Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-3-24

… OK, don’t rush to your concordance, or a God-Goes-Google if such a thing exists. I am not quoting chapter or even verse. But I believe I am citing the gist of what I honestly believe must be on His mind, sometimes. Or – stick with me – the essence of a lot of the Gospel message.

The Lord would not be so rude, but we know that His Son Jesus occasionally lost His temper.

It is bad enough that we, His children, tend to sin and rebel. But, for Christ’s sake (I am being literal) – when He promises the Truth, gives us the Truth, proves the Truth, and by His Holy Spirit guides us to all Truth… why do we sometimes act in ignorance of the Truth?

Many Christians, “baby” believers and longtime believers both, often begin their prayers by telling God how undeserving they are. In what they believe is humility, they confess their unworthiness. They paint a picture of approaching God nervously, conscious of their shortcomings. In their dirty robes, timidly approaching the Throne of a Holy God…

I suggest that God hardly sees you at all when you pray like that. In the first place, people who pray in that attitude are not humble at all, but stupid. Well-meaning, perhaps, but mistaken. In fact, it insults God rather than honors Him. The Bible tells us that when we have Jesus – when we are “covered in the Blood” of His sacrifice on the cross; when the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts – He does not see us first, but sees Jesus! He sees the Blood! He recognizes the Holy Ghost, which He sent as part of Godhead to, yes, dwell within us! And then there we are, children of the Living God.

Do you think that the Creator of the Universe, having spoken trillions of galaxies into existence, brought you into this world, knew your name since conception and counts the hairs on your head; that He desires that you commune with Him in worship, and grieves when you choose to sin; and Who, as a Holy God, cannot abide sin, yet – even before you repented – became flesh and dwelt among us… and was willing to have His incarnate Son suffer and die, taking our punishment on Himself… and then took the form of the Holy Spirit to live in our hearts… do you really think that God would like to see you groveling before Him? Acting as if we are not the “apples of His eye,” the joy of His creation???

Scripture tells us that when we have been saved and confess our sins, God tosses our transgressions, sins, and unworthiness into the “Sea of Forgetfulness.” Those dirty rags are now robes of white. God could remember all that makes us “unworthy” but He promises not to.

… so why do we want to keep reminding Him?

Get up on your feet… “boldly approach the Throne of Grace”… and let us act like we know who we are! Do we still fight the tendency to sin? Of course – but now we have the power, and the right, to approach God, confess, and be refreshed and forgiven. Even angels cannot savor that! God looks at us, but sees His Son.

I loved the way the old evangelist R W Schambach used to refer to the Savior – “My elder Brother, Jesus!” Another reminder (read your Bible!) that we do not need intercessors to approach that Throne of Glory – not a Mary, not a Saint, not our dead relatives. YOU are worthy!

Stand up… look at those beautiful robes you are wearing, and run to the presence of Almighty God! I’m sure you will understand, if our Heavenly Father would hear you talkin’ like you used to, He shouts a loving “Shut up, My child… and come to Me!”

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Click: Who Am I

5-13-24

The origin of the word “holiday” is “holy day,” which, once upon a time before used-car sales and peoples’ desires for three-day weekends, virtually were synonymous.

Vestiges of holiness have been stripped from commemorations, and lately even the names of observances have been neutered. It is a symptom of the Strange New World we live in, where “BC” (“before Christ”) has been de-personalized as “BCE,” Before His Era. Where Thanksgiving, in schools, has been stripped of giving thanks and replaced with noticing a “harvest” (even in districts where a farm is an abstract concept). Where college entrance-exams are no longer really tests; where urban crime rates go down because crimes are, simply, not called crimes any more; where Bible passages are labeled as hate speech by the government.

Christianity is not always the victim of such sea-changes in contemporary life. Not when Christianity itself sometimes is in the forefront!

Note: I am not referring to denominations. Like the United Methodist Church, recently in the news for encouraging homosexual ordination and blessing of homosexual “marriage.” Nor churches that deny the Virgin Birth or Divinity of Christ. Nor the Catholic Church’s tolerance of its most prominent member, the president of the United States, who frequently and aggressively advocates for the abortion of unborn children.

Those matters aside, I note with particularity how large swaths of the contemporary church has sublimated aspects of essential Christian doctrine. I attended a church service recently on Pentecost Sunday where the entire sermon on the Holy Spirit mentioned the Gifts of the Spirit only once, and then not with reference to them as… well, God’s spiritual gifts offered to us for edification and power and service. The latest monthly magazine of a church I attend was devoted to the Gifts of the Spirit… and addressed not one paragraph to the Gifts described in Acts and listed in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.

These sins of omission are endemic to many contemporary denominations. Instead of a Triune God, do Christians today prefer to worship a Diune God?

Another example, actually dispositive, is the Church “calendar” as it largely is regarded these days. It is a symptom of contemporary theology, and represents a deficient view of Christ and Who He really is; how He is regarded by His people.

Returning to “holy days” and what they once said to us, in effect –

The Annunciation once was a major observance in the church, calling us to remember how the Holy Spirit told Mary she was with Child;

Christmas marked the fulfillment of uncountable prophesies, and reminds us of God becoming incarnate, dwelling in human form;

Palm Sunday once was a festival, symbolically marking the entrance of Jesus as He should be welcomed – into our hearts;

Good Friday was “God’s Friday” or “good” because God’s Son was made a sacrifice for our sins and spared us the punishment we deserve;

Easter was the recognition that Christ overcame death, and the promise that we may do so likewise, when accepting Him as Lord;

Pentecost was the “birthday of the Church,” when the Holy Spirit, foretold in prophecy and promised by Jesus, came to live in our hearts, imbuing wisdom and power.

That’s it, right? The Gospel story in one bundle of holidays? No. Actually, far from it. All of those sacred days are worthy of commemoration. Essential to our understanding of God’s plan for humankind. Vital to our faith. However, as Holy (indeed) as they are, they all lack one final piece of the Gospel puzzle, so to speak.

Mary, bearing Jesus, beheld a miracle.

The birth of Jesus, God-with-us, was a miracle and blessing.

That Jesus can enter our hearts, like He entered Jerusalem, was a miracle and blessing and opportunity.

Jesus’s betrayal and crucifixion and death on Good Friday was a miracle and a blessing and an opportunity and a call to repentance.

The Resurrection of Jesus on Easter was a miracle and a blessing and an opportunity and a call to repentance and a promise of New Life.

The Baptism of the Holy Spirit was a miracle and a blessing and an opportunity and a call to repentance and a promise of New Life and a Gift from God.

… but none of these fully confirmed the Deity of Jesus. That only happened on the next Holy Day on the Church Calendar: the observance of the Ascension. This commemorates when Jesus bodily rose Heaven in the presence of Old Testament saints and His Disciples.

Yes, we know that God proclaimed “This is My beloved Son,” and we know of many miracles performed, many supernatural acts and Godly wisdom He dispensed. Signs and wonders. But on Ascension Day, Jesus again became one with the Father.

In some traditional and Orthodox faiths, Ascension Day is still observed as a major Holy Day. In some European countries, lip service (at least) is paid to the Day of Ascension, and it is a holiday from work and schools. I wonder, in most American churches, how many worshipers know when or what it is. We ought to. Without the Cross, and the Resurrection – and the Ascension – our faith is in vain.

Do you know the Jesus of the holidays or the Jesus of the Holy Days?

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Click: Holy, Holy, Holy

5-6-24

There are many things we know about God. Thank God (awkward phrase here!) that He has made Himself known in many ways. And because of Scripture and prophets and revelation there are also many things we understand, a different thing than knowing, about Him and His ways and His will for our lives.

Yet. There are uncountable things we do not know about God, and will never understand.

Never? Actually, yes. Even in Heaven we will not know everything about God and His ways. The angels do not: if they knew what He knows, if they could (for instance) see what God sees, and be where He is at all times, they would be as God. And they are not. This is one reason, despite our inclinations and superstitions, we should not pray to angels or saints or departed loved ones. Thank God, again, we can approach the Father’s throne directly, in Jesus’s name, praying to God.

Speaking of Jesus, we have a similar situation – knowing a lot about Him, His ministry, His purposes as Savior. But have you ever wondered about the things we don’t know about Him?

I have a new friend who cites the documentary record of Jesus’s life and ministry; and implies that since accounts were recorded after Jesus walked on earth, the Bible is unreliable. I would file these arguments under “I” for “Irrelevant,” because they deny that a sovereign God can work through inspiration; and they ignore the “harmony of the Gospels”: factors of time and space were overcome, and a multitude of prophesies – for instance myriad details in Isaiah’s Chapter 53, written 700 years before Christ was incarnate – were fulfilled in precise details.

But do you wonder? We know little about His childhood, for instance. The Bible says virtually nothing of Jesus’s life up to His thirty-third year. Arguably, His real “story” began when He was baptized in the Holy Spirit by John. That is when we have the accounts of His ministry, preaching, miracles, teaching, signs and wonders; and of His persecution, betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection.

Why? God knows, to coin another phrase. We might have questions, and I believe God wants us to ask questions… to speculate on His ways… to dig deeper into spiritual matters, for ourselves. For example, we are told that Jesus was writing in the dust when the adulterous woman was brought before Him, to trap Him if He might answer contrary to Levitical or Mosaic laws. What is the point of telling us that He was writing in the dust… and not sharing what He was doodling? My guess – and I have to imagine the Mind of God to make this guess – is that the Lord might have been writing the numbers One to Ten. Why? It would have been a form of “prior restraint,” challenging those in the mob to consider which Commandments they broke before condemning a woman for a Commandment she broke…

Another “missing” set of events is What did Jesus do, really, in those 40 days between His rising from the dead and leaving the tomb, and physically Ascending to Heaven? Yes, we are told in the Book of Acts that He preached, and that many witnessed Him. But… we are not told what He preached. Or what miracles He performed. We have a few accounts of His miraculous appearing to the Disciples, His showing evidence of His wounds, some of His words…

But other than the “holy tease” (if I may so call it) that “the books of the world could not hold” all the accounts of those 40 days… we are not told much. (Soon afterward, historians like Josephus would; and church fathers like Eusebius would.) That book of the Bible, remember, is about the Acts of the Apostles, not of Jesus at that point.

So we are left again with what I am quite happy to accept as God’s invitation to speculate. I find great wisdom and comfort in the Gospel song “God Walks the Dark Hills.” You see, the Risen Jesus surely taught and preached and healed. We know that crowds gathered. Many marveled. Many came to believe in Him.

But I have a picture in my mind that, between His “events” like preaching and healing – maybe when crowds dispersed, when folks around Jerusalem slept – Jesus walked the dark hills.

Maybe He sought out individuals, not crowds. Maybe He ministered to the lonely, not only the curious. Maybe, while some people looked for Him… He looked for others.

That would be very much like the Jesus I know, because He still does that. Oh, we have to seek Him, to desire to meet Him, to want His presence. But, time after time, we will find that Jesus is already “there.” He has been waiting for us; actually, He is on His way to find us. He walks the dark hills, the ways and the byways. He walks in fields and meadows, by night and by day, in rain and sunshine. Through our joys and in our own Gardens of Gethsemane. In hard times and harder times. He’s seeking you out.

He still walks the dark hills, because He loves you and me.

This is what the high and majestic One says, the One who fills the eternal realm with glory, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in high and holy places, but also with the bruised and lowly in spirit, those who are humble and quick to repent. I dwell with them to revive the spirit of the humble, to revive the heart of those who are broken over their sin.” – Isaiah 57:15

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Click: God Walks the Dark Hills

1-29-24

These thoughts were shared by a friend of a friend a few years ago. They are perspectives on a timeless thought about the Ultimate Friend:

One day Satan and Jesus were talking. Satan just went to the Garden of Eden and he was messing and laughing, saying:

Yes sir. I just took a world full of people out there. More than I ever have! I set them up, used all sorts of bait. I knew they couldn’t resist. They are all done!

What are you going to do with them? Jesus asked.

Oh, I’m going to have fun with them, Satan replied. I will teach them how to marry and divorce, how to hate and abuse each other, drink and smoke and do drugs, and of course I will teach them how to invent guns and bombs to destroy each other. I’m really going to have fun!

And what will you do when you get tired of them? Jesus asked him.

Oh, I’ll kill them, Satan said with a look full of hate and pride.

How much do you want for them? Jesus asked.

Satan answered: Oh, You don’t like those people. They are not good. Why would You want to take them? You take them but so many hate You. They will spit in Your face, curse You, and kill You. You don’t like those people!

How much? Jesus asked again.

Satan looked at Jesus and answered sarcastically: All Your blood, Your tears, and Your life.

Jesus said, done!

And that’s how He chose to pay the price.

God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. – Romans 5:8

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Click: Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus

2-20-23

There are strange things happening every day.

For a change, not everything in the news seems Apocalyptic. At a small university in Kentucky, a religious revival has broken out. Stranger than its occurrence, perhaps, is the fact that it is being noticed by the news media. Social media, these days, cannot keep the lid on much.

Revival. It was only on February 6 that this blog made an argument that Christians stop praying to God to send revival – my point being that we should, ourselves, work to revive our faith, our churches, our communities, our nation; and then God will bless us. “Revive us again,” in the words of the old Gospel song: inspire us to do Your work that You may bless our land.

God does, after all, work in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. On February 8, in a morning chapel service at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, a seemingly routine message, based on Romans 12: 9-21, was delivered. Its message was love – one of Scripture’s most forceful presentations of the necessity to discern Christ’s love, to share love, to be love. Mostly students in attendance, the young campus speaker in a stained T-shirt; when chapel was over there was an invitation to pray.

Chapel did not end, however. There was prayer in the seats and in front of the stage. Students did not leave. Praying and singing grew more intense. By evening the auditorium was full, the balconies too, and praying and singing continued – singly, in groups; quiet and exuberant. A choir sang and individuals spontaneously preached. Everyone prayed and laughed and cried and hugged. Now adults joined the throng – faculty and neighborhood folk.

This did not stop at end of day. It continued overnight, into the next day. It continues still, more than 10 days later. As word spread (as the Word spread!) the university opened satellite locations around campus; people gathered and prayed and sang on lawns and elsewhere on campus. Social media accelerated the phenomenon – yes, clearly a revival – and there was news of similar occurrences on other campuses around the nation. People arrived from around America.

Besides the prayer and worship there have been testimonies, conversion experiences, healings, ecstatic gifts, demons cast out; and no less significant, profound private prayer and quiet fellowship, prophesies and revelations from God, and answered prayer requests. I have been to Pentecostal revivals that are more exuberant, but… God works in mysterious, and myriad, ways.

I want no one to think I am implying a connection between my little call for individuals’ need for revival, and the Asbury events a few days later. I should be struck down if I thought to imply such. However, if the Holy Spirit moved me, and others, to address the need for a proper understanding of revival in our land… well, that working of God is perhaps mysterious but not “strange.” The Holy Spirit might be motivating many people at the same time. And, I notice, a movie about the Jesus Movement has been released just now.

In fact an aspect of the current Asbury Revival (there have been others on that campus, most recently in 1970) was the “strange” story of a Christian couple from Malaysia, of all places, who were inspired to move to Kentucky, of all places, and wait for the falling of the Holy Spirit in a worship-revival setting. It did not come for years, and, discouraged, they moved to New York City. But they were inspired in their hearts to return to Kentucky, which they did… days before the current revival fell. After God moves, His timetable becomes clearer!

This had been my point. That we, as believers, cannot order God around with a wish-list that He “send” deeper spiritual experiences on demand. That is our job. But there is a holy synergy.

When His people work and wait… expect and believe… study and spread the Word… open their hearts and “till the soil,” so to speak – He will plant the seeds. And bring a harvest such as we see at Asbury right now. Remember: “Revive” means, literally, Re-Birth.

As I said, I have been in revivals like the famous one in Pensacola, the “Brownsville Revival” that lasted years. There have been others. In fact, what the Asbury chapel resembles is the early, first-century church after Christ’s ascension. Other experiences have included the four notable “Great Awakenings” between the Colonial days and the Civil War, as well as in brush arbors and camp meetings on the American frontier; but they have accelerated in the past century: Wichita in 1900; Asuza Street in L.A. in 1906; revivals in Wales and Scotland; the Toronto Blessing; etc. Their increase suggests that the End Times are approaching.

In the Second Chapter of Acts it is foretold: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people; your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.

Regarding my recent message here: “Hasn’t God sent revival after all?” Yes. My plea, again, was for us, like watchmen at the wall (Isaiah 62:6) to wait, warn, and work. Also – there is Revival and there is Revival. A “revival” of the nation’s politics and morality is important. But even the most well-meaning Christian patriots must not confuse the priorities:

We must work for our own spiritual revivals, in our households and communities, before working for, and expecting, national policy-revivals. Any other order is futile.

And – this is so important to notice about the Asbury Revival! – this is happening among the youth!

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There are many, many cameras trained on the Asbury Revival right now. Search Google and YouTube and elsewhere; you will easily find video clips and news reports and even live streams. Experience it for yourself, even on the TV or computer screen… and maybe invite the Holy Spirit to your own community.

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Click: News report on the Asbury Revival

12-12-22

This weekend I attended a performance of Messiah, the famous oratorio by Handel. Inspiring, always. Familiar, too. The musical miracle of Handel’s many great works, all three hours or so composed in about 23 days, invariably is heard this time of year, in concerts, on radio, even in snippets on TV commercials.

It is associated with Christmas but Handel intended, and lyricist Charles Jennens arranged Biblical passages, to tell the whole story of Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Incarnate Lord, Jesus. That is, not his “biography” but the dramatic glory-story from prophecies to the Millennial Kingdom.

I mention the words and concepts of the masterpiece because many people assume it is only Christmas music. As we shared here recently, the songs of salvation should never be filed away for one day or one holiday season – because that would mean they are neglected for the rest of the year. God forbid!

Handel, the “Greatest of English Composers” (1685-1759) was in a sense three different men: The German Georg-Fridrich Händel, born in the Saxon town of Halle; the popular composer of Italian operas Georgi Federico Handel; and the English George Frideric Handel. He settled in England, serving occasional patrons and arranging his own concerts. His string of operas (the fad of the entertainment world then) gave way to religious oratorios through the years. He became more and more religious as he grew older.

It is often misstated that he was brought to England by the Georges, kings of Hanoverian birth. But he did execute many works for them (they craved the association) and among his early works in England (1717) was a commission for King George I, the Royal Water Music. The Royal Fireworks Music is equally famous.

Händel was born in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, slightly more than 100 miles from Bach’s town of Eisenach; and attended Martin Luther University. Händel and Bach, the two masters of Baroque composition, were aware of each other, but never met. They were born only months apart, and Händel outlived Bach by nine years. Ironically, they both suffered from blindness at the end of their lives, coincidentally treated by the same eye surgeon. Tragically, the doctor was something of a quack.

Händel, once nearly bankrupt in England, was relatively wealthy by the end of his life. He was always generous with his resources. He had financed the new organ that had its first use in the debut of Messiah. Händel conducted that first performance, and annual concerts (in London) occurred every year until his death, all the proceeds going to his beloved charity, the Foundling Hospital.

Messiah was first performed in Dublin, in the New Music Hall. Significantly, two choirs were engaged: from St Patrick’s and from Christ Church (Trinity) – a symbolic bow to Catholic and Protestant “harmony.” Its initial presentation was over-subscribed; the crowds trying to enter resulted in SRO, and advance-ticket holders were turned away. Händel offered to conduct a second performance to satisfy the demand.

Among his many great works, Messiah was beloved of Händel. When he was close to death, his last prayer was that he lives until (and die upon) Good Friday – which would coincide with that year’s performance of Messiah. God granted this wish, by hours. The version we know today was enlarged in scope by Mozart; the oratorio has been touched by history’s greatest masters.

At this season, with such magnificent music, it is virtually impossible not to think of “other things” during the moments we pause to listen to the music… and the words. Oddly, the church where I attended a performance this weekend was in Flint, Michigan. “Oddly,” I say, because a news story was published on Friday that by some metrics or other, Flint was judged the worst city in America among almost 500 in the survey.

But in that beautiful church, hearing talented amateurs sing and play, proclaiming and believing the promises and reality of the Savior of humankind – unto us He was given – all the news and noise of the neighborhood and the world melted away.

The reality of a God who sent a Messiah to our world while we were yet sinners, must overcome the “reality” of this corrupt world.

And, for Christ’s sake (literally) do not pack away that truth in some box, to be forgotten the rest of the year.

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Click Video Clip (one short passage from Messiah, the prophecy of Isaiah, 600 years before Jesus’ birth): Unto Us a Child Is Born

5-2-22

The Shroud of Turin is back in the news. New scientific tests and findings; new “expositions” – displaying of the actual cloth and exact replicas; 3-D formations; analyses of the cloth, even minerals and pollen found in the fibers.

Old mysteries, new debates; old debates, new mysteries.

A summary for those who have not heard of the Shroud or followed its occasional appearance in news stories. The lengthy piece of cloth (approximately 14.5 feet by 3.5 feet) is reputed to be the burial cloth of Jesus, or in any event a man who was laid upon the cloth which then was brought forward to cover the front of the body. That is, not wrapped like a mummy.

The Shroud was imputed to be that of Jesus because there is a faint yet detailed image of a man fitting the details of a body abused as described in Bible accounts.

Mysteries immediately present themselves:

Why have people thought the man was Jesus? First, the man’s features are that of a Palestinian Jew, with beard and hair in the style of Jesus’s time.

Further mysteries: there are apparent bloodstains and wounds and hematomas, and many of them. That the Shroud did not hold an average prisoner or random tortured criminal (besides the fact that the condemned would not have been afforded careful and honored burials in such shrouds) is another evident mystery: a great number of the evidences of the man of the Shroud correspond to Jesus’s Passion and death.

The mysteries of those bloodstains: Bloodstreams from thorns thrust on the head. A wound on the side (Jesus was pierced with a spear between the ribs). Other “stripes” – evidence of whippings and scourging as recorded in the Bible. Bruises, particularly on the face, correspond to the accounts of how Jesus was beaten.

There have been accusations and suspicions of forgery which skepticism is a reason the Shroud is frequently in the news: the wounds where spikes would have held the body on a cross are through the wrists, not hands. For centuries, Christians traditionally assumed that nails pieced Jesus’s hands – which is only the case in a general or poetic sense, but not by correct anatomy. Relatively recently, researchers nailed corpses to crosses; through the hands, the body’s weight ripped through the hands and the bodies fell. But because the wrist has many bones, the bodies were upheld. The man of the Shroud shows nail wounds through the wrists. Ancient forgers, if there were, did not depict that; innumerable artists  of ancient times depicted the crucified Jesus with nails or scars in the hands.

The biggest mystery is the image itself. It is faint; it shows a man as described in the Gospels, brutalized and naked. Through the centuries, people wondered, however, why the image appeared in sepia tones and “almost” real. But somehow “backwards” or reversed. Why? When the Shroud was first photographed in the late 1890s, its photographic negatives startled the world: HERE was a virtual photograph of a man fitting the Bible’s descriptions.

A mystery: the Shroud was a virtual photographic negative! What? Why? How?

Books have been written, and will be; but I will try to condense and summarize the facts, doubts, proofs, tests, and… mysteries. Ownership of the Shroud could be traced back only to about 1300. It was either forged then, or, as claimed, was hidden, cherished, then kept from Moslem invaders of churches in Turkey that claimed to possess such a relic.

How was the image made? It is not of paint or dyes; the image does not permeate the cloth; and (years before the atomic age) the idea was advanced that at the moment of Resurrection, a supernatural burst of some sort scorched the Shroud, transferring the image we see.

There are strange patches on it today. They were sewn when a fire occurred in a church where it was housed centuries ago, and its silver reliquary melted and burned in the folded cloth. Speaking of its being folded, the Shroud might explain the mystery of “Veronica’s Veil,” an ancient legend of a cloth that mysteriously took on the face of Jesus when a sympathetic woman wiped his sweat as the cross was carried to Golgotha. The Shroud in ancient times evidently was displayed in folded form, showing only Jesus’s face… perhaps inspiring that legend.

So the Shroud evidently was seen and venerated for decades after the Resurrection… went missing through persecution and wars… and for a thousand years has been traced in castles and churches, now residing in a basilica in Turin, Italy.

Skeptics have demanded proofs; and even the Vatican is neutral about its authenticity. Historians, doctors, experts in geography, agronomy, fabric analysis, and forensic science have debated. On both sides. Mysteries arise and are stoked: disagreements on the types of cloth weaves… the explanation for pollens on the Shroud from the area around Jerusalem (that is, not in a European forger’s studio)… measurements of the anatomy of the man of the Shroud… explanations for the absence of paints and the presence of blood serum. And so forth.

Back in the 1970s, when many discoveries were made and hotly debated, I became very interested in the Shroud, and researched all I could. I acquired rare publications from the 1890s, when the world became curious; I purchased documentary materials and even delivered lectures with a slide show. “The Mysteries of the Shroud.”

The church’s handlers allowed for a small portion of the Shroud to be cut, and undergo Carbon-14 dating analysis… whose conclusion (without explaining the manner of the image’s transfer and other mysteries) was that the Shroud was about a thousand years old, not 2000 years. Yet mysteries were compelling.

For instance, new technology has enabled the formation of 3-D models based on scans of the image on the Shroud. I was present at its display – a perfectly formed body of a man, every aspect in perfect proportions. Imagery even identified details on the coins placed on the body’s eyes… but that are disputed by others. Pollen, tiny seeds, the fabric composition, so much more, was explained… or explained away.

Meanwhile, Carbon-Dating has been found often to be unreliable, and easily contaminated. Some mysteries might have been answered this week, from a new technology that has dated the Shroud as from the time, and place, of Jesus’s life. Specifically, almost an exact match with fabrics from the siege of Masada, 74-55 B.C., in Israel.

“Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering,” or WAXS, measures the natural aging of flax cellulose. A scientist from Bari, Italy, described its superiority to carbon-14 spectrology: “Molds and bacteria, colonizing textile fibers, and dirt or carbon-containing minerals, such as limestone, adhering to them, in the empty spaces between the fibers that at a microscopic level represent about 50 per cent of the volume, can be so difficult to completely eliminate in the sample cleaning phase, which can distort the dating.”

As I said above, we have old mysteries, new debates; and old debates, new mysteries.

I invite you to think about the mysteries as much as about the Shroud, compelling as that is. Whether old or half-old, authentic or forgery, plausible or impossible… it is a matter of faith. And what is that “matter” of faith? – only something that can excite our curiosity and engage our interest.

At best – and I write as someone who is quite persuaded that this actually held the body of Jesus Christ – the Shroud is a relic. An object. As a relic, let it not persuade you (as relics have, sadly, throughout history, persuaded people) that it is holy; that it can save your soul; that it can heal you; that you should venerate or pray to it.

I have been to many sites in Europe where relics are housed and displayed: fingers of saints; locks of hair; skulls of martyrs. A favorite church near my favorite hotel in Rome, the Basilica of St-Paul-Outside-the-Wall, as it is known, has a wall of boxes and shelves with many of these “holy objects.” If all the “pieces of the True Cross” in European churches were put together, it would look like a redwood forest…

If I am dismissive, why have I pursued and maintain an interest in the Shroud? Very simply, because it is a graphic display, miraculously detailed, of what our Savior endured for us. It illustrates how He was tortured. It reveals everything He experienced. It documents, life-sized, every detail of humiliation, rejection, suffering. Eyes closed, somehow at peace – released – it visually explains what He allowed Himself to go through…

… to suffer and die as a substitute for the punishments we deserve as sinners. I cry when I think about what Jesus did for us; I cry when I look into the face of the Man of the Shroud. I rejoice that it exists – to remind me of the Cross and what He did for us.

I believe the Shroud survived to be that Holy Reminder for us. It explains what the Bible’s words tell. A Forgery? If so, why, then, didn’t forgers manufacture dozens of fake shrouds, instead of only one? Skeptics says that the image on the Shroud must have been “borrowed” from the way Byzantine artists depicted Christ – meanwhile never considering that, on the contrary, those countless painters depicted Jesus according to what they saw on the Shroud. Mysteries, yeah.

The real mystery? To me, it is that people can keep themselves from being moved by the story of His death on the Cross. And it is a mystery that people venerate relics instead of the Truth behind them.

In these days between the observances of the Resurrection and Jesus’s Ascension to Heaven, contemplate what is not a mystery – that the Creator of the Universe loved you so much that He sent His Son to live among humankind to suffer like this, and miraculously rise to life again. And all of which we can understand more powerfully through the Shroud. It is, literally, the Message of the Cross.

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Click: Rise Again

4-18-22

We have just passed through the darkest days of humankind’s history.

I don’t mean the headlines and videos of the war in Ukraine, or the travails and statistics of our contemporary challenges. I don’t mean, in sweeping reference, to the bloody horrors of the last century.

As we recognize events and commemorate moments of history, whether we learn from the past or pretend things did not happen; whether we honor people or invent heroes of distant days; whether we celebrate fictional events or ignore noble events – I think the most horrible… the coldest… the loneliest… the most confusing… the most frightening days of humankind were the days between the death of Jesus and His rise from the grave.

He died.

The life was gone from Him. The Roman guards pierced his side to make sure, and blood flowed from His heart. He was taken from the cross, and His dead body was cleansed, prepared for burial, covered in a shroud and placed in a donated rich man’s tomb, secured with a heavy stone. His mother and others tended to His burial. Officials placed 24-hour guards at the tomb to make sure that zealots, or His enemies, did not steal the Body.

At the moment that Jesus breathed His last breath, there arose stormy skies and winds. The earth shook. A giant veil in the Temple spontaneously ripped, ceiling to floor. Reports of citizens and contemporary historians, not only Scripture, told of these things.

Turbulent nature was reflected in the minds and hearts of His followers. Distraught that their precious Friend was tortured and killed – taken from them – was compounded by confusion. And terror.

Would they be next?

What of their “movement”?

Not remembering the prophecies of Scripture, or Jesus’s predictions – or His comforting promises – they wondered whether the past three years were a bad dream. Or a ruse, a plot, or a fraud.

They scattered in fear.

What to do? Where to go? Hide? Pretend the Man from Nazareth was a mere teacher, a persuader only, unreliable about all the wisdom He shared?

How to explain all the miracles… the healings, the supernatural wisdom, the changed lives – their changed lives???

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Those few days – after Jesus suddenly had been ripped from their lives and hopes and dreams – must have been the emptiest, coldest hours anyone could experience. Women weeping, men crying for blood, authorities threatening, and… His friends huddled, hiding, shivering in fear.

One disciple said that He had believed Jesus was going to start a revolt against the government. Another said He was sure that Jesus was going to strike the religious leaders and the Roman authorities dead. Another must have doubted that Jesus was the Messiah after all, as they had come to believe.

Surely some – certainly His mother Mary, at least – must have remembered Scriptures, like the symbolism of Jonah in the great fish for three days; or what Jesus said, confusing at the time, about the Temple: if destroyed, it would be restored in three days.

Then the women went to the tomb.

The women intended to honor the dead Jesus, leave perfumes and oils if they could.

The women found the guards gone. The women found the tomb empty. The women saw the burial cloths that had covered the Body… but there was no Body there.

The women returned to the cowering Disciples, sharing what they had seen. All ran, entered the tomb, and saw what the women had reported.

They returned to where they had been hiding, and began to discuss, and plan, and remember things Jesus had foretold, and, and… what? Was Jesus in fact alive? Where was He? Is there hope? Was this not a catastrophe, as they had feared? Was this not — God forgive them for their suspicions — all a strange game? Or was God doing something supernatural, again, in their midst?

Mary Magdalene, however, returned to the tomb. While weeping, a man asked why, and she wondered if “they had stolen” the Savior’s body. She assumed the questioner was a gardener… but she turned and recognized the transformed, resurrected, living Jesus.

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She and the women became the church’s first evangelists. The good news was shared with the Disciples, and then the groups of followers, then the city of Jerusalem and countryside of Galilee, then the world.

Supernatural? For the next 40 days, Jesus appeared spontaneously to individuals and crowds. Walking through walls, performing more miracles, dispensing more wisdom. And now He gave His followers “marching orders,” different than advice about merely how to act. He issued “The Great Commission” – that believers in Him should “go into all the world sharing the Gospel [literally, the good news] and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Not that Jesus’s ministry was ever a game, but henceforth being a follower of Christ became a serious life-commitment.

He challenged His followers: Do you love Me?

He commanded His followers: Feed My sheep.

He promised His followers: Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

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Were they ready?

Are we ready today?

Are you ready?

The Life of Jesus is not a mere story. The ministry of Jesus was more than performances to impress crowds. The torture and death of Jesus is more than a lesson. The Resurrection of Jesus was more than proof that He overcomes death. The Ascension of Jesus will be confirmation that He was Divine. That He is one with the Father.

The world might still ignore Him, reject Him, deny Him, explain Him away, persecute Him (and us), in fact hate Him. And us.

The world can be savage against us – because of the Jesus who lives in us – or it can dismiss us; trivialize the Savior. It can call Christianity a game.

Let them do so. We can turn around and call the “game” Jesus played as something He virtually said that Easter morning:

“Here I come… ready or not!”

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Click: He’s Alive

12-20-21

We know that the ways of God are mysterious. He works in mysterious ways, we tell each other, but His story, history, also overflows with blessings that surprise people, challenges that somehow bless people, and surprises that challenge humankind – always, mysteriously, drawing us closer to Him.

That He would “empty” Himself and “become flesh” and dwell amongst us is the greatest of mysteries. It was foreordained – prophesied in diverse ways by numerous people through the ages until the Incarnation itself. In Isaiah Chapter 53 Jesus was predicted and described; His place and manner of birth was foretold; His ministry was reported beforehand, as was His eventual suffering and death; the meaning of His life on earth was told, and His resurrection explained.

Yet Immanuel, God-Becomes-Man, is a mystery to us.

Humankind could have confronted its sinful rebellion by obeying laws, but didn’t.

God might have sent a Ruler in a burst of terror to confront the wicked, but didn’t.

Humankind might have understood a Holy warrior, a righteous reformer, a rebel with a cause. But God chose to come as a… baby.

Mysteries. It is useless to confront God for reasons and answers. And more useless to want to question His love.

Let us step back for a moment. Christmas cards and carols and gift wrap and pretty ornaments make us forget some of the truths of Christmas. Shepherds: why shepherds as the first to behold the Savior? A manger: rough straw with livestock spittle? Mysterious scenarios, yet God’s choice of arrangements.

Did the world welcome the Savior? – Of course not. Humankind’s inclination to sin was the reason God acted through the Incarnation. Our hearts are dark; such is humankind’s reaction to free will.

Was the “first Christmas” a time of rejoicing? – Hardly. The innkeepers turned Mary and Joseph away (I am tempted to think it really was because she was a pregnant virgin…). The Roman authorities, knowing Scriptural prophecy too, ordered babies younger than two to be slaughtered in the land. Mary and Joseph and Jesus fled to Egypt to escape a deadly and hostile situation.

And the birth of Jesus: was Mary full of joy? – Not completely, of course. As a mother she was blessed, yet she knew the sorrows, rejections, suffering, and death that lay ahead for her Baby.

Mysteries. These things had to be. Let us remember such truths.

Yes, we want to celebrate a Holy Birthday Party. Yet the seeds of a funeral were sown at His birth – in fact from the earliest events in the Garden. Jesus did not come to us to teach and do good deeds, tra la, before things went wrong for Him, despite His loving ways.

Jesus came to earth to die.

His ministry was to teach; His blessings included healing; He acted to fulfill prophecies; yes. But He came to die. As “fully man and fully God,” He would struggle with betrayals and pain and death – mysteries again, how God “emptied Himself” – yet He knew that is why He was born in human form.

Kids and trees and presents and smiles aside (and I am not saying to be forsaken), we should remember the Easter message, too, at Christmastime. I believe the baby Jesus did. When He first opened His eyes, I believe He looked into the face of His loving mother, and shepherds, and angels, and, yes, some lowly animals.

And I believe He also looked up from His mother’s arms and somehow – mysteriously – saw the cross too. And the (empty) tomb.

Let us rejoice for all these sweet mysteries of our loving God.

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Click: What Child Is This

12-13-21

Certain holiday songs are appropriate on certain holidays, naturally; and others seem inappropriate at any other times of the year. “I’m Dreaming Of a White Christmas” might soon be labeled as Politically Incorrect, but in the meantime would be out of tune, so to speak, if sung in the middle of August. But… we always can dream.

Similarly odd, or anomalous, is the incidence of songs that are relevant at any time of the year but are relegated to one season only. Shoved into the storage closet, as it were. Handel’s The Messiah is an oratorio about the entire life of Jesus, from prophesies 700 years previous to His birth (in Isaiah) to His Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and Ascension. Its performance is appropriate at any, and all, times during the year. But it is consigned to the Christmas season, and seldom heard otherwise, even in parts.

And some holiday music, church hymnody, shifts outside its logical boxes.

One of the most significant musical pieces (and indeed, sermon topic or cited prayer) is what has come to be called, from its Latin name, the Magnificat. It is the very simple, very brief prayer offered by Mary concerning one of the most profound events in the history of humankind: the Incarnation. God became man to dwell among us.

The angel Gabriel visited Mary and told her she was chosen to to bear the Savior, who would be conceived as a miracle by the Holy Spirit. Overwhelmed, humbled, and full of Grace, she knew the prophesy that a virgin would conceive, and… her prayer was a reaction that the Messiah would be her son.

Her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with the future John the Baptist, visited her. As recorded in the first chapter of Luke:

When Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, [her] babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit… “As soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.”

And Mary said:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant; For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me, And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel, In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers, To Abraham and to his seed forever.”

Many thoughts and blessings and lessons can be inspired by that simple but profound prayer. Imagine her thoughts… her humility… her responsibility… her coming sorrow (for she knew the whole of prophecy, from Scripture)… the favor of God Almighty.

One aspect we might note is how the unborn child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped for joy at the mention of the coming Messiah. A lesson, surely, to those who deny the humanity of the unborn.

I mentioned the “shifting” days of observance in church and holiday music; surely Mary had nine months until the birth of Jesus; yet Advent, properly named for what is profitable to contemplate, is an appropriate time to think about the Magnificat – how Mary confessed that her soul “magnified” the Lord.

Just as deceptively simple but utterly profound – in a musical context – is the Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach. If you are not familiar with it, and if you have ever listened to Handel’s The Messiah, I really urge you to open the video performance linked below. Very much shorter than Handel’s oratorio – surely an “oasis” you can find amid holiday busyness – it is a miracle composed by the greatest of humankind’s music masters.

I devoted attention to its multiple aspects in my biography of Bach (who has been called “the Fifth Evangelist,” and, had he been Catholic, would have been declared a saint). And I spoke about this work at the magnificent 150-year-old St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Flint MI at their Bach Festival some years ago.

As a musical genius but also as a Bible scholar, Bach’s exegesis of Mary’s prayer, employing no other text, sometimes focuses on one word (e.g., “Magnificat”) or two; “Omnes Generationes” takes Mary’s awe-struck realization that “all generations” will call her blessed. Groups within the choir sing “all generations” over and over, high and low, over each other, in tender harmony… and one has the impression of the hosts of Heaven raining down praises.

Any mere description is unworthy: it must be heard. Bach composed it in 1723, shortly after his appointment to St Thomas Church in Leipzig. Our video features a performance in an old church, and on period instruments of Bach’s day.

May I suggest, in this Advent season, assisted by the supernal music of Johann Sebastian Bach, that we pause to contemplate the miracle – and God’s miracle plan – of this season. The Creator of the Universe emptied Himself to become human, to remind us that He knows our sorrows and joys and hurts and hopes; and that He offered this Son as a sacrifice against the price justly required for our rebellion and sins.

No, I don’t fully understand it either. But God is LOVE, after all.

And when I hear it, I leap for joy too.

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Click: Magnificat

10-18-21

To reassure the curious, or assuage the indignant, I want to state that if this message were a foreign movie, the translation of the title (that is, my real meaning) would be as follows:

All of humankind has a need for a Savior. As Orson Bean, the comedian, said when he became a Christian, he realized that God designed us all as if we had a sort of hole in the middle of our emotions – something that needed to be filled. Which is the reason that all people, at all times and in all places, have sought a god or found God. We have an innate yearning for something better, and Someone better, in our lives; an answer to the questions we cannot answer ourselves. As my new friend Janet said recently, the comfort of knowing someone Someone who does not only have the answers, but IS the answer.

That is Jesus, of course.

And, yes, with that “hole” in our lives – which can be anything from loneliness to horrid desperation and everything in between – we look for it to be filled. The usual detours are dissolution, alcohol, sex, drugs; we know all the varieties.

But we are all alike in one basic way: our need for a Savior. “Wise men still seek Him,” as the Bible says; or maybe it is a Christmas-season bumper strip, I forget. But it is true.

So what in the world do I mean, in my title, about a “futile” search???

What I mean is an important component of the Gospel message and, I think, essential to getting to know this Jesus, this Best Friend, this Savior, this “Answer” to all our needs.

Salvation is not futile, of course. The Savior, the Son of God, Himself does not represent futility in any regard. Of course. What’s left in my title is the “search.”

OK, when we are in a dark place, or deep in a figurative hole, or feeling completely lost, or clueless about whom to trust, what to do, where to turn, how to act… of course we go into the search-mode.

But my point is this. The nature of Jesus is that we don’t have to SEEK Him. He is always there. Always with us. He is not Someone on speed-dial; not found by a spiritual Google-search. When you accept Him, acknowledging Him as the Son of God, and believe that He took your sins upon Himself, and after dying for your punishment, rose from the dead… then He lives in your heart. No “searching” needed; He already searched us out.

Your new brother, not anymore a mere concept of a Savior. Closer than a shadow.

Jesus promised that when He arose to Heaven, God would send the Holy Spirit to be the indwelling presence of God, to both comfort and enable us to be the Children of God.

So that hole gets filled. Jesus is the ever-present help in the times of trouble. In fact, even gently, but always, He will not leave us alone. Heavenly nagging for which are grateful! Never letting us feel again like we are in that dark place, or deep in a figurative hole, or feeling completely lost, or clueless about whom to trust, what to do, where to turn, how to act.

But my point is about peace and reassurance. The “need” to search for Him, when we are told about it, actually is a problem, a stumbling-block, with a lot of “religions.” That we need to start searching puts it on us, as if all the work is ours. We have to seek Him out? We need to learn where to look? Do we need a road map? What do we first need to do before we start the search? What if we’re not good enough? And so forth…

The “point” of Jesus is that He already has searched us out.

He “came to earth and dwelt amongst us”; we don’t have to squint toward Heaven or perform lists of good deeds to impress the Lord, to earn salvation.

Every other religion is about reaching out to a god. Christianity is the only faith where God has reached out to us.

It is human nature, sadly, to believe that we are so lowly that God cannot accept us without virtual 12-step programs our denominations and churches have devised. Organized religion can send more people to hell than a squad of demons could. We are lowly, without Christ, yes; but that’s the point.

We can search… and search, and search. And get addicted to the search. That is futility.

He’s already there next to you. Sit still, stay put, and let Him put His arm around you.

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Click: He Reached Down

12-21-20

Christmas should not be confined to one day, or one season, a year. This is not an anti-commercialism rant, or not only that. Of course the “spirit” of Christmas should be with us all year long, but that veers to the sloganeering: Peace On Earth and other sentiments, as important as they are.

But anything that diverts us, even nobly, from the realization of the Incarnation – the astonishing, crazy, illogical, radical, loving invasion of our lives by the Creator of the Universe, should make us laugh and weep and sing every of of the year.

Jesus didn’t come for Christmas.

Jesus didn’t come for Christians.

Jesus came that all might become Christians – believers in Him.

Jesus didn’t come for a lot of the things we associate with Christmas… because those associations persuade us to unwrap them, and then put them away with other decorations, for another year.

God’s goodness and mercy are not meant to be commemorated and call down more in one “relevant” season, more than in the rest of the year. Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection should not be contemplated during Easter alone. I wonder if there has ever been a church that has celebrated Christmas and Easter on each others’ dates! Odd? No merely rare, but perfectly appropriate contemplation, veneration, and truths.

OK – I’ll tell you what’s out of place in this idea. Santa Claus, overweight, that full head of hair and whiskers, in that head-to-toe flannel outfit. Sleighs, snowmen, all those things on Christmas cards – in Springtime? Or… hunting for colored eggs; bunnies; fancy hats – in the middle of Winter?

The trappings of these holidays – holy days – are actually just that: Traps.

Jesus has been born into your life every day of your life; not on December 25. God chose to become human to bear witness, to remind us that He knows of our sorrows and dreams and hurts and joys. He came to fill the need we all have for a Savior… which is the case every day, not one day.

And Jesus took our sins, and takes our sins, upon Himself… not on one Springtime weekend, but every moment of our lives. Not only that, but while we were yet sinners. He suffered rejection, torture, death. Good Friday is today. He rose from the dead. That is still true, not an ancient tradition. He ascended to Heaven, and He still reigns.

I do not condemn Christmas trees because they had a pagan origin; nor colored eggs as symbols of fertility in some peoples’ rites. All things are made new. But let us not condemn ourselves to mechanical celebrations and misguided holidays, either. When we are Children of the King, wherever we stand is Holy Ground. Whenever we acknowledge Him is a Holy Day.

Maybe we need to give a new meaning to that nickname of Christmas and Easter Christians, “Chreasters”! Let’s take it back!

Oh, we need peace on earth, and we need goodwill toward men on whom God shows favor. We are compassed about by fears and dangers – some imagined; some very real. But our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness; not Santas and bunnies.

Lest I drift into even more clichés, I challenge you to call to mind “other” Christian observances, every time one greets you – especially at Christmas and Easter. Our Savior was, after all, the Alpha and the Omega.

The Beginning and the End. Jesus came to die. That we might live. The Lord of all, come as a baby. The Lord Almighty, surrendering to suffering and death.

A country singer named Joey Feek can give birth to a Downs’ Syndrome baby and then learn she has terminal cancer… and sings Jesus Loves Me. The blind opera singer Andrea Bocelli can sing Amazing Grace – “I was blind, but now I see,” and mean it.

You figure it out. I’ll just worship Him. Every day is a holy day.

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For readers with hand-held devices, click or copy and paste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpXwOSHTwsY

(There is a “download spammer” that sometimes interferes with music and video downloads. It is not malicious or harmful; but it is annoying, Please just “refresh” a couple times to get our video download.)

Click: Amazing Grace, Andrea Bocelli

4-8-20

It is a Christmas tradition to burn the Yule log in the fireplace… or, more likely these days, watch a video loop on TV. Take a rest from preps, sack out with egg nog, stare at the log…

I suggest we do a similar thing this week, before Easter, but with more purpose and reward. Besides: we are quarantined. What I suggest is perfect for these days.

The Coronavirus has us in a contemplative mood, anyway — or should — and here is the perfect storm. To think about what really matters in our lives and families… and to think about the most important spiritual matters we can face.

I recommend two musical presentations of Holy Week — the “Passion” of Jesus Christ; His arrest, persecution, trial, torture, and death on the cross. As many people traditionally listen to Handel’s “Messiah” at Christmas, these pieces should be more familiar to us.
The St John Passion and St Matthew Passion were written by Johann Sebastian Bach almost 300 years ago. The greatest story ever told, by the greatest composer who ever lived. Utterly profound.

Bach used instruments, choir, and soloists to tell the story — narrators; singers in the roles of Jesus, Pilate, and all; but no costumes or drama… beyond the words themselves, many straight from the Gospel accounts. Matthew stressed the unfolding events; John focused on the personalities, and the love of Jesus.

I recommend these versions, maybe the best on video for all the unique reasons for contemplation: Karl Richter (with the Munich Bach Orchestra and Choir) was one of the supreme interpreters of Bach; famous and talented soloists; and… the video productions are works of art in themselves.

The “St John” interpolates views of the singers and musicians in church with ancient works of art depicting the events of that week.

The “St Matthew” is an astonishing presentation — a stark performance stage, with an huge cross hanging from the ceiling, subtly changing its position according to the portion of the story; changes from bright light to dark shadows; singers facing front or each other, and soloists mirroring their characters’ words throughout. Stunning and meaningful.

Both versions have English subtitles.

I wrote a book on Bach about a decade ago, joining a long line of people grateful that he ever lived. History has called him “The Fifth Evangelist” — not a pope; not Luther. He was a Bible scholar and teacher, not merely (?) the greatest musical figure of the human race. His music is supernal, still. And never more powerfully than in his two Passions (and his Mass in b minor) (and his Magnificat) (and more than 200 cantatas)… You get the point.

But try to set aside time, for yourself and your family, to watch, listen and meditate. Especially this week — to focus on the One who sacrificed Himself that we might not know death, but have eternal life.

St Matthew Passion: click here

St John Passion: click here

1-20-20

Regrets, I’ve had a few. Yes, something in common with Frank Sinatra. But those of us without regrets simply have not lived long, or even well. It’s part of life.

We seldom regret things that have happened to us, but rather things we did or didn’t do; opportunities we could have seized; what ifs; personal woulda-coulda-shouldas; errors of omission, commission, even remission.

Theodore Roosevelt, in a philosophical moment, once wrote: It is not being in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts. What we do with regrets can determine what kind of life we lead – I refer to our emotional equilibrium. And, of course, our spiritual serenity.

I have chosen, for the video clip below, a performance of the old “plantation spiritual” first printed in a hymnal in 1899: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” The haunting lament of the Black church asks a rhetorical question. Yes… you were there. We all were there, because our sins sent Jesus to the cross.

He went there willingly, yes; but it was to suffer punishment we deserve. Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. You? Our sin-consciousness should make us tremble… and be filled with profound regrets!

However, a message of the cross is that we should come away from our culpability in the Passion of Jesus trembling for joy, ultimately. That plantation song is an Easter tradition, but it is a shame if we do not meditate on it all year long. It’s not just for Easter. On the contrary.

After Jesus died, Judas was so filled with regrets that he hanged himself. After denying Jesus, Peter instead was transformed by the Resurrection, and led a reformed, joyful, powerful life.

We have those choices to make, about everything that causes regret in our lives. I confess that I am very jealous of one of God’s attributes – that He is able to take our sins, or anything else, and throw them as into a “sea of forgetfulness.” Can God Almighty not do something??? Yes, when He chooses, He can forget things, in the process of forgiving us!

Good trick, Heavenly Father. Beyond our abilities, of course: we are not God. So it remains for us, rather, to deal with our regrets. Not to be warped… not let them haunt us.

My friend Kent Kraning is a pastor at Friends Church in Yorba Linda CA, and he recently wrote a book about parenting – more, about father-son relationships; but even more, fairly overflowing with wisdom about family life overall – and he asked me to lend an editorial eye to it. It is called Dirt Bombs, from one of the book’s anecdotes of many stories that resonate. Stay alert on Amazon for it.

Anyway, Kent wrote a casual line in the book that had great impact when I read it. I would nominate it for plaques on family room walls, bumper strips, or Bible bookmarks. It is a better single sentence than my whole essay here, I think:

Swim toward tomorrow, or you will drown in yesterday.

Have you made mistakes? Learn from them. Do you have regrets? Don’t repeat those things you regret. Is there something you think God can’t forgive in your life? News bulletin: You’re wrong. He aches for the chance to forgive.

You might come face to face with Jesus, and have feelings that you are unworthy, and regrets that you might have failed Him. For a moment you may tremble, tremble, tremble. But then, as He will tell you if you will only listen, you can rejoice for the forgiveness and new life He offers. You will tremble, tremble, tremble in joy.

And – even if the current seems strongly against you at times – swim toward tomorrow!

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Click: Were You There?

1-13-20

Religion is one of the poisons in contemporary life.

Sometimes – a lot of times – we have trouble because we really don’t care to avoid trouble. Counter-intuitive? It is a human tendency, emotional inertia; unreasonable fear of change. When it comes to matters of the spirit, too many Christians get stuck in Neutral.

Yet life goes on. Every Sunday – or every Christmas and Easter – there will be church, and we will see the same old friends. It is easy for weeks to turn into months and months turn into years this way. A sort of spiritual comfort zone, without getting serious about faith.

We know, or ought to know or remember, that God hates this condition. When we sense that we have needs, maybe even empty holes in our spiritual hearts, how often do we turn to God? To ask Him to open our eyes, to shake some sense in to us? Or how often do we complain, or sigh and move on, or moan about bad luck, or “suffer in silence”?

This is no mystery or great revelation. In the book of James we are told, plainly, that we “have not because we ask not.” God’s plan… sitting there, gathering dust in our lives?

You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures (James 4:2-3).

Are we surprised that God has figured us out? Why do we act surprised that He has given us many solutions, many answers… when and if we realize that He does?

Am I making an argument for religion – that we are not religious enough? No, my opening line here, and the lines since, identify religion as a problem. Let us understand that religion – any and all religions – are human constructs. As inventions of humankind, religions are systems. Religions are what we invent and even innovate or evolve, for various reasons.

At the best, religions are attempts to worship and systematize beliefs and behaviors. At the other end – there always is the other extreme – religions are man-made counterfeits, salves for the conscience, efforts to be exclusive and exclusionary.

To address the criticisms of the professional skeptics through the centuries, religions have committed many sins and even atrocities. In the case of those who follow Christ, it is religion – which Christianity is not – that has offended, not Christ nor His teachings.

People have corrupted Christianity, and still do. But Christ never preached hate nor prejudice nor offense. Those who do malign things in His name are the transgressors.

To reduce to bumper-strip dimensions: Christianity is not about religion, but a relationship.

Added to the acknowledgment that Christ is the sole means to eternal life; the only One who offers salvation; belief in Whom dispels other systems of faith and effective works, we have the Son of the Living God who died and rose again, as no other “god” has claimed.

It is the Person of Jesus, not the rites and rituals and customs and rules and saints and holidays and popes and evangelists and rabbis and priests and relics and temples and cathedrals that get you one inch closer to God. Those are things of religion.

Do I say we should quit our local churches or family traditions? No, but work to see they are pure… and that your faith is pure, and focused.

I leave you with one more thought: Who sent Jesus to the cross, who demanded of Pilate that He be put to death? Not cheats, thieves, whores, and adulterers to whom He ministered.

It was the religious people.

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Click: The Church’s One Foundation

Mary, you are a little teenage girl. Can you believe that it was an angel who talked to you, or was that a mad dream?

You find yourself pregnant, even without a husband… even without a man. How can this be? And if so, what will your family say? What will Joseph, your intended, say? You wonder these things.

You know your scriptures. You know that God promised to send the Messiah in the form of a humble baby, born of a virgin. But… you? You know these things, but can you believe God has chosen you?

You are asking: “Me? Blessed among women? Of all generations?” You humbly fall to your knees and weep. Yes, you are blessed. But you know scripture well enough to know that your baby will grow to heal, and teach, and love, and… be rejected of men. Be persecuted, tortured, despised, and die. Why? Because he loved.

Mary, can you know?

I think you do know, because you know what the scriptures foretold; you heard from angels.

You know that when your baby’s ministry is finished – after you give birth in a lowly place, after your baby grows in wisdom, sinless, even does mighty miracles – you will be helpless as you watch him suffer and die. At the moment when a mother should protect her son, you will be unable.

On that day in the future, you will be in a small group at the foot of a cross, and maybe the only friend or family member who has remained loyal.

Because you are a mother. Because you listened to an angel. Because you know scripture. Mary, can you know that at that moment your baby Jesus will look down into your eyes and say, “Mother, behold your son”?

Can you know these things?

All these events – prophesied in great detail 700 years earlier in the Book of Isaiah, or looking forward to the end of days – Mary knew. And if she did not… she believed; she trusted; and she was obedient.

You and I should bring such gifts, ourselves – belief and trust and obedience – to the Babe in the manger.

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The amazing song Mary, Did You Know is here performed by its writer, Mark Lowry, and its composer Buddy Greene.

Click: Mary, Did You Know

12-16-19

This title does not refer to the interesting traditions and separate observances, including dates, of the various Eastern and Orthodox rites. But I always reflect during Advent about the “other” aspects of the Christmas holiday that most of us in Western civilization, the familiar European and American Christmas, have come to know.

I am frequently tempted to think, with some sadness, that we have been hijacked by Coca Cola ads and Hallmark cards. They are only problems when they take our eyes from Christ – not just the plastic one in manger sets – but the warm and memories and, we hope, spiritual prompts cannot be bad.

We cannot disdain Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup as comfort food, but we can have regrets when it keeps us from enjoying grandma’s homemade soup and the genuine thing.

So At Christmas, as I will share, it is interesting and maybe beneficial to remember “counter-intuitive” things.

For instance, many of us have mental images of snowy villages and evergreens at Christmastide. But we know that Jesus was born, most probably, in the Spring. And in a part of the world where pine trees do not grow. However, Jesus was born.

Yes, Jesus was born, and that is the reason for the season, to coin a phrase. For most of Christendom’s 2000 years, Christmas was a very minor holiday. Odd? Maybe. To make very broad generalizations, and theological essentials aside, Christmas is a bundle of coincidences – prophesies fulfilled. Good Friday, more prophecies fulfilled, and the self-sacrifice of the Willing Servant. Easter, the greatest of the Christ’s miracles. Ascension Day, ultimate proof of Jesus’ Divinity, rising to the right hand of the Father.

Stick with me: my point is not to ignore the Virgin Birth or the uncountable other parts of the Incarnation. But the ancient church placed more emphasis on the later parts of Jesus’ story, not to denigrate His birth, but, perhaps, to apply more reverence to His ministry, His suffering, His atonement, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension. And that cannot be bad, at all, if we must choose focus.

I think that the best Christmas carols, therefore, are ones that remind us the holiest aspects of the Birth and Incarnation. It summons the artistry and talents of poets and composers to do so.

One of the very oldest surviving Christmas carols, maybe the oldest, is the Wexford carol. In Celtic, Carúl Loch Garman. It can be traced to County Wexford in Ireland, and that is the surest thing about its origin. It was recorded about a century ago; written down about a century before that, its lines seemed to have existed in the 1600s and 1700s, and its Celtic tune, maybe a thousand years ago. Perhaps… like all good legends.

It has blessed people, from little villages and small chapels, to cathedrals and on CDs. But its ancient flavor is haunting. True and beautiful. Just as its core, the Christmas story itself, should be to us – true, and beautiful.

Good people all, this Christmas time, Consider well and bear in mind / What our good God for us has done / In sending his beloved son

With Mary holy we should pray, / To God with love this Christmas Day/ In Bethlehem upon that morn, / There was a blessed Messiah born.

The night before that happy tide, / The noble Virgin and her guide / Were long time seeking up and down / To find a lodging in the town.

But mark how all things came to pass / From every door repelled, alas, / As was foretold, their refuge all / Was but a humble ox’s stall.

Near Bethlehem did shepherds keep / Their flocks of lambs and feeding sheep / To whom God’s angels did appear / Which put the shepherds in great fear.

Prepare and go, the angels said / To Bethlehem, be not afraid /
For there you’ll find, this happy morn / A princely babe, sweet Jesus, born.

With thankful heart and joyful mind / The shepherds went the babe to find / And as God’s angel had foretold / They did our Savior Christ behold.

Within a manger he was laid / And by his side the virgin maid /
Attending on the Lord of Life / Who came on earth to end all strife.

There were three wise men from afar / Directed by a glorious star / And on they wandered night and day / Until they came where Jesus lay.

And when they came unto that place / Where our beloved Messiah lay /
They humbly cast them at his feet / With gifts of gold and incense sweet.

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Click: The Wexford Carol

7-8-19

Many well-meaning agnostics, and ill-intentioned atheists, and clueless friends who think they are being “welcoming,” showing they can meet Christians half-way, will intone that they regard Jesus as a “great man,” surely a “great teacher.”

Close on the heels of such specious arguments often come the “open-minded” assertions that every religious tradition has great teachers… that all of these teachers must lead to god (whatever they think god is)… that all the teachers all preached peace. And taught how to get along. Didn’t they?

Regarding the chief attributes of Jesus as being a good man and a great teacher: these are worse insults than outright denial that He was God incarnate. Blasphemy. (Blasphemy, by the way, is the one “unforgivable” sin spoken of in the Bible.)

An incomplete God is not God at all.

A “shadow God” is one or the other, not both. Jesus casts shadows. He is the Light Of the World. He is “the image of the One True God; the first-born of all Creation.”

Other “teachers” of other religions did not claim to be more than teachers or prophets; does everyone know that? Jesus, however, claimed to be the Messiah – “I and the Father are One” – literally, God-with-us.

Other religious leaders died. Alone of them all, Jesus rose from the dead, and physically ascended to Heaven.

“Oh, I respect Him as a great man, a wise teacher.” Your friends who say that to you are in effect calling Him a liar – funny thing for a Holy Man to be! – because Jesus was the Son of God who taught; yes. But He also healed. He read minds and convicted people of their sins. He raised others from the dead. He performed a multitude of miracles, recorded not only in the Bible but in contemporary accounts. Miracles.

He taught love, yes. But, more, He was love.

Can mere teachers transform lives; heal families and their pain; redeem the desperate among us? Can a mere teacher have turned my own heart from inclinations toward sin to seeking forgiveness, redemption, and holiness? Teachers can try – religious and secular teachers both – but only Jesus, come to earth for these missions, can do these things, be these things.

You say Jesus was a good man, a great teacher? Let me say in love: shut up – I have got some life-changing details to share with you. Good man, great teacher… are the first two of uncountable check-boxes in the list that describes my Savior and Friend, Jesus.

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Click: Yes, I Know

2-12-19

That phrase, “My elder brother Jesus,” was used uncountable times by the evangelist R W Schambach, whose ministry played a big part in my spiritual revelations and growth. Our relationship with the Savior is multi-faceted, but this is a component that is real, and important, and not sufficiently appreciated by believers. Or acted upon.

The three members of the Godhead have multiple personalities, if I might use a contemporary clinical term in the most respectful way. To people who are skeptical about the existence and nature of God – “What about One True God?” and “Why not thousands of gods like the Eastern religions?” – usually are asked to be bratty, not truth-seeking. There is something to be savored, however, in what I called above the multiple personalities of the Deity.

The essence of the “Old Testament God” (stereotyped as stern and vengeful) did not change when He became incarnate as the Christ: new aspects, new expressions of love and forgiveness (often exemplified in the Gospel of John), were revealed. But God has always spoken, and inspired, His people in myriad ways. When Jesus ascended to the Throne, He said to His followers that it was good that He leave: “In fact, it is best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Advocate won’t come. If I do go away, then I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world of its sin, and of God’s righteousness, and of the coming judgment” (John 16:7,8). The Holy Spirit was present, and active from the beginning of the world, but specifically has been the source of wisdom, discernment, and power in Jesus’s place.

So the One True God has revealed Himself in three manifestations; and acts in uncountable ways, as we noted. More than an everlasting help in time of trouble, He is indeed the Alpha and the Omega – the beginning and the end – literally the Great I Am. “I was formed before ancient times, from the beginning, before the earth began” (Proverbs 8:23).

When we consider the lineage and patrimony of Jesus, we are, or should be, in awe. He was the agent by whom all things were made… and was made flesh to be the agent of our salvation. He performed miracles; stilled the storms; healed the diseased; read peoples’ minds; brought the dead back to life; walked through walls and walked on water.

The simple acknowledgment of Who He is and confessing your belief, He told us, is sufficient to attain eternal life. What a mighty God we serve.

Yet do we sometimes forget the aspect, the truth, of Brother Schambach’s characterization – that Jesus is our Brother, too? There is power in that realization. The shed blood of the cross, after all, is enough to have God overlook and forgive our sins – just as the Passover lamb’s sacrifice was sealed on the lintels of believers’ doors. That is, when we accept Jesus, when we invite Him to live in our hearts, God no longer sees us, but sees His Son. We are “covered in the Blood.”

That does make us kinfolk of the Savior. Children, finally, and fully, of God. Brothers and sisters of Jesus.

I feel the persuasion to carry this beyond clichés. Many of us grew up with Sunday-school bulletins with paintings of Jesus and the little children, sort of a Holy Babysitter. Many of the older movies portrayed Jesus as a moon-faced mystic, serene and floating through crowds. We know that He was angry with the money-changers, and that He wept over the apostasy of Jerusalem; but those are rare glimpses.

As fully God and fully man, however, Jesus did everything we do. He ate and drank, more than when He consecrated meals. The water-into-wine? Surely He drank, as all the guests did. Feeding the 5000? He too would have eaten the loaves and fishes Himself also. There is no record in Scripture, but He would have defecated and urinated as other men and women did. I do not mean to blaspheme – I am not – but we need to remember that Jesus had many mortal aspects.

That is how He could identify with all of us, in all our ways.

For all the portrayals of Jesus preaching and performing miracles; for all the paintings of Him with a halo and an aura; for all the movies where we see Jesus persecuted and in agony on the cross… it would do us good to remember that He is our Brother.

I reckon that as many times Jesus preached and healed, He more often laughed, put His arm around friends and strangers, and was a brother in the best sense. That’s what brothers do.

And that’s what our elder brother Jesus still does.

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Click: What a Friend We Have in Jesus

9-17-18

“Don’t you know that Jesus Himself never claimed to be God?” Many atheists, or agnostics, or armchair theologians have challenged me through the years. In fact: Yes, He did. Often. In many ways. Plus, He proved it by fulfilling prophecy and doing mighty works. Hey, if you cite the Bible, try reading it first. To quote the Good Book (somewhere) (I think) shutteth thy mouth.

Jesus was “only a teacher”? Read His words… see His effects on uncountable multitudes through the ages.

A few decades ago there was a book that flashed in the pan, but persuaded some people whose itching ears were waiting for persuasion, titled The Passover Plot. It represented heresies that have popped up for a couple millennia arguing that Jesus was a fraud; that His miracles were staged; that He was either a charlatan or simply delusional. His disciples, too, were either political manipulators or likewise crazy.

Absurd on its face, even if only for the fact that very few people – certainly not all the Disciples; all the early Church’s martyrs; the persecuted who endured torture and death as Christianity spread; and millions today who die rather than renounce Jesus — would “die for a lie,” follow a lunatic.

The great Christian apologist C S Lewis posed the most profound of challenges to skeptics. To those who are familiar, you can hear it shared one more time.

For those of you who have not heard it, read carefully.

Jesus lived. He lives in the accounts of Roman governments; and of contemporary historians like Josephus, the great Jewish historian. Was He divine? Was He the Son of God… God incarnate? If you are mathematically inclined, you can figure the odds of hundreds of prophesies, written by dozens of writers, over many centuries, in different locations… all fulfilled in the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

OK. Perhaps that does not persuade you. Here is what C S Lewis proposed:

The historical figure of Jesus, heir to spiritual inheritance and a recorded lineage, was known to have taught and preached and healed. No one claims He was like a Greek god or mythological figure: He lived. So now we confront this Jesus. “Who do you say I am?” Before the rhetorical answer, Lewis confronts us with the logical choice… the only possible answers to Jesus’s claims about Himself.

One: He was a liar. And ringmaster of an elaborate conspiracy.

Two: He was a madman, claiming to be God, but able to convince multitudes.

Three: He was – is – who He says He is.

There is no other logical choice. Much of the world thinks about it – frankly, hardly at all – and bets on the Teacher thing; or the craziness of ancient shepherds; or maybe they bet on the kindness of a god, if there is one, who will tally their good deeds, or make allowances for “good hearts” and charity deductions on their tax forms…

But there is that nagging question: What if Jesus IS who He says He is?

Are you willing to bet? Do you like the odds? Would you bet your life?

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Click: What a Friend

4-10-17

We recently observed here that Bible passages in many printed versions have italicized verbs. The old King James committee was making theological, more than grammatical, points. Philological, really: to be exquisitely precise; to use the correct words that reflect the correct context, correct meaning, correct implications.

Not to be pedantic (although this realization has enormous significance), and to encourage readers to comb their Bibles is never a bad thing. But notice the number of times that Jesus referred to something that previously had happened, but spoke in the Present tense; and described things of prophecy likewise in the Present tense.

In fact, philology fans, that brings me to my point after only two paragraphs – Holy Week, more than any other time of the year, focuses our attention on things that seem ancient, but are of today. The Present.

Jesus made His entrance on this week we commemorate. People rejoiced at the news of His coming. Steadily, however, the people’s enthusiasm waned. Their leaders, both religious and secular, denied His status; they dismissed His message; they denigrated His divinity. From officials to individuals, Jesus the Christ became the inconvenient and marginalized Jesus the mere rabbi and troublemaker. Their adoration turned to indifference, which turned to rejection, then to hostility. He endured it all – friends who disappeared; disciples who betrayed Him; recipients of His miracles who found other things to do other than plead or weep for their Friend. He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. He did that to take away the punishment the people deserved for their sins. Till the last moment, He forgave them.

Or… to use the King James method of reminding us that God’s truth of yesterday is identical to the truths of today and eternity – that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever – let us apply the Present tense to the previous paragraph:

Jesus makes His entrance this week. People rejoice at the news of His coming. Steadily, inevitably, people’s enthusiasm wanes. Our leaders, both religious and secular, deny His status; they dismiss His message; they denigrate His divinity. From officials to individuals, Jesus the Christ becomes the inconvenient and marginalized Jesus the mere “teacher” whose teachings are annoying. Our adoration turns to indifference, which turns to rejection, then often turns to hostility. He endures it all – friends who disappear; followers who betray; recipients of His miracles who always find other things to do other than serve or worship their Friend and Savior. For us, He is the continuous reminder of obedience unto death, even the death of the cross, ever willing to bear the punishment we deserve for our sins. Till the last moment of time, He will forgive us.

All that He requires is that we repent and ask for that forgiveness; to believe in our hearts that He is (not merely “was”) the Christ who made that sacrifice; and that God raised Him from the dead.

The only aspect of this Holy story that is not timeless – that is, an element that actually might expire – is the chance you and I have to accept Christ, to embrace the simple requirements Jesus offered. Or, using the Present tense, offers. You and I still have the awesome, and potentially awful, power to accept or reject Jesus.

There is no time like the “Present.”

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Click: The King Is Coming

12-26-16

One of the things a lot of us like about Christmas is the comforting security and tradition of it. Right? The one time of year, we are wont to think, when conflicts and arguments are suspended; when families gather; when people go to church for time-honored services and familiar hymns bathe our souls. Even if it is the only day of the year that some people go to church.

I am not going to be Scrooge here, but the Christmas we know so well would have been a mystery in many ways to history’s generations of Christians.

Christmas cards really commenced, in thoughts and printed versions, in the 1840s. The image of Santa Claus as we know him – know him?? – dates from about the same time. Thomas Nast depicted the basic Santa we know; illustrator Haddon Sondblom created the definitive version for Coca-Cola ads in the 1940s. Many familiar Christmas songs were written in the past few decades; and the “old favorites,” with only a few exceptions, were unknown before two or three centuries ago – a blip in 2000 years of Christian worship.

Most of us know, even if we do not dwell on the facts, that Christmas trees, red-and-green, probably the exchange of gifts, and certainly the date of December 25, all are of pagan origins. “Gifts” can be grafted onto God’s purpose of the Incarnation; and various Christian faiths disagree on the date of the Christ’s birth.

But the actual observance of Jesus’s birth was for centuries one of the Church’s minor festivals and commemorations. Easter was, of course, a focal point of belief and believers. At one time Ascension was – I think properly – the major holy day that Christmas was not, quite. Pentecost, also.

So, am I a Scrooge after all? I have no problem, at all, with observing all the “traditional” cultural trappings of Christmas. Yes, I am glad that many people feel free to say “Merry Christmas” again. I never stopped; and I am fine with the presents and the colors and the decorations and the food. Street lightings in October, and radio marathons, annoy me.

What annoys me a lot, however, is the mandatory cheer of this “season.”
If some people, some Christians or well-intentioned revelers, try hard to be cheery at Christmastide, it is not bad… but only to the extent that we should always be charitable and exercise good will to men.

But we should all – all of us – temper our cheer. Stick with me. There are many aspects of Christmas that should turn us contemplative, not into elves with frozen smiles. The Incarnation was the most incredible miracle of God, the greatest gift to humankind. And we should be joyful. Scrooge has left the building, OK?

But. God became flesh and dwelt among us… because the human race was corrupt and lost, headed for damnation, loving sin more than God. That is sobering, especially because so many of us are still lost in sin; still needing a Savior after 2000 years.

Hallmark cards have sanitized the Birth story. I personally am persuaded that there was “no room in the inns” because inn-keepers rejected providing rooms to teenage girls who conceived before marriage. Abuse and calumny likely followed Mary and Joseph through the streets of Bethlehem.

The stable was “humble”? Certainly, but it was less than that. The manger is where animals’ food was placed, so the Baby Jesus lay amongst old food scraps and the spittle of various animals. If frankincense were needed, it was then… because that stable undoubtedly reeked of excrement.

The advent of Jesus into a needy and hurting world was, sadly, akin to the birth pangs of a mother, all mothers in painful labor. Herod knew of the prophecies about a Savior (isn’t it odd, by the way, that even Herod believed, in his way; yet millions of our contemporaries think that Christianity is a fairy tale?) – and Herod, fearing a rival to his authority… ordered the deaths of boys under age two, throughout his realm.

That is what history came to call the Slaughter of the Innocents. One of the most beautiful-sounding Christmas tunes is the lullaby we know as the Coventry Carol. Mother sings to child, “Bye, bye, lully lu-lay,” a transliteration of ancient French. It is sweet, certainly; but many have forgotten that the mother in this lullaby is whispering good-bye to her son, about to be slaughtered.

And so forth. We dishonor God when we willfully neglect the full meaning of Christ’s Mass. We are happy to assert that Jesus is the reason for the season: just so. But the ancients pondered the truth that “God, with a heavy heart, His Son did impart.” Heavy heart? Yes… God was Incarnate in order to suffer and die for us.

At least we humans have learned much in these two thousand years.

No… we haven’t. That is what I have been arguing. We have managed to sanitize, subvert, corrupt, and disguise Christmas. We make it about our memories, not God’s meaning. The Lord made it all about His Will; and we make it all about our wants. Ultimately, His focus was on us, His beloved children, and our salvation; and we make it… also all about us. Something’s not right.

Indeed, something is not right. After two thousand years of “doing” Christmas, this is still – perhaps more than ever – a needy and hurting world. More Christians were persecuted, tortured, and martyred in the last century than in all the centuries, combined, since the Holy Birth. Around us, here at home, we are beset by hate, injustice, infidelity, apostasy, self-delusion, materialism, and corruption.

Abroad – well, we can just look at the lands where Jesus was born, walked, preached, died, and rose. And loved. Let us just look at Aleppo, where the world has been looking… and looking away. Again, slaughter of innocents.

The “Middle East” is comprised of countries where Christians recently have been in the minority, but sometimes in substantial numbers. Those numbers are depleted, diminished, decimated now. “Ethnic cleansing,” refugee purges, forced conversions and rapes, beheadings and slavery.

Herod was an amateur.

After 2000 years we still await a Savior without really knowing why; or knowing He already has come. Or how to greet Him if we were to meet Him.

If Jesus showed up at your house for Christmas dinner, would you set Him an extra place at the feast, or would you fall at His feet? Would He have to remind you why He came to earth? Would we rethink just what it is we celebrate? Should we accept the present of His Birth… or make a gift of our lives and hearts? And would we cover it up with wrapping paper and fancy ribbons?

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This video is dedicated to all displaced children and in particular Assyrian children who have suffered the most by war and bloodshed in the Middle East. The familiar carol is sung here by people of Jesus’s neighborhoods and languages, Assyrian-Aramaic. These faces like Jesus knew, loved, and was.

Click: The Coventry Carol (Acapella)

12-19-16

Last week, our essay was about the “Little Town of Bethlehem,” the village where God chose to become flesh and dwell among us. Last month, there were violent clashes and civic friction there. Last year, we recalled the sad story of a simple Palestinian Christian who served his church there, gunned down in crossfire in Manger Square. For the last generation, we almost have gotten used to – no: we have not – news stories of hatred, violence, oppression, persecution, and blood in the streets of the birthplace of Jesus.

NOT filled with pilgrims, worshipers, locals, as once was the case for 2000 years. Violence between the Israeli forces and Palestinians had broken out, harshly. Again, this year. As before, during random days of the years. Again this year, but at Christmastide.

There is a powerful song about a heart-wrenching story that was in the news a dozen years ago. Britain’s Independent newspaper reported then: “For 30 years, Samir Ibrahim Salman had made his way dutifully to his task as bell ringer and caretaker at the fortress-like stone-and-wood church revered by millions as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.”

Salman “crossed Manger Square to get to the church to climb the steps to the fourth-century bell tower” as he did every day of the year. “Minutes later, Samir was struck by a bullet in the chest. It was an hour before an ambulance could reach him but by then, he was already dead. The Palestinians claim he was killed by an Israeli – the Israeli army says they did not fire a shot near the church. Samir, who was mentally disabled, may have been unaware of the danger.”

It was a time when Palestinian fighters, running from advancing Israeli troops, took refuge in the church. They and 40 Franciscan brothers, four nuns and approximately 30 Orthodox and Armenian monks, were trapped in the basilica complex. There were also disputed claims about damage to the holy site, which was built over the manger – reportedly where Jesus was born.

This story about hatred, violence, and bloodshed in Jesus’ hometown, perhaps over the spot where He was born, has resonance this Christmastide.

I shared with some friends that I would be writing this message. “Why make a martyr of an Islamic person, especially at this time of year?” some responded. “Why cite a song that talks about ‘Palestine?’” asked others. “That’s provocative!” However, Salman was an Arab, but not Islamic – he was a Palestinian Christian. How many Americans realize that Bethlehem was traditionally governed by a Christian mayor and majority Christian council; and that there is a higher percentage of Christians there than in Israel — or was, before “Christian cleansing” became the Mideast Mode? Concerning ‘Palestine,’ Bethlehem is not even in Israel but in the West Bank, under the Palestinian Authority with Israel’s full sanction.

But I want us to return again, remembering the Christmas season, to Nativity Square in Bethlehem. Samir Ibrahim Salman lay there alone. He died in the pool of his blood, maybe instantly, maybe slowly… no one was brave enough (or simple enough, as he was) to go out in the open and tend to him. He had been beloved of the town, and special to the church, because he rang those bells as a volunteer every day of the year for decades, different bells for different occasions, serving Christ and his neighbors.

Let us not lament only the hatred that shatters the calm of Bethlehem, or the peace of Jerusalem. Christians today are being slaughtered by the thousands, and driven from Iraq, which the US has “stabilized.” Likewise from Syria; areas that ISIS touches; Christian parts of Africa, north and south of the Sahara.

In a brilliant but deeply disturbing report for World Magazine a few years ago, my friend Mindy Belz provided details of the US military’s (and NATO representatives’) answer to a question about whether persecuted Christians would be pr rotected in Iraq. By us, the United States. Their answer even then was “No.” Under Saddam Hussein, 1.5-million Christians lived in relative security; today, fewer than 300,000 Christians remain in Iraq, many in fear. Likewise, in Syria, the Alawite Bashir el-Assad was the Christians’ protector.

Protected by the US? By our military security? “No.” Mindy correctly calls this “extermination by any other name.” If American Christians betray Christians in Iraq (and Syria, and Egypt, and Nigeria, and China, and Myanmar, and…) we are not merely ignoring the wrong, or decrying the wrong; we are on the side of the wrong.

Back to Bethlehem, where God chose to come in human form to reconcile ALL men unto Himself. This holy ground is where God chose to fulfill His promise from ages past, that through Him “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

Who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed the simple Christian Bell Ringer of Bethlehem? To those of us who are ignorant of the issues, who blindly perpetuate stereotypes, who support missions we don’t understand – and don’t support missionaries and aid workers we ought to – we can shudder at the thought that we might have been closer, in commitment of spirit, to the triggerman than to the Bell Ringer that morning. God forbid.

As children of God, we have been given the ministry of reconciliation, to be ambassadors to a fallen world – peoples of all faiths, and no faith. Now THERE is a peace treaty!

For the little town of Bethlehem. For everywhere.

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The news story from The Independent was picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald, where the Australian singer-songwriter Carl Cleves spotted it and was moved to write this song:

The Bethlehem Bell-Ringer

An ancient church in Bethlehem,
A target in a battle of men,
Stands on the ground where Christ was born
Trapped inside the eye of a storm

Oh Jesus, please, help Palestine
Turn all that blood back into wine
Oh Turning Wheel, Divine Design
Please bring peace to Palestine.

8-29-16

Nations almost always have traitors in their midst, and their motives are myriad – money, revenge, alien doctrines, contrary loyalties. Benedict Arnold probably is America’s most prominent traitor. He escaped to England, for whom he betrayed the Revolution and his supporter George Washington, to an appropriate life of loneliness and opprobrium. His go-between, British Major John André, was hanged as a spy. (In Tappan, NY, a bicycle ride from my high school in Old Tappan NJ; near old stomping grounds of Palisades, where I briefly ran an antiques shop; and Blauvelt, where some cousins lived.)

The spot of Maj. André’s hanging still has a marker, outside the Old ’76 House, a tavern where André was jailed awaiting the gallows. When I was a boy, the proximity, if not the reality, of historical events was almost romantic.

But I mean to address traitors and false prophets, not recount the peregrinations of a young teen, or old, naïve views of history. Treason is a serious thing. It is no longer fashionable, if I might use the word, or considered righteous to execute traitors these days. Many spies and traitors since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have committed espionage – caused commensurate harm – to the United States, but I believe the Atom Bomb thieves were the last to receive the justice of every society’s severest penalty.

To lack the will to ultimately punish traitors is to condone treason; and is to encourage disloyalty. A hallmark of our times.

What traitors are to nations, false prophets are to believers.

We know that the Bible warns of false prophets – signs of the End of the Age – as well as the Anti-Christ and other dark figures. But looking back, so to speak, and not forward in prophecy, the Bible’s history is replete with false prophets. The most prominent (indeed, living now in subsequent general parlance) is Jezebel.

According to the book of I Kings she lived around 900 BC, a queen married to King Ahab of Israel. She persuaded the king and much of the kingdom to abandon Yahweh and worship Baal instead; she conspired, framed, and persecuted Hebrews for their faith. Ultimately she was rejected and was literally overthrown: pushed to her death from a palace window, her flesh devoured by dogs, as the account goes.

Readers of my essays, or casual visitors, might wonder in this election season, and by the title of this essay, whether I am going to identify Jezebels in our midst. False prophets? A woman?

That is not a Hill I will climb here. My use of the term “President” here is metaphorical: our virtual and generic leaders can be considered as “presidents” in their realms. But I want to look at the array of persuasive, influential, prominent, consequential figures in our culture. Our bosses. In biblical days, and through feudal times, “lords.” Trend-setters; role models. All virtual “presidents” – presiding over areas of our lives.

How many are Jezebels, male or female? How many are false prophets? These days, most of them. Remembering my distinction between traitors and false prophets, we can truthfully say that almost all of our modern leaders are false prophets.

Many of them “preach” such “truths” as:

There is no God;
There is no such things as sin;
There is no heaven or hell;
We may eat, drink, and be merry with no consequences;
Drug use need not be discouraged;
Adultery is fine;
Abortion is not murder;
Truth is relative, everyone’s personal choice;
Black is white;
Up is down.

I added a couple… not really stretches, though. These Contemporary Ten Commandments come at us rat-a-tat from government, media, journalism, the educational establishment, entertainment, and, sadly, much of the church. What do false prophets do? Using a biblically historical paradigm, they induce us to worship false idols. Mammon, of course. “Instant gratification” is a sacrifice to the god of Self. Abortion – infanticide, little different except for labels and settings of clinics instead of volcanoes – is child-sacrifice to the gods of convenience and a new morality.

As I said above, what traitors are to nations, false prophets are to believers. And to innocent folks trying to make their ways in this world. They are glitzy celebrities and influential politicians, and bling-bling entertainers and heroes, so-called. But remember the words of Jesus:

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:15-16b). He also said that in the end times, “Many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many” (Mt 24:11).

We can make lists, long lists, of ways to recognize false prophets. These times are upon us. I would ask you to remember two important things that can sum up the (broken) law and the (false) prophets:

1. When Jesus said that false prophets will deceive many, He did not mean “many of the unbelievers”! Unbelievers are already out in the spiritual “cold.” No. Many believers, members of the Church, faithful followers of Christ, devout and pious folk, even the Elect… shall be deceived. Be. on. your. watch.

2. All the warnings and checklists and litmus-tests and watchwords are worthless against the only dispositive standard: do the people, and their policies, glorify Christ? Is the Bible the bedrock? Are you directed to Jesus?

Is there a “shadow of turning”? Any compromise that is “hoped” will make people amenable to the Gospel? Reject it! The World System hates us, and lies to us.

Remember what Paul wrote in his second letter to the church at Corinth (2:1-2): “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I decided to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

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Click: Hold To God’s Unchanging Hand

8-1-16

Tim LaHaye died this week. Many people know him from – indeed, were mightily affected by – his books, the famous Left Behind series.

I never met Tim, but had mutual friends across the landscape. I attended the church he pastored, Scott memorial, later Shadow Mountain, in California. A magazine I edited, Rare Jewel, promoted Beverly LaHaye’s organization Concerned Women for America, and we interviewed him. Likewise we profiled the Institute for Creation Research in El Cajon, which spun off the college Tim founded, now known as san Diego Christian College. My friend Stacy Hollenbeck from girlhood was a friend of the LaHayes, and Tim married Stacy and my buddy Mike Atkinson (I mean… he officiated at the ceremony). Finally, my agent, Greg Johnson, was Tim’s literary rep on many of his books.

It sounds amazing, actually, that we never met. In my San Diego years, I did get to know quite well some Christian luminaries (of different camps, truth be told): Mike Yaconelli; Wayne Rice; Jim Garlow; David Jeremiah; Miles McPherson;
Josh McDowell – forgive me for name-dropping, one of my cardinal sins. Which
reminds me, I saw a cardinal in my back yard yesterday…) Maybe I was just Left Behind.

The Left Behind books were a publishing sensation. Co-authored (actually written) by Jerry B Jenkins, they numbered more than a dozen titles and sequels; movies; and uncountable debates. They brought the Tribulation (the awful events at the end of history, foretold in many Bible prophecies), the Rapture (the physical disappearance of believers before the end of the world), and the apocalypse of Daniel and Revelation (and many other places in scripture), into mainstream discussion.

LaHaye’s views and books formed a sort of Second Blessing of Eschatology (study of End Times), following upon the wave of interest generated by Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and other books in the 1970s. My wife was one of the followers of the Left Behind series, and followed the news with informed interest, finding Biblical parallels that LaHaye’s books made more evident.

The phenomenon peaked about a dozen years ago, and will, if the End Times do not come first and subsume humanity and rapture the faithful in the meantime, assert itself again.

Just as with the “other end” of the Bible’s timeline – Biblical archaeology – modern science is explaining things to us that once seemed like fantasy or even nonsense. Ancient cities and rulers once described by “experts” to be of mythology or legend… are appearing in diverse places like desert plains shorelines, and under Jerusalem’s streets. Likewise, coins and amulets with faces and names and dates, are now confirmed as real, not fictional. (Just wait – I have had a glimpse – until you see the National Center of the Bible, opening soon on the National Mall in Washington DC. It will open many eyes.) (Need I say? NOT sponsored by the Federal Government…)

It is remarkable, just as science is explaining, if not confirming, many of the “mysterious” events and occurrences of Bible prophecy. Thank you, God, for Your timing. Some of us have waited patiently (sometimes impatiently) for scientists to catch up with you. Our next chuckle is when some chucklehead with a degree realizes that the Big Bang is just tech-language for Genesis.

Having asserted all this wise-guy stuff, however – and no offense to the late Dr LaHaye – there are some things about End Times that pastors, theologians, fiction writers, and scientists will never explain. And I hope they never do.

The Book of Revelation – Jesus’s dictation to John on the Isle of Patmos – even specific letters to specific churches, are shrouded in the type of mystery that leaves us ever conflicted. Literal words? Imagery? Poetry? Warnings? Fearfulness? Hope? Of course, Bible prophecy is a bit of all these… but in what mixture, with what emphasis here, or there, I believe God means to be ambiguous.

The mysterious aspects of the End Times, to the extent they are mysterious, are intended to KEEP US ON OUR SPIRITUAL TOES.

It is a sin that eschatological questions often are the basis of angry disputes among believers. They can claim to be well-intentioned, but Christians think they can improve on God – who always has been quite clear when He wanted to be. Let us speculate: that is useful. But let us not obsess.

We’ll find out… maybe sooner than we think.

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Click: Midnight Cry

6-13-16

This seems to be the year of celebrity deaths. To those of my generation, we read of people we sometimes did not realize were still alive, TV stars of our childhood. Singers. I will never get over Merle Haggard’s passing. I met him a number of times, but his work would have been a part of my life if I never had.

Celebrities are dying and in predictable cycles, a period of public consternation often is followed by the unsurprising “news” that drugs were the murder weapons, so to speak. I have yet to hear one saddened fan or, say, TV commentator, treat such news of lethal overdoses as anything but a sorry mistake by the decedent.

Some deaths, the visible ones, are under scrutiny because we should pause over the self-infliction of drugs and dangerous lifestyles. As I said, our society does not draw lessons, so these useless suicides (as we may see them; all suicides being horrible), routinely roll forward, festooning every fourth or fifth cover of People.

Some people kill themselves with drugs, some with unsafe sex; many with many assorted and, sadly, time-tested paths of drink, gluttony, greed, and so forth. Then there is the gray area of practices we know are self-destructive if not outright deadly. California just passed a law allowing people to choose suicide if two doctors sign off, and people administer their own poison. California is not the first state, nor is the United States the first country, to legalize suicide.

Then there are the people like Muhammad Ali.

My friend Milt Priggee, the editorial cartoonist from Washington State, drew a brilliant cartoon after Ali died, a switch on the famous photo of Ali in the ring after a knockdown of Sonny Liston, savagely growling over his opponent, almost inhuman. But in the cartoon, Ali was on the mat, and the victorious fighter was the figure of Death, with the label “29,000 head blows induced Parkinson’s.”

Would Ali have quit boxing if he knew Parkinson’s awaited? He grew up among old-time fighters who were “walking dead,” insensate, laughingly called “punch drunk.” The last 30 years, or more, of his life, were wracked by physical and mental debilitation. Junior Seau, whom I met in San Diego and seemed to all the world like an affable and contented retired football hero… shot himself to death, and his autopsy revealed Chronic Brain Damage, a common condition to pro football players. Today, many football players refuse to allow their sons to play football. A major movie, Concussion, is devoted to the sport of personal destruction.

I met Muhammad Ali once. My college invited him to speak in the late 1960s, and I was on the Programming Board so was able to spend a few moments with him. I was caught up in the audience’s frenzy after his bombastic speech – actually, a lot devoted to black self-sufficiency – and I was among those who wanted just to pat his back as he walked past. He was charismatic.

A few years later I was comics editor of a newspaper syndicate in Chicago when a black cartooning aspirant came to my office with an idea for a daily cartoon based on the quotations of Ali. I thought there were commercial possibilities in the concept and went to the law firm Sidley&Austin, which represented the boxer. As I remember the sad incident, his reps were interested but did not like the work of the artist, and were willing to discuss going forward with some other cartoonist… with no compensation to the fellow whose idea this was. I declined to proceed. (I am reasonably certain that the samples never went before Ali, but I do not know. It is interesting to note that a few year later, the future Michelle Obama was an associate on staff of Sidley&Austin; and Barack Obama worked one summer there.)

Not much personal, but it is interesting to note that until the recent canonization, there was legitimate debate about whom among Jack Dempsey or any of a number of heavyweights including Ali, was the best pound-for-pound boxer of all time. In recent eulogies, little was made of his refusal to register for the military draft. When referred to, people now often cite Ali’s courage and convictions. He was, however, sentenced to five years in prison, overturned in a virtual conscientious-objector judgment after he claimed that 10 per cent of his life would be boxing, and 90 per cent to be spent as a Muslim minister.

I come not to criticize Ali but to think of him in perspective. We are hearing of acts of kindness, for example a virtual tug-of-war to give a hitchhiker money for the Bible the man offered in thanks. I hope these stories are true; and they seem to be of a kind with other celebrities performing kindnesses. A Somali woman recently braved retaliation from two groups by calling Ali a great fighter but not a great man, that when he converted from Christianity to Islam “he essentially sold his soul to the same kind of [Muslim] racists who rounded up his African forefathers and sold them into slavery… and are still doing so in the Middle East today.”

That gets close to something that always repelled me when I was young, and since; even as the world found his routines compelling. “I am the greatest.” Of course he meant the greatest boxer, but he didn’t stop there, and neither have his acolytes. The hagiography, fertilized and insulated by the horrible Parkinson’s Disease that plagued him, will continue. He will be a role model whose main achievement was punching people senseless; who refused the uniform of the nation that nurtured him; whose legacy is seen in the illiterate jabber of interviewees in the Louisville neighborhood of his youth. That is to say, black youths, supposedly inspired by The Greatest all these decades, are poorer, more illiterate, and specialize in illegitimacy, in ever-greater numbers. Not the legacy that is ascribed to him.

But what specifically repelled me, and still saddens me, is the choice he made to turn his back on Jesus. Worse, to cast himself as the “Greatest” when humility and a recognition of Jesus’s greatness was there for the taking. And especially as his adopted Islam widely is being associated with barbarity and slaughter. LIKE AT THE HOMOSEXUAL NIGHTCLUB IN ORLANDO.

God “is the great ‘I am’”; and His Son Jesus Christ – not a prophet but the Son of the Living God – is Advocate (1 John 2:1); Almighty (Rev. 1:8; Mt. 28:18); Alpha and Omega (Rev. 1:8; 22:13); Author of Life (Acts 3:15); Author and Perfecter of our Faith (Heb. 12:2); Author of Salvation (Heb. 2:10); Beginning and End (Rev. 22:13); Bread of Life (John 6:35; 6:48); Christ (1 John 2:22); Creator (John 1:3); Faithful Witness (Rev. 1:5); Heir of all things (Heb. 1:2); High Priest (Heb. 2:17); Horn of Salvation (Luke 1:69); Image of God (2 Cor. 4:4); Lamb of God (John 1:29); Lord of All (Acts 10:36); Only Begotten Son of God (John 1:18; 1 John 4:9); Our Righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30); Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:6); Savior (Eph. 5:23; Titus 1:4; 3:6; 2 Pet. 2:20); Truth (John 1:14; 14:6); Wonderful Counselor (Isa. 9:6); The Word (John 1:1).

We can all “float like butterflies.” As with the lowly caterpillars, we can be transformed into beautiful creatures, through Christ Jesus, the one and only Greatest.

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Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness

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Real Clear Religion, on whose site many readers have followed Monday Music Ministry, has been for many people an indispensible part of their daily fare. It is going through changes right now after almost seven years.

For those who have followed us on RCR, please be sure to continue receiving our weekly essays by Subscribing to Monday Morning Music Ministry. (See link under “Pages” at right.)

5-23-16

Back when I was a writer for Disney Comics, I was given a bible – not the Holy Bible, although it had the properties of life and death in its pages. Like “script bibles” or “story bibles” in filmmaking and TV series, it is a summary of characters, personalities, traits, and background data, to keep writers and artists on-target. The essence was plainly stated: “Stick as close to Barks and Gottfredson as you can.”

Many of us grew up with Disney comics, and the definitive creators, although they were anonymous at the time, were Carl Barks (“the Duck Man”) and Floyd Gottfredson, who drew all the Mickey adventures. What a dream: write and draw like Carl and Floyd (each of whom I was blessed to know), and get paid for it.

I had monthly conferences with my editors, and for a while things went swimmingly. I even bought a house from all the stories I wrote. But there was one major bump in the road that I remember, decades later.

Scrooge McDuck and his nephews often set out on adventures. Humor and suspense, mysteries and slapstick, conflicts and surprise endings – what fun to dream up those stories. Once I was excited to invent a premise that contained a “switch” on a famous historical legend. Just as the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon sought the mythical Fountain of Youth, I wrote an outline with Scrooge, Donald, and the nephews coming across the Fountain of Age.

The story possibilities were great. Of course Unca Scrooge inadvertently would drink from it; his instant decrepitude would be more than dismaying; it would materially threaten their quest in that story – I think it was a race against his rival; the attempts to counter the guzzling could be funny; and so forth. I was surprised, for all the ink spilled over the centuries about the Fountain of Youth, that nobody ever utilized its opposite as a possible storyline.

One of my editors, in a meeting, rejected it out of hand. “A Fountain of Old? That’s nonsense; it can’t be possible.” No; other editors tended toward my point of view; there could indeed be minerals or properties that could speed the aging process. Maybe a local tribe of elderly looking people could warn Donald and company at the last minute.

But that one editor persisted. “It simply doesn’t make sense that there could be a fountain, or a lake somewhere, whose waters make you age rapidly.”

I remember the session. After a moment of silence, I looked around the room and said, “Wait a minute. We are dealing with ducks here – ducks that walk and talk and dress themselves. One of them is richest duck in the world, and we carefully make sure he has his top hat, spats, and cane, every story. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, each of whom speaks a third of a sentence. Talking ducks!!!” And we were stymied about a plot where a hidden lake’s water aged you quickly.

The larger absurdity – or maybe it was ultimate logic – was that a room full of grown men, indeed an entire industry, made careers out of creating a “universe” of talking ducks and mice. The logic rested in the fact that the American public (and the world’s population, deep down) likes fantasy.

I was struck at the time (by the way, the story did make print), and I still am impressed, by the fact that many of the world’s great stories and legends have to do with water. Of course water is elemental source of life, irrigation, navigation, and all manner of sustenance: no mystery. Considering the dramatic possibilities – but not to be over-dramatic – the great poets and artists and writers and dramatists did not enthuse over air in the same manner as water.

Yes, they breathed; and manned flight might have been more of a technical challenge awaiting these professions. But, for instance to my case, humankind could have ventured into the waters of the world to fish… and been satisfied. But rivers became roads beckoning elsewhere; seas and oceans were irresistible, if frightening, gateways to the unknown. And we are back to Fantasy’s role in humankind’s DNA. From the arts to commerce.

The first chapters of Genesis make seemingly disproportionate references to water and “the waters.” It was through a Flood that God first judged the human race. Water, throughout the Bible, is a “type” of the Holy Spirit over and over. Jesus turned water into wine… His FIRST miracle. When Christ’s side was pierced on the cross, it is reported that both blood and water flowed. Start searching for references to water in the Bible and you will be deluged, by the number of them, their variety, their significance.

Are any of them references to a Fountain of Youth?

In a way, yes. The fourth chapter of John records that Jesus encountered a Samaritan woman who was drawing water at Jacob’s Well. He asked her for a drink and she was surprised, since she was a despised foreigner. Nevertheless she was sarcastic when He said that she would thirst again from the world’s water but He offered water after which no one would thirst again.

She still scoffed, and then He identified her as an adulteress, and other facts that made her call Him a prophet. But He said of Himself that, more, He was the Christ, and His meaning became clear. As clear as pure water.

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  The woman then said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Augustine has explained that the woman was a “type” of the world, the coming Church, for whom Jesus came: gentiles, pilgrims, and strangers who needed the Living Water. “So the woman left her water jug and went into town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this indeed be the Christ?’”

Truly Jesus provides – and is – the Eternal Water of life. It occurs to me that we all, in a way, are drinking from a Fountain of Old without really intending to do so; and we scurry about, all our lives, looking for a Fountain of Youth – or some other elixir of life, happiness, or prosperity.

And we thirst again, and again. And again. What odd ducks we are.

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Click: There Is a Fountain

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Real Clear Religion, on whose site many readers have followed Monday Music Ministry, has been to many people an indispensible part of their daily fare. It is going through changes right now after almost seven years.

For those who have followed us on RCR, please be sure to continue receiving our weekly essays by Subscribing to Monday Morning Music Ministry. (See link under “Pages” at right.)

4-11-16

What would you call the age we live in? When I was a child, we were told that the Machine Age had been superseded by the Atomic Age. But that was marketing of sorts. Anyway, nuclear energy and the ability to incinerate the planet have become mundane topics. We might be in the Computer Age, but that term soon will sound as musty as new-fangled “horseless carriages” and “talkie movies” that once inspired awe.

I think we all flatter ourselves that we are blessed to be “modern,” up-to-the-minute (if not quite hip). So is this the Modern Age?

Actually, philosophers and artists maintain that the Modern Age ended long ago, followed by Post-Modernism… which has also ended. Eclipsed by – Post-Post-Modernism? Some people use this term. Do you get the feeling that we have just taken our seats at the stadium, and the game is already in extra innings?

My preference, and it seems very logical to me, is that our age is best described, in perspective of history’s grand sweep, as the Post-Christian Era. Some people would dismiss that as being too theocentric… but in view of the cultural, artistic, intellectual, economic, even diplomatic, and yes, religious, core of two millennia: yes, “Post-Christian” describes where we are.

“Modern” and its permutations are terms that tend to elude us. Whether the Renaissance was the last whiff of Classicism or the dawning of Modernism is debated. But we must go back in history that far. Luther was the last Pre-Modern. The Age of Reason was on the horizon in Europe, espied from the platform of Humanism. Yet Luther, the last Medievalist, held fast to the proposition that “reason is the enemy of faith.”

More than two centuries later, Luther’s artistic disciple Johann Sebastian Bach summed up the heritage of the Gothic, Renaissance, and early Baroque eras. Intending to summarize more than innovate, he was not seduced by potential acclaim nor his effect on the future. In fact, he was rejected by the first “Moderns” in Rococo Europe. Bach’s scientific contemporary, Isaac Newton, was representative of the Age of Enlightenment.

I am aware (all too aware, because it is clearly counter-factual) that many schools today teach, when they teach at all, that Enlightenment scientists and philosophers freed Western Civilization from the shackles of religion and superstition. That’s what “enlightened” meant, right?

Wrong. Philosophers like Pascal and Locke; scientists like Galileo and Newton; and creators like Bach and William Blake, all saw the substantial advances in their fields as confirming, not disproving, the existence of God and His plans. Newton concluded, it has been said, that we live within the space of God’s mind. The poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ And all was Light!”

But then, 50 years or so later, the mad swirl of Romanticism, revolution, industrialization, and social turmoil broke forth as like a lanced boil. It has not healed; the burst dam has not been mended. We have had Marxism since the 1840s, Darwinism since the 1850s, wars and rumors of wars since the 1860s, and the Industrial Revolution that brought many blessings but also brought poverty, injustice, dislocation, and wage-slavery instead of less pernicious traditional slavery.

Many people have not yet come to full realizations about the enormous disruptions caused by elements of contemporary life specifically of the past 200 years. As people became educated; climbed the ladder of prosperity, or were crushed under it; and earned the new commodity of leisure time… religion became less important.

People relied less on God. And for those vulnerable souls who need God’s blessings, the Modern State and its Socialist and Marxian manifestations are there, attempting to substitute for the Church. These tendencies have multiplied and accelerated. Not only the Dynamo (Henry Adams’ term for the Machine Age’s deity, supplanting the church) but the arts and ever-more secular philosophers, all worked to convince people that God was dead.

God has indeed died, in the Nietzschean sense that society no longer acknowledges Him, depends on His Word, worships His Son, or serves Him.

This is true. The inclination of sinful souls to reject God finds comfort in a culture that makes it safe to reject Him. Denominations even twist scripture and call evil good. Humankind’s soul is no less dark then ever, wars are more brutal, and the world hurtles toward unprecedented chaos, envy, and strife.

The Secularists have an answer: that we distance ourselves even further from God and His Word.

We have itching ears, as the Bible foretold – we hear what we want to hear. We invite cultural enablers.

We are happy to revel in wine, women, and song – or what seduced the decadent Romans, called “Bread and Circuses.”

How do we respond to all the biblical prophecies, all the warnings of our wise forebears, all the lessons of fallen civilizations gone before? We laugh and ignore the certainty of calamity.

The anti-religious impulse of scientists, of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Relativism, Secularism, the negative effects of finance capitalism and repressive Socialism, the pollution of the earth and of our minds; indeed, human nature unfettered for the first time in history – where has it gotten us? Where are we headed? Adherents of those false gods should repent, as should we ALL.

Given the signs of the times and biblical prophecy, those who reject God ought to repent or at least desperately HOPE there is a God. For their alternative ideas have not worked, but rather have brought the world to chaos. Welcome to the brave new world of Post-Christianity.

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Our Click this week is a song by Merle Haggard, the iconic American poet, songwriter, and singer who died this week on his 79th birthday. Of the many genres he mastered, God and Country predominated. This song is among his best. Sadly, it is as pertinent now as when he recorded it, 1971.

Click: Merle Haggard – Jesus, Take a Hold

12-28-15

On Christmas Eve, the news stories were filled with stories about Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, NOT being filled with pilgrims, worships, locals, as usually the case for 2000 years. Violence between the Israeli forces and Palestinians had broken out, harshly. Again. As before, during random days of the years. Again this year, but at Christmastide.

There is a powerful song about a heart-wrenching story that was in the news a dozen years ago. Britain’s Independent newspaper reported then: “For 30 years, Samir Ibrahim Salman had made his way dutifully to his task as bell ringer and caretaker at the fortress-like stone and wooden church revered by millions as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.”

Salman “crossed Manger Square to get to the church to climb the steps to the fourth-century bell tower” as he did every day of the year. “Minutes later, Samir was struck by a bullet in the chest. It was an hour before an ambulance could reach him but by then, he was already dead. The Palestinians claim he was killed by an Israeli – the Israeli army says they did not fire a shot near the church. Samir, who was mentally disabled, may have been unaware of the danger.”

It was a time when Palestinian fighters, running from advancing Israeli troops, took refuge in the church. They and 40 Franciscan brothers, four nuns and approximately 30 Orthodox and Armenian monks were trapped in the basilica complex. There were also disputed claims about damage to the holy site, which was built over the manger where Jesus reportedly was born.

This story about hatred, violence, and bloodshed in Jesus’ hometown, perhaps over the spot where He was born, has resonance this Christmastide.

I shared with some friends that I would be writing this message. “Why make a martyr of an Islamic person, especially at this time of year?” some responded. “Why cite a song that talks about ‘Palestine?’” asked others. “That’s provocative!” However, Salman was an Arab, but not Islamic – he was a Palestinian Christian. How many Americans realize that Bethlehem was traditionally governed by a Christian mayor and majority Christian council; and that there is a higher percentage of Christians there than in Israel — or was, before “Christian cleansing” became the Mideast Mode? Concerning ‘Palestine,’ Bethlehem is not even in Israel but in the West Bank, under the Palestinian Authority with Israel’s full sanction.

But I want us to return again, remembering the Christmas season, to Nativity Square in Bethlehem. Samir Ibrahim Salman lay there alone. He died in the pool of his blood, maybe instantly, maybe slowly… no one was brave enough (or simple enough, as he was) to go out in the open. He had been beloved of the town, and special to the church, because he rang those bells as a volunteer every day of the year for decades, different bells for different occasions, serving Christ and his neighbors.

Let us not lament only the hatred that shatters the calm of Bethlehem, or the peace of Jerusalem. Christians today are being slaughtered by the thousands, and driven from Iraq, which the US has “stabilized.” Likewise Syria; areas that ISIS touches; Christian parts of Africa, north and south of the Sahara.

In a brilliant but deeply disturbing report for World Magazine a few years ago, my friend Mindy Belz provided details of the US military’s (and NATO representatives’) answer to a question about whether persecuted Christians would be protected in Iraq. By us. Their answer even then was “No.” Under Saddam Hussein, 1.5-million Christians lived in relative security; today, fewer than 400,000 Christians remain in Iraq, many in fear. Likewise the Alawite Bashir el-Assad was the Christians’ protector.

Protected by the US? By our military security? “No.” Mindy correctly calls this “extermination by any other name.” If American Christians betray Christians in Iraq (and Syria, and Egypt, and Nigeria, and China, and Myanmar, and…) we are not merely ignoring the wrong, or decrying the wrong; we are on the side of the wrong.

Back to Bethlehem, where God chose to come in human form to reconcile ALL men unto Himself. This holy ground is where God chose to fulfill His promise from ages past, that through Him “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

Who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed the simple Christian Bell Ringer of Bethlehem? To those of us who are ignorant of the issues, who blindly perpetuate stereotypes, who support missions we don’t understand – and don’t support missionaries we ought to – we can shudder at the thought that we might have been closer, in commitment of spirit, to the triggerman than to the Bell Ringer that morning.

As children of God, we have been given the ministry of reconciliation, to be ambassadors to a fallen world – peoples of all faiths, and no faith. Now THERE is a peace treaty! For the little town of Bethlehem. For everywhere.

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Click: The Bethlehem Bell-Ringer

An ancient church in Bethlehem,
A target in a battle of men,
Stands on the ground where Christ was born
Trapped inside the eye of a storm

Soldiers move from door to door
Mortar fire, it’s all-out war.
Army tanks patrol the street,
They treat civilians with conceit

Oh Jesus, please, help Palestine
Turn all that blood back into wine
Oh Turning Wheel, Divine Design
Please bring peace to Palestine

Samir Ibrahim Salman
Fulfills his task the best he can.
Each day at dawn he tolls the bells,
While all around the army shells

He walks across the Manger Square
For thirty years he’s lived near there,
A simple man who spends his time
In quiet prayer at Jesus’ shrine

Upon the roof a sniper aims
His bitter heart with hate inflames
Samir walks slow, his back bent low
And is struck down by the bullet’s blow

For many hours Samir lay there
Bleeding on the Manger Square.
No ambulance permitted near,
And so the bell ringer died here

An ancient church in Bethlehem
The bells of peace won’t chime again
The people now all live in fear
Grieving wails are all you hear

Oh Jesus, please, help Palestine
Turn all that blood back into wine
Oh Turning Wheel, Divine Design
Please bring peace to Palestine.

12-21-15

I don’t know about you, but along about Thanksgiving time I start getting really tired of Christmas.

It’s not that I have anything against religious holidays. But Christmas is not really a religious holiday any more. This will not be a message about how Hallmark Cards and Rudolph and Santa’s elves and striped candy canes have overtaken Christmas. Or the rush of parties and presents and cookies overtaking the “meaning” of Christmas. We say that each Christmas… and every next Christmas too.

This will not be a message complaining about those things. Oh. Wait. I already have. Well, it won’t be a message about those things alone.

It seems, year after year, that those traditional (?) complaints have been distilled to a new bitterness. Now Christmas also is a political holiday; more political than the way America celebrates the Fourth of July these days. A holiday that is so “inclusive” that it includes everything; therefore, nothing. Things that were once sacred, whether foundational to the culture or intensely personal, have been sacrificed on the altar of Political Correctness.

As our society has been spared the litany of beloved carols of the season in schools and public places, I will spare you the litany of crude attacks on our “free exercise” of religion; and the successful “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” by courts, legislatures, the press, schools, and the entertainment-industrial complex. There. You have been spared.

Once upon a time the New Totalitarians in our midst rejected charges that they engaged in many and varied forms of prior censorship and bigotry. Now, rather, they boast about such things.

Christians have been reduced to defending displays in public parks and shopping malls and maintaining that YES – Santa Claus and red-and-green ribbons ARE symbols of Christianity. Fine. I wonder how close we are to seeing mainstream churches, in the spirit of “welcoming” “compromise,” will suffer the little children to believe that it was the Easter Bunny who was nailed to the cross.

When Christmas and its essential theological centrality becomes no longer a “holy day,” and a mere holiday, in our culture, it becomes the least necessary holiday. We can, after all — and should — hug children and celebrate family every day. That’s not what Christmas “is about.”

But what can we, the remnant, do to salvage our spiritual self-respect? Sure: free ourselves of the fetish of wrapping paper, cartoon specials, and annoying secular seasonal songs – not necessarily in that order. We can reinforce the lessons that largely survived as artwork on Sunday-school bulletins:

That we give gifts because God’s greatest gift – the Lord Himself incarnate – is thereby honored;

That Jesus could have come as a King in the clouds, but instead was a baby lain in a dirty manger from which animals ate, is a reminder to be humble;

That innumerable threads of prophecy, from many times and many places, written by many hands, were all fulfilled in Jesus’ birth;

That countless MIRACLES – not poetic convergence or imputations of wisdom – occurred that day, that week, in that place, to those people; and to us;

That sinful humanity, unable to reconcile itself before a Holy God, was graced with a Person, a plan, to redeem itself, receive eternal forgiveness, and embrace the Savior of their souls.

Those are the elements of the Christmas story. “Oh, yes, we know,” people absent-mindedly might say, as they put a David Bowie Xmas CD in the car player. “Chestnuts Roasting,” indeed.

The best observances and celebration of the Christmas story would be for households and churches to shift it, and tell parts of it in, say, May, July, and October. To listen to Handel’s “Messiah” at Eastertime – it is about the Savior’s entire life, after all. Let’s exchange gifts at Pentecost, and contemplate God’s spiritual gifts that He offers. Or, at any time of the year, gather to buy or make and wrap gifts… and send them to needy neighbors or foreign missions. And so forth.

The Christmas holiday is one that many scholars (not Orthodox scholars) believe is arbitrarily observed on December 25, perhaps an early-church marketing ploy to attract pagans on one of their holy days. I have no problem with marketing ploys, in that case, if they draw upon, meaningfully observe, and point to the Savior.

In that sense our Christmas is perhaps the most superfluous of the church’s holidays. The Person of the Christ, His moment of birth as God-with-us, was the nexus of history. In the baby Jesus all that was before, everything that had been prophesied, all the miracles and teachings, the scourging, crucifixion, sacrifice, Resurrection, and Ascension, were manifest. The Creator of the Universe became flesh and dwelt among us. The Hope of humankind came to us as a baby who would be able to identify with our needs, hurts, temptations, joys, and sorrows.

It does seem unnecessary, and perhaps should be redundant, that we reserve “Christmas Day” to think on these things. More than any other holiday, the entire sweep of the Bible coalesces here. Too often we let it become “only” on December 25. Yes, Jesus came as a baby; but to freeze that image in amber – or in snow globes – can cause us to forget that Jesus grew up! From a manger to a throne to our hearts.

Oh, it is good marketing to choose a day to remember Christ’s birth; or so we hope. To write meaningful hymns, at least before they are overtaken by jingles and reindeer songs.

But it is a sin to compartmentalize the Incarnation. Let us observe, contemplate, and celebrate it every day of the year. We don’t need a “hook” to remember what “Christmas” is all about. In that sense Dec 25 is the least necessary of our holidays.

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Music Video:

I want to take you back as far as we can travel, musically, to the worship of Jesus’ time and place.

It is not known exactly when this Hymn of the Nativity (Christmas Troparion and Kontakion) was written, but it was a mere few centuries after the life of Christ on earth. It is from the early Byzantine era, although not from Byzantium (Constantinople, present-day Istanbul), and its words are Greek of the time. They exist too in Syriac and Aramaic (Aram being another name of Syria), and other local and ancient tongues. These primitive tropes are what early music sounded like, in the Middle East, and into Europe.

I choose this not only for its historic or informative function this Christmas, although interesting enough. But the changes I refer to in the essay, our culture’s onslaught on Christian traditions, are made evident by this music, and the images – look at the the images! (They are all labeled at the end of the clip.)

A few short years ago, the world took note of persecution against Christians in totalitarian states like China and North Korea. Christianity was proscribed in Muslim, Hindu, atheist, animist, and Communist societies. But today, many thousands of Christians are being slaughtered every year. Tortured, raped, crucified, beheaded. Threatened with death if they do not renounce Christ. Forced from homes by the millions.

Some of those homes and their church communities go back to the times immediately following Jesus’ ministry. For the first time in history, often, these communities of believers are being martyred, “cleansed” from their 2000-year-old homelands. Do we know? Do we care? Sadly, many of these people are being as betrayed and forgotten by the church, as Jesus was by his “friends” at Crucifixion.

Our president does logical contortions to explain away Islamic radicalism in our midst. Yet persecuted Christians around the world receive scant notice from our government. Islamic refugees are welcome; displaced Christians are not. A sin.

These are people from Christ’s time and place; and the music video here shows sites and churches and shrines from those times and places – birthplaces of Christianity. Here are images of the mighty ruins of Petra (where the Wise Men reportedly stopped on their journey); from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; significant sites in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan; the West Bank. Places where Jesus walked. Now being swept of Christianity.

Be filled with wonder; and with sorrow. And be reminded of our heritage. Have a blessed Christ’s Mass.

Hymn of the Nativity

12-14-15

A guest message by my friend Lucille Zimmerman, a Licensed Professional Counselor with a private practice in Littleton, Colorado. She also teaches psychology and counseling courses at Colorado Christian University.

I woke up with Jesus on my mind.

Many years ago, I felt embarrassed when I walked into a home that had scripture verses or crucifixes on the walls. I thought those people were dorky. Backwards. I had grown up attending church, but it was meaningless. A series of motions.

But after many horrible years of emotional pain, I met someone who radiated love and joy. I began to study the faith that gave him peace: Christianity. I wanted what he had. When I was 27, I fell head over heels in love with my Savior.
 
I began studying the Bible, and realized it was a book you could make sense of. It contained 66 sub-books written hundreds of years apart, but each book supported the other. Then I read books from critics who tried to disprove the historic evidence for Jesus… but those people ended up believing Jesus was real, too.
 
There is more historical proof that Jesus walked this earth than about any person in history. Hundreds of witnesses verified his miracles. He was killed because he was a threat, but this was His plan all along: His blood would be shed for our sins.
 
After three days He rose from the dead and sits with God just like He said he would. Just for fun, pick up a Bible or go to Google and read what Jesus told his closest followers in the Gospel of John, chapter 17, just before He gave His life, and upon which sacrifice we might believe.
 
In the past 23 years I have continued to study who Jesus was. And I am only more convinced that He is the way.

In these days, when 80 per cent of Americans believe another ISIS terror event will happen, soon, on our soil… these days when ISIS has stolen the machines to make fake passports…. these days when our government cannot tell us how many people with Syrian passports were allowed in the US this year… these days when our leaders cannot even tell us how many people have overstayed their visas: the threat is real.
 
It is scary these days. But you can have a more solid peace. When the Columbine tragedy happened in my Colorado community, one of our pastors said you can never be ready for the scary things that happen in this world; but you can be ready nonetheless.
 
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world He gave His only son that whosoever believes in Him would have everlasting life.”
 
You are the “whosoever.”
 
You don’t have to be good, or go to church, or pray a certain number of times a day. If those things were the way, you wouldn’t need Jesus.
 
All you have to is believe. Or want to believe. Whisper a prayer to God and ask Him to show you if this is the truth. The Bible says God honors those who seek Him.
 
If you don’t know Him, I pray this year you would consider it. I can’t think of a better time, when the world is in such chaos and danger, and Christmas is two weeks away.

This can be the merriest, happiest, most rewarding Christmas you ever can experience by following Lucille’s version of God’s plan , and Jesus Christ’s invitation. And if you know Jesus already, consider printing or forwarding this message to friends or family members who do not. A Christmas gift of love!

+ + +

Click: Trust

Lucille Zimmerman is the author of Renewed: Finding Your Inner Happy In an Overwhelmed World and What Does God Say About Suffering?
www.LucilleZimmerman.com

9-21-15

I once worked for a youth-ministry resource company, as “Director of Product Development.” Actually it was as editor, sometime conference speaker, and seldom directing the development of new products, despite the title; unless books are called Products, which I suppose they are.

Anyhoo, an excellent editor and I oversaw the publication of about 50 books a year. Now that I look back, even between the two of us, that was a book every week, which we did, yes, “develop,” from brainstorming sessions, to proposals, to outlining, to many author conferences, to helping design and work on cover art; along the way contributing gems of wisdom about people who might write introductions and endorsements, suggesting promotion and ad copy; ultimately to develop comebacks for a Christian bookstore in, say, Pittsburgh, that objected to the way a kid looked on a back-cover photo.

But, a book every two weeks, as we, Solomon-like, divided the chores. No wonder we went crazy. Holy crazy, of course; sanctified bonkerdom. Biennial conventions, various office duties, and office picnics broke the monotony if not the workload.

But it was a wonderful company, a for-profit “ministry,” and thousands of pastors and youth workers – and by extension multiple thousands of kids – relied on our books, conferences, and products.

While I was at the company, the owner died in a horrible auto accident – one of those deaths when you automatically say, “Too young, too young.” He was too young, and it still would have been a tragic loss if had been 108. His widow picked up the reins. Soon into said reign she inaugurated a monthly book review group. It was voluntary in the office; Christian books were assigned; and she led a free-flow discussion.

In one of the sessions, talk turned to being secure about going to Heaven, as it does sometimes among members of old-line churches and even among skeptics. Our leader announced that she was pretty sure she was going to Heaven, because she and her husband “had given so much money to charities through the years.”

I paused. One way to put my reaction.

We all live in a land that was founded and settled by Christians, in a society that largely was designed and informed by Protestant theology. It is not against the law for anyone to dissent from these situations and their implications. But to be ignorant of them – especially as the owner and life-worker in jobs devoted to sharing the gospel among churches – is astonishing.

It is very common in America for average citizens to be ignorant of dogma that onetime permeated Western societies, however. It is common for people these days to be quite unaware of doctrines and traditions of the churches they attend – if those churches, many of them, “independent,” even hold to such things.

And the surprise I evinced that afternoon might have been unwarranted, because I had developed doubts that any shade of orthodoxy inhabited any corners of that office. And these are days when popes question traditional doctrine, and pastors gut the gospel and newly interpret – or couldn’t be bothered to – the Bible.

But the logic of revealed truth, if there is anything to the Bible, and Christ’s ministry, includes the fact that we cannot buy our way into Heaven. We cannot fool God with promises, bribe God with good deeds, or impress Him (that is, unto Salvation) with good works. If so, rich people writing checks would elbow themselves into Glory… and we know what Jesus said about the rich getting into Heaven. Indeed, if salvation were that easy, Jesus’ incarnation, birth, ministry, miracles, teaching, persecution, torture, condemnation, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, would all be worthless shams. Hoaxes. A cruel trick on the Christ, first of all; and then us. All in vain.

All through humankind’s history, people have been susceptible to “natural” curiosity about, say, reincarnation. Superstitions about karma. And false hopes that good deeds now and again will be sufficient to please a Holy God. Wouldn’t it be nice? And easy? The bad news is that it’s not true.

The good news is that there is a satisfactory substitute available to all. With our sinful inclinations, we cannot do it on our own, anyway – but God has provided the substitutionary and atoning death of His Son to pay the price of sin. Simple. Easy. Not cheap. But free.

Next, how do we live that new life with changed hearts? Jesus said to take up our crosses and follow Him. Yes, we should be Christ-followers. At the same time, as we are pilgrims and strangers in this world, we proceed forth, “stepping out in faith.” Alone? No, we know that Christ is there, leading from behind (as current phraseology goes)!

Over, under, above, below, however, the best we can ask for, and hope for, and have, is Jesus holding our hands. He will guide us day and night. He, working through the Holy Spirit, will correct us when we are mistaken.

That is, sometimes we follow; sometimes He is behind us; and sometimes it is best to hold His hand… the security of knowing that He is with us. At our sides; what a fellowship, what a joy divine, leaning on the Everlasting Arms.

If we happen to slip into error or heresy… well, think of it this way: if you are persuaded to buy your way into Heaven through offerings or donations, if Jesus is holding your hand, it will be hard to reach for loose change or a checkbook. You will find yourself being reminded that charity is from a pure heart, and giving is the result of Salvation, not the price of a ticket to Heaven.

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The great gospel song by Albert E Brumley, “Jesus, Hold My Hand,” is a virtual sermon in song. It is a song I have sung solo in churches more than any other. Here is a heartfelt and, um, enthusiastic version by Jerry Lee Lewis.

Click: Jesus, Hold My Hand

4-6-15

It’s strange. This Jesus, who told us all the time that He stands at the door and knocks – at the doors of our hearts – is “not home” when we come to His door. My name is Mary; you have heard of me. I went to His tomb this morning, and the stone was rolled away. He is not there. His burial cloths are, but not His body.

Gone.

Where has He gone?

It’s a few hours later, and the Disciples, who have been hiding in fear and confusion, some of them came, too, and see the empty tomb. “Gone,” they say. The few days since Jesus died on the cross were the blackest days of our lives. Maybe in humankind’s history. The Savior was promised and prophesied… He was made flesh and dwelt amongst us… He performed miracles and talked wisdom and preached love and told us what to do to receive forgiveness… and be reconciled to God… and to live eternally with God. Now… gone.

It is a few days later. Jesus is alive! He has appeared to us. He has mingled with multitudes. He showed His scars; He let a doubting Thomas touch His wounded side. Those who condemned Him are seeing Him, and they fall at His feet. Even Romans and Jewish historians like Josephus see Him. Gone… but returned.

He died for all sinners, He said. He loved us while we yet rejected Him, He said. His sacrifice substituted for the punishment we rebels deserve, He said. Before He was gone, all that made no sense. Now that He lives, we understand.

I am not sure, but now that He is not gone, and is showing Himself to people, I have an idea that since He left the tomb and lives again, maybe He is seeking out some of the people He died for. They were gone, too, when things got rough. He wants to bring them home.

Now I can tell more, from the perspective of 40 days after the Resurrection. Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven. Gone again? Not really; He promised a Holy Spirit to take His place in our hearts. Gone? Hardly.

I remember the Virgin Birth; and His many miracles; and all the prophecies fulfilled, but if Jesus did not rise from dead – if the “gone” was REALLY “gone” – it is all a useless, cruel joke. [“And if The Messiah is not risen, our preaching is worthless and your faith is also worthless,” I Corinthians 15:14]

But… He is not gone.

No. Jesus is not gone. Our faith is NOT worthless, not in vain!

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In Jerusalem, on a stage under the night moon, gospel legend Jessy Dixon sings “Gone,” the classic song by Eldridge Fox.

Click: Gone

3-30-15

In this changing world, it might be possible that some day the death penalty will be outlawed everywhere. On the other hand, if governments are being kinder and gentler with miscreants, we are seeing more summary death penalties these days – executions of infidels, troublemakers, and… “others.” I think of scimitars used by Moslems for beheadings, and remember when I was a child, I wondered if Jesus lived today, whether He would be put to death by firing squad or electric chair.

If so, would Christianity adorn its churches with representations of guns, or an electric chair, or a lightning bolt, or the symbol of poison we see on vials? Would Christian women wear jewelry in the shapes of a noose, or a sword?

It is not an impertinent question. It is pertinent if we think again, and perhaps with more focus, on the death of Jesus – and on the manner of His suffering and sacrifice. Experts on such things as torture say that crucifixion is one of the most horrible forms of meting out death in the charming history of our species. The forms of execution mentioned above surely are quicker and therefore higher on the scale of mercy. Burning at the stake was relatively quick, as were other “medieval” forms of torture and death, compared to crucifixion.

To be nailed to a cross, awful in itself, and left to hang and die, took several hours; sometimes longer. The arrangement of internal organs and the law of gravity combined to bring slow death, not so much by unbearable pain but by suffocation of the lungs.

But for a moment we can consider what else Jesus endured – aspects that were not usual with other Roman victims. The painful, mocking, bloody crown of thorns was unique to this condemned Man. Some prisoners were tied by rope, not nailed through the wrists and ankles, to crosses. Other factors were “either/or” in the Roman justice system: bearing the patibulum, the 100-pound crossbeam, through the streets to where the vertical wooden stipes awaited; whipping to within an inch of life; flogging by the worst instrument, the flagellum – not a normal whip or cat-o’-nine-tails, but leather strops with lead balls and animal bones filed to sharp points – would break the skin, catch it, and pull strips (“stripes,” as the Bible prophesied) off the back. Scourging, when ordered, often killed the prisoner, and seldom reached 40 in number, as Jesus endured. Of course, we know that He was mocked, poked, punched, and spat upon also, during His “trial.”

Over and above that – the combination of which few if any men ever sustained – I believe the worst thing for Jesus was the knowledge that, during those hours and days, He had been betrayed, denied, and abandoned by His followers, those who knew Him best. During this period of testing and trial, when fulfilling the Father’s plan and completing numerous details of Old Testament prophesies, when, perhaps, He was MOST human, the rejection by His friends and disciples must have hurt more than anything else. “The body they may kill…”

And Jesus went to the Cross. It was difficult (I say with irony), interrupted by all those things like trials, beating, scourging, humiliation, carrying a rough, heavy crossbeam along the via Dolorosa on lacerated flesh. I say that they interrupted the walk, because despite the agony – the human side of the Messiah asking the father if the “cup” could pass from him – it is true that, metaphorically, Jesus virtually scrambled up the Cross.

So we approach the Mystery of the Cross we can never fully comprehend.

Jesus knew His whole life that He would, as the lamb of God, be the Sacrifice for humankind’s sins. The Israelites had sought to please God by sacrifices of spotless lambs. God was pleased, at this moment, to offer His spotless son, without stain or blemish, as a sacrifice so that we, believing, might be cleansed of sin.

The Mystery further includes that Jesus did not merely die, as we have stated, but that His torment might have been worse than any individual has ever suffered.

The Mystery further includes that He suffered in silence. In his “trials” and hanging from the Tree, as ancient writings and hymns sometimes called the Cross

The Mystery further includes that He could have called down 10,000 angels to rescue Him, but did not. He might have struck His Jewish accusers dumb; or Pilate and his court dead, but did not.

The Mystery further includes that Jesus’ suffering and death were not only recorded in the harmony of the Gospels, some in more details than others, but cited by secular contemporary historians like Josephus. The predictions, details, and implications of the Cross are there for the world to see.

The Mystery further includes that we are told that our simple acceptance of Jesus’s substitutionary death on the Cross is the first, simple, requirement for our sins to be forgiven and to spend eternity with Jesus. (The other requirement is to believe and proclaim that God raised Jesus from the dead. “To be continued…”) So simple. Such a miracle. Such a mystery.

The Mystery further includes something that is not in the Bible, but I believe is totally consistent with every word in the Bible:

I believe that if every other person who ever lived, or ever will live, were sinless, as impossible as that would be – but stick with me – that Jesus Christ still would have sacrificed Himself; served his ministry; allowed Himself to be captured, tortured, and sentenced; and would have endured death, even the death of the Cross. He would have done this even for one individual out of human history.

For me. Or for you.

God’s love is as wide as a universe: without end, without walls or ceilings. But as laser-focused as to know the names of you and me. The facts of our lives. He knew us before we were born. He knows our all. He counts the hairs on our head.

He loves us that much. Jesus DID die for you, and me. The Messiah died for mankind, and, just as accurately, He died for you and me as individuals. A sacrifice not for “most.” Not for “many.” Not for 51 per cent of us, like in a democracy. He died that ALL might be saved as the human race deals with the invitation. But He also died for individuals, who make decisions as individuals. A mystery, really.

You and I were not in the ragtag group of scoffers and the curious – and His mother – at the foot of the Cross. Yet I believe that when Jesus looked down, through swollen and bloodstained eyes, He clearly saw… you and me. Individuals.

As we meet His gaze, we have to confront the Cross, and respond to all that it implies. A Mystery.

We become aware that every time we sin, with every act of disobedience or rebellion, we nail Him to the Cross as surely as the Centurions did. Do think how often you betray, deny, insult, and abandon the Savior? A Mystery… that chills our bones.

Behold the force through which the universe was formed, become human for a season and for our good (yes, Good Friday, thank God), enduring all these things and hanging limp on a Cross. Can we fail to respond to this? He died but He rose; He was not defeated but He conquered. He was very man, but is Very God.

Another Mystery: This Jesus is a King… who rules from a Tree.

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Click: When He Was On the Cross

3-23-15

Here is an anomaly – something like Winston Churchill once called, in another context, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: It is possible in America today, a “Christian” nation founded by Christians, many of them pilgrims and many who dedicated their lives, their lands, and their legacies to Jesus Christ; a country where churches dot the landscape and where sermons and Christian music are common on airwaves… it is the case that many people in America today grow up never hearing the gospel presented.

Multitudes reach adulthood, and live their lives, without the basics of the Christian faith being explained to them. America, “one nation under God,” land of the Pilgrims’ pride, of religious holidays, of the Ten Commandments?

This is certainly the case in Western Europe, despite some countries still having “state churches,” and where tax money is levied to support denominations. Many people are aware of churches, and traditional holidays, and have heard familiar hymn tunes without being at all aware of the tenets of faith.

When church attendance is a matter of indifference – or avoiding church is a matter of pride – and when rejecting every reference to Jesus, or every mention of the gospel is as easy as changing the radio dial or clicking the TV remote, millions in these “Christian” United States live in the spiritual condition of many savages from remote corners of the earth, and the vicious heathens of history. Strange. Seemingly unlikely. But true.

Believers throughout the millennia have endured torture to learn and savor the gospel of Jesus Christ – the Good News. Many believers have sacrificed their all in order to know and serve the Savior. Many believers have risked, and lost, their lives in order to share Christ.

These facts are yet true today. In lands where it is most difficult and dangerous, there are martyrs we hear about. We read of secret house churches in China, meeting in whispers and in danger, yet boldly reading the Bible one page at a time each meeting. We know of imprisoned believers in North Korea and Cuba and Iran. We read where, in the face of persecution and death, hundreds and thousands from other faith traditions convert to Christianity, in places like Egypt and Syria.

Yet in the Christian West, so-called, millions are indifferent to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Worse, our culture grows hostile to the faith.

In an ironic way, many people who are skeptics and rejectionists – agnostics and atheists – cannot be faulted as nonbelievers if the culture has conspired to shield them from the gospel, from Christ’s gentle invitation. How can they believe unless they hear?

I do not have to tell those who HAVE accepted that invitation some time in their lives, who know the life-changing and soul-cleansing New Life offered by Jesus, that the day they made that decision is the most important day of their lives. We have the knowledge that “our lives,” after that encounter with the risen Savior, means eternity, not just the days we shuffle around here.

And the second most important day in someone’s life, although it is of course the other side of the same metaphorical and significant coin, would be the day a person rejects Christ. But… just as consequential.

One might say that people can’t be accountable for things they have not heard; and we have agreed that this unlikely scenario is possible in our secular society. It might be the case that people have heard sermons, but sermons that encourage people to, say, be nice to others… and not about the crisis of sin and rebellion, and the fatality of separation from the Savior. Very possible.

But at some time, I believe the Holy Spirit will arrange events so that every person at least one time hears the simple message of the Messiah, and the challenge of the Cross. And will have the opportunity to open ears, mind, and heart. Ignorance is not bliss; ignorance, one Day, will not be an excuse.

It might be a word of a friend. It might be a stray gospel song or random TV preacher. It might be messages like this. Maybe you are reading this by “accident”; maybe a friend has forwarded it to you. But by any of these happenstances, you can no longer, ever, say that you never really heard the gospel explained to you. The personal invitation from the Lover of your Soul –

There is one God, creator of the universe; who always was and always will be. He created vast domains of the heavens, yet counts the hairs on your head.

In love He created the human race and our bountiful earth. In love He granted humankind free will; and we all have gone astray. We rebel, we sin, we think our puny selves sufficient; and that grieves God.

Through His inspiration, in writings and through prophets, He has offered rules of conduct; He delivered miracles, chastisements and blessings; and yet His children sin. We all have gone our own way, and God, not having created robots, grieved.

As only an awesome God would do, He emptied Himself and became human, walking amongst us and posterity, sharing Truth, showing His power by miracles, and showering us with His love through teaching and by example. He was incarnate so we might be assured that He knows our suffering and sorrows. He offers the mere acknowledgement of Him to be our path to reconciliation. That is what God yearns for in us.

Because He is so holy, and we are sinners, we cannot otherwise be reconciled. How can we approach the presence of One so holy, except, once offered, through justification, by faith, in Jesus? When – true to form for humankind – the Christ was once again rejected and was betrayed, tortured, and put to death, prophecy was fulfilled. But at that turning-point of history, Christ overcame death and the grave, and rose from the dead.

Miracle of His many miracles, He lived again, ministered and preached, all this in ways that His contemporary skeptics reported and no other founder of another religion can claim. Confirming His divinity, this man born of a virgin then ascended bodily to Heaven, where He lives today, interceding for the believers. The blood He shed at Calvary is what paid for our sins that separated us from God.

We are “covered in the Blood,” so that when God sees us, he no longer sees rebellious children, but the precious blood sacrifice of His Son. We form the Blood-bought church. Too special for you to treat with indifference.

And in the place of Jesus on earth, the third incarnation of God was sent to live in every believer’s heart. The Holy Spirit empowers, inspires, and encourages Christians today. Healings; deliverance from sin and addictions; restoration of relationships; new beginnings – these are what the Holy Spirit accomplishes. I have been the recipient of the born-again experience. So have millions. So can you be.

So… there. If this is the first time you have read the Gospel message, or maybe the first time you have heard it so simply reduced, you cannot claim, when your life on earth is judged, that “you never knew.”

You can say the Bible is a book of fairy tales… you can say that man created God and not that God created man… you can say that Jesus never lived or that the Resurrection was a plot… you can say that billions of believers are deceived and have been, for 2000 years… you can wrestle with the fact that uncountable Christ-followers have known the Truth so completely that they have endured torture and death, refusing to deny His existence… you can spend sleepless nights trying to comprehend how this or that person’s life has been amazingly transformed… you will scoff, perhaps, at displays of love and sacrifice that seem crazy to you… you might still think that you know better than this “God” and the preponderance of history and the evidence in writings and cathedrals and chapels and art and music and in changed lives. Transformed natures. New births. Joy unspeakable.

… but you cannot claim that you have never heard the message of the Gospel, the Good News. The details will follow later – when you accept Christ, you become hungry and thirsty for them, no worries. But to believe Jesus was the Son of God, and that God raised Him from the dead: believe it in your heart, and confess it with your mouth (in a prayer; to a friend) and you have satisfactorily accepted God’s simple invitation.

God honors sincere seeking, and never lets the yearning prayer of a hungry soul go unanswered. In the midst of a sinful and secular society, a culture of cold churches, people can still move on this or any day from the second most important day of their lives (as dangerous as rejecting Christ is) to feeling like they have arrived at that most important day. Welcome home.

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The first time in almost six years of Monday Morning Music Ministry that we share a video from Family Worship Center, but this infectious performance by Nancy Harmon of her classic gospel song says it all about the role of Christ’s shed blood in our salvation:

Click: The Blood-Bought Church

How many terrorist victims were there in the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices this morning? Before you scramble for the latest numbers, the answer is: None.

Cartoonists, writers, and security people were murder victims, not terrorism victims. The distinction is important. The victims of terrorism are citizens of Paris; Christians, Jews, and secularists throughout Paris, France, Europe, and the West; and cartoonists, satirists, thinking people.

Never again, at least for years to come, will average people be able to think skeptically, critically, humorously, even heretically, without looking over our shoulders even in some small way. That is the definition of terrorism, to instill fear and alter our lives.

Charlie Hebdo (Weekly) is a newspaper that is the second incarnation of the comics magazine Charlie Mensuel (Monthly), a magazine named in honor of Charlie Brown. Its original version was satirical but also a reprint vehicle for comic strips, including from the U.S., in the manner of Linus, Tintin, and other character-named European monthlies. In its current version it is aggressively left-wing and had been the object of arson attacks, government censorship, and concomitant success as a humorous, iconoclastic institution.

As a former cartoonist and a publisher and writer who has worked with the European comics industry, I knew two of the cartoonists who were murdered in the Charlie Hebdo offices, Georges Wolinski and Jean Cabut. Amiable fellows — more than amiable; like most cartoonists, personally merry and friendly — they were left-wing and perhaps a bit nihilist. They, and their paper, were equal-opportunity intellectual anarchists: all religions received savage treatment. There were far more attacks on Christianity than on Islam; many more personal and insulting depictions of clergy, and of Mary, God, and Jesus.

This is not to excuse or mischaracterize their work; they never asked for nor expected such defense. Wolinski also scripted a series of pornographic comics, so I seldom was in sympathy with any of their work. Properly regarding satire as free speech; that is, written words and drawings are as of spoken words, we remember that James 3:8 says, “The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”

When the Bible tells us that, it is a warning to devout believers, but also a key to discerning the nature of attacks, harmful speech, and even satire. But after millennia of investing in, and living in, democratic cultures, we are also committed to the dictum misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Liberals and conservatives are quick to quote Voltaire, but often are absent when push comes to shove. Radio’s Michael Savage was banned from travel to the United Kingdom because he called terrorists “Islamo-Fascists.” Not only did the federal government fail to protest, but fellow conservatives, especially the prominent in media, were relatively silent about his case. The British historian David Irving has told me about his incarceration in solitary confinement for two years in Austria because he entered the country years after he spoke there, questioning not the fact but the numbers of people slaughtered during World War II. No governments and few fellow historians protested the violation of free speech, freedom of opinion, in his case. In countries like Canada, Australia, and Germany it is against the law to voice opinions on this subject; yet the West deplores Muslim objections to criticism of the Prophet.

Nativists, xenophobes, and cultural traditionalists have been rising in Europe in recent years. In Austria and Germany (some would say, predictably) but also in countries like Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. We see rallies, movements, and laws that are anti-immigrant and, because of the statistics, less religious-oriented than economic, social, and cultural.

In a perfect world, Christians would not mirror the intolerance of Muslim extremists. In a perfect world we would reach the lost, convert them by love, and work toward St. Augustine’s “City of God” wherein few are motivated to commit such acts.

We are called to love, but embracing suicide, even cultural suicide by a thousand accelerating concessions and surrenders, cannot be so described.

1-5-15

Life has been likened to a game through the ages by saints and sages, by poets and even pastors. We are warned on one side against a game of “eat, drink, and be merry,” because one day we die. Or sometimes we properly are reminded that like some sports, life can be a very grim game indeed. Me? Sometimes I see life as a grand chessboard. Unfortunately I see myself a checker, not a chess piece. Gulp.

Today we think of our lives as vast jigsaw puzzles, not at all illogical.

See how the pieces fit: babyhood, youth, adolescence, nonage, adulthood, dotage. They usually fit together well, although some of us, putting this puzzle together, really have to search for the piece that depicts maturity. But into each life also come pieces that represent curiosity, hope, disappointment, joy, sadness, grief, happiness, greed, ambition, pride, modesty, temptation, sin, desires, charity, unforgiveness and forgiveness, envy, intellectuality, faith…

Have I left any pieces out? Surely. But I have not only described life’s jigsaw puzzles of me and you, but everyone who has, or has had, a pulse, on this earth. Those pieces, in my analogy, will be of different shapes, some of mine larger than yours; some of yours smaller than his or hers. We all, when complete, form different pictures.

And we know, don’t we, that even the kindly old lady down the street has had bouts with envy or pride. “There is not one amongst us in whom a devil does not dwell,” Theodore Roosevelt once wrote to the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson; and we note he metaphorically used a lower-case “d” in “devil.” He continued, “It is not being in the “dark house,” but having left it, that matters.”

In the same way as the kindly old lady we all know, or TR’s Everyman, there are awful folks and hardened criminals who have tender spots, and are capable of conversions. Think of Ebeneezer Scrooge; of St Paul who, as Saul, persecuted Christians; of John Newton, slave-trader who saw the light and write the words to “Amazing Grace”…

But I want to suggest that no life, no matter how long, or how many pieces make up the picture, is or complete without a piece I did not list above. Did you catch that? Can I give you a hint? – it is shaped like an “L.” Ah! There are a couple holes in the jigsaw puzzle of completed lives.

See the missing piece, shaped like an “L,” for Love.

We have all experienced love, even the most miserable amongst us. We have expressed it and shared it – given it away – some of us more than others. But it is a common and irresistible force. To humans it is mysterious because, as serene as it should be, it can also bring heartache and disappointment. It can be the basis of charity but also frustration of broken dreams.

There is a reason that 95 per cent of songs have love lyrics. Even “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” is a love song, about dashed dreams. So are the melancholy lieder of Franz Schubert, and the many grief-toned piano sonatas of the perpetually lovelorn and frustrated Beethoven.

OK… that “L” piece fits there. One more hole in life’s jigsaw puzzle. It looks like an L-shape could fit there, but a little differently. Maybe, turned around a little bit, it looks like a “J.” Yes, J for Jesus. Now our life’s jigsaw puzzle is a complete picture.

Those similar-looking pieces, L and J, in fact make any life complete – especially puzzled lives, to reinforce my metaphor! They are the most important of our lives’ components. Indeed, we are not complete without them. We occasionally might flatter ourselves that we are pretty good puzzle-masters; and perhaps so, occasionally. But we are not puzzle-makers, and cannot be. God plays that role.

I sometimes wonder if Love did not exist, could we imagine it? Like a color that might exist but we’ve seen; or a seventh sense: hard to imagine what we cannot imagine. God’s Love, expressed in the Person of Jesus. He loved us so much as to create us and place us on this beautiful earth; loved us so much as to be forbearing as we humans have sinned and rebelled generation after generation; loved us so much as to share the Truth, offer forgiveness, to open Heaven’s gates…

… loved us so much as to lower Himself to the form of a human, His Son, to share our sorrows, show us the Way, and to offer healing and salvation to those who believe on Him; loved us so much as to remain amongst us in the form of the Holy Spirit, to guide, comfort, and empower us. To have His Son take our sins, our deserved punishment, upon Himself – could we imagine such love? And all this, while we were yet sinners?

Surely this love – our puzzle-piece “L” and the similar-shaped “J,” signifying Love and Jesus – can make the puzzles of our lives complete, whole… making sense.

Look at either one, and if you really can’t understand them fully, just accept them and fit them into your life’s picture. Each one is a piece that passes understanding.

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“The Love of God” is a traditional hymn performed here by the three brothers Aaron, Nathan, and Stephen Nasby, The “NCrew,” their band called Eli Eli. It is a hymn that comes as close as any to defining the indefinable, indescribable unspeakable mystery that is God’s love. There is a legend that a madman in an asylum once heard the song through his barred window and wrote the words of the third verse on his wall. Somehow the plausibility of that story reflects the love, the peace, that passes understanding.

Click: The Love of God

12-8-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Mary, Did You Know?

12-1-14

A dialog, as if overheard. This has been a “crowded” week in America – a confused jumble of social unrest and riots; of Thanksgiving holiday and prayers – or at least thoughts, maybe – of traditions and faith.

“Look at those protesters! They have no hope!”
“Are they protesting or looting? And, I think they have plenty to hope for.”
“OK. They have nowhere to go but up. But they need schools.”
“Schools are not magic. If kids don’t attend, no learning can take place.”
“Well, look around the world. Drugs, prejudice, oppression, greed!”
“It sounds like the end times the Bible talks about.”
“Oh, the Bible. Christians haven’t helped anything – they’ve caused a lot!”
“You ignore Christian charity? The Words of Christ?”
“I’m smart enough to see the bad that has been done, is done, in His name.”
“So your problem is with followers who are mistaken, who sin; not Him.”
“My problem is with the hypocrites who fill the churches.”
“How about the Ferguson church that was torched? It had preached peace.”
“So why didn’t their Jesus save that church?”
“Why do you hate the gospel message of love so much?”
“Why do YOU talk about messages? Can’t you see what people WANT?”
“In Ferguson?”
“No! People everywhere, oppressed by the system, who want justice.”
“Justice… Peace. Those things begin with each one of us.”
“Fool! People everywhere want self-esteem!”
“I think people everywhere need self-respect.”
“Churches don’t deliver self-respect.”
“Maybe not; sometimes not. But Jesus does.”
“Jesus doesn’t bring justice to the streets.”
“But Jesus brings justice to our hearts. His sacrifice justified our sins.”
“All religions say those things. And life is still miserable everywhere.”
“No other god than the Lord defeated death and promises life… and peace.”
“Fairy tales. I don’t see that working anywhere.”
“Then you haven’t looked around you, at healed, saved, peaceful souls.”
“I hear stories, but that’s all they are!”
“Well, you are talking to someone who knows that peace.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t live in poverty, you are not oppressed.”
“Christians, missionaries, everywhere are some of the poorest of people.”
“But Christians are still on the side of the powerful classes.”
“Nearly a thousand Christians every day are imprisoned, tortured, killed.”
“Maybe THEY should rise up and riot and take the streets back!”
“Maybe they’re busy praying God’s mercy on the souls of their oppressors.”
“And where will THAT get them?”
“Maybe to eternal life. Certainly to a place where their souls are at peace.”
“We’re back to that again. They’ll still be poor and get no respect…”
“Go on: no self-respect? No hope? Still with that awful hole in their souls?”
“You just don’t understand. You don’t understand what people WANT!”

Actually, the answer-man in this dialog might be right. We cannot always understand want people WANT.

What do people want? is a question that doesn’t go away, and burns hotter every day. But to me, more important is: What do people NEED?

Answer to the quiz: People need the Lord.

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“We are called to take His light To a world where wrong seems right. What would be too great a cost For sharing life with one who’s lost? / People need the Lord, people need the Lord. At the end of broken dreams, He’s the open door. People need the Lord, people need the Lord.” These are words from the beautiful song by Steve Green. Covered here by Fiona Hui.

Click: People Need the Lord

8-4-14

“Caring” is a buzzword that has become – as most buzzwords do – overused, oversold… and underappreciated, to the point of emptiness. In our society, Caring is a word that covers a multitude of sins: bureaucratic assembly-lines; government overreach; the tyranny of a minority. All in the name of Caring.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with caring. Quite the opposite. But it is a word that must be coupled with something, or else it is a disembodied emotional phantom. Abstract.

It has entered the realm of “Politalk.” A few years ago, some politicians received memos suggesting they insert the words “Caring” and “Children” every so often in speeches. We listeners were supposed to start wagging our tails like Dr Pavolv’s dogs at the words. Enough of us did. “Do anything to me, but just tell me you care.”

The inherent problems are more than emptiness of meaning. The Caring meme charts a steady course from compassion to compulsion to coercion. Next, the Compassion Police come knocking at the doors of our conscience, serving writs of Guilt.

Lest I sound like Scrooge, think of what the vulgarization of Caring has come to mean in the 21st century. In the name of Caring and Compassion, we have allowed governments to co-opt the role of individuals, and individuals’ consciences. The point of the parable of the Good Samaritan was that an individual was moved, and acted alone – in fact, out of character and social expectations. Jesus Himself healed, and empowered His followers to heal… notice that He never empowered or commissioned the government of His day. In fact it was “render unto Caesar,” not “demand from Caesar…”

Through history, the great agencies of Caring, after individuals and family, were more than governments. The authorities in ancient Greece and Rome did build public baths. But it was the church, in a thousand ways, that delivered charity and succor. Also, it was guilds and businesses. The Fuggers, bankers and merchants of Augsburg in the Middle Ages, established almshouses for the poor. In 1858, individual donors enabled a doctor to open baths and health facilities for the poor in County Cork, Ireland. By 1860, around the engine works of the Great Western Railway in New Swindon, outside London, the directors built worker’s cottages, libraries, and hospitals; they provided health care and free medicine.

The point of this history lesson is that in recent years, governments have co-opted care-giving functions from individuals and associations. To cite “efficiency” is to worship a false god, because in the process, individuals are being robbed of the option to emotionally notice; denied the challenge to intellectually consider; discouraged from the initiative to assist. In fact, when governments collect taxes in order to be the agents of Care, people eventually will feel less obliged to do charitable work themselves.

St Augustine (in his Confessions) speculated that the meaning behind the reminder “the poor you will always have with you” is that God desires to set before us circumstances to which we will be inspired to act charitably. Our broken hearts touch His heart.

Through it all (or despite it all), Americans still contribute more money and more missionaries and social workers than do most other countries to most world needs. But the relentless socialization of charity has brought us to a realization – confirmed as we watch the nightly news these very days – that regimes that ruled in the name of managing peoples’ fates, are having their true natures revealed: corruption, theft, oppression.

We give our lives over to institutions that care… but they crumble. Leaders who care… but they get turned out. Officials who care… but they play the system against us. Politicians who care… but they lie. Programs that care… but they run out of resources. Meanwhile, all the time, Jesus has been standing at the door, knocking. When Jesus cares for us, it is not because He has compassion, but because He is the essence of compassion.

And when He cares about us, and cares for us, something happens. He offers healing, provision, and the peace that passes understanding. Those things are not in the fine-print of anything the world’s “compassion” can deliver.

We should not suspect the motives of the compassionate in our midst; not at all. But we always need to remember that without the godly component, the world might care about, but truly cannot care for, its people.

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Does Jesus Care?

A powerful, simple song was written a hundred years ago around this question – and this answer: Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you (I Peter 5:7). It is sung here a capella by the Isaacs – brother and sisters Ben, Becky, and Sonya. From the excellent beanscot Channel on YouTube. It will stay in your heart all week!

Click: Does Jesus Care?

5-12-14

“Selfie” is the latest neologism – a newly invented word – to enter the dictionary. These days, everybody, it seems, has been infected with the need to photograph themselves and publish the images far and wide. No matter that one’s arm is extended awkwardly, to hold the camera; that angles are askew; that silly smiles predominate; that people crowd the frame, even if a chinbone or cowlick are all that appear.

Well, it’s fun. Evidently, because everyone, inevitably, smiles. Facebook would look like a dry ledger-sheet if selfies were banned. The Pope has been in selfies. President Obama even took a selfie with Prime Minister David Cameron and the hottie Prime Minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning Schmidt, at what should have been a somber occasion, the funeral of Nelson Mandela. (You remember: Michelle Obama, NOT in the selfie, was not amused.)

History, and the history of art, tells us something about the changing manners and mores of societies. Some cultures and religions proscribed images of faces. Peoples have believed that depicting individuals robbed them of their souls. “Iconoclasm” originally was a term applied to those who were against any artistic portraits, and believed that icons led to idol worship. For several generations, photographic portraits of presidents and peasants mirrored stone faces and serious miens. Eventually, people in family portraits and on driver licenses felt the need to smile like fools.

Whether selfies are narcissistic or merely an amusing triviality will likewise come and go, similarly hinting at what our civilization is about, or not. The relevance of such things has a shelf-life, with expiration dates.

So maybe we should call them shelfies. In a sense, selfies have been a part of human history, because – whether we have cameras or not – we humans tend to gather with our like-kinds. We want to be seen with certain people, whether friends or celebrities. We want to remember, and be remembered. We are joiners, we form loyalties, we associate. With or without photographs, humans have always tended to compose selfies.

In this form of “virtual” selfies, how often is Jesus one of the group of people who gather around you?

Think back over your “crowded hours.” At significant times, was Jesus next to you? Was He one of the smiling pals? Was He in your circle of friends? Have you, by implication, always invited Him, wanted Him near, held him close?

The answer about whether Jesus has been next to you… is Yes, of course. Even if you have not regularly included Him in your activities, associations, and fellowships. He is always with us.

Go deeper and you can realize that Jesus is “in” those virtual photos, in the virtual album of your life. But is He a background figure, waiting for your invitation to get in the shot? Or have you let Him be a major presence by your side – in moments of joy, or times of sadness; in triumphs and trials; in happiness and grief?

The answer to such questions, the title on the cover of your life’s family album, so to speak, will reveal whether smiles in those selfies and shelfies are real and warm and life-affirming, or silly and frozen and artificial.

Say “cheese!” Someone IS taking a picture.

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There is an old folk song that deals with the regrettable aspects of life’s random snapshots, if we let sadness overtake us, if we choose to be pictured solo. A lot of people think Hank Williams wrote “A Picture from Life’s Other Side” because he a great version; but it was an old standard when he recorded it. Likewise the Blue Sky Boys and Bradley Kinkaid. Some people think that J Frank Smith wrote it, when it became the first big seller in recorded gospel music in 1926 (by his Smith’s Sacred Singers, a shape-note quartet)… but it was an old standard even then. It existed as sheet music in the 1890s. But, its message is timeless. This is a Mac Wiseman cover. The “Voice With a Heart” was inducted in the Country Music Hall of fame this year – long overdue for the man who has kept traditional American ballads alive than any other recording artist

Click: A Picture from Life’s Other Side

4-14-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Hosanna!

3-31-14

I have come to realize that a lot of things they say about Jesus Christ are not true. Oh, I’m sure He smiled a lot, and sometimes wore perfectly starched robes, and went around patting children on the head, like I saw on the covers of all those Sunday-School pamphlets. And, if I remember correctly, we have stories of Him preaching and dispensing wisdom, and then moving on to the next towns and lakesides. He was misunderstood; people were jealous of Him or threatened by Him; and He was an innocent victim of persecution. I understand all that.

But why can’t He just leave me alone with those images? Messiah, I get it. Died for my sins, fine. Shouldn’t that be enough for Christmas and Easter?

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

A Jesus who smiles all the time? No… I see Him. Sometimes He is angry. Sometimes He is disappointed and looks sad. Sometimes I see tears in His eyes. In those moments He is confronting ME. He reminds me that I sin, that I am lost in this crazy world. He pleads with me to make a choice. To change. To believe in Him. To replace the junk in my heart with the goodness He promises.

Another annoying thing: He never shuts up. I wish there were a fishing village down the road He could move on to. He persists. He won’t let me go. Those Sunday-School paintings of Jesus standing at the door and knocking? Don’t let that kid you. He knocks at the front door, the back door, He scratches at the windows, He is like an alarm clock; like virtual phone calls and texts. “Why do you ignore Me, reject Me?” is what He seems to be saying. “I love you!”

And how annoying is this? – I’ve gotten the feeling that Christmas and Easter are not enough for Him. Or church once in a while; or even every Sunday morning. He wants me, not my schedule or habits or family customs. Don’t I pray, or think about praying, when someone is sick, or I’m having a crisis? What does He WANT from me, anyhow???

Why, why can’t Jesus be like the guys in those other religions? A wise man, a powerful teacher, a prophet, a role model… those are good enough gods for all those followers, and their lives are OK. Well, maybe not, but at least those religions are sensible. I mean, Buddha and Mohammed and Confucius and the rest didn’t ever claim they were sons of God, or “God With Us.” Isn’t it just like Jesus, though, to be the only One claiming that this is exactly who He is? That accepting Him is the way, the only way, to eternal life? It gets annoying.

Because if it’s true… I’m fried. If that persistent, sincere, earnest, holy, logical, annoying Person called Jesus is telling the truth, I should be scared crazy. I remember that writer named C. S. Lewis said something: “You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Annoying, right? Then I heard that Bono, the singer and activist, recently said, “Jesus isn’t lettin’ you off the hook… When people say, you know, ‘Good teacher,’ ‘Prophet,’ ‘Really nice guy’… this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge in that: which is either Jesus was who He said He was, or a complete and utter nut case… You have to make a choice on that.”

Annoying! “Make a choice!” First Jesus says it; and then these guys; and then… then… then I know I do have to make a choice. Annoying! Everything else in life these days frees us from having to make choices. Or, if we make bad choices, someone is there to say “It’s all right” and “No problem.” That’s what is great about modern life, right? But… “Make a choice, make a choice!”

It’s not like my life depended on it. Can’t you see how annoying this Jesus is? Why? WHY?

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The simplest Sunday-School song, maybe the very first hymn a lot us remember hearing, answers the question of Why Jesus is so… well, annoying, sometimes. But Jesus loves me, this I know.

Click: Jesus Loves Me

3-24-14

At Christmastime many people listen to Handel’s “Messiah.” Some of us listen to excerpts; some listen to the entire work. Some people attend performances at local churches or watch television broadcasts. For some people it is their only exposure to Baroque music during the year… and for too many, sadly, their only exposure to church music. Yet, in the words of the Sursum Corda portion of the liturgy, it is meet and right so to do. In all times and in all places – or, as often as possible – we should commune with our God. And that should apply to Easter as much as Christmas; with other supernal music as much as the traditional “Messiah.”

If we would wade into the waters of debate about the relative importance of dates in the Christian calendar, we would be reminded that over the centuries, Christmas was a relatively minor celebration, at least compared to Easter. (And that the Feast of the Ascension – marking Jesus’s physical rise to Heaven, completing the affirmation of His divinity, closing the theological circle of the Incarnation, begun with the Virgin Birth – was once more observed than it is in today’s churches.)

A propos these observations, I offer a suggestion that we all reverently replicate the consideration we give to Easter, and the attention we pay to the “Messiah,” by something new this Lenten season. Lent should be more than giving up chocolate, anyway!

Additionally, Lent gives us 40 days (that is, more than the week or so that Christmas affords) to enjoy music, and contemplate this season, concerning the most profound event in the history of humankind.

Let us avoid the temptation, for a time, to watch and wait upon events that explode in our midst, as compelling as are Russian osmotic invasions, or the perplexing disappearance of passenger planes. Let us look inward and commemorate an event 2000 years old but as immediate as the seconds and minutes of our fleeting lives.

I suggest we listen to one of the greatest creative works of the human race, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Passion According to St Matthew.” The word Passion refers specifically to the rejection, betrayal, suffering, humiliation, torture, pain, and death of Jesus. That we should focus on these details indicates no prurience: that any person, much less the Son of God who could have waved it all away, endured such things, for us, ought to inspire our devotion.

So the “St Matthew Passion” enables us to understand, to internalize, to enrich our faith. There is a link below to an astonishing performance. I commend it, to watch in portions or in one dedicated private time. If you cannot, I will still explain why it is beneficial, and how art can serve our appreciation of the gospel.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Passion story is based on Matthew chapters 27 and 28. Christian composers, as early as the eighth century, but mainly in the 16th-18th centuries, wrote Passions to be distinct from other church music. Passions used large ensembles, sometimes two choirs, orchestras, and organs. They were dramatic presentations, with “narrators” and soloists. Sometimes they were performed outside churches, occasionally in costumes and with dramatic action, a halfway-house to oratorios or opera.

In Bach’s version, he declined costumes but achieved great drama. In our video link you will see a stark and spare performance stage, singers in simple suits or dresses. There are no props; it is not in a cathedral. However you will notice profound symbolism in the changing placement of the singers; the colors that light the performance stage; and the illuminated Cross that floats above the performers – changing shades, morphing from dark to light to dark.

This video – made in 1971, and conducted by the legendary Bach interpreter Karl Richter – is an immense work of art in itself.

You will be grateful that the text, translated to English, is on the screen. When subtitles do not appear, it is because singers are repeating phrases. This impactful video allows you to appreciate the myriad of subtleties Bach used to emphasize the STORY of the Passion, behind the lyrics and melodies. Words are biblical passages, or the librettist’s paraphrases.

Take note of the highlighting of meaningful words, by orchestral emphasis. Notice that solo voices have keyboard accompaniment; Jesus has keyboard and strings… except for His dramatic cry “Why hast Thou forsaken me?”

Notice the music (instrumentation and style of play) reflecting singers’ hope, sorrow, or desperation.

Notice the musical (and the camera’s) emphasis on words like “Barabbas!” and “kill Him!” and “crucify!” Notice Bach’s use of musical devices – pulsating rhythms for tension; short bursts by the flutes to suggest tears; upward modulation when hope is displayed.

Note the repetition of musical themes (popular church tunes) by the choruses to unify the narrative themes.

This is a monumental work of art.

The “St Matthew Passion” was considered by Bach to be his most significant work. It was first performed in Leipzig at the St-Thomas Church in 1727, and many Holy Weeks thereafter; he frequently revised it. His autograph score shows loving attention, written in red or brown inks according to the biblical and dramatic libretto sources, and employing calligraphy in careful Gothic or Latin letters. He preserved it as an heirloom.

Baroque music and Bach’s genius temporarily were out of fashion after his death in 1750, and the “St Matthew Passion” was never performed again until 102 years after its debut. Felix Mendelssohn had discovered it, conducted a condensed version in Berlin… and the Bach Revival, which has never stopped, began. Mendelssohn, a Jew converted to Christianity, found his Lutheran faith much strengthened by Bach’s work.

Other famous Passions of our time include the play in Oberammergau, a small Bavarian town of two thousand inhabitants, half of whom stage and act in the seven-hour re-creation of Holy Week events. The play has been produced every ten years since 1634 when the town, threatened by the bubonic plague, collectively prayed for mercy and vowed to share with the world this portion of the gospel story if they were spared. In Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, every July the Canadian Badlands Passion Play is presented in a thirty-acre canyon bowl that forms a natural amphitheater. And of course many people watched the movie “The Passion of the Christ” a decade ago.

None can be more powerful than Bach’s version. If you are unfamiliar with, or dislike, “classical music,” this video will not kill you. If the hairstyles or once-cool eyeglasses of 1971’s performers look squirrely, just imagine how we would look to them; or how a magical capture of the actual 1727 debut in Leipzig would look to us. Or how the original suffering and death of Jesus, nearly 2000 years ago, would have seemed if we were there…

… ah! THAT is the art of J S Bach. This performance of the “Passion of Jesus Christ as Recorded by St Matthew,” DOES bring us back to the amazing, profound, and significant events of our Savior’s willing sacrifice for us. It is REAL. All the elements of Art – not just music and words, but the nuances of staging – drive the meaningful messages home. To our hearts.

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Click: Bach’s “St Matthew Passion”

The conductor and musical director of Munich Bach ensembles, as noted, is the great Karl Richter. The members of the instrumental and vocal ensembles are more numerous than in Bach’s more intimate times. This performance is longer than three hours (and was originally performed in segments during the weeks of Lent in Bach’s churches) but I beg you not to make it “background music.” The staging – the arrangement of the singers, the lighting, especially the position and illumination of the cross that floats above all – is profoundly significant.

2-24-14

I have a great new friend, and in the process of getting to know each other, she has been condensing portions of her life story into what she calls “Reader’s Digest versions,” as do I, and we return, and will, to share details. Life is about the stories, of course, not their titles. I have come to appreciate, in literature and not only in conversations, that the gift of revelation is in storytelling, but the gift of self-revelation is in our choice of labels, titles, and summaries.

So – setting aside, here, the conversations with a friend, but in larger senses – I have been thinking about the codes we all use, whether short stories tell about great narratives, or a phrase can represent great truths. A major risk we face is “reductio ad absurdum”: oversimplification. I have observed, in the Christian context, that some churches today “reduce” certain messages of God to present, in effect, the Six Commandments (or so) instead of 10; or, worse yet, repackage what effectively becomes the “10 Options.” Or, you know, Jesus’ “Suggestions From the Mount.”

But the opposite risk is to pile on, adding to the gospel: over-intellectualization. Martin Luther called Reason the enemy of Faith. With encyclopedia versions instead of Reader’s Digest versions of biblical truths, we can lose God’s Word in the weeds! The simplest message is the most profound. What doth the Lord ask of us? I am reminded of a conversation between Jesus and Peter.

“Do you love me?” he asked Peter, recorded in the 21st chapter of John. In fact, He asked Peter – the impulsive, the quick and often presumptuous apostle – “Do you love me?” three times. We should note that He did not challenge Peter with the agendas of contemporary Christianity: Do you know Me? Do you serve Me? Do you defend Me? Or even, Do you work for Me?

“Do you love Me?”

Jesus asks us the same question. Don’t be quick to answer, “Why else would I be serving others and doing good works and attending church and praying? I do these things because I love You! Of course I love You!” If that is the nature of our answer, we get the order of importance reversed. And we should realize that Jesus really, simply, merely asks us a Yes or No question.

It is not only greed and sin that lurk in the verse that warns, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26). It surely can refer to Christians who fall short in nurturing their souls, who interfere with the Spirit’s nurture of their own spirits, because they scurry about like wind-up Christians. In love with projects, and worship services, and meetings… and maybe, not quite so much, in love with Jesus.

“Do you love Me?”

Christians who were once messed up and found their Savior… can mess themselves up again. For “churchy” reasons. This is sin, too; and grieves the Heart of Jesus. We need to look beyond the Reader’s Digest and bumper-strip versions of the Gospel, and likewise strip away the ponderous rules and restrictions of men – the barnacles on Jesus’s fishing-boat – and be still. Be still and know that He is God. Listen.

Listen to the question Jesus asks. Listen for the Heartbeat of the Savior.

Then, although both things are profitable to our troubled souls, we can discern the difference between our personal cries in certain situations for the peace of God… and the life-long Love affair we should desire with the God of Peace.

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An anthem about the bare-bones, essential priority of loving God, in spite of everything else in our lives, is the powerful “Yet Will I Sing,” by Audra Lynn Hartke, singer and worship leader at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. Graphic slideshow by beanscot.

Click: Yet I Will Sing

2-3-14

I recently have re-read “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan (or re-re-re-read, actually forgetting the number of times I have read it). It is the most remarkable of books, once held to be the most printed book in the English language after the Bible. Despite our culture’s sudden and virtually total disassociation from it, that record might still hold.

Bunyan’s book is an allegory: the journey through life of the everyman hero, Mr Christian. It once was required reading in schools, beside the Bible – yes, in bygone times – but also for its masterful allusions, exquisite language, and impressive construction. The hero’s name, and those of myriad characters (Valiant-for-Truth; Worldly-Wiseman), were not crudely conceived of an impoverished imagination but to be clear about metaphors and symbols. Bunyan was teaching a lesson.

He wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress” while he himself presumably was being taught a lesson. The Englishman Bunyan, who lived 1628 – 1688, had been a poor tradesman of relatively loose morals, but was converted to Christianity when he heard the voice of God. Like Martin Luther more than a century previous in Germany, he became conscious of his sinful nature, and grew to faith in fear of God. He was moved spontaneously to preach, and attracted a following. But at that time, in England, it was forbidden to preach unless ordained by the Crown’s church.

During two prison sojourns Bunyan wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The texts were received, the writer said, through visions, in the manner of St John transcribing the Book of Revelation on the Isle of Patmos.

Quotations from this great book strike us like lightning-bolts through the centuries. Its truths are still true. The nature of humankind – our needs and temptations and failures and hopes and triumphs? There have been no changes to our natures: we still need the message!

“What God says is best, is best, though all the men in the world are against it.”

“A man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.”

“The man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world.”

“It is my duty to distrust mine own ability, that I may have reliance on Him that is stronger than all.”

But the most significant allegorical aspect of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” – in any event, the metaphor on which the narrative depends – is the Road. The Path. The Way. The journey’s channel; the Highway. Mr Christian proceeds amidst detours, roadblocks, false advice… toward the Destination, the Cross. To Heaven.

“Now I saw in my dream, that the Highway, up which Christian was to go, was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.”

The Highway to Heaven is an allegory easy to comprehend. But it is hard to travel! As hard as the poor, beleaguered Mr Christian found it. Bunyan likely was under no illusions that his book would turn the world upside-down. Indeed it had great impact – it is possible that millions have accepted Christ because of it through the centuries – yet it can only be expected to speak to readers one by one. One by one.

Despite books of old and mass-media today, the personal appeal of the gospel, which in fact was the mode of Jesus and the Apostles, is just that: a PERSONAL appeal. God’s plan… Christ’s Great Commission… the Holy Spirit’s ministry. “Go and make disciples.”

It is a temptation of human nature, and a specific spiritual malady of contemporary Western culture, to think that knowing ABOUT the “Highway,” being generally supportive, is enough. Or that wandering down detours at least corresponds to good intentions. Or that “other” Highways are efficacious, if the traveler, after all, means to arrive at a similar happy place to where the cross stands.

These relativistic lies and deadly heresies will result not only in others (and ourselves) walking aimlessly through life… but being “lost.” Fatally lost. Eternally lost. The Bible makes clear that all other roads lead to destruction. God is a guide; the Bible is our road map; and millions of sermons, songs, allegories, and books like “The Pilgrim’s Progress” graciously have been laid before us as spiritual MapQuests.

Even more, God allows U-Turns, as my friend Allison Bottke has called her ministry. However, He doesn’t allow short-cuts. He has not cancelled, nor even postponed, our journeys. And to use another Web-Age reference, it is Jesus’s voice we hear in the GPS, reminding us that there is no way to Heaven – no other way – but through Him.

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“Walking Up the King’s Highway” is a standard song in many hymnals. It is a favorite of the Black church, written by the great Thomas A Dorsey and Mary Gardner. Here it is performed in rousing fashion by more than a hundred “Gospel Legends,” giants of influential Spirituals of the past half-century. The late Rev Donald Vails leads the singers. Billy Preston is on the organ.

Click: Highway To Heaven

1-12-14

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

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

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

Who was this Jesus? How did people know Him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Click: Go Ask

1-6-14

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

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

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

Who was this Jesus? How did people know Him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Christmas season is over. And now you know the rest of the story.
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Click: Go Ask

11-4-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing lukewarm about the ways of God.

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

Click: Dancin’ the Boogie

9-30-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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