Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-11-18

This has been a week of tremendous news, emotional and important for everyone on every side of (seemingly) every issue. International diplomatic breakthroughs; daring trade confrontations; history-setting economic news at home.

“Winners” (for instance, those happy with the Supreme Court’s decision) should refrain from hyperactive victory dances. These days, spiking the ball can bounce back in our faces! We should prayerfully be grateful, but respect the debate if well-intentioned.

Of course, these days, well-intentioned discourse seems rare. Jack Phillips, the decorator at the modest mom-and-pop Masterpiece Cakeshop of Lakewood, Colorado, is not a raging bigot who barred homosexuals from entering his shop, as his detractors claim. Very few people can even cite his denomination, if he has such membership, and ascribe anything more than his fidelity to the Bible. (Many people do not know the origin of “Masterpiece” as his shop’s name. It is Ephesians 2:10 – “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago.”)

But Jack’s policy at Masterpiece was based on conscience, informed by faith. The modest, flour-splotched baker is actually in the pantheon of Heroes of Conscience alongside martyrs of the early Church and Reformation; Luther; persecuted Christians around the world today, both notable and anonymous.

He is consistent, and willing to sacrifice for his beliefs. If that means closing on Sundays, so be it. If that means declining to decorate cakes with off-color themes or requests for sexy or violent images (his artistic talent could tackle any challenge, if he chose), or Halloween or homosexual messages; if his “bottom line” is decreased, so be it.

Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby close on Sundays too. In fact if Jack’s standards reduced him to selling only a few cupcakes to class reunions, he would proceed. God has given Jack a talent… and a conscience. He does not need to be loved by everybody, but he would like to be respected by everybody. And he does not NEED to be attacked by anybody, yet within hours of politely declining to design a homosexual message on the icing on a cake, the attacks started – organized protests; thousands of robo-computer e-mails; automated phone messages; vandalism; etc. In the name, you understand, of “love.”

My friend Penny Carlevato, also of Lakewood and in whose home we recently shared thoughts and lasagna with Jack, made a clever observation, that America was built on religious liberty, and has succeeded in large measure because of it; but ironically those who hate religion and our cultural heritage now use that freedom to attack the traditional foundations.

Jack and his family endured emotional distress, a down-sizing of his business, and other privations during the years of these trials (approximately six years). The Colorado Civil Rights Commission would have forced him to express messages contrary to his values; to accept a set of rules written by some external moral arbiters; to force his workers to undergo training sessions in “sensitivity”; regularly to report compliance to a state agency.

Some of his friends were slightly downcast as the nature of the Court’s “narrow” decision became clear – that the conflict between conscience and public accommodation was not solved. News flash – at the current stage of democracy’s evolution, it never will be solved; get ready.

No, the “narrow” aspect is that the Commission, on the first rung of this long ladder, exposed the virulent anti-Christian bias of two commissioners. Religion led to slavery, Jack was lectured before he could open his mouth; and Christianity was responsible for the holocaust.

The gist of the Court’s “narrow” ruling is that the government in this instance was NOT impartial; exposed a very uneven playing field; displayed prejudice against people of faith.

THAT, friends, is actually a silver lining of the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. Because of it, every local board of self-righteous commissioners, every tyrannical town council, every petty school board, every legislative committee, every gaggle of unelected bureaucrats high and low, have been put on notice that they cannot act arbitrarily and imperiously. They cannot display bias against religious traditions, against people of conscience, against Christians exercising their faith.

In the future, at least for awhile, these little Big Brothers will think twice before imposing their secular agendas – their revolutionary stink-bombs, their Rules for Radicals – on the rest of us.

The martyrs’ hall of fame, those who died and those who fought for individual conscience, and the essential importance of one’s faith, has a new figure, as noted above.

If the media try to ask – “Such a big deal over WEDDING CAKES?” and “Is this really a Constitutional crisis, led by a neighborhood baker?” Let us recall what James Abram Garfield said when he was elected president. He left his position as an elder in his local church in Ohio to move to Washington, and he said: “I resign the highest office in the land to become president of the United States.”
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Click: I Shall Not Be Moved

12-15-14

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

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

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

We believe, and we want to believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I speak of moral alchemy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: I Shall Not Be Moved