Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-25-24

It is altogether fit and proper that we recall the words of a secular American saint if there ever was one, Abraham Lincoln. He responded to an informal tradition, a Day of Thanks, and officially proclaimed the first Thanksgiving Day as a national day of observance.

His words had meaning – and, significantly, give lie to the canard that he was not a man of faith. Year by year, through his presidency, Lincoln increasingly infused conversations, letters, and official documents with references to the God of the Bible, His mercies and His judgments. In the last year of his life his writings and speeches often were like sermons.

From his second Thanksgiving proclamation:

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they may then be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend to my fellow-citizens aforesaid that on that occasion they do reverently humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.

If this is formal, or seems obligatory for him to have proclaimed – which it was not – consider his Proclamation appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer:

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. …

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.

Yes, a president of the United States wrote such words. More has changed than clichés and phrases we now often exchange. (“Thanks.” “No, thank you.” “No prob.” “You bet.”) In fact, does our understanding of the need to thank God need a reassessment too? Maybe a hit of the Reset button?

Let’s see it this way: Of course we should thank God, in many ways and all the time, for the uncountable blessings He bestows. But are thanks all that we can raise? In a real sense, God’s gift of salvation, sacrificing His Son so that we might be free of sin’s guilt, is God’s Thank You to us.

“God’s Thank You to us?” Can that make sense? Yes, the Bible tells us that God so loved the world… and that, significantly, Christ died for us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8). To me, that sounds like God saying “You’re Welcome” before we even say “Thank You”! But it is what He has done.

The mysterious ways of God are always like this. He challenges us, yet He knows us. We have free will, yet He holds the future. We seek Him, yet we can know Him. His yoke is easy, and His burden light. We are in the world, but not of the world. St Augustine was not the first nor the last, but maybe history’s most contemplative believer, to gather these apparent contradictions and see them as evidence, not of a capricious and confusing God, but a God who loves us in myriad ways and always meets us where we are, and where we need Him. (And He keeps us guessing; that is, seeking Him!)

All important, as I say. The larger meanings of Abraham Lincoln’s words… and our hearts’ duties. We should remember Lincoln’s perspective: people should set themselves apart; pray; and give thanks, give thanks, give thanks.

Let the stores close for a day… for the proper reasons. To give thanks in ways that matter. Not for convenience or commercial reasons, but remembering the reverence Abraham Lincoln would have us cherish. Three things should be open in America on Thanksgiving Day: open hearts. open Bibles, and open soup kitchens.

Let us also remember that “holidays” have their word-origins in “holy days.” It is odd that in a land of such abundance we often fail to embrace an attitude of gratitude. And when we comprehend that God has thanked us for being faithful stewards… we should reply with a loving “You’re welcome,” and maybe a heartfelt “No, thank You!”

+ + +

The exuberance and joy of counting blessings and giving thanks was expressed in music, too; and never better than by Johann Sebastian Bach. Here is the opening sinfonia from his Cantata number 29:

Click: We Thank You, God, We Thank You!

11-11-24

There is significance that can be gleaned from punctuation and spelling which, as a Word Person, I am happy to assert as often as I can. It is true of missed dates and common misunderstandings, which have led to bloody wars. This message will be a rambling collection of tangents, forgive me; but little things in life are often consequential. We have the aphorism repeated from ancient days by Poor Richard (Benjamin Franklin):

For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost.For want of a shoe the horse was lost.For want of a horse the rider was lost.For want of a rider the message was lost.For want of a message the battle was lost.For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

November 11 is Veterans Day, and I began these thoughts with notes about grammatical precision because it is important, if we are going to commemorate events and observe holidays, that we remember why we do so.

Veterans Day began as “Armistice Day,” dedicated to those who died in World War I. Strictly speaking, President Woodrow Wilson wanted to hallow the moment when peace was declared, more than honoring the millions who died to secure that peace. It was typical of that self-righteous megalomaniac to build a psychological edifice while – in the opinion of many people at the time – soldiers died on the battlefield while the clock ticked toward Wilson’s “11^th day of the 11^th month, 11^th hour, 11^th minute” irrelevancy.

“Armistice Day” eventually became Veterans Day. Word distinctions: Memorial Day was declared to honor those who died, Veterans Day to honor all who served in wars. And it is not “Veteran’s Day” or “Veterans’ Day,” so we remember all vets. A national holiday pf commemoration – in effect, our day to honor them, not their vacation day.

Do I make too much of these distinctions? Possibly. But I urge us to regard Veterans Day as a day where we all (we who are not military veterans) meditate on what others have done; what our brothers and sisters have sacrificed; and the essence of becoming a veteran. Yes, you can be a veteran of, say, an average golf match… but as we routinely understand the word, Veterans usually have gone through some version of hell. And, often enough, for you and me.

So. I would have us appreciate, in others and in ourselves, what we go though in life ourselves, and should go through as our duty, the choice of work, service, and sacrifice. Such is Christ’s call on us – to reach the world with Gospel, which is not easy. To reach our family and friends too, which might be less easy. To be transformed by that Gospel ourselves; for some of us, that step was, or is, difficult.

God helps us… Jesus is like a buddy in life’s foxholes. And we see how He has helped others: To think, for instance, that He ordained a filthy-minded, adulterous, wealthy man with evil in his heart to preside over a nation… makes us think. Yet God did that… and that man, by God’s grace, eventually did much good, and wrote the Psalms.

Oh, did you think I was talking about Donald Trump or someone else? No, I mean King David. We are all flawed. But we are all veterans too, of some good fight.

The reason I like “Veterans Day” without the apostrophe is that I think we should appreciate, and encourage each other, in that thought: we are all veterans. We have been through a lot, every one of us. Challenges, crises, distress, disaster. Health, finances, relationships. Self-confidence, lack of faith sometimes?

My friend Becky Spencer, active in myriad ministries, is called by those who know her remarkable faith and work, the “Fight Lady.” Are you an “overcomer”? Are you “more than a conqueror”? You can be, and therefore you are a veteran; God sent the Holy Spirit to be your comrade-in-arms. I will repeat a fable I shared here just last week, and which ignited a lot of responses: A man arrives at Heaven’s Gate and is challenged by St Peter to display the scars he acquired during his life on earth. “I have no scars,” the man says. St Peter replies: “Really? There was nothing you ever thought was worth fighting for?”

Believe me, of course I am not urging that we stop honoring military veterans (in fact, we don’t do so enough). And it is a fool’s errand to suggest we establish a holiday to honor ourselves, even if we begin to dedicate ourselves to greater service. Banish that thought.

But if we can begin to ask ourselves what we are veterans of… what we have chosen as our mission(s) in life… what will lead to God telling you in Glory – in reality; not a fable – “Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”… that will be the greatest Veterans Day of all. We are all in this together, this thing called Life, and we need to follow God’s battle plan.

+ + +

Click: Will You Look At Me and Say “Well Done”?

9-30-24

Oh, no! – Another political message? No… it’s not. I hate the clogged mailbox, and the repeated TV commercials, and the “blind” phone calls, and the annoying e-mails, as much as anybody.

So, I invite you to rest easy. But this topic is one that transcends partisanship (or should). It is something for us to think about whether or not an election is imminent. If there is a danger associated with Socialism – and I believe there is – perhaps societies should have been thinking, and acting, since the 1840s when this current version of governmental pick-pocketry was foisted on our culture.

We can dispatch all the kindly excuses for Socialism advanced by well-meaning folk, especially the moon-eyed “Christian Socialists.” Yes – some of its root impulses are to help the unfortunate. Yes – there are systemic inequities in our societies. Yes – if I may run immediately to the arguments of religious folk – the Bible admonishes us to care for the widow and the orphan, the “least of these.”

But, as we bankrupt ourselves and lose our freedoms, there are NOs that we should listen to, and consider, instead. No! – Government is not, should not be, and cannot be the major agency to distribute charity. No! – If there are inequities in societies, we should fix them, not arrange for governments to take from us… without our input, often, or permission, especially when contrary to our standards and beliefs. No! – The Bible admonishes us to care for the widow and the orphan and the “least of these.”

St Augustine, whose writings have nurtured me more than any church father between St Paul and Luther, opened my eyes to these points… and he wrote about 1450 years before the destruction of free enterprise and Christian social values was even a gleam in the eyes of Karl Marx. A rough contemporary of St Patrick – they never met nor likely knew of each other – he had evangelic effect, but largely though teaching, writing, and the force of logic.

In his Confessions, Augustine addressed the words of Jesus that “the poor you will always have with you.” He dismisses what many people still think without thinking. The Savior was not a defeatist; He did not mean that charity is futile. Neither was He a cynic. Is poverty inevitable? – is that what Jesus said, a cold-hearted acceptance of inequity? No! Could He have meant that we should have benign neglect toward the poor? No!

Rather, Augustine argued that Jesus wanted to remind us that our hearts must always be inclined toward charity – that anyone we might deem less fortunate in areas of resources, health, emotions must evoke love and care on the part of Christians. (And we know that the proper translation of “charity” in Scripture is “love.”)

These views cannot be mere lessons in ancient Post-Manichaean, Neo-Platonic, Patristic theological debates; nor should they enable weaponization of Scriptural truths to serve in contemporary political arguments, as I said above. No, we are living in a time of world history larger than things like inventions and labels. Mighty achievements like the nuclear bomb, miraculous advances in medicine, and tools like computer chips and Artificial Intelligence are mere details. They are virtual toys, with impacts as substantial to us as pyramids were to the ancient Egyptians, or as astronomy was to the Persians.

… meaning, those civilizations ultimately crumbled and were covered in dust, as ours someday will be. Scabrous pathologies like Socialism are not the actual enemy: not the disease, but the symptom. We live in an arc of history that is self-indulgent; Socialism is a result. We are self-destructive; Socialism draws standards down instead of elevating. Since the Renaissance, the post-Christian world has promoted “self” in the arts, philosophy, and religion. Luther declared that even in his time, Modernism was a false god – and it since has slid to worse manifestations. He declared, as much as our contemporary age is shocked to admit it, that Faith is the enemy of Reason.

And our world for 500 years has made the choice, Reason over Faith.

In the meantime, Socialism (and its theories under different names) has crept into all aspects of daily life. Western societies basically do not look to God anymore for help or strength or wisdom: the Government has co-opted all such functions. The logical extensions of economic Socialism – state-run schools; government mandates in all spheres of life; monopoly-capitalism – are entrenched. The Government sees all, knows all, controls all.

Jesus’s reminder, and its holy application, is what suffers. The victims are our souls, more than a poor widow or hungry orphan. The Savior’s message was that our hearts should always be inclined to love, then help, our fellow men and women. People are in distress? Families in trouble? Instead of looking to government programs, we should act as sensitive friends and families and… churches, communities of believers.

The mindset of Socialism has crept into other spheres of life. I have come to resent the campaigns of stores, banks, TV shows, fast-food restaurants, and sports teams that announce financial pledges to this-or-that charity. They also rob us of our personal choices and our own impulses to help people or causes. We can make those decisions because we have the desire to, not because some corporation wants to pick our pockets (and usually for their cozy relationships, PR, and tax benefits).

Hey! Charge less for groceries and services… and let us decide what charity we seek to support. “Socialism” is the blanket-term that covers all sins, and has permeated thought, word, and deed in our post-Christian world. The Apostles, we know, pooled their resources – while they were being persecuted; but thereafter raised money, spent money, and financed their missionary journeys.

We remember also what Jesus said about Money and the “root of all evil.” The Savior did not say that money is the root of all evil… but that the “love of money is the root of all evil.” In the same manner also may we see that the denial of Christian charity – the organized thievery of Socialism – is a cause, not the solution, of the disintegration of society and the corruption of the church.

+ + +

Click: He Reached Down

5-20-24

One of my daughters was very young when my father died. On hearing the news, she cried, “Oh, no! I never had the chance to tell him about Jesus!” Her beautiful naïveté illustrated a proper priority of love (and was misplaced, for he knew the Lord) yet her childlike expression taught me a lesson.

We always have the chance to share, or say, or do the important things. How often in life, however, do we take the chances?

My friend Christine Martin, a beautiful poet and writer and singer, has addressed this topic, and she is our Guest today:

Recently our pastor talked about having boldness to talk about God to others. He mentioned how easy it is for us to talk about the weather or politics or anything else, really, but how hard we make talking about God. It shouldn’t be that way. God literally saved our lives and we should be overflowing with gratitude, and want to share that with others.

I too struggle to talk about God sometimes. It can seem awkward or scary. We often talk ourselves out of it by thinking we might turn people away from God or say the wrong thing. This is the devil playing with our minds! When we talk about God, He gives us the right words to say. We do not need to worry about this. Our pastor encouraged us to pray about an opportunity to talk about God to someone; and he encouraged us to be bold.

I prayed for such an opportunity. Recently, locksmiths came to fix our doors, and were here for nearly three and a half hours. During this time I prayed that God would help me speak up about Him.

I had to make muffins for a get-together and although I didn’t need to make them in the morning, I decided to go ahead and make them so that I could offer some to the locksmiths. Maybe this could be a great way to talk about God…. All the while, I was praying that God would help me to be bold and say something about Him. Well, they left and I went to the window thinking maybe I could still go out and say something, but I saw that they were already in their van.

I said to myself, “Christine, you blew it.” Then I prayed, “God, please let them have forgotten a tool or something so they will come back and I can talk about You.” I glanced around the room to see if they maybe forgot a tool but I didn’t see anything. A split-second later, there was a knock on the front door. They were back!

God had answered my prayer and I was so excited and thankful and surprised at how quickly He answered and at how He answered. I opened the door and the locksmith was holding the key ring from my old house key. They had made me new keys and the old one didn’t work anymore and he asked if I wanted my old key ring. God gave me the courage to say, “Yes, thank you. By the way, if you like good food (since they loved the muffins) and music, our church is having a 5th Sunday potluck…” And that was the beginning of our Church conversation.

The man was interested and said that he and his mom were looking for a church. I was able to give him a card to our church with the address, and shared with him how welcoming they are and how they have really been a blessing to my husband Daniel and me. When he left with the card and I closed my door, I was so full of joy and thanked God for answering my prayer and giving me the boldness to open my mouth and talk about Him.

When we ask God for opportunities, He gives them to us, and when we ask God for the right words to say, He gives them to us. I have been discouraged as of late. You know, sometimes we get caught up in thinking that God isn’t hearing us or has forgotten about us. It just isn’t true. God hadn’t forgotten me and He was listening. He showed me that by answering my prayer in such a neat way. You will be amazed at the ways God works through you and in your life. Oh, what joy it is to serve a living God who is always at work!

I put my new house key on that old key ring, so that when I see it or hold it in my hand, I can remember that God answers our prayers, that He is still at work, that He has not forgotten me; and that He will give me boldness to talk about Him. What a great reminder. Who would ever have guessed?

God works in mysterious ways and He can use something as simple as a key ring to remind us of so much, to encourage us, and to open that door… to plant a seed in someone’s heart.

Thank you, Christine. I have another friend, Gordon Pennington, who is so gifted (and so prolific in exercising) the sharing of Jesus with strangers, that I have encouraged him to write a book – a “user’s manual” for witnessing to people. A “How-To” book can be useful, but as Christine has shown us, we always have opportunities… and God will set the stage and write the script for us!

(By the way, you may be encouraged, and follow Christine’s thoughts, through her website Tea Cups and Roses)

+ + +

Click: A Beautiful Bystander

11-27-23

We in the United States have celebrated, if not observed, another Thanksgiving. Like other holy days… holidays… long weekends, it has begun to endure the onslaught of secularization. No longer are there widespread expressions of thanks to Almighty God in schools, from the White House, and, yes, even in churches.

It is beneficial for us to remember that Thanksgiving, as a holiday, is not really traced to the Pilgrims, as thankful as they were “24/7,” in many ways formal and informal. It was a lowly politician – in proper view, the closest we have had to a saint in Washington, President Abraham Lincoln – who conceived the idea of setting apart a day for government and citizenry to beseech God for mercy and forgiveness, and literally count our blessings.

His Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863 began a tradition that held, until recently. He wrote in part after enumerating some of the gifts God bestowed upon America:

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens… to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them… ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings….

We can fast-forward to now, when a supposedly Catholic president dutifully issued a proclamation, but included no mention of God. Even simple logic, if not religion, should have suggested to Biden that if you urge people to be thankful, you should mention to Whom they should be thankful. His 2023 proclamation instead distorted history and denigrated faith by claiming the Pilgrims merely “honored the harvest” and expressed gratitude for the “Wampanoag people who made it possible.”

The current president then stated that Americans would gather this year to “celebrate the love they share and the traditions they built together… grateful for our Nation and the incredible soul of America…. I encourage the people of the United States of America to join together and give thanks for the friends, neighbors, family members, and strangers who have supported each other over the past year in a reflection of goodwill and unity.”

The current White House surely knows how to pinpoint things it advocates or hates. But “being thankful,” a passive, neutered term – instead of giving thanks – is a willful avoidance of a worldview that acknowledges God and His role in our national heritage and current affairs. When Biden gives thanks for “Friends,” he might well be talking about the episode where Joey gave Chandler a goat.

This is a symptom, of course, of the country at large; certainly the popular culture. But also of the Party in power. That party and its allies would be suing or censoring Abraham Lincoln for engaging in “hate speech” in the Proclamation.

This New Ingratitude trickles down to everyday speech and social interaction. Take note, this coming week, to how people express and receive Thanks. Remembering that words mean things and are significant, listen in stores, food counters, and dialogue on TV programs. “Thank you” is still uttered, but usually “Thanks” is the grandest form of sincerity.

Moreover, these days “You’re Welcome” is a virtually obsolete phrase. The response, rather, often is something like: Sure… You bet… No problem, or No prob… You got it… Sure thing… Back atcha…

Words have consequences. To paraphrase William Butler Yeats, we are slouching toward a society of ingratitude, or, worse, indifference. Americans – and I include much of the church – know how to complain; what to hate; whom to resent; when to lose patience. But we have lost the capacity to be grateful; to acknowledge good happenings; to share credit; to… thank God, not just our own work or luck, for blessings.

Almighty God does not demand gratitude and thanks from us… Well, yes, He does, actually. He is a “jealous God” and through the Bible we are told, by Him and His prophets, that gratitude and thanks are due Him. Our worship liturgies remind us that it is “meet, right, and salutary that at all times and in all places we give thanks to Him”… “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever”… “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus”… “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name”…

At one time we were a people who knew that God was the source of good things, and that He was worthy of praise and thanks. Now we are a people routinely expecting entitlements.

I want to view the Lord and Thanks-giving in one more way. It is proper that we have an attitude of gratitude. But through the Bible, God does not only demand our thanks, praise, and obligation. We should also recognize that Christianity is a two-way street, so to speak.

What I mean is this: God thanks us, too. His blessings are “thanks” for our faithfulness. His amazing Creation was given, a gift, to humankind. Answered prayers are “thanks” for our devotion and supplications. The Gifts of the Spirit surely are His reaching down to bless us. The very fact that He became incarnate flesh to dwell among us and offer a plan of salvation is a manner of advance-thanks.

God demonstrated His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

Was there ever a more heartfelt “Thank You”? The Lord considers us worthy of thanks, this verse says, before we would even deserve it. Thanks for believing on Him; loving Him; serving Him. The challenge to Christians is how we return thanks, how we give life to “You’re Welcome, Lord.”

But respond we must, with sincerity and purpose. Gratitude. And a spirit of giving Thanks.

+ + +

Click: Thank You

1-2-23

New Years is a sort of anti-Lent. We resolve to do things as New Year resolutions; and many people vow to give things up for Lent. There is a similarity, however: very few of us carry through on either category of intentions. The more interesting survey would be to track the average number of days people “keep” such pledges.

I have a new idea for New Years resolutions.

It involves neither self-sacrifice nor a “self-help” box to check, although you will feel good for having done it. But you will make others feel better – a pretty good way to start the year. Of course it does not have to be on the first of the year… but many of us need some “hook” to hang our good intentions on. (I think that is the justification for a lot of holidays on the calendar.)

There is not one among us who does not know, or know of, an “angel.” Not a literal, sent-from-Heaven angel (maybe), but friends who do good deeds. People who reach out to folks in need, even in mere moments of loneliness. They encourage. They involve themselves in local causes, perhaps with no fanfare. They sacrifice or volunteer. They smile when smiles are hard to come by; they weep with you when nobody else understands.

Praise God, every family, every neighborhood, has these people. Sometimes they never know how they are appreciated, because they go through life without being thanked… but they do not bless others in order to garner praise.

I suggest bringing a few of those people you know – because surely you do – to mind. One of them; three of them; whatever. And let them know they are appreciated, sincerely. Arrange to see them… write an anonymous thank-you note… send a non-anonymous, personal, thank-you note or e-mail… express your appreciation over coffee… whatever.

The form is not as important as the will to do it; and the will is not as important as the deed. I will name three or four such people I know. I will decline to use their names here, although that would honor them. But angels like this do not operate for glory or honor, and I want to inspire similar outreaches among you.

One friend has been a teacher in Texas, also is an author, a church worker, a selfless volunteer at conferences. She has managed difficult family situations, and may never get over the loss of her husband to cancer. She is chiefly, however, an encourager of others. She has blessed uncountable other people, not the least with her famous sense of humor; but some of us know she cries as many tears as she causes smiles. In all, an angel – a saint – and the type of friend who deserves the type of note I suggest for a New Year resolution.

No less spiritual, but active in other realms important to Christians these days, is a friend whose faith motivated her to be active in local, then state, politics. School curricula, mask and vaccine mandates, governmental intrusion, moved her to attend school board and legislative hearings. Often stonewalled, she climbed the ladder of activism, only to be frustrated further. Even at her state capital, deliberate snubs. She and other “moms” banded together and ran for offices. She challenged her state’s senate majority leader. She lost but, again, was frustrated when she requested to see vote totals. Time, trouble, and expenses racked up. She and her fellow moms – Christian Patriots all – are now primed for future crusades. Our whole nation should be filled with selfless angels like her. Her children are out of school, but she battles for the Kingdom.

I have another friend who similarly believes that Christians must be active in the public sphere – that we are seeing the heritage of our faith slip away. He had been brand-manager for a well-known international fashion company, jet-setting around the world doing consequential work. He gave it up, returned to his family’s fifth-generation home in rural Michigan… and still is a jet-setter of sorts, but now he attends conferences, speaks at events, organizes large meetings. His two spheres, now, are Christianity and the political crisis we face. As the previous angel is doing, my friend does not merely complain or advocate; he has rolled up his sleeves as a poll-watcher and attends meetings from the local to the highest levels. And his greatest joy – I have seen this over and over – is sharing Christ, witnessing to others. Baristas, handymen in town, celebrities he knows. It is what angels do.

Another friend is an angel in work overalls. He was an assembly-line worker who was obliged to retire when he developed a disease that made it unsafe to continue on his shifts. In his wonderful family he has a wife and two beautiful daughters who have debilitating, degenerative afflictions. I have never heard any of them complain or display anything but smiles and good cheer, goodwill. My friend uses his skills to manufacture or retrofit lifts for people’s vans, or stair lifts for their homes… and many of these folks are virtual strangers to him. Angels come in all forms.

In situations like these I have described, the “angels among us” do not have to be old friends from their address books… but are, after all, the best friends many folks could want.

Or need.

You surely know some Angels Among Us. Bless them with a warm reminder that you know about, and appreciate, their ministrations.

+ + +

Click: Someone is Praying For You

3-30-20

Three events this week seemed connected in a way I think God would have us see. The unifying factors are these: that God has plans for us that occasionally look anything but good at first glance; we seldom can predict these life-adjustments, or even recognize them at first; and, number 3, God wants to use us. Yes, you and me. He gives us assignments for His work.

* In no particular order. I first will address the Coronavirus pandemic. Of course we have enormous sympathy for the deaths and dislocations – businesses closed and savings gone – that are resulting. But last week I listed some of the new priorities and redundant traditions that are good to be cleared away in a single season, instead of over a generation.

This social (not medical) craziness is bringing out the best in people, and I pray it lasts through and beyond the lockdowns. Acts of charity; innovative ways to care; new initiatives. My daughter Emily, in Ireland, was close to opening a restaurant and making other arrangements for her new food business, just a few weeks ago. She could have been locked into a horrible arrangement, as shops are hard-hit there as in the US. Instead of stewing (ha), she came up the idea of operating a “food pantry” to deliver food to doctors’ offices and hospitals, for those weary workers on extra shifts and unable to enjoy home-cooked food. The community is responding, in her city and elsewhere. Pallets of packaged foods; restaurant surpluses; volunteers; contributions.

Her inspiration was Jesus feeding the 5000. It’s not about her; she calls the initiative the National Health Service Pantry. For “Front Line” workers – what we would call medical first-responders and staffers.

Good will come from this plague. In myriad ways. That’s what Christians should make happen. God does not want people to catch and die from a virus. But in the midst, He has plans for us all while it is here. There’s at least one plan for you – just find it!

* Then I was reminded that the Feast of the Annunciation was this week. Forty weeks before Jesus’ birth. Mary woke up one day a lowly handmaiden; was visited by an angel; and went to sleep knowing she would give birth to the Savior of the human race. Quite a day!

Which means we cannot, usually, predict or expect or recognize events. We think such things are rare, but plagues and storms and wars often surprise us; and things are “never the same”… yet life goes on, doesn’t it? And for the good things too – blessings, gifts, visits from angels. Like Mary, as recorded in her prayer called the Magnificat, our souls magnify the Lord. We are humbled. We need to understand His lovingkindness. Those are acts to undertake. Just find one!

* Finally, did you notice in the news this week that Roger Stone, the perennial political dirty-trickster who was swept up in the “Russian Collusion” hoax, and sentenced to prison, attended a Franklin Graham crusade and gave his heart to Jesus? A little like Chuck Colson, the Nixon operative who was born again and founded the Prison Fellowship ministry.

Is it a legitimate conversion? I have a view of the matter. Many years ago I worked with two partners of his, just before the three founded a Washington lobbying group. More to share in a future column, but this born-again story – and a viral 25-minute video interview on CBN – caught my attention. And it ties in to my third “coincidental” inspiration for this week. Just think —

God has plans for us that are not always clear to us at first. His messages and callings usually are things we could never have expected. But… God wants to use us.

Use us. He doesn’t have to. He could use your neighbor. Or a stranger. Or nobody, and wave His hand over situations; He is God. But He issued a challenge to Emily’s faith… He blessed Mary with an unspeakable privilege… He broke Roger’s heart of Stone. He challenges, we respond. That’s how God works.

These things came together this week, amid good and bad health and financial news. The same message is delivered to us all – be open to God; welcome His surprises; and be willing to be used.

Just listen. Just see. Just act.

+ + +

Click: The Unseen Hand

03/17/2020

Not the caricature, please. No green plastic hats and “Kiss Me” buttons and green beer.

Honor the man who honored Christ. Taken into slavery. Found a Bible. Freed, evangelized England. Evangelized Ireland. Evangelized German lands, the first great evangelist since St Paul.

The Patrick who preached, and lived, reconciliation. I have been to places where he stood, where he preached, and where he knelt. Let us kneel with him.

Click: Hayley Westenra,  Abide With Me

9-30-19

Do many people confess this – ‘I Don’t Know How To Pray!’ – or would, if pressed? You would be surprised how many Christians, even, are uncomfortable when called upon to pray audibly, or front of others.

My late wife Nancy’s birthday was last week; and she died almost seven years ago. I have written how she suffered almost uncountable numbers of ailments and afflictions, including cancer, strokes, and heart and kidney transplants. She never stopped attending church all her life through, but her natural shyness plus an upbringing in church and home that did not encourage spontaneous and public praying, brought her seldom to pray in front of others. Even before our family, at mealtimes.

But when she was listed for transplantation, she began a ministry on the Heart Failure floor of the hospital. She saw a need, particularly as – believe it or not – clergy seldom visited and prayed with patients there.

A Catholic priest scurried through once a week, sharing the Host and the Sign of the Cross to Catholic patients on his list, and then moved on; scarcely chatting. Protestant clergy, sometimes from patients’ home churches, occasionally made calls and had conversations more than prayers. In those times, almost 25 years ago, transplant recipients were wired to monitors and telemetry units, so the machinery and poles prevented them from even venturing to the chapel on the hospital’s ground floor.

It seemed curious and, frankly, cruel to Nancy that patients were receiving medical care but not spiritual care.

She started a hospital ministry. She visited rooms. She had us bring Bibles that she could distribute. It became a family ministry, even as our children Heather, Ted, and Emily would pray, sometimes with children of patients. We began holding services on Sunday mornings in rooms, or the lounges, or atrium, depending on attendance.

And attendance grew. Patients were wheeled in; nurses joined as they could; family members timed their visits to the services. We dealt with crises of faith. We saw miracles. We played recorded music, always surprised that rural men fell in love with Black spirituals; faithful Jewish couples lost themselves in the joy of Southern gospel songs; Hispanics sang the traditional hymns in Spanish as we sang in English.

And before we knew it, people prayed with us… and prayed, themselves. Enthusiastically, and spontaneously. People opened up to request a specific prayer, as, they said, they never had done in their lives. Patients shared thanks for things that happened during the week, or for a breakthrough they experienced. Very often, patients or family members were bold enough to ask God questions, in front of all us. (You don’t know how liberating, and Biblical, it is to answer “I don’t know! I don’t know, either! Let’s pray about it!”).

Sometimes widows or widowers, or children of patients who died after transplantation, or during procedures, or while waiting, came to thank us all. And to share peace with their “new” families. Local TV stations, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, did multiple stories on Nancy and this ministry. We continued it as a family for almost seven years after she received her heart and kidney, until we moved to San Diego.

Nancy received more than a heart and a kidney; she had a personality transplant. This woman who was so shy that she seldom audibly prayed over dinner… became a prayer warrior.

“Out of the abundance of the heart, so the mouth speaketh.” Once, a patient’s wife said that she believed her husband was “listed” at that time and in that place, in order that he learn about Jesus from us. He accepted Christ – over which she had prayed for years – but I don’t believe God sends sickness. The lesson, however, is that our job is to turn circumstances around on the devil.

There were many times patients prayed, in front of others as well as the Lord, for the first time in their lives. I still can almost hear the accelerating thump, thump, thump heartbeats on the monitors at those times. Spiritual emotion. Once, on New Years Eve, a sweet hulk of man from the Philly suburbs requested that we all gather in his room. “I don’t know how to pray!” he confessed… but declared that he wanted to do so, for the first time in his life. He did, through tears – his and ours – and his “Amen!” was followed by the biggest smile you could imagine.

Is it possible, dear reader, that you don’t know how to pray? Is it awkward? Either before others, or privately to God?

If so, that grieves God more than you can know. He wants to communicate with us; the Bible says we should share the burdens of our hearts. He knows them… but he wants to hear from you. Is there a guilt that impedes you? Confess it! He knows that already too! Are you so joyful that you think prayer is not necessary? Shame on you! You have extra reason!

All of us live a little south of Heaven and a little north of Hell. We are in a common (even crowded) place from which to approach the Throne of God. You don’t know how to pray, or what to pray?

If your slate is that empty, start by simply praising Him. Thank Him for Who He is, and what He has done. Can’t think of anything? You will. It will start as a “sacrifice of praise” and then start to roll. He will speak to your spirit. Are you getting through? The Bible says that the Holy Spirit will speak, even groan when we are troubled, to God on our behalf. Pray. I pray of you.

You don’t need to be confined to a hospital’s Heart Failure floor, but, believe me… we all need heart transplants.
+ + +
Click: Prayer

9-23-19

My friend Gail Torman recently noted that the “She Built New York” project has denied an honorary statue to Mother Cabrini. Saint and Sister Francesca Xavier Cabrini was America’s first ordained saint, summoned by the Pope to help the flood of Italian immigrants pouring into America in 1889.

“While in New York City, she opened 67 social service agencies as well as orphanages, missionaries, day schools, classes in religious education, a nursery, a hospital, and much more across the city,” Gail quotes the National Italian American Foundation. Many parks and monuments and hospitals and projects in New York bear Mother Cabrini’s name yet today.

The stated mission of the “She Built NYC Project” is to create more statues of women to be installed around the city. A public vote was held to select the top female candidates to have honorary statues. Mother Cabrini obtained the most votes with 219 votes, winning by a two-to-one margin and clearly defining her as the winner; the runner-up polled 93 votes, the Foundation notes. The wife of Mayor Bill diBlasio, Chirlane McCray, leads the project. After the poll was taken, McCray formed a panel to review the results and make its own recommendations on the seven winners to be memorialized. Exit Mother Cabrini.

The project is funded by about $5-million in taxpayer money. So – my opinion, putting words in no other mouths – this is a taxpayer-robbing scam to pander to minorities, feminists, and sexual deviants (LGBT “crusaders” popped up on the winner list).

More clearly, this is the latest example of our culture’s war on Christians and white people. Confirmation that, sadly, America is a post-Christian society.

In this New York City situation, we can feel sure that if Mother Cabrini were, say, Haitian instead of Italian, she would lead the pack. Or if she had been a very public atheist. The same might attend the situation of Mother Teresa, with whom many comparisons might be drawn – a European whose mission field was Calcutta. She has entered the language as the embodiment of charity… but contemporary liberals have been ambiguous and uneasy about her since she scolded Clinton and Gore to their faces in Washington about the sin of abortion.

Way beyond the politicization of charity, and racializing public service, is the new definition of Doing Good. Charity (whose roots as a word are shared with “love”) once was regarded as the impulse that moves us to care for those around us. Now, charity is what the government does; no one else need apply… nor ask questions.

“Charity” is a box to check on tax forms. Charity is performed by the government, and enforced by the Compassion Police. Political Correctness precedes acts of charity. To qualify you must be of the proper group; to administer you must not be of proscribed groups.

As St Augustine pointed out, recognizing that “the poor ye shall always have with you” is not a warning of futility, but rather God’s reminder that He wants us to develop, and exercise, a spirit of compassion, of charity, of love, at all times. No pre-conditions.

And about the poor – and sick and persecuted – whom we serve, I have been impressed by something while praying over these things.

A message to those brothers and sisters too: Some people are imprisoned behind bars; some feel bound by virtual chains. Some people are resigned to being poor forever. Some people feel doomed by illnesses, prejudice, abuse, and other circumstances.

The truth is that these factors might keep you in certain situations, for a time.

But a greater truth is that nothing can keep Jesus out.

This should be an encouragement to the oppressed and needy… also to those among us who are spurred to exercise charity… and should be a rebuke to those dictatorial bureaucrats and thought-police whose obsessions are applying, and removing, definitions of our compassion.

As Christians, we will keep our own consciences, thank you. And by the way, the sick and poor among us, as they are served, will be statues enough, in their own way.

+ + +

Click: He Reached Down

May 20, 2019

I have returned from a writer’s conference, one of several I attend each year. Writers, like artists and poets and few others, are obliged to be hermits. We wear our hearts and lives and fears and joys on our sleeves; but require solitude to work. It seems an odd thing for fragile creative spirits ultimately to toss their precious babies, so to speak, for the world to seize upon… maybe criticize… or, maybe worst, reject. Or ignore.

Yet we do it because we must. I think (without being presumptuous) that the closest we can get to understanding the essence of God is to create. In a sense, as we are to be spiritual “imitators of Christ,” we can savor the Creator by being creative too. Besides, it is His fault since He put the creative spark in us! Seriously, if He has gifted some with creative gifts as He apportions other gifts to other people as He wills, writers, artists, poets, performers, and other creative people have special responsibilities to touch the world… and translate the myriad aspects of God to others.

I will reaffirm some of the thoughts I had last year at another conference. The recent confab was the wonderful Write His Answer conference annually organized by Marlene Bagnull in Estes Park, Colorado. I was one of several speakers, conducting a couple of classes, and meeting a lot of great new friends. I also was reacquainted with some old friends.

It was attended by a couple hundred people, a majority of whom are aspiring writers, and many who had published a book or books or some blogs, still looking for tips to advance further.

When you want to write, you write. In fact, you need to write. And write. And read and write. It’s what you do because you are God-wired that way. I often heard people before and after classes, in the auditorium and lunchroom, in hallways: “Did you read what I wrote since last year?” or “Have you read my book?”

Never boasting, these questions were asked by people from nervousness or justifiable pride, and every writer’s sub-textual intention – hoping that people notice and understand your message; touched, maybe changed, by what you have to say, how you write His answer.

It always strikes me that the frequent question – “Have you read my book?” – might indeed have been the de facto theme. “Up above our heads”; all around us; and a part of everything we did, everything to which we dedicate our careers. But in a very real sense, God Himself also asks, “Have you read My Book?”

He asks that every day.

He asks us, not to read the Bible every moment of every day, but some time during every day, as many of us do. A passage, a chapter, a book, a verse. It is not an unreasonable request – but a request is inherent in the question – as God’s admonitions never are unreasonable.

The Bible is what we know of God. Yes, there is nature – I know well enough from our mountaintop experiences in Colorado. Agnostics who pose, and Christians who are lazy, can say that they can know God from communing with nature.

Wrong. That is one of the ways we can see God, even feel Him. But to know Him, we must read His book.

He meant it to be so. We have the Ten Commandments… written. We have Jesus’s teachings… recorded and written and published. I recommend visiting the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. I saw its substantial portions when it was on tour (in Colorado a few years ago!), and a lesson for believers and skeptics alike is that, for the hundreds and hundreds of texts from different countries, different scribes, different languages, different centuries, the texts of the Holy Scriptures vary hardly at all. The Holy Spirit “dictated” to the hearts of many writers, and oversaw the consistency of God’s Words.

Words.

Jesus communicated God’s love for us. And words, books, scripture, communicate Jesus to us.

The Bible says we are to “hide the Word in our hearts.” How better than through study of those words? They are precious. I shared with an attendee at the conference that, even when I read a Bible passage for maybe the hundredth time, some new revelation dawns on my heart. One speaker this year, Ava Pennington, delivered a powerful message that made we weep. She used phrases, and cited truisms, that I have heard all my life. But when we write or speak, and organize thoughts, the old can become new; and the new become newer. The wonder of words.

How much Bible reading is proper? Have things turned irrelevant? The Bible’s first history lesson reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Are some passages obsolete? II Timothy 3:16 tells us, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” A beloved old hymn states, “I love to tell the Story… ‘twill be my theme in Glory.”

Have you read His book lately?

+ + +

Stephen Hill (1956-2012) was a Baptist preacher and session singer before he launched his own gospel-music career. This is a song he sang when he and Woody Wright were invited to perform in the Netherlands. A moving song; you will be impacted in spite of the overlapping Dutch and Norwegian subtitles (he was very popular in Europe). Words!

Click: Will He Look At Me and Say ‘Well Done’?

This world seems to be getting smaller, at least places we know about. Right in our living rooms, we see problems in Syria, troubles in Europe, summits in Vietnam. Yet for some of us, the most difficult travel is between our homes and the church. 

In the actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.

Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength, which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.

There are enough holidays for most of us that can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday-making. Sundays differ from other holidays, among other ways, in the fact that there are 52 of them every year.

On Sunday, go to church.

Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he strays from church, he does not spend his time in good works or lofty meditation. He looks over the colored supplement of the newspaper.

He may not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate, he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing, humdrum, and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.

He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. 

And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss.

He will probably take part in singing some good hymns.

He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good quiet neighbors. He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard churchgoing as rather a soft performance.

I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.

The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1917

• + +
  Click: Just Suppose
  

1-7-19

The last words Theodore Roosevelt spoke, before going to sleep on January 6, 1919, a century ago, were to his valet: “James, put out the light.” The next day, Vice President Thomas Marshall said, “Death had to take Theodore Roosevelt in his sleep. If he had been awake, there would have been a fight.”

Famous, as suggested there, for boundless energy, but also for boundless enthusiasm, interests, and accomplishments, TR was an author of dozens of books, a legislator, cowboy and rancher, police commissioner, cabinet officer, soldier, governor, vice president, hunter and explorer, conservationist and naturalist. Loving husband and father of six children, he earned the Medal of Honor on the battlefield, and the Nobel Peace Prize.

Oh, yes, and President of the United States. For all of his success in that position, he might be the only president for whom the presidency is not the greatest item on his resume. The most interesting American.

An important aspect of TR that curiously has been neglected by history is his fervent Christian faith. In some ways, he might be seen as the most Christian and the most religious, at least the most observant, of all the presidents.

A list evaluating presidents by this rubric would be subjective at best, and a difficult one to compute and compile. Putting TR’s name at the top might surprise some people, yet that surprise itself might bear witness to the nature of his faith. It was privately held, but it permeated countless speeches, writings, and acts. His favorite Bible verse was Micah 6:8, “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Theodore Roosevelt was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. He participated in missions work around New York City with his father, whether the charity was church-related or “personal,” public or private—it was all God’s work. TR taught weekly Sunday school classes during his four years at Harvard. Throughout his life he wrote for Christian publications. During the White House years, Edith, a strong Episcopalian, invariably attended her denomination’s church across Lafayette Park, the “Church of Presidents.” The president himself usually walked a little farther to worship at a humble German Reformed church, the closest he could find to the faith of his fathers.

Roosevelt called his 1912 bare-the-soul campaign speech announcing his political principles “A Confession of Faith.” Later he closed perhaps the most important speech of his life, the clarion-call acceptance of the Progressive Party nomination, with the words: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” That convention featured evangelical songs and closed with the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

He titled one his books Foes of Our Own Household (after Matthew 10:36) and another Fear God and Take Your Own Part. He once wrote an article for The Ladies’ Home Journal, “Nine Reasons Why Men Should Go To Church.” After TR left the White House, he was offered university presidencies and many other prominent jobs. He chose instead to become contributing Contributing Editor of The Outlook, a small Christian weekly news magazine—tantamount to an extremely popular ex-president today (if we had one) choosing to edit WORLD Magazine. He accepted a salary approximately one-eighth of salaries offered by magazines like Collier’s that hoped to snag TR’s services. His first essay for the magazine, telling the public why he chose to associate himself with the journal cited The Outlook’s “paying heed to the dictates of a stern morality,” and its “inflexible adherence to the elementary virtues of entire truth, entire courage, entire honesty.” No fake news permitted in his space,

Roosevelt was invited to deliver the Earl Lectures at Pacific Theological Seminary in 1911, but declined due to a heavy schedule. Knowing, however, that he would be near Berkeley on a speaking tour, he offered to deliver the lectures if he might be permitted to speak extemporaneously, not having time to prepare written texts of the five lectures, as was the custom. It was agreed, and TR spoke for 90 minutes each evening—from the heart and without notes—on the Christian’s role in modern society.

TR was not perfect, but he knew the One who is. Fond of saying that he would “speak softly and carry a big stick,” it truly can be said also that Theodore Roosevelt hid the Word in his heart and acted boldly. He was a great American because he was a thoroughgoing good man; and he was a good man because he was a humble believer. In a hundred years we have not seen his like again.

Thoughts of Rick Marschall, Roosevelt scholar, author of 74 books; member, Advisory Board, Theodore Roosevelt Association.

+ + +

Click: Rick Marschall at Truman Library Institute, Kansas City Public Library

Millions of servicemen in World War I were sent abroad with New Testaments with a spiritual message from Theodore Roosevelt

Can a Christian serve in politics?

8-13-18

Years ago our family worshiped at a neighborhood church in Connecticut. By “neighborhood” I don’t imply small; it was where a lot of our friends spent their Sunday mornings… and Wednesday nights, and Saturday mornings for Bible studies, and many weekend evenings for fellowship and book review groups. A thriving church.

The pastor had been converted to a fervent Christianity in his youth by Billy Graham; and, ironically, when he “graduated” from the church he joined the staff of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in North Carolina. He was a wonder pastor; more, a great teacher.

One of the adult Sunday School classes was in his office. Changing topics and lessons, but my wife and I were in the sessions about some of the Pauline letters – the Epistles of Paul on his fascinating and varied missionary journeys.

My wife and I had recently, in a different church and under different teaching, become Pentecostals, believing in – accepting – the Gifts of the Spirit as described in the Book of Acts; listed in I Corinthians 13; and elsewhere in the New Testament. We had traveled to crusades held by Jimmy Swaggart, the great R W Schambach, Kenneth Copeland, and others; and some couples in this new fellowship had, with us; and were intrigued by ministries of tongues, healing, wisdom, prophecy, and such.

There are 12 such “Gifts of the Spirit” listed carefully in the first letter to the church at Corinth. Now, this new church of which I speak, was not a Pentecostal church; it was Evangelical Free. And the good pastor was not Pentecostal, evidenced by his answer to the question posed by one of the couples, “What do you think of the 12 Gifts of the Spirit?”

He answered, “Well, they are in the Bible, yes; but I have a problem with several of them.” Wise-guy Rick immediately asked, “Howe many of the 10 Commandments do you have a problem with?”

My timing might have been that of a wise guy, but my point was, and is, serious. I know (believe me; from hundreds of discussions and debates) I know the arguments of the anti-Pentecostals – that the Gifts of the Spirit were specific “ministry gifts” for the First-Century Church; that such miracles were withdrawn by the Giver of the Gifts after the Apostolic Age, after the Apostles were all martyred. And so forth. Of course the Gospels say no such thing; the Books of Acts recorded miracle-gifts throughout; there is no hint of expiration-dates in the Epistles of Paul and other writers; no warnings in the Book of Revelation. In fact John wrote there of the End of Times, not the End of Gifts.

Beyond my spiritual snarkiness just concluded, I do not, here, want to litigate the question that will be solved to our satisfaction when we arrive in Glory.

But I do want us all to consider the manner of Christian religiosity that my tale represents. All of us, me too, and conservative and liberal Christians; Catholics and Protestants; evangelical and Pentecostal and fundamentalist and “seeker” and post-modern and Orthodox; in other words, all human beings… practice at the altar of a Pick-and-Choose belief system.

In a way, of course, that is another way to describe hypocrisy; but few of us intend to be hypocrites, especially in matters of core beliefs. These days, it is explained away as “relativism” in many places, in the way (it seems to me) that skin cancer could be called an itch. Now, I recognize that this dilemma is not restricted to religious beliefs, but political affiliations or even patriotic fervor do not have rules that are strict.

“Strict”? Yes. We – in the 21st-century West – scarcely regard our spiritual affiliations as requiring strict adherence. As recently as a century ago, this would have been regarded as anathema by most of those spiritual affiliations – denominations.

My daughter, a youth pastor, has been hired by churches where she was not required to know denominations’ doctrines, yet was obliged to teach children. Not Luther’s Catechism in a Lutheran church, not Calvin’s Institutes in a Presbyterian. Sort of like joining the Boy Scouts without having to be a boy… oh, wait.

To take to its logical extension, what is the point of systematic theology? God gave humankind the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions. Jesus taught; He did not propose debates. When He healed and forgave, He said “Go thou and sin no more,” not “Hey, whatever; go for it.” When talked about the necessity to be Born Again, He did not say, “No one gets to Father except through Me… and Buddha and Tuesday Meditation classes and Oprah.”

The culture seduces us; and the double-edged swords of modernism and intellectual vanity, and secularist education. And the mistaken trust that everything in life is either settled democratically… or according to whatever the heck feels right to us.

Think of every challenge that might confront you, or disaster that might threaten you. You might pick a certain reaction, or choose a way to respond… but the serious things in life are not defined – cannot be defined – by a pick-and-choose acceptance or rejection. Life is real; life is earnest, as Longfellow tellingly wrote.

And nothing is more real than the disposition of your soul for eternity, and your respect for the word of God.

+ + +

For Nancy

Click: The Church’s One Foundation

8-6-18

There is a story – probably apocryphal, but most good stories are – about W C Fields, the great comedian. In his last days, the man whose comic trademarks were finding humor in drunken turns and misanthropy, was dying of alcoholism and in solitary loneliness.

He was to die on Christmas Day 1946, and shortly before then one of his friends, I believe Gene Fowler, visited Fields in a sanitarium. He was surprised to see him, alone in the corner of a room by the window, leafing through a Bible.

“Bill! This is a first! I’ve never seen you with a Bible! What are you doing?”

Fields looked up and said, “Looking for loopholes.”

+ + +

Gather together, gather yourselves together, you shameful nation, before the decree takes effect and that day passes like windblown chaff, before the Lord’s fierce anger comes upon you, before the day of the Lord’s wrath comes upon you. Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land, you who do what he commands. Seek righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the Lord’s anger” (Zephaniah 2: 1-3).

Whether a nation or an individual has strayed from the Truth, the results will be the same. In our culture, with our traditions, ignorance of God’s commandments and the teachings of Jesus is no plausible excuse. And willful defiance of God will bring the greater wrath.

Not swifter wrath. God is sovereign, and at times in His-story He has stayed the “terrible swift sword,” and many of us believe that judgment in this land of sinfulness and a culture of death, that we continue along at His sufferance.

The Apostle Paul said, in his time of persecution, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” Why do so many among us act like we are ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ – even as doing so invites more and more persecution? We often are seduced by enticing lies.

Like a belief that if we all withdraw to our tight circles, we can create the Remnant and be insulated from God’s wrath;

Like a belief that if our fellowships, or denominations, send enough missionaries abroad, or feed enough hungry people, that we counterbalance the sin all around us;

Like a belief that compromising with error will draw sinners to salvation;

Lake a belief that being ashamed of the gospel – when we know the Truth but we do not allow the Truth to set us free – is, for the first time in history, pleasing to God.

Be not deceived: God is not mocked. God is not bribed. God is not fooled. There ARE no loopholes.

+ + +

We cannot suppose that God will change His mind about His solemn promises, or His warnings. In fact, He cannot change His nature – although the Post-Christian church acts like it hopes He will.

God, the God of Peace, the heavenly Father, who sent Jesus to be our substitute for sin-punishment… is still a God of Wrath? Didn’t that end with the Old Testament?

The essential nature of God is Holiness. It is impossible for Him to countenance evil, to allow sin to stain the Heavenlies. Like camels passing through the eyes of needles, better that we work to repent; have our families and churches repent; have our neighborhoods and nation repent; and have our leaders and culture repent.

And in the words of Zephaniah’s prophecy, we cannot assume, but we may pray that – after repentance, not instead of repentance – perhaps we “will be sheltered on the day of the Lord’s anger.” May that be our fate, not because of loopholes, but by repentance, forgiveness, and mercy – God’s Grace.

+ + +

Click: Sheltered In the Arms of God

7-16-18

That we live in an upside-world ought to surprise nobody who has even a cursory relationship with history and tradition. Our age is often called “modern times,” but according to philosophers and cultural anthropologists, the Modern Age ended after the Renaissance; after the Enlightenment came Postmodernism, in which many people we currently are mired… but we are past, or below, that. Clearly this is a post-Christian Age; but is has also been described as Post-Post-Modern (yes), Nihilistic, and so forth.

I raise these definitions not because there will be a quiz in in-boxes tomorrow. We are better off if we understand where we are in the sweep of time, to what twigs and leaves we cling as we helplessly ride the rapids of time.

Why? Perhaps we can discern the evidences of madness that beset us; perhaps the better to resist. In my biography of Johann Sebastian Bach a major goal of mine was to pain the absolute centrality of faith in that composer’s life. It is almost impossible to understand the genius of Bach, and his music, without understanding the role of faith in his life.

His jobs were not merely at churches where he wrote to order. He was as learned as professors of religion; he had a large library of Christian books; he taught Catechism; two-thirds of his approximate 1800 compositions were church music; and his secular music was virtually always dedicated to God.

It is how life was in Germany of the 1700s. And his fellow Protestants took their cues from Martin Luther and other Reformers of the 1500s. Remember, Luther rejected the term Modern, and declared Reason to be the enemy of Faith.

The son of friends recently returned from a bicycle semester in Europe, 11 countries. We had an evening enjoying his photos, including the great town square in Prague, where there is a statue of the great Reformer Jan Hus, bound to the stake before his immolation as a martyr for the faith… a hundred years before Luther. (From my visit, years ago, I assumed that it was the spot where he was put to death for his faith, but that was in Konstanz; the great Bohemian was commemorated in his home city.)

In those days people died for their faith. Today, they still do… mostly in what we call the Far East and in the Middle East and south of the Equator. Not so much in Europe and America. Here we largely, at best, endure annoyance for our faith; or complain to each other.

Some, like the Masterpiece Cakeshop decorator, are not asked to die for their faith, but probably would. At moment people like Jack Phillips sustain abuse, vandalism, and sacrifices to their businesses and home lives. The most our culture forces, at this moment in time.

I bring up Bach’s livelihood and terms like the Dark Ages because, as noted, it can be a healthy thing to realize how different we are than those of earlier generations. In the days of Bach, Luther before him, and especially back to the Dark Ages, churches were at centers of every community.

The center? Yes, for prolonged worship, several days a week; for municipal events of all sorts requiring space; for schooling and civil ceremonies. And many churches, especially cathedrals, took decades and even centuries to build – and every citizen took on duties. Often when a day’s work was done in fields or shops, people ate and hurried to put in long hours – willingly – for carpentry work, masonry, sculpting, stained glass arts, and so forth.

It is what they did. And desired to do.

And in ages where illiteracy was common, the churches also “spoke” the Revealed Word of God – every color of vestment or altarpieces, every carved lectern, every sign and symbol in elaborate tapestries and stained-glass windows… MEANT something, telling the Gospel story, representing Biblical truths, reminding worshipers of the lives of saints and martyrs.

In other words, as Henry Adams noted in his great book Mont St-Michel et Chartres, the “Dark Ages” where not so dark at all. One of the only times in human history – certainly the last time in Western Civilization – when an entire culture was of one mind in matters of heart and head; when societies were unified in belief and purpose.

I was reminded of this when I came across a video of singers and musicians gathering to rehearse a performance of Vivaldi’s great Gloria, in Venice, in a cathedral, at night, dedicated in a haunting performance. Chilling, and a little taste of people gathered just more than 300 years ago at the School for Wayward Girls, where Vivaldi was Music Teacher and Priest. The profound liturgical words likely date from the Fifth Century.

Appropriate association: it was in 400s that Christianity largely had been swept off the European continent. At outposts like Hippo in northern Africa, Augustine kept the scriptures alive; and in far-off Ireland Saints Columba and Patrick kept Western Civilization, and scholasticism, alive, in shrouded monasteries. Slowly, Patrick made missionary journeys to Germanic lands, converting the Vandals who previously had chased and slaughtered Christians, from Rome and elsewhere.

Look, if you can, at this video of performers gathering in Vivaldi’s place to perform Vivaldi’s sacred music. You will get a taste of times when spare times of people were devoted to serving, and praising, God.

And note the great sacred environment, also a symbol of forgotten times. Today, in this Post-Christian Era, we have tunred many churches into museum, empty of spirituality. And we have turned museums in today’s equivalence of sacred places – venerating the art of music of earlier Christians into exhibitions and concerts.

An upside-down world.

+ + +

Click: Gloria

6-18-18

Thinking back on family scenes on Father’s Day, I was reminded of my parents’ story about days of my childhood, when I was too young to have remembered myself. Among the first words I spoke (that is, “words” and “spoke,” with qualifications) was “Hobbo-loody.” It seems I uttered the phrase often and emphatically, and to much consternation. How could mom and dad show off my skills to visitors (I was the first-born) if the sound was gibberish?

Howdy Doody? “A baloney,” as in sandwich? They finally solved the mystery as I jumped for joy when my father exclaimed, in another context, “Absolutely!” It was his frequent, if hyperbolic, word of agreement, or affirmation. “Yes” would not do; “I agree” apparently was too weak – “Ab-so-LUTE-ly!” he boomed. My immature fealty was “Hobbo-LOOdy!”

People do that today, saying “Absolutely!” even substituting the word for “you’re welcome!” when they are thanked.

Hyperbole and exaggeration in our time betray a conversational laziness, because we can remain detached but switch in some camouflaged emotional investment. Many times I hear toddlers in shops and malls say “Oh my God!” Besides the blasphemy, it is ridiculous to think that young children can so regard, say, a soiled gumdrop on the floor. My late mother-in-law dropped the phrase at the slightest turns until one day I asked her what she was saving for a presidential assassination or world war.

An additional feature of the word “Absolutely,” beyond its frequently needless employment, is what it really means. Absolute things are the “max,” unable to be topped, extended, or multiplied. On the other hand, something that is “absolute” cannot be diminished and remain absolute. Nothing can be LESS absolute, or modified, or qualified – because then it is out of the realm of the absolute.

In today’s spiritual world – that is, reality; not passing fads and trends in society – the word “Absolute” needs to be re-asserted. This is not a mere word-game.

God’s Word contains ABSOLUTE truth; in fact it IS Absolute Truth.

His promises are ABSOLUTELY true and trustworthy. Not “mostly”; absolutely.

When Jesus spoke, He had the authority of ABSOLUTE Truth, not – as relativists and liberal Christianity and Post-Modernists and Emergent church leaders say – “relative truth.” Or “relational truth.” Truth is truth: it is inherently Absolute. Any adjective other than ABSOLUTE unplugs the essence of what Truth is. (In lexicography, “Absolute” here is emphatic, not qualifying. Lesson over!)

This world, as it always has been but seems more so then ever before, is relativistic. “What’s right for me is right.” “Believe what you want, if it doesn’t hurt anybody.” “What’s true for you is not true for me.” “There is no right or wrong” – which sums up all the equivocations.

In the 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre presciently maintained (with approval) that in the coming age, “authenticity” would be all that mattered. This is a cruel philosophical version of the advertising industry’s saying, “Sincerity! Once you fake that, you’ve got it made!”

Around the same time, Dr Will Herberg beheld the vaunted “New Morality,” and seeing no trace of respect for Absolute Truth, said it should rather be called, “No Morality.”

When there are no Objective Standards in peoples’ lives – that it, no respect for absolute truths in their core beliefs – there are no standards at all. Humans are wired to worship SOME thing, and when we neither recognize nor seek Absolute Truths, or standards greater than ourselves… we fall back, virtually, on worshiping ourselves.

Not a recipe for spiritual health or societal wellness. As the world slid toward more self-worship and less God-awareness, in the 20th century… well, we cured polio and put footprints on the moon, but slaughtered more people than in all previous centuries combined.

“You shall be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. You shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deut 5:32,33a). Oh, the world will ask about other Old Testament verses that seem cruel or obsolete… we will be challenged about rules that seem not to apply to post-industrial societies… and so forth.

The Bible confirms itself, almost endlessly, and those who confront us with seeming contradictions (there are none) or ancient cultural contexts (there are some), would better spend their time absorbing truths than straining to find loopholes. From mighty saints of God to, say, humble cake decorators (possibly also mighty saints of God) who regard the Truths of the Almighty as Absolute – not in ancient times or distant places, but right where they are – are all good and faithful servants.

Sorry, Dad – and others who use words like “Absolutely” a little too freely. You gilded the lily. When paired with the word “Truth,” we must obey.

Absolutely.

+ + +

Click: There Is a Balm in Gilead

5-28-18

Memorial Day. It is easy to get caught up, these days – or lost – in the homogeneity of patriotic holidays. Fourth of July? Veterans Day? Memorial Day? The culprits, if we forget the specific origins, are the general diminution of patriotism in America, and also the side-effect, the lack of teaching and remembrance. A disregard, frankly, of the importance of who we are as people… how we got here… and who paid the costs.

The Fourth of July, of course, commemorates our independence, and the spirit behind that independence. Veterans Day generally honors the veterans amongst us. Memorial Day, once “Decoration Day,” honors not so much the veterans who live, but those who died.

I wish we had few such holidays. Not because I want to wish away wars, and certainly not against the spirit of sacrifice. But just as “President’s Day” cheapens the immense honor due to Lincoln and Washington and few others, when officer-holders high and low are commemorated, so would more holidays. Especially when our contemporary age creates or re-fashions national holidays around weekends and possible commercial sales opportunities.

On Memorial Day, “we call to mind the deaths of those who died that the nation
might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution, should not crumble into meaningless ruins,” said Theodore Roosevelt in a Memorial Day address.

Speaking personally, I have opposed many of our wars, especially in my lifetime. I am a man of the Right, in Whittaker Chambers’ phrase, ready to die for the red, white and blue, but not always for the flags of strangers. I revere the American Republic; not necessarily the American Empire. But what I think is statistically irrelevant, and irrelevant in my slight role as an essayist with some followers.

My own ambiguity about foreign policies and priorities that result in shed American blood is put aside – cast aside – on these Memorial days.

I pray that we all share admiration and respect and honor for those Americans, especially in these days where the military draft no longer exists; those who did what they did for the heritage of our past, the reality of our present, for the hope of the future.

What were these men and women made of? They volunteered; they sacrificed; they died. They suffered nightmarish injuries. When able, many of them re-enlisted.

No matter what progressives, especially those of an earlier generation, say, our servicemen and servicewomen did not wear uniforms and train with weapons because they hated.

They loved.

They loved their comrades. They loved their flag. They loved their missions – the people whose situations they liberated, the people they rescued. They loved their families back home, believing that the sacrifices ultimately were worth it. They loved their homes and streets and towns; their way of life.

Even the least-schooled understood the inchoate but essential virtues behind the tattered flag – that America has stood for something. They fought, and were willing to die, for something greater than a village, or bunker that must be cleared. They were conscious of being children of a great tradition (even if they were recent immigrants in uniform)… and were conscious of being fathers and mothers of that continuing tradition.

I put aside the controversies surrounding our wars and rumors of wars. On this Day especially I stand, and salute, and visit graves at random, of men and women who did the unimaginable courageous things, often in dutiful and routine ways.

Because of who they were. Because of what America is. Or was, God help us.

We salute you.

+ + +

Click: Thank You

5-14-18

I never have had the privilege of being a mother. As closely bound as I was to fathering, being present at the births of our children, then nurturing and rearing them; fatherhood in all senses… I am aware it all is a far-distant second. The special relationship of mother and child – among all species – is a unique and precious blessing.

A birthright, in fact.

For all the good feelings engendered by Mother’s Day, I reserve a portion of contempt for those creatures who denigrate the institution of Motherhood. Not loutish men alone, but women themselves who, ultimately, are self-loathing. Those who deny the privilege – to others, not only for themselves – of sanctifying the foundation of the family; for hating what we love; for hating what is love.

I reserve a portion of pity, too. I must. What I often call in this space the Culture of Death extends beyond the trashing of motherhood and women’s traditional roles. Biologically, homosexuals cannot naturally procreate (pro-create). Abortion fanatics crusade for death – disguising their “advocacy” as concern for “convenience” for the mothers; as birth-control-after-the-fact. And so on. They are to be pitied, and prayed for.

In the meantime, my Mother’s Day is filled with memories of the Mom I knew. I loved her, and love her. She was an example whose nurture appears stronger through the years: seeds, planted, and growing in my life. A servant’s heart, making silent and willing sacrifices. Was she perfect? Smoking and drinking were regrettable but did not affect her salvation. Big deal. My sisters and I prayed for Jesus to turn the wine back into water.

Of vital importance is that she knew Jesus, was active in churches, and related almost every question I ever had to the gospel.

A preacher in aprons. A saint in curlers. An invariable forgiver.

And that example was no less special because it is the frequent role of mothers – not stereotyped, not clichéd, not pressed upon her as a dirty, leftover job – the role of imparting life lessons, of teaching values; sharing love.

Fathers can do such things before mothers do, with their children. Life’s circumstances dictate such things, and some fathers might be the more tender of a set of parents – but we all know that in the vast majority of cases in the Human Family, it is the mother who holds, hugs, shares tears, teaches, and smiles, a little more than the father, or at least a little earlier. And we children remember.

Fathers discipline; mothers forgive. Fathers prod the way forward; mothers welcome us home. Fathers mold us; mothers know us.

I believe God created Woman not only as a helpmeet to Adam, but as an Assistant to Himself. As Mothers, to show unconditional love; to bond in unique ways with their children; to bear the essence of comfort, understanding, acceptance.

Think back to the first song you learned, maybe a lullaby. The first prayers you heard, or memorized. The first gentle nursery rhyme or fairy tale. Chances are that was your mother’s voice, mother’s smiles, mother’s tears. And if not… probably Grandmother’s. This is our DNA, emotions as strong as genetics.

I admired my Dad, oh yes; I still finish every project wondering if he would approve; to be a good professional. But Mom? If I can be as good a man as she was a mother, I will die grateful and content.

There are some women who, by circumstance or infirmity, sadly cannot become mothers. Most women whom I have met from those groups have hearts even more tender for families and for children.

However, sorry to tell all of you radical harridans who hate, you have disinvited yourselves from family reunions – not at ballparks on summer afternoons, or Grandma’s house on Winter evenings – but from that mystical, privileged, and sacred Family that truly is a gift of God.

+ + +

Does this essay seem to dwell on old-fashioned things? I plead guilty! There are too many old fashions that we are losing. Here is one: a tender lullaby, a mother’s song, written by Stephen Foster 150 years ago. Recently we shared another tender song by this great American poet and composer. This, sung by Alison Kraus, is equally impressive. And some crazed radicals are tearing down his statue in the town of his birth…

Click: Slumber, My Darling

5-7-18

I don’t care so much about ages of rocks. What’s more important to me is the Rock of Ages.

So said William Jennings Bryan (or perhaps it was Matthew Harrison Brady) in a famous confrontation over points of the Creation / Evolution debate. The Rock of Ages, familiar in the eponymous old hymn of 250 years ago, refers both to the smitten rock of Moses and the broken body of Jesus, both “cleft” for us and our protection.

Turning around the phrase “age of rocks” is another double-meaning, suggesting the pursuit of scientific, even beneficial, discoveries should not blind us to life’s priorities.

Evolution is not our agenda here, no matter how it would turn out. Priorities are.

Godly people, Christians, the spiritually inclined, usually live out their faith by service. Service and sacrifice; good works; dedication; charity and charitable work; missions work; good deeds. I can personally attest that after a conversion experience – in fact, usually especially after a born-again or life-changing transformation – we are filled with zeal.

We want to know God. We hunger and thirst for the Word. We pray, sometimes as the Bible says, virtually “without ceasing.” And, as night follows day, we want to serve Him. How many of the faithful for 2000 years have done everything from be dedicated to personal piety, profoundly, to abandon lifestyles and become missionaries or serve the sick or poor… or join holy orders, preaching and teaching, sometimes taking vows of silence or poverty… or, like holy sponges, study, study, study, the scriptures.

Since I asked “how many,” I will answer truthfully: we cannot know. There have been uncountable such believers, transformed by the power of the Holy Ghost. Thank God for them, recruits and foot-soldiers in the army of the Lord.

I do not suggest these people – most of whom, frankly, I regard with jealousy – are misguided. Not at all, but as I have yielded to these impulses through the years, responding in myriad ways, I can also identify with what sounds at first like “knowing God and making Him known,” a motto of many churches. Not bad, I want to suggest… but not the best response.

I must quickly explain my distinction! Citing the recognition of the “Rock of Ages” as being our refuge; and remembering that Abraham Lincoln said in response to wartime prayers, “We should not be so concerned that God is on our side, but that we are on His side,” I believe we get warmer about proper priorities.

Knowing God… desiring that we feel good about Jesus… and urging others to want to know and feel better about God… must not be our top priority. Those are good impulses, but not entirely His. Wanting to feel better about God might be a cloud-parting revelation to some people. And… inspires us, certainly, to do good deeds.

Yes, there are “fruits” of our changed lives. But pleasing God – feeling better about Him – should not take precedence over the corollary. That is, the impulses of our Holy Spirit indwelling can be parallel, not either / or.

My point is that when we know Jesus, it is not as important that we feel good about God. It is more important – essential, really – that GOD feels good about US.

In the end (literally, the End Times) he will not look so much at our deeds. Yes, we are told He may declare, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And we do tasks and works: after all, He has a calling on every believer’s life.

But a miracle-working God can do deeds independent of us; and does. He does not need us, really… except as His Plan is worked through us. And remember that the Bible reminds us to be humble – and remember priorities! – when we are told that our deeds, our “righteousness,” are like dirty rags in His sight. He is holy.

What impresses God, so to speak, is not our acts so much as our hearts. Jesus did not come in service of committees and ministries and campaigns.

He came for us.

Individuals. God sees our hearts… knows our hearts. THAT truth might make us tremble at times. But is no less truthful. God wants to feel good about our hearts and is not automatically blinded by “works.”

Listen: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Yes! The natural response of believers will be to serve, and that is 100 per cent proper. And we desire to know Him and please Him.

But never lose sight of God’s priority – that He cares more about knowing you than anything you can do or say. How about your heart? Is it right with God?

+ + +

Click: Search Me

3-19-18

In some ways, St Patrick is more of an American saint than an Irish saint. He was born in Britain and enslaved, while young, in Ireland. While tending flocks in the lonely hills, the unschooled boy sought God in his musings and humble prayers. Eventually he came to faith, followed God’s voice to dare returning to Britain. He did… he learned more of the Bible and Christian doctrine… returned to Ireland and mightily evangelized a special race of people, leading to their empowerment to great things, temporal and spiritual.

Why do I say he is, in a way, more of an American saint? Because in America, not Ireland, cities hold massive parades, dye entire rivers green, and festoon homes and schoolrooms, even those of Blacks and Jews, in green. I once was in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, and in the Temple Bar section of the city there were uncountable drunks in funny green hats, green vests, and “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons.

To a person, they were all American tourists. The Irish, north and south (and the Anglican Communion too) revere St Patrick in a more proper and reasonable manner. My son-in-law Norman McCorkell, of Derry, Northern Ireland, is our guest blogger this week. He is a BA (Hons) graduate of the Irish Bible Institute in Dublin, and is passionate about discipleship and mission. He serves on the teaching team of Foyle Vineyard Church in Derry; and visits the local prisons as a volunteer through Prison Fellowship Northern Ireland.

During the “Patrick celebrations” the more theologically minded among us will find it difficult not to marvel at the prolific missionary work in Ireland led by Saint Patrick. After returning to the land of his enslavement as a teenager from western Britain, some 400 years after Christ gave the command to go and make disciples, Patrick inaugurated a disciple-making movement in Ireland that would change civilization. His burden to see the pagan “barbarians” transformed through the Gospel stood in stark contrast to the church of the Roman Empire, which for many years constrained the Gospel to within its borders. A lack, frankly, of missionary zeal.

Patrick passionately embraced the best of Irish culture, redeeming it for the Gospel by firmly standing against elements that were incompatible – ending the slave trade; reducing tribal warfare and murder. His life was an example of a new and different kind of courage – one that lived fearlessly and peaceably through God’s promises in an atmosphere containing daily threats of those horrors: murder, betrayal, and enslavement.

Despite the violent, and even magical, opposition from locals (druids and chieftains), and criticism from church leaders (conventional bishops in Britain), Patrick used his lack of formal church training to work creatively within his context. Instead of employing church structures used by the civilized Roman Empire – based in cities, where bishops were supreme – Patrick formed an ecclesiastical model more like the Irish, who were rural and tribal. The inhabitants of Ireland had no settled towns, roads, currency, written law, government bureaucracy, or taxation. Society was decentralized, and organized around tribes led by local “kings.”

With Patrick’s influence, monasteries were established and developed as places of spiritual devotion and learning. Young men who had once given their lives to clan feuds were now transformed by the good news of Jesus Christ. Monasteries became “sending centers,” noted church scholar Steve Addison: “the Irish church took on the character of a missionary movement.” And thus Ireland became a glowing spiritual base for sending out monks into western and northern Europe to “be pilgrims for Christ.” This made Celtic monasticism “highly flexible, adaptable, and able to be transplanted – everything that the Roman Empire was not.”

“Sending Monasteries” grew rapidly throughout Ireland and Europe bringing with them unprecedented prosperity, art, and learning. These population centers on the continent would eventually develop and become cities.

Norman tells us several enormously significant things here:

Saint Patrick was a real saint, not a manufactured icon – a real man who overcame ignorance and slavery; sought God’s leading… and followed it.

His work, and his powerful, persuasive witness, transformed the social manners and repressive tendencies of countless tribes and warrior-kings in ancient Ireland. The Irish indeed saved Western civilization.

St Patrick overcame his challenges by love, and the Gospel of love. He was brave, all by God’s grace.

Four hundred years after Christ, it is notable that even when the mighty Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion, it kept it within its borders, as large as the Empire was. It was Patrick who first preached to alien and hostile tribes and barbarians… the first missionary since Saint Paul.

— These are lessons for today: what we can do, too, even by ourselves and against great odds, to bring the revolutionary message of Christ’s Good News to others.

I thank Norman for these words from “the ould sod” itself. My daughter worked for awhile for the St Patrick Foundation, which works to bring healing, knowledge, and reconciliation to the two Irelands.

For Patrick is not an American saint, no. But he was not a Catholic saint alone, nor Protestant nor Church of England nor Church of Ireland.

He was a saint for all, and is a Saint for today.

+ + +

A thousand-year-old Irish hymn, “Be Thou My Vision,” has an extra meaning, sung here by Ginny Owens, who is blind.

Click: Be Thou My Vision

1-15-18

Two good friends this week recounted some tough circumstances in their lives. Who among us does not have rough patches? The answer is None.

The difference between us, at these times, is how we react. My two friends each said that things are in God’s hands; that the Lord has a purpose. I pray that most people who say such things really have deep-seated trust and faith, as my friends do. But who among us does not occasionally fall back on such sayings as… sayings?

God forbid that we are not serious about discerning – and seeking – God’s will in hard times. And good times, too, no less!

I believe we have free will, and we all might believe that actions have consequences. Yet God orders our steps. A contradiction? Not at all. When we seek His will, God often answers in ways that are mysterious to us… and very often contrary to the shopping-list of demands that our prayers must sometimes look like to Him.

It is an essential element of faith, I think, that even if we let ourselves be virtual leaves on the stream of life, sometimes, God moves us, slows us, speeds us, and directs us – in spite of ourselves, sometimes, according to His will. If we love God, have faith, and accept the calling to His purposes.

Have you ever looked back on your life and realized how radically different things would be – family, profession, homes – if this, or that, had not happened?

I think of my dear daughter Emily, who lives in Northern Ireland now. When she was barely 10, missionaries visited our little church and told of their work in Central American villages. She was mightily affected, full of emotion, and dedicated her life, young Christian as she was, to work in the missions field, and serving Christ. Before, during, and after her college years, she joined missions trips to Mexico and Russia and Northern Ireland.

She had a heart for the hate-filled streets of Derry (scenes of the bloody “troubles” between Catholics and Protestants through the years) and returned there, for a longer stay. During that posting she made friends, fell in love with a guy from the local church, Norman. They married and attended Bible College together in Dublin, and have served in Ireland and Northern Ireland. And have “been fruitful and multiplied,” making this Papa proud of two grandchildren.

Ah! What if we, 25 years ago in Pennsylvania, had joined another church, or gone away the Sunday those missionaries visited? Would Emily have received that vision, found that passion? What if she had attended a different college here… or not made friends, when we lived in California, with our friend Paula who preceded her in that Northern Ireland missions program?

What if? What if?

Perhaps, when we think of these life-threads as we all can. God would have us wind up in the same places, but by different routes! More likely, it seems to me, we could be in different places doing different things. (I hate to think, as a father, that I would not have the children with whom God did bless me!)

This is not an essay, or ramblings, about the randomness of life: just the opposite!

As Christians we must rejoice in the fact that we are God’s; it is He who has made us and not we ourselves. We do not float through our allotted time willy-nilly, trying to remember to pray that we luck out in places we find ourselves. Rather we should earnestly pray to see God’s hand in our lives’ events… we must bathe every decision in prayer to seek His will (God promises never to leaves such prayers unanswered)… we must be patient to hear His voice and His leading… and we must pray for spiritual discernment to guard against crowding out His answers with our desires.

A current meme among Christians these days is, “It’s a God thing.” That phrase is used to explain “good” things, dismiss “bad” things, and is mantra for many occurrences in between. Some things ARE God things, yes. But a lot of things are also Satan-things; us-things; even dumb-things. We must learn to anticipate beforehand and discern afterwards.

Ecclesiastes 9:11 says that “Time and chance happeneth to all.” Let us not be fooled that God was explaining the randomness of life. Rather that we, His children, all have the same challenges; that we all are in the same boat. Or are the same leaves in the same stream of His care.

BUT. Just as important. God’s streams God’s streams have twists and turns and little spots where the water swirls unexpectedly. My way of saying that we need to be conscious of more than where we are taken, and what affects us. Just as often – in face, frequently – YOU might be the person, that random friend, a “missionary” telling a tale, even a stranger leaving an impression on someone. A daughter, a neighbor, a stranger, and perhaps the littlest word or action can wind up changing that person’s life.

Such things, indeed, happeneth to all.

+ + +

Please, please, listen to this moving song about this very subject. By Ray Boltz.

Click: Thank You For Giving To the Lord

1-8-18

Sometimes, when our minds wander, we think of inconsequential things that seem important for a moment, no more. This evening, for instance, I started wondering about souls in hell – When some other soul makes them angry, where do they tell them to go?

Frankly, beyond the fraction of a chuckle, that does suggest a serious matter. There is a hell, it is a place of everlasting damnation and torment. We are told there are eternal fires burning there – but I have had visions of a worse reality. A couple times when I have felt apart from God – when I have forsaken Him, not vice-versa – I have a sense that there is no worse feeling, or fate, than being separated from God. The prospect of that loneliness, apart-ness, solitude in Eternity, represents a coldness to me that seems worse then any flames.

Which is all a reminder that part of our jobs as Christians is to work to save people from hell. Is this the same as steering people toward Heaven? Actually, yes: there is no third way, no alternative destination.

Sharing Jesus and the Gospel – the good news, literally – is to have people confess with their mouths that Lord Jesus is the Son of God, and believe in their hearts that God raised Him from the dead. They will be saved, according the Romans 10: 9, 10. Thus forgiven and redeemed, souls are spared judgment unto hell.

The job, as I call it, of believers is relatively simple. Not unimportant – quite the opposite. Too many Christians make the Great Commission from Jesus to go and make disciples to be a complicated or onerous job by thinking everything is on their shoulders. They risk offending the Holy Spirit… whose job it is to “close the deal.”

We are only charged with planting the seeds. The Holy Spirit cultivates… and harvests.

In that way my wandering mind today recalled how the Bible is replete, in virtually every chapter, with symbols, “types,” meaningful numbers, minerals and woods and gems that have specific and consistent import. So has been religious art, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, poetic verse, Christian literature, and the lyrics of songs and hymns.

One reliable symbol of Christ in song and story is the lighthouse. A couple of favorite hymns or songs build on that symbolism – Ronny Hinson’s I Thank God for the Lighthouse; the Rend Collective’s My Lighthouse.

I want to share here that we miss a sweet truth if we seize that symbolism and take from it a lesson that we should be lighthouses that attract sinners, unsaved loved ones, the “lost.” In fact the imagery that reflects the Bible’s truth is that Jesus is the lighthouse – His beams are seen by those in peril; the piercing light attract those “at sea” in their troubled lives.

Our jobs, however, are different but vitally important. In the words of an old Dwight L Moody sermon that inspired hymn-verses by Philip P Bliss in 1871, “Let the lower lights be burning.” What are the lower lights? Once ships in dark and stormy seas know where the shore is, where safe harbors might be found… lighthouses have had lower lights that shine, not ‘way out over the dark waters and to distant horizons, but that illumine the rocks and shoals and harbors and docks.

God shines, Jesus calls, the Spirit guides… and then we, as the “lower lights,” welcome the lost. Provide safety. Care for the struggling seamen. Am I nit-picking about God’s commands and our role in discipleship? No. Understanding where God wants us, and what He would have us do in the Kingdom, is essential to understand.

It is interesting that despite the passage of time and the development of technology, lighthouses still are used! I spent every boyhood summer near the famous lighthouse at Barnegat Beach NJ; and my parents lived in the shadows of the Twin Lighthouses at Atlantic Highlands NJ. Now I live in Michigan, whose periphery is dotted with dozens of picturesque lighthouses.

Lighthouses, even those that double as maritime museums, often still operate. Lights – once flames, then incandescent, might now be halogen – but still send their beams across the waves. Seamen and shore men might use sonar and computers… but somehow, also, still rely on the time-tested beams of light. And the “lower lights” to guide ships to safety.

Let your lower lights keep burning. Hurting friend, weary pilgrim, struggling seaman… welcome home!

+ + +

Click: Let the Lower Lights Be Burning

12-11-17

Sometimes we plan for something, and when it happens it seems anticlimactic. When surprised by something special, however, we usually are more impressed. That happened to me in one of the great moments of my life – the cultural-me, anyway – when I first visited Venice.

I anticipated uncountable sites and sights. Indeed I was rewarded with the many canals; the obligatory, and necessary, gondola rides; San Marco Square and the basilica’s gleaming face; Giudecca, by legend the Jewish quarter on an island across from the city; the Murano glass works; and I even rented the famous Room With a View (which is nothing to write a postcard home about, either as a room or for its vistas).

Not on my bucket list or its Venetian equivalent was anything related to Antonio Vivaldi, the great composer of the Baroque period. So I was surprised when walking along a canal-hugging sidewalk (yes, they exist) I turned a corner and was face-to-face with a sign marking the birthplace of Vivaldi; a modest sign on a modest house.

I almost dropped to my knees, animated by the unexpected encounter, in reverence.

Vivaldi is one of history’s great composers. He was a major influence in the music of his day. He absorbed and in turn influenced the characteristics of the Italian school, and the Middle-European and German schools (indeed, it was in Vienna where he died). His music made its way far north to Saxony, where no less a figure than Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed several of Vivaldi’s works.

A major contribution of Vivaldi was his codification of the Concerto Grosso and its trademark construction – solo-and-orchestra; three movements, fast-slow-fast. He wrote more than 500 such concerti in addition to many other compositions. Detractors say that, rather, Vivaldi wrote one concerto 500 times.

But letting yourself be bathed in his music chases away that idea; and you will be joined by Bach and others in your admiration. Leonard Bernstein helped fuel the Vivaldi revival in America.

The reason for this little historical tour is related to our title: like strolls through Venice, I cannot stray far. Vivaldi was a composer, but he was a priest first – nicknamed “The Red Priest” for the vivid color of his hair. He served as the director of music in a Venetian church, the Pieta; and very specifically was teacher and concert-master at the church’s Orphanage. In starker reality it was a home for wayward girls, as society once described unmarried pregnant women.

Women, many of them “girls” in terms of their tender ages, were cared for and housed by the Pieta, and they were educated in various arts and letters. And they learned to read, sing, and perform music. Through the 1700s’ first decades, they were the charges of Fr Antonio Vivaldi. Hence, a voluminous catalog of compositions, and many concerti that showcased solo instruments for talented young women.

Again, there is point beyond general history I wish to share. It resonates at Christmastime, and has relevance in this season of discussions (and scandals) related to women, of their relative subservience or assertion of rights, and their dignity. An extreme extension of a male-dominated society in Vivaldi’s time was not allowing women to perform, sing, play instruments in church; and soprano parts were supplied by castratos – castrated boys whose voices remained as boys’ sounded, even into their adult years. This was especially prevalent in France and England. At the other end was Germany, where its churches, even before Reformation, broke ranks by mixing German with the Latin, and sometimes employing women as singers. Bach did.

Vivaldi had to do so! As Director of Music in an all-women institution, exceptions were granted. The Red Priest must have been as good a teacher as he was composer, because the female musicians and singers of the Pieta were renowned.

There are many pieces of church music associated with Christmas. The Magnificat, many chorales, hymns, and popular carols. The Gloria is not, specifically, Christmas music, but that is because its spare and sweet words – “Glory to God in the highest” – are appropriate, and appropriated, throughout the church calendar. But it is performed and sung, within the church service or independently, with particular meaning during this Advent season.

Following are the English words of the Gloria. And if you are able to click on the video, you will see Vivaldi’s Gloria – possibly the most joyful and profound of the many written by many composers – performed in Vivaldi’s church, the Pieta. And, as in his day, the musicians and singers are all women (in period dress, playing period instruments, to assist our imaginations).

You will notice that the singers are arrayed in the balconies, many of them behind wrought-iron facades. This was the era’s compromise with keeping women “separated,” supposedly to keep worshipers from being distracted (ancestors of senators and movie moguls in the congregation?). OK… at first glance they appear to be in cages, but as I have explained, those women were actually liberated. To sing, perform, praise. Men, too, often were in such locations in churches – simply a practice of the time. In fact, in many churches the organ loft, with singers and musicians, was behind and above the congregation. The focus was forward, to the altar, symbols, Host, etc.

In the context of their time, Vivaldi and his female charges were iconoclasts, pioneers in the free, and equal, and of course welcome exercise of talent and worship.

If the female performers at the Pieta had commenced a tradition that continued and spread elsewhere, women might have had more freedoms, sooner won, and more broadly exercised, across the West. (Remember that, except through the influence of guilds and arcane means, even the men of 1715 Venice did not vote, either.)

Can we agree that the point of social progress is less about unfortunate timing, and more about ultimate justice? In spiritual perspective, it is not whose voices sing praise, but what they sing. And to Whom they lift their voices in that awesome church – “Glory to God in the highest!”

Glory be to God on high And in earth peace, goodwill towards men, We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee, for thy great glory O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.

O Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesu Christ; O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

Thou that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the Father, have mercy upon us.

For thou only art holy; thou only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father.

+ + +

You will notice something besides the floral ironwork behind which the choir sings in the Pieta. The performers are dispersed, widely around the great basilica’s perimeter. This was not an uncommon practice of the time. I noted in my biography of Bach that many churches had their anthems and choruses performed this way: in Salzburg the great early-Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber wrote several pieces for as many as 40 “parts” – singers, choirs, musicians scattered here and there, high and low, seen and hidden. For worshipers in the congregation, it must have seemed like prototypical Surround Sound!

Click: Gloria

11-6-17

George Santayana famously said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. A cartoon-meme popping up on the web these days has an old guy reflecting that those who DO know history are doomed to watch other people repeat the mistakes.

That IS a danger. Rather, it is a reality. We see it around us, every day.

Without delving into whether this is unprecedented or one of history’s tragic cycles is open to question, but ultimately the question is silly – in the face of reality. In this world, today, it surely seems that a large portion of humankind has gone mad. We have rejected in many ways the concept of Absolute Truth, the possibility of its existence, and the benefits of seeking to know it. History’s masses, let us say in the West, often suffered as a lot in life. However they usually believed in improvement; in advancement; in better things and better days. They believed in themselves, in leaders they respected… in God.

The world, in turning inward instead of outward, living for today without regard to an afterlife, abandoning standards that nurtured their ancestors, of course will reflect disharmony and chaos. Art imitates life, after all (what Plato called “Mimesis”). This should worry us very, very much about the state of things ‘round about us. This world is not one politician or one new fad or one hangover away from righting ourselves. We fool ourselves when we think so. And meanwhile we are diverted by bread-and-circus movies and sports and TV shows and celebrity orgies…

Never since the Flood has humankind, over the face of the earth and not in isolated pockets, rejected Truth and Purity in such determined ways.

So, we fight. We fight as individuals, we fight as nations – or, we give in as individuals and as nations. This truth reflects a crisis of the age, and the great challenge of our time. It has always been our portion to fight – “Life is real; life is earnest,” Longfellow wrote:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each tomorrow Find us farther than today.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

About these fights as individuals and as nations, Theodore Roosevelt reminded us that it is beyond our choosing to participate in our fate. Our only choice is whether we play our parts “well or ill.”

For more than a generation America has had a volunteer military. I cannot imagine American society, our country’s youth, ever returning to a military draft. To have to interrupt (or fulfill) your life’s path by having to serve in one of the military branches? Frankly, I wonder even if America were attacked whether the spirit of service and sacrifice, across the population, would exist again as in the past. I wonder, further, that even if there were universal social-work service for one, two, or four years whether American youth would comply.

We have compartmentalized military service. In an intellectual manner we have come to treat the military as slaves. We “thank them for their service,” yet keep our hands clean of their work; the sacrifices; the threats; the separation, injuries, deaths; the stress and trauma. At the same time, sadly, we also separate ourselves from the glory of service, the thrill of victories and fights well fought, and the pride of wearing those uniforms.

That is a tragedy. Unfair to the servicemen and women; robbing the rest of the population of necessary components of healthy souls.

In these days of “advanced warfare techniques” (a sanitized term for more efficient means of maiming and killing) it is almost beyond comprehension how men and women enlist – and often re-enlist, and volunteer for repeated tours – knowingly assuming the collateral “oncoming” of separated families, variable support from the System, oftentime insufficient medical and psychological care as veterans.

We cannot admire these servants enough. Even if we dissent from foreign policies, overseas involvements, controversial missions and nation-building… we must stand in awe and gratitude to the people who serve.

And. For those of us “at home,” we cannot forget that we serve too. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines do our bidding in faraway places. Which makes it easier to be seduced by the feeling that all our battles are being waged by others. But we, all of us, have battles too, every day.

We must fight for our souls, against evil. We fight for our families, against all manners of threats. We fight for our culture, against corruption. We fight for our civilization, against enemies seen and unseen. We fight for our God, against the devil and all his ways, and for the Kingdom that is to come.

Or… we should.

If we don’t fight these battles, we surely will be subsumed.

On Veterans’ Day let us honor those who have served… and let us re-enlist, the rest of us, for the battles of life. Sooner or later, we too will be counted as veterans of those good fights.

+ + +

Click: Gone Home

10-30-17

I recently have been thinking, and writing about, the Protestant Reformation, whose anniversary is October 31 – the 500th anniversary, and traditionally observed on All Saint’s Day, when Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses (arguments, theological complaints, debating points) to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Regular readers here might be tired of these reflections, but on the other hand, “hits” and “shares” and comments have increased, to use internet indications of response. Speaking personally, I think that, as with other spiritual topics, it is good for us continually to contemplate certain things.

So: back to Luther on this birthday party of sorts. Readers will know that I revere Brother Martin as a biblical scholar whose dedication opened his mind to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. That his clarity of thought was what the church, and Western civilization, needed at that moment in history. That his personal bravery was a thing to admire, and is an example to beleaguered believers in our day.

And that we need to compile, and dedicate ourselves to engaging, 95 theses – at least – today.

But I will finally address the significance of Martin Luther and the Reformation from a different perspective. Yes, he sparked a spiritual purgative, even a catharsis, in the Church that he never intended to split. I want to consider the secular aspect of Martin Luther.

Lost in the ecclesiastic disputes is the fact that Martin Luther was a transformative figure in Western Civilization. Apart from theology. Let us appreciate his contributions to culture, and where we might be, or might not be, today without him.

He stood for the individual against the state – the Establishment of the day.

He elevated the role of Conscience and personal responsibility.

He advocated turning the Church’s role in every life and institutions to the opposite – bringing Christian sensibilities and priorities into civic life.

He democratized worship: under Luther, services were held in the local languages; singing was permitted by members of the congregation; women became participants in services.

He translated the Bible into German, and encouraged other translations into other languages. Of “the people.”

He championed the “priesthood of all believers” based on the Bible (I Peter 2: 5-9 and other passages) – the assertion that believers do not need intercessors to approach God; not fathers or nuns or pastors or even saints or Marys.

Also citing the Bible itself, he led to the disposal of man-made additions to scripture like Purgatory. Contending with the Book of James, but citing the Letter to the Ephesians, he recalculated the Catholics’ reliant view of works in God’s (ultimate) judgment unto salvation… and saw that by grace, through faith, we are justified; and that, instead, good works flow from a pious heart.

He held that Salvation was not mere “fire insurance” (i.e., avoidance of hell) but a thing much to be desired, and that Christians can have the assurance now, not dependent on prayers of survivors, their offerings, candles, beads, or lists of good deeds.

He encouraged literacy, was responsible for home libraries throughout Germany, which spread the concept of schooling and the education of women.

The German princes who hid Luther from persecution and death were emboldened to assert their independence from Rome and the political arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The “Germ theory” (no pun) of political liberty such as led to the American constitution, fostered in the forests of Germany, was godfathered by Luther.

He challenged other extra-biblical traditions of the Roman church. Priests marrying – after his excommunication, he married and had children. Mariology – he denied the divinity of Mary, arguing that the temporal mother of Jesus was not the Mother God, and pointed to scriptural accounts that an incarnate Deity in the person of Mary would not have done.

He was not perfect, and Luther immediately and violently silently stopped any such talk, even that he was a Prophet. He was an imperfect man but for the shed blood of Christ. He sometimes was intemperate; he had a bawdy sense of humor; he was prejudiced against Jews of his day; he drank and argued more than, perhaps, he should have.

And he was not a revolutionary, by design anyway. He was forced to rebuke his followers for excesses against Catholic churches and clergy. (In his wake was Rome’s Counter-Reformation… spawning what history knows as the Counter-Counter-Reformation.) In his aftermath was the Concordat, which made peace between German princes of Catholic, Lutheran, Pietist, and eventually Calvinist communities. Yet religious differences contributed to wars like the Thirty Years War in the 1600s that left one-third of the German population dead. Luther would have deplored such things.

Yet even the deplorable conflicts sorted things out throughout Germany and the remnants of the old Holy Roman Empire. Independence, literacy, increased liberty, and a stable middle class all followed. As part of universal education, musical instruction was promoted in and outside the church. Johann Sebastian Bach, although his birth was 200 years after Luther’s (and in the small town where Luther had hidden from assassins) was a virtual disciple. It is he and not Luther whom history has called “The Fifth Evangelist” – but Bach was a firm and learned Lutheran.

Christians, even adherents of the Roman Church, therefore still have much to learn from Martin Luther’s theses, his debating-points. But citizens of Western Civilization, indeed the world, are also indebted to the teachings, the boldness, the influence of this priest from the small German town. He was no special priest, he would tell you; but however no less a priest than the Pope himself in God’s eyes.

All that was left, in his teachings and the examples of his life is… that what he did was not in vain. That we, today, exercise the fidelity to scripture, a mature understanding of grace and faith, and the boldness to stand, as he did – a humble servant who declared his conscience “captive to the Word of God.”

+ + +

Today’s clip is not a music video but a full-length movie. The magnificent 1953, award-winning (and two-Oscars nominated) “Martin Luther.”

Click: Martin Luther

10-23-17

America, 2017. When our story is written we will note the bizarre nature of our national discourse at this frozen moment in time. Serious and silly. Aggressive and passive. New values and no values. Decadence versus… degeneracy.

The Wasteland of the Free?

What I have called Soft Anarchy accelerates. I do not assess based on an overheated stock market, but by spiritual, moral, social markers. Let us look at events clogging the news headlines. Harvey Weinstein and the tsunami of rumors, revelations, and regrets – America’s new Three Rs. The death and accolades surrounding Hugh Hefner. The continuous confirmation that Bill O’Reilly is a sleazy boor.

Two latecomers to the anti-Weinstein party have caught my eye. Scott Rosenberg, whom I once knew peripherally in the comics business, has come come out in sackcloth and ashes, confessing that he was well aware of Weinstein’s loathsome habits for years.

Almost 25 years ago, I had a Yugoslav friend who wanted to establish a publishing beachhead in America, and recruited me as a partner. The venture would have been called Spring Comics, and for various reasons including my disinclination to be a pawn instead of a partner, I faded from the enterprise. He hooked up with Scott Rosenberg. Soon afterward, he wanted to sue a cartoonist acquaintance of mine whose idea (about cowboys and Indians vs invaders from outer space) clashed with his own similar idea. My Yugoslav friend wanted me to do all I could to support that claim, but I could not join the claim, based on my knowledge of the timelines of their concepts. My foreign friend – up to then, a better and older friend – bitterly dropped me like a nuclear potato. But he soon took Scott Rosenberg as a partner.

The two “went Hollywood,” produced a movie about cowboys and aliens; and TV series; and books, if I remember. Then – gee, what a surprise – they had a falling out: attorneys, lawsuits and counter-suits. Did they deserve each other? I left those angels to dance on the heads of pins.

But last week Rosenberg went public with tales, and tears, about his eventual relationship with Weinstein. He knew (a phrase repeated again and again in his mea culpa: “I knew,” “I knew”), but the benefits of membership in the Friends of Harvey club had been too seductive for him.

The director Quentin Tarantino issued a similar confession, also recently – he knew, he knew (even that his girlfriend Mia Sorvino was sexually assaulted by Weinstein) and he did nothing. These men and others have cited all the familiar excuses designed to exonerate themselves. They knew, they whispered to others, they sublimated, they feel bad now. I have friends who admire Rosenberg’s newly minted “apology,” which is a repulsive farce: whether they are sorry for his inaction or their inaction (sorry that Weinstein got caught, that is) is immaterial.

None of the saints with dirty faces like Rosenberg and Tarantino in their “confessions” ever admit what they should have done: confront Weinstein himself. They would have lost work; been kicked off the gravy train? Likely so. But today’s hollow confessions condemn, not excuse, them.

The new “O’Reilly Factor” Talking Point should be How can anyone be surprised about Bill? Night after night the FNC host alternately leered at women and demeaned them. Calling male guests by their last names was merely rude; calling females by their last names was distasteful. The manner in which he treated Lis Wiehl on his TV panel and especially on his mercifully canceled radio show, where she was a sort of co-host, was a recurring nightmare of a predator on display. The $40-million “settlement” recently revealed says all we need to know.

The recently departed Hugh Hefner widely has been praised as a free-speech pioneer and – bizarrely – credited with raising the status of women in our time. I never met him, but have many mutual friends because Hefner first dreamed of being a cartoonist, and routinely attached vellum overlays to cartoon submissions with his little changes suggested in pencil. Ultimately, of course, he was not a cartoonist but a successful and gold-plated pornographer.

The objectification of (airbrushed) women – and, in ultimate irony in his magazine’s tribute issue, a “transgender” being – did not free women, or men, from voracious and predatory sexual perversion. It dignified and codified such things. Sexual Revolution indeed. And its curious prophet! Even as a young boy, naturally curious about such things as found in Playboy, I wondered about this obviously gay man posing amid mammaries and strangely dressed, or undressed, women-as-ornaments. He evidently thought that pipes, silk pajamas at three in the afternoon, and Admirals’ caps were… sexy? Manly? He established a sexual landfill, not a Sexual Revolution.

The ways of nations – even nation states, their boundaries, their thrones, even their treasures – come and go. It has always been thus. But our hearts and souls are eternal; our civilization, the children we bear, and their security, are things that must take priority in our daily lives. We are warned against the lifestyle of eating, drinking, and being merry.

My point is that the pig Weinstein, the bully O’Reilly, and the smut peddler Hefner, could NEVER have succeeded for a week if America were not receptive or envious of them; or willing, vicarious, partners. Not only customers, but junior Weinsteins and Hefners. America has been a fertile field just waiting to be planted with seeds of destruction. These things do not surprise us from behind and force attitude adjustments. If Playboy offended people, there never would have been an Issue 2. If the facts about Weinstein were stated and circulated early, decent people would have boycotted his movies before the next popcorn was popped.

The activities of Weinstein and O’Reilly, long condoned and ultimately encouraged or rewarded, were blatantly egotistical fingers thrust at the world, not individual women. When all is said and done, pathetic people like them have problems with pride more than sex. “Pride goeth before a fall…”

Shakespeare correctly observed, “The fault… is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Jesus said (Matthew 7:13-14), “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

It is not difficult, really, to see the Right. For many it is a challenge to do the Right. It should be the opposite, but this is America, 2017.

Which returns us (did you expect otherwise?) to this month’s theme, Martin Luther and the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Brother Martin saw the Right – fetid corruption at the highest levels of the Church. He knew what was right – to create the conditions for average believers to read the Word of God. He calculated the risk of Righteousness – a world-system that threatened him with excommunication, torture, and death for his convictions.

Instead of merely (merely?) standing tall in the face of the most powerful forces of his day, Martin Luther, 500 years ago, composed a checklist of complaints about the Church, the spirit of the times, and the world in which he found himself. Ninety-five “theses.”At first, his was a lonely voice.

How many Theses would you compose today? How many complaints about our contemporary world?

+ + +

This Sunday is the traditional observance of Reformation Day, commemorating Luther’s posting of the 95 Theses on the Church door at Wittenberg. Get thee to church where this is celebrated; or think anew, be rededicated, to Reformation.

Click: “Reformation” Symphony by Mendelssohn

10-16-17

You have heard the expression, “It all depends whose ox is gored,” or maybe you haven’t. It is the basis of a common-law precedent, and even a couple of Biblical references. Back when just about everybody had some beast of burden for a little farming or transport, or I suppose for eventual food, we kept oxen or cows or old horses.

If a horned ox injured another, or a person or property; or was injured somehow itself, the bedrock question of adjudication and responsibility – and an owner’s attitude – often boiled down to depending on whose ox was gored.

Outrage was relative; demands for justice were dependent on whether you were the aggrieved party – or owner – or, well, had no control over what a dumb beast did on its own…

The phrase in other words meant and means that our reactions often relate to how much we will suffer inconvenience or liability. Your ox? Get over it. My ox? I demand compensation!

The formal term for this attitude, most exercised in religion and philosophy, is “relativism.”

In broader terms today – taking it, as our culture does, to its logical extension – relativism is a moral disease that infects religion. The contemporary church, in many of its corners, defines Right and Wrong not by traditional biblical revelation, but by what is thought to be right and wrong in each situation – an ethical lapse also known as Pragmatism.

In the legal world, neither the 10 Commandments nor even English Common Law are called upon as they once were, by common consent. What seems right? What can be explained away? What is convenient? Who can say what’s “right” and “wrong”? These attitudes echo in our courtrooms.

When people reject standards and values, there are, by definitions, no standards by which they can live, or will be governed. It is what American society has slipped into: Soft Anarchy.

Relativism? Sex scandals in politics and the entertainment industry? The left howls when preachers and newsmen (for instance) are exposed; and the right drives the stories of political leaders and major entertainers committing atrocious acts.

Relativism? Political and financial corruption are decried by the right and left… selectively.

Relativism? The sanctity of life… attitudes toward war and military action… which Constitutional amendments or principles to champion or ignore… how God’s earth and Creation itself is to be respected… when protest is legitimate or crosses the line… all “depend on whose ox is gored.”

It is hard to remember that at once time the world – the West, the United States – had values and standards that nearly every person honored. If they did not believe them all, they were anyway observed in the breach. A priori ideas were first defined by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, but the idea of theoretical truths whose validity is independent of deduction or experiments, extended back in time past Kant, to Luther, to the Magna Carta, to Augustine, to the Gospels, to Plato, to the Old Testament – the Decalogue.

Once, despite all the other problems and challenges to humankind, societies operated on accepted truths, agreed-upon principles, “givens.” That is hardly the case in America, in the West, any more. Soft Anarchy. That we roll along, deluded that we advance, is more inertia than progress.

I mentioned Martin Luther, and have in recent essays, and will again until the 500th anniversary month of the Reformation has passed. His revolutionary life (I am ever more persuaded that he was a revolutionary, not simply a reformer) was more than the nexus of previous centuries’ growing contradictions and the world’s future vistas of faith, democracy, literacy, and liberty.

More? Yes – more, to us, than these possibly abstract principles. Luther’s imminent persecution and death; the challenges to his mind and his conscience; the affront to his relationship with Christ – the “free exercise thereof”; where have we heard that, since? – were on trial that fateful day 500 years ago.

He defended himself before the Holy Roman Emperor, to representatives of the Pope, to influential princes present in the court… and to us, 500 years in the future. Would he recant (deny) his writings? As legend tells us, he said:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted; and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot, and will not, recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.

Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me.

These words, properly, should thunder through centuries, down to us.

But how many Christians, say, think abortion is murder, but fail to do anything for fear of offending their neighbors? Or are outraged that the Bible has been taken from schoolrooms, instructions, and the courts, yet are too timid to act? Or are bothered when their churches stray from the Word of God, but label their own lack of response “not wanting to rock the boat”?

Our oxen are being gored every day, friends. What are we doing about it?

+ + +

Click: “I Can Do No Other”

10-9-17

We observe the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, of Dr Luther nailing his 95 Theses (complaints to be debated) on the Church Castle door in Wittenberg, Germany.

What momentous forces collided in that sleepy burg! The Holy Roman Empire was shattering; Medievalism was ending; Humanism and the Renaissance were dawning; literacy was sprouting, and with it the seedlings of personal freedom; the arts fiercely bloomed; the Enlightenment was nigh; European land wars and incredible maritime exploration commenced – both of them fueled by nascent commercialism and appetites of a growing middle class; serfdom was yielding to feudalism… and in turn, soon, to democracy and republicanism.

In the death-throes of the Old Order, hoary courts and royals entrenched themselves by  committing atrocities of race, religion, and conscience. The Church of the humble Savior had grown opulent and gaudy: corrupt. To finance the construction and ornamentation of St Peter’s in Rome, schemes like the selling of indulgences – buying late relatives spots in a fictional rest-stop to heaven called Purgatory.

We have outlined this, and I have lost some subscribers, presumably because I mention 500-year-old theological disputes (which objections I do not dismiss strictly on the basis of the vintages). But let us look beyond theology!

Martin Luther was the prophet of a new age. He stood for the individual in the face of organized power. He stood for popular culture, if I may go there, because he reformed the church’s trappings – the Bible for everyone to read; German, not Latin, scriptures and liturgy; congregational singing; priests who could marry; and so forth. He stood for scripture; “Scripture alone,” he bellowed to councils and popes.

He stood.

That, to me, is a notable takeaway from the life of Martin Luther. He was a Reformer, but also a Revolutionary.

In America there is a controversy over people kneeling during the National Anthem. To me, ironies abound: On matters of conscience, Luther stood, he did not abjectly kneel. Viewed from another angle, the press and the liberal Establishment in America (not to mention the NFL) condemned Tim Tebow for kneeling instead of dancing silly after touchdowns. A short prayer to God. However, countless black players are praised for kneeling symbolically to criticize their country. Consistency, thy name is not America 2017.

Luther, standing, was extraordinarily brave. There is a letter in his hand, written the night before his trial, in the Museum of the Bible that is soon to open in Washington DC (I saw it in Steve Green’s traveling exhibition). In the letter Luther calmly assumes he will be put to death and instructs his friend how to dispose of his possessions. And he asserts, once again, his “stand” for truth and for his conscience as informed by the Holy Spirit.

The Individual had come of age in humankind’s history. In Luther’s mature view, he realized that he stood for a world of more, not fewer, responsibilities – something that is scarcely appreciated today.

The crisis of the age – and for many ages – was upon Luther’s shoulders. Ironically (as we may think in the 21st century) Luther fit no mold. He was a Medievalist, not a Modern, even in the dawning days of Modernity. He really did not want to break from the Catholic Church, much less have a denomination rise in his name; but merely desired to reform it. And as the Age of Reason approached, he proclaimed that Reason is the enemy of Faith.

Yes, this New Man, harbinger of a new era and individualism – he considered Reason the enemy of Faith. So he was not a simple contrarian – he had clear but complex standards, living by them; and was prepared to die for them.

Martin Luther would die for what was sacred to him. In 21st-century America we have become a society where nothing is sacred but pleasures of the moment. Life is disposable, increasingly so, at birth and at death. Drugs supply counterfeit tastes of heaven, and our cultural heritage widely is mocked. Our civic life has devolved to games of “gotchas” and revenge. Self-indulgence and materialism are the new religions.

To the remnant and faithful, crises await our contention. We no longer have to wait, surprised when a serious life-dilemma confronts us. But we are at one of those moments in history when crises are unavoidable… and likewise our engagement is unavoidable, every one of us.

I cry for our culture; I cry for what we have squandered of our religious heritage, Western civilization, and our intellectual patrimony.

And I cry, too – every time in my life, I think, when I sing the last verse of my favorite hymn: Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever!

+ + +
Click: The “Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

9-4-17

“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Many times we have heard those words of Jesus, recorded in Matthew 25: 40a. Almost everyone knows the parable, if not the full meaning, behind the story of the Good Samaritan.

Another little-understood passage is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and John, when Jesus said that we shall “have the poor with us always.” Almost always misapplied. It was St Augustine (in his Confessions, written around the year 400) who opened the eyes of my heart to this. Jesus was not being a defeatist, that poverty is inevitable in our midst. Nor did He sanction a spirit of resignation in His followers.

No, Jesus instructed us to keep things in proportion – that we need to keep our eyes on Him while we can; that even good deeds can distract us from salvation. Further, Augustine argued, God has a certain loving plan for us, that we cultivate a spirit of charity. We must care for the least of those among us; we must practice compassion… because God Himself is Love.

Can we do that if everyone were on the same plane as we are? just as secure? comfortable? healthy? No. We should be aware, and compassionate, toward the lame, the halt, the blind. So we should be aware that these live among us.

Thoughts like these occur to us especially in days like these, after natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey.

I share here an editorial I wrote this week in response to the responses to Harvey. In the form of a memo to President Trump:

MEMO TO PRESIDENT TRUMP

The flood area in Texas and Louisiana is larger than Lake Michigan, and larger than several of our states, combined. The devastation, by several metrics, is already the worst in American history… and getting worse.

As rains cease, flood waters continue to rise. After flood waters recede, the apocalypse of ravaged homes, buildings, roads, and bridges will have been visited on those lands; as will spoilage, irretrievable ruin, pollution, deaths, and displaced persons. And, of course, massive economic challenges.

We do not need a North Korea in the news to remind us that this aftermath will resemble the devastation of a war – maybe even a lost war – across a broad swath of land and a large population.

As there has been no real precedent, there likely will be no real replication of these conditions for quite some time, so this suggestion would not be activated with every “normal” hurricane or tornado in the future.

Mr President, you should treat the entire area, when this is “over,” like a virtual war zone. Take extraordinary measures of aid and mobilization. Cooperate with locals, but also get involved as if it is a national emergency… because it is.

MAJOR emergency housing, relocation, funding, rescue, cleaning, new infrastructure. Not “normal” sandbags and box lunches and temporary shelters, but renewal as if the whole area had been flattened by an enemy. Because (damn you, “Mother” Nature) it was.

Do I suggest a “statist” response, a federal takeover of others’ functions? No – this response would fulfill one of the few legitimate Constitutional duties of the federal government.

Would cabinet secretaries and current federal departments be stretched too thin with these extraordinary “marching orders”? Borrow from your predecessor and appoint “czars” and “civilian generals” to take charge, category by category.

If Texas and Louisiana had been hit by thousands of bombs and instead of trillions of gallons of water, such a plan would be in place immediately. Move alongside the excellent local and regional (and private!) agencies… do not supplant, but partner… be forthcoming with more than checks, even blank checks, from across the continent.

In an odd way, this might be one reason why you, with your background and instincts, were elected to do.

Trump the Builder and Kelly and the military guys… could do this. Heck, it is what the US military has been doing for 15 years overseas, in places we can’t pronounce and most of us can’t find on maps – planning, building, rebuilding, paving, irrigating, cleaning, planting… even providing kids with hundreds of thousands of laptops.

Why not Texas and Louisiana?

Well, who knows what the President will do… however, already, my first impressions of his first acts are hugely positive. The same with state and local officials. And various agencies. And – not to quantify the acts being performed, because as Portia said in The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of Mercy is not strained” – the uncountable random rescuers we see on TV.

Spontaneous, courageous, sacrificial – these angels of mercy have come from down streets (or, now, rivers) or from across the country. Shoulder-deep in water, paddling makeshift crafts, hoisting old folks, pets, and children. Awe-inspiring. No less is the impressive outpouring of donations – money, food, furniture, meds.

And a hurricane – no, a tsunami – of prayers.

Despite my call for federal action, almost a military response, however, is an unshakable belief I have that is underpinned (I think) by the words of Jesus, and by Shakespeare, while I’m at it.

The government can help in these situations. As I said, however, these situations are among the few actually assigned to the federal government by the Constitution. It is our job, our duty, to respond as individuals. Our hearts, hands, resources.

One of many things I hate about Socialism and the paternalistic state is that they wean us from reliance on God; they persuade us that we should turn to the ubiquitous government for every answer; the State substitutes itself for faith, genuine cooperation, a real sense of compassion… and a true spirit of charity.

“Why do any of these things ourselves, when the government is there? Isn’t that why we pay taxes?”

We do not pay taxes in order to absolve ourselves of the (glorious) burden of helping our fellow travelers along life’s road. Thank God those basic, biblical impulses were not washed away in the flood waters of Hurricane Harvey!

+ + +

Click: He Reached Down

7-31-17

I recently returned from two weeks in Ireland, a fact that might be wearying “news” to my readers and correspondents, but I am one of those people who experience new things, or visit a place for the first time, and come away with delight, enthusiasms, and a desire to share. (For instance, I invariably return from overseas and try to replicate dishes or cuisine methods in my own kitchen. This week I made fish and chips – with major variations – having been not tired of them but challenged.)

All of which is a justification for one more Irish reference.

There were many coincidences and random discoveries while traversing the Emerald Isle. To digress again, briefly, the joy – and hallmark – of a seasoned traveler is to program your itinerary, and your mind, in such ways that “coincidences” and “discoveries” will meet you at almost every turn.

Near the end of the trip, having circumtraversed the island’s two countries, we spent a night in the delightful Old Inn at Crawfordsburn in Bangor, County Down, outside Belfast. It was a random booking suggested by friends because there was no room in the other inn, so to speak – the nearby Hotel Culloden Estate and Spa of Holywood, a magnificent ancient five-star wonderland so exclusive that Room Service has an unlisted number. (That is a travel joke.)

The sprawling, creeky, artifacts-crowded ancient in Crawfordsburn had numerous charms of its own, not the least of which was a plaque modestly stating that C S Lewis and his bride Joy had spent their honeymoon (“a perfect fortnight”) there, before an eventual trip to Greece; and through the years he and his literary circle would convene there. Not Shadowlands but Crawfordsburn.

For generations of children, the association with “Chronicles of Narnia” and “Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe” is compelling. For generations of Christians, and surely generations to come, his simple classics of Apologetics and lay theology will continue to touch uncountable souls. “Mere Christianity,” “The Screwtape Letters,” “The Problem of Pain,” “Miracles,” “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” and other books by Lewis explained the tenets of faith to believers (and non-believers, as he once was) second only to the parables of Jesus, in some people’s opinion.

Lewis had been an atheist and had traveled the same path to faith, or back to faith, that his literary fellows (some of them the fraternal members of the “Inklings”) like J R R Tolkien, G K Chesterton, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Fallen-away, agnostic, skeptical, Socialist, atheist… all became not merely orthodox Christians but fervent believers, uniquely sharing the gospel in ways that we categorize as “apologetics.” The young Lewis even met the brilliant Irish poet William Butler Yeats – whose modest gravesite, again “coincidentally,” we stumbled across when stopping for a photo-op at a picturesque old church ruin on a country road! – and whose own relationship to Christianity was complicated but thought-provoking.

Lewis’ marriage was to an American Jewess who also converted to Christianity. After a short marriage (there IS a touchstone: Crawfordsburn; I have not forgotten!) she died of cancer. Lewis wrote a tender and thoughtful book on spiritual confrontations with death – but published it under a pen name, not to traffic in his loss.

It was such a meaningful and profound book that on its publication, many of Lewis’ friends sent him the book as perfect reading to assuage his grief, not knowing he was the author.

It is more than these coincidences – except the coincident result of my contemplating the great man since the trip – that inspires this essay. One of C S Lewis’ great books about faith is the modest yet intense “The Weight of Glory.”

Literary-minded people always are  impressed by phrases or titles that immediately capture an argument, or augur compelling thoughts. I suggest that “the weight of glory,” as a proposition, is pregnant with implications and challenges. I will briefly (you’re welcome) and feebly recommend its contemplation in a few rehashed words.

Glory. God’s glory. Salvation. When someone comes to “saving knowledge of God” – a personal relationship with Jesus – they have joy unspeakable, the greatest experience of this life. Or, naturally, eternity.

Christianity. The Bible, and C S Lewis among other exegetes, tell us how simply “mere” Christianity can be achieved in our lives. But the Bible, and relatively few evangelists through the centuries, remind of of how difficult it is – even weighty and sometimes burdensome – to be a Christian, to receive the glory of the Lord.

When you are a Christian, you must share Christ. If you knew the cure for someone’s fatal illness, you would share that information. Well… you do.

When you are a Christian, you cannot get enough of Him; you will have insatiable thirst. Your passion does not end when you swear an oath.

When you are a Christian, you pray without ceasing – praise and requests; desires and confessions.

When you are a Christian, it is because you are a Christ-follower in all ways; not merely Not a Jew, Not a Muslim, when people ask.

When you are a Christian, you will not only “put away childish things” of belief; you will BE renewed in mind and spirit – and feel it, and show it, and live it.

When you are a Christian, you will have charitable impulses you never felt. You will sacrifice. You will tend to the sick and hurting; you will ache to have your family join you in Glory.

These impulses are not simple membership rules. They will be the “fruit” you bear. And you will be “convicted” in your spirit if they do not become part of your conscious DNA.

Are they worth it? Oh, yes. But salvation will involve more than a refreshing moment and a spiritual “Get Out of Jail Free” card. It is what C S Lewis called “The Unspeakable Burden of Salvation.”

I do not believe in ghosts, but the lobbies and halls of the Old Inn at Crawfordsburn reminded me of C S Lewis’s life and career and writings: his clarity and his impact. Worthwhile remembrance! Christianity is “merely” simple, and profoundly transformative.

+ + +

Mo Pitney sings:

Click: Give Me Jesus

5-29-16

July 4 is a pivotal date in American history, not only the date when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Fifty years later, to the day, two of the Framers, erstwhile political opponents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents of the United States, respectively, died. After the Siege of Vicksburg, U S Grant accepted the surrender of that Confederate stronghold of the Civil War. The battles around San Juan Hill were fought and won by Col Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.

And, of course, it was on the 4th of July that Southern troops under Gen Robert E Lee withdrew after three bloody days at Gettysburg PA in 1863, and retreated to Virginia.

It was to establish a National Cemetery and commemorate that Battle of Gettysburg during the iconic Fourth, that President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg address. It was one of the great state papers in America history; and indeed one of the finest orations in the history of humankind.

It is, not at all, to denigrate that speech – how could anyone? – nor to criticize our current President, whom I have grown to admire, if for nothing else, daring to keep his commendable campaign promises, that I offer here the Gettysburg Address as it might be delivered by Donald J Trump (stick with me!):

Four score and seven years ago – that’s eighty-seven years, folks; a long, long time ago, let me tell you – our forefathers brought forth, upon this continent, this great, great continent, believe me, nothing like it anywhere in this country, a new nation; conceived in Liberty – right? Liberty, nothing like it, I tell you – dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Great, great men. And women too, don’t forget the women.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, the greatest – maybe the greatest ever in this country, and I know what I’m talking about, believe me – testing whether that nation, or any nation so concerned, and so dedicated, and so civil, let me tell you, can long endure. Long. Endure. I tell you, long endure, right? We are met here on a great, great battlefield of that war, that great war. The greatest; you know that, right? See, I told ya. We have come to dedicate a portion, a wonderful, wonderful portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. Resting and living, how great. Rest and live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Fit – we fit, right? C’mon!

But in a larger sense, a much, much larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hollow this ground. Hollow ground, believe me. I love hollow ground. The brave men, living and dead and many other ways, many wonderful wonderful ways, I tell you, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or subtract. But not poor for long, just wait! The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. Never. Forget. The great state of Gettysburg, which supported us in November. Right? Remember? C’mon – the world WILL remember!

It is for us, the living, rather, you and me, and Corporal James Tanner – where are you, James? Where are you? Stand up! Somebody help him stand – we are dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on, ahead of schedule and under budget! It is rather for us… to be here dedicated… to the great task remaining before us… that from these honored dead, all those dead, those many, many dead, believe me, to take increased devotion to that cause… for which they gave the last full measure of devotion… to which we are devoted… a great, great devotion, let me tell you… that we hear. Highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, I tell you. That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, great freedom; and that this government will Drain. The. Swamp. I tell you. With all of the people, to all of the people, from the people, shall not perish from the earth. I tell you, you will be tired of not perishing.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Well, I beg forgiveness to those who think I being irreverent to either Lincoln or Trump… or those hallowed dead. In fact, Gettysburg, and Lincoln’s address, are the closest things we have to civic holiness in America. I am tweaking the president’s rhetorical style, as a friend – and as an admirer of his most recent speech to vets and Christians, on July 1, 2017.

There is a larger point, perhaps, that as thinkers and writers and speakers we should be careful about our presentations. Words matter. Lincoln’s genius was in part his pellucid thoughts… and his flawless delivery. Not his voice, which was remembered as high and raspy, but his brilliant arrangement and construction.

This attends whether we argue legal cases, preach the Word of God, teach classes, or instruct our children. Everyone’s business is communication.

End of “lesson”! I am loth to finish, however, without citing the actual Gettysburg Address. It is something I long ago committed to memory; and I think every American should.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Finally, we go from Fake News to Fake History if we believe the books that say that Lincoln was a religious skeptic or agnostic. Year by year through his life he increasingly invoked God and the Bible. In his last years his speeches, writing, proclamations, letters, and conversations were so spiritual that he sometimes sounded like a preacher.

Of the many biblical affirmations he made, to me among the most profound is:

My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.

+ + +

Click: Battle Hymn Of the Republic

4-24-17

Not quite the same thing, but I might address the Fallacy of Progress. Being skeptical of Progress is akin, in these times, of ancient heresies deserving of the stocks and public derision.

Our human family, “advancing” through culture, literacy, prosperity, science, and democracy, has ambled through history, ultimately through eras of Humanism, Enlightenment, and Universal Democratic Principles, to the Twentieth century. Was the promulgation of a “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” a landmark of humankind’s progress… or a shining example of human folly, pretentiousness, and folly? Its self-delusion might be measured by the effectiveness of its “universal” application since 1948.

In any event, its Twentieth Century – even after its somber adoption – was a period of unimaginable cruelty and barbarity, which saw the shedding and squeezing of blood from uncountable millions; wars and scientifically refined methods of slaughtering one another; virulent hatred and oppression, and mothers’ tears, probably exceeding those of all of history’s previous centuries.

We, humankind, have arrived at the present time, riding into town, as it were, on the horns of a dilemma – which sounds like a Dr Seuss animal, but represents, rather, a crisis in world history. All nations and peoples have come to realize that monarchies and serfdoms and dictatorships are dysfunctional at best and brutalizing at worst…

No. All nations and all peoples have NOT realized that. Only dullard high-school teachers and meaningless United Nations resolutions maintain this fallacy. Is this Progress? – billions of people around the world live under dictatorships; some of the enslaved people are restive and desperate, but some are relatively content because they have creature comforts their parents lacked. Some percentage of humanity retains a totalitarian strain, happy to profit by it at least in some emotionally selfish manner. If they are not among the persecuted, of course.

Even in America, the first nation to overthrow its monarchy, many citizens still act like subjects. That is, a fannish slobbering over “Royals.” Seemingly a trivial fascination, this reveals that the average American craves to be subservient to random groups of “superiors.” No offense meant to Queen Elizabeth, especially at the time of the old girl’s birthday, but how any of her breed should be called “high-ness” or “majesty” is degrading; a mystery to me.

The American obsession with subservience extends beyond Accidents of Birth. It is no different, but surely costlier, when Americans idolize athletes, movie stars, and “celebrities.” Not heroes, but Personalities, that bizarre euphemism for people otherwise lacking in admirable characteristics beyond good looks or the ability to pretend to be other people before cameras. The modern equivalents of taxes paid to the local lords are higher ticket prices and higher product costs due to funding their salaries, endorsement fees, etc.

Have computers and the internet brought heaven on earth… are not they proof of Progress? Surely the increase in knowledge is impressive, and has vast potential for good. Yet pornography is the most-visited category of web hits. Students have access to virtually limitless data, yet are ignorant (and increasingly so, each year that passes) of foundational facts of government, history, and religion.

Able to learn about history’s greatest figures, and humankind’s most significant conflicts, Americans choose the Kardashians and video games.

If one accepts that human nature is dark, then any system with few restraints is going to be dark too. That applies to democracy and politics, or lowest-common-denominator popular culture. The computer’s mouse makes a sorry compass. Human nature, allowed freedom to its Nth degree, is not going to turn benign because we take a wrong turn in the direction of Instant Gratification.

The horns of that dilemma I spoke of is this: We cannot turn back any clocks. It is rare when a nation votes itself fewer freedoms. When it has happened, an awareness of sclerotic licentiousness is never the reason. “Those who surrender freedom for security end up with neither.” Churchill is supposed to have said that “democracy is the worst form of government, until you consider any alternative.” Yet democracy has brought us corruption and self-indulgence.

The malicious impulses behind democracy and finance capitalism are cancers that have, and will, spread. I pointed to the celebrity culture as an example of a free people returning to false values again and again, as the Bible describes dogs returning to their own vomit. The Caesars knew: bread and circuses keep an exploited population fat and happy… until a culture rots from its core.

Progress? The word is becoming odious. “Turn back the clock”? History never really regresses, either. The answer is a Third Way. It is in the Bible – the wisdom of the ages for all things. It holds the answers to all questions. Its knowledge is dispensed from the Throne.

Two verses from Proverbs, of course, are keys that can unlock the door of our cultural dilemma:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (1:7); and

“Gold there is, and a multitude of rubies: but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel” (20:15).

If our land were to rightly regard the Source of all knowledge and wisdom, and lean not to our own understanding and lusts, that dilemma would be tamed, and we could know genuine spiritual progress indeed.

+ + +
Click: Do You Know?

4-17-17

“And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Easter is complicated enough in its significance without us poor humans festooning it with spiritual irrelevancies and celebratory ornaments like bunnies and painted eggs. The early church, which practiced forms of marketing, perhaps named it Easter after pagan fertility rites (Springtime; the rising sun in the east; the fecundity represented by rabbits and eggs); perhaps after the Egyptian fertility goddess Isis or Mesopotamian fertility goddess Ishtar; perhaps the Anglo-Saxon tribes’ goddess of the dawn, Eostre. Names, not substance, of course.

Easter is at once the densest theological concept, its history and meaning easy to reject by the skeptic; and the easiest message to accept by the lost, the hurting, the confused, the hungry, the searching souls of humanity.

That is to say, the truth of the gospel is audacious in its simplicity. Too good to be true, we are tempted to think. It is welcomed, and has been for 2000 years, by all but the hard-hearted and stiff-necked.

It takes more hatred and more hostility to dismiss the gospel, than it requires an open mind and an open heart to believe.

It requires more skepticism to reject the incarnation, Jesus’ ministry and atonement as concentrated in the events of Holy Week, than the faith required to believe it – the countless prophecies precisely fulfilled; the accounts of many eyewitnesses; the life-changing testimonies… Well, I am not writing to convince skeptics today, but rather to be persuasive with those who identify as Christians.

The world asks, “What if the Easter story is not true?”

To contemporary Christians, I ask:

What if the Easter story IS true?

Can people see a change in your life?

Do you forgive?

God became flesh and dwelt among us. He taught wisely, but did not come to earth primarily to teach. He performed miracles, but perhaps largely to confirm His divinity. The details of His life, as we have said, fulfilled prophecy to levels of mathematical improbability… confirming to a doubting world that He was indeed the Messiah.

Jesus did mighty works modestly and He did loving acts mightily. He performed miracles, raised the dead, healed the sick, read minds, walked on water, produced food for the hungry, calmed the wind and troubled waters. What manner of man was this?

As Emmanuel – God-with-us – He emptied Himself of His divinity when He chose. He wept for the lost. He allowed Himself to be ridiculed, rejected, betrayed, persecuted, accused, tortured, jailed, humiliated, killed.

Sacrificial lambs never did have an easy time of it.

We should see the events of Holy Week not as rituals Christ had to endure, as pages of a script. They were the mightiest of His miracles! To do all that for us – when He could have waved away enemies and soldiers, even Satan – were mighty miracles. Even mightier, to a lowly observer like me, was forgiving those who did these things during His last earthly days. Forgiving me, like Paul, chief among sinners; dying for us all while we were yet sinners.

Indeed, What manner of man is this?

+ + +

Click: He Lives

3-13-17

There are rhythms to all things in life, and in life itself. Cycles. In Ecclesiastes chapter 3, they are called “seasons.”

“To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, And a time to die”… Later, “A time to break down, And a time to build up; A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance”… Condensing the chapter’s long list of dichotomies, Byrd-like, “A time to tear, And a time to sew; A time to keep silence, And a time to speak; A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace.”

To everything there is a season, indeed; we all know this by intuition and experience. But most of us do not notice a huge qualification to this wisdom and poetry… later in the same chapter:

“I know that whatever God does, it shall be forever. Nothing can be added to it, and nothing taken from it. God does it, that men should fear before Him.”

In other words, one thing does not change. Truth is immutable. Truth does not depend upon cycles, nor rely on “times” or seasons, nor wait upon our opinions. God’s Word is unchanging; God Himself is eternal. Jesus came once, for all.

There have been cycles of reform in the church of Jesus Christ. As inspired by the Holy Spirit, faithful servants of the Word have seen the need for renewed fidelity to scripture, and acted – often at the peril of scorn, rejection, ostracism, persecution, and sometimes death at the hands of fellow… Christians.

2017 marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses – complaints – to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. It is a convenient numerical commemoration, but no less worthy of recognition for it.

Change is not needed in the body of Christ every 500 years. Sometimes it urgently is needed more often, and has been throughout history. Councils and creeds were plentiful in the battles against errancy and heresy. The Truth of God does not need defense in the realm of ideas; but it does need protection “under this inverted bowl we call the sky, whereunder crawling, cooped, we live and die.” Hence, apologetics and evangelism. And reform.

Every 500 years? Every generation? No, every day.

Some of the greatest persecution of believers has come, and is coming, from fellow “Christians.” Yes, we face opposition from Muslims, the secular culture, governments, the world, the flesh, and the devil; but we also have Error and counterfeit Christianity as foes of our own household. In the Last Days, even the saints will be decieved. And we now are at a crisis point in spiritual history.

God has never needed the dilution, or perversion, of His Word in order to “attract the lost.” Just the opposite. Steel sharpens steel, as Proverbs reminds us! Today, the church in America, in the West, is conforming itself to the world instead of being transformed, instead of having others be transformed by the Holy Spirit to the renewing of minds. It is doomed to failure. Not of God, it is hellish.

In the many stresses of daily life in the 21st century, our paths to spiritual comfort ought to be clearer, not more complicated, than they have become… easier to embrace, not inaccessible. The church, itself in its blind flailing of good intentions, is a prime offender.

Relativism – substituting our logic for God’s Truth – is rife. The contemporary gospel would create God in mankind’s own image.

Religious imperialism – missions outreach that imposes our sort of Christianity on the third world – is offensive. And counterproductive: as the spread of the gospel explodes south of the Equator, even outpacing Islam, missionaries from Africa and South America now see Europe and North America as mission fields.

The deadly “works doctrine” – holding that we can earn our way to Heaven, or buy God’s favor – sparked Luther’s outrage but unfortunately did not die with him. Indulgences have new names, and they are not all Romish. Pentecostalism has been perverted by the Prosperity Gospel. “Seed faith” and “faith offerings,” paired with assurances of God’s material payback, are a stain on the church.

Mega-churches; uncountable “versions” of the Bible; Christian 12-Step programs; retreats and seminars; encyclicals; media ministries… do you notice a pattern? They all tend to be about selves, about each other. Abstractly, not horrible in such a hurting world. But. How many of them are about God? About meeting, knowing, loving Jesus? This should be the “first step” in any “12 Step” program that addresses our challenges.

Our problem – a sin, really – in the contemporary church is this: Too many programs, and Not enough Jesus.

The church has become fluent in identifying needs and creating programs to help alleviate stressors. But the Church itself should be discipled in such a way that these programs need not exist!

We are to bear with one another, not reflexively direct each other to a local church’s ministry program. We ought to shoulder each other’s burdens, umbrella each other when we can, in order to protect and love them. We are not only God’s children, but His witnesses as well. What more could we witness to others than the love, care, and protection that a Father offers? 

In the first century, when the Church was new and exciting and vital, before cathedrals and media ministries, believers met in small circles. Families and extended families. Neighbors. People who knew each other, and wanted to. Brothers and sisters who cared, and served. No microphones and rock bands and back-screen projections or gold-encrusted crowns and robes, or bingo games or mega-anythings…

“Yes, but…” missions? Youth trips? Building programs? Let the dead bury the dead. When Jesus looked down from the cross, he looked into our eyes, each of us, mysteriously, separately. He did not say that He came for programs and ministries. He certainly did not die for Denominationalism that parsed His word into irrelevancy.

He came for you, and your soul. You can take it from there… or, actually, the Holy Spirit can: it is the reason the Paraclete was sent to us.

God sent Jesus to save our souls, and the Spirit to be our Umbrella, our inspiration to overcome the vicissitudes of an evil and false generation. “For me and my household…”

We have been blessed to visit sites of the First-century church. In Roman catacombs (whose primary functions were as places of worship, not hiding) and Irish fields. The goal of Christian pioneers was to withdraw to intimate fellowships; not to expand so as to boast of unmanageable numbers and programs.

Do you yearn for the spiritual comfort and true fellowship of the first-century church?

Rick Marschall and Emily Joy McCorkell

+ + +

Click: Faith of Our Fathers

3-6-17

A possible Sign of the Times. But this sign says “Going out of business.” Not Sears nor Macy’s nor Outback Steakhouse nor JCPenney nor Kmart nor Office Depot nor Aeropostale. Not American automakers, either; nor air-conditioning plants; not other businesses being yanked back to our shores.

No, this week it was announced that Family Christian Stores, the self-proclaimed “World’s largest retailer of Christian-themed merchandise,” is giving up the ghost. For several years, the chain’s financial woes widely have been discussed, inside and outside the camp.

There were bankruptcies, reorganizations, proposals, takeovers, conversions from for-“profit” status to non-profit; promises to earmark income to charity; inventories that disappeared; unpaid invoices; at least one publisher and one distributor who were forced to go out of business because of Family Christian’s actions; and, of course, approximately 3000 employees in 240 stores across 36 states.

Beyond this recitation of facts, no more will be said, even as employees in the home office in Michigan are not being told much more than their final dates to report. Many good people tried to make Family Christian Stores work, and the causes perhaps will be fully revealed someday.

The chain began 85 years ago when brothers Pat and Bernie Zondervan (yes, those Zondervans) opened stores. Their bookstores were re-christened Family Christian Bookstores when HarperCollins bought the Zondervan publishing arm. This was about the time, in the interest of disclosure, that books I edited were distributed by Zondervan, and books I wrote were sold in FCB shops. So Zondervan begat Family Bookstores begat Family Christian Bookstores begat Family Christian Stores…

When I noticed that the logo changed – removing “Books” from the name – it told me more than did gossip on business pages and in Christianity Today. Two years ago, in a court-sanctioned bankruptcy move, the chain “shed” $127-million of its obligations; and soon thereafter was sold for $55-million. Customers were little affected, but publishers, authors, manufacturers, and distributors were, negatively.

Excuse me for already breaking my Commandment to recite no more facts. We have the sad reality of this major go-to source for everyday Christians… no longer is a reality. In any form of reorganization.

Time and chance, however, happeneth to all. “The business of America is business,” Calvin Coolidge famously said (and, little appreciated by many, not as a valedictory to capitalism but as a spiritual rebuke to shallow materialism) – and there is a macro-narrative about companies that outlive their usefulness. Manufacturers of buggy-whips were mightily depressed when Henry Ford coldly threatened their existence.

Similarly, as many American manufacturing jobs are moving overseas, history might record that it was the “turn” of emerging economies as the United States moved on to other technologies. To the extent this is true, despite the discomfort and dislocation of middle-aged factory workers, a lot of Economic Nationalism might be retrograde.

Lucky for me, digressions are still in vogue, and I shall return from mine. My point is that times are a-changin’ in retail publishing, as elsewhere. Another Michigan-headquartered chain, Borders, was a recent casualty. Barnes & Noble retains a measure of viability because, and to the extent that, it has become a bookish theme-park in each store, with coffee bars, easy-chair oases, gifts, toys, music, puzzles, and kids’ zones. Smart.

Family Christian did the same thing, accelerated in the past few years. Unlike Barnes & Noble or Starbucks’ pastry and CD counters, the move was doomed to fail, however. Family Christian was in a different line of work, and when it forgot that fact, its days were numbered.

Ken Dalto is “retail expert.” These days, despite the Trump Bump, I fear, his line of work – that is, performing autopsies – will be a growth industry. But his post-mortem of Family Christian’s demise is: “I don’t think it has anything to do with religion – I see it as pure business.”

Indeed, that was the problem: the stores had less and less to do with religion; the Christian religion, specifically.

Which was the chicken; which was the egg? Did the customer-base of believers hanker for more jewelry, pictures frames, wall hangings, travel mugs, driftwood with Bible verses, and baseball caps? Or did Family Christian’s strategic planners cast bigger nets to capture larger numbers of fish? The question is not rhetorical, nor is the answer dispositive: both trends must be true. However, it would have been difficult to hew close to the bedrock commitment to offer of solidly Christian material; and to remain a retailer of books and music.

Being “all things to all people” failed St Paul’s injunction when, say, FCS refused to carry Chick tracts but ballyhooed the latest Osteen books or Christian-lite DVDs. No, Family Christian had tried to become some thing for some people according to the dogmas of marketers and focus groups. In so doing it fell between the pier and the boat.

A Christian literary agent, Steve Laube, was quoted, I think about the consequent failure of Send the Light Distributors: “One less [sic] major distributor to feed the Christian store market.” Beyond the cold analysis, which is unavoidable at any temperature, we arrive at a snapshot of Christian publishing, 2017. Literary agents using bad grammar; Christian book stores that scarcely carry books (during this morning’s visit to my local Family Christian store, a large outlet, I counted only four short aisles of books); and many of the “Christian” books are relativist, celebrity-oriented, motivational, sometimes heretical.

“The Shack” and “Silence” are touted, and consumed, as contemporary substitutes for the Gospel itself. So many new translations of the Bible appear these days that I wonder if God sees this, ultimately, as a churchy Tower of Babel redux.

But times does march on, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there?

I love my 14 commentaries, most of them the size and weight of car batteries. I am proud of my 40-volume set of Luther’s works. Yet I will admit that I haven’t cracked them in several years, not the commentaries anyways. After almost everything I write, I literally thank God and Google. And Wikipedia, sure. Change.

As a Christian author I lament the death, and perhaps dearth, of Christian stores.
But the internet allows us all to sell, and to buy. Smartphones and iPads allow us conveniently to follow scripture passages in our pews. Bibles have not yet been outlawed; and they have margins to accommodate home study.

Up to the minute, the great site FaithHappenings is a one-stop shop for ordering books, reading reviews, following debates, learning about concerts and speakers – more than “old-fashioned” (ouch) retail outlets ever could.

Roughly concurrent to the Family Christian announcement, Tim Keller of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian shared the news that he would retire from his pulpit… however to shepherd his megachurch into three smaller congregations; each in turn to plant three “daughter” churches of their own. Thus (through the City to City program) has Tim encouraged the establishment of almost 400 churches in 54 cities around the world.

It’s hard to keep a good Gospel down. But my daughter Emily made a prescient point about the trend, perhaps death-spiral, of Family Christian’s product-line decisions. Christian jewelry and decorations and toys were not co-opting Target and WalMart – who will, after all, pick up Jesus products in new corners of their stores, complete with the superficiality.

No, it might all be illustrating the stark fact that contemporary Christianity in America has become jewelry and decoration and toys.

If belly-up Family Christian Stores across the landscape is what we need to demonstrate that sad fact, then may the chain Rest in Pieces.
+ + +
Click: Lachrimosa

11-28-16

I was a young boy in 1961 when I heard on my transistor radio that a Russian “cosmonaut,” Yuri Gagarin, had orbited the earth. A few years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik – the first man-made satellite – into earth orbit I remember being amazed at these scientific developments, as I was aware that the American government was scrambling to keep pace.

I was aware because 1957 had been declared the International Geophysical Year, and that all sorts of school programs and textbooks had begun posing the challenge to nervous 12-year-olds like me the rhetorical question: “You don’t want us to fall behind the Communists, do you?” So kids seriously thought of doing their physics and chemistry homework, and dreamed of being astronauts instead of cowboys or G-Men.

In my naiveté, after hearing that radio news bulletin, I scrambled for pencil and paper, as if this moment would be lost to history if I didn’t write the name of Yuri Gagarin. I recall that I could only phonetically scrawl, “Eeuree Gaggarin.”

Ironically, many people have forgotten Gagarin and Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, Gene Cernan, and many others, including astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders, who read from the Bible to earthlings during a lunar mission. Even President Obama seems to have forgotten a lot of the mission of space exploration, as he transferred many American capabilities to Russia.

There is no more Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Twenty-five years ago many nations of Eastern Europe and the “Warsaw Pact” foreswore Communism, with hardly a drop of blood shed. Other nations have discovered freedom – sometimes with steps forward and back along the way – and the very latest movements are toward nationalist pride, and the rejection of centralized control.

Winds of liberty blow across the globe. Except in spots like North Korea and Cuba.

These memories returned this week when Fidel Castro died, aged 90. He was 90 in human years – some would say “inhuman years.” He kept alive ancient strains of selfish totalitarianism, a regime built on hate and resentments rather than love and constructive fellowship. Democracy might not be the panacea for every society, but you can be suspicious of the leader who cloaks his tyranny in mantles like “peoples’ republic” and “democracy” when self-determination is forbidden.

I was 10 when a TV in the local bowling alley was turned to the news, and the anchor warned parents against letting their children see the disturbing footage… so of course I gazed intently. Black and white movies of Havana streets with dead bodies and pools of blood. “Batista flees” was a headline I remember in the New York Daily News about the dictator, scarcely less brutal or corrupt than Castro would be, whom Fidel routed. My father quoted the New York Times description of Castro as an “agrarian reformer.”

A year or two later Castro declared himself a Soviet-style Socialist and visited a United Nations General Assembly session in New York. He famously stayed in a shabby hotel uptown; trashed his rooms; and embraced Soviet leader Khrushchev. I attempted one of my first caricatures and political cartoons as a budding artist – it was a natural subject because Castro dominated the news in those days. The bay of Pigs invasion. The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Through the years he settled in as the hemisphere’s resident dictator, often shunned on the world stage and frequently accommodated by neighboring and worldwide economies.

My wife, as a girl, had neighbors who fled Castro and had their sugar lands confiscated. I worked summers in college at a factory manned almost exclusively by Cuban émigrés. Many of them – some, doctors and lawyers whose credentials were not yet recognized in the US – told me with tears in their eyes of murders they witnessed at the hands of Castro’s police; and telling me earnestly how they appreciated freedom and loved America probably more than I did. I eventually met Fidel’s sister Juanita, whose shame and abhorrence of Cuban Communism was not matched by the other sibling Raul.

Cuba remained grindingly poor during Castro’s term. He would bleat, and international leftists continue to maintain, that the US embargo was the cause. This was palpable nonsense. It was a policy not to engage in trade: not a blockade. Canada, other Latin countries, all of Europe, and of course the Soviets traded all they could; and provided aid to Cuba.

Three points are dispositive, especially as the media now will be awash in rosy nostalgia for the eccentric guy with the beard.

First, Cuba was, and remained, poor for precisely the same reason that the citizens of Socialist economies in Latin America, in Africa, and around the world, suffer poverty. Stifled initiative, inherent corruption, and artificial allocation of resources.

Second, there are thousands and thousands of Cubans who had their property confiscated or their businesses shuttered. My wife’s neighbors were sugar growers before they fled the island. Neither Cuban citizens nor American investors ever received compensation, even almost 60 year later. THAT is why Washington refused to “normalize” relations – that, and the righteous rage of hundreds of thousands who emigrated to the US with nothing their lives.

Finally, Castro summarily executed many opponents; imprisoned many more; set criminals and mental defects on boats alongside multitudes who braved the open sea in flimsy boats. His defenders in Noo Yawk and the media point to universal health care and free college in Cuba as glories of Castro’s regime, but have been unmoved for decades by closed churches, spying on Cuban citizens, and the denial of political activity.

Stooges like Jimmy Carter and John Kerry weep tears for Castro; popes like John Paul II and Benedict, surprisingly, visited him, and the current wearer of the Shoes of the Fisherman admired the dedicated Cuban atheist. Other people, the usual gang of leftists, love Castro for reasons of their own (romantic?) but more likely, and frankly, would be in favor of closing Christian churches in America, too; and suppressing political dissent, as in that promised land.

In a sense, Castro had more integrity than his apologists in America: you can trust a Communist to be a Communist. Liberals will excuse any offense if there is lip-service paid to “education,” “health,” or redistribution of someone else’s property (except their own). Castro was a wolf in wolf’s clothing, worse than Jesus’ memorable warning in Matthew 7:15.

And as Kipling wrote,
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”

+ + +

Click: Komm, Susser Tod

11-21-16

Thanksgiving approacheth.

Oh, good! (or, “Oh, no!”) – Turkey. Trimmings. Leftovers. Football games. Black Friday sales. Take down the Indian corn and gold-and-orange decorations quickly, and put up pine wreaths and red-and-green.

I wonder, and I hope, about the number of people who remember the “real” origin of the holiday. Not the Pilgrims and Indians in casting-call costumes… but remembering our blessings and their Source.

I am wondering about a couple other things this season. As in past years, I note how few people say “You’re Welcome” anymore. Have you noticed? Take a survey – listen to interviews on TV, or how store clerks respond. “You’re welcome” is an endangered phrase.

Notice, it has been replaced by “No problem,” or “No prob.” Or “Sure thing.” Or “You betcha.” Or “Thank YOU.”

Curious.

This is not a moral failure; just a conversational tic of the sort that enters the language. Similar to so many people larding their sentences with “y’know,” or beginning conversations with “So…”

But I have a serious thought whose way-stations are observations like this.

The first American Thanksgiving celebration was organized specifically to give thanks to God for bountiful harvests, safety, and peace with neighbors and environments.

“It is meet, right, and salutary that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to You, almighty Father, everlasting God, through Jesus Christ our Lord…” So reads the ancient liturgy preceding the Sanctus.

We give thanks to the Lord, for it is good; we present offerings; we make joyful noise unto the Lord.

It has occurred to me that God covets our thanks, because it shows our hearts are mindful of His many blessings, and this is proper. But have you ever thought that sometimes we should say “You’re Welcome” to God?

“You’re Welcome, God”???

When we think on this, we better appreciate the unique relationship God has – and wants – with us: He does thank us. Often. Humble servants that we are. He thanks us abundantly.

When you receive answers to prayer, the sovereign Lord is also thanking you for faithfulness.

When you are blessed, it is a Thank You from God for seeking His face, and praying earnestly.

When a loved one is healed, or saved, or in some way moved, it may also be in some small way God thanking you for having faith, witnessing, sharing Christ.

Like prayer itself, Thanks is not a one-way street. God honors our faith; the Bible reassures us of this many times. And what is that except a “Thank You” from the Lord of Creation? Can that humble us?… but remind us, too, of how we are loved.

“For God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” Back to football! – these are the words of the “John 3:16” signs you see in the stands.

Some people like to refer to Jesus’ birth as God’s Christmas present to humankind. Yes. But we also can see Jesus – God in the flesh to dwell among us – as God’s Thank-You note. The best Thank-You note possible… while we were yet undeserving. But He thanks His children who have open hearts and pure spirits.

When you pray, pray literally: “You’re welcome, Lord: You are welcome in my heart.”

+ + +

Click: Thank You

9-12-16

Anniversaries are convenient things to help us remember and commemorate what we ought. The 15th anniversary (integers are cooperative) of the 9-11 attacks will evoke appropriate tears, and possibly inspire people to actions of some sorts. This week – and I hope not lost in the political rhubarbs and 9-11 remembrances – we lost another iconic American Tower, so to speak.

Phyllis Schlafly has died.

Of course there will be people in 2016 who don’t know her name, but many do; and virtually every American has been affected by her work, her dedication, her crusades, the force of her personality. For more than half a century, this elegant bulldog of a lady changed politics and public policy in America. She inspired millions; she caused laws and regulations to be enacted, and – doing what even King Canute of legend could not – she withheld many waves of political “change,” for instance almost single-handedly preventing the requisite number of states to make the Equal Rights Amendment part of the Constitution.

I was an impressionable teenager in 1964, persuadable by both sides in that momentous presidential election. Until, that is, I read two books: Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of Conservative, after which I became one of “Barry’s Boys; and Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not an Echo, a history of American politics and a tocsin about the Current Crisis. Hers was an informed, logical blueprint: appreciating the genius of the American Experiment; learning the nature of threats to the Republic; and the essential importance of activism.

Nothing, for me, was the same after that. Advocacy in high school; engagement in college (in Washington DC during the Vietnam era); community work in local politics; work as a newspaper columnist and political cartoonist. Phyllis taught me, and uncountable others, what we could do and should do if we want to rescue, redeem, and restore traditional and vital American principles.

She did this through the most minute efforts, the old-fashioned neighborhood work of persuading neighbors, attending meetings, writing to officials. And, in “major” ways, she wrote almost two dozen books, founded the advocacy group Eagle Forum, established Stop ERA, which battled the radical-feminist attempt to add an intrusive amendment to the Constitution – despite massive push-backs and abuse, her efforts stopped the states’ passages of the Act at 35 when 37 were necessary. Eventually, thanks to Phyllis, five states even rescinded their approval. She championed the Defense of Marriage Act, and many other pro-life and pro-family initiatives.

President Reagan appointed Phyllis to commissions in honor of her ability and accomplishments (by the way, she was a practicing lawyer, and received a Masters degree in Government from Harvard) (and not by the way, she was also a mother of six children). In his diaries there are notes of his breathless admiration of her work and dedication. I remember a column by Bob Novak, written during Platform deliberations at the 2004 – usually dry sessions, devoid at attention – when he encountered Phyllis Schlafly, alone in a vast side-room. The 80-year-old bulldog was going through drafts line by line, determined as always to find devils in details, to keep politicians’ feet to the fire.

All politicians. All their feet. All the fires.

Obviously, she was a heroine to me. I followed he through her long-running newsletter. Through her weekly newspaper column. Through the five-day-a-week radio commentaries. Seeing her on C-SPAN, making speeches, testifying before Congress. I once interviewed her, by phone, for a magazine I edited, the late lamented Rare Jewel, published by Tim Ewing.

But I never met her until we both attended a conference conducted by Dr D James Kennedy. And it was like this: I walked into the hotel’s breakfast room, and there sat Phyllis, alone. We both were earlier than our appointed breakfast-mates.. There she was, in person, and I suddenly realized her resemblance to Margaret Thatcher. Without the overbite. With preternaturally and, seemingly, permanently coiffed hair. Warm smile and steely eyes. Yes – Phyllis was American politics’ “Iron Lady”: how she would have done if we had a parliamentary system and she stood at Question Time! Her last book, by the way, was the recent Conservative Case for Trump.

I nervously introduced myself, and explained that I merely wanted to tell her what a difference she made in my life, and continued to; and how I could attest to what I hoped she knew, that there were many, many committed warriors like me. Like her, if we could manage.

With genuine humility she thanked me but then asked what I did, where I worked, how things were going, what was next… and suggesting even moiré ways I could be engaged. Amazing. A general with the passion of a recruit, and the enthusiasm of a common foot-soldier.

I have not yet mentioned what motivated Phyllis Schlafly. A love of America, certainly. But she was a committed Christian… and she willingly admitted – insisted – that her faith informed her patriotism. Christianity was the foundation of her concerns. The essential urgency she continuously evinced was of a kind with an evangelist’s zeal.

She was the person who put “Christian” in the Christian Right, and “Right” in the lexicon of Christian patriots. As the culture rapidly grew more and more secular, she was the girl with her thumb in the dike, fighting the good fighting at same time as alerting the rest of us to the tides of opposition. Amazing.

To the extent the crisis in our culture has involved secularism in all spheres, she said to me in my magazine interview: “I think the secularists have mounted a force on every front. You see this in the attack on the Pledge of Allegiance, the attack on the Ten Commandments, the attack on any public acknowledgment of God.

“What they want to do is treat Christians like smokers. ‘You can do it in the privacy of your own home, maybe down a dark alley, in a little corner somewhere, but not out where anyone can see you.’ … We have a big battle in the political sphere, in the cultural sphere, and the spiritual sphere.”

And who responds to battles? Soldiers. We have lost a mighty soldier in our society’s wars. But Phyllis Schlafly was a von Clausewitz, a Sun Tzu, a Saint Paul: equipping us for the tough work ahead. With the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in her other, Iron Lady Schlafly, dignified yet ferocious, showed us the way. We should all be, not followers, but actual leaders in her fashion.

+ + +

Click: Mozart’s Lacrimosa

7-18-16

Our recent essay “Welcome To the Revolution” has excited a bit of discussion, some readers claiming I am an alarmist, and others granting that I might be predicting the future instead of, as I believe, reporting on the present. To the charge that I am an alarmist, I would reply that doctors operate when there is disease; firemen rush to houses on fire; when I see alarming things, I sound the alarm.

There are many subjects that American schools do not teach any more, and we generally are an anti-intellectual society. In that vein – specifically, the danger of even right-thinking Americans being ignorant of the Current Crisis – I recall what Alexander Boot wrote about Hellenistic Man, that “he was not ignorant of history; he simply did not see how it affected his life.”

For the immediate future, I believe we are headed for the Summer of Our Discontent. Where once a polite diving-line was drawn between Democrats and Republicans, even liberals and conservatives, now there are bottomless chasms between family members. Ugly schisms divide former friends. “Occupy” and “Black Lives Matter” partisans ascribe blood libels to Tea Partiers, and vice-versa.

Those who think murdered soldiers and policemen are victims of random gunfire, and those who think we are seeing war in the streets. Now, Baton Rouge. Next?

The conventions and campaigns will be ugly – and the Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas parties of many families likely will be bloodier. These rifts will slowly – if ever – heal: people must first desire healing; and for all the empty clichés about Getting Along, the contemporary American is quite happy to excoriate his opponent. Hate Thy Neighbor.

So this is a classic case of “inability to see the forest for the trees,” America’s fatal state of decline. We have gone from decadence to destruction, and when we catch a glimpse of the “forest” – an active society where things continue to happen, where we still wake up, go to sleep, and scurry about our affairs – it is rather a case of inertia that masks the crisis.

Our fall has not been the result of a sudden explosion, but gradual poisons in our cultural water supplies.

One of the favorite Bible verses of Christians in recent years has been II Chronicles 7:14: “If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

How many of us are guilty of quoting that verse, even applying it, superficially? For one thing, it seems, in a forest-for-the-trees manner, like a fortune-cookie aphorism. “Straighten up your act, people,” to be followed by spontaneous revival and Heaven on earth.

But the verse needs to be parsed – examined phrase by phrase. In the first place, linguistically, it strictly is not a promise of God. It is a conditional statement: “If… then.” The Bible is filled with many such conditions, warnings, threats, and yes, promises. But God requires things of His people. Humility. Prayer. Seeking Him. Repentance. All of them “big time.”

THEN He will forgive transgressions and heal the land.

“If.” That is the condition – a big “if.”

“My people.” Not necessarily the entire population, but the Children of God. The saved; today, Christ-followers.

“Who are called.” All of us must be open to the specific call of God on our lives: His will for us.

“Humble themselves.” This does not mean to stop being haughty in church, but to adopt true servants’ hearts.

“Pray.” Jesus Himself prayed fervently before every important act. How less should we?

“Seek My face.” Request guidance and acknowledge God as the source of all good things.

“Turn from their wicked ways.” Here God means true repentance… transformative changes in our personal lives.

Then you “will hear from heaven.” Prayers will be answered.

Then He will “Forgive your sins.”

Then He will “heal your land.”

That makes this verse more than “words to live by.” Or something for Christians to claim in agreement or to memorize for a Bible study or Sunday School class. Not those things alone – good start – but incomplete. Even the famous verse is incomplete! It is the second half of a sentence, not a new sentence in Two Chronicles, as Donald Trump would call it.

Can we, o average American and Christian Patriot, read the context, and learn what the Lord was really saying? Starting with Chapter 7, verse 11:

Thus Solomon finished the house of the Lord, and the king’s house: and all that came into Solomon’s heart to make in the house of the Lord, and in his own house, He prosperously effected.
12 And the Lord appeared to Solomon by night, and said unto him, I have heard thy prayer, and have chosen this place to Myself for an house of sacrifice.
13 If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;
14 If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
15 Now Mine eyes shall be open, and Mine ears attent unto the prayer that is made in this place.

First, that is a lot of IFs. Second, there are severe warnings. A third point might be that these are specific instructions to David’s son Solomon and the people of ancient Israel. However, it is valid for us to draw lessons.

The most sobering of lessons, chastisements, and warnings of punishment (indeed, God’s promise) is a few verses later:

19 …If ye turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments, which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods, and worship them;
20 Then will I pluck them up by the roots out of My land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified for my name, will I cast out of My sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations.
21 And this house, which is high, shall be an astonishment to everyone that passeth by it; so that he shall say, Why hath the LORD done thus unto this land, and unto this house?
22 And it shall be answered, Because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods, and worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath He brought all this evil upon them.

In effect: We bring this evil upon ourselves.

+ + +

Click: Leaning On the Everlasting Arms

+ + +

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.)

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.

+ + +

Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness

+ + +

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.)

5-2-16

The great composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived between 1685 and 1750, universally is regarded as one of the great music-makers of the human race; certainly on almost every critic’s list of the great composers of all time.

Bach received additional plaudits when in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft was sent to nowhere in particular except up, with the hope that, hurtling beyond the solar system and maybe the galaxy, it might some day intersect some civilization in a remote part of the universe. Perhaps, it was hoped, aliens would discover and understand something of mankind from the spacecraft’s unique payload – a copper and gold alloy disk with images and music, estimated by its designers “to last a billion years.”

Among the playlist of global music, Bach was the only composer represented thrice: the Second Brandenburg Concerto, first movement, performed by Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Orchestra; the Gavotte from the Violin Partita No. 3; and the Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 were chosen to represent humankind’s creative profile.

At the time, biologist Lewis Thomas was asked what he would have nominated for this message to unknown civilizations about humankind. “The complete works of J.S. Bach,” he suggested. “But that would be boasting.”

Such are the sorts of tributes due to Old Bach, among countless heartfelt tributes when trained musicians and common laymen and everyone in between have their hearts melt and their souls stirred by his music.

Bach himself saw his music – and his entire life – as a tribute, instead, in all humility and with his priorities straight, to God Almighty. He was aware, but not vain, about his music-making gifts, gifts from God. Therefore his talents deserved to be raised up to God. In his life, he was first a Christian; second a family man; third, a man who made music. He made music, wrote music, composed music, taught music, was an innovator of music, breathed music, as did his family tree of 40-odd Bachs before, during, and after his own lifetime.

More than half of his approximately 1800 compositions (1200 of which survive) were of Christian focus: cantatas and chorales, motets and masses, Passions and Oratorios.

Yet for all his mighty “secular” works of keyboard and organ pieces, suites and concerti, songs and fugues (whew!)… he viewed all of them, too, to be written as unto the Lord. He knew the Source of his inspiration, and the One to whom credit was due.

Bach began virtually every composition, even his secular music, with a blank paper on which he wrote, Jesu, juva (“Jesus, help me”) on the upper left corner of the first page; and Soli Deo Gloria (“To God alone the glory”) on the bottom right corner of the finished ending.

His was a personal relationship with the Savior, not a professional duty even when he was employed by churches.

Such “bookends” were as anointing oil over all of Bach’s creative work. So did he begin and end his days – and his life – with such petition and praise: “Jesus, help me” and “To God alone be all the glory.” With or without the mode of music, such dedication speaks to us through the years.

The “S.D.G.” (his occasional abbreviation) should have a special meaning to us today. Most people of the 21st century, understand “God,” and understand “glory.” But it is hard for us, in contemporary times, to understand how a man like Johann Sebastian Bach could say, and mean, “alone” in that Credo. Can we?

Emerging cultures and emerging churches have compartmentalized every aspect of life, including God, and arguments are made that God would have it that way. Not so! “Personal fulfillment” is the artist’s goal in today’s world. But to Bach’s worldview, such an idea was an offense.

God “alone” is the source, the content, and the goal of artistic expression. Alone.

These prayers, and the prioritization of “ALONE” when we thank God, is how we should live, and how we should pray. Not (virtually) “thanks for helping me in this way or that way, God”; but “Thank you for being my inspiration, my helper, my right hand, my goal… my all in all.”

When we are too busy to pray, we are… too busy. We all know this, yet it happens. But if – at least – we start every day with the brief “Jesus, help me” as Bach began his compositions; and if we ended every day with “To God alone be the glory,” we will be in appropriate frames of mind.

We will start dwelling on the profound and proper life-truths of those simple prayers. We will not escape from their gentle but deep implications. We will expand on them in our active thoughts, and in our subconscious moments. We will hide those words and their implications in our hearts.

The truths spoken to our lives will become like… tunes we cannot get out of our minds. Like many of Bach’s themes. Musical and spiritual.

+ + +

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.)
+ + +

The second movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite:

Click: Bach’s “Air”

4-25-16

I noted the annual observance of Earth Day. And right about now I am making ready for my annual pilgrimage to the top of that earth.

Not quite Mount Everest or Mont Blanc or Mount McKinley, but high enough: Rocky Mountain High. Not a holy trek… although it is associated with the annual Greater Colorado Christian Writer’s Conference (attendance at which I urge on all aspiring writers, published authors, casual readers, and everyone in between). Is it a true pilgrimage? Yes, it is.

Many pilgrimages have been undertaken by pilgrims (obviously) to sites of holy or historical significance; sometimes in celebration or in observation of dates or past events. They can venture to the unknown (think the New World) or to very familiar places (think Jerusalem or Lourdes).

Or they can serve to re-charge one’s battery, so to speak. To savor the sustenance one expects to be waiting. To commune in a way unavailable elsewhere.

I will re-create the experience for those of you not from bumpy lands. I was born in New York City, where all the peaks are of stone, but piled up by man, not God. (Ask me about trips to Bavaria and Switzerland and Austria sometime, too.) You arrive in Denver, nestled in mountains a mile high. You drive to Estes Park, a frontier-flavored town half again as high above sea level. Local landmarks are the Stanley Hotel and the sprawling YMCA retreat and conference center, which hosts the writers’ conference. And, of course, 360 degrees of mountains, snow-capped year-‘round.

Every year after the conference a few faculty members and friends make the trek upward – so it seems, straight up! Past the Theodore Roosevelt National Forest, into the Rocky Mountain National Park, passing scattered cabins and lazy elk and deer, we climb farther, into thinner air. The deciduous trees disappear; we are above the pine line. Soon, even the pine trees can grow no more, and there are only strange scrub plants, jagged rocks, and frozen snow.

At summits you stop to walk – carefully and slowly, because the thin air ensures that you easily become winded. If the temperatures are cold, even when you see your breath, you still shed jackets and sweaters because the sun strangely compensates. At these levels, discreet signage informs you of the height; of the fact that nearby snow scarcely melts and might be many years old; and strictly warns against stepping on the only discernible vegetation: lichens and moss. The organisms, actually not related to each other, form greenish shadows on rocks, and – as the signs warn – can take hundreds of years to reestablish themselves if stepped on and destroyed.

As high as I and my friends have ever ventured, there are always peaks not far away (probably many miles!) that reach higher. Birds with magnificent wing-spreads float above, not having to flap their wings, seemingly ever, as they catch the upward wind drafts. We stand at cliffs’ edges and look down, down, down, seeing four-legged animals we can hardly distinguish, gaily leaping between precarious peaks.

One year, in glaring sunlight and amidst unearthly silence, our group beheld these scenes and someone started singing the old hymn, “This Is My Father’s World.” One by one, everybody joined in.

“This is my Father’s world, And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and ‘round me rings The music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought.”

Perfect-seeming. A natural setting, an appropriate response, a love song to God as He has revealed Himself. Who would not have the same reaction?

Very few of us, that’s who. Yet God, I think, would have us remember that such glorious scenery can be seductive; pristine nature is only part of the Father’s world. I believe God would have us remember two categories of truths that easily elude us, especially after we plan pilgrimages or encounter the stunning beauty of Creation.

The first category of truths – reminders, I will call them – is comprised of realities that are as hard and sharp as those of mountains. We can occasionally drive away from, but not escape, the concurrent existence of sickness and disease; of hate and sorrow; of wars and rumors of wars; of crying mothers and crying orphans; of abused women and aborted babies; of poverty and injustice; of persecution and oppression; of pollution and waste; of prejudice and corruption; of slums and poverty; of greed and envy; of empty hope and no faith. All around us.

THESE are also parts of my Father’s world. Just as much as pretty landscapes and joy-filled nature.

The second category of reminders, no less significant in God’s plan, tells us that the first category is not a random list of uncomfortable truths. Rather, they are God’s checklist of matters we must address. Christians are familiar with forebears who knew about the Promised Land. All of Creation once looked like the snow-capped Rockies. The Garden of Eden we know. The Land of Beulah was sought in Old Testament days as representing a virtual marriage feast, preparing for fellowship with the Lord.

Heaven has been described to us: The land of milk and honey, where sorrows shall cease, where joys will never end, where the buildings shall be as mansions prepared for us. If it were not so He would not have told us.

But the pathway there requires all of us to climb down those mountains, often to dwell in dark valleys. Vales of tears, usually. Valleys of the shadows of death. We will not merely encounter unpleasant things in life: we must confront and do battle with them. God’s work must be our own. We must wrestle with more than flesh and blood “but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

Not a warning; not an option; more like a prediction; in fact a promise from God. These are not assignments to win God’s favor. They are simply the duties of a follower of Christ.

In fact, they are privileges.

To care for those who hurt, to minister to their souls as well as their bodies, is what Christians do. Not often enough, maybe… but it is what we do. To comfort, to feed and clothe, to sacrifice and serve, to share Christ and to BE Christ; to love. To love.

Marlene Bagnull, Director of the conference in Estes Park, always remembers among the hubbub of seminars and programs and fellowship, to highlight two missions programs each year; one at home, one overseas. Truly, it is meet and right so to do. The work God gives us is as likely to be halfway around His world as across our hometowns.

And surely those tasks are also in our neighbors’ houses; in our schools and offices; in the hallways and bedrooms of our own homes. These places, these people, these problems… are all squarely in “My Father’s World,” too. As we redeem His people, we redeem His planet. His world. Let us all remember every corner of creation; pleasant and – for the moment – unpleasant. By the way, Earth Day is not a celebration of Mother Nature but Father God, Creator.

“This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world. The battle is not done.
Jesus who died shall be satisfied, and earth and Heaven be one.”

+ + +

Click the embedded link to learn more about the Colorado Writer’s conference.

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.)

Click: This Is My Father’s World

4-18-16

We should always be growing as Christians. In fact we should grow in all aspects of our lives: a dead curiosity, an atrophied sense of adventure, are mere reflections of a life winding down. We SHOULD keep growing in our life activities, but our faith MUST keep growing.

Faith is not the destination, after all. We recently shared that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This verse that opens Hebrews 11 – the “Hall of Fame of Faith” – confirms that we keep hoping as we keep believing.

In the six years or so that I have been offering these blog essays, and have been carried by RealClearReligion.org, which sadly is closing up shop, I have not so much lectured, as learned. That is how ministry is supposed to work. You gain insights more than fashion them; you are blessed more than you bless; the responses from random readers, usually unknown to me, have kept me humble, and have strengthened my faith.

Humility is one of the bedrocks – one of the cornerstones – of Christianity.

To be used of God is what we must seek, fervently. There is a seduction to compose mighty messages and memorable sermons. We – the contemporary church, especially in the West – have a frequent sense of urgency to seize the moments. To gather everyone we can into church or small groups or para-church or youth ministry. To “close every deal.”

In fact that is the job of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said so. It is our job, rather, not to subvert the work of the Holy Ghost, but to plant seeds. Let the Spirit nurture and harvest.

Humility.

How often do we realize that, in our scrambling to “reach” others, that maybe God grieves that we neglect ourselves – our own souls, our own spiritual growth, our very salvation? Jesus died and rose for us… not our programs, our ministries, our notches on a spiritual belt.

Humility.

How often do we realize that for all the good we do, for all the myriad aspects of our spiritual lives, that God’s call on our lives – one Mission that is pre-eminent in His eyes – might be ONE encounter, one person, one circumstance where He has placed us?

Humility.

In that sense I have come to an increasing awareness that we all are “mere” stones. Rough-hewn, seemingly not significant, almost interchangeable, in life. But in God’s view, indispensible! Mighty, God-glorifying cathedrals are built stone upon stone upon stone. Usually rough, or seemingly indistinguishable one from another.

But after the cornerstone who is Christ, those stones, piled correctly, and high, and interlocking, ultimately make a cathedral.

But if some are defective, or arranged wrongly, or missing… the cathedral collapses. Our profiles are humble. Our roles, however, are vital. We must see ourselves in this perspective. God resists the proud, but exalts the humble. Just as importantly, however, we must see others, and all of life’s work, in this manner also.

I always reminded my children that not every student who does scales becomes a great violinist; few do. But EVERY great violinist, without exception, began by doing scales. There is a humble way to “do” life that our contemporary culture fights against. Try-it-all, taste-it-all, do-it-all is not a formula for success… nor happiness. The Bible warns against the allure of “wine, women, and song.” You know the rest of the verse: “… for tomorrow you die.”

So, fellow “stones.” In humility let realize our roles, and not exalt ourselves or our meager efforts, even on behalf of the King. Later in that chapter of Hebrews we are reminded of Abraham, who properly “looked for a city, whose builder and maker is the Lord.” In humility let us anoint our writing, our ministries, our… appointments God has arranged for us.

In humility let us rejoice in the work we can do. It’s is God’s work, after all; not our own. Some day, here or on the other side, we will look up, and look around, see what a mighty spiritual edifice we have been blessed to be part of.

And keep in your mind that Jesus said that even if the world withholds its praise of Him, “even the stones would cry out”!

+ + +

This is a valedictory of sorts to Real Clear Religion, which has seemed to many people an indispensible part of their daily fare: news, sermons, surveys, essays, so much more. Jeremy Lott and Nicholas Hahn were superb editors, and generous to share MMMM every week for years.

For those who have followed us on RCR, please continue to receive our weekly essays by Subscribing to Monday Morning Music Ministry. (See link under “Pages” at right.) May God bless all you “stones”… even pebbles, such as “who am I.”

Click: Who Am I

3-21-16

St Patrick’s Day is over, a mini-holiday in the commercialized America that likes to observe at least one holiday a month. The truth is, the American economy might collapse if it were not for our periodic celebrations, three-day weekends, and “holiday” sales.

Approximately one-fourth of all retail sales are in the Christmas season. When you consider the hoopla and commercials built upon Presidents’ Days and Easter Bunnies and Halloweens, you can believe that without formerly Christian holy days and once-patriotic commemorations, our economy would collapse.

Where, once, Christian observances and patriotic anniversaries inspired us, now their superficial and counterfeit shades prop us up.

St Patrick’s Day is in that category. Bins of discounted green plastic hats, and the few remaining posters for green milk shakes, confirm this. Sic Transit gloria mundi. Until next year. Until the next holiday – bunnies and peeps hot on the trail this season. Some Americans even assume that “Saint Paddy” was one of the fictional or dubious Catholic saints, like St Christopher and St George.

But Saint Patrick was real, and is real.

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

He was born in western England and kidnapped by Irish marauders when he was a teenager. As a slave he worked as a shepherd, during which time his faith in God grew, where others might have turned despondent. He escaped to Britain, became learned in the Christian faith, and felt called to return to Ireland. On that soil he converted thousands, he encouraged men and women to serve in the clergy, he worked against slavery, and quashed paganism and heresies. Among his surviving colorful lessons is using the shamrock to explain the mystery of the Trinity, the Triune God, to converts.

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

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

As Lori Erickson recently wrote in a series on St Patrick for Patheos, “In the eighth century, Celtic Christians created a masterpiece of religious art called the The Book of Kells, a book whose vividness, color, and artistic mastery reflect Christian traditions laced with Celtic enchantment. The Book of Kells is an illuminated Latin manuscript of the four Gospels. While scholars don’t know for certain, it was likely created on the remote island of Iona off the coast of Scotland, and later brought to the monastery at Kells, Ireland.

“Made from the finest vellum and painted with inks and pigments from around the world (including lapis lazuli from Afghanistan), the book is almost indescribable in its loveliness, with designs that are convoluted, ornate, sinuous, and dreamlike in their complexity. Some scholars have called it the most beautiful book in the world,” she wrote. I can add that it can be seen as an early graphic novel.

It is on display at the magnificent Trinity College Library in Dublin – whose famous, cavernous, multi-balconied library room is akin to heaven for bibliomaniacs like me – and surrounded by back-lit photos and displays of enlargements, it sits in an environment-controlled case, one page at a time turned every few months. To behold that book, so magnificent in its reproductions, in its reality, was one of the great experiences of my life.

The Book of Kells is awesome for what it is, surely one of the greatest artistic achievements of the human hand, head, and heart. A majestic monument to faith, all the more remarkable for being anonymously produced, unlikely by one person; possibly by a virtual army of creative souls. The Book of Kells is significant, too, for what it represents:

The tenacity of faith; the triumph of trust; the assumption of lonely devotion in the face of worldly temptations and the world-system’s persecutions; the joy of creativity; and obedience to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Knowing Him; making Him known. Not incidentally investing artistic beauty along the way… and having obvious, visceral, evident fun in the process.

Back to Saint Patrick. When the ancient masterpiece we behold as The Book of Kells was created, the man Patrick who bravely and no less tenaciously fought for the gospel on that beautiful soil was already, himself, 500 years in the past. The church has been blessed with famous saints like Paul and Augustine; and those who touched souls for Christ but never were designated saints subsequently, like Martin Luther and J S Bach; and many, many saints who mightily served Christ in obscurity, like the monks who made The Book of Kells, and uncountable missionaries and martyrs.

Saint Patrick, born a pagan, made a slave, once a fugitive, was transformed by a knowledge of Christ. He taught us how to overcome challenges, listen to the Holy Spirit, formulate a vision, and change the world. Not just his world; but the world ever after.

+ + +

For more than a millennium a hymn, set to the haunting Irish tune “Slane,” and using St Patrick’s teaching in the words of the 6th-century Irish poet Saint Dallan, has spoken to the hearts of believers and non-believers: God is our All-In-All: Be Thou My Vision. It is performed here – with obvious and profound extra layers of meaning – by the blind gospel singer Ginny Owens.

Click: Be Thou My Vision

2-29-16

Just for a moment, stop. Savor the good; calculate the not-so-good. We must live our lives, even as the culture tells us to put on costumes and spout lines, letting our selves go past our eyes as if we were spectators, not the players. We, all of us, go around and around and around in our worlds, always meaning to start, or finish, something or other.

Parents know: running kids from here to there and back again. Activities. They’ve got to enjoy themselves, right? But how often do they enjoy talking to their parents… talking with their parents? How many times have you returned from a vacation, feeling that now you REALLY need a rest; whew!?! Even leisure has become an industry.

A while ago I wrote an essay based on Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God,” in which I suggested that great wisdom comes from a deliberate parsing: “Be.” “Be still.” “Be still and know.” “Be still, and know that I am.” “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Profound wisdom in each portion, each inviting deep contemplation – maybe a lifetime’s! Yet the essence that we of the 21st century take away is the admonition to be still. It is hard to hear God above the noise. It also is difficult to hear ourselves above the noise.

And when that happens, we stop even trying to listen to ourselves. In the next step – a downward step on a spiral staircase, I’m afraid – we finally stop talking to ourselves. Not talking to ourselves like mad people do, but conversations with the “inner selves” God has placed in our make-ups. Our creative selves. To stop that, I believe, is a sin.

When God created mankind, He made them in the likeness of God. (Genesis 5:1)

The question of listening to ourselves, to responding to the “creative spark,” is something that long interested me. My father, a polymath and omnivorous reader, encouraged me to draw and paint and write; to love music and art and history. But I came to realize that our earthly fathers and mothers only can cultivate such interests. It is our Heavenly Father who plants the seeds.

For a while, as a baby Christian, I was persuaded by some people that we are rebellious if we claim to create anything – that Only God can create, and that nothing can be created that is not of Him already. Pretty soon I realized that this is only a word game; and, when that game is played, it would rob the Lord of one of His great joys. He is Creator-God, yes; but when creating us in His image, He puts creativity within us!

If we are to be “imitators of Christ” in our standards and actions, so we can be imitators of God, and seek to create in His spirit; to dream and imagine, and dare. Attempting the likeness of God’s very creativity, we can seek perfection, look for beauty, and bless others.

We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10).

I humbly suggest that in God’s eyes, “good works” are more than sharing Christ and being charitable. It is good work indeed to be all that God intended you to be, to fulfill the creativity wherewith He graced you. To me, it comes close to insulting God to dismiss the talent and imagination you have – and Yes, you have gifts; we all do.

If you doubt, this is when you should stop and be especially quiet, and listen for the Holy Spirit, and to the voice of your creative self. My daughter Emily is tenfold more talented than I, and she draws and paints and writes, beautifully. She has proposed collaborating on a children’s book with her Pop – can anything honor a father more? She has dreamed, lately, of opening a restaurant. When life intrudes, as it will, creativity just sprouts elsewhere, like the pretty shoots and buds and reeds appear every spring, sometimes in the most surprising places. Emily now is designing a website about cooking and baking and serving others through kitchen-fun.

Another Hero of Creativity, and a poster child for quietly listening, obeying, and sharing God’s spark in her life, is Eva Cassidy. I only learned of her from friends in Ireland, where her acclaim commenced after her death. A singer born in the Washington DC area, she played in local clubs and made only a few recordings, partly because she loved so many genres she was hard to categorize; partly because she was intensely shy. But… she was warmed by that creative spark.

Her performances were astonishing. Just past 30 years of age she died, suddenly, of melanoma cancer. After a few years her tapes made it to England, where, played on the BBC, her songs suddenly topped the charts. Eventually her music sold millions, in the UK, Ireland, throughout Europe, and back in the USA.

I cannot listen to her without getting teary. Not just her voice and interpretations. But her example. She stopped and savored life, with the stereotypical obsession to be a superstar; but she sang to please others, where she was, with what she had. She listened; she loved God; she dared to step out. She sang because she loved to. She mastered her craft and surrendered to her heart – when, today, most of us try our hardest to do the opposite, often failing at both.

“How lucky am I,” she once said, “to just do what I love: play the guitar and sing songs.” How many of us can savor the satisfaction of doing what we really love… and really loving what we do?

There’s the pursuit, and often the attainment, of happiness. That is one way to please God. It is not selfish: it is doing what He has prepared you to do. Go thou and create!

+ + +

Eva Cassidy died in 1996. The Georgian/Northern Irish/British singer Katie Melua is about as old now as Eva when she died; they never met. However through the creative use of technology, they have performed duets, sensitive and powerful in their beauty. Eva’s “half” is from a serendipitous video-cam capture of a performance 20 years ago. Stop and watch and listen.

Click: What a Wonderful World

2-8-16

In a season, during this time, in American history, when traditions are being abandoned; myriads of concepts and lifestyles are “new normals”; and basic assumptions are no longer basic nor widely assumed… we had an American president, this week, who spoke at a mosque associated with the murderous Muslim Brotherhood. And the next day he argued before the annual National Prayer Breakfast about the “fundamental contributions” Islam has made to American society.

Obama did not mean current contributions, such as his usual focus on voting blocks, or even the negative effect of violence, terrorism, or such fears: those contributions. No, he maintained that Islam has been here from the start. Typically, few lovers of Christianity – or of history, or of common sense – spoke up in protest, there or afterwards in print or speeches. More astonishing, to me, than his bizarre claims.

It was a peculiar re-spinning of history, as if the Declaration of Independence were drafted by Abu-Ben Franklin, or the Constitution advocated by Al-Exandir Hamilton, or that presidents swore upon the Qu’uran or fought the Civil War to uphold Mohammed-sanctioned slavery.

His speech (not his first such with distortions of history and slights against Christianity) was more like a revision of the classic collection of fairy tales, “The Arabian Nights Entertainment,” rich in lore and imagination. His speech could embellish that book’s alternate title: “A Thousand and Two Nights.” Aladdin, Sinbad, Scheherazade, Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves and… Barack Hussein.

On this Presidents Day, in this month when we ought to discern the actual birthdays of two of America’s great sons, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, I would like to leave the hot burning desert of our national spiritual wandering, and return to the oasis of America’s Golden Age. Whether we can reestablish ourselves in that cultural oasis, or reclaim our unique birthright… or whether our moment as a blessed society in history’s grand sweep was, to continue the nomadic metaphor, ultimately a mere mirage.

Obama’s greatest display of ignorance, or cultural subversion, has been when he has decried claims of “American Exceptionalism,” as if people think they are special by virtue of their pulses or ZIP codes. American Exceptionalism does not refer to people; it refers to the American experiment of biblical foundations, systems of laws, recognitions of rights, devotion to liberty, a brilliant Constitution, and balance of rights and responsibilities. As a result of these unique factors… we have been blessed with gifted leaders; we have succeeded in correcting inevitable flaws; we have been generous-minded in uncountable ways; we have forged a nation out of many peoples. We have been blessed because we bless.

If we (loosely) turn an Arabic word and Islamic concept to English and the American context, the United States never was tempted to be a Caliphate because its foundation was as a democratic republic; citizenship was borne and maintained by loyalty, initiative, and merit; and its “Caliph” was the God of the Bible. We have stumbled, in my opinion, by the seduction of Empire – the deadly prescription of all of history’s great civilizations – but can redeem ourselves of that, and further distance ourselves from a Caliphate’s model.

Returning here to the presidents we should remember specially this month, I recall first something Lincoln said to a group of visiting ministers who advocated for firmer military measures – in effect that we should not be as concerned that “God is on our side,” as, always, that we be on God’s side.

This, from a supposed skeptic and one who rejected the Bible. Nothing is further from the Truth. Progressively and almost constantly during the last 15 months of his life, Abraham Lincoln read the Bible, quoted scripture, and appealed to God as much as, say, any preacher might have. His speeches and letters often were virtual sermons.

We recall Washington’s words:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports… And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Years after Lincoln’s death, his old friend from Kentucky days, Joshua Speed, recalled: “As I entered the room, near night, he was sitting near a window intently reading his Bible. Approaching him, I said: ‘I am glad to see you so profitably engaged.’ ‘Yes,’ said he, “I am profitably engaged.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘if you have recovered from your skepticism, I am sorry to say that I have not.’ Looking me earnestly in the face and placing his hand on my shoulder, he said: ‘You are wrong, Speed. Take all of this Book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.’”

To honor these amazing Americans – whose lives and service we must consider as gifts from God, appearing at the right time, in the right places, and doing the right things – I will quote another great American, Theodore Roosevelt:

“As a people, we are indeed beyond measure fortunate in the characters of the two greatest of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. Widely though they differed in externals, the Virginia landed gentleman and the Kentucky backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials; they were alike in the great qualities which made each able to render service to his nation and to all mankind such as no other man of his generation could or did render.

“Widely though the problems of to-day differ from the problems set for solution to Washington when he founded this nation, to Lincoln when he saved it and freed the slave, yet the qualities they showed in meeting these problems are exactly the same as those we should show in doing our work to-day.”

“There have been other men as great and other men as good; but in all the history of mankind there are no other two great men as good as these, no other two good men as great.”

Amen.

+ + +

Click: When I Get To the End Of the Way

11-30-15

There has been a firestorm of chatter – accusations, distortions, smears, confusion, explanations – lately about Dr Ben Carson and elements of his biography. Whether he had violent tendencies in his impoverished youth in inner-city Detroit. Whether he attacked, or wanted to, kids and even his mother. Whether, as an excelling young student, had the SAT scores he has spoken of, and whether he was told he would be a good candidate, with reason to feel confident, for the US Military Academy.

Et cetera. Dr Carson has noted that the rabid press has not pursued for almost a decade the mysteries and inconsistencies of Barack Obama’s past. Dr Carson’s modesty has not made an issue of the fact that all the calumny has been disproved – the charges have, one by one, been refuted by facts and history and eyewitnesses.

Myself, I am just as (not) surprised that the tsunami of questions at Dr Carson’s press conferences are not about, say, being named head of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. At the age of 33. The landmark surgeries he performed. Becoming a world-renowned, encyclopedia-named brain surgeon. The number of lives he saved. His dozens of honorary degrees. The work of his foundation, which encourages and supports academic excellence in youth. His Christian witness and talks, inspiring millions. Where are THOSE stories?

… in fact they are in Dr Carson’s book “Gifted Hands.” It is his autobiography, written years before he retired from medicine and turned to public service (what a term – he has been serving the public all his life!), and from which an inspiring movie was produced (Cuba Gooding Jr portrayed Carson).

And that brings me to why I am writing this essay. The “man in the news” I want to share is not Carson, here, but his co-author on “Gifted Hands,” Cecil Murphey. That book is being cited, mis-characterized, and everything in between.

Cecil Murphey is a friend of mine, if I may boast, and I would like to share some things about a man who, to many people at the moment, is just a name. Cec is the author or co-author of almost 150 books. He is the absolute master of co-authoring the works of notables, interesting people, and average but inspirational folks; as well those who are inexperienced or too busy for the nuts-and-bolts of putting a book together.

“…With Cecil Murphey” appears on the covers of life stories of Ben Carson, Don Piper (“90 Minutes in Heaven” and others), Shaun Alexander, Dino, et al., including many famous names on whose books he did not receive credit (which is a common practice in publishing).

He also assisted on Dr Carson’s book “Think Big – Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence.” He has also written scores of other books – Bible apologetics; romance mysteries; travel and self-help; devotionals; and inspirational books addressing addiction, recovery, loss, healing, caregiving, grief, exercise, aging, sex trafficking, loved ones with dementia, and living with sexual abuse. Specifically, sexual molestation from the family’s point of view, living with the victim; and from the victim’s own viewpoint. Cec himself suffered abuse as a child, and his own book (“When a Man You Love Was Abused”) on the subject was difficult to write, challenging to have published, and… is touching, powerful, and useful.

Behind the scenes (for many) – Cec has also written books on the craft of writing. He holds seminars and has mentored many writers; he is an encourager. He has appeared at many writer’s conferences (Marlene Bagnull’s Christian Writers Conference is where I was blessed to first meet Cec) and has – anonymously – donated thousands and thousands of dollars for scholarships to aspiring writers.

He has received honorary degrees, many awards, was a pastor in the Atlanta area, has served as a hospital chaplain, and was a missionary in Kenya for six years. He is a man of unbelievable energy (myself, I am worn out just listing a few of his accomplishments!), with a generous heart, tremendous talent, and – pertinent these days, as his name is being dragged into mud-slinging political smears – utter integrity. A man of God, serving God and humanity. No less than the similarly modest, gifted, and brilliant subject of certain of his books, Dr Ben Carson.

The Founding Fathers of the United States fully intended – and fervently prayed – that future leaders would arise not from a permanent political class but from the general population. They would be farmers, and lawyers, and shopkeeps, and… doctors; they would serve as law-makers for a spell, representing their neighbors, always feeling responsible to them and obligated to serve them. And then they would return to their farms, their offices, their shops, their patients. Citizen Patriots.

Dr Carson understands that vision, and fulfills that aspiration. He lives it. And Cecil Murphey, the man who wrote Dr Carson’s story almost 20 years ago, understood it too, and communicated. In the same manner, he is a journeyman writer with his own Gifted Hands.

Every news item has a back-story. Cecil Murphey is the story behind a lot of other stories, and the stories of a lot of impressive people. There is a good chance that you have read a best-selling book he helped to write, or ghost-wrote, without your being aware of it. I am glad to share his story here, and proud to have him as a friend. He is also a Christian worker who is a Citizen Patriot serving his nation.

+ + +

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune will not deter Dr Ben Carson as he seeks the presidency and, perhaps someday, even higher positions; nor Cecil Murphey, whose pen is a mighty sword of God. Here, a contemporary song of Christian encouragement, sung by Joni Eareckson Tada.

Click: Alone Yet Not Alone

Cecil Murphey

11-23-15

An ironic side-effect of the current wave of bombings and attacks against Christians by fringe-group Mohammedan jihadis is the revival of disputes between Christians. Not Moslems vs Christians; but Christians vs Christians.

On the airwaves, in churches, on street corners, over dinner tables, proponents range and rage. Put aside the ancient debates about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin: I would not be surprised if even those angels are arguing as they dance on the heads of pins.

What would Jesus do? Should we stop the flow of refugees? Are some of them “refujihadis”? Should persecuted Christians from the Middle East receive preference? Are we being bigots as we express wariness of Moslems? Do we invite slaughter on our doorsteps? Isn’t it about who we ARE as a people? What is wrong about wanting to preserve our inheritance and traditions? And so forth.

It seems certain that there is not one answer to each question. There might be no good answers. They might all have bad answers. Maybe the choices of the Christian West, speaking generically of our background and heritage, are Bad and Worse. Challenges that shift and morph are difficult to solve wisely. Enemies who declare their blood-lust hatred but refuse to expose themselves are complicated adversaries, surely.

Theoretical, even theological, responses, in the face of secular and Christian dissenters with whom we contend, are influenced by putting ourselves in the places of persecuted refugees (I hope none of us identifies with embedded terrorists)… or innocent potential victims.

There are many aphorisms in folk wisdom, which we all revere, that nevertheless contradict themselves. “He who hesitates is lost,” yes; but “Look before you leap.” Life lessons whose wisdom, sometimes, is difficult to discern. The Bible is no different – in fact it contains the pre-eminent life lessons.

Yet we have Jesus adjuring uncharitable listeners with the parable of the Good Samaritan… but told His disciples to tend to the Jewish “lost sheep” before the Samaritans. He tells us to “turn the other cheeks” but overturned money-changers’ tables and called people “fools, blind guides, hypocrites, murderers, brood of vipers, tombs with rotting corpses inside, hell’s offspring,” etc. Was Jesus inconsistent? No, God cannot lie, and Bible scholarship relies on scripture confirming scripture – contexts, cases, prayerfully perceiving God’s will.

So it is with “secular” issues… many of which, today, are not so secular after all.

In 1988 I took my family on a vacation to Europe, landing in Paris and proceeding through France to Germany. In 1988-89, the Eiffel Tower was painted a tan color that looked dull up-close, but at night, in floodlights, gave it a look of pure gold. It was for the 100th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World’s Fair.

One evening we took a boat ride around Paris on the Seine, watched a fireworks display, then went up the Eiffel Tower to view the city, and for a late snack. It is not a one elevator-ride express, ground level to top: there are platforms with shops and restaurants. But we decided to go all the way to the top, and then walk down the iron-rail steps a level or two.

My daughter Emily, who was only five, suddenly froze in fear halfway down one of the stages. It was hard to get her to move… until we suggested that we all hold hands and walk down together. Some people joined us (including an Australian couple we met again on a tour bus in Germany a week later!).

At one point, Emily smiled and looked up and said, “If we all hold hands, we can do ANYTHING!”

That is true today as well. In Paris, certainly. And all over the world. And… in our own neighborhoods.

Before we can join hands with our enemies, even potential enemies, we must learn to join hands with one another. But does it seem, these days, that this is the more difficult challenge?

+ + +

Click: Jesus, Hold My Hand

10-19-15

Later this month we will observe the 157th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt’s birth. One of the greatest presidents of the United States; the “Most Interesting American”; and, often forgotten, one of the most devout and observant Christians to have served as Chief Executive.

TR frequently quoted Bible verses (and titled two of his approximately 50 books from Biblical passages); he volunteered to teach Sunday School while a student at Harvard; he often delivered impromptu sermons when requested at churches he visited (and seldom missed Sunday worship throughout his life, whether in the wild west or in the White House); and, despite higher-profile and more lucrative offers after he retired from the presidency, he became Contributing Editor of The Outlook, a modest weekly Christian opinion journal.

His faith, of course, was “manly,” in the parlance of an earlier age – bold, unapologetic, encouraging. He once said, in an address to the newly formed Gideon Band: “The Christianity that counts is the kind that is carried into a man’s life. The man who does ordinary work well is working for the Lord. I do not like to see a slack man…. If you do not find in a man any outward manifestations of the Spirit, I am inclined to doubt if it ever has been in him. I like to see fruits…”

In the same manner he also spoke at a church dedication: “In business and in work, if you let Christianity stop as you go out of the church door, there is little righteousness in you. You must behave to your fellowmen as you would have them behave to you. You must have pride in your work if you would succeed. A man should get justice for himself, but he should also do justice to others. Help a man to help himself, but do not expend all your efforts in helping a man who will not help himself.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite Bible verse was Micah 6:8 – “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Imagine this today, but in 1917 Roosevelt wrote an article for the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, and the subject was “10 Reasons Men Should Go To Church.” Imagine a president of our time writing for magazines as diverse as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Outlook (and National Geographic and the children’s magazine St Nicholas and The American Historical Review and Cosmopolitan and The New York Times and American Museum Journal and…). And imagine a president today exclaiming Christian faith. Frequently. But to TR every venue was a pulpit, and a bully one at that.

Words for then, words for now: here is his article on Why men should attend church.

In the actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.

Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength, which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.

There are enough holidays for most of us that can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday making. Sundays differ from other holidays, among other ways, in the fact that there are 52 of them every year. On Sunday, go to church.

Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he strays from church, he does not spend his time in good works or lofty meditation. He looks over the colored supplement of the newspaper.

He may not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate, he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing, humdrum, and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.

He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss.

He will probably take part in singing some good hymns.

He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good quiet neighbors. He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard churchgoing as rather a soft performance.

I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.

The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.

Think about Theodore Roosevelt on October 27… and then think about the things one of our greats president thought about!

+ + +

Judy Collins and the Boy’s Choir of Harlem, at the U S Capitol:

Click: Amazing Grace