthew 7:23).” “And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is [the book] of life… (Revelation 20:11-12).”

Chilling. And reason to take solace in Eternal Security of those who have accepted Christ.

But we have that challenging question of what is informally called the “believers’ judgment”: “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment (Hebrews 9:27).” “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things [done] in [his] body, according to that he hath done, whether [it be] good or bad (2 Corinthians 5:10).” No threat of hell, but… judged.

I have an idea. It is not in the Bible, but I don’t believe it is anti-biblical. There are several instances in scripture of God judging His people. Satan tried to condemn Job before God. The devil, we are taught, is Accuser of the Saints. I believe, however, that part of the “believer’s judgment” will not only be Christ on His throne, or God holding the Lamb’s Book of Life, or Satan like a devilish prosecutor, accusing us of sins or shortcomings in life.

I can picture other people surrounding us. It will be their eyes, not God’s, who meet ours, and accuse us. Can you picture it? These will be people who failed to accept Christ in their lifetimes, destined for damnation. But we failed THEM, by not sharing Christ.

Unsaved loved ones will cry: “Why didn’t you try harder to tell me about Jesus?”

Jewish friends will lament, “I knew the basics of the faith. Why didn’t you lead me to Yeshua??”

Someone you met once will say, “I expressed curiosity about the Bible one day; you could have shared things with me. Why were you silent???”

An associate who had self-destructive tendencies, that you knew about quite well, could sob: “That was when I needed Jesus! Where were you?”

A friend you were with during his or her dying days might shout out, “THAT was the moment I needed to get my life together. You knew the Truth! Why did you never say a word to me?”

This circle of people cannot condemn us, but they can accuse us, indict us. God forbid that their names are written under our names in the Lamb’s Book of Life. I’m afraid we all have people we have met in our lives, who could populate that crowd of accusers – our Lost Chances.

Looking ahead to this possible aspect of Judgment should bring us up short now. We can store up treasures in heaven… by not squandering them on earth.

+ + +

Click: I Do Not Know You

4-28-14

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.” Even more under-reported is what Jesus did during the 40 days between His resurrection and His ascension to Heaven. I have thought, and shared thoughts, about this period before, and its appeal does not let me go.

Let’s visit the topic again… and imagine Palestine in those days, mysterious because we have been told so little.

Jesus walked and talked in places where His ministry had been; He was seen in His restored body by thousands; He healed many; He continued to preach, He continued to love. And then He ascended to Heaven, taken up in the sky, which also was witnessed by others.

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. We shared, in the recent Easter message, how the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus referred to it, as did other writers, matter-of-factly. 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.

The number 40 appears 146 times in the Bible, a number of God’s significance. We think of Noah; of the years in the wilderness; of the days Moses was on the Mount; of Jonah and Nineveh; and, in Jesus’ case, the number of days He was tempted of the devil… and the number of days between the Resurrection and the Ascension. Usually this number signifies testing, trials, probation, or a provision of prosperity. We must believe the last comes closest to the risen Lord’s season before He ascended. 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 responding to the curious crowds, but 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”; 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.

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 us from experiencing the love of Christ. He is closer than a shadow, no matter what you think, or what you might prefer to believe.

“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 of gospel music is the haunting “God Walks the Dark Hills,” embodying mystery in its 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 Goodmans; here it is sung by the appropriately haunting voice of Iris DeMent.

Click: God Walks the Dark Hills

4-21-14

In a generation after the first Easter, Christianity had spread to the far corners of the known world. There were churches in the future lands of England and Ireland; after a century, church settlements in “barbarian” northern Europe; and around 300, Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the formerly pagan Roman empire.

The Bishop Eusebius wrote remarkable histories during the reign of Constantine that traced the lifelines of the church: communities; outposts; heresies; theological and leadership rivalries; miracles; persecution (for instance in Gaul, which made Rome’s look like child’s play) and martyrs. Christianity spread, subsuming the cultures and arts… as, it seems to me, any movement fostered by the Creator of the Universe, was proper to do.

“Gospel” means “Good News.” The early church fathers, in the manner of Mary at the tomb, were Newsboys in a very real sense; so were the rising corps of evangelists, missionaries, and pastors.

But have you ever stopped to think of what enabled the Gospel to spread so rapidly? There is a temptation to think it was the witnessing of Christ’s miracles. Eusebius, for instance, had spoken to people who had spoken to people who knew Jesus, heard Him preach; seen His miracles, encountered His resurrected self.

I think it was different; I think it was more. After the Ascension of Jesus, it was as if the scales fell from peoples’ eyes. Gentiles had the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament explained to them. Jews, multitudes of them, remembered those prophecies anew, and recognized how Jesus fulfilled them to the smallest detail. As the Roman centurion said, in a sudden moment of clarity, “This Man indeed is the Son of God.”

Additionally, what happened was the miracle of Pentecost. On that feast day, the frightened Disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit, which Christ had promised to them – to us – and told them to wait. After it comes, as on that day, believers share their head-knowledge with heart-knowledge. They becomes doers of the Word, not hearers only. They supernaturally gain wisdom and knowledge… and boldness.

So: my view was that the sudden spread of Christianity, even despite (and maybe because of) persecution, was due less to the MIRACULOUS elements of Christ’s ministry, and more to the LOGIC of His incarnation. Some people were late to the party – oh, what a party! – but their minds were clear, in those first centuries. It became the most natural thing on earth (and beyond) to live (and die) for the God-with-us, Jesus.

Among the logical evidence that Gentiles learned, and Jewish believers recalled, were the words of Isaiah, written an amazing 700 years BEFORE Jesus was born. Without verse numbers and footnotes, it is a startling narrative:

“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? … He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken. And they made His grave with the wicked – but with the rich at His death, because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. … He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

What does this tell us? That after Jesus rose to Heaven, His followers shared the Good News – the Gospel message. It was indeed good; humankind’s best. But it was not “news.” It, and uncountable other details about the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, had been planned and written before the foundation of the world.

Not “breaking news,” but Good News indeed.

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It took “breaking through the clutter” to hear, for the first time, or thousandth time, the STORY of Jesus. Then, as now, the simple logic overwhelms our minds and hearts and souls. The supernatural becomes natural. This ordinary paradigm has been summed up touchingly by songs of two female poets of the 1800s. I implore you to click this short video, watch, listen, and learn… or re-learn. “Tell Me the Story of Jesus” is a beautiful plaint by “America’s Blind Poetess.” Fanny Crosby was blinded at birth, began to write poems in her 40s, and before she died in her 90s had written nearly 9000 hymn-poems, many beloved today. “I Love to Tell the Story” was written by Katherine Hankey, a well-to-do British girl who shared the gospel with factory workers and street people until she became too sick to leave her deathbed. But, she wrote, “I Love To Tell the Story.”

Click: The Story of Jesus – Telling and Being Told

4-14-14

Can we remember from our Sunday School lessons – Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey, the crowds of common people going wild, welcoming him with shouts of praise, laying down their garments and palms spread before him on the dusty road. The images are strong; we took away mementoes of the cut palms we often kept for a year. The facts of the story were clear enough.

Jesus entered Jerusalem, having recently performed mighty miracles of healing and even raising Lazarus from the dead. The population marveled at His wisdom and power; His preaching and moral challenges; His feeding of peoples’ empty stomachs and empty souls.

By all accounts (even of skeptics of the day, and secular historians) Jesus was making a triumphal entry, as, today, a rock star or political favorite would do.

We even remember the anomalies: Why get in the face of the Jewish temple leaders who were poised to take Him down; why challenge the Roman authorities who tolerated everything except revolution among the Jewish masses? Or, why not walk boldly, why not enter on a charging horse, why not organize the adoring public?

We understood in Sunday School. Numerous prophecies were being fulfilled, down to the donkey and how it would be obtained by the disciples. We understood the meaning and significance of it all. But the multitudes that week in Jerusalem did not understand everything. Even the disciples themselves understood little.

We can recall those stories, and cherish those images, in the same way many of us tucked the palms behind pictures on the wall, or atop the bookcase with our Bibles. But have we forgotten the points of significance about Palm Sunday, the same way the people around Jesus never really understood everything?

They called out “Hosanna” and “Son of David” and shouted “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” but we know that the general enthusiasm of the crowd was for one they hoped would be a political savior. They craned their necks to see the one who performed all those miracles… but perhaps as curiosity to see a magician or celebrity. There probably were more shouts of “prophet” than “Savior,” but in either event the Chief Priests felt threatened.

In other words, many of those people hailed Jesus as the hope of quick fixes; momentary comfort; or as an emergency manager.

How about today? Jesus, after all, without much imagining on our part, is riding down that dusty road still, coming towards us. Do WE know who He is? Before you say “Of course,” remember that his disciples, who lived and traveled and ate and slept with Him for three and a half years – who saw miracles, had their lives touched, heard divine wisdom – even they did not understand everything about Him.

To many in the Jerusalem crowd, this Jesus was many things, but not always the Son of God, their Savior. With their passions and grievances, many of those people knew what they wanted, but they did not know what they needed. And day by day, the following week, the cheering people fell away. Remember, “He came unto his own, and His own received him not.”

I call Palm Sunday the national “Pick Your Own Savior” day, because this understanding, or lack of understanding, infects our lives no less. We, too, might speak words like “Lord” and “Master.” But how many people mostly regard Jesus as a crutch during crises? As a good-luck charm instead of the One who died for our sins? To how many of us is He a stranger… until we need Him?

Are we, too, like the rabble in Jerusalem? Oftentimes, we too know what we want from God, but we don’t seek what we truly need from Him. We lay down palm leaves according to our momentary agendas… for the health-crisis Jesus… or the financial-problems Jesus. But He is Lord of ALL: that is why He rode straight into Jerusalem.

Do we really think God’s plan is for us to pick our own Savior?

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The Jews of Jerusalem shouted “Hosanna!” based on the Hebrew word in Psalm 118:25 – “Save now, I beseech thee, O Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, send now prosperity!” It has come to us a pure shout of praise, but had a subtext for those who laid palms.

Click: Hosanna!

4-7-14

Words. Words can liberate our minds. They can be used to sway the masses and instruct our children. They can bring joy and comfort. Remembering that the Bible calls words potentially dangerous – “No one can tame the tongue; it is restless and evil, full of deadly poison,” says James 3:5 – we know that words can misinform, confuse, and be harmful.

In that regard I noticed that two recent news stories – the disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines plane, and another shooting at Fort Hood – were accompanied by speculation about terrorist involvement. Indeed, most news anchors spouted, in advance of any journalistic reason to raise the topic, “It is too early to speculate on whether there is a terrorist connection.”

Game, set, match. Thus the speculation begins. Moreover, by contemporary journalistic-speak, what more evidence of terrorism than a missing plane or a shooting rampage? What the media mean in 2014 is “Islamic Terrorism.”

“Terrorism” has become another kidnapped word, ripped from dictionaries and traditional parlance. “Gay” and “Holocaust” are two other such words. When the storm troopers of Political Correctness are on the rampage, we become haters if we do not conform. And so “Terrorism” is now equated with “Islamic Terrorism.”

I maintain there is a third spin to this neologism. Quick: a pop quiz. How many victims of terror were there on 9-11? An approximate number will do.

It is likely that you thought, Approximately 3000. More, some would reckon, adding to the Twin Towers, the horrors in Shanksville, the Pentagon, the planes, the Pentagon employees.

Those numbers are ‘way off the mark. I would have us realize that the 3000 or so who died on 9-11 were not victims of terrorism. They were murder victims. The victims of terrorism are approximately 300-million who were left with pain, hurt, sorrow, fear, anxiety, inconvenience, and life-routines forever altered. Such a result is the goal of terrorists. The dead were murdered; the living are terrorized.

They commit murder to spread self-doubt, fear, and even hatred. To terrorize the survivors. Innocent people can never be reconciled to terror, and therefore terror triumphs in the prevalence of paranoia, the surrender of security, eventually the loss of liberty.

These are not matters of “sticks and stones”: words have meaning, and can define how we navigate the troubled waters of life, as citizens and as Christians.

In the civic realm, we are seeing lawbreaking condoned, and criminals excused. Acts regarded as harmfully anti-social a generation ago – actually, throughout human history in all cultures – are being promoted today as beneficial and “progressive.” To oppose dependency and sloth is (to the Compassion Police) committing “hate crimes,” whatever that really is.

In the spiritual realm, we are witnessing the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Men are calling evil good, and good evil; putting darkness for light, and light for darkness; putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20). We see traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God (II Timothy 3:4). And the Bible prophesied: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears” (II Timothy 4:3).

So is it a surprise that many Christians are quiet when religious expression is attacked by our own government? Why are Christians afraid to proclaim Christ against the attacks of false faiths and aggressive atheists? Why are those who claim the title of Christian so numb to the horrific persecution of believers around the world? – greater in numbers, in the past century, than in all previous centuries, added together, since Christ?

The answers include the facts that “truths” from the new pulpits have lulled us to sleep. That heresy and error have subverted the churches. That we have become more interested in pleasing other people, than pleasing – obeying – God.

WORDS have made truth relative, and irrelevant. Words are encouraging people to abandon the faith of their fathers. Words enable feeble minds to think that God’s precepts depend on our opinions of them.

Words are sending America to hell.

And that alone should terrorize us.

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An old-fashioned but utterly relevant musical coda to this message can be found in Tracy Chapman’s “All That You Have Is You Soul.” Whether it is a grandmother’s message to a vulnerable child, or a symbolic lesson to a nation gone astray, through all the struggles and temptations and false hopes and glory, and shiny apples… in the end, all that we have is our souls.

Click: All That You Have Is Your Soul

3-31-14

I have come to realize that a lot of things they say about Jesus Christ are not true. Oh, 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 towns and lakesides. 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 for Christmas and Easter?

A lot of people think that’s the whole package… but that’s what is not true. And that’s what makes me annoyed, drives me crazy.

A Jesus who smiles all the time? No… I see Him. Sometimes He is angry. Sometimes He is disappointed and looks sad. Sometimes I see tears in His eyes. In those moments He is confronting ME. He reminds me that I 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.

Another annoying thing: He never shuts up. I wish there were a fishing village down the road He could move on to. He persists. He won’t let me go. Those Sunday-School 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!”

And how annoying is this? – I’ve gotten 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 habits or family customs. Don’t I pray, or think about praying, when someone is sick, or I’m having a 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 followers, and their lives are OK. Well, maybe not, but at least those religions are sensible. I mean, Buddha and Mohammed 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 eternal life? It gets annoying.

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 remember that writer named C. S. Lewis said something: “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Annoying, right? Then I heard that Bono, the singer and activist, 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 in that: which is either Jesus was who He said He was, or a complete and utter nut case… You have to make a choice on that.”

Annoying! “Make a choice!” First Jesus says it; and then these guys; 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 there to say “It’s all right” 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.

Click: Jesus Loves Me

3-17-14

Logos. It’s the Greek word for our English word, “word,” from which we also derive “Logic.” Logos is to speak intelligently.

Today’s message is a guest essay by Leah C. Morgan.

When God, who IS wisdom, wanted to communicate with mankind, He sent His son.
“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1,2). God has spoken intelligently. He spoke the Word – the Logos – the Son.

“In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth” (John 1:1,14).

More than 300 years before Christ lived and before His disciple John wrote of the Word becoming flesh, Aristotle presented LOGOS as one of three methods used to persuade another to a point of view. Through logic, reasoning, and sound supporting evidences, the thoughts of an individual can be turned.

He taught PATHOS to be another means of bringing a counterpart to a change of opinion – the process of stirring the emotions, of appealing to a sense of justice over the unfair.

Aristotle identified ETHOS as the third vehicle of persuasion. It is the tool of credibility, lending weight to a point of view when presented by an expert, or by someone of respectable rank or position, on a topic. It is present even in the simple act of trusting, when a relationship exists between the parties of a discourse.
 
John, who writes of the Logos being God and becoming man, also writes of the compelling force behind both. “For God so loved the world he gave His only begotten Son that whosever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). God so loved the cruel ungrateful world that He offers up to that world the transformation of His divine, all-powerful Son into a vehicle of vulnerable flesh.

I find that a convincing argument to love Him back.
 
God offered up Jesus with Ethos. You can’t find anyone more credible than the One who fashioned the universe and upholds it in His palm, deciding to send His offspring to step foot onto a fleck of dust, within the realm of His vast cosmos, called earth. He made it. He operates it.

He visits it; I’ll pay attention to His words.
 
And what Pathos! We respond to the dog tied to the tree in the yard, left out in the summer heat without a drink, or shivering there in the winter exposed to the elements. It’s not right that an innocent creature, something made to be our companion, is so mistreated for no fault of its own. Christ was no dog on the street. But there He was, nailed to a tree, hung up to thirst, exposed to the onlookers with none to pity or defend. The injustice of an innocent One coming to befriend us, to rescue us, dying for our lies and greed, for our meanness and selfishness.

This wrings my heart. It secures my love and gratitude.

God really did set out to commune with us, to convince us, to reason with us. “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18).

When looking upon the pride of man, the degradation, the violence, God responds not by wielding His hand in wrath, nor by withholding His hand. He extends it. He opens it with the best of heaven’s treasure, the life of His Son.

I’ve read the Logos, and I believe. I’m convinced. I am persuaded “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38 39).
 
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Religion, of course, is mankind’s effort to reach up to God. Christianity is God reaching down to mankind. Leah has limned three major ways God reaches down to us, easy and powerful ways to appreciate His love. The summation of our response? — How can we keep from singing?! Here is the late (and great) Eva Cassidy performing the favorite gospel song. It dates from 1868.

Click: How Can I Keep From Singing?

3-10-14

As a period in history, the so-called Dark Ages probably could use a Marketing Specialist or a Branding Team. The term has been applied to the period between the Third-century fall of Rome and the Carolingian Renaissance (Charlemagne’s rule of the briefly reconstituted Holy Roman Empire) or, usually, the Late Gothic and Florentine Renaissance, around the 13th century. Certainly, sanitation and plumbing declined and virtually disappeared during the Dark Ages; literacy was uncommon; life – in Europe – was simpler, less ambitious, less creative after Rome. The lack of records and paucity of artifacts means that a certain darkness descended over the centuries about which we are curious.

I have often said, and I know that “futurists” hold, that if a social catastrophe were to hit the United States – perhaps on the order of cessation of electricity; stoppage of water supply; production, transport, and delivery of goods – a New Dark Age would descend. Would you know how to raise meat and produce for your family’s table? Could you resume a livelihood without computers and electricity? How, long-term, to make clothes from scratch, or build houses? Most of us would bemoan the New Dark Age.

All this is not implausible. But it would not really be a Dark Age. It would be hard, brutal even, a radical change in so many lifestyles.

But it would not be “dark.” Presumably we would all remember (those who possess it now) elements of culture. We would savor traditions, and pass them along more fervently than now. We would form associations, standing together. We would probably turn again to religion, not out of emotional desperation, but for spiritual succor, and because we would realize the perilous nature, and the fragility, of self-sufficiency.

So it was in the Dark Ages. The term, by the way, has been variously applied, re-invented, connoted as negative and positive through the subsequent years, so as to make it virtually meaningless except as temporal book-ends. But we shall visit a moment with a man who, perhaps better than anyone else, saw things to admire – greatly admire – in the so-called Dark Ages. His reasoning can light our path today in the Post-Post-Modern Digital Age where people are so sure they have everything figured out.

Henry Adams was the great-grandson of America’s second president, and grandson of our sixth president. He was a diplomat, author, journalist, professor, social critic, friend of the intellectual and political elite of two continents, and by nature somewhere between a cynic and a misanthrope. In 1880 he wrote, anonymously, the scathing indictment of Gilded-Age society, “Democracy.” Even his friends never knew he was the author.

Two books, however, led Adams to a unique perspective on the Dark Ages. His autobiography, “The Education of Henry Adams,” was published in a small edition for friends only. It was published for the general public the year after his death, 1918, and soon won the Pulitzer Prize… and is considered one of the great books of the 20th century. Among many other wonderful observations, Adams reported visiting the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, and being transfixed by the Dynamo – a gargantuan machine that moved, roared, displayed myriad moving parts, all to no specific purpose! But it was built to suggest that such machines were the wave of the future, able to do all, manufacture all, satisfy all.

Henry Adams saw even more in it: the dawn of the machine age, when such mechanisms would not only supplant labor, but be a unifying Force in the modern world… a new Church, even a Savior, that would draw all men to it. The Machine. Including of course, by extension, in our day, the Computer.

He was primed for such a point of view, based on obsessive private scholarship about yes, the Dark Ages. What the Dynamo was in 1900, he saw French cathedrals, especially, as representative of a certain ethos in the past – regrettably, the dead past. He studied every little corner, and every grand architectural metaphor, in cathedrals; the major book that resulted was “Mt St-Michel et Chartres,” and it too was meant for few eyes, in fact written as a treatise for the edification of his niece. Almost a decade later he was persuaded to publish it for architectural students; but it was embraced by the general public.

To our point: Adams recognized in the Dark Ages not a suppression of knowledge but a singular devotion of all of European societies to an ideal, a unifying force, commonly held beliefs, a loyalty to something bigger and nobler than themselves. In Europe, generally, Jesus; in France particularly, around 900-1100, the Virgin.

People worked their jobs, and then worked harder and longer to build these colossal cathedrals. Every family member lived around, and for, the church. They knew scripture, debated little, and found fulfillment in serving the church. Thousands of design elements, colors, symbols in the exteriors and interiors, stained-glass windows and vestments, MEANT something, theologically… and therefore meant important things to the daily lives of locals and worshipers. For those who could not read, signs and symbols told the gospel story.

There was cultural unity in the “Dark” Ages. And they were better societies for it. At least, we have not seen this in the West for centuries; and today we are fractured, disputatious, rudderless, “diverse,” and unhappy.

In a civic sense, there was a season in America when an astonishing maturity of purpose, a common understanding of political ideals devoted to liberty, bound a happy society together. It ran through the times of the Founders, the Framers, and the “Era of Good Feeling” when de Tocqueville visited in the 1840s. We surely do not have this harmony today, neither in civic nor religious senses.

I cannot end this tour on a happy note. Can the UNITY represented by majestic, consequential cathedrals of the Middle Ages – by the US Constitution, in the civic sphere – return in America? Would people, all across society, again agree on common principles, goals, and sacrifices worthy to bear?

Today, denominations argue over points of social policy more than points of theology. One result is seen in a recent news story about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In the five years since the denomination formally embraced homosexuality, including in the clergy, it has lost half a million members and 1000 congregations. Maybe there IS unity among believers, but it is different from that of the enlightened Christians of the Dark Ages.

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For anyone who thinks that peasants of the “Dark” Ages were insect-infested dirt-eaters, a quick tour of Chartres Cathedral will dispel that notion. The massive scope, the architectural challenges that were solved, ambitious feats of construction, the multitude of delicate artistic and design touches… these were people, a thousand years ago, who lived not in the Dark but in a special Light. In future essays we will visit Mt St-Michel, built on a monolithic rock off the Brittany coast.

Click: Chartres Cathedral

1-27-14

There is a difference between happiness and joy, and the difference is not just one of grammar or philology, but of theology – that is, the nuances can hold lessons for our lives. At the least, let us consider the two words and take away some things that we might pass on to others, or remember ourselves in future reading or conversations.

The real distinction can, “unhappily,” be a bit frustrating to ascertain, as dictionaries these days tend to be sloppy. Too many dictionaries help us this way: “Happiness, n. The state of being happy.” And “Joy, n. The emotional result of being joyful or cheerful.” These should be moved in such dictionaries to the “D” section… for “Duh.”

Dictionaries I consulted helped when synonyms for Happiness included Bliss, Blessedness, and Bliss (in other words, an emotion on the path to Joy). A definition for Joy I found wrote, “A feeling of extreme happiness” (also holding happiness relatively subordinate). So… general consensus is that Joy is the superior state of emotion.

Years ago my daughter Emily had the insight that Joy (her middle name, by the way) corresponds to spiritual matters; and Happiness – no matter how extreme or elevated – is a human emotion related to our worldly, temporal, and indeed temporary pleasure. No matter how valuable: contentment, satisfaction, gratification.

To further validate the primacy of Joy, we recall some Bible verses:

“I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). Not mere “happiness” in Heaven; it falls short of Joy.

James 1:2-4 says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” Here is an example of Joy being more mature, more efficacious, than mere Happiness.

And finally the most familiar Bible verse about Joy: “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). We recall, too, the admonition to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord”; “happy noise” would sound very superficial!

In America’s civic life we recall that the Founders proclaimed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as a right. Later politicians elevated “happiness” alone as a right, not the freedom to “pursue” happiness. A tremendous difference, since governments have taken to defining the meaning of happiness. Even more egregious, re-calibrating a Happiness Meter for its citizens, and announcing why everyone should be resentful of their lot.

So Happiness has become the secularists’ Holy Word.

Whittaker Chambers once wrote about this attitude adjustment: “The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.” Too true… and another example of the fact that if lines are being blurred between church and state, the guiltier party is the government, usurping the prerogatives, outreach, and role, of established religion.

(Actually. A point of clarification. This can go on for longer than a blog message in itself, but for the record: I often think that “established religion” has been a major enemy of God’s heart and humankind’s souls. Not always, but often. Better we should seek personal relationships with Christ than with “Organized Religions.” Just sayin’… this is what I meant.)

The phrase “pursuit of happiness” has become a part of everyday discourse. In the same manner, many recognize the strains of Beethoven’s great “Ode to Joy” without knowing its meaning – or understanding the words, as it is Friedrich Schiller’s German poem set to music. In today’s little lesson, these words can inspire us. They remind us that Beethoven was a profound Christian, in a direct line from Johanes Kepler (not a composer but subscribing to the Pythagorean theory of “music of the spheres,” and Plato, who saw musical harmony as a reflection of heavenly perfection) in his “Harmony of the World” (1619). Enter the Enlightenment!

Today, schools teach that the Enlightenment was when smart guys threw off the shackles of religion and superstition, and let Reason illuminate mankind’s affairs. This was not so. Kepler, a skeptic about church laws that persecuted Copernicus, was nevertheless a believer, a bit of a Christian mystic. He devoted himself to seeing how mathematics and science proved God’s existence. The same with Isaac Newton. And, on the continent at the time, the musical scientist, Bach. After him, Haydn and Mozart, profound Christians… and Beethoven, whose ego was astride everything he surveyed, except Christianity: he was a humble believer.

Here, some of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” that Beethoven chose for the chorus to sing in his revolutionary Ninth Symphony. Take joy from the words!

And – to drive home my modest points in full blast-furnace fashion – try to click on this video clip. This performance is by a Japanese ensemble in an outdoor stadium. Not counting the audience, you will see 10,000 singers and musicians joining, in German, in a scale the composer would have relished, to transmit Beethoven’s genius… Schiller’s thoughts… and powerful reminders of the Joy of the Lord.

Do you fall down, you millions? Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek Him above the starry canopy, Above the stars He must live.

Joy is the name of the strong spring In eternal nature.
Joy, joy drives the wheels In the great clock of worlds.

Escape the tyrants’ chains, Generosity also to the villain,
Hope upon the deathbeds, Mercy from the high court!
The dead, too, shall live!

Brothers, drink and chime in, All sinners shall be forgiven,
And hell shall be no more.

A serene departing hour! Sweet sleep in the shroud!
Brothers—a mild sentence From the final judge!

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Click: Ode to Joy

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NOTE: WordPress, through whom we create and format the MondayMinistry blog, recently informed me that we have passed the 200th message mark with them; previously MMMM was a weekly e-mail blast for subscribers. But the “anniversary” marks the milestone of when our webmaster Norm Carlevato came aboard. He receives the raw manuscript each week, pours it into the right formats, attends to the details of links and subscribers… all as a volunteer. So are we all — this is a ministry — but Norm routinely goes Above and Beyond in this work, amidst his other activities and large family. I am profoundly grateful for his service and his friendship. We are approaching, after four years, 70,000 hits. Someone is watching! And Norm helps it happen.

1-20-14

Seventeen years ago (on the next Valentine Day, ironically) my wife Nancy received her heart transplant. For the subsequent six years, until we moved to California, our family conducted a hospital ministry at Temple University in Philadelphia. We visited weekly, at least, conducting services, praying with patients and their families, and ministering as we could, even to staff.

There were breakthroughs, some healings, conversions to Christianity, and, as you can imagine, uncountable emotional moments.

Our services invariably were comprised of the most random assortment of people… as random as the population is vulnerable to heart disease. Protestants and Catholics happily sat side-by-side. Hispanics and Asians who sometime barely understood the rest of us would attend… and often prayed earnest words that we all somehow understood. Skeptics and Jews were among our most faithful attendees. Wives and children of those waiting for hearts… or widows and families of those patients who sadly slipped away while waiting, or after unsuccessful procedures. (Even our eclectic music provided surprises. Blacks usually liked Southern gospel, rural whites appreciated black spirituals. We had a Jewish couple who loved, just loved, old Christian hymns. Moved to tears.)

Pastors would ask Nancy how she, untrained as a speaker or exegete – and terminally shy, otherwise – could face the questions, the crises, the cries and sobs: “Why?” WHY?

Our only answers were consistent with scripture. There is sin in the world, and disease; nobody is immune. The Bible does not promise that we will be free of trouble; just that God will be with us through troubles, sometimes healing bodies, sometimes healing spirits. And the best answer to the burning questions “Why? Why me?” – “I don’t know.”

This answer is not a counselor’s sign of surrender; not a loss of wisdom. Rather it is the wisest course any of us have through many of life’s crises. We cause some of our own problems; and the devil can bring things upon us. But. The mark of a mature Christian is not to load all the Bible verses we can into the knapsack, and whip out the best ones at the best moments. No: it is to admit that we need God. To call upon HIS wisdom. To pray without ceasing. God forbid we ever have the attitude of “OK, God. Take a break. I’ll carry it from here!”

In fact, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That is in Psalm 111:10.

It is a familiar verse despite its spotty application in many of our lives. There were other verses, in our hospital services, that patients and their families would often quote, to pass wisdom along, or to explain their brand of spiritual comfort-food.

“God will never give us more than we can handle.” “Into each life a little rain must fall.” “God helps those who help themselves.” These words are familiar to many of us. But would you fail a pop quiz about in which books of the Bible they can be found? The maxim about rain was written by the poet Longfellow; the last saying was written by Benjamin Franklin.

God gives us burdens mercifully short of our breaking-points? Probably a corruption of I Corinthians 10:13, about God not tempting us beyond our powers to resist.

This is an important point. God surely DOES allow things, and might even “give” us things, that are more than we can handle. Why should we kid ourselves? It is an empty sort of security to think that this is not so. It is a false conception of God to think that a loving God would not allow such things. Tough to deal with, but true.

Why else would we rely on Him? How can we seek His face otherwise? What would be the purpose of a Spirit-led life? Who would we go to, otherwise, in times of trouble? When we are in pain – emotional, spiritual, not only physical – what instincts should be automatic? Where can we go, but to the Lord? As Andrae Crouch wrote in his great song “Through It All,”

If I’d never had a problem,
I wouldn’t know God could solve them,
I’d never know what faith in God could do.

Nancy used to say that she would not choose to go through again everything she endured… but she wouldn’t trade the journey for anything. Behind those words was a saint who also received a kidney transplant, had diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, strokes, eye problems, amputations, dialysis, and more.

January 21 is the one-year anniversary of her death. The testimony of a believer whose faith remained strong, and kept looking forward, and trusting even when she didn’t understand, is encouraging still. It was the path of a Christian.

There are other sayings that come to mind, that we always hear. Vince Gill, the singer-songwriter, properly dismissed a discussion about “filling someone’s shoes” by just declaring that sometimes they don’t make a certain kind of shoe anymore. Which mirrors another proper definition: “Some people cannot be replaced. They can only be succeeded.” There is no shame or regret in that.

The same Vince Gill wrote a song when his brother died. “Go Rest High” has become an anthem in churches and the country-music world, at funerals and memorials. His brother had a difficult life, and the words of the song, with a change of tense or nuance, could apply to Nancy and other faithful “Overcomers.”

I know your life on earth was troubled,
And only you could know the pain.
You weren’t afraid to face the devil;
You were no stranger to the rain.

Oh, how we cried the day you left us.
We gathered ‘round your bed to grieve.
I wish I could see the angels’ faces
When they heard your sweet voice sing.

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This clip of Vince Gill’s classic song was performed at the memorial service of George Jones. Vince shows his emotions during the song – as he frequently still does, and can anyone who watches it do otherwise? – and is assisted by the great Patty Loveless.

Click: Go Rest High

1-13-14

The recent comments about capitalism and socialism by Pope Francis – although he never used the terms – probably excited more interest than the many other topics of his lengthy Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. A new pope, especially history’s first from south of the Equator and from the Western hemisphere, will have theologians and the laity alike looking for tea leaves to read.

A religious leader’s predictable censure of materialism was heightened by sharp condemnation of secularism and relativism in today’s world. But he went steps further, with several and specific denunciations of capitalism, free-market finances, and even “trickle-down” economics by name. Some commentators and apologists (that is, those who advance Christian apologetics) have claimed that selected passages were taken out of context, that the Pope condemned socialism and collectivism elsewhere with equal reproach.

In fact this is not the case. His harshest words for totalitarian governments were directed against persecution of Christians, and relatively few words of that. Little about suppression of rights and basic liberties around the world, even in some countries where the Catholic Church predominates. As a non-Catholic and as a basic free-marketeer (but not a capitalist, a distinction I make because prefixes like “corporate-” and “crony-” too often are endemic these days), I come neither to bury nor praise Francis, but to consider his comments about wealth. It would do us all well.

In Point 54, Francis wrote: “…some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the… workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.” From this, not only capitalists but statisticians can dissent. While the poor we still have with us, more souls have been lifted from poverty by the prescriptions of Adam Smith than any other system: surely more than have benefited from Karl Marx.

Later, in Point 56, he continued: “[Economic] imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, [some people] reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.”

I suggest that Francis confine his Absolutes to the areas of morality and theology. There are no countries in the world, and virtually no political economists, who advocate “absolute autonomy” of the marketplace or “any form of control.” Some ideologies might pay lip service to such theories, but in reality even the most extreme libertarians compromise on myriad points.

So we have the Pope’s words as one of our culture’s periodic talking-points. My own talking point, just stated, is that the lack of balance he displayed about world economics does not mean that the critiques on the heavier side of his scale are not correct.

It is accurate, as he wrote, that materialism has tended to create a “globalization of indifference” where the prosperous are “incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them.” I don’t think the logical extension of this observation – whose remedies are, after all, as old as any commands in scripture – is to advocate governments and economic systems that co-opt Christian charity. Can we not let free people grow their prosperity freely, and governments cease micro-managing… which has evolved to include managing the work of churches and the charitable work of individuals? Not to mention having become everyone’s Conscience Police and Compassion Monitors?

In the meantime, we do have a moral crisis, not just an economic crisis, in the United States. We rot from within because of false values, overweening materialism, and deadened consciences. Pope Francis can stand behind me, no one ahead of me, in this line of criticism. The problem is as old as human nature, and is not capitalism per se – money — but, as the Bible specifies, the LOVE of money. It is the root of all evil. It is difficult not to notice, by the way, that despite press-agentry about the Pope’s decision to live in less opulent sleeping quarters, and wear simpler vestments, that the jewel-encrusted aspects of the Vatican – thrones, crowns, rings – contradict his words. He is neither the first pope nor the first human being to hunt for sawdust in the eyes of others:

“And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye” (Jesus quoted in Matt. 7: 3-5 NLT).

But we all are awash in contradictions, and we seldom feel the need to set the course straight. Francis made some wise observations. I am praying that he is saving fusillades against totalitarian governments and repressive “planned economies” for a future encyclical. For surely, in this world there are crises of hearts and minds, not only stomachs. In the meantime, there are places to look to start solving this crisis from which we all may be infected. We look to moral leaders; we look to the Bible.

And we can look around us. Even comedians and singers, wise in their way, have characterized our moral predicament in simple terms: Do we just have too much stuff?

+ + +

The comedian George Carlin, not exactly a Prophet Jeremiah, nevertheless made some sensible observations about “stuff” in a famous routine. Recently the singer Delbert McClinton, with Lyle Lovett and John Prine, put the observation to music. Zeppo’s slideshow is money… er, classic. When opening the link, if prompted to click “YouTube,” do so to open the vid.

Click: Too Much Stuff

1-12-14

… This was the name of one of Paul Harvey’s famous radio features. We have just passed through, or survived, Christmas and New Years, times when we are obliged to deal with, if not actually think about, the concepts of God-with-Us and the New Year as a New Beginning. Thank goodness THAT’s all past us, eh?

Rather, we enter the season when the dust settles and we CAN think about these things. We should not forget them. Who was this Jesus… who IS this Jesus? And, do we need new beginnings? … Well, who doesn’t?

Jesus’s profession, we presume, was that of carpenter, like His earthly father. Of course, He was a carpenter who also mended broken bodies; but that ministry came after He was anointed by the Holy Spirit. No, his profession was carpenter, but His job was assigned from the day of His birth… indeed, from the foundation of the world: to die. For us. To assume upon his shoulders and brow the sins we all have committed, to receive the punishment we all deserve for rebellion against God.

Who was this Jesus? How did people know Him?

Did He have a halo, like in ancient paintings? No, He did not. He did not stand out from the crowd.

When Judas betrayed Him to Roman soldiers, the traitorous Apostle had to kiss Him, so He could be identified from among a small group of men.

There are times when “He passed out from them…” withdrawing from opponents, almost unnoticed. When He was a boy and separated from Mary in the marketplace streets, her descriptions of Him did not resonate with pedestrians. When He was discovered in the temple, it was the boy’s wise teaching, not His appearance, that indicated He was Jesus the Christ. For His whole earthly life, it was who Jesus was, not how He looked, that marked Him as the Holy One.

And with us, it is what’s in our hearts, more than our outward appearances or even actions, that God cherishes.

“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground,” the prophet Isaiah described Jesus 700 years before He was born.

“He has no form or comeliness, and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

“He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

“And they made His grave with the wicked – but with the rich at His death, because He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth.

“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days… By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities. … He was numbered with the transgressors, and He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”
The Christmas season is over. And now you know the rest of the story.

+ + +

Click: Go Ask

1-6-14

…This was the name of one of Paul Harvey’s famous radio features. We have just passed through, or survived, Christmas and New Years, times when we are obliged to deal with, if not actually think about, the concepts of God-with-Us and the New Year as a New Beginning. Thank goodness THAT’s all past us, eh?

Rather, we enter the season when the dust settles and we CAN think about these things. We should not forget them. Who was this Jesus… who IS this Jesus? And, do we need new beginnings? … Well, who doesn’t?

Jesus’s profession, we presume, was that of carpenter, like that of His earthly father. Of course, He was a carpenter who also mended broken bodies; but that ministry came after He was anointed by the Holy Spirit. No, his profession was carpenter, but His job was assigned from the day of His birth… indeed, from the foundation of the world: to die. For us. To assume upon his shoulders and brow the sins we all have committed, to receive the punishment we all deserve for rebellion against God.

Who was this Jesus? How did people know Him?

Did He have a halo, like in ancient paintings? No, He did not. He did not stand out from the crowd.

When Judas betrayed Him to Roman soldiers, the traitorous Apostle had to kiss Him, so He could be identified from among a small group of men.

There are times when “He passed out from them…” withdrawing from opponents, almost unnoticed. When He was a boy and separated from Mary in the marketplace streets, her descriptions of Him did not resonate with pedestrians. When He was discovered in the temple, it was the boy’s wise teaching, not His appearance, that indicated He was Jesus the Christ. For His whole earthly life, it was who Jesus was, not how He looked, that marked Him as the Holy One.

And with us, it is what’s in our hearts, more than our outward appearances or even actions, that God cherishes.

“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground,” the prophet Isaiah described Jesus 700 years before He was born.

“He has no form or comeliness, and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.

“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

“He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

“And they made His grave with the wicked – but with the rich at His death, because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth.

“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days… By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities. … He was numbered with the transgressors, and He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

The Christmas season is over. And now you know the rest of the story.
+ + +

Click: Go Ask

12-30-13

When I have visited Bologna through the years, mostly to attend the International Children’s Book Fair, I stayed at an ancient villa outside the city. Its site went back to pre-Christian Roman days; it is named “Torre di Iano” – Tower (or castle or fortress) of Janus, the Roman god of new beginnings; of transitions; of endings and commencements. The grounds were beautiful, patrolled, believe it or not, by peacocks. The twenty-somethings who bought the decaying structure restored it to a comfortable hotel and restaurant status one room at a time, one floor tile at a time.

Iano. Jano. Janus – the two-faced god invented by the Romans, looking backward and forward. It is where we get the name for the month January, representing the year ending and the year beginning.

Thank God (not Jupiter) that we have a Lord who is never two-faced! He is, on the contrary, the fullness of creation, the Alpha and the Omega – who is, the Bible tells us, “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” He is constant, reliable, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Remember this on New Year’s Eve, through your New Year’s resolutions, whether (or how soon) you break them. We mortals always do.

In fact the new calendar gives us reason to think of Jesus anew – not because He takes to Himself a new or changing set of characteristics… but because He doesn’t. This is a remarkable attribute. A God who is faithful even when we are not. A God who is invariable. A God who is an ever-present refuge in times of trouble. A God who is just but merciful, and whose promises are forever.

… a God who doesn’t break HIS resolutions, even when, as surely we will, we try and fail, try and fail ourselves. A one-faced God, whom we see through Jesus, the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”

Happy new year!

+ + +

The composer Vep Ellis wrote a gospel song with the same title as a beloved ancient hymn, that is no less beloved or impactful. “The Love of God” speaks to the Lord’s never-changing faithfulness and His eternal worthiness as an object of our devotion. The Gaither Vocal Band sings:

Click: The Love of God

12-9-13

If you had a child playing at the edge of an ever-widening sinkhole – and sinkholes lately have been in the news, including ones that swallowed people as well as houses – you would call that child to move back. If your friend were eating something poisonous without realizing the dangers, you would advise that friend of the fact. We do the same, some of us, with people, even strangers, who smoke. “Intervention” today increasingly is employed on behalf of people with drinking problems.

Followers of Christ, who subscribe to the beliefs that all of us make mistakes and are sinful at heart; that therefore a wide gulf separates us from a Holy God; that this God nevertheless desires eternal fellowship with us and offers forgiveness and salvation; and that “accepting” Jesus – believing in our hearts and confessing with our words – these Christians cannot do anything else than have the same regard for other people’s souls as we do their health and comfort.

How often do contemporary Christians fit that last puzzle-piece in place?

Failing this, we condemn ourselves; and we are implicit in sending others to the cold darkness of eternity, separation from God. How often do we avoid sharing even the smallest portion of Jesus with someone because we might “offend them”? Hurt their feelings? “Hey buddy, don’t smoke in your apartment, but I don’t care if you go to hell.”

It’s not always comfortable, but neither was that splintery cross. Living in a multimedia culture makes it easy to assume everyone thinks like we do, or has access to the same facts that we process. Not so. When the Apostle Paul arrived in Ephesus, word-of-mouth about the Savior had already led to the establishment of several Christian communities. But not every word had been shared by every mouth:

“…he reached Ephesus, on the coast, where he found several believers. ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ he asked them. ‘No,’ they replied, ‘we haven’t even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.’ ‘Then what baptism did you experience?’ he asked. And they replied, ‘The baptism of John.’ Paul said, ‘John’s baptism called for repentance from sin. But John himself told the people to believe in the one who would come later, meaning Jesus.’ As soon as they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then when Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in other tongues and prophesied” (Acts 19:1-6, NLT).

Paul wrote letters to local churches and church leaders, sharing the good news, and answering questions. These letters comprise the majority of the New Testament. We shared last week how papyrus letters from a generation or two after Paul are extant. Before Christ’s time, spiritual news and God’s words were shared by Torah scrolls, inscriptions, sacred texts. After him we have the successive march of letters, manuscripts, tapestries and stained-glass picture stories, parchment books, printed books, mass-production, tracts, evangelistic crusades, recordings, radio, short-wave, television, and the internet.

The SHARING of the good news is central to the good news itself. “Go into all the world…” Jesus said, commissioning His disciples. Romans 10:14-15 argues: “How can they call on Him to save them unless they believe in Him? And how can they believe in Him if they have never heard about Him? And how can they hear about Him unless someone tells them?  And how will anyone go and tell them without being sent? That is why the Scriptures say, ‘How beautiful are the feet of messengers who bring good news!’ (NLT) Like much of the Book of Romans, this is like an advocate summarizing his case. How can they hear about Jesus unless someone tells them?

Right about in the middle of humankind’s list of ways to share the good news – not in a timeline, but in the numbers of methods and technologies – is the radio. After its invention it was available to almost every community on the earth. And much of its message, especially today on short-wave broadcasts, is Christian. I went to Sunday school as a child, but it was preachers on my AM transistor radio from whom I really heard the first hard (and sweet) truths of the Gospel; and came face-to-face with decisions to make, or avoid, regarding Jesus Christ.

Albert E. Brumley was an American gospel songwriter of the past century. He wrote more than 800 sermons-in-song, many of which are favorites today in churches, hymnbooks, and recordings. Among them are “I’ll Fly Away,” “If We Never Meet Again (This Side of Heaven),” “I’ll Meet You In The Morning,” “Jesus, Hold My Hand,” “I’d Rather Be An Old Time Christian,” and “Rank Strangers to Me.”

He told a story about another of his classics… and the role of radio in spreading the gospel:

“I wrote ‘Turn Your Radio On’ in 1937, and it was published in 1938. At this time radio was relatively new to the rural people, especially gospel music programs. I had become alert to the necessity of creating song titles, themes, and plots, and frequently people would call me and say, ‘Turn your radio on, Albert, they’re singing one of your songs on such-and-such a station.’ It finally dawned on me to use… ‘Turn your radio on’ as a theme for a religious… song.”

Like the poor, radio we will always have with us. In the words of the song, “turn your radio on and listen to the music in the air; Turn your radio on and heaven’s glory share…”

Are you tuned in… to what God is saying to you? Don’t touch that dial! You can broadcast (as it were) a brief public-service announcement, or a personal message, every once in a while yourself.

+ + +

Many folks’ favorite version of Brumley’s classic song is by the great Ray Stevens. Fun, upbeat, infectious… meaningful. Here he sings at the piano, surrounded by friends who sing along, as you might, yourself.

Click: Turn Your Radio On

12-2-13

There is an exhibition quietly and modestly making its way across the United States that is one of the most astonishing displays I have ever witnessed. I choose my words carefully – actually, an unbreakable habit of mine, even on good days – but I have been to America’s great museums, as well those of the world, including the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Uffizi, down to treasure-filled Halls of Fame. But currently (until Feb 1) housed in an otherwise ordinary former retail space in a neighborhood of Colorado Springs, is “Passages: The Experience.”

I think the weak link in their chain might be “branding,” since it is impossible to guess the exhibition’s theme from its title. And this is counter-intuitive, since the person behind this exhibition is one of America’s great marketers: Steve Green. The President of Hobby Lobby, Steve recently has been the focus of news – and prayers – because of his determination to resist the government’s ObamaCare guidelines to provide and pay 100 per cent of abortifacients , contraceptives, and abortion procedures for his employees. He and the Green family have sacrificed much to fight this battle, which has this week been accepted by the Supreme Court for a hearing.

“Passages” is an exhibition of Steve Green’s substantial collection of Bibles, illuminated manuscripts, ancient scrolls, biblical relics, and artifacts of the faithful. After Colorado Springs
( http://www.explorepassages.com ) the exhibition will continue its tour to other cities, ultimately top reside permanently in Washington DC.

Papyrus 39

After the Colorado Christian Writers Conference in May, my friend Diane Obbema read about the exhibition and suggested we visit. It was a great day of my life. First, we were impressed by the sheer scope. An iPod audio guide is eight hours long, for visitors who visit every display case and presentation. Cases, captions, actors and robotics, videos and interactive stations. Portions are designed for younger visitors. History comes alive. You see a Gutenberg press, you can pull one’s own prints.

More than that is the impressive display of scarce, often one-of-a-kind, artifacts. The second-largest private collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. Many cuneiform tablets; illuminated manuscripts; the world’s largest collection of vintage Jewish scrolls and ancient Torahs. Wycliffe’s likely Middle-English translation of the New Testament; the majority of the rare Gutenberg Bible; many of the famous early printed Bibles, like the Geneva Bible and the first King James Version. The exhibition’s surprises are… very surprising, and inspiring to see: a letter Martin Luther wrote night before his trial in Worms, half will and testament of the presumed martyr, half a rehearsal of his defiant “Here I Stand’ statement. In another display case, the manuscript copy of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Amazing.

Martin Luther’s Will

This is the story of Christendom – the Church through the ages, managing to survive and spreading gloriously.

There is an overarching story beyond the gospel story itself, yet usually missed by most of us. Often it is willful ignorance or rejection. My mother-in-law was one of myriad, in this land of many churches, who fundamentally doubted the Bible’s authenticity or reliability. “It was written by men,” its first putative offense, and she also indicted its authorship “by many people, over many places, across many years, and through many translations.”

A slippery slope it is, of course, to dismiss the Bible as a collection of fables, or purloined wisdom, or irrelevant stories and lies. And, at first glance in the presence of the Green Family’s collection, the sheer variety of translations and versions can seduce the credulity of an average believer.

But none of us should be average believers! We are indwelt by the Holy Ghost, the same Spirit of the Living God who inspired – literally, “breathed life” into – these scriptures. “The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). It has advanced despite hideous persecution. It has survived, sometimes, in remote outposts where Christianity was anathema and believers were hounded. It has also at times triumphed, in the worldly sense… inviting corruption and diluting its tenets.

Yes, many men wrote the first lines; and many were there who copied, and translated, and transliterated, and remembered verses, and strove to record the words of Christ and the testimony of apostles and martyrs, who saved the songs of poets, the wisdom of the anointed, and the letters of evangelists. When men first sought to put the Words of God into the languages of the people, they were, for hundreds of years, pursued, humiliated, tortured, and killed for so doing. Yet more than a thousand tongues now have Bibles in their own languages.

… are these prescriptions for error and mistakes, prejudices and bias, carelessness and sloppiness; for local churches and leaders with tempting agendas, to bring distortion? Would it not be logical – with all the people, places, and possibilities over the years represented in the display cases of “Passages” – that, instead of one True Bible of thousands of translations and versions, that there be thousands of competing Bibles?

Yet discrepancies are a tiny fraction, seldom close to any major theological or historical point, and always quickly reconciled. To me, THIS is the evidence of the authority, even inerrancy, of scripture. Tried, tested, true: a living document that is not malleable to suit every generation’s distractions. No: living, to be a vital source of hope, truth, and salvation; a reality to every one in every time and every place.

The texts studied in Northern Africa, in the Fourth Century, say; or the lessons taught in Asia Minor or to the heathen in northern Europe at the same early times; or the sermon themes in faraway Ireland – all are virtually identical to the words of the Bibles we have in our homes today. About what other books can this be said?

To visit “Passages” is inspiring. Yet when Diane and I left the “Experience,” I could not help but see the physical evidence of devotion, scholarship, sacrifice, martyrdom, and enterprise of uncountable saints through the millennia… and not feel a chill of caution.

Is America today capable of such fidelity to the Word of God? Does Western civilization have the loyalty to Christianity that it once did at Saragossa and at the Gates of Vienna? Right now, no.

The Word of God will survive always: axiomatic for the Eternal Truth. But if the Church of Christ dies in what is left of Western Civilization, it ultimately will be due not to persecution by its enemies, but neglect by its adherents.

+ + +

For those who cannot visit the “Passages” exhibition, or until its goal of a permanent home in the nation’s capital, books and other materials are available from the organizers: https://store.explorepassages.com

I have chosen a beautiful performance in a beautiful setting of Mozart’s beautiful “Laudate Dominum.” The text is the entire Psalms 117, shortest in the Bible, followed by the doxology. The music, if I might presume to characterize it so, is by the Holy Spirit, received and passed to us by Mozart. One of his supernal masterworks. The singer is the beautiful – yes, beauty abounds – Katherine Jenkins. The captions are the Latin text and Czech. Here is the English:

Praise the Lord, all ye peoples,
Praise Him, all ye peoples.
For his loving kindness
Has been bestowed upon us,
And the truth of the Lord endures for eternity.

Glory to the Father, Son, and to the Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen.

Click: Laudate Dominum

11-4-13

Some years ago I was in the New York City studio of Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, and his wife Francoise Mouly, now Art Director of The New Yorker magazine. We have many convergent interests across the graphic arts and in cartooning history, as well as events and locations across two continents. But a cartooney light-bulb went off over their heads when they remembered a question they wanted to ask me. Or someone like me, a Christian who might be able to explain an advertisement they saw in a magazine.

The ad was in an underground magazine, placed by evident Christians; another cartoony image adorned T-shirts for sale, with the legend: “Jesus, don’t spit me out of your mouth!” It clearly was not meant to be disrespectful, yet seemed random and confusing. Could I explain it? They did have a Bible with the New Testament in their loft, and I showed them the passage from Jesus’ letter to John, known as the Book of Revelation: “To the… Church in Laodicea write: These are the words of… the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

Some scholars think the letters to the seven early centers of the church addressed literal challenges the communities faced as pioneer Christians. Others believe the seven churches represent periods of future church history through which the larger corporate church would pass before the End of the Age. A prophecy; “dispensationalism.” No matter here, and no matter for Art and Francoise: the point we CANNOT miss is that God scorns the lukewarm.

God can deal with us as sinners, or as members of the Redeemed. It is impossible to believe that He cannot cope with lukewarm people, but He confesses (human-like) to frustration! If we cannot figure things out ourselves, God seems to be saying, even Christ Almighty feels like spitting you out!

The spiritual lessons – that is to say, virtual commands! – are clear. How often do believers whose souls have been saved, and lives redeemed, by the grace of God, the Creator of the universe… how often do we act like we are the beneficiaries of such unspeakably glorious gifts? (Answer: not often; not often enough!) If we hear, say, a good joke, we share it with friends; but how often do we share the Good News? Even when I was a child it amused me that, in parts of the liturgy that included the word “hallelujah,” our congregation would say it with all the enthusiasm of reading an actuarial report. Lukewarm.

My father used to answer my questions about this by saying that he didn’t cheer at sports events or New Year’s parties, either. And he didn’t. As the next generation German Lutheran, I suppose that I too am less demonstrative than the average citizen of this world or the next. But I generally allow, or invite, the emotions wrought by hard preaching and sweet assurances, to be manifested by heartfelt tears. Gentle precipitation, perhaps, rather than the calm or the storm; my brand of emotional response. We have our own responses, but never should they be lukewarm.

Further, I believe that Christ’s words for the church at Laodicea are properly applied, and perhaps even addressed in part, to aspects of life beyond our worship and our manifested faith.

With an apology, of sorts, to legalists who scorn exuberance in the arts, or the freedom of our talents, minds, expressive visions, and our bodies, to celebrate unbridled joy — the Creator of the universe has imbued his children with gifts of creativity, and I believe He is well pleased when we exercise creativity. For it pays tribute to the One who planted such seeds, the One who breathes on such sparks, the One who has always made Himself manifest to the world through His children’s works of art.

I cannot dance (I look ridiculous enough just walking), but I admire those who do – and appreciate those who dance with abandon. I find joy in writing books and essays, and always do so as unto the Lord. If poets and songwriters and composers have the gifts, they should not be casual but take their talents to the max. Singers and musicians and actors commit cultural crimes, and cheat themselves, if they are desultory in their expressions. Especially as all these things are, after all, metaphors for life.

Jesus told a parable in Luke chapter 8: “No one, when he has lit a lamp, covers it with a bushel or puts it under a bed, but sets it on a lampstand, that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light. Therefore take heed how you hear. For whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.”

This is more than encouragement to let your light shine, display your faith to the world, and reflect the glory of the Lord through creative expression. It is His reminder that in all things – even joyful dancing, and music, and the talents used to share your feelings and to move other peoples’ hearts (unless those expressions are meant to offend God, but that is a general rule of life), take them to the max. The Creator of the universe, after all, never did any of His mighty and joyful works “halfway.”

There is nothing lukewarm about the ways of God.

+ + +

A different vid for a different message. Exuberance in creativity, joy in exercising God’s gifts. Here is pianist and composer Silvan Zingg, and dancers William Mauvais and Maeva Truntzer. It was taped at a festival in Switzerland. It is interesting that ragtime, stomps, and, especially, boogie woogie music is so much more popular today in Switzerland, Germany, France, even Russia and Australia, than in the land of their birth. Share the joy these performers express!

Click: Dancin’ the Boogie

9-30-13

Jesus on the cross surely is one of the most depicted moments of humankind’s history. Think of icons, crucifixes, paintings, stained glass windows, mosaics, tapestries, statues, murals, tableaux, movies, and even Sunday-School lesson illustrations. I cannot think of any that do not depict this tender and powerful scene either straight-on or, occasionally, from some upward angle, the perspective of those at the foot of the cross.

Actually, I can think of one exception – the famous “Christ of St-John of the Cross,” the realistic/mystical painting by the master Salvador Dali. In this famous canvas, Dali painted Jesus from above, but front-on, hanging near the cross, without nails, or crown of thorns or scourges or blood. Beneath Him are not the gathered Mother and guards and random curiosity-seekers, but open water. At the extreme bottom, from a different perspective, the surrealist painted a shoreline of fishing boats. It is arresting, and thought-provoking.

Dali based his painting on a sketch by St John of Avila, a 16th-century monk, that came to both artists in dreams.

Yet I don’t think I have ever seen a depiction of the Crucifixion from the actual viewpoint of Jesus… as if through His eyes. Such a painting would not only suggest Christ’s perspective to us – literally and metaphorically – but Father God’s perspective too.

Jesus looked down, through encrusted, swollen, eyes, at His dripping blood and bruised body. He saw the splintery wood of the rough-hewn cross. On the ground He saw people looking upward – a collection of grief-filled, angry, regretful, indifferent, and hateful people. Looking toward the horizon, He saw the environs of Jerusalem, God’s Holy City, the scene of biblical history of the past, and of the future.

God’s perspective, as if to look down over the shoulders of Jesus? To think upon it is to come closer to understanding the mysterious separation yet unity of Father and Son, especially to meditate on the Incarnation: why God poured Himself out to become human flesh at this fulcrum-point in mankind’s history. Such an image would be to reassure a lost humankind, as if we need one more narrative – but we always do – that God sees us through the eyes, and the pain, of Jesus, who gave Himself so as to fulfill God’s provision, in turn, and so on! The Godhead identifies with our failings, our confusion, our need of salvation, our pain, our hopes.

It would be wonderful to see such a painting, or to paint such a perspective in our minds.

I have one more thought about that setting, seen through the eyes of Jesus lifted up on the cross. It is another example of what I call “virtual theology” – not in scripture, but not at all anti-biblical. In fact I think it might distill the sweeping message of the Bible’s entire narrative.

Jesus died for all. God’s plan, once mankind understood, or could be shown, that the Law was insufficient to lead people to right standing with a Holy God, was to cancel the blood-sacrifice of sheep and rams, and offer Himself as a sacrifice. This was according to prophecy. His children no longer would invent works or propose offerings to try to please an angry God. He would ask them only to BELIEVE in Him through the substitutionary sacrifice of the Messiah, thereby please a loving God.

Humankind. Here is my virtual theology: When Jesus looked down at the assembled few at the foot of the cross, I believe that He looked also into history past and history to come, and see the entirety of humankind. As God-in-flesh, He had managed more extravagant miracles.

Further, I believe that He was able, and did, look down, past the faces of Mary and the centurions, past the shades of millions of souls, into your face and mine, eye to eye, individually. After all, He came for us, and loves us, individually.

Still further, my theological understanding proposes this: that if every other person in history were perfect and sinless; that is, everybody except you or me out of billions of people, He still would have gone to the cross.

Willingly He would have gone. Eagerly. In fact, since He could have avoided the cross or miraculously changed those circumstances at Golgotha’s hill, the truth is that He virtually scrambled up the cross… answered the question “How much do you love?” by spreading His arms wide… and invited the nails.

He would have done that for you or me. In fact, that is NOT virtual truth: He DID do that for you and me.

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A great gospel song that parallels and illustrates the theme of this message was written around 1985 and has become a standard in hymnbooks and on concert stages and Christian radio. It was written by Ronny Hinson and Mike Payne. Here performed at the Family Worship Center, Baton Rouge.

Click: When He Was On the Cross, I Was On His Mind

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9-9-13

“This do in remembrance of me.” A few thoughts that do not pretend to be Theology 101, but have long been impressed on my heart. Communion… the Last Supper… the Eucharist… the Lord’s Table. Some few Christians make special daily observance; many churches celebrate each Sunday. The church of my youth offered it on the first Sunday of each month, common cup at one service, individual cups at the other. The church where I worship locally celebrates it twice a year, accompanied by foot-washing. Some churches have returned to the ancient practice whereby every celebrant passes the bread and wine, with spontaneous blessings spoken.

These are all celebrations, and indeed we should celebrate what Jesus did for us: breaking His body, shedding His blood. He did not merely prophesy: He announced at the Passover meal what would happen not many hours hence. “Ritual” has sometimes become a disparaging word, yet rites are instituted to honor things – events, ideas, truths – worth honoring. With reverence.

Here is what has roused my spiritual heart: the Church in all places and at all times has made a set-apart ceremony of the Lord’s Supper. It is observed in divers ways mentioned above, and others. There is something special about “breaking bread”: in every culture, every generation, the dinner table – no, the kitchen table – has represented the ultimate in hospitality and fellowship. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” The One who could not lie never spoke a clearer truth.

So, should we not regard EVERY meal, every time we “break bread,” whether it is literal bread or any food, and share a cup, whether wine or juice, or whatever in a meal… should we not be reminded every such time of the broken body and shed blood of Jesus? Why just at a designated Communion Service?

Of course I do not think less of 2000 years of church traditions. Neither do I mean to visit disputes over Communion’s symbolism or literal essence – consubstantiation vs. transubstantiation – we are, I think, past the time when bloody wars were fought over the debate. I am trying to commune, here, with the Heart of Jesus, and what the Holy Spirit would have us do.

As reverent as a weekly or monthly observance can be, would not a… remembrance, every time we eat (“breaking bread”) and drink at a meal, be holier? To bring ourselves to think more often, virtually constantly, three meals a day or more times, of Jesus’s amazing sacrifice for us?

Would it lose its meaning? That depends solely on us. Is it, practically, too burdensome, especially in these busy times? No, many of us offer brief prayers before meals, and thanksgiving has been a traditional part of meals among many. Thanksgiving, usually for material blessings, can be joined by thanksgiving for spiritual blessings. To be reminded, and think upon, ever fresh, the sacrifice of broken body and spilled blood represented by the meal before us… is holy.

It is not the calendar, or a tradition, but the hunger in our hearts, fed by spiritual food, that institutes the sacramental aspect of the Lord’s Supper. True communion in all ways.

Read, maybe in a new way, from I Corinthians 10 and 11:
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread. … Therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. … What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not? … I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

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A contemporary song, “Breaking Bread,” visits these questions. This version, with meaningful images, is a studio session of Johnny Cash from end of his career. Harmonies are by internet fans of the Man in Black. The lyrics recall the Bible portions cited above, as well as “bread cast upon the waters,” the feeding of the 5000 miracle, and other associations with breaking bread.

Click: Breaking Bread

7-29-13

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

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

But that does not mean it is not truthful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Tears Of an Angel

7-22-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Worship at Taizé

6-3-13

Do you have memories that come unbidden to your mind? There is one I have recalled a thousand times through the years. Not a bad recollection; in all, a good memory; but it convicts me – there is always a little wince that accompanies it.

Decades ago, before I married, I worked in Manhattan for a newspaper syndicate, editing comics and columns. Often I worked late and would walk cross-town in the dark to catch a late train. But one evening it was bitterly cold, and I hopped a bus. As I settled into my seat I overheard an elderly couple behind me sharing the fact that the icy cold obliged them, too, to take the bus despite the fact that an occasional bus fare affected their meager budgets.

It was hard not to listen, as they sat right behind me. They were friends, maybe closer than friends. She shared some cute facts about what she had done during the day: little babies she saw; fancy window displays; how she called to a lady who had dropped her gloves; and how she couldn’t wait to meet her companion for what was this impromptu and warm bus ride. For his part, he told little stories about people he met and conversations he had. A magazine article he read at the Public Library; music he heard outside the Record Hunter store. They had each stopped at churches during their day. With delight, he said he bought some hot chestnuts. He opened the bag and they shared them.

This sounds almost charming, but – shame on me – I let other senses trump my sentimentality. I turned my head as if to look at something out the window, and could see that they were as ragged as could be. Today, in political correctness, they would be filed away as “homeless.” They probably had homes, or shelters, but anyway were clearly in extremely straitened circumstances. They exuded an aroma – wet clothes on a warm bus – that was redolent of urine and other city smells. Shame on me, I moved to another seat.

My new seat, however, let me observe them better. They took joy in each other’s stories and little gifts, in each other’s smiles and eyes. It is a cliché to say they didn’t care about each other’s clothes or fragrance; and I didn’t know about their commitments or relations, but they loved each other. They loved being with each other. I don’t think I have ever seen another couple so much in love as those two raggedy denizens of the bus.

I shed tears for them – not in pity, not at all. I was touched, I was envious, I was scolding myself: I almost missed, and dismissed, an example of pure and unconditional love as we seldom see in this life. I realized this was a manifestation of Jesus’ love for us. Jesus could have been the dispenser of love as I beheld; He should always be the recipient of love that we are told to share “even unto the least of these.”

And… I had a sense that these people were, in a way, manifestations of myself relative to Jesus. Believe me, for I know: there is no one more raggedy, at times, and stinky too, than I. I am speaking metaphorically – but not sarcastically. There we sit, ungainly, unattractive, reeking of sin and who knows what else… and Jesus comes alongside us with a smile. And joyful words. And little gifts. In a warm, comforting place. With the assurance of friendship. More: love. Pure and unconditional.

How odd, I thought then, and think now, a thousand recollections later. Finding another person who shares such love, in this world, is actually a rare occurrence, precious and to be cherished.

… when the love of Jesus, freely offered and available to every one of us – especially those who need it most – is often ignored or rejected. Odd, and sad.

Those raggedy denizens of the bus were happier, and luckier – that is, more blessed – than they knew, I thought. God bless them. But on second thought, I think they knew quite well how happy and “lucky” they were indeed. And such a realization, when it happens to any of us, is even rarer than the fact.

How often do we say “God bless you”? How much more often should we recognize reality, and encourage people, and say, “God blessed you!”

“I have learned how to be content with whatever I have” (Philippians 4:11b).

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Approaching Jesus, or receiving Him, surely is a “come as you are” party. Not only are there no conditions He places on fellowship, or healing our wounds, or receiving our confessions or needs – it would be as ridiculous as thinking we have to bathe before we take a shower. He already knows not only who we are, already, but how we are. So we approach Him “Just As I Am.” There is powerful meaning in the old hymn, here sung in a Celtic version by Eden’s Bridge. Designed by the great Beanscot Channel.

Click: Just As I Am

3-31-13

Many of the new games that absorb young people worldwide – virtually obsessing them – are role-playing games. Video games, “gaming,” computer games, hand-held games, are largely dependent upon tech innovations and New Media. (That’s me, back there, in the dust.) The designs enable players to choose identities and play roles, and engage in “what if” scenarios.

When I worked for Marvel and for Disney, and otherwise wrote fiction, the goal generally was to focus on one character, develop a personality for him/her, and define a clear narrative path, with beginning, middle, and end. Today the computer gamers deal in bifurcation of heroes’ personalities and narrative options (or quadfurcation – yes, that’s a word – or further dispersal of story elements… what if’s… alternate realities).

My son-in-law is a computer-game programmer. As I said, part of my background is in comics and superheroes. When we get together, we usually talk about… the grandkids and the weather. Ha! Superficially similar, the new, popular adventure media are worlds apart from the… “old.”

However, I got to thinking recently about the Easter story in a new way. Through the prism of “role-playing.” Can we imagine ourselves as some of the principal players? What we would have done? How we would have reacted?

For instance: Judas and Peter. Two Disciples. Close friends for more than three years, the glue of their association was the mysterious and wondrous person named Jesus. They both gave up everything to follow Him. They listened to His wisdom, even when they did not always fully comprehend. They saw incredible acts of kindness, and devotion. They witnessed astonishing miracles.

When crunch time came, however, they were traitors. All the Disciples scattered like autumn leaves on a windy street when persecution began, but Judas and Peter were different. Judas betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin, the sure first-step to arrest by the Romans. He did it for money, like spies who betray their country. Peter betrayed Jesus by denying he even knew him – three times, not once.

Let’s role-play. Would you have done the same things? We can say “no” quickly… but remember, even Peter said he could never do such a thing when Jesus predicted it only hours previous! Which is worse in this exercise – “fingering” Jesus, or claiming to have nothing to do with Him? Remember also that Jesus, knowing all, told Judas to go and do his dirty work, in effect. Jesus knew everybody’s roles in advance, even if they did not.

The real role-playing challenge – and the lesson that waits for us – is the next level of their games. Both men were mortified, overwhelmed with guilt. Judas threw away his bribe money, and hanged himself. Peter cried for forgiveness, and soon renewed his devotion to the Messiah. In fact, I identify with the “early” Peter because he was always the impulsive and sometimes reckless Disciple, even to the Upper Room, after Resurrection and Ascension, till the Day of Pentecost. But when he waited upon the Holy Spirit, wisdom came upon him, and Peter became one of the great and effective Apostles.

We sin every day; that is, the rules of the game don’t vary: we all fall short of the glory of God. But the next level is amazing – we can choose incredibly different paths. We can remain in sin, or be so remorseful that we cripple ourselves. And, frankly, disappoint God all over again. A constantly repeating game, unhappy ending. OR we can confess our sins, ask forgiveness, proclaim devotion to the Savior, and dedicate ourselves to Him. Not just needing, but wanting, to serve others in His name.

Judas or Peter? Whose game will you play?

And let us not forget the “2.0” version of this game – which, of course, is not a game, in that our response must be deadly earnest and has tremendous consequences.

But Jesus played a role, too. He fulfilled all the elements of myriad prophecies – chapter 53 of Isaiah, alone, reads like a news account of the crucifixion in every detail… except it was written 600 years before the events! – and played them perfectly.

He role-played on the cross, too. He took the role of you. And me. We chose separation from God by our transgressions. We deserve punishments for our sins. We do not deserve to live with God in Glory; we fall short. But Jesus played a Holy game. He said to the Father, “In this story of eternal justice, I will play the role of…” and insert your name. Or my name, or anyone you can imagine. In fact, you can name people of His day, of our day, of people yet unborn; people who are sinners, even people who despise the name of Jesus.

He came to take your place in that great game of life. When He died, the rules were adjusted. When we accept Jesus as God’s own, and that His sacrifice, the shed blood, served just the purpose He stated, God no longer sees us – that is, our imperfect hearts – when He looks at us. He sees Jesus.

Rate that Holy Game “E” for Everyone.

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Click: He’s Alive!

3-29-13

We listen to Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” at Christmastime (even though the piece is about Christ from ancient prophecy through His Passion and Ascension to Heaven, and therefore is appropriate at any time of year). Less often do we listen to Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio’; a shame, because it is stunningly grand and inspiring.

Perhaps the facility of arranging background music when the Yule Log burns, or when trees are decorated, assists the popularity of “Messiah.” I suggest that ANY excuse is appropriate to listen to the two Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach – the St Matthew and the St John.

I will suggest, and provide a link here, to the more modest (shorter) and unjustly obscure “Easter Oratorio” of Bach. But it is beautiful, moving, and masterful in its presentation of music, harmony, lush instrumentation, choral and solo movements. This version features original instruments, sometimes unfamiliar but fascinating to our ears, in the setting of a Baroque-period church.

Originally written by Bach as a cantata for Easter Sunday, it is appropriately festive, because it begins with the empty tomb – its first title was “Come, Hasten, and Run!” In other words, share the news that Christ has risen! Mary, after all, was the first evangelist of them all, spreading the good news.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

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Click: Bach’s Easter Oratorio

3-25-13

“Life is cheap” is a saying that gets bandied about, usually referring to the horrors of war or the cruelties of peace; that is, social injustice. The term has increasing, not diminishing, application – widespread abortion; the terrible euphemism of “mercy killings” of the elderly; child and spousal abuse; human trafficking. “Life is cheaper” should be the slogan of our time.

My wife, in her last months, saw the early effects of the Affordable Care Act, and concluded that the new law, in its name, manifested neither. Already, the government is mandating that fewer conditions be addressed with less frequency, and at lower rates of compensation. “There won’t be ‘Death Panels,’” she would say, “at least they won’t call them that.” Life is cheaper and cheaper.

Perhaps in a culture that increasingly is “throw-away” it is harder to appreciate the sacrifice that believers commemorate this week. I wonder how many non-believers – even in the midst of a nominally Christian society – ask, “Jesus died. But we all have to die.” Or, “Tortured and crucified. But so were other people, criminals on each side of Him, and multiple thousands through the Roman empire.” Big deal? Life is cheap, right?

If you ever are tempted to think these things, you simply must remember the facts.

Jesus was perfect, sinless, did not deserve His earthly fate. Surely one’s sense of justice must rebel.

Jesus’ suffering and death had been foretold by many prophets, centuries previous, down to the most minute details. This was more than “a” death.

God Himself foretold the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrificial death by first establishing a plan of blood sacrifices, vows of repentance, and atonements for the sins we inevitably commit.

When humankind could be convinced that it was unable to approach God because our natures are inadequate to obey commandments and fulfill such cleansing rituals, the Father fully instituted the plan that had been prophesied.

“Life is cheap”? God did not think so; He does not think so. He could have exploded galaxies to show His power. He could have sacrificed, say, all the sheep on the planet in one moment, to take the ritual the Nth degree. Or any spectacular, supernatural display. And show His children the fully realized plan of salvation. But it was time for the Plan, and there was, or is, no Plan B. Even while we were yet sinners, He took the form of a human being. That aspect of His Being would become obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

Life is cheap? No, life is precious.

Two thousand years later, there still is no Plan B. No other sacrifice, not our own works, no other savior. No more merciful plan… for us. God is Holy, and we cannot, in justice, approach Him. However, by just believing that Jesus is the Son of God, and confessing it, we in effect accept the blood shed on the cross’s altar. As with the sacrificial lambs of earlier times, His blood cleanses us – NOW we understand it all! As the blood on the door frames in Egyptian bondage made the Angel of Death pass over, we are free from eternal death – NOW we understand it all! As Abraham was asked by God to show himself willing to accede to the crazy request to sacrifice his son; although his hand was held back – NOW we understand it all!

We fast-forward 2000 years. In some families, babies are aborted; in some neighborhoods, children are abused; in some towns, little boys and girls are abandoned. Is life cheap? But in some families, miscarriages are grieved; in some neighborhoods, children happily are adopted; in some towns, boys and girls are rescued. Is life precious? For many people, yes. For God, always.

When God chose the Plan of Salvation, He was telling humankind that He was sending the most tender message He could imagine – the importance, the grief, the identification – that God could share with His children. He understands. And now we, too, understand it all.

Do you know what it’s like to lose a child?

God does.

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The amazing J J Heller has written a song with the line “Sometimes I don’t know what You’re doing, But I know who You are.” A song about life, and loss, and romance, and love, and hope; a seemingly secular setting, but a very spiritual message. The same thing, precisely, can be said about Good Friday upcoming. Be blessed.

Click: Who You Are

3-18-13

St Patrick’s Day has assumed an important part in my life, my faith life, in recent years. And I find myself for a week or so afterwards thinking about meanings and issues surrounding the person and the work of St Patrick. This year I invite us all to do that.

I am not Irish; I am American. And my background is not at all Irish; it is German. Propelled, I am eager to admit, by a remarkable book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” by Thomas Cahill, I have learned about a gifted people who, not unlike other ethnic groups, endured persecution through generations; and learned about a land that was repository of many tribes, not least the Celts, until its craggy Atlantic coast became the last European stand against pagan barbarism. Those tribes became a people, and their land virtually became, for quite a while, the secret refuge of literacy and faith, in lonely monasteries and libraries.

I will also admit that my main interest in things Irish was principally fed by my daughter Emily’s missions trips there. She had a heart for Northern Ireland, rather the border of north and south. She served in the city of Londonderry (or Derry, depending on one’s prejudice); she returned for a longer time, ministering to street kids in the fabled neighborhoods of the “Troubles,” where things have improved, but violence still occurs – somehow less on American news shows, however. American “journalism” has moved to other bloody areas around the world.

Emily met Norman McCorkell at church. They fell in love. They married. They attended Irish Bible Institute together. They have gifted me with two grandchildren. So I am rather more emotionally invested in things Irish than I previously was. But something near my home in Michigan taught me more about old St Patrick’s mission, and new Ireland’s troubles, than my visits and conversations have done.

There is an “Irish Shop” a few towns away from me, where imported items are sold, and which 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 wife, was a kidney transplant recipient, so there was never a shortage of conversation. We told her about Emily; how the ministry was scrupulous about being “Christian,” not Protestant or Catholic in its outreach, about the many dangers of the neighborhoods they entered with hot coffee and warm words.

One time we entered the shop, and by way of introduction – for she must have many customers – I said, “we’re the couple with the daughter who works with the street kids of Derry.” She remembered us: she said, matter-of-factly, “Oh, yes. Teaching the Protestant kids to hate Catholics.” No tongue-in-cheek. She was not kidding. Automatic reaction.

That remark, that attitude, taught me anew the lingering power of hate. It is never new, sadly, yet we all need to be reminded, if we are to attempt resistance. Two weeks ago in Derry a mortar-filled van was discovered and defused minutes before exploding. It would have caused history-making devastation. I was reminded that if people had been killed, perhaps Emily and her family, there are other people who would not a shed a tear. And, of course, the other-side around, too.

St Patrick knew persecution. There understandably is some obscurity about a man who lived in the late 400s, but two letters he wrote survive; there are records of his deeds; tremendous influences surely attributable to him are still felt; and he did die on March 17. These things, and more, we do know.

He was born in western England and kidnapped by Irish when he was a teenager. As a slave he worked as a shepherd, during which time his faith in God grew, where others might have turned despondent. 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 in the clergy, he worked against slavery, and quashed paganism and heresies. Among his surviving colorful lessons is using the shamrock to explain the mystery of the Trinity, the Triune God, to converts.

He was an on-the-ground evangelist – possibly the church’s first great evangelist/missionary since St Paul – and he preceded much of history: living more than a hundred years prior to Mohammed; 500 years before Christianity split into Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy; and a thousand years before the Reformation.

No labels – except the gospel and love. The gospel AS love. He preached reconciliation before the issues arose that we think are irreconcilable. But nothing is impossible with God.

This week I am lifting up three friends, especially, in prayer. Somehow their challenges all relate, in the eyes of my heart, to the mission of that brave apostle of God from so long ago.

One friend faces serious health issues, and has been nervous about approaching God. Patrick taught that God can become our breastplate, our shield, as well as our dignity. He takes those things upon Himself.

Another friend lost her husband four years ago, and their anniversary was St Patrick’s Day. Her wounds sometimes still seem fresh. It is a gift as well as a magnificent burden to have a tender heart. St Patrick taught that God offers to BE our heart, and our vision, in all matters of life.

Another friend is ministering to her precious daughter through a crisis. I don’t know the details, but when Christians ask for prayer, we don’t have to know the details; God knows. St Patrick taught that God does not only gift us with wisdom: He IS our wisdom. He not only bestows spiritual treasures: He IS our treasure.

“St Patrick’s Breastplate” is a prayer that has comforted uncountable people for 1500 years. Another ancient Celtic hymn, “Be Thou My Vision,” incorporates the words I have just quoted. We can draw inspiration… if we choose to listen. Reconciliation, healing, love, and peace are still pummeled by life’s waves of indifference and hatred.

But, for those who will not listen, St Patrick reminded us that God offers to be our ears, too.

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For more than a millennium the hymn, set to a haunting tune and using St Patrick’s teaching, has spoken to the hearts of believers and non-believers. At its essence is a plea for what is already true: that God is our All-In-All.

Click: Be Thou My Vision

3-11-13

This is the Christian story: The Lord of the universe was pleased to create the earth and populate it with human beings. An aspect of His love was to imbue His children with free will, which no mortal has ever failed to use toward rebellion and sin. God delivered laws and commands to His Chosen People, called so because in His plan, when the Law would be recognized as insufficient for a rebellious humanity to be reconciled to Him; that from them, a Messiah would arise who would provide the means of that salvation.

These basics are widely known, even if non-Christians shrug their mental shoulders; even if Christians cease to be in awe of God’s plan, even taking for granted their astonishing inheritance. It has been calculated that the odds of all the Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the birth, life, locations, miracles, and other circumstances surrounding Jesus (most not disputed, even by enemies of His and His disciples at the time) exceed a hundred million to one.

I sometimes wonder, given all this, why the Christian population of the world is approximately 3-billion; more than one-third of humanity. History, threads of religious traditions, logic, the personal testimonies of those who lives have been supernaturally touched – I wonder why 95 per cent of people do not claim Christ.

An answer has come to me. A very 21st-century outlook might be a matter of packaging, or “branding.” Just as, to me, the upcoming end of Lent will feature too much Bunny and not enough Easter, it might be that the church insufficiently communicates the reality of Holy Week as we look ahead.

Most of us know the stories, and the pictures, of Jesus humbly entering Jerusalem on a donkey, amidst adoring crowds. We know He was falsely accused; He was betrayed by one follower, and denied by another; He was chased down and arrested; He was tortured and abused; He was humiliated perhaps as no man ever has been; He died on a rough cross between two criminals; He was carried to a borrowed tomb; on the third day He rose, conquering sin and death.

As scripture prophesied, He was led like a lamb to slaughter.

But can it be that we place too much of our attention on His submission? Jesus could have called down ten thousand angels to lift Him from the cross, to strike His accusers dumb, to spare Himself the pain, humiliation, and (worst, in my book) the abandonment of His friends and disciples.

We must understand that Jesus was born to die. And to overcome death. He knew the Father’s plan to become the sacrificial lamb, to take the sins of the world – our sins, through history to you and me – upon Himself. From the wrath of God, everything we deserve for our rejection and rebellion, He spares us.

So in this view, I have another image. I know it is VIRTUAL, not the way the Bible describes it. Nevertheless it is true. I ask you to see Jesus, not ambling on a donkey into Jerusalem, but galloping full speed. I remind you that Jesus, at the Passover seder, did not stop Judas from ratting Him out, but hurried him on his way. I suggest to you that Jesus, silent before accusers in the temple and before Pontius Pilate, was virtually shouting, “Come on! Do your worst!” That, until He collapsed, a Man of sorrows and a man painfully bleeding, on the via Dolorosa, He carried His cross as if to say, “Let’s do this! For this I came to earth!”

… and that, instead of being stretched and nailed to a cross, it is spiritually the case that Jesus virtually scrambled up that cross. For us. “Forgive them; they know not what they do.” But Jesus knew what He was doing, and despite the portion of humanity with which we can identify (“if it be possible, let this cup pass…”) He was there for us. He was there. For us.

And then, looking forward to what we call Easter Sunday, we read the accounts of the risen Jesus appearing quietly to Mary, to pedestrians on the road, to His old disciples, to many hundreds of others – accounts recorded by the Jewish historian of the era, Josephus, and by the historians Origen and Eusebius. He quietly appeared and witnessed to people. But let us realize that Jesus metaphorically burst forth from that tomb. In that sense he ran out, shouting to everybody, “I’m Alive!!!” In words of Anthony Burger’s little son, ad libbing in a Sunday School pageant, “Here I come, ready or not!”

Then, and now, Jesus runs up to every person and says, “I live so that you may live also! Believe on me, and you shall have life for eternity!”

Let us return from the virtual and metaphorical. These truths, no matter what the details of their playing out, cannot leave us unchanged. We can make the life-changing decision to ignore Him, or the life-changing decision to accept Him. There simply is no middle ground.

If we see Jesus in this different way – that He was Savior not just willing to die for our sins, but EAGER, such is God’s love for us, and that He excitedly confronts us daily – then we might see Lent in another light. And the rest of the year. And the Lord Himself. And the condition of our souls.

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Humanity’s response to God’s plan, and the sacrifice of His Son so that we might be reconciled by the acceptance of Jesus’ substitutionary death, has taken myriad forms through the centuries. Indifference, sadly; to revelation about the availability of a personal relationship with our Savior; to expressions in art and music. The awesome mystery of this salvation plan often is met by the question, “Why Me, Lord?” We know the answer is “Because I love you,” yet our souls scarcely can comprehend the enormity of God’s love. A contemporary song is Kris Kristofferson’s classic plaint, “Why Me, Lord?” Here he explains to some friends how he came to write it, after he had a life-changing experience.

Click: Why Me, Lord?

2-18-13

It seems like sometimes half of America wants to prove that the Founding Fathers were Deists, agnostics, skeptics, and dismissive of churches and organized religion. It is not the case. However, it might be closer to the truth than what many Christians, well-meaning as they must be, believe – that, virtually to a man, the Founders were fervent Christians of today’s evangelical stripe.

In their zeal these Christians do an injustice to history, and to the integrity of Christian scholarship. I am specifically referring to those people, some famously, who tattoo contemporary styles of worship and expressions of faith onto their profiles and descriptions of America’s Founding Fathers. Now, this is a blog post – at its most ambitious, an essay – not a PhD thesis. But my training, and most of the 70+ books I have written, is as a historian. As a Christian as well, I am quite comfortable to concede that many of the Founding Fathers, and more than a few presidents, have not been Christians in today’s born-again, evangelical, missions-minded, revivalist mode.

Does this mean we have been lied to… that America is NOT a Christian nation? The Supreme Court declared us so in 1892, specifically recognizing foundations, social contracts, and traditions. Of course, the Court’s opinion did not exclude other religions or deny their freedom to worship. No: Let us be honest on this Presidents Day, in all ways.

The vast majority of the Founders were Bible believers. And the New Testament was part of their Bibles. In an age when religious profession was rather private, public figures did not speak so often of their personal faiths. Jesus frequently was quoted, and honest readings of the Founders’ words leave the impression that it was taken for granted that Jesus was the Son of God, and that His words were those of the One True God.

It is a fact that the virgin birth, and miracles, were among the spiritual topics little talked about; but that largely was the case with clergy as well. Christianity was practiced somewhat differently then. Mysteries were regarded as mysteries, rather than take-offs for parsing and exegesis.

The Bible was not a mystery, in its sum, however. Children were named for biblical figures; biblical allusions were frequently framed; and – most important as we think of the Founders, and honor presidents at this time – the Bible was universally acknowledged as the best roadmap and blueprint for men building and governing a society.

Secularists among us cite that, say, Washington seldom attended church, or that Jefferson invented the phrase “separation of church and state,” and then build a doctrine on such things. This is worse than nit-picking. At best it is a foolish means of discussing history (worse than schismatics who build theological doctrine on one out-of-context Bible verse). But at worst – and this is what goes on these days – it distorts history in order to further the evil, destructive goals of self-loathing Americans. There dwell among us people who loathe our heritage also, and would be quite happy to see the American temple brought down to rubble.

“Foes of our own household,” the Bible calls such people. Naïve Christians and patriots are too quick to give these cancerous domestic enemies the benefit of every doubt.

The Lord knows, we don’t, why Washington seldom went to a church. But he prayed, and he invoked God’s blessing, and he publicly sought God’s guidance. Jefferson (after he was president and in a private letter) described the Constitutional safeguard against a state-funded denomination as “the wall of separation.” Among frank references to God through the years, Jefferson bestowed the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, not from hostility to God, but in respect to His worshipers and their consciences. So few Founders were hostile to Christianity, or even neutral, that Theodore Roosevelt (also a professional historian) singled out Thomas Paine as a “filthy little atheist.” That is, no signer of the Declaration or the Constitution could be similarly characterized, even politely. Yet John Quincy Adams was an early Unitarian, as was William Howard Taft almost a century later. Not everyone in America’s pantheon regarded Christ as God.

One of the few shortcomings of the movie “Lincoln,” to me, was that the portrayal of the final months of the president’s life did not fully reflect his increasing, almost daily, references to God, speeches about God’s will, conversational mentions of God’s role in life; and his growing reliance on God. But this spiritual evolution is a fact, in his hand and in the memoirs of his intimates. This supposed church-rejecting agnostic could have been our most devout believer among presidents.

But let us not forget that the Founders, whether they went to church often or seldom, or how they expressed their creeds, were, almost to a man, zealous about following the spirit of Holy scripture, and honoring biblical injunctions about governments and societies. About this they were clear and firm.

And let the presidents of our time not forget that the vast majority of pilgrims, pioneers, settlers, preachers, revolutionaries, civic leaders, and, yes, their predecessors, no matter the details of their religious exercise, looked to the Bible and to the words of Jesus Christ as they built a nation.

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I just experienced – there is no better word – a concert by Phil Keaggy. Many people consider him the greatest guitarist in the world; and if he is not… no, he is. His career has been one sharing his talent, performing and writing songs of tender love, of confronting life’s challenges, and of the overcoming power of God’s love. A song of collateral relation to today’s topic, although not a direct reference to presidents per se, is “True Believers.” We need True Believers, we should savor them, we should be them. (And we should elect them!)

Click: The True Believers

1-28-13

I have been thinking lately of insights that my wife shared during her period of ministry. Some I have “swiped” and used in my blogs and other writing; just as any Christian wisdom we all gain has been similarly swiped from the Holy Spirit, after all. One of the Holy Ghost’s job descriptions is to guide us in all ways spiritual.

She once observed that the devil doesn’t hate us for ourselves – he doesn’t give a fig for us – but hates the Jesus in us. And that hatred is in direct proportion to the amount of Jesus we have invited into our hearts; that is, the Christ who lives in our lives, and we display and exercise. Just so. This is why Jesus warned that believers would have trouble in this world, and face persecution from all sources, even from family.

She also once observed that before every major event in Jesus’s life and ministry that is recorded in scripture, He went aside to pray. Here was the Son of God – the Incarnate God, in that great mystery – who nevertheless needed to pray. He prayed in private; He prayed long; He prayed often; and He prayed fervently. Surely an example we must not ignore.

And then, Christ’s many references to Heaven. He did good works, and He encouraged others to do good works; certainly. But He focused on Heaven. It should be our goal. It is our natural home. It is where we will find peace… where we will receive treasures… where we will dwell with the Most High. But Jesus did not try to bribe His followers with glimpses of a dreamy theme park: eternal life should be our goal. It is gained by believing that Jesus is the Son of God, in your heart, and confessing this Truth by your words.

There is a movement in contemporary church circles to denigrate the place of Heaven. A gaggle of propositions is maintained chiefly by the “emergent” church, who merely comprise the shock troops; philosophies have also infected mainstream and many evangelical churches. The simple Gospel message is too, well, simple, in their eyes.

It amuses me that the vocabulary of the movement invests it with a secret-society entre-nous aura that is the spiritual equivalence of certain door-knocks to enter speakeasies or secret handshakes in fraternal societies. Let’s see: it is not a church; it is a “conversation.” They are not Christians; they are “Christ-followers.” It is not about answers; it is about “questions” (many of the proponents deny Absolute Truth). It is not about the destination, but about the “journey.”

When the destination is Heaven, this last emergent commandment stubs its spiritual toe. Recent emergent cardinals or popes have dismissed the relevance of Heaven, and some reject the existence of Heaven and/or hell. The real importance, if I can apply a generous patina to their reasoning, is to do Heaven’s work on earth. That is, charity, caring, assistance, and service to others. It is what Jesus would do if He were now, we are told.

Yes, He would. Yes, He did. But He never missed the opportunity to be up-front about a person’s heart, faith, and eternal life. Salvation. Heaven. The place Jesus talked about, and pointed us towards. It was His priority, to be every person’s priority.

It is simple, really – Christ’s concern was our own salvation, one by one, so that after our standing is sure, we might properly serve others. And for the proper reasons. It is ironic that after 500 years, the “works doctrine” asserts itself again. The same with this modern version of relativism, which has polluted the church for 2000 years. If good deeds earn us eternal life, be prepared to meet a lot of government bureaucrats who otherwise despise the Bible, and Communist commissars who dictate food allotments but who shut down churches.

Our righteousness – the “good deeds” we do, our pumped-up conceits of the works we perform – are as dirty rags to God. The Bible tells me so. Practically speaking, these acts might be worthless, and are surely worth less, in God’s eyes, if we neglect our own salvation and do not preach it to others.

The sixth chapter of Matthew has words about these things. It is one of the Bible’s chapters that fairly overflows with elemental wisdom. The Lord’s Prayer; not letting your left hand know what the right does; the lilies of the field; today’s troubles being sufficient to themselves. And “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” Read it when you have a chance. Here are some excerpts:

Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven. When you give to someone in need, don’t do as the hypocrites do—blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity! I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get. But when you give to someone in need, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing….

And when you fast, don’t make it obvious, as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and disheveled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth, that is the only reward they will ever get. But when you fast, comb your hair and wash your face. Then no one will notice that you are fasting, except your Father, who knows what you do in private. And your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.

Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is! …why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?

So don’t worry about these things, saying, “What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?” These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously….

All pointing to Heaven. To earnestly desire Heaven, we will, as our hearts overflow with godliness, serve others. To do service work as a way of earning Heaven – or, worse, to not care whether we will have eternal life with God or not – is the abrogation of faith, of love, and of obedience.

As we think of Heaven – as I believe Jesus wants us to do, continuously – we also look forward to experiencing the joy of fellowship with the saints, communion with God, friendship with Jesus; and the grandest of all reunions. What a meeting in the air!

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Click: What a Meeting In the Air

12-22-12

An early Christmas present. If you are one of the many celebrants who finds joy or solace or peace, each season, by playing Handel’s “Messiah” or letting the TV screen show the never-ending burning Yule log, here is an alternative.

Thanks to uncountable technologies, and innumerable traditions, you can enjoy a marvelous musical and spiritual experience by watching, or just listening to, the “Christmas Oratorio” of Johann Sebastian Bach. One of the greatest pieces of music in Western culture, in or out of churches, Bach’s oratorio is a full composition, like Handel’s, in many parts. There are full orchestra and full choir movements, solos, narrations, and instrumental sections. The words are from the Bible’s story of Christ’s birth; the music is some of the most stirring you will ever hear.

The very first part, “Exult! Rejoice!” (Jauchzet, Frohlocket in German) is an astounding cascade of choir and orchestra led by the motif of tympani drums’ notes.

Like the “Messiah,” it is in several parts and lasts almost three hours. It originally was performed in Bach’s St Nicholas Church, and some nights in St Thomas Church, in Leipzig, in 1734-35, essentially through the 12 nights of Christmas, in parts, beginning on Christmas Day.

Of several excellent performances on the web, I have chosen to share a recent video recorded at that very St Nicholas Church. See the grand Baroque setting as it appeared when first performed… listen to the period instruments, simulating the actual sounds of Bach’s music… enjoy the camera’s examination of the church’s details, and the community’s reverent models and landscapes of the Christmas story.

There are no English subtitles of the German texts, but you know the old, old story! You will hear the names of Jesus and Mary, Abraham and Old Testament prophets, and references to God and angels. The order of the six constituent cantatas’ subjects are: the Birth; the Annunciation to the Shepherds; the Adoration of the Shepherds; the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus; the Journey of the Magi; the Adoration of the Magi. I thought it better to be “home” in Bach’s own church, and to see the re-creation of a Baroque celebration, than to choose a performance-only video, or one of the versions with one old painting on display over the entire performance.

I hope this brings extra joy, special comfort, and stirring inspiration to you this Christmas season. Bach has been called “the Fifth Evangelist,” and works like this illustrate why. Georg Christoph Biller leads the Thomanerchor and the Gewandhausorchester Leizig.

Click: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio

12-10-12

Here is a holiday surprise: Let us celebrate Easter this Christmas! Or Ascension Day, or All Saints Day, or any other day of the church calendar.

The current assault on Christmas around the world, particularly virulent in the United States, properly should be seen for what it really is: a tool, a weapon, just one battle in the war on Christianity. The Brave New World of tomorrow, where piety is mocked, religion is persecuted, and God is denied… is here, today.

The multitudinous forces that attack Christianity are doing a favor to the remnant of believers, in one sense: they clarify the issue at hand. The world has always hated us; the world system works against us; the world, the flesh, and the devil ceaselessly work to do us harm. Rather, they rail against God Almighty, and, often, we are in the way.

But the very specific, and frequently absurd, crusade against Christmas has caused me to sit back and assess matters.

Christians, sitting around the dinner table, or at church suppers, are incensed when municipal governments remove Christmas trees, when restaurants take down colored balls and angels from seasonal ornamentation, when schools and offices yield to pressure and remove red and green decorations, and call Christmas holidays a Winter Break.

All of a sudden Christians find themselves mustering their courage, channeling their outrage, to stand up for Christmas – in the forms of Santa Claus and reindeer; cartoon elves; lawn displays of Scooby Doo and snowmen with red caps and scarves; and, boldly, saying “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” to anyone we choose, in open view. They fight for nativity scenes in public squares (usually if Zoroastrians and Druids can have equal space). They pointedly will say “Christmas tree” and not “Holiday tree.”

THIS is what Christmas means to a lot of Christians? Defending Santa Claus to the death? Preserving plastic Wise Men in the town square? Playing “White Christmas” on the radio where you work?

Where is the Jesus in all this? – except for our “reason for the season” bumper strips. Are we making a god of the fat guy in the red suit? Why doesn’t our religion get it over with, and have a holiday with a pink Easter bunny in the manger, Santa on the cross, and communion with cookies and egg nog? The enemies of Christmas – of Christ – can go to hell, and I am not being coarse: I am stating a biblical truth. But a lot of Christians might join them, if in the process they are seduced into sublimating the Son of God to exalt the Commercial One (Santa), fellowship with the saints (shoppers), share the Truth (madly address Christmas cards), or sing for joy (about Rudolph). We make Christmas more of a secular holiday than atheists can ever dream of.

My suggestion for this Christmas season is based on the text “Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” My subtext is that Jesus came not into the world in order to amaze shepherds that a virgin could conceive. God became man and dwelt among us in order to save humankind from its sins.

The cross, indeed, is the purpose of Christmas: the reason for the season.

Why do we compartmentalize Christmas and Easter? I exclude the obvious suspects from the ranks of record producers, TV programmers, and Hallmark cards. I propose we celebrate Easter this year at Christmas “time”! And that on Easter we meditate on the miracle of the Incarnation! On Pentecost, we can celebrate the sacrament of baptism! And so forth.

Is it a sin to sing a beautiful Christmas carol during the other 11 months of the year? What is wrong with saying “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” in December? When our faith is full, and our appreciation of the Lord transcends artificial boundaries, we can move in and out of spiritual ghettos to luxuriate in the fullness of God. Time-restricted holidays can be a curse.

So, let us fight as we can and when we can against the secularization of a culture that was built on biblical principles and a Christian heritage. Sure. But in the process, while fighting the atheists and secularists, let us not exalt Santa over Jesus.

Christians: replace “Let’s keep Christ in Christmas” with “Let’s keep Christ in Christianity.”

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Giants of the church like Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach, and I daresay Jesus Himself, would be pleased, and think it perfectly proper, that even a farmer who raises ducks would pause in the pen and sing praises to God. It is truly good, right, and salutary that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to the holy Lord, almighty Father, everlasting God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who overcame death and the grave; and by His glorious resurrection opened to us the way of everlasting life. Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven we laud and magnify His glorious name, evermore praising Him and singing. Here is a poultryman, making Holy ground of a duck house — a manger, if you will — just as we can celebrate Christmas on any old day of the year.

Click: Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desiring