Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-27-17

If you have been visiting with this Junior Jeremiah of late, you know that I am persuaded that our problems in America, in the West, in the church, are well nigh intractable. I am afraid that we have slipped down the slippery slope, and probably are close to swirling down the tubes.

God is sovereign, of course; and many of us pray for revival. Fervently. But logic, not to mention Biblical history, argues against spontaneous moral regeneration. Does God impose rectitude on a people who are not so inclined? Is it likely that our culture, en masse, will awake some Monday morning, saying, “OK, enough of several generals of decline! Let’s all return to being moral, polite, just, considerate, chaste, responsible, and religious”?

The Law of Civilization and Decay (posited in the brilliant but largely forgotten book of that title by Brooks Adams, 1895) is unfolding in history’s latest crumbling culture, our post-Christian West. The statistics about our condition are dispositive… and daunting.

Yet as a Christian, if not otherwise an optimist, I do not prescribe resignation. As Christ’s representatives in the world, we will go down, if we do go down, fighting. Christians have already won in the sense that we are joint heirs with Christ to the Eternal Home that is ours. But to fulfill His Great Commission, for the sake of our children, and for the lost souls of the world who need to hear the Truth… we fight on.

The signs of “progress” around us can be mirages. Communism largely has been defeated, but repressive governments have not. We have become a people who brag about liberating people’s minds and bodies, yet millions willingly enslave themselves to drugs and destructive ideologies. Including folks in our very midst.

At home, we have built a society where “sex sells” — libido-drenched imagery in movies, TV, ads, commercials, music, entertainment. And then we should be surprised when people conform their behavior to sexual impulses?

Overseas, our government cuddles up to China, which this week raided yet more Christian churches, jailing worshipers and ordering the installation of portraits of Xi Jingpin. “Acting on American values” — which are…?

The “progress” we applaud is an opiate, calming our sense to the Pentecost of Calamity that is coming in this world.

So. How do we fight these trends?

There is a crisis of the Old Order. We, as citizens – albeit pilgrims and strangers in this world – are stuck with Democracy. Can I mean that? Yes, I choose my words. Democracy in many ways has come to mean a corrupt web of favoritism, corruption, and deceit. Broken promises, cynical use of the System. Secret alliances between Big Money, Big Media, and Big Politics. Running up IOUs to fall upon our children. Consensus-building by pandering.

In the same manner I have also realized that Capitalism has become our enemy, having been transformed into Finance Capitalism, Crony Capitalism. We instead should embrace Free Enterprise, a nice-sounding brand name for our economics, but which scarcely ever has been practiced.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said that Democracy is the worst form of government… unless you consider the alternatives.

A clever aphorism, but it has the practicality of a sieve when we need to bail the sinking lifeboat. If we recognize that we are in a spiritual crisis, it is a spiritual solution that we need. Political action? God bless activists… but we must look beyond. There are three traditional areas we turn to these days, each more difficult than the next.

The first: CHANGE LAWS. Especially in this system of pandering, of government by propaganda, of Big Lies and False Promises… the cry to “make things right” by new laws is the biggest lie of all. Laws are not magic wands. Prohibition did not work; drug laws are a farce; and gun regulations are chimeras. However, people look to Washington for salvation… in futility.

The second: CHANGE MINDS. Here is where Big Media plays its game. Background players and manipulators control the debate… and, we see increasingly, they monitor, manipulate, and censor internet communication and cell-phone activity. We think we may persuade (and, theoretically, we still can, in small ways) but appeals to reason are merely tolerated, and do not thrive, these days.

The third: CHANGE HEARTS. Aha. The simplest route? Sit down; talk and share; appeal to morality and self-interest; cite ethics and God’s Word. The “hot button” issues – guns, abortion, heresy, homosexuality, war, abuse, divorce, greed, immigration, workplace discrimination, drugs – can’t we all “get along”?

All you have to do in each of these topics is cite a “higher authority”; for Christians it would be the Bible. Secularists would fall back on philosophers. Changing hearts of opponents in such arenas should be the easiest way to begin changing hearts, no? Laws get rusty, and peoples’ minds change. And such remedies are seductive: easy to try, relatively easy to apply, and… very easy to forget. We can wipe our hands, and brush the dust from our sandals, and move on.

No, the hardest of all methods to bring change to our world is to change hearts.

It is the surest way, too. But to change hearts we must be committed, be earnest, be persistent, and be sincere. We must, if necessary, leave some our OWN hearts with those with whom we contend.

Take the current sexual-predator scandals. We can appeal to the Law: “We will make it (more) illegal to do such things.” We can appeal to the Mind: “Wise up! You might get caught!” Or we can appeal to the Heart: “It is wrong. You are harming someone. You disgrace your family. You are displaying a lack of self-respect. You are better than that! It is a sin. Repent, seek forgiveness.”

“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

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Click: The Wide Gate

1-13-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click: Too Much Stuff