Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-18-13

The late Malcolm Muggeridge was an iconic figure in British life and English letters. An essayist and critic, soldier and spy, journalist and satirist – he served as editor of Punch, the venerable humor magazine – he was, until his death at age 87 (1990) a thinker who was forever interested, and always interesting. He walked a path that similar intellectuals walked: an early interest in Socialism or Communism (his wife’s aunt was Beatrice Webb, the famous Fabian Socialist), then a roughly simultaneous conversion to conservatism and Christianity.

Those others include G. K. Chesterton; C. S. Lewis; Hilaire Belloc; in America, Whittaker Chambers – literary men whose early views were either Marxist or atheist or both (Lewis’ friend J. R. R. Tolkien wound up his journey as a profound Christian, but did not commence from a radical origin). Like these persuasive apologists, Muggeridge not only came to understand the gospel’s relevance to the contemporary world, but he was an extraordinarily gifted apostle, a missionary to his own people.

I recently came across Muggeridge’s thoughts inspired by, of all things, a caterpillar: “Quite often, waking up in the night as the old do, and feeling… like a butterfly released from its chrysalis stage and ready to fly away. Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth-crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely painted wings? If told, do they believe it? Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as theirs should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly’s? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads – no, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream.”

These are reflections not so much on the miracles of resurrection and of new life in Eternity – or, indeed, new life on earth after accepting Jesus – but upon humankind’s congenital disinclination to accept supernatural gifts of God. Deliverance? Healing? Forgiveness? Salvation? Eternal life with God? Available to ME? “No, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream.”

At another time, perhaps inspired by the same encounter with a caterpillar, Muggeridge was challenged by his friend William F Buckley, on the latter’s television program “Firing Line,” to invent a parable whose meaning was unambiguous.

“I was actually watching a caterpillar in the path of my garden, a furry caterpillar. And I thought to myself: Now, supposing the caterpillars have an annual meeting, the local society of caterpillars. And my caterpillar, an older caterpillar, addressing them, says: ‘You know, it’s an extraordinary thing, but we are all going to be butterflies.’

“‘Okay,’ the caterpillars say. ‘You poor fool, you are just like an old man who is frightened of dying, you’re inventing something to comfort yourself.’ [But] these are all the things that people say to me when I say I am looking forward to dying because I know that I am going to go into eternity. You see?”

Buckley asked, “Please explain.”

“And so he – the caterpillar – abashed, draws back, but in a short time he is in his chrysalis, and, sure enough, he’s right. He extricates himself from the chrysalis, and he is no longer a creeper, which is what caterpillars are; he is flying away.”

As before, the lesson I derive is not – I should say not ONLY – that there is a New Life. Because we know that truth from God’s word; from examples of uncountable transformed sinners; and because some of us have experienced profound inner, spiritual changes. And in terms less prosaic but no less miraculous, we see examples of amorphous tadpoles become distinctive bullfrogs, and, indeed, creepy caterpillars become beautiful butterflies.

But in the parable of Muggeridge there are, once again, the other factors as old as humankind’s sentience: doubt, skepticism, ridicule, denial, and the old “scientific proofs” against the miracles of God Almighty. These attacks, and myriad attackers, can be daunting to a lonely believer.

Yet that scenario does not affect, at all, the Truth. Yes, it is the case that we can be (and, as Christians, are in the process of being) transformed from ugly and common, to precious and unique. The Truth does not rely on people’s opinions of it. Neither do God’s promises wait for the world’s vote on whether He will keep them.

Muggeridge’s predecessor C. S. Lewis wrote of the night his frankly intense devotion to atheism was transformed, melting (kicking and screaming at first?) to a realization of the Fact of God’s existence: “You must picture me alone in that room… night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. … I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most… reluctant convert in all England.”

And the rest of his days were glorious. The author of “Mere Christianity” and “The Screwtape Letters,” as Malcolm Muggeridge was to do a generation later – and as you and I may do this week – spread his new and colorful wings in splendor, affirming God’s transformative power… as a new creation in Christ.

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I have taken us back a century or so, visiting names of great converts, great exegetes. We can also visit the 1970s, when the Jesus Movement and other manifestations of “Born-Again” Christianity swept the nation. A children’s song that was savored by adults too – still, to today, as we all are a little grayer or (in the case of singer-songwriter Barry McGuire) balder. But still appreciating the joy, and the truth, of “Bull Frogs and Butterflies.” From a backstage interview in Australia recently:

Click: Bullfrogs and Butterflies

10-28-13

Deeds of faith are mightier – more consequential, more lasting, more essential to our living – than physical deeds are. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, our souls and spirits must always squarely be in the Arena of Life, where a person’s “face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

And so with faith as well as deeds. I cannot imagine never being curious about new ideas, discovering new things, reading new (and old) books, attempting new projects, and (not to sound sappy) dreaming new dreams. I have said, and I hope we would all have this attitude, that I want my retirement party and my funeral to be on the same day. Life is more than about accumulating baubles.

But these sentiments are a cruel joke, worse than empty clichés, if not accompanied by the spiritual component. We can be “secure in our faith,” but that never means we should stop learning the Ways of God, or seeking after the Things of God, or obeying the Will of God. Just as other things in life attract us… except that the essentials of faith are more important. We can be, yes, secure in our faith, but it will be tested; in fact, over and over again. The tests are not what matters. What matters is our response to the tests.

To those people who continually seek the Truth, which I hope means all of us, there are many pitfalls and detours on the way to the destination. Read the classic book, second only to the Bible in terms of copies printed, but regrettably neglected today, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” And to continue the metaphor of a pathway to Truth, there is an enormous gap between Belief and the next station, Faith.

It would seem a small step, but it is not. My wife used to say that all the possible “head knowledge” was nothing compared to even a portion of “heart knowledge”; that is, faith. Even Solomon, in all his wisdom, writing three books of the Bible, building the Temple, lord of a wealthy, united Israelite kingdom, ultimately displayed belief but not as much faith. He wrote well, but acted little as a man of faith… and then he failed. He became apostate, married hundreds of wives and was seduced by their diverse pagan religions, and earned the enmity of God. He died broken in spirit, and his kingdom was split irrevocably, broken into contending provinces.

“Faith without works is dead,” but works without faith is like “building a house on shifting sand.” God forbid that any of us are like Solomon, writing and speaking and appearing to be wiser than we really are.

Faith is something we can have, and we must regard it is a living thing, not a relic or prize: it must be nurtured and fed. But it is also something we can DO – in philological terms, a verb as well as a noun – in that we must exercise it. Share it. Live it. And not an abstract faith that the world has kidnapped as a term – a synonym for optimism or self-assurance or goodwill. “Have faith,” “keep the faith,” can be empty terms, baby-steps, or maybe backward-steps. Romans 10:17 says that real faith “comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” This journey of ours is sometimes hard. Where could we be without the gift of Faith?

There is an even more precise definition of that Faith which we seek across the chasm. The Bible tells us, and wants us to learn through contemplation and experience: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

This is not a riddle for intellectuals. It is not a postulate for scientific measurements. It can be difficult to understand. But it is easy to accept. It is the wisdom of God.

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We can find biblical wisdom mirrored in secular works of art. The tragic tale of Dido and Aeneas, from Virgil’s epic poem, was written for the operatic stage; libretto by Nahum Tate, author of many hymns, music by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the greatest of all English composers. Its excruciatingly sad ending is “Dido’s Lament,” sung as the Queen of Carthage commits suicide because she thinks her lover, the Trojan hero, has abandoned her:

“Thy hand, Belinda. Darkness shades me, On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest.

“When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast. Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”

As with the unrelated story of Romeo and Juliet, the death was useless – tragic – because of misunderstanding. In fact Aeneas was rushing to her side even as she sang her dying words of love. But the lesson of great art, indeed the lesson of life, is not how we scheme to avoid the hard choices facing us, but how we exercise faith, and faithfulness, even to what the world calls “tragic” ends, as overcomers who will never dwell with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Please do not cheat yourself: Watch this brief vid, sung by the incomparable Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebo; graphics by animation student Ryan Woodwart. Goodnight, Nance.

Click: Dido’s Lament

10-21-13

My father, US Army Air Force captain, was involved in the D-Day invasion. He used to say that you could always tell the true military heroes at get-togethers: they were the ones who listened quietly and didn’t brag. The braggarts usually were the phonys, he said. What did he do on D-Day? “I was in the Weather Squadron,” he answered. “We just flew over the coast and battlefields, safely looking at clouds.” The toughest part for him, he said, was counting the planes, every day, of buddies who never returned to the English airfield at Bury-St-Edmunds in Suffolk.

There is a similar dynamic with prayer. Christ Himself warned us against the types who make big shows, loudly praying, in prominent places in the church. We are to emulate those who steal away and pray modestly; and give, even if only mites, like the humble widow did.

About personal prayer, we should be modest. We keep phone conversations quiet, or should; and a conversation with God is really no one else’s business. But sometimes Christians are quiet because… they just don’t know what to pray.

I suspect that two people who are among the first names we all would cite as the saintliest amongst us, Mother Teresa and Billy Graham, often had times they simply were at losses over exactly what to pray. Not to compare ourselves to them (believe me) but when our family conducted a hospital ministry after my wife’s heart and kidney transplants, and when, frequently, patients or families or spouses, or even doctors and nurses, would ask us with tears in their eyes, “Why?” – we discovered that sometimes the best answer was, “I don’t know either.” Honest prayers are starting- points. Presumption fools no one, least of all God.

Such a surrender of our almighty wills and self-important knowledge can be liberating. We should not always pray for answers: sometimes we should pray for understanding. Both goals may elude us, but to seek understanding requires trust, and faith, and surrender.

The Bible has a further solution for those moments of spiritual stammering. It is one reason that the Holy Ghost was sent into the world, in fact one of the job descriptions. “The Spirit also helps our weaknesses: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And He who searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26,27).

Body, mind, and spirit: they are not one, but our own trinities. When our bodies ache or we are troubled, and our minds stumble as we seek God… our spirits are able to connect with the Holy Spirit of God. We can pray in the Spirit, utter a gifted prayer language, or simply surrender our spirits to God. And we can feel it when that connection is made. Some Christians say “we know that we know that we know.” We not only communicate with the Father, we commune with Him at those moments.

Worse than being spiritually tongue-tied in moments of crisis or distress, is when we simply don’t feel like praying. Why approach God? We might be resentful; we can feel abandoned; frequently we are confused. But fear not; do not be discouraged. All the saints of history have confessed to occasionally having such emotions. Those who don’t, like those bragging war “heroes,” might not be truly seeking God anyway, but that’s their business. Our business, however, when we don’t feel like praying, is simple:

Do it anyway. Offer a “sacrifice of praise.”

“Let us go to Him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here, we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise – the fruit of lips that openly profess His Name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices, God is pleased.” Hebrews 8:13-16, NIV

Praise Him for His many gifts. For the fact that your problem is not worse. For the unspeakable joy that awaits the Christian. For a godly perspective on our challenges. For the problems that did not come our way. For the incarnation and sacrifice of God’s only Son for you. For a love so marvelous that a place has been prepared for you in glory. For… God so loved the world.

When you can’t think of what to pray, start with “Thank you.”

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Click: I Know How to Say Thank You

10-14-13

I’m going to conduct a little tour today. To a place called Beulah Land. It is a place of relationship, though not actual geography, mentioned in the Bible. It appears in John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” It is the subject of more than a dozen well-known hymns and gospel songs. Our brief journey here will look over that land as much for what Beulah is NOT, as much as what it is. A clearer picture of the Bible’s message is never a bad thing.

Many people, including some teachers and many hymn-writers, have assumed that Beulah Land is a picture of Heaven – if not an alternate name, then a poetic allegory. Such connections are also frequently ascribed to “Canaan Land,” “The Promised Land,” and other terms. They all point forward, spiritually, and are meant to encourage God’s people to persevere. But they are not literal nor allegorical nor biblical pictures of Heaven.

The reference to Beulah Land appears only once, actually, in the Bible, and only in earlier translations. Isaiah 62:4: “Thou shall no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shall be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah; for Jehovah delights in thee, and thy land shall be married.”

At a certain point in the history of Israel and Judah, those nations were apostate and they “married” themselves to foreign gods. The Lord had in fact briefly abandoned His people (Desolate, Forsaken) in response (Isa. 54:7), but the verse of chapter 62 refers to God later bringing them to the Holy City, called Hephzibah in this reconciliation. And the picture of a full, restored relationship with God – as a marriage would be – is called a state of Beulah.

Hephzibah means “My Delight Is in Her.” The word “Beulah” means “Married.” Neither, however, means Heaven. The recent English Standard Version translation is more literal: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.” A wonderful place to be… a blessed relationship there… a Land to strive toward… but not Heaven.

Many believers through the centuries have prayed to attain Beulah Land as Heaven, to live at least at in Beulah land as Heaven’s border region. The idea was propelled by the allegorical writer John Bunyan in “Pilgrim’s Progress” – “The Enchanted Ground is a place so nigh to the land Beulah, and so near the end of their race”; the place “where the sun shineth night and day.” A wondrous place, but… not Heaven.

Why do I think it is important that we recognize the distinction? What could be so bad about all the depictions of Beulah Land, a marriage relationship with the Lord?

As beautiful, paradisiacal, fragrant, pleasing, the Land of Beulah is – described by the most fervent writers, poets, and songwriters – and for all the images our spirits can summon, all the pictures of Beulah Land are NOTHING compared to what Heaven will be!

The Land of Beulah is wondrous because we compare it our lives here on earth. Having a relationship with God akin to a marriage is amazing. Yet Heaven will be all the more wondrous – superlative – and there we will have an eternal lifetime of joy with Him.

Is “the Good the enemy of the Perfect”? Sometimes. But our recognition of a Land of Beulah, the most beautiful place we can imagine, should not be substitute for seeking Heaven, the most beautiful place we can scarcely imagine. A Wedding is a happy day. A Marriage is a joyous life.

“I can see far down the mountain, Where I wandered weary years,
Often hindered in my journey By the ghosts of doubts and fears.
Broken vows and disappointments, Thickly sprinkled all the way,
But the Spirit led, unerring, To the land I hold today.”

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We closed with lines from what is probably the most familiar hymns about Beulah Land. This version is sung by Squire Parsons, who also wrote another song that is beloved in the contemporary church, “Sweet Beulah Land.”

Click: “Is Not This the Land of Beulah”

10-7-13

Many popular sayings that are regarded as embodying folk wisdom are, in fact, as crumbly as the fortune cookies where they should stay. I have always been struck by how almost every handy, traditional capsule of folk wisdom is cancelled by another such time-honored saying. “Look before you leap”? But… “He who hesitates is lost.” You can “roll with the punches” OR “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” And so forth.

I recently thought the oft-quoted Thomas Wolfe aphorism “You can’t go home again” when I did in fact visit the home in New York City where I was born, and the address in the New Jersey suburbs where I was reared. I drove from the Philadelphia Christian Writer’s Conference with my friend Shawn Kuhn, who was born in a different neighborhood of Queens. We were each a little surprised that our neighborhoods were clean, appeared safe, and had not fallen prey to real or clichéd urban blight: just the opposite.

Later in the week, with my sister Barbara, we visited the address of our adolescent years – I call it such because it was recently razed and replaced with what regretful “natives” like me are calling “McMansions,” ridiculous mini-estates on half acres. Most of the new owners likely suffer from the affliction common to parvenus, the Edifice Complex.

It was sad to see my home no longer there; our Village School boarded up; the town’s Swim Club closed and overgrown; and the church of our youth condemned, doors chained closed, neglected.

However. Paging Thomas Wolfe: “You CAN go home again.” I understand that I am supposed to understand that the past is past, a rose is a rose, and all those other syllogisms. The more important facts relate not to whether our parents have died, or our homes have been demolished, but what value they had in our development. The important corners of our memories. Then, the question is not whether we can “go home,” but whether those “homes,” our foundational values, can, or should, ever leave us.

I will call someone else, George Santayana, into the discussion, and mangle his own famous aphorism: “Those who forget the past are not only in danger of repeating it, but of having no past at all.”

I recently quoted Theodore Roosevelt in this space: “Both life and death are parts of the same great adventure.” And we should be reminded that Wolfe’s adage refers to the emotions and our intellectual growth, as much as nostalgic real-estate tours. My childhood is not a house; it was spent in a home that stood there. What I am, or have achieved, as a man is no less real because my parents died after my formative years. The chapel of my affectionate memories is gone, all the more bitter because it stands as a skeleton; but my faith was not diminished because the doors are chained shut.

Indeed, the pasts we miss and the futures we distrust are seldom pieces of real estate or schoolrooms or, say, battlefields. They are of the mind, the intellect, of life-choices, emotions… in fact, the spiritual realm.

Even when we know this fact, whether we are filled with joy or anxiety, it is easy to forget: a most human part of our humanity. My heart currently grieves for the director of the writer’s conference Shawn and I attended, because she is beset by personal problems, health trials facing herself and family members, business challenges galore… (Please look for the website of Write His Answer Ministries and see the wonderful things Marlene Bagnull has done and is doing)

Christians know the Author all good things, and know who is the enemy of our souls, who comes to seek, and kill, and destroy. Words are cheap (if I can cite another old cliché) but, being a frequent victim of discouragement myself, I feel qualified to remind anyone who will listen that there is a Larger Story. We cannot always see it. But we need to remember it.

“I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee,” Joshua 1: 5.

We call to our memories: we should summon the best of them. They call to us. And, whether our children live near or far, we should always be in the mode of calling them home too. Just as our Heavenly Father does to us.

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We can visit our old houses, or not. But we remember our homes. When parts of our past remember us, so to speak – “call to us” – it doesn’t mean we look backward, either to change course or to summon regrets. We are reminded, properly, that life is a continuity of traditions and values. Memories of homes, schools and churches are represented by parents, calling; just as we will be calling our children “home.” The classic song by Doyle Lawson, sung by Emmylou Harris.

Click: Calling Our Children Home

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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9-23-13

A theme song of cynics – there are many; many cynics and many are their themes – is the famous sentiment written by Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” (Julius Caesar, Act 3, i). But the hopeful among us must see that this is honored in the breach, that the exception proves the rule. We must not merely be convinced that fights for righteousness and honor and creative expression are worth the fight in this difficult life… but that the fight ITSELF, not only the goal, is worthy.

Cynicism is challenged by uncountable examples of service and sacrifice by kind souls, by acts of charity, a word whose original meaning is “love.” Challenged in the over-arching sense by the work of weary toilers in the fields who sometimes are bent but never broken. And in the very personal examples of artists who die without ever knowing the effect their work eventually has on other people. There are stories we all know from history.

We think of van Gogh; of Poe; of the composer Schubert and the novelist John Kennedy Toole… and of Eva Cassidy.

Some serious critics have called Eva the greatest American vocalist. Do you ask, “Who?” Her relatively sparse playlist has swept record charts around the world. Some of the era’s greatest singers and producers have attested to her uniqueness. The acclaim and sales have all come years after she died. Eva was born in Washington DC in 1963. Self- (and dad-) taught on several instruments, she listened to the great performers of several genres she rapidly mastered herself: blues, jazz, gospel, country, pop standards.

Eva played in several clubs in the Washington area. A college town, DC is replete with jazz clubs, music venues, performance clubs. As a student there myself in ancient times, I was privileged to enjoy, in places like the Cellar Door, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Randy Scruggs before they were nationally famous. Later, Eva Cassidy attracted a local following and made a few CDs, but her fame was fairly restricted to the District. Pros and record execs who heard her music were astonished, but many of them simply did not know in which category to place her. All of them later regretted their short-sightedness. Her voice was angelic (if angels were to sing the blues); her interpretations were miraculously emotional; her guitar style was unique.

When she was 30 she had a malignant tumor removed from her neck. Three years later she was dead, the melanoma having survived within her body, spread to bones and lungs. After her diagnosis (three to five months to live, no hope of survival) she returned once more to her stage of choice, DC’s Blues Alley, and sang “What a Wonderful World.” That choice, as much as hearing her music, confirms what a wonderful person, not merely a musical talent, Eva Cassidy was.

But it was five full years after her death before the world really heard about her, and heard her. A stray CD made its way the BBC Radio studios in London. Airplay on a morning show lit up the proverbial switchboard. Fast-forward this story to Number One on British record charts; five CDs in the Top 150; continuing presence in England and Ireland, especially, but also Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Australia… and, finally, America; and sales exceeding 10-million CDs.

It is easy to lapse (thusly) into numbers and statistics. But it was Eva Cassidy’s astonishing talent, and her effect on listeners, that is the story. She had a gift for making mundane lyrics special, for discovering spiritual nuances in standard love songs, for making happy tunes blues-y and turning sad ballads hopeful.

That her “success” is posthumous is ironic at least. Yet once we take account of life’s vicissitudes, we should take heart. The good that we may do DOES live on “after our bones are interred.” When we do the Lord’s work, sharing hope and sunshine, we are eager to see the “seeds” we plant take root and bloom. But we don’t always know if, or when, it will happen. Mostly, we cannot know. As servants of the Word, it really is the Holy Spirit’s job to “close the deals,” and we should resist the temptation of pride if we are too concerned with the seeds we plant. We can plant those seeds; we can even cultivate; but only God can make life grow.

In fact there is a legitimate spiritual satisfaction in not knowing these details. When writers, artists, singers, songwriters, poets, and all people graced with God’s creativity set their works out (as it were) like baby Moses in a basket, among the reeds and into unknown waters, we don’t know who will discover them. But, trusting the God whom we serve by serving our fellow men and women, untold numbers of people, and their families after them, may be profoundly touched. Even if one person’s spirit responds, we have done our jobs.

If we, any of us, exercise the talents wherewith we have been graced, if we see our lives as parts of the cultural continuum of civilization, just as we are woven with the scarlet threads of redemption, then some of us might be the next van Goghs, Poes, Schuberts, Tooles, and Eva Cassidys. And be content that the value is in the working and the works, not the accolades of the world. And the rest of us? We can feel blessed that we are witnesses of these great talents.

Remember the Yogi Berra quotation, “It ain’t over till it’s over”? Memo to Yogi: sometimes it only BEGINS when it’s “over.” The theme song of THAT truth is sung by Eva Cassidy.

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One of the only videos of Eva Cassidy singing is an amateur camcorder capture of her and her guitar at Blues Alley. It often brings tears to viewers’ eyes for the unique interpretation and commonly untapped meanings from a pop standard previously considered without spiritual depth. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was recorded the year of Eva’s death, 1996. I commend this performance to you, and its compelling whisper to your soul: “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true. … If happy little bluebirds fly above the rainbow, why, oh why, can’t I?” When Eva sang, she made it a spiritually rhetorical question: We can.

Click: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

9-16-13

Either God exists, or He doesn’t.

The question this statement poses, among uncountable other speculative, philosophical, ontological, and even religious questions, is THE most basic and most important that can be asked of human beings, or any beings.

As someone who is secure in the answer, I was confronted by the question this week in a way that never escapes anyone’s imaginings. The Voyager I spacecraft, NASA announced, has left the friendly confines of our solar system. Not the universe, of course, for that ends… well, we are not quite sure where. But Voyager has crossed the border of our Sun’s “bubble” of “plasma” – charged electrons in “empty” space whose density changed, though differently than expected, when Voyager passed over the line into interstellar “space.”

The inherent limitations of conceptualizing scientific facts, no less than imperfectly understanding scientific theories, has us turn to inverted commas and air-quotes. I will save electrons, myself, by dropping all these quotation marks. But we should keep them at the ready, because they represent the intellectual crutches we often need when discussing such things. We – humans – know more and more every day; by one estimate, every eight months we discover and learn more things than in all of mankind’s previous history. Yet even with Voyager the assumptions about the density of outer-space electrons, in these otherwise empty-seeming neighborhoods of the universe, have been revised. Interstellar plasma is acting differently than scientists predicted. And brand-new questions about magnetic forces in space, not just as carried by solar wind inside the solar system, have presented themselves.

My brain starts to hurt too, despite the thrill of such data. Perhaps we will learn more when Voyager reaches its next sun’s neighborhood. Be sure to stock up on provisions, if you plan to wait for that news; that will not happen for another 40,000 years. Such is the vastness of our universe.

By then, Voyager probably still will be hurtling along, but its information-gathering and transmitting facilities expired. Interestingly, the probe, which was launched in 1977, has computers far less complex than of any smartphone today. It records data on… yes, an 8-track cassette. And it sends that data back to earth by a 20-watt signal. By comparison, a radio station near where I live has a thousand-watt transmitter, and can be heard for a range of 25 miles or so. Yet, we launched Voyager, it observes, and we learn: a modern, and more peaceful, turn on Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Amidst this week’s tsunami of news of wars, rumors of wars, crises, corruption, killings and beheadings, revolutions, disasters of weather, economies, and human folly, we have this news that takes our minds (and I hope the imaginations of our spirits) to other things. Out of this world. Almost by definition, eternal things. If you didn’t see photos or artist conceptions, or movies of distant solar systems and planets, watch the video whose link is at the end of this essay. We inevitably are in awe.

In awe of what? There is that question again. If God doesn’t exist, the theories of atheists and agnostics and secularists about when the universe was formed, why it was formed, and how it was formed are interesting (or not) only as speculation.

Although theories abound, no one comes close – absent the God Proposition – to advancing any sort of a definitive idea about when the universe began (including the question of what was here previously, wherever here is); how large the universe is (when the question includes “what, then, lies beyond its borders?”); and how, just how, then, did we get here? There are scientific ideas… that often change. And these questions are lights-years from the larger question facing scientists: Why?

The fact that no human has, by oneself, answers for such questions does not automatically prove the existence of God. There is no proof, which is why it is called Faith. But it does suggest a universal prerequisite, humility, when one addresses such questions without what I call the God Proposition.

My explanation of why many “intelligent” (yes, I will resurrect the quotation marks) people reject God is that we all of us have a latent desire to BE God, to be in control of our situations, to have all the answers. Unfortunately, among the primitive, including sophisticated primitives, this leads to superstition. At the other extreme it leads to oppression, destruction, and death; that is, when clever and resourceful men presume to be gods, the eternal temptation consumes. Never has a mortal been able to benignly control others – an oxymoronic concept anyway – when none ever has been able to control his own self, and the “base passions” of our spiritual DNA… absent the God Proposition.

More than the rudimentary computer systems on Voyager was something of greater significance. In the hope that the craft might meet some alien civilization in a remote part of the universe, it carried a unique payload – a copper and gold alloy disk (estimated by its designers “to last a billion years”) with greetings in 115 earth-languages; some images of our species and schematic maps of earth; and music. The first selection was a recording of the Second Brandenburg Concerto, first movement, by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed by Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Orchestra. Among the playlist of global music, Bach was the only composer represented thrice; the Gavotte from the Violin Partita No. 3, and the Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 were the other pieces chosen to represent humankind’s creative profile.

Biologist Lewis Thomas was asked what he would have nominated for this message to unknown civilizations. “The complete works of J.S. Bach,” he said. “But that would be boasting.” I love the (proper) tribute to mankind’s greatest music-maker, but it is interesting that our greetings, our physical likenesses, and our greatest artistic expressions were sent aboard Voyager, in hopes of telling the Universe about us.

… but, significantly, the designers and programmers chose to skip the crowded narratives of human history that are filled, like this week’s headlines, or any week’s headlines, with war, cruelty, murder, and oppression. A half-truth can be no different than a lie. We wanted to show what earth is like, what humanity has done. We just wanted to sanitize the story.

But in my view, there comes that “God Proposition” once again. The dirty little secret, deep down in all our souls, is that our natures are sinful, and many humans have tended to kick and scratch and resist God… but there is also a part of us that yearns for the God who sees good things, and has created good things, and wants to share good things. Part of us – because God planted such yearnings – seeks the good: sometime, occasionally, we have the same impulses as our God.

We don’t need to understand every little (unknowable) thing about the universe and God; we do need to accept Him. It should not be difficult! We cannot be God, no matter how hard some will try. And though we know Him imperfectly, and even love Him imperfectly, we can rest assured that He knows us, and He loves us, perfectly.

Just look at the stars and the galaxies and the universe, fellow voyager.

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I chose another of Johann Sebastian Bach’s immortal works, the second movement of his Third Orchestral Suite, BWV 1068, commonly known as “Air On the G-String.” Images are from NASA probes, including from the Hubbell Space Telescope. N.B.: the text’s passage about Bach’s music aboard Voyager is adapted from my biography of Bach published by Thomas Nelson, 2011.

Click: Bach’s Air On the G-String

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

8-26-13

It is a familiar scene this time of year. Children go off to school, some walking up the steps of the yellow school bus, some into the front doors of the school where you drop them off, some into the car, off to college. Familiar scenes; also familiar feelings, at least for parents.

Separation anxiety, of sorts. Landmarks. Turning points. All very emotional. For me, as a father, these scenes were especially emotional, because my children appeared to seldom notice anything special at all about them. Tra la la, they couldn’t wait to board the buses or run for the schoolyard. The most sentiment ever displayed was my son Ted’s annoyance at my insistence to photograph him on the porch, each first day of school year after year (because, um, I KNEW that some day he would cherish the memories) (that day might yet arrive).

It all threatened to get really slobbery when they went off to college. At those points I was ready to grab each of my three kids around their ankles, unwilling to let them go. They reflected no such emotion. I have chalked this all up, by the way, to their active sense of curiosity and adventure, nothing to do with me being the Weirdest Dad On the Street, proven by such episodes.

OK, I exaggerate a little (I tend to exaggerate at least a million times a day). But we need to remember – which means, when I write it, that I often forget – that the “saddest” things in life really are sometimes the sweetest.

When we sign up to be parents, part of the contract is to let go some day. Actually day by day. It is not a mixed blessing, even if we get, in the immortal words of Maynard G. Krebs, misty in those moments. In a recent essay I quoted Theodore Roosevelt, when he said that both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure. Likewise, no less, are dirty diapers, silly tantrums, going off to school, asking for help with homework, the first date, the second broken heart, going off to college or the military, and watching them get married.

“Time and Chance happeneth to all,” we are reminded – and we do need reminders – in Ecclesiastes. If God sees sparrows falling to the ground, He also sees them when they leave the nest… and fly. If Mama Sparrow is not sad about that (which is my guess), neither should we regard our tears as anything but droplets of joy.

Our first born, Heather, I assumed to be exceptional from her first breath, so when she was three months old or so, I festooned the house with large signs labeling everything, just to help her to read a day or two sooner than otherwise. My son Ted entered a more sensible world. Our youngest, Emily, we knew would be our last child. My subliminal response to this, I now realize, was to keep her a baby forever, to preserve her like amber in childhood (hers, not mine). I tried to hide from her the knowledge of things like bicycles and solid food.

I kid again, a little, but rearing children, after all, is more about your values at the time than their “molded” personalities afterward. It is unavoidable, and not to be regretted but rather celebrated. Savor it all, parents, even the separation of day care, summer camp, or college in some state you cannot locate on a map.

Part of God’s sweet plan of life is that when you have children, and nurture them, and train them, and endure (and share) all the dramas of childhood, the hours drag by slowly.

… but when the kids have left home, for whatever the myriad reasons, the years then go by quickly. Remember that, while you still have the gift of remembering.

One of Emily’s friends is Amy Duke Sanchez, whom we would not know except for having “let go” of Emily when she left for a faraway college right about this time of year. Recently AmyDuke forwarded to me a very wise saying – “Don’t ask God for anything until you’ve thanked Him for everything.” That is not merely a template for constructing your prayers.

It is a reminder to stop and think about the implications of “everything.” We know that all things can work for good, and we need to see that our momentary regrets, especially in this, the Season of Empty Nests, can really be puzzle-pieces in God’s eternal and joyful plan.

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Even after mxplf years (gee, how strange: a typo) since my youngest went off to college, I still get as misty as Maynard G. Krebs when I listen to Suzy Bogguss’s bittersweet classic about a child’s Rite of Passage, “Letting Go.” The lyrics about the empty nest, and turning the page on memories, are wonderfully captured in the video with the song. Please treat yourself.

Click: Letting Go

8-19-13

I attended a local theater production of “Fiddler on the Roof” this week. The legendary musical and the Yiddish story that inspired it concern themselves with assimilation, and, of course, tradition – the writer Sholem Aleichem was a sensitive genius – but I found myself, this week, seeing it as a strong treatment of the relationship of fathers and daughters.

One reason might be that this week was the first anniversary of my granddaughter Sarah’s birth; followed after nine days by her death. The precious preemie, in the words on the grave marker her parents placed over the tiny casket, will always be loved and never forgotten.

We cannot quantify, and scarcely begin a manner to measure, the loss and grief in the hearts of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, when death visits us. “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure,” said a hero of mine, Theodore Roosevelt. He wrote this after his son Quentin was killed in a World War I dogfight over French battlefields; we he left unsaid is the anguish of those left behind as others join that Great Adventure. And those who watch die a child not yet of the age of knowing.

I thought further about the notable paucity of father-daughter relationships in sacred writings, mythology, and literature. Unless there is a hole in my memory (and I invite discussion) the subtext of Aleichem’s story is a rare theme. Think: most of the resonant generational male-female stories in the myths of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. are mother-son, not father-daughter. Isis married her brother and became mother of Horus. The legend of Oedipus was, famously, a son-mother tale. The complicated cosmogony of Roman deities was comprised of some father-daughter relationships, as of course anything emanating from life, real or invented, cannot avoid – however, virtually all of the significant relational myths are father-son, brother-brother, or, sometimes, mother-son.

In the Bible it is rather the same. Fathers have daughters, of course, but the significant stories and lessons seldom involved fathers and their daughters. Adam and Eve had two sons; Noah had three. Abraham was challenged to sacrifice his son… with the attendant emotions and reflections readers cannot avoid. Indeed, God the Father arranged that His only begotten Son be sacrificed. Lot’s daughters? Not our role models. Naomi and Ruth: meaningful story, but not father-daughter. We revere Mary through the Magnificat, and empathize with her presence at the cross and the tomb, but by inference.

In literature we find, again, numerous enough examples of fathers and daughters, but portrayals are seldom invested with the cathartic implications of male-to-male relationships, or mothers-and-sons. Curious, really. Often, characters who are the daughters of fathers are cast as manifestations of rebellion or symbols of fulfillment – filling roles of the weak paterfamilias. Interesting literary devices, but, again, failing to examine the love, the special love, that exists between father and daughter.

A few examples: Shakespeare’s daughters often were social surrogates more than generational, emotional partners. In “Romeo and Juliet,” Juliet came of age and was willful in part because her father, Capulet, was not. The rebellions of Desdemona and Jessica (in “Othello” and “Merchant of Venice”) were as two-dimensional as the compliance of Ophelia in “Hamlet”; that is, bereft of mature love. Pure hate we see in the daughters Goneril and Regan in the tragedy of tragedies, “King Lear,” while their sister Cordelia is an exception that proves my rule.

In more recent literature, the daughters in the novels and plays of Goldsmith, and the novels of Austen where they rose to be lead characters, asserted themselves almost always as patient surrogates for weak-willed fathers. Their fulfillment usually was prompted as much by duty, or pity, as much as by love. The same can largely be said of the daughters in Thackeray and Dickens.

Well, I have broken my intention of keeping this introduction to a compelling riddle brief. I will segue by wondering (a facile escape, not a logical answer) whether fables, and the Bible, and literature, come up short on treatments of father-daughter bonds for same reason they seldom address why the sky is blue or why trees are made of wood: the obvious need not be addressed. But 10,000 speculative essays cannot convey the truth, and the depth, of father-daughter love as to experience, as a shy and crusty bad dancer, the invitation to dance with your daughter to the corny “Daddy’s Little Girl” at her wedding reception.

So the “Fiddler” performance reinforced my thoughts on the anniversary of Sarah’s death. Early and in distress, she lived only nine days.

Pain and sorrow, especially for Pat and my Heather and Sarah’s two brothers Gabe and Zach, will never disappear and scarcely dissipate, although God grants peace and acceptance in His measurements of grace.

From the blog Heather started after Sarah’s death (http://sarahs-baby-steps.blogspot.com/ ):
“Can I let you know that grief isn’t like a pit that you climb out of or like a fork in the road that you walk away from? Our grief and sadness will be a part of our lives until we are reunited with Sarah in heaven. We are healing from the ‘rawness’ of the grief, but we still have difficult moments…. I’ve heard it said that we learn from our children even as we are teaching them and I believe that is true…. We didn’t know Sarah personally very long, but the experience of having known her and then dealing with the grief of missing her has changed us deeply.”

There is a way that fathers can bond with departed daughters… or any readers, with any families of babies who have died. After Sarah died, a nurse offered a dress that was, sadly, unused in a similar situation, for a photo to be taken. Heather continues the story: “We decided to just lay the dress on Sarah and tuck it around her so as not to move her much. It was a beautiful white crocheted dress with a pink rosette and was just what I had envisioned for her baptism dress. Later, after pictures, I asked about it and if they had lots of dresses–I assumed there was a closet-full. [The nurse] said that she had been given the dress awhile ago and told to give it to a family who needed it. For whatever reason, she felt we were the right family. That kindness shown to us and our daughter took a bit of the rawness out of the day. Our girl was ‘dressed up’ for a bit and we got to have sweet pictures taken as a family.

“We started a fund to provide dresses to families whose preemies are in the NICU where Sarah was. Much more was generously given that we ever thought. The [nurse] says that the donations given in Sarah’s name ‘have currently purchased over 75 beautifully handmade layette sets for infants and their grieving families.'”

What a beautiful concept. If anyone is moved, please consider a donation. See below.

Otherwise, take a moment any time (or many times) during the anniversary of Sarah’s life, Aug. 14-23, and remember a brief life, a tender life situation, a lost life… the precious gift of Life itself, in all its ways and promise.

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“Going Home” has become a sacred song for those who have passed from life. It is actually a Negro spiritual based on the tune of the second movement of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” Performed here, in church, by the London churchboy’s choir Libera.

Click: Going Home

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NICU Dress fund
Donations can be made to “William Beaumont Hospital NICU” in memory of Sarah Shaw…. We would like to provide dresses in Sarah’s memory for other families who have to say goodbye to their little girls. This is a fund we started to support families in their grief. Checks or micro-preemie dresses (button or closures in the back, please) may be sent to William Beaumont Hospital, 3601 W. Thirteen Mile Rd. Royal Oak, MI 48073-6769 Attn: Mara Sipols). Please put “Sarah Shaw” in the memo of checks so your donation goes to the right fund.

8-11-13

A friend, the noted theatrical impresario Charles Putnam Basbas, recently forwarded one of those oft-forwarded internet stories to me. The story of a miracle baby born prematurely, it was not outrageously implausible (not to me anyway; my children were born 10 weeks, five weeks, and eight weeks early around 30 years ago when those factors were dicey; and they had, and have, healthy, robust lives). Yet this story, as full of meaning as of surprises, checked out as true when I pursued “truth or fiction” sites.

Maybe you, too, have read it:

The Smell of Rain

A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. She was still groggy from surgery. Her husband, David, held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news. That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24 weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency Cesarean to deliver couple’s new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing.

At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature. Still, the doctor’s soft words dropped like bombs.

“I don’t think she’s going to make it,” he said, as kindly as he could. “There’s only a 10 per cent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one.”

Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Danae would likely face if she survived. She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.

“No! No!” was all Diana could say. She and David, with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away.

But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Danae’s underdeveloped nervous system was essentially “raw,” the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn’t even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love. All they could do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl.

There was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there. At last, when Danae turned two months old. her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chances of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero, Danae went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.

[Five years later] Danae was a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an unquenchable zest for life. She showed no signs whatsoever of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she was everything a little girl can be and more. But that happy ending is far from the end of her story.

One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting in her mother’s lap in the bleachers of a local ball park where her brother Dustin’s baseball team was practicing.
As always, Danae was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby, when she suddenly fell silent . Hugging her arms across her chest, little Danae asked, “Do you smell that?”

Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, “Yes, it smells like rain.”

Danae closed her eyes and again asked, “Do you smell that?”

Once again, her mother replied, “Yes, I think we’re about to get wet. It smells like rain.”

Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, “No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on his chest.”

Tears blurred Diana’s eyes as Danae happily hopped down to play with the other children. Before the rains came, her daughter’s words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along.

During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.

Back to MMMM. As I noted, in recent years, Danae’s story has circulated on the internet. It first was published in Richard L. Scott’s book, Miracles In Our Midst: Stories of Life, Love, Kindness, and Other Miracles (Wessex House). Scott, the former CEO of Columbia Health Systems and currently the Republican governor of Florida, sought out tales of triumph over medical odds. Danae’s story (then titled “Heaven Scent”) is his favorite. That little girl Danae, without knowing it, has inspired many people. An angel, in her own way.

To me, the spiritual “icing on the cake” to this story Charlie forwarded was someone’s legend at the bottom:

ANGELS EXIST, but sometimes, since they don’t all have wings, we call them FRIENDS.

And this summation reminded me of a song with a spiritual message, sung by a secular singer, the great Delbert McClinton (who is great even when Vince Gill and Lee Roy Parnell are not backing him up…) —

Click: Sending Me Angels (Just Like You)

8-5-13

A guest message by one of my great friends and a most insightful and sensitive writer, Leah C. Morgan:

I’ve never been acquainted with stress. People throw the claim around, and plenty act like they indeed really are stressed over everything, but it’s always been a stranger to me. Now because of some recent challenges I am fighting to push the weight off my chest, to keep the sickness in my gut at bay.
 
Here’s how. My husband Bonnard has been teaching on Creation and Evolution at church. We have talked about laws of probability and physics, many wonderful things. But the facts presented last week did something supernatural for me: facts inspired my faith.
 
If the distance from the earth to the sun were represented by the thickness of a single sheet of paper, do you know how close we are to the next nearest star? Using the same scale, we would need a 71-foot stack of paper to span the distance. We would need 310 miles of stacked paper of that normal thickness to reach outside our galaxy. And 31-million miles of stacked paper to reach the end of the galaxy known to us.
 
If the sun were hollow, it could hold 1,300,000 earths. But the star Antares could hold 64-million suns! And the star Hercules could hold 100-million Antares; and the star Epsilon could hold 125- million Hercules.
 
“What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?”
 
The earth that we live on, and love, is smaller than a speck in the universe; and I am microscopically smaller than that. And yet God tunes his ear to my pleas, He listens to my cries for help and my words of adoration, and is moved for me.

I know He is near. He’s so far away in the vast, wide sum of his creation, but yet He is close by. I’m so absolutely convinced of His love for me. He is for me. For some reason, like a love that’s bigger than Epsilon, He’s interested and compassionate and busy for me.
 
The weight on my chest is gone, the crowded thoughts in my mind are swept clear, when I think that although I might need a telescope to see God, He’s got a microscope on me. 

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The group of “Christian Tenors” known as Sing! Tenore is comprised of Shane Wiebe, Jason Catron, and Mark David Williams. On this vid, illustrating Leah’s spiritual cosmology, they perform, with the Prague Orchestra, “This Is My Father’s World.”

Click: This Is My Father’s World

7-29-13

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

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

But that does not mean it is not truthful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Tears Of an Angel

7-22-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Worship at Taizé

7-15-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: This World Is Not My Home

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

5-13-13

“To sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief: that is a fate more terrible than dying.” So declared Joan of Arc. “One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it.” Joan was a martyr, but she was also a revolutionary. No less a hero of the faith was Martin Luther a few centuries later. Offered a pardon from excommunication, torture, and death if he merely recanted his written opinions, he declined and said to his accusers words that have thundered through the ages: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Heresies nibbled around the edges of the early Church two thousand years ago. Often they were persuasive enough to some believers that creeds were codified in order to resist error. “What do we believe? Let us keep things fresh in our minds, and write these principles down, that we might meditate on them, and bequeath them, properly, to our children.”

Today most churches have forgotten the creeds. Protestant churches often ignore them. Many churches no longer recite the Lord’s Prayer. There is no vacuum, however: their places have been filled by rituals like Exchanging the Peace. “Peace be with you.” A holy kiss. A three-pat hug. We care, as Christ commended. Programs exist to facilitate, and prove, that caring impulse, for all the world to see.

The impulses that Jesus admonished us to adopt, as His followers – charity, for instance – frequently have been co-opted by governments. It would be wrong to say that the Modern State has been a pickpocket or a thief of our prerogatives and rights and inclinations, however. Contemporary Christians largely have surrendered the traditional tenets of their faith, willingly ceding the role of the church to the state. No “separation” there.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” So declared Satan in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Book I, 254-255. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (263).

The Bible predicts that in the End Times, people will call evil good, and good evil. Even the saints – devout churchgoers – will be deceived. Even believers will have “itching ears” ready to listen to perversions of the Truth and excuses for immorality.

In recent days the trial of a Philadelphia abortionist accused by his employees of killing babies after live births, and causing the deaths of some mothers, has trickled through the filters of news media that do not think such atrocities are newsworthy… or blameworthy. He was found guilty, and Planned Parenthood hoped the killing would continue… but in facilities “cleaner” than Philadelphia’s angel of death. A Cleveland man is accused of imprisoning three girls as sex slaves for a decade, inducing abortions by physical abuse. Elsewhere, judges who prevent 15-year-old girls from having aspirin pills or cigarettes in school, ruled that girls of that age, and younger – no age restrictions – can buy “abortion pills” over the counter, with no doctors’ approvals nor parental notifications.

We have been taught that ancient cultures practiced infant sacrifice to appease their gods, and we have been taught to regard those societies as triangulated somewhere in the middle of barbaric, primitive, and deluded. Just so. But what is it about our own culture – Our GDP and economy? wide-screen TVs? iPods? college degrees? sports cars? – that makes us any different?

We sacrifice children, even babies, to the gods of Convenience, of Lust, of Selfishness, of Political Correctness. The older cultures burned babies on flaming pyres, or threw them into volcanoes. We sever babies’ necks and toss them into dumpsters, or let them sift between the culture’s cracks into basement dungeons or for sale to “trafficking” networks.

This, in Christian America. Or what has become – let us be honest, no longer “threatening” to become – Post-Christian America.

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How many of us long to return to simpler times? Do we need to be in the shadow of Solomon’s Temple? Is there no substitute for the fire of the First-Century Church? Should we burn with the fervor of biblical reform, as did Martin Luther? Must we sit under “hard preaching,” as Puritans under Jonathan Edwards? Maybe. But some of us would just like to live in a world, again, where a simple “mother’s faith” nurtured us, protected us, guided us. And these scenes were sacred, not ridiculed.

Click: My Mother’s Faith

4-15-13

One of the very tantalizing aspects of Bible scholarship is when you come upon different versions of the same events. Professional skeptics pounce upon “different facts,” ready to assert that Scripture contradicts itself, and therefore cannot be true. But I said “different versions,” not “different facts.” In fact it is more than tantalizing to see how the Bible is full of nuance and shades of meaning and diverse descriptions – all bringing a richness to believers in its message.

Similarities in God’s word, His message, are pathways leading to the same goal. Besides, any seeming contradictions are not really anomalies at all, and never involve important points of doctrine. Skeptics huff and puff about unimportant matters.

Sometimes Christians do, too.

There are reasons for the existence of hundreds of denominations, sometimes very good reasons. From the days of the Apostles, heresies and false doctrines emerged. It would be a logical goal of Satan to destroy the Church. But there are bad reasons for the existence of hundreds of denominations, also; sometimes very bad reasons. Corruption, pride, jealousy, ignorance, flawed traditions, all are elements of false doctrines and tragic schisms.

Religionists can be obsessed with How many angels can dance on the head of a pin… and skeptics crowd at their elbows, debating loudly why angels cannot dance on the heads of no stinkin’ pins. Accusers and apologists, renegades and religionists, can drown out everything, and every one, around them, sometimes.

Meanwhile, humble and quiet, is the Truth of God. It really needs no army to enforce its views. And it is impervious to the attacks of those who hate it. It was bequeathed modestly, offered to God’s children for their instruction, and, along the way, their unspeakable joy and eternal security. On the other side, it savagely has been attacked by brutal governments, fanatical leaders, seductive intellectuals, and physical persecution during every moment of humankind’s existence… and it stands, pure and strong and unassailable as ever.

Some of the last words Jesus spoke to His disciples, after Resurrection, are recorded with slight nuances by the gospel writers. Again, whether we take away Jesus referring to Jews and gentiles, or Jews THEN gentiles; or “authority to teach” or “authority including healing”… are perhaps deliberately open to phantasms of opportunity. To those who seek the full import, and not those who love disputes. Listen to what has come to be known as the Great Commission:

“The… disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20)

I am going to suggest that even the broader points, not just the nuances, of the Great Commission, are sometimes lost on Christians. This was the Great Commission, not the Great Suggestion; so, we can agree on its importance. The to-do list, such as it was, is little more than 1) going; 2) making disciples; 3) baptizing people; and 4) teaching them to obey.

The story of the church for two millennia has played out through point Number 2. Religion has been at its most innovative, and least consistent. It has produced its softest individuals (saintly missionaries) and harshest hordes (Crusaders and Inquisitors), all in the name of “making disciples.”

Discipling means “coming alongside,” or inviting people to come alongside you. Then, in this broad swath of establishing emotional connections, we can imitate the Christ. Therein lies the way to make disciples.

We can be so serene that troubled souls desire “what we have.” We can know the Commands of God and the Words of Christ so that people want to learn what is hidden in our hearts. We can live changed lives so that folks who are hurting want to walk our new walk. Discipleship probably is evanescent unless we exhibit these types of “witness,” as Jesus did – quiet, modest, truthful, secure.

Modern pastors bleat about the “power of story” in their preaching (forgetting that Jesus relied on parables… but let them have their fun) – and often wind up telling stories about themselves, not the Savior. Postmodern theologians prattle about meta-narratives and relational truth, hopefully impressing people with words, words, words, to quote Hamlet.

But there is wisdom for the humblest friend of a troubled friend, or the most prominent evangelist: Tell them the story of Jesus. Nothing more. And nothing less. And all things will be added to it. It has all the elements that will draw people to Him.

Tell them the story of Jesus, Write on their hearts every word;
Tell them the story most precious, Sweetest that ever was heard.
Tell how the angels in chorus, Sang as they welcomed His birth,
“Glory to God in the highest! Peace and good tidings to earth.”

Tell of the years of His labor, Tell of the sorrow He bore;
He was despised and afflicted, Homeless, rejected and poor.
Tell of the cross where they nailed Him, Writhing in anguish and pain;
Tell of the grave where they laid Him, Tell how He liveth again.

Love in that story so tender, Clearer than ever I see;
Stay, let me weep while you whisper, “Love paid the ransom for me.”
Tell them the story of Jesus, Write on their hearts every word;
Tell them the story most precious, Sweetest that ever was heard.

Your assignment for the Great, Great, Great Commission? Tell them the story of Jesus.

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That poem is by Fanny Crosby, the blind poet who started writing hymns and lyrics in her forties, and wrote more than 8000 creations like this before she died fifty years later. Another beautiful and powerful song on the same theme is one that we all should want to sing, “I Love to Tell the Story”! Two such people, in this video, are Emmylou Harris and the actor Robert Duvall. It was written by Katherine Hankey, a pioneer of sorts – a young girl of the late 1800s who evangelized on London street corners and factories. She became fatally sick and confined to bed, and voiced her biggest regret: that she could not go out in the world and “tell the story.” But she did… through this classic hymn.

Click: I Love To Tell the Story

4-8-13

One of the most significant periods of the church calendar, and least celebrated or noted, is the 40 days after Jesus rose from the dead. He 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.

We really should think more about these 40 days, and the significance of the Ascension. Jesus’ birth had been according to Scripture. His miracles had shown His power. His preaching had taught the world wisdom. His persecution and death had fulfilled prophecies. That He conquered death was an astonishing miracle. But His ascension to Heaven – His bodily rise to be with the Father at the Throne, the mystery of rejoining the Godhead – more than any detail of these other manifestations, confirms the Divinity of Jesus Christ.

Forty 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. The contemporary Jewish historian Josephus referred to it, as did other writers. Two 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. The last verse of the last gospel’s last book (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.”

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 His 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 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 knock on the door – “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. You might have experienced, say, the nightmare of something like a crib death; remember that Jesus offers peace that passes understanding. You might have health scares, insecure about your very life and what your place on earth is; remember that Jesus walks the dark hills to guide you and me. You might have had problems with drugs, and the law, and custody, maybe losing your home, with nowhere to turn; remember that Jesus offers you refuge. You might be a girl who has tried to shake addictions time after time after time; remember that the feeling around your shoulders is Jesus hugging you tightly. You might have lost a preemie, having prayed, believing, for a healthy child; remember that, through it all, trust is more important than understanding.

“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, to seek out… me? and you? where we are? in our hurts, in our messes? That’s the miracle of the Miracle Man, to me, still – that He loves you and me.

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Click: God Walks the Dark Hills

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

3-18-13

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?

2-3-13

It seems that every innovation and new device that jumps out at us from aisles at electronic departments is, yes, wondrous and miraculous (until next year’s Consumer Electronics Show convinces us how outdated and useless they are) but all seem to share a few aspects. Yes, they tend to be smaller than the toys they replace; and, yes, they usually are more expensive than their predecessors. But I am thinking of something else.

New phones, new computers, new bells, new whistles, every i-thing that comes down the pike all tend to isolate us more and more. “Personal” is the common adjective in the descriptions, if not the brands. We can talk faster, do extra things, command more, multi-task… ultimately hunched over, closer and closer to the screen of each new device. At almost every restaurant I visit these days, I see a family of four or five who are all absorbed by their phones, smart or otherwise. They communicate only to place their orders and, perhaps, offer a belch or two. Otherwise, dinner is the screen and whatever.

Curious. We communicate more, but socialize less – ultimately, communicate less in the traditional and, I believe, worthwhile sense.

The “Friends” mania is analogous: similarly confusing and seemingly self-contradictory. Facebook now opens my home page with a question up top: “How are you doing, Rick?” It is relatively obnoxious to me, because I have a sneaking suspicion the question is insincere. If it is Jeff Zuckerberg himself who invites the response, I seriously doubt that he would much care either way how I answered. (For the record, I am tempted to reply, “How am I doing WHAT?”)

And Facebook Friends largely are an odd species to me. People I knew before Facebook was spawned, well, they ARE friends. But I constantly get “friend requests” from people I never heard of, which could be flattering except that I have heard that some people assemble numbers of Friends like Chicago politicians assemble voting rolls: neither acquaintanceship nor even pulses matter. Now there is a company that markets an application that informs us when somebody DE-friends us. Neologisms atop irrelevancies.

Somewhere, someplace, someone is writing a research report on an American culture that has become so desperately lonely that society finds comfort in manufacturing friendships that are immune from human contact; people obsessed with maintaining such artificial interaction; and a form of paranoia that fears the suspension of such counterfeit “relationships.”

Like a king, I may live in a palace so tall, With great riches to call my own.
But I don’t know a thing in this whole wide world That’s worse than being alone.

We are not merely being seduced by the novelty of toys, I think; nor engaging in faux-communication that will pass after a season. Given the chance, contemporary Americans deal with relationships in a new manner that, in fact, suits us just fine: somewhere between wary and disdainful of human contact. The New Normal is the Old Abnormal.

Sooner or later solitude, whether voluntary or forced, will catch up with our souls. We are not meant to fly solo. Before that time comes, our culture will cripple itself and interrupt the dynamic emotional flow that once characterized the American spirit. And eventually we will discover that it is not about the difference between being, say, a social animal and an introvert. Nothing so superficial.

Some time we, as individuals and as a culture, will confront the difference between being alone and being lonely. Even in the midst of multitudes.

Once I stood in the night with my head bowed low, In a darkness as black as the sea.
My heart was afraid and I cried, Oh Lord, don’t hide Your face from me.

The coldest emotion we can ever experience is the sense of loneliness, of no one nearby – no one to understand, no one to listen, no one to care. But to BE alone? That is a state of mind as much as physicality. You can have memories and books and music – things that are prized comforts – but they take you only so far. Then you have family and friends; they can be the most precious , and irreplaceable, blessings imaginable. The only thing better is the knowledge, and the perceived presence, of God by your side.

I learned something about the value of friends some years ago, and I will bring it forward, re-cast to recent events, because the lesson is the same. And it is one I need to remind myself of, every so often; too often. Through tough times, friends will call, friends will write, friends will pray, friends will send cards, friends will visit, friends will even communicate on those new little e- and i-devices. So another friend, a skeptic, once taunted me – “You talk about Jesus all time, how He helps you here, and ministers to you there. But listen to yourself – all your comfort has been coming from friends, not your Jesus!”

And my reply – as all our realizations and replies should be – “That IS Jesus bringing me comfort. My friends are just His messengers.”

There is a place where we may overcome loneliness, a place where no one stands alone. Let us all find it, and all realize it, and all embrace it.

Hold my hand all the way, every hour, every day, From here to the great unknown!
Take my hand, let me stand, Where no one stands alone.

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The poetic lines above are verses from the classic gospel song by Mosie Lister, full of profound meaning, lessons for us all in troubled times; and an emotional tune with majestic chord structures and modulation. Performed here by the Gaither Homecoming Friends – yes, “friends”! The composer is in the audience, introduced at the end of the song.

Click: Where No One Stands Alone

1-14-13

We all walk along pathways, sometimes smooth, sometimes rocky – inevitably smooth AND rocky – and, taken together, the pathways are called Life. How we walk or run, how we deal with obstacles on the pathway, and our companions we choose or choose us, all define the journey. Today’s guest message is by my daughter Heather Shaw, sharing profound thoughts about her walk. —

I have been on this path for as long as I can remember – sometimes walking, sometimes running, but always moving forward.

Step, step, step.

For years the path was relatively easy. There had been some unexpected twists and bumps, as well as some detours, that had frustrated me. But overall there wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle, and it had been a pleasant path to be on.

After a long, rocky, twisty stretch, the path suddenly turned a corner and in front of me was a smooth, straight path. All around there were signs of springtime. It was a welcome sight after the last twists and turns, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t happen often to have this kind of an easy path, and I was filled with joy. I ran along happily, excited about all the sights I could see down the way. I couldn’t wait to get to those milestones, and dreamt about what it would be like when I would arrive.

Step, step, step.

Suddenly, without warning, Darkness descended and violently shoved me off my path and onto another path. This new path was not at all like the last path or any I had been on before. I’d done rocky paths before, but this one was covered by sharp, jagged boulders that I had to climb over or around. It was messy – muddy and covered by debris. As I regained my balance and started to move forward again, I realized that I had been severely injured when I had been shoved. I looked down at my legs and saw that both were mangled. Stopping was not an option. I had to keep moving forward on this messy, new path.

Step… step… step…

As I limped forward, I began to hear voices from others who were calling out while traveling on their paths:

“Don’t worry! That must have been the plan for you! It will all turn out good!” Good? I wondered. Darkness shoved me. Does Darkness ever have a good plan?

“You’re strong – you must have been chosen to travel your path since you can handle it!” Huh, I think. Sounds like a rotten gift.

“At least you still have your arms!” Someone yelled out. I wonder how in the world that is helpful as I limp along. I liked my legs. They were different from my arms and very much a part of me.

I nodded my head as each voice spoke. I understand. They try to make sense of what happened to me. I wished they would be quiet; they were hurting me more.

Some others ran up closer, rather than calling from a distance. They briefly came near and said, “Wow. That’s a hard path you’re on. You’re doing great!” and then quickly ran back to the safety of their own path. Again I nodded. I understand. They care for me, but don’t know what to do and are possibly scared that the same thing could happen to them.

Some who traveled my path returned again to tell me that it will be OK – there are some spots up ahead that will be better than where I am now. They said that I would slowly learn to walk better and the pain will lessen… but the limp will remain until the end of my path. These people are brave, to have gone back to places they had already struggled through, to encourage me. I admire them.

And then there were those voices I heard through the fog, calling out, “I’m here! I don’t know what to do or how to help, but I’m here, my friend.” And instead of running back to the safety of their paths, they rearrange their paths to be close to mine. They are getting messy right along with me.

Step… step… step…

People ask how I’m doing. They listen to me ramble on about how unfair it is or how in pain I am. They listen to me talk about my old path and how I miss it and what it would be like if I were still on it. They understand if I need to be silent. They let me cry. They don’t try to make up answers to the whys. They spend time with me just being friends. I can see on their faces that being close to my path sometimes makes them uncomfortable, but yet they stay close. They stay right by me, urging me to keep going. To do one more step, and then another, and then another.

Step… step… step…

And then there’s one more Friend. He doesn’t just walk near me – I feel His arm always around me. I don’t – or can’t – hear Him say much other than “I’m here.” I yell at this Friend often: Did He shove me off the path? Was this His idea to bring me, injured, to this muddy, boulder-filled path? Why didn’t He stop the Darkness as it shoved me and injured me? Other times I just cry to Him. I hurt. I’m not supposed to be here. I get no answers. Just, “I’m here.”

Sometimes when I look to my side, I can faintly see my old smooth path through the trees. I see the milestones and the places where I thought I’d get to. I want to jump off my current path and go over there but I know it is impossible. Sometimes I want to curl up and just escape this nightmare of a path and go back to that dream. But my friends, and my Friend, help me keep putting one foot in front of the other. “You are doing great,” someone says, “You’re stronger than you think!” And that helps me keep going.

Step… step… step…

I hate this new path and the new way of walking, but at the same time I am starting to enjoy parts of it. I have learned to appreciate the moments where the path clears up a bit. I pause to look around and I enjoy the beauty that I see around me. I enjoy the small things, not knowing if around the bend Darkness waits for me again. I appreciate those who have gotten messy with me. I know as I watch them traveling close by that it can be uncomfortable for them, but never before have I fully understood or needed true friendship. And I have come to love the arm of my Friend that is always around me.

I used to think my Friend was just traveling the path near me – guiding me and pointing me the right way. But now I understand that His arm has always been tight around me. It is a love unlike any I have ever known.

And I keep walking.

Step…step…step…

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Heather has chosen the wonderful song “All My Praise” by the wonderful trio Selah, a music video with some wonderful graphics, to accompany her wonderful message. “Wonderful.” When Jesus is our companion on the journey, everything, in the end, is indeed filled with wonder. To see more of Heather’s writing, find her blog “Baby Steps – Sarah’s Journey” at http://sarahs-baby-steps.blogspot.com/

Click: All My Praise

1-7-13

Giants of faith do not always act like giants – usually they don’t, not showy – and sometimes don’t look like giants. Pete was a guy in a Saturday morning Bible study, a men’s group I belonged to a couple decades ago in suburban Connecticut. There was not one, but two astonishing aspects of faith he quietly manifested, that have stuck with me through the years.

The group was a mixed lot, as such gatherings probably should be. We had a vice president of a major international corporation. We had a “new Christian” who, bless his heart, in spiritual fervor responded to every comment with “Y’see…” believing he had been graced with all answers to all things. Some of us were hungry for the Word; some felt the need to be hungry all over again.

Pete was the quietest of us all. He was not nervous, nor was he shy. He was just quiet. Short guy, kind of a leprechaun beard. But when he did talk, his faith – the logic of his faith – was memorable.

Once we all shared the moment we came to faith – the new faith, or stronger belief, or committed Christianity, that born-again folks experience. With some of us it had been a gradual process, although the season in our lives, or the year, could be specified. With many there was a “road to Damascus” moment: a crisis, the death of a family member, a career predicament, serious illness, that leads people to look toward Heaven for help, answers, ultimately that new relationship with God.

Pete’s conversion came as no other I have ever heard. At an earlier point in his life everything was “going right.” Unexpected promotions in his job, a windfall salary, affirmation of his professional community, family harmony. He said, one day he stopped to wonder about all his good fortune. “It must be God,” he thought, “who the Bible calls the Author of all good things.” And he decided then, in gratitude and with the light of realization, to dedicate himself to a closer walk with Jesus.

This is NOT the usual path of committed Christians. It should be. It is not.

I have another astonishing memory of Pete. During the course of our Bible studies, things “went south” for him. He lost his job, he had family problems, he was in danger of losing his house, and a passel of other distress. Every week would be grimmer reports as we prayed for him. He set up interviews aplenty, and we prayed with him over every one. And even the “sure shots” came back as disappointments. I would say that many of us wept with him… except that Pete never wept.

He was disappointed, yes; but not discouraged. The high-powered commuter’s enclave outside New York City was more of a pressure-cooker than the average area, and his problems seemed magnified. However, after a while, when he received another rejection letter, or was passed over for a job, we would ask him about discouragement.

Time after time he responded: “No, actually, I feel blessed.” Huh? He said that for a few days there, or a week, whatever, while he waited to hear about a job application, he was able “to experience feelings of hope – and that hope was so sweet, just what I needed in those moments.”

Pete savored the hope, he dismissed the disappointment. That seemed to me supernatural. Our natural spirits do not work that way.

Our natural spirits, even after we come to that level of closer fellowship with God, too often persuade us that we have achieved the level where our faith is sufficient in all situations; that we cannot admit to spiritual inadequacies. Faith IS sufficient, but not always OUR faith. If it were not so, the Holy Spirit would not be the agent of “Gifts of Faith” as promised in I Corinthians. Obviously, the Lord knows that sometimes we need those gifts, and extra spiritual supplies – “I believe; help Thou my unbelief.” God knows all. We should, therefore, admit all.

There is a gospel song, a contemporary classic, that paints this very well. It illustrates Pete’s ability to summon a faith few of us do:

You talk of faith when you’re up on the mountain,
But the talk comes so easy when life’s at its best.

It’s down in the valley of trials and temptations,

That’s where faith is really put to the test.

And, forgive me, but the writer in me wants to point out the songwriter Tracy Dartt’s inspired use of prepositions in the chorus of “God On the Mountain”:

For the God on the mountain is still God in the valley!

When things go wrong, He’ll make them right.

And the God of the good times is still God in the bad times,

And the God of the day is still God in the night.

The lesson of the careful wording is this: all of us, even in darkest moments, will acknowledge that God is God of mountaintops and valleys, good times and bad times – I almost want to say, yada yada. God is God. But this song’s words make a distinction that is exceedingly reassuring during crises: He is God ON the mountain, but we need to embrace the truth that he is also God IN the valley. That is, He is with us.

He is God OF the good times. Many churches these days have replaced the creeds and traditional prayers with the mantra: “God is good – all the time! All the time – God is good!” Which is fine, but this song reminds us of the other side of that spiritual coin: He is not only God OF the good times, but IN the bad times.

Faith, among other things, is acting like you know what you know. Have faith. The faith of a mustard seed, even the faith of Pete, might do you just fine.

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Songwriter Tracy Dartt brought us the classic “God On the Mountain.” A little over a year ago, he walked through his own valleys as he needed a kidney transplant, which came in God’s timing and providence. This song – performed here by the great Lynda Randle, whose brother Michael Tait has been a member of both DC Talk and Newsboys – has touched thousands of people .

Click: God On the Mountain

12-17-12

Like a recurring nightmare, we hear once more of carnage and senseless violence, a bizarre attack and unanswerable questions; and a school yet again is the setting. A lone perpetrator, but a million mysteries. Worse than only hearing the news, we see these days the anguish and fear, the confusion and panic; we see distraught children, and we see the tears on the cheeks of mothers.

Before those tears dried, there were calls from some quarters to change laws and outlaw guns. But on the same day a school in China was invaded, children injured at the hands of a knife-wielding maniac. Arsonists have, throughout history, claimed the lives of men, women… and children. Innocents. History’s pages are, in some ways, chronicles of the slaughter of innocents.

Would that we had the power to outlaw hatred and evil, not just guns and knives. Then we might be spared seeing mothers’ tears… and mothers themselves might be spared the constant fears, and all-too-common realities, that continuously, cruelly plague them as protectors of their precious children.

Mothers’ tears must burn like acid. I write as a man, a father, who cannot imagine that special maternal bond. We grieve for mothers as well as their lost children in these nightmarish situations. What I have been slowly comprehending, as time goes on, is the news footage of events around the world, seemingly different, is more and more alike to me. Mideast terrorism, wars in Afghanistan, genocide in Africa, religious persecution everywhere, and random attacks in our own neighborhoods: I used to listen to statistics, see the weapons, read the demands or justifications, the “claims of credit” of armies and groups. They all become as white noise. Now I only see, more and more, the tears on the cheeks of grieving mothers.

Are the tears of a Palestinian mother any less sacred, after a missile strike, than the tears of an Israeli mother after a bus bombing? An Afghan mother whose village has changed “sides” every week for months – are her tears less precious when one faction or other patrols her streets? A Christian mother in Pakistan loses her child to Muslim zealots; a mother from an African tribe loses all her children when a rival tribe sweeps her village; mothers all over the globe lose their daughters to traffickers and slave masters – do we harvest those tears to weigh and measure them… against what? The humble teardrop is a leveling agent.

There was one mother in history who shed such tears, and in fact witnessed almost all these varieties of separate, horrible atrocities happen to her son. She experienced grief a hundredfold, for her son was persecuted, taken from her, framed, tortured, abandoned by almost everybody except her, and murdered. She witnessed it all. The woman who cried those tears was Mary. It is a risky thing to attempt to quantify grief, but hers was unique because she KNEW these things would happen to her son – and to her – 33 years in advance.

Mary was chosen to be the one who would fulfill prophecy, a virgin who would bear the Incarnate God, sent to humankind to assume our sins and suffer the punishment we deserve. Mary knew these Old Testament prophecies, and she listened to the angels who visited her. When she in turn visited her cousin (who was pregnant with John the Baptizer), Mary spoke the classic “Magnificat”:

My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. Because He hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me; and holy is His name. And His mercy is from generation unto generations to them that fear Him. He has showed might in His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. …

Christians remember Mary’s prayer in the Advent season. We remember the promises of God, knowing they are blessings. We meditate upon the ways of God, as Mary ultimately had to. And we are confronted by the obscene vagaries of life, as Sandy Hook mothers must.

There is sin in the world. A loving God gave us free will, desiring that we experience life. He did not create us as angelic robots. Such beings cannot know sorrow nor joy. Redemption and salvation cannot be experienced by beings who need them not. No angel could ever sing “Amazing Grace” with tears of joy streaming down the cheeks.

But with life, in all its fullness, come the other tears, to which we return in sadness; and, can we all agree, in confusion and bitterness and at times unspeakable grief. There is no escaping it. It is human nature to feel these emotions, even when we trust God fully. In our seasons of pain we can try to understand human nature, and sometimes hear people apologize for it. But our attempts to understand are futile.

In that futility – beyond the fundamental proposition that it is a sinful nature – we must recognize on the other hand that God’s antidotes are easy to understand. He knows our sorrows, He understands our weaknesses, He feels our pain, He identifies with our losses, He has sent the Holy Comforter on whom we can call, He offers us peace that passes understanding.

Let us pray that weeping mothers and grieving families find that peace, and draw closer to, not farther from, God at these times. To lose faith, after losing a child, would intensify the unbearable misery of those who suffer.

It has long been warned that if God were removed, so to speak, from America’s classrooms, that trouble, danger, and evil would fill the void. This week one Adam Lanza entered a school to fill that vacuum. And all the mothers’ tears alone cannot wash away the horror.

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Mary cried tears of joy and tears of grief, as the mother of Jesus. May the timing of the Sandy Hook school massacre in the Advent season find some little connection as we contemplate the tears of mothers. The beautiful and profound new Christmas song “Mary Did You Know” is coupled with images of Mary and her Son. They are moments of birth and joy, pride and love, loss and death, and are from the movie “Passion of the Christ.” As is well known, these are difficult images to behold, so this is a Warning to Viewers; yet the scenes correctly portray the grief of one mother who witnessed, not just learned about, the massacre of her Son.

Click: Mary, Did You Know

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

12-3-12

Surveys tell us that an awful (and I do mean awful) lot of people are buying into this Doomsday Scenario. You know, the 12-21-12 Farewell Party supposedly devised by the lost civilization of infant-sacrifice folks, the Mayans. The prophesy is found in pictograms carved into a stone, a very small fragment of which was rescued from a gravel quarry. How coincidental, or not, that someone writing a book salvaged this message from centuries past, just in time for a book he was writing. And what a coincidence, or not, that the due-date for the evaporation of the universe, after all these centuries, is right about now.

There are, supposedly, many other dire predictions from many other cultures, all with the same date circled on their calendars. Or virtually so, because many of these fortune-tellers had no conception of the Christian calendar, or months and years. Ah, skeptics like me are told, it is not about dates, but how the celestial bodies line up. OK, I get it. Folks could divine future events, even to precise moments – the same folks who were incapable of surviving as societies, much less inventing doorknobs. I might be straying from the fine points of documentary evidence, but you get my point.

Scientists today could be busier enumerating new varieties of nitwits infesting our society, than tracking the veracity of such theories. There are many adherents indeed, and among them are, perhaps not surprisingly, scientists, who are no less immune than others in subscribing to crackpot nostrums. Among them, also, are many Christians, who should know better.

Near the top of many reasons why Bible-believers should not pay attention to a word of this nonsense is God’s familiar injunction that “No one shall know the day or the hour” of the end of things. Not angels, not even the Son, will know. It is God’s prerogative.

Isn’t it odd that so many people caught up in this mania are also worried about the future of the economy, and the Middle East, and, oh, the football season, so fervently? The “fiscal cliff”? Hey, forget about it!

The Doomsday Scenario is nonsense — just a diversion like news about celebrity infidelities, and tabloid stories about dogs who play chess.

To step even further back, however, there is an extra reason to put the “Fiscal Cliff” in a more proper perspective. I reckon that America’s economy went off a cliff a long time ago. Policies, corruption, irresponsibility… we can see now that there were no exit ramps. It was inevitable. The only question is how hard the crash will be. But there are even more serious cliffs we are headed toward at 80 miles an hour, chatting on our cell phones, and scarfing down fast food. Driving at night. With our lights out. And with bad brakes.

Christians: what about the moral cliff? How rotten have we let society become on our watch?

Parents: what about the “nuclear-family” cliff? Do we honor the family unit, do we keep our households intact, do we set good examples, do we teach discipline and exhibit leadership?

Businessmen: are we good stewards of the resources we manage, and the welfare of our employees?

Civic leaders: does the government help or hinder average citizens? Are you continuing the Founders’ visions of letting free people make free decisions? Are you penalizing success in today’s economy?

Celebrities: are you good role models for your audiences? Do you promote moral values and decent behavior? Do you realize the impact you have when you traffic in sex and drugs and self-indulgence? IS it all about money?

Clergy: is it more important to dilute your message in order to attract and keep church members; or, rather, to hold high the gospel message – sometimes hard, always uncompromising – and trust the Holy Spirit, that Truth will draw all unto it? Do you really think that watering down the Word will inspire youth to trust it… or trust you, in the essential matters of life?

We have been driving toward, and over, many “cliffs” in America for quite some time. If you remember thinking you had a smooth ride back in the day, maybe it was because we have been, for some time, sailing through clear air, where there are no bumps in the road. But there will be a hard fall. A dead end.

Oh. Back to “knowing the day and the hour.” If you read carefully, the Bible DOES teach that we can know when the Lord signals the End of Time.

Here it is: When we least expect it.

So forget the Mayan Calendar, and think “larger” about Fiscal Cliffs. Let the Bible be your calendar, let the Bible be your roadmap.

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Often you will hear, in apocalyptic movies and even TV commercials, the music of Carl Orff. So we shall not disappoint here. “Carmina Burana” was composed in Germany in 1935-36, a cantata based on the poems found in medieval works by Benedictine monks from roughly the 14th and 15th centuries. The first movement is titled “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” or “O Fortuna,” lamenting the hopes and disappointments of worldly desires. The performance in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is by Andre Rieu and his typical, and typically impressive, cast of thousands.

Click: O Fortune

11-26-12

I have become aware of the condition of a friend who has experienced some trials lately. None of the experiences are, perhaps, unusual in themselves, but their almost simultaneous visitations might test anyone’s spirit. He is trying, not to make sense of these sorts of life-happenings – because everything makes sense or nothing makes sense; and “time and chance happen to all men,” as Proverbs says – but to cope, simply to cope. Have you ever been there?

In less than a calendar year his special-needs niece died; his nine-day-old granddaughter died; his wife, after multiple long-term illnesses, is to choose between dialysis and hospice; and his sister, who lost her home in Hurricane Sandy, is losing a battle with HIV that was long held at bay. My friend says he keeps fighting the seduction to moan about his own condition, his own emotions and reactions to these matters.

But he knows – that is, he too infrequently remembers – that it is not about him. It is about these loved ones. And about God. Usually, when nothing makes sense to us, and God seems to be somewhere in the story, it means that God is EVERYWHERE in the story. The man’s wife, for instance, has been cited by many, many people through the decades as an inspiration: encouraging people to faith and endurance as her faith helped her to endure. And his sister, after years of rebellion, has come to know Jesus, drawing closer to God.

Why do we find it so hard to see the silver linings to the dark clouds? Why are we always surprised at the grace that infuses every “crisis”? Why do we forget that the sun shines, not only after the storm clouds pass – but all the time, even when the storm clouds temporarily are overhead and blot the sun from view?

Just like the natural tendency to be sad when a loved one dies, such emotions are a brand of selfishness. Not the nasty schoolyard selfishness, but self-ish focus on one’s own condition. Rather, or I should say in addition to the unavoidable, we should direct all the emotions we can toward the loved ones in their difficulties, and to God on their behalf.

We should not believe that God is in control only when the course of events magically follows our own scripts. God wants us, more than anything else, to trust in Him. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith is not summoning patience until God does what we want. Faith is, sometimes, stopping our obsession to understand everything.

And faith is humility. Obey His commands, trust in His love, accept His plan. My sister, newly a friend of God, is blessed not just by the power and balm of the act of praying, but of praying on her knees, specifically. There is a language of prayer, in some gifted circumstances; and, surely, there is also an attitude of prayer.

And sometimes, my friend has discovered anew, there is the biblical concept of the “sacrifice of praise” – when you don’t feel like praying, and even less feel like praising, is when to do it. Loudly and confidently, or softly and tenderly, do it.

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If you never have clicked on a music video after one of these messages, please do watch this one, the completion of this message. The classic hymn “Softly and Tenderly” was written a century and a quarter ago by Will L. Thompson on similar reflections, and among its verses, “Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing, Passing from you and from me; Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming, Coming for you and for me.” But followed by: “Oh, for the wonderful love He has promised, Promised for you and for me! Though we have sinned, He has mercy and pardon, Pardon for you and for me.” And the promise in the chorus: “Come home, come home, Ye who are weary, come home; Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, Calling, O sinner, come home!” Sung by RoseAngela Merritt of NewSpring Church, Anderson, S.C.

Click: Softly and Tenderly

11-19-12

I had planned to write today a version of my annual Thanksgiving message – subsection B, the rant about how “Thank You” and “You’re Welcome” have become abused, misused, and confused terms these days. So, you will have a year to notice how people might still utter “thank yous” but how the responses are, these days, almost always “Thank YOU,” or “You bet,” “Sure thing,” or “No prob.” All of which invite us to think about the value of sincere thanks and heartfelt responses, social habits, and the meaning of it all. If there is a meaning.

There is a meaning, but it is worthwhile to think about social graces that expire, and why.

Instead, today, I was knocked off course by an e-mail I received from a friend; in fact, several recent e-mails. They have touched me, especially as I make the obvious link to the essence of Thanksgiving: giving thanks.

I have been rocked recently by professional and personal events, the personal matters mostly due to (and not to be mentioned in the same breath as) health crises of my wife. She has been in the hospital for almost three weeks, and this is, I think, her seventh hospitalization this year. We have had blessings and travels during the “good” periods lately, but this year has been visited by several mini-strokes, pneumonia, kidney failure, and grim diagnoses about her 17-year-out transplanted heart.

Nancy’s faith is strong, but I think she is getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. Through it all, the support of family and friends has been a comfort. And a hundred little things that are not little: the concern and indulgence of my agent and publisher; prayers from unknown and surprising places; and so forth. People who do not just say, “I’ll keep you in prayer,” but, having the face-to-face opportunity, pray right in the moment. Friends who, when they say they are willing to drop everything and help, mean it; and we know they mean it.

And the e-mail I received this morning, from a friend who did not even know of Nancy’s recent crises:

Dear Rick, I’ve been praying every day for you and for your family. I know I didn’t write to you after your grandbaby died, and I feel bad about that, but I don’t want you to think that means I don’t love you, because I do. It’s easy to pray for you. I would find it hard to forget!

But something about the season of Advent changes all that. Words start to flow like milk and honey! … If you have some time, I’d love it if I could call you and have a good talk. If not, don’t worry, I get that! But consider this message a hug and an expression of genuine friendship and great regard. My brother in Christ! It’s just so great that God loves us, and love is just such a cool thing!

Well. Is there better medicine that that? And I don’t mean to disparage the precious notes and calls from other friends, from brief “I’m thinking about you,” to long letters, all precious. A friend in Arizona with whom (I regret) I don’t speak to as often as we used to, reminds me that Thursday of every week he prays for me and my family. Another friend is bursting with news she knows I want to hear, but gives me space and a prayer that the space is occupied with blessing. Reaching out in such ways is what friends, especially Christian friends, DO.

In the family of God, NOTHING is more precious than the fact of family: we are brothers and sisters in Christ, children of a loving God who has graced us with salvation and a promise of eternal life, with Him in glory.

And part of that blessed truth is that we have a promise… but we don’t have to wait for the promise to fulfill itself in Heaven. We can know it now, and in the midst of trials, share the love of Christ in a way that the world can hear about but never FEEL, Hallelujah.

This is something we don’t often enough gives thanks for in and of itself; at least I don’t. It is a wonderful gift of God, and truly a gracious thing, because we hardly deserve it. While we were yet sinners, God visited humankind and sent His Son to assume the guilt for our sins. On this Thanksgiving week, I picture it like this: our natural selves rebel and insult God in many ways, uncountable times, and God’s response is almost like “Thank you.” Huh? “I am sending my only-begotten Son as a sacrifice for your transgressions. Believe on Him.”

That is not exactly a “Thank you,” of course, But as His “You’re welcome,” before we even repent, it is a form of advance-“Thank you”… and it merits from us a lifetime of continual “Thank YOUs” and “You’re welcomes,” and praises and gratitudes. And thanks. Of the most profound sort.

What my friend this morning showed is the proof that Christ lives in us. That is to say, such expressions as she made is evidence of the Spirit-filled heart, for we are told that in such things it is not us, but the Christ who lives within us who enables us to do such things.

I am reminded of the mirror-image, an insight Nancy had during our hospital ministry after her transplants. When Satan attacks us, it is not us whom he hates – for, clearly, he has little regard for us – but he hates the Christ within us. The more Jesus in our hearts, the more he attacks.

Abraham Lincoln set aside the third Thursday of November for the nation to gives thanks to God. He summed up sentiments of previous leaders, and anticipated powerful proclamations from some of his successors in the office. Indeed we should give thanks to God for our bounties and harvests, our material blessings. But Lincoln also admonished, and people like my dear friends remind me, that we must remember, and cannot help be thankful for, the Author of those blessings. How He works in our lives; how He lives in fellow believers; how He can, and should, inhabit our works.

Thank God.

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The moving hymn “Now Thank We All Our God,” appropriate this week and every week of our lives, has an interesting story behind it. The best hymns do. It was written by Pastor Martin Rinckart during the Thirty Years’ War. In the Saxon town of Eilenburg, the site of battles and pillage and plagues, he was the only clergyman who survived to minister to the ravaged populace. At one point he performed 50 funerals a day, and the year he wrote this hymn, 1637, he performed more than 4000 funerals. Nevertheless, in the midst of it all, he wrote “Now Thank We All Our God” for his family. Was there any way to summon peace and praise in such circumstances, except by the Holy Spirit? “Nun Danke alle Gott” was used as a theme several times by Bach, and was – and should be – a vital component of church worship ever since. It was translated into English by Catherine Winkworth in 1856.

Click: Now Thank We All Our God

11-22-12

“Have a seat!” “Help yourself!” “What would you like to drink?” “Feel free to have a second helping!” Every society through history has constructed grand halls for meetings, and decorated lavish living rooms for entertaining, but common to every culture – indeed to every family – is the dining table, even the kitchen table, for conviviality. It is where we bond, relate, and confirm friendships.

Shared meals have always been the signs of sincere respect between host and guest. It is said that sleepers never lie, and perhaps that is so. But it would seem as likely that hearty hosts and welcome guests, over a prepared meal, cannot stay suspicious or hostile for long. “Ess, ess, mein kind!” “Mangia!” “Bon appétit!” “Guten apetit!” “Buono apetito!” – all the world’s invitations to the table are first marinated in friendship.

If these practice,s and customs, are parts of humanity’s DNA, then it is no surprise that we find the recipe, so to speak, in God Holy Word. Many essential points of doctrine, teaching, and examples are related to food, to dining, to hospitality, to eating, to sharing.

The Lord could have couched His warnings and conditions in the Garden in any terms, but it was eating, of the tree of knowledge amid so many other offerings, where humankind met its first test. Of all the challenges to the Hebrew children, wandering the desert for 40 years, sustenance was the most obvious – but the Lord miraculously provided manna. Jesus’ first recorded miracle was at a wedding feast, turning water into wine. A later, celebrated miracle was feeding five thousand from a few loaves and fishes. Where did Christ take leave of His disciples and ordain the possibility of receiving Him as an indwelling presence? The “Last Supper.”

And so forth. This is not a Bible Bee – these are only a few of the many examples God has used to confirm the spiritual significance of nourishment, beyond physical requirements of eating.

When we think of the imagery of a feast prepared for us in Heaven, we can recall these examples and others, ranging from the celebratory feast prepared for the prodigal son, to the signification of the Host – “Take, eat; this My body, given for you.” But we would starve ourselves, so to speak, if we do not fully appreciate the table prepared for us over yonder, in Heaven.

God does not have a simple table setting, or a mere meal, waiting for us. It will indeed be a banquet table. A buffet table is how I see it. To visit various cultures again, think of a smorgasbord, a tapas menu, a dim sum experience, a churrascaria offering. Unimaginable varieties of surprises and blessings.

In fact, we would even more starve ourselves, spiritually speaking, if we restrict the visions of a blessed banquet table to Heaven, where indeed it awaits us. But we should remember that Jesus is the Bread of Life. We have communion now. The Lord does not just promise a spiritual feast sometime later: He IS a spiritual feast. Christians can behold the buffet – there is salvation, here is healing, there is forgiveness, here is comfort, there is wisdom. All prepared for us, sweet to our taste, nourishing to our souls.

Have a seat! Help yourself!

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A video clip of a moving performance of the classic Ira Stanphill gospel song associated with Gov. Jimmie Davis and many other singers, “Suppertime.” Here it is sung by the beloved Southern Gospel singer George Younce, surrounded by friends. George was undergoing dialysis at the time, and this was his last public performance.

Click: Suppertime

10-8-12

A provocative blog this week by my friend Craig Bubeck on the site Internet Monk addressed the role of Christians in the political process. Drawing upon his own reassessments, he dealt especially with this season’s hot buttons: the role of morality in civic affairs; loyalty to nation and party; and the legitimacy of coerced charity as practiced by government.

He makes the point that too many Christians automatically reject state-mandated charity, when (recalling Jesus’ admonition to show love “to the least of these”) believers should applaud charity, no matter what the source; and that “values voters” tend to compartmentalize acts of love and charity. The church’s domain, many think.

Craig’s essay did provoke thoughts. I believe I have fairly stated his theses, and my own thoughts are based on his, not the second round of debating-points. I think that a lot of sincere citizens – sincere about their love and country and love of God, including therefore love of fellow men – do not often enough admire or support acts of charity when committed by government agencies.

However, the “other” side of the question (and it IS a foundational question facing Christians and all Americans) concerns how many governmental acts of charity are acts of love. That is to say that Jesus’ bedrock challenge, the element of love, should be the yardstick by which we formulate national policy and our own responses. Long-term, does the state’s co-option of charitable impulses – picking winners and losers, deciding between those in need, attaching strings to aid and comfort – assist the least of these amongst us solely? Or does it, ultimately, interfere with the prerogatives of churches and individuals? Is it a distinction with a difference?

The widow was praised for giving a mite, all she had. The rich man, in the parable, is not praised for, at least, giving something. There is nothing in Jesus’ story about mandating that the widow give, or setting her donation level, or rejecting the rich man’s donation. Love, in the heart, was the Lord’s determinant. Likewise it is evident, even to the extent of using a Roman coin in another of the Lord’s lessons, that “giving unto Caesar” meant the things of Caesar’s – first amongst them money and taxes. Surely the “things of God’s” meant the currency of love, deposited in the heart.

“The poor you will always have with you.” Many Christians do not dig deeply into yet another verse. It is not easy so to dig; my suspicion is that the parables and admonitions of Jesus seem to meet us less than halfway in order to oblige us to think a little harder than usual.

The statement about the poor is some times, at least subliminally, regarded as a reminder that “there are always those who are less fortunate than ourselves.” Perhaps a sanctified defeatism, that poverty will never be totally eradicated? Yet St. Augustine viewed Christ’s words not as a statement of fact or a statistical view of society, but a command, a challenge, a commission from God Almighty.

In the Augustinian view (in his “Confessions”) Christ was saying that no matter how severe the relative poverty — or, that is to say, also the relative comfort-level — of our neighbors, we must retain the spirit of charity. We believers, that is. In the original tongue, “charity” meant “love,” the act of Christian loving and compassion.

It would seems clear that such an impulse, a holy command rather than a feel-good, do-good suggestion, would find little fulfillment in the cultivation of systems that would transfer personal responsibility, and personal commitment, to others. In fact when governmental agencies assume the impulses and instincts toward charitable impulses – and sometimes virtually outlaw them, by sanctions against churches and faith-groups – we witness a war against religion.

A giant step in my political and ecclesial maturity was when relatives from Europe (where in many countries three per cent of citizens attend church, and where “state churches” are a matter of course) told me that many people attend church three times in their lives: baptism, marriage, and funeral. When the clergy is paid by the state, the Bible recedes to a book on the shelf among driver’s manuals and counselor’s handbooks; and the clergy is relegated to a list of state-supplied counselors you may call on, or not.

My own relatives in America, my grandparents, shared Great Depression era stories with me. A propos cheering “charity” when dispensed by the government, I recall that my grandmother, who sold cookies (not apples, as in the common images) on street corners, frequently confronted by “block captains” that government assistance for her family was tied to registering and voting with one of the two political parties. Render unto Caesar – Washington – indeed.

Simply: it is seems to me that if Christians perceive that there are problems in society, they ought to act more Christian than, perhaps, they previously have been acting; and should encourage fellow Christians and churches and faith-groups to respond better. That includes monetary gifts and it certainly includes physical involvement.

But when Washington says it can do such things better than Christians can – but moreover, and increasingly, attaches conditions regarding Christians’ freedom of conscience about things like abortion, homosexuality, reliance on the Bible’s instructions and God’s commands – we ought to reconsider the extent of “rendering unto Caesar.”

Surely Jesus did not categorize conscience and liberty, much less the charitable impulse, as things that are primarily the government’s domain.

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“Be Thou My Vision,” a beautiful Irish hymn of the fourth century, associated with St. Patrick, seems appropriate to hear in relation to this message. This version is by the trip Selah:

Click: Be Thou My Vision

10-1-12

Old and new. Up or down. Happy or sad. Passive or aggressive. Fast or slow. Liberal or conservative. Hot or cold. Yin and yang. Life is a story of extremes, and our choices between them. Can’t everything, basically, be understood through such a view?

Black or white? Right or wrong? … Good and evil? Not all things that seem like opposites ends of the spectrum are even on the same spectrum.

Aristotle thought so, that there were the extremes of thesis and antithesis, and the truth, or best formula for living, lay in the center: the “Golden Mean.” His friend Plato disagreed, sensing that there were abstract principles of right, and justice, and truth; and that humans should strive toward that truth, ennobling themselves by the quest for truth, and the fidelity to certain standards. Even before Christ, Platonists recognized Abstract Truth. Aristotelians claimed Relative Truth. The early church fathers were neo-Platonists.

In a civic sense we can say that the Founding Fathers of the United States proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” as a right. Later politicians elevated “happiness” alone as a right — bestowed by government, since government would define the meaning of happiness every so often, and re-calibrate the Happiness Meter for its citizens.

In the spiritual realm, in religion, the question (and answer!) about two extremes is essential to our existence, not just our happiness or moral equilibrium. Many otherwise serious people secretly subscribe to the cartoon portrayal of good and evil as two silly characters sitting on our shoulders: the cartoon angel, and the cartoon devil. Yes or no; do it or don’t; speak up or shut up.

Many people believe that the figures, silly as they are, represent God and Satan. Of course. Our consciences roil. Whom shall we let persuade us?
But in this life-view of good and evil, such a view is fatally flawed. The opposite of God is not the devil. Neither is Satan’s counterpart Jesus. The Bible tells us that Satan is a fallen angel. In the heavenly realms, Satan’s counterpart is St. Michael, the Archangel… about whom many Christians neither know nor care much, and do not have to, really.

God is above all. Before all, and pre-existent. God is all-powerful, not co-powerful. All-knowing, not a partaker of certain knowledge. Creator, not co-worker. Judge, not jury.

God, not partner.

There is no counterpart to God. The spirit of evil, the devil whom we know, is so far beneath God that if we only realized that true relationship, we could better understand that sin has no power over us. Jesus confirmed this by the Resurrection and Ascension, which should ever remind us of God’s pre-eminent position in the universe, and in our lives, whether we fully comprehend it or not.

The opposite of God is not the devil, but the ABSENCE of God. He is so all-present that the only way we can find an opposite extreme is to shut him out completely from our hearts. This we are free to try, and result is not a variety of things we call sin, but worse: a coldness, a total isolation, a frightening awareness of separation that is horrifying.

Suicide victims, despairing of God, have spoken of that coldness. Listen, by the way, to many atheists, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, who, in spite of themselves, often argued against God as unfair or demanding or confusing. But NOT non-existent. Such positions place them somewhere on the road to belief, not non-belief. Hitchen’s famous book, after all, was called “God Is Not Good,” not “There Is No God, So Why Are We Even Talking?”

Fortified with such understanding — whose points are posited hundreds of times in hundreds of ways in the Bible — we can stand stronger when we face moral dilemmas and ethical challenges. Jesus reigns in our hearts, and that funny character with a tail and a red suit never really sat on our shoulder at all. And if Satan’s jewel crown (sung about in those terms in an old and profound gospel song) is on your head, you placed it there once when you thought false choices were real. Let God reach down and cast it away.

+ + +

Many singers have sung the amazing gospel song of the obscure past by the forgotten composer Edgar L. Eden. One was Bruce Springsteen, of all people, in a stirring version:

Click: Satan’s Jewel Crown

9-24-12

“Regrets, I’ve had a few…” Such words imply a summation, and we humans often stop on the path to wipe our brows and rest, and think about what got us there. There is not one among us who does not think about the What Ifs or the Missed Opportunities, but we seldom give thanks for the wrong decisions we avoided or the opportunities that might have led to grief.

The saddest situation attends those whose regrets outnumber the joys. And sadder still is when people sigh and believe that such is their fate, or that it is too late to change their life’s profile, so to speak. While anyone has one breath remaining, this is a cruel lie.

One of the Bible’s great subtexts is that it is never too late. And the application is in every sphere of life, not a theological corner. (Eventually we all will realize that theology is not a corner of life but the entire room, the broad landscape. Other “important” aspects of life are actually corners and compartments.) That is, it is never too late to receive, and accept, God’s favor. Salvation is offered to the vilest sinner. Think of the worst person you know, or history’s cruelest villains. Not one person will be shut out of Heaven, or receive God’s forgiveness, if that heart seeks God, repents, and accepts Christ as Lord and Savior. The Bible tells us so.

If that seems unjust, it is because you look at things, still, from a human’s point of view, instead of God’s. All Heaven rejoices, as you will too, some day in Glory, when a sinner is saved. And for some detail, or by some perspective, or after altered circumstances, you or I might be that vilest sinner. Shudder that you might be voted off the island of Eternity. Even St. Paul called himself “Chief among sinners.” We are well off when we are aware of our faults

… AND when we are aware of our opportunities. It is never too late. I have friends of great accomplishment who nevertheless regret that they have not mastered new languages, or learned to play instruments, or mastered the arts of painting. Yet any of these things can be done in short months. We all have the capacity to write a poem that will move the hearts of millions, or write The Great American Novel. Or – no less significant, essentially, to our lives – to come to a truth, share a thought, touch another person’s soul, that will “make it all worthwhile.”

Acts and deeds, concepts and creations, all may ennoble us; but the important matter to our self-regard, at least, is that we realize it. God confirms our worth so that we may affirm our courses. We need not be condemned, or condemn ourselves, by either the taunts of unfulfilled dreams or the dubiety of the Now, that things will never change.

To pull back from the brink of blather: Orlando Gibbons, almost four centuries ago, wrote and set to music the simplest illustration of the encouragement that our life’s glory can come even at the last moment. And cancel all the rest, which is prep-time after all for what might be our most satisfying acts. The simple song is about the silver swan, a gangly and sometimes mangy, always awkward – in fact absurd-looking – water fowl. Yet geese can be sillier, right? In the song, at one moment the bird rises to elegance, becomes handsome, and sings a beautiful note which it previously was never capable of “unlocking.”

His lesson, for sinners, for creative minds, for fellow and average humans, is that we are forever capable of that Moment, that act; and that we should never judge ourselves by false standards, or the consensus of the rabble all about us. More fools now live, than wise.

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approach’d, unlock’d her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more.
Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

+ + +

The very brief, but very profound, madrigal from the Restoration Period. The haunting and beautiful tune helps fuse this to our consciousness. An early example of polyphonic harmony:

Click: The Silver Swan

9-3-12

Labor Day weekend. The end of summer… Schools back in session… Once upon a time, it was the “new television season”… The beginning of the presidential campaigns (I wish it WERE only starting now, instead of two hundred weeks ago)…. Anyway, these few days are called many things, but they are also regarded by many, many families as the Festival of the Empty Nest. Many young people are going off to college for the first time.

Leaving home, whether it is to dive into life, or for the intermediary step of a college career, or the military, or a job opportunity, is a Rite of Passage. For parents and children alike it is, or should be, the essence of Bittersweet. All of a sudden, 18 years or so seems like a blur; everyone becomes conscious of unfinished projects and unshared words; but the clock is ticking, the calendar is calling, and life awaits.

I watched the Republican convention this week and wondered about the rising class of future leaders. Impressive speakers, comparatively young to be national leaders, boosted the candidate, but also, as part of their assignments, introduced themselves to a national audience. I thought, here are people who might be on the scene four or eight years from now, or 20: should they hold back with their searing testimonies or impressive personal stories, until “their day in the sun” arrives? Of course not!

That day might never come. Or, the way to assist its advent is to tell all, show all, be all, right now. It is a lesson framed many ways: “Carpe diem” – seize the day. “Never a second chance at a first impression.” “Strike while the iron is hot.” “We pass this way but once.”

I saw this as a lesson to be applied in family situations when kids leave home, too. Having regrets should not equate with not letting go. And every one of us should say all that we can, express everything, without reservation. Children can juggle the loss of the family’s pod-like security and the excitement of independence. However, their parents will always be as close as a phone call, e-mail, text, or an ATM.

For parents there is no way properly to describe the mixed feelings of the mixed blessing. You will miss the daughter or son – for many of us, despite the contrary assurance of worldly logic, a crater suddenly exists in our everyday lives. But we are wired as parents to possess an indescribable joy in seeing our children take their next steps into the world. Spread their wings. It is RIGHT. It is what you have prepared your child for – even if not yourself, fully – these 18 years.

Being a parent was never easy. Right? Then how is it that the hardest part comes when they leave our homes?

I’m not sure science has ever analyzed tears. Maybe one of our budding students will win the Nobel Prize for such research. But there are tears of pain, of regret, of sorrow, of bitterness, of lost opportunities, of lost love and found love, and surely tears of joy. The tears that parents (and, I can remember back that far, children too) shed during these rites of passage are of a special composition. Distilled, they somehow confirm to us God’s loving “wheel” of life – “there is a season,” He tells us. Whether a little scary, or seemingly sudden, or a guarantee of big changes in our lives… we must seize the season too.

“Letting go?” Think of it as spreading your arms in fond farewell, so that they can be open to receive, when the next season comes.

+ + +

I have never heard a song, or read lyrics, that more beautifully reflect the bundle of emotions in the Rite of Passage of children leaving home (in this case, a college student). “Letting Go,” by Doug Crider and Matt Rollings.

She’ll take the painting in the hallway,
The one she did in junior high.
And that old lamp up in the attic,
She’ll need some light to study by.

She’s had 18 years to get ready for this day.
She should be past the tears; she cries some anyway.

Letting go: There’s nothing in the way now,
Oh, letting go, there’s room enough to fly.
And even though she spent her whole life waiting,
It’s never easy letting go.

Mother sits down at the table,
So many things she’d like to do.
Spend more time out in the garden,
Now she can get those books read too.

She’s had 18 years to get ready for this day.
She should be past the tears; she cries some anyway.

Letting go: There’s nothing in the way now,
Oh, letting go, there’s room enough to fly.
And even though she spent her whole life waiting,
It’s never easy letting go.

+++

For a music video of this song, amazingly performed by the amazing Suzy Bogguss (wife of Doug Crider), click:

Click: Letting Go

8-20-12

When my sisters and I were children, there was a stretch of Christmas mornings that provided a 55 Walker Avenue version of Hollywood. Our father had a new movie camera and blindingly bright, hot floodlights, and each year he wanted to film us coming down the stairs, acting surprised to see presents under the tree, and laugh like maniacs as we opened them. Every year there would be a little glitch, or a detail shy of his director’s-eye perfection; and we invariably re-staged the scene multiple times. After the fifth “take” or so, the surprise was hard to feign, including over the presents we ultimately were permitted to open.

It was a little tedious, frankly, for us children. But such are the demands of show business. Ah, the burdens of being a star, even of amateur 8-mm home movies. We laugh about it now. Dad meant the best, wanting to create instant memories. Those few years actually stand out from all the other years of orgiastic wrapping-paper frenzy. Home movie cameras were new toys for guys like Dad; and, frankly, so was fatherhood. Part of the fun of life is trying to program life, and another part of the fun of life is when the “programming” doesn’t quite work out — coping, rolling, and watching memories create themselves.

Another, more common, rite of passage in childhood and parenthood is the faulty programming in finding the “perfect” present at gift-giving times. How many parents have noticed (and, I hope, eventually laughed about) the ultimately futile planning, or the anticipated delight over some gift, that falls flat? Perhaps the boy had been asking for a certain toy, or the girl was wishing for a certain doll; maybe they saw things in friends’ houses, or in stores, or, God help us, television commercials. Then comes Christmas morning, or their birthdays, and…

… the reaction is indifference. Worse yet, for parents-as-directors, even without cameras in tow, is when the child takes more interest in the packaging than the gift, like when the box becomes a train or an ersatz doll house. How many times does it happen? A boy receives an action figure, but reverts to his time-worn Teddy Bear at, literally, the end of the day. A little girl receives the fanciest of dolls; but she winds up dragging around, and snuggling with, her beat up Raggedy Ann. Sometimes the most precious of toys and dolls are even ones that are cast-offs, the ones that were found and “rescued.”

But there is something life-affirming in those tendencies, not just because we can see kids asserting their preferences and thinking about choices, making little declarations of independence, a good thing for parents to see.

I believe that when children make such choices – the beat-up over the shiny; the broken over the new, things needing patching up because they are not “perfect” – they exhibit a spirit that God plants in each of us. He wants to nurture certain impulses, and have us encourage it in others too, especially our children.

That spirit is the spirit of charity (whose biblical meaning, when the King James translators did their work, is “love”) and of service to others. I believe that the spirit motivating a child to cherish a beat-up Teddy will often manifest itself when that child, a few years later, prays, say, for lost souls. Or cares for hurting neighbors. And the oppressed and persecuted. Doing missions work across the world, or supporting it close by, or practicing it with neighbors. And to strangers they meet.

And that child who cherishes a broken doll and loves it and tries to mend it, will grow up, with our nourishment and encouragement, to care for the broken ones she will meet in life. People in jeopardy who seek her out, or whom she seeks and finds. Life’s cast-aways. She will be a doctor or a nurse or a teacher or a care-giver or some sort of volunteer. She will not be reluctant, but will rather embrace, the likes of addicts and victims of abuse.

Broken ones. Jesus came to fix the Broken Ones. And even if we have not been, say, persecuted for our faith, or are victims of abuse – or even have not been persecutors or abusers ourselves – we still need mending, every one of us. We are all broken. Are there enough “menders” to embrace a broken world?

Jesus was a carpenter who mended broken bodies. And He was the Great Physician who ministered to invisible souls. Holy irony. These actions are but two of the many ways we are to “imitate” Christ. When it is done for the sake of Christ, with His message as part of the caring, we make a gift of the best present anyone can receive. This should be the ultimate motivation for loving each other.

Tend to the broken ones. In life’s home movies, we find ourselves, gratefully, taking direction from God. To become “stars” – but stars in His crown, alongside our fellow once-brokens and patched-up neighbors.

+ + +

The “theme” for this message, its inspiration, is the great song “The Broken Ones,” by the Talley Trio. In it (and the music video by James and Angela Rowe) we follow a little girl who, indeed, found a tattered Raggedy Ann doll and cared for it despite its missing arm and dangling button-eye. Fast forward to the girl as a shelter caregiver, tending to a 17-year-old hopeless girl, a battered addict. Caring for Broken Ones is to follow the Perfect One.

This week my little (one pound, 11-ounce) granddaughter Sarah, born at 24 weeks, teeters between life and death. Her life is fragile enough, but a day after being born she suffered lung and brain hemorrhages. God is in control, and His mercy prevails. In the NICU, hour by hour, however, His hands ARE the doctors and nurses, caring for the Broken Ones.

Click: The Broken Ones

8-13-12

Hey, God. It’s Me Again. You know I realize the importance in approaching You in reverence and awe; and I usually do; and it often bothers me when Your people do not. But I need a little more of the way we can also approach You in prayer – I love that you have so many facets! – as if we are on a first-name basis. Which we are.

I have been seeking you hard this week, God. And when I have not prayed, I have the feeling that You have read my heart even better, anyway. And You have answered me in the thousand ways that You always surprise me. Remembering Your promises at odd moments. Hearing from friends who care. Catching an old favorite gospel song on the radio. Thinking of Bible verses I didn’t realize I had memorized… in fact, some of them I KNOW I had not memorized. How do You do that???

And then You spoke to me. No, I can’t tell whether You have a deep voice or a raspy one, or what accent You have. But I found myself KNOWING things, and knowing they were from You. They made sense, they brought me peace, and I could never have such wisdom on my own. Like the other day: I was thinking, with all my problems and frustrations and vulnerability and despair – the day I wanted to just get in a car and drive for three days, with no destination in mind – and, remember?, my cry that I felt like a faulty Christian? It had to come from You that I was not a faulty Christian, but in Your eyes, I was just… a Christian.

And then I felt I knew Your heart that no Christian is “just” a Christian, because that is the best You want for us! And I remembered that Your Word says that problems don’t evaporate when we accept Christ. You tell me they will even increase. I know that. But I have Your arm to lean on, a rod and staff to comfort me, a presence even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, that You are an ever-present help in times of trouble. God, I realized how cold and alone people who don’t know You must feel.

You have brought me peace. I thought a couple times that I understood it. But, you know, it passes understanding.

But in healing my hurts, in being a God who listens and whispers back, You brought me more than peace. You brought me miracles. You might not know this – well, I guess You do! – but I feel like real miracles have touched me now, at the end of this trial. You know what I mean:

I felt so “down”… and now I am filled with joy.

I have felt so dumb and acted so stupidly… but You gave me knowledge of so many profound truths.

I have been blind, and missed so many things right in front of me… but You made me see. Clearly.

I was not listening to You or Your promises or Your children in so many ways… but now I hear Your words, Your sweet music.

I have been lame, feeling crippled in my “walk” with You… but right about now, God, You have me dancing!

And something that’s hard to understand, and harder to explain to other people, is something else I KNOW is true. This has been a tough week, God, and I thank You for answering my prayers; but slap me silly if I ever pray again that I want to live in a world where these trials simply do not exist. In that kind of world I would never need to turn to You, or want to know You better, or feel Your love, or be touched by Your miracles. I don’t want to get adjusted to THAT world. With You just a prayer away, I’ll keep it right here.

And, God… thanks again.

+ + +

North Dakota’s own Mitchel Jon leads a group of singers in a re-creation of a vintage camp meeting. On the grounds of the Billy Graham Conference Center, the Cove, outside Asheville NC. It is the Gaither Homecoming Friends; and, yes, that is George Beverly Shea you see at the video’s end, enjoying every note of this classic song, at age 100+.

Click: I Don’t Want To Get Adjusted

8-6-12

Recently I heard a world-famous preacher talk about God’s promises. Actually, it was the wife of a world-famous preacher, who had developed quite a thriving business with her own ministry. These days it seems that evangelists and big-name ministers are not just called to preach the Gospel, but called to be the wife, or son, of a big-name preacher. Prosperity often follows.

Actually, that was the topic – prosperity – of this evangelista, who shall remain nameless. But Victoria Osteen is not the only prophet of the Prosperity Gospel these days. Many of my brothers and sisters in the Pentecostal churches, and in other corners of Christianity, frequently preach about prosperity, “seed offerings,” the blessings that await the faithful – under the general, spiritual umbrella of “receiving God’s promises.”

Content warning: I do not intend to join the debate, here, on the theology of what should be a more active discussion in today’s American church. I want to address our response to the promises of God, not whether people are wasting chances for nice homes and cars, or whether people are wickedly twisting the words of the Bible, or whether naiveté or agendas have driven new translations and understandings.

For my own part, the plausibility of God’s intention to shower me with material things was shaken years ago when the magazine of a favorite evangelist printed a chart that explained the “hundredfold return” that Jesus promised. It explained by simple arithmetic how dollars given as offering would return in dollars that were, well, one hundred times greater. A sure bet.

Mark 10:28-31: Then Peter began to say to Him, “See, we have left all and followed You.” So Jesus answered and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My sake and the gospel’s, who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time – houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

Hmmm. Christ’s fine print included sacrifices that do not mention money; results in this life and the next; persecutions might be numbered among the “dividends”; and a warning against expecting anything by formula. It IS called the Hundredfold “Return,” not “Reward.”

So much for not joining the debate, but I do urge us all to think about God’s promises for a moment. God had made many promises to us, His children. Many more than we realize. More than most of us ever… take advantage of? … receive? With terms like that we stray close to presumption, a sin. Not petitioning God to do something, not expecting, but presuming He will do something; and as it turns out in the circumstances of believers, it translates to Him do doing something we want. Not usually the mode of the Almighty.

Bookstores are full of biblical “Promise Books”… and should be. Indeed, God has made many promises. In fact, besides the history and commandments, we can say that the entire Bible is “God’s Promise Book”! Some of God’s promises are conditional, of course. But His greatest promise – eternal life bought by the substitutionary death of His Son – is unconditional. Jesus died while we were yet sinners, and we are free to accept or reject this unspeakable gift according to His grace.

How often do the evangelists talk about OUR promises, in between “calling in” those of God? Every one of us, maybe in different ways, have made the same promises to God – when we received Christ into our hearts; when we have been hurting; when we have sought forgiveness; after we have sinned; at times of confusion; when crises have hit; during challenges in the areas of health, finances, career, loved ones; and so forth in an endless list. When we recite the Lord’s Prayer or the Creeds, we exchange promises with God. The mere act of repentance – a frequent thing for Christians – is tantamount to making a promise.

… and how often do we break our promises to God? How many times do we sin? The thoughts, words, and deeds, even of “saints,” are not perfect. We break our word to the Creator of the Universe, the master of our souls. Often. And we have the audacity to call God out about what we perceive to be His promises to us? God cannot lie, no… but let us be a little humble about this Promise thing. As Micah wrote, He has showed you, oh man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Does God want us to prosper? I say that it is not inconsistent with His will. But I have a friend who once said to me, with tears in his eyes, “I KNOW if I were rich, I would lose control of myself in a lot of ways, afford the sins I used to lust over… probably kill myself in the process.” If this man was correct about himself, it would be a merciful God who would prosper him in radically different ways.

Farther along, we will understand the finer points of theology. But we can receive the spiritual blessings of justice, mercy, and humility, right now. That is a solid promise we can take to the REAL bank.

+ + +

Part of a Christian’s humility is accepting that we will never know some things… or know them “farther along.” Here that great old hymn of faith is sung in a living-room setting – complete with flubbed lines! – by three of the most beautiful singers, and beautiful voices, in music today: Suzy Bogguss, who opens and sings the verses; Matraca Berg; and Gretchen Peters on the mandolin. A prosperity of talent! (With the line, “And still we wonder why others prosper…”)

Click: Farther Along

7-23-12

Death by Pop Culture. The last thing Aurora, Colorado needs is the last thing the world needs in response to the multiplex murders: politicians and news crews infesting the community, imposing hugs on survivors, and “standing together,” whatever that means. Haven’t those people suffered enough?

In America, bizarre killing sprees have become part of the contemporary socio-entertainment complex, down to the killers identifying with fictional villains. A dark night has risen, when people are more willing to adopt psychopaths as role models, eager to endure obloquy, or even self-immolation, than to work toward positive personal achievement.

When people don’t believe in an afterlife, they are happy to grab what they can in this life. And when the culture glorifies violence, and makes celebrities of monsters, the path is clear for too many deluded souls. America has become in many ways a culture of death. Abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicides can all be seen as manifestations of this. As the thought is father to the deed, ubiquitous violence (10,000 violent murders, realistically staged on TV, seen by the average adolescent) begets violence – but the older sibling is a generation of desensitized children.

What we probably need less than staged hug-fests after such horrific events – a few words for cameras and then flights home, mission accomplished – is one more column, sermon, or blog. Nevertheless here it comes. But I have a bit of a different viewpoint that many others might have.

At one time I was an editor at Marvel Comics, and although Batman is in the DC Comics universe, I was close enough to the genre that when the first volume of the DC Archives reprint series was published (now scores of books covering the major characters in their significant periods) I was asked to write the introduction. The essay was about the origin of Batman, the book comprised of the very first stories. I knew Bob Kane, who created the character; Jerry Robinson, who created the Joker, was a good friend. And so forth.

For that essay I thought and re-thought the premise of the iconic character, and the unique premise, a costumed hero without super-human powers. The dedication to justice, fueled by the irresistible motif of revenge. Frank Miller, and then other cartoonists and moviemakers, have accelerated these basic aspects to warp-speed. The Batman stories and movies have been, to me, largely excellent works of art and craft, even politics. The controversies – not the least surrounding The Dark Knight Rises – have reinforced thematic preoccupations with justice and integrity, and toward a society free of violent threats.

Through all my experiences in the comics world, extending beyond Marvel and DC to the Thundercats cartoons and superheroes with European publishers, I never was completely comfortable with the superhero genre. (I also wrote Disney comics, and I never knew why talking ducks seemed more reasonable to me. For another time…) Specifically, I always wondered, and still do, why a formula dependent upon men and women in tights, and who needed fantastic powers instead of their own wits to solve problems, appealed to the American public. Would history conclude that Americans were so insecure that they needed to invent heroes whose powers they could never assume themselves – thousands of costumed attendees at San Diego Comic-Con to the contrary notwithstanding? And further (we apparently see it now in the person of James Holmes) why do so many kids think the villains are cooler than the heroes?

Why does America lack heroes, but embrace “superheroes”? It is ironic that so many people shelled out major money for tickets to see a movie about a superhero, and after the shooting we hear of so many stories of REAL heroes in the audience: those who shielded their spouses, dates, and kids, many of them sacrificing their lives.

Meanwhile, friends have been writing about the movie. Batton Lash, a wonderful cartoonist himself, says that The Dark Knight Rises… to new heights of excellence. Dr Ted Baehr, of Movieguide, reviews the movie and says that themes of redemption are powerfully positive. Just so.

But I have come to the point of asking new questions about the role of popular culture as society is affected in (invariably) subconscious ways. Mankind is evil, and every culture has honed violence, oppression, and death to the same, or greater, degree than its moral, artistic, and spiritual standards. We understand that. And many great works of art have dealt with conflict and resolution. Also understood. And somehow people are drawn to tales of extreme threats, actions, and retribution. But which is the chicken and which is the egg – does popular culture lead, or reflect, the public’s ethos? It is a question that will never be answered but should always be addressed.

But to my friends in the comics and the Christian worlds, I propose that it is time we stop hiding behind mantras that “good ultimately triumphs,” no matter how much blood through which audiences must wade. To invest a story with incredible acts of evil by incredibly evil villains, strung out through incredibly graphic depictions, all toward a conclusion where the bad guys are vanquished – but frequently with a “conflicted” message and subtexts of no resolution at all – is just window-dressing, maybe conscience-salving, for the glorification of violence.

Is violence in itself bad? No; to paraphrase what Theodore Roosevelt said about guns, the relative moral value depends on the character of the user. But we should be aware that technical brilliance, in a culture that has become known for technical brilliance and little else, is a short yardstick. And if we have to weed through, and sit through, hours of violence, to discover moments of relatively positive messages, it might be a small prize at the bottom of the proverbial box. “But the kids love the action movies! They are going to see superhero flicks anyway!” – we get back to the question of the chicken and the egg again.

(It’s like a joke I heard years ago about a man with sexual urges who went to a psychiatrist for help. The doctor showed him ink-blot pages and asked what the man saw in them. “That one looks like a door, with a keyhole, and, oh, what’s going on in there!” “This one looks like a window shade pulled closed, and I’ll bet I know what’s happening there!” And so on, until the doctor said, “Well, it’s pretty clear – you have an unhealthy obsession.” The man responds: “ME? You’re the one showing me all those dirty pictures!” The point is that the creative community needs to ask itself whether it leads audiences to higher planes; or whether there are seeds of unhealthy appetites they cultivate, instead. Does Art imitate Pandering?)

As a Christian in God’s community I am secure that this vale of tears is short; as I wrote above, justice will prevail in the end; His justice. But as an American in our culture I am hugely depressed. We cannot turn back the clock. We are not going to re-establish prayer in schools, for instance. The divorce rate is unlikely to change; broken-home statistics are troubling; abuse of women and children, and trafficking, will not go away next week; drugs and sex and violence will continue to “sell.” Those in positions of influence in the media and the celebrity class will continue to make excuses for the New Morality. The culture of death inexorably will march on.

Do I want these things to change? I pray every day they do. But I know that a just God invariably acts… justly. Does America deserve mercy? Pity, yes. But mercy, really? To quote a bumper-strip of questionable theology but persuasive logic: If God does not mete out justice to America, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.

In the meantime we may turn our hearts back to Aurora. God doesn’t need photo-ops to hear our prayers over the situation. And I am convinced most of the local people do not either. If we can re-dedicate ourselves to praying for the living; if we can pray for the potential killers in our midst – if we can share Bibles and tracts and personal prayers, and not just comic books and action-flick DVDs, with kids we meet; if we can affirm God’s standards of justice, and not Batman’s or Spiderman’s… this senseless multiplex murder spree might itself rise to have some redemptive legacy.

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An uplifting comment by a brother who lost a sister at Aurora put wind in my sails. He was devastated, of course; but he said he was grateful that he had an opportunity to tell the world for a moment what a wonderful person his sister was. He is anchored; she is memorialized in an inspiring way; and we are left with a unique perspective on grief. “Standing together” might include crying together –a theme we have visited here recently – and that can be healthy too. In 1692 Henry Purcell, in his opera The Fairy Queen, wrote the heartfelt lament, “O, Let Me Weep!” It is touchingly sung here by the counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky and his ensemble Artaserse.

Click: Oh, Let Me Weep

7-9-12

“The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” The lesson implicit in this aphorism, that we should be satisfied with what we have, discounts the possibilities that you are standing in quite a barren patch indeed, or that the other grass IS greener, or perhaps that a life represented by greener pastures is not just our desire but a necessity.

But human beings have a problem with sorting out desires and necessities. It is always worthwhile, for instance, to pray for discernment so that we might ask God for what we need, not what we want. Spiritual maturity is when we know He will answer along those lines anyway: but we must keep our priorities straight. We should look less to the pastures over the fence and over the horizon, and more to the One who nurtures those pastures.

Our culture (what the Book of Common Prayer calls “the world, the flesh, and the devil”) continually distorts this understanding. The tendencies of our natures to be dissatisfied with what we have, combined with the spirit of the age that tells us that human devices ultimately will be sufficient to satisfy every human yearning, add up to an upside-down world. Upside-down values, upside-down actions, upside-down results.

The world’s literature is filled with tales of men who try to recapture a lost or misspent youth, and, contrarily, youths who aspire to manhood before the wisdom that comes with experience – the literal meaning of premature. Closer to home, I turn to something I have observed about American society. I rely less on charts and graphs when I think about certain things, trusting instead to random half-hours at shopping malls. I have lost count of the number of teenage girls I have seen who, evidently, cannot wait to be women: excessive make-up; clothes and undergarments that (they apparently believe) make them look 30 years older; smoking and rough language; making babies like Mom did. I notice in equal numbers women who need to fool the world, or themselves, that they are still 30 years younger: tattoos; clothes designed for teens; and, again, cosmetics and outfits that are more camouflage than fashion. Upside down.

It extends to more serious realms (not that I don’t think that corruptions of age, gender, and roles are not serious). Ours has become a culture where the blessings of science and medicine run on simultaneous tracks – more miraculous techniques of delivering pre-term children and rescuing at-risk lives… and devising more efficient means to euthanize babies and “mercy kill” the sick, the elderly, and the “inconvenient,” conspiring in laboratories and courtrooms. Upside down.

Politicians say one thing and do another. Upside down. Many of society’s role models would have us think that bodies are indestructible and souls are fragile and off-limits; upside-down advice, because Americans abuse and overburden our bodies to an alarming degree; and even preachers don’t always act like they know our souls can handle all manner of tough love. And they should, to stay healthy.

Competition is good for people. One way we can test this is by observing that self-destructive elements in America have transformed it into a dirty word. Yet there is a fine line – the fence separating the greener grass, if you will – between the healthy impulses of ambition, and mere dissatisfaction or cynical pessimism. If we wallow in hypocrisy, we are a heartbeat away from fatal defeatism as a culture.

… these are all secular observations, very secular. Upside-down values are guaranteed in a secular culture, because secularism by nature does not have an Anchor. Does America yearn for better things, or are we into a cycle where we reflexively will keep hating what we have, and who we are?

By returning to God and to biblical principles, we can be free of the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil; we can find self-respect in ways other than upside-down role reversals dictated by TV shows and commercials; we can be patient and confident, not impatient and full of doubts.

Boys act like men and men act like boys? Girls act like women and women act like girls? Scientists act like killers and killers act like scientists? Here’s another one: Every day, everywhere, people act like God, or think they can. Does God act like us?

Well, we should be grateful that God does not act like us. But one time, in one unique way, He did. He chose a nexus-point in history to become man, and to dwell amongst us. Of the many reasons for this, chief of these to provide a means for our salvation, God wanted to assure us in case we ever forget (!) that He knows our sorrows, He shared our pain, He understands temptation, He is not offended by failure and He honors repentance, He can forgive sin, He wants to live within us so that we can have a better “self” to self-respect.

He tells us that the color of the grass over the fence does not matter. After all, there will always be other fences and distant pastures. What matters is His promise that all things will be made new. Consider the words of that promise singly, separately, in any combination: All. Things. Will. Be. Made. New.

Meditate on the words of this promise, and the upside-down will pass away, whether green or slightly greener. Whatever. Things are rightside-up in God’s world, the Kingdom Come.

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We have context this week that inspires, supports, and illustrates the message. Beautiful thoughts and images from the anointed Beanscot Channel on YouTube; and a tender but powerful song by the gifted singer-songwriter J. J. Heller. “All Things Are Made New.”

Click: Kingdom Come

6-25-12

When you write books, or blogs, you never know in advance – and, usually, even afterwards – who your readers will be. In my Christian writing, I begin every work the same way I advise writers I mentor: pray that you honor and please God, but also lift up the readers you don’t see and probably will never know. Our job is to plant seeds, not reap harvests.

In this short piece, however, I DO target specific readers: not curious web surfers nor casual Christians; but rather the “subset” of readers who are committed Christians, on-fire believers, dedicated church workers, lay volunteers, teachers, missions workers, youth workers. You fit these descriptions, and perhaps you came to know Christ in a personal and powerful way many years ago. Your life has been changed, ever since.

For those of you in this group, I have a question:

Do you remember God?

Is the God you serve, and to whom you pray, the same One you met when the Gospel miraculously and joyfully invaded your soul? Are you still surprised by Him every day? Is Forgiveness still something that you crave, and cherish, and share? Does the message of salvation astonish you, and humble you, every time you think of it? Does the sacrifice of Jesus’s passion and death still grieve your soul – and does the miracle of Resurrection thrill you like nothing else?

Did you once shout Hallelujahs in church, and now you merely say the word without passion? Do you shed tears, any more, of sorrow or joy like you once did? Is it possible that your “faith walk” has become, not a challenge nor a privilege, but a habit?

I am qualified to ask these questions because I have come face to face with them, often pleading Guilty. Many times do I MISS the early bloom of New Faith: the excitement, the spiritual hunger, the doubts and the overcoming of doubts, the really real realization that I am a new creature in Christ Jesus.

How do we reclaim the exhilaration of becoming not just a Child of God but a Baby of the King? That is our task, and its answer is within our grasp; just because these pitfalls are common does not mean they are inevitable or incurable. Stay in the Word, and proceed on your faith walk, as it were, on your knees.

But here are some factors I nominate as signals that very good Christian religionists might be slipping from the ranks of very good Christ followers:

You love your church! But do you find yourself, when recommending it to others, talking about the programs and activities… and, less, how Jesus is mightily proclaimed?

You love the worship team; maybe you are a part of it; you tell others about the awesome music. Is it possible, by the evidence of your testimony, that you are more in love with the worship than with the One who is to be worshiped? Do you leave church talking about a new revelation of Truth, or the awesome guitar solo?

Does your pastor interrupt his own greeting with admonitions that the congregation didn’t yell “good morning” to his satisfaction; or that people aren’t smiling enough? What about people who enter a church, risking the Cheerful Police, in order to lay in front of the altar, crying unto the Lord? Such hurting souls seem unwelcome in some of today’s “churches.”

Your involvement in projects, in small groups, in kids’ activities, even social and service work – is it all church-related? And is that good? Are we pulling up the blankets around us, creating a comfy Christian ghetto, when all is said and done? “Go ye into all the world,” Jesus commissioned. Not “Go ye to other satellite home groups…” The world is full of clubs and groups; maybe we should compartmentalize, not blend, our social and our spiritual needs.

I have a suspicion that the Lord grieves when our pattern of “reaching out” to others, so called, leaves the nurture of our own souls behind. After half a millennium, the “gospel of works” is alive and well.

This is not an “either-or” situation for Christians, whether they are “old” or “new” believers. Yet we tend it make it so. I suspect further that God is more honored, and likely is more pleased, that we cherish and cultivate our own spiritual needs first. Public libraries host book-review groups; neighborhood clubs go on day trips; and the Colonel is always there for the fried chicken. Let the church be used again for seeking, and worshiping, God Almighty, once in a while!

Do you remember God? Remember this: He has never forgotten you, nor cooled nor changed. It is not in His nature, and should be resisted in ours.

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A song that many people cite as describing their initial, impactful, encounter with the Living God, is “In the Garden,” sometimes called “I Come to the Garden Alone.” This year marks the centennial of several memorable events: the sinking of The Titanic, which will always be a compelling story; the exciting Bull Moose campaign of Theodore Roosevelt, a watershed in American history; and the composition of this precious gospel song. C. Austin Miles wrote “In the Garden” in 1912, and uncountable people have felt an affinity with its beautiful tune and narrative, over the ensuing century. In line with today’s message, note that the first line says, “I come to the Garden ALONE…” Showbiz aside, the Lord wants to meet us one-on-one. Lilacs, lupine, hydrangeas on all sides.

Click: In the Garden

6-18-12

Christians believe that God created the universe, provided a plan for His children to spend eternity with Him in Paradise, sends healing and other miracles, counts the grains of sands in the world and the hairs on our heads… but how is it that many Christians have a hard time believing that God is able to keep His own promises?

Many otherwise sincere and faithful Christians betray a flawed faith (I can attest to this, because I am always doing it) when they pray. For instance, how often do we pray, with a heavy heart, for forgiveness for some thought or act? And again. And again. And again. Do we perhaps think that the number of our petitions equates to the seriousness of the sin… as if God needs coaching. What are we doing? Is every subsequent prayer a signal that we think God doesn’t have enough forgiveness to go around?

If God is all-powerful, shouldn’t we think that He is able to do some of the simplest things He assures us He can and will do? God promises to forgive. The fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. He is faithful to forgive. The only qualification in the Bible is that God asks us to forgive others for transgressions in order to receive His forgiveness. He promises to throw our sins into the sea, as it were, far from His remembrance or His sight. Can an all-powerful God actually forget things as if they never existed? Yes, when He wants to.

Otherwise, we remind God of something He forgot! Do you want to do that?

When we accept Jesus, His Son lives in our hearts; His Holy Spirit takes up residence in our lives. When we have Christ, and are truly children of God, flawed yet redeemed, God looks at us in a new way. When He sees us then, He sees Jesus. So does the devil. That’s why the enemy attacks us in proportion to the “Jesus” we invite into our hearts, and show, and share.

That means, no matter how guilty we might be at times, or how ineffectually we might pray, When God looks at us He no longer sees a sinner; He sees Christ. When God looks at us He no longer sees an addict; He sees His Son the Savior. When God looks at us He no longer sees a cheater; He sees our brother Jesus. Do you call yourself Weak, Sinner, Rejected, Betrayed?

That’s funny. God call you Beloved.

Oh, we might look the same that we used look to each other, but not to Him. We might occasionally act the same, but God has provided a script whereby we might be forever free of the consequences. And He wants you to know that He respects a repentant heart… but you only have to read that holy script of His once. Then, go, in peace.

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Asking God to remind you of who you are, in His sight, is the theme of Jason Gray’s song. It will help you “put away the old person” you are.

Click: Remind Me Who I Am

6-11-2012

One of my favorite books in the world is one I re-read every few years. One of the reasons it is a favorite book is a favorite chapter. (Sometime I would like to edit a book and call it “Chapters” – to ask people to nominate favorite chapters of favorite books, because sometimes an author strikes a chord, composes a masterful scene, captures a special feeling, standing even higher than the whole book.) Anyway, for me, “The Piper At the Gates of Dawn” stands out from the rest of the Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. I am no fan of the Disney commercialization, but the original book, and this chapter, are magically unique. Grahame draws readers into a special world.

Nurturing my interest and affection, I recently read a book by Grahame’s widow Elspeth (I’m sorry: her name could not be anything other than Elspeth), an obscure book now, but written after she was widowed. She shared stories of her family, and of the creation of Wind in the Willows. And the book offers some previously unknown drafts.

In the course of her story, she quoted an appreciation by Clayton Hamilton, a professor of English Literature. He tells a story of visiting the Grand Canyon, seeing a copy of Grahame’s book in a gift shop, and surprising the owner, who had been waiting years for some customer to express affection for her favorite book. In that unlikely setting she was doubly gratified that her customer was actually a friend of its author.

Fans of certain books have an automatic kinship. And I value anyone whose fond instincts draw him to the world that Kenneth Grahame created. But even Grahame realized there were other worlds: he loved the world of nature (real nature, not just that of Toad Hall); and the world of childhood, as he created and defended in his other books The Golden Age and Dream Days. Read what Prof. Hamilton said of the Grand Canyon:

“Having seen it, I am relieved of any desire to see it again. It is the most gigantic chasm in the surface of the earth and is, of course, impressive because of its immensity…. But it is a lonely place, devoid of any human interest. Nobody, in historic or prehistoric times, has ever lived in the Grand Canyon. Though many of its pinnacles and buttes take on at times the look of towered castles, they have been sculpted only by uncounted centuries of wind, and show no touch of mortal hands. That dizzying immensity is empty of all human memories, and offers nothing to stimulate the sense of drama or romance.”

It is not hard to summon pity for people like Prof. Hamilton. My guess is that Kenneth Grahame would have disdained his cold sense of wonder. I do. Theodore Roosevelt (another fan of Grahame) beheld American landscapes like the Grand Canyon and unilaterally preserved them by the millions of acres, so that future generations, even Hamilton’s descendents, could be awestruck by the beauty of God’s creation. In their pristine states. Even if their pinnacles were formed not by men or even winds alone, but by God.

The humanistic phase of human history, where we float now, elevates the human mind and its accomplishments, but unfortunately is unable to separate human passions from that which guides us. It is the dark side of freedom, the residue of democracy – human nature, which never changes on its own, generation to generation. Religion, philosophy, and politics aside, humankind tends to lose something in exchange for greater “self-expression”: the acknowledgment of a marvelous Creator God; finding pleasure in His amazing works; and the enjoyment of His handiwork. In the beginning, it was created for our delight, too.

I have just returned from a three-week trip in which I experienced snow in the mountains of Colorado and 107-degree heat in the Nevada deserts. Bright red sandstone was the coincidental theme: a friend took me to Red Rocks, high above mile-high Denver; Red Rocks is the name of an area north of Las Vegas, similarly dotted with sandstone monoliths and buttes. And my son planned a day in the “Valley of Fire,” so called because its endless stretches of sandstone are so brilliantly hued as to resemble, from a distance, flames.

I have been blessed to visit many of the world’s great cities, and I marvel indeed at buildings and monuments and statues. But I have been doubly blessed to have visited many scenes of God’s handiwork. Sorry, Prof. Hamilton: it is not an “either/or” situation. The natural world of nature’s God is awesome because He intended that we be awestruck. If “towered castles” impress you, remember that it was God’s children and their God-given talents that made them. God still wins, buddy.

The evangelist Ellen G. White put it in perspective: “The flowers of the field, in their endless variety, are always ministering to the delight of the children of men. God Himself nourishes every root, that He may express His love to all who will be softened and subdued by the works
of His hands.

“We need no artificial display. God’s love is represented by the beautiful things of His creation.”

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Is there any more beautiful musical expression of these thoughts than the old hymn (with glorious nature videos)? –

Click: This Is My Father’s World

6/3/2012

A few years ago when I lived in California, I helped organize retreats for the people in the office where I worked. Spiritual getaways, opportunities for refreshment. We availed ourselves of landmarks of the state’s rich heritage, and held them at ancient missions that dot the coast. Few of us were Catholic, but the solemnity and Christian dedication of these oases were special indeed.

Early settlers built a network of missions along the Pacific coast so that travelers could be within foot (or horse, or mule) distance of one day from mission to mission. Most still stand today, active as religious communities that also welcome visitors… including individuals or groups who want a place to worship God or meditate on the Word. My friends and I visited Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside.

These experiences were so good for my soul that I gratefully learned about abbeys, fewer in number, also each hundreds of years old, that likewise welcomed visitors. The abbeys are more active religious communities, however; and conforming to the rules of the order was more of a requirement. I arranged to stay at the Benedictine Abbey of St Andrew in Valyermo. It was to be for three days, living, even dining, among the monks. Participation in worship was not required, but silence – one of the order’s strictures – was.

One has free run of the beautiful grounds, including the Stations of Cross, a precious tool to reflect on Christ’s sacrifices; and the abbey’s library. There was no “lights out” policy in the Spartan rooms, because there were no lights. But the library, with many volumes and a cozy fireplace, was open all night.

When I went to the abbey I was not enduring a spiritual crisis, but I needed refreshment (we all do, always; whether we realize it or not is the matter), and I arrived expecting all sorts of insights, breakthroughs, and revelations.

I received none. None that I hoped for, or expected. I was not disappointed, but I was confused. In the silence, I had expected to hear God’s voice, but I did not. In nature I expected to see Him more clearly, but I did not. In the solitude, I expected to be free to bump into God at every turn, but I did not.

Yet after three days, without insights, revelations, or breathroughs to headline a journaling page… I was closer to God than I ever had been.

I had the sense – a reminder, really – that a curse of modern life is that we often are too busy to meet God on His terms. In modern religion, we are taught to construct “expectations” and then devise ways to meet them, all the time thinking that such paradigms will please God. In modern spirituality, we tell ourselves that we are on progressive paths to know God better and better and better.

… where, sometimes, the stark realization that we cannot fully know Him, is to rediscover the sense of awe at His majesty, His omnipotence, and His mystery. We have lost a sense of God’s mystery. It does not threaten to make God more distant; it does, however, make Him more God-like to us. Our goal must not be to be God (if that were possible), but to be Children of God. We should not think we can be Christs, but we are instructed to be Imitators of Christ. Yes, it is one of our charges to “know God and make Him known,” but we cannot have a presumptuous attitude: if we fool ourselves into thinking we can know all there is to know about Him… there would no longer be a need to know Him.

I came to appreciate, not regret, that “space” between our knowledge of God and God Himself. It is not empty, as we sometimes fear, but is that mysterious zone where we can just stop and have reverence and awe and wonder at the unknowable power, and love, of God.

That mysterious zone, of course, is called faith.

Embrace its vastness, do not scurry to shrink it. Love the fact that God created and maintains it as a special gift for His children. To lose yourself in the mystery of real faith is to feel, to KNOW, that you are closer to Him than you can ever teach yourself to be, or work towards. To try is futile, to surrender is divine.

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Writing our stories into God’s song, BEING the glory of God, is the essence of Christa Wells’ moving song “How Emptiness Sings.” Let your tune resonate in the open spaces.

Click: How Emptiness Sings

5-28-2012

In the United States we have a few “secular-sacred” civic holidays. Memorial Day is one of them. Its origins, significance, and meaning have all become somewhat obscured and homogenized in the commercialization of all holidays into justifications for department-store and used-car sales. A sorry situation. Ask people what “Memorial Day” is, today, and you are more likely to hear responses about the “beginning of summer” or sales or barbeques than honoring servicemen of the past.

When I was a boy, many people still called it Decoration Day. Its origins after the Civil War were among Black freedmen, celebrating their liberation and the nation’s fratricidal war to achieve it. Union veterans under the Grand Army of the Republic (an early American Legion of sorts) urged that it be a holiday for all veterans; in fact, for all Americans to remember war, honor peace, and commemorate fallen military personnel. People would pray, hold parades and solemn gatherings, and decorate graves. When I was a kid, moms would decorate baby carriages in red, white, and blue bunting, and join the parades. Hello, Ridgewood, Queens, New York.

Before and after the Civil War, the American military protected the Republic, one of the very few responsibilities delegated to the Federal government by the Constitution. It is interesting – and, I believe, instructive – that the more that our military has been used for humanitarian work and “nation-building,” the less effective it has been as a fighting force. My yardstick is the traditional standard: results of wars that look like wars (e.g., Vietnam), not non-military actions like evacuations from Libya, distribution of laptops to Iraqi children, and earthquake relief all over the place.

In the meantime, and as part of the same imperatives, the military has been forced to advocate for homosexuality in its ranks and, also frequently in the news, prohibit expressions of Christian faith in its ranks. Under the radar, so to speak, the humanitarian work of the American military is subversive to its basic mission, as well as to our civic culture as envisioned by the Founders.

What I mean is this: there are many agencies that can, and do, minister to victims of disasters and even wars around the world. A governmental decision to use the military for such actions interferes with the Red Cross and other groups. Private charities – especially churches – exist to do Christ’s work on earth. God delights in our charitable instincts and responses. We volunteer, we serve, we give, we travel, we sacrifice, to minister after natural disasters in America and across the world. We bring medicine and food; we build schools and hospitals; we even distribute laptops and dig wells.

Or… the government can transform soldiers, sailors, and marines into White Wings. Noble intentions do not change the facts that the military is supposed to do military things, and private citizens are supposed to be free to do charity. Our own responses, and responsibilities, are being co-opted, and handed to people – our warriors – whose jobs they should not include.

Let us remember the spiritual traditions of Decoration Day, Memorial Day: thanking God for the incredible service and noble standards of our military in America. The red in Old Glory can remind us of the sacrifices made by countless servicemen and women through the generations. They served and often died to protect their flag, their communities, and the unknown future. Even the future that perverted the template of our “secular-sacred” civic experiment known as the United States of America. Shed a tear for our heritage, decorate a soldier’s grave, and give thanks.

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A musical tribute to the service and sacrifice, and eternal security, of people who have paid with their bodies for their souls’ desire. For those who are noble, and we all know some of them, let us remember them. Oftentimes it is the most modest who have the greatest stories. Seek them out this year.

Click: Gone Home

5-21-2012

On the heels from a week at the Christian Writers Conference in beautiful Estes Park CO, I come away with a heart exultant from fellowship, encouragement, and creative interaction with creative geniuses (some of them not yet published, but surely to be, soon). We also had reports and prayerful consideration of the cultural and spiritual crises facing Christians in this broken world. Human trafficking, persecution of believers, orphans in desperate situations… these “we will always have with us,” but as followers of Christ we cannot fail to respond.

I actually wonder whether Americans know what “hard times” are. I have been through some difficult patches, but I cannot say that I have known Hard Times in the sense that every previous generation in history, virtually everywhere in the world, has experienced.

I have been sad, but not in sorrow. I have been in debt, but never destitute. I have had regrets, but never grief. How many of us can share such relatively comfortable testimony? In my case, to whatever extent I rightly judge my insulation, it is largely due to my standing as a Christian — receiving joy that passes understanding — but we also have to credit modern life, in America, with /its technology, medicine, and general prosperity.

Hard Times do come in America, but somehow all the wars and crises have the lengths of TV mini-series, and if not, the public grows impatient. The public has a sound-bite mentality. We used to face our challenges; but now we are distracted with the modern equivalents of the Romans’ “bread and circuses” — pop entertainment, push-button gratification.

In many ways this indicates that we are not advancing as a culture. I’m not sure we are “going backwards,” either, because that might actually be beneficial. Giuseppi Verdi (yes, the composer otherwise known as Joe Green) once said, “Torniamo all’antico: Sara un progresso” — “We turn to the past in order to move forward.”

I got thinking of Hard Times in America when I pulled an elegant old volume off my bookshelf. “Folk Songs” was published in 1860, before the Civil War. This book is leather-bound, all edges gilt, pages as supple as when it was printed, a joy to hold. The “folk songs” of its title refers not to early-day coffee houses, but to poems and songs of the people, in contradistinction to epic verse or heroic sagas; the way the German word “Volk” refers to the shared-group spirit of the masses.

Many of the titles are charming: “The Age of Wisdom,” “My Child,” “Baby’s Shoes,” “The Flower of Beauty,” “The First Snow-Fall”… However, such sweet titles mask preoccupations with children dying in snow drifts, lovers deserting, husbands lost at sea, fatal illness, mourning for decades, unfaithful friends. No need to guess the themes other titles from the index:”Tommy’s Dead,” “The Murdered Traveler,” and “Ode To a Dead Body.”

It reminded me that people 150 years ago were not gloomy pessimists: they were not. But Hard Times were a part of life, and therefore part of poetry and song. On the frontier, life could be snuffed out in a moment. In the imminent Civil War, roughly every third household was affected by death, maiming, split families, or hideous disruption; yet anti-war movements never gained traction; life went on. Abraham Lincoln almost lost his mind over an unhappy love affair; his wife likely did lose her mind when her favorite son died in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt’s young wife (in childbirth) and mother (of a kidney disease) died on the same day in the same house. Hard Times? Close enough, we would agree.

Also before the Civil War, a composer named Stephen Foster wrote a song called “Hard Times.” He is barely recalled today, sometimes as a caricature, but he might be America’s greatest composer. He wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” “Old Black Joe,” “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginia,” “Way Down Upon the Swannee River / Old Folks At Home,” “Oh, Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Beautiful Dreamer”… and “Hard Times, Come Again No More.”

This last song has been resurrected lately to a certain repute, or at least utility. In some circles it has become an anthem for charities and lamentation of poverty. Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, even the Squirrel Nut Zippers, have sung it. It has taken on the air of a secular anthem. But in fact, although Stephen Foster did not embed a Gospel message in the lyrics, he had written many hymns in his life, and — if we can turn back our minds to the world of 150 years ago — it is clear that the Hard Times he wrote of were the world’s trials, to be relieved in heaven. It is clear that the “cabin,” and its door, in the song are metaphors.

Here is a memorable video to evoke the reality of life’s Hard Times, the promise heaven holds, and the beauty of Stephen Foster’s music to you. The seven singers are from the amazing project of a few years ago, “The Transatlantic Sessions” — singers and musicians from America (US and Canada), Ireland, and Scotland singing old and new “folkish” songs in a living-room setting.

Listen to the wonderful performance, the amazing music, and the important reminder that we should keep Hard Times in perspective… but also that God provides a joyful relief from life’s disappointments when they come. By and by, they will “come no more.”

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The singers are, left to right, Rod Paterson, Scotland; Karen Matheson, Scotland — hear her incredible soprano harmony on the left channel; Mary Black, Ireland; Emmylou Harris, US; Rufus Wainwright, his mother the late Kate McGarrigle, and her sister Anna McGarrigle on the button accordion, all Canadians. The other musicians are fiddler Jay Ungar — he wrote the haunting “Ashokan’s Farewell: tune of the PBS “Civil War” series — and his wife Molly Mason on the bass.

Click: Hard Times Come Again No More

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh hard times, come again no more.

Chorus:
‘Tis the song, the sigh, of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times, come again no more.

(Chorus)

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times, come again no more.

(Chorus)

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times, come again no more.

(Chorus)

5-14-12

Last week my little corner of the country, mid-Michigan, made the news. Actually, after living here for five years, I still cannot describe the geography well. Some news-readers and weathermen describe the area as “central mid-Michigan,” or “northern southeast Michigan,” or “west of the ‘thumb’,” and “south of the Upper Peninsula.”

But it wasn’t difficult for a freakish thunderstorm to find it last week. Almost 10 inches of rain fell in a five-hour period. Power was out for 15 hours. Experts called it a “Once in 500 years storm.” It was five solid hours of lightning and thunder, very strange, like in a cheap horror movie. I suffered a basement flood, damaging some of my archives and collection of thousands of books and hundreds of boxes just down there. This despite a rather comical – I can say now – routine of trying to keep the rising water from a dead sump pump, by candlelight, one pot at a time. The Little Dutch Boy I am not. Eventually I lost the race with the rising water and leaking walls.

What could be worse?

Well… my neighbors who lost everything. Nearby basement apartments where water on the ground burst through their windows. A friend whose bedroom had water up to his chin. Dozens of cars in town completely covered by water. A tractor-trailer on the interstate (this is what made national news) that was stuck in a flooded underpass, and the driver had to be rescued after climbing atop the truck’s roof.

They all had it worse. No matter how bad things get for any of us, we can always find someone who is worse off. Sometimes that truth is a reality-check about our own conditions. We should not always be Whine connoisseurs. Sometimes this truth inspires sympathy toward others, a good thing. It is a reaction common to the human condition that we wonder whether our suffering (or pain or disappointment or betrayal or sickness) is unique to us. My family started a hospital ministry after my wife’s heart transplant, and we frequently were asked the question by patients and members of their families, and survivors after a death: “Why me?”

I eventually came to a revelation that the question, as natural as it is, is partially misdirected. We walk through this vale of tears; disease and sickness exist around us; there is sin in this world, and humanity suffers the consequences; and “the rain falls on the just and unjust.” Sometimes, a lot of it.

“Why me?” I suggest the real question should rather ask, “Why me – why does God love me so?” or “How do I deserve His favor?” or “While I was yet a sinner… and despite my continual rebellion… God sent His Son to die for… ME?” — Why me?

This is the real meaning of the real question we should cry out every day. It brings a very humbling perspective. While there are possible reasons for “Why did my house get flooded?” or plausible factors behind “Why does someone’s heart fail?” – there is NO answer to “Why me, Lord? How do I deserve You?” … except the answer of His loving Grace.

Let THAT answer flood over us all.

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A musical treatment of this perspective is expressed in the classic gospel song written by Rusty Goodman, “Who Am I?”

Click: Why Me?

4-16-12

The gifts of God. Spiritual gifts. The Bible talks about such things. Sometimes even dedicated Christians can lull themselves into thinking that spiritual gifts are activities we are drawn to, ways in which we like to serve, that we then ask God to bless. The twelfth chapter of First Corinthians, however, lists nine specific spiritual gifts of God. One is Faith. Now, if we have the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we have imparted faith. And we can summon faith, to an extent, in our own spirits. But… faith is also a GIFT. When we feel weak, it is not an admission of more weakness, but of assurance, to ask God to grant a gift, an extra measure of faith. He offers it, all the time.

My good friend Melanie Bayless Veteto is our guest today, with a special message on this special subject:

Today my daughter Hazel asked, “What gifts did God give you, Mommy?” She was probably talking about my ability to draw a rainbow with the colors in the proper order, or my highly developed skills that involve scissors, paper, glue, and glitter (both “gifts” particularly impressive to a seven-year-old whose favorite color is pink) but I was happy to interpret her question in a spiritual way. She got me thinking about our spiritual gifts.

Now, I have a sister with a Divine gift of administration, and another with an indisputable gift of helps. My husband has the gifts of evangelism and teaching (and yet, I’m the professional teacher in the family), and my mom has that of hospitality; both of my brothers have strong leadership gifts and my step-dad has the gift of mercy.

But me, my darling Hazel-girl? My gift is faith.

We are all blessed with this one, if we believe that the Holy Spirit lives in us. Even so, some of us have an extra measure of confidence in the One who guards our trust. We have an assurance that in the end, the wrongs will be made right because that’s the promise of the resurrection; we have an assurance that all things will work out for our good because in the end that’s what the scripture says; we have an assurance that what is unseen is the real story of our souls, and that what is seen is only a shadow of our lives. In short, we have the assurance that our faith in God is not misguided and our hope in His word is not misplaced. We know it. We believe it.

I vividly remember the day I received the worst news of my life so far: my father (biological) was dying of metastasized stage IV melanoma. In the events surrounding his final weeks and death I remember driving, driving, driving and desperately looking into every car, and on every face, hoping to see evidence that I was not the only one daily living out one of the worst human situations I could imagine. In spite of my very serious efforts, I never saw anyone else’s pain during those upended weeks. But today, on an ordinary day in my life, I see pain all around: I have a friend who is suffering the collapse of her marriage; another dear one who sits at the hospital bed of her severely handicapped sister, holding her hand and watching her heart fail; another whose daily life is centered around the care and whims of a contentious spouse; an inspiring former pastor who is battling cancer (the cancer seems to be winning); a family whose son is facing diseases that make adults grow weak in the knees; another whose world cannot seem to straighten out no matter what good is granted it, and . . .

… you get the picture. Every day we face the worst situations we can imagine. The human condition is wrought with pain, suffering, and misunderstanding. We really don’t need to look too hard to find it. That is our story.

But here is our song: take heart. Have faith. The story isn’t over yet. Our souls can find strength when we hold fast to what we have been taught about God’s faithfulness, to what we have seen Him do in our past, and to what we have known deeply in our spirits, those assurances granted to us by the Faithful One. Wrongs will be made right, even if we don’t understand it now, and our gift of faith is especially proven in those moments of shadowy, earthly distress and discomfort. If we have faith enough to believe in a Savior, we can find faith enough to trust in His goodness.

My sister (the divinely administrative) sang this beautiful and favored hymn in a clear voice at our father’s funeral. Its message is hope. Its beauty lies in singing praises to the One who gives us song and voice during all our times, including (but not limited to) the run-of-the-mill and the dark and difficult. We sing because we know the eternal outcome is going to be all right.

Therefore, take heart, dear friends. Have faith. Be assured, blessedly, that though your story is difficult, messy, and human, your song will come as you hold fast the faith.

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One of the great gospel songs of the blind poet Fanny Crosby (of the 9000-or-so hymns and poems she wrote) is Blessed Assurance. Sometimes called This Is My Story, This Is My Song. This moving version is sung by thousands of attendees from around the world at the youth rally of Korean Campus Crusade for Christ 2007 in Busan, South Korea.

Click: Blessed Assurance

4-9-12

Happy new year! That’s one way to feel about the first day after Easter. “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” is how Christians of the first centuries would exchange greetings. All things are made new, after the Resurrection. But then, every day should bring the realization of a new life in Christ!

I have been thinking of the first times I heard about Jesus. Too early to remember an exact day, because I was fortunate to be born into a family of believers. “Church-goers.” As a child I had a standard faith – I use the term because it was only in my twenties that I came to an intense, personal knowledge of biblical truth and relationship with Jesus: born again. Yet, early on, seeds were planted; Bible stories were told; verses were memorized; prayers were said; hymns were sung.

Seeds. A good metaphor at Springtime. Not many committed Christians in our culture can say that they only heard about Jesus for the first time in the their twenties or forties. (Hearing the “hard truth” of the Bible, in this culture, is another matter… for another discussion). But almost every new believer will say he or she “returned” to the faith. Seeds, when planted, sometimes lay dormant, but can always sprout.

A “standard” church-going kid, I went through my wise-guy period of rebellion against God in my high-school years. Never an atheist, I veered toward agnosticism, and yapped a lot of skepticism in classes and to friends.

In the cafeteria, there was a kid who was kind of a loner. Not the newspaper-headline kind of loner, just a guy who always pretty much kept to himself. He was a pudgy kid, I don’t think an object of bullying or anything, just kind of private. One day he called me over to where he was eating, alone. I never really had talked to John Frost (what were his parents thinking?) before then.

I remember being impressed, a really nice kid, good conversations, a clever guy. Before I knew it, as natural as anything, he was talking to me about Jesus. He shared a little, but no grilling of me, no “decision” challenge. Every once in a while, thereafter, we would share lunch – I’ll admit that he did more of the inviting than I did – I would share dessert, and he would share Jesus.

I will tell you that Johnny’s quiet witness, as we can call it, had a greater impact than the substance of what he said… or so it seemed to me. The fact that a stranger would do this, non-confrontationally, randomly, bravely, and – what else? – in the purest form of Christian love, impressed me. Later on, it inspired me. How to be gently bold.

Seeds. Can you remember who first told you about Jesus? Most likely it was a parent or grandparent (am I wrong to want to suggest “mother or grandmother”)? Was it a random song on the radio or Christian cartoon on TV? Was it a Sunday School teacher? Almost all of the “yes” answers would still have to trace back to parents who placed us in situations where we could see or hear… where seeds could be planted. Parents, take note.

I certainly can remember the first “hymn” I learned. It is still one of my favorites, not only because of its profound though simple message, but because it always transports me back. “Jesus Loves Me” puts me in the place where God first said Hello to me, where I had an inkling of a loving Savior, where I could believe that I belonged to Him, and where a book called the Bible could hold answers to my questions. Yes, Jesus loves me!

Is that song one of the “seeds” of your faith? Can you remember who first shared Jesus with you? And early, middle, or late in life, did someone else come alongside you to nourish those seeds? In my case, it was a guy named Johnny – a real Spring Frost; maybe an angel – who chatted comfortably about the greatest truths of history, and the neediest needs of my needy heart, in the corner of a high-school cafeteria.

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Click: Jesus Loves Me, This I Know