Monday Morning Music Ministry

8-10-20

I stink at math, but nevertheless – or maybe because of that fact – I pay attention to all the times people throw around the “one per cent” figure. We hear it a lot.

“The one per cent” of people ought to pay more to government. “The one per cent” controls our lives. “The one percent” is richer than 80 per cent of us; or whatever.

Almost every time you hear these charges, or this “one per cent” theme, it is not part of a compliment paid to the one per cent who pay more taxes, roughly, than the 99 per cent do. The one per cent creates many of the jobs for the 99 per cent, however. To resent the one per cent often means resenting success in life. Someone else’s success.

The sin of envy is little different than the sin of greed.

The thrust of the “one per cent” prattle these days is to assert that the rest of us are powerless, hopeless, nearly worthless.

In the United States of America none of us is any of those “-less” things. In America change is possible. Slaves were freed, women got the vote, and rights have been extended and affirmed. Slow, maybe, but always sure.

Are we “there” yet?

I have a clue for you: We will never be “there.” Whatever is good about democracy, whatever is true about progress, the value sometimes is as much in the process as the goal.

The “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence I believe is seldom understood correctly. “Happiness” surely was meant not to represent enjoyable vacations in the hammock, but a state of justice; a sense of equality as all men were created; a savoring of liberty, under a system of laws that gave practical meaning to “freedom.”

Then, the word “Pursuit.” They could have advocated Happiness by itself, or made a list of the blessings of liberty. But they wanted us to engage in the process.

Return to that “one per cent,” the following questions are valid for the one per cent and the 99 per cent: How has America practiced democracy for so long and now, seemingly, is convinced that being “right” depends on being in the majority? … of letting polls convince us of what to believe? … of Political Correctness dictating to us what to think, what to hate, what to feel guilty about?

More so, we are talking about the major institutions of society turning anti-American. We are talking about organizations self-defining as Marxist calling for the overthrow of the government (which once was called “treason”). We are talking about mobs of criminals breaking into stores, looting, defacing buildings and monuments, attacking police and setting fire to their cars and stations.

We are talking about mayors and governors siding with these creatures, even when the mobs’ manifestos declare war on wider neighborhoods and the suburbs.

That this continues is not a symptom of polite indulgence, or patience. It is worse than cultural impotence. First or last gasp, we are in the midst of social apostasy, a world-system that has rotted from within. Heresy has planted its seeds, and the roots seem to strangle the other roots, those of our raising. The heresy challenges not only Biblical truths, but all the previous assumptions about Western civilization, American exceptionalism, and neighborly goodwill.

America might be ready for a radical civic overhaul. Maybe a new Constitution. Perhaps the pandemic, the economic crisis, the showdown with China, the accelerated technological changes – perhaps these all will combine to bring about major changes in the way we live every day, and shop, and learn; perhaps such adjustments are overdue and inevitable.

Perhaps. But one thing that is not a surprising flash-point of economics or race relations or radical politics. It has preceded, and underlies, everything else.

It is the decline of faith in America.

We don’t need polls. Church attendance alone is not a barometer, because many established churches themselves have lost faith and strayed from their moorings. Statistics about crime and divorce rates and addiction and abuse and suicide rates? They are effects, not causes.

Christians are fond of praying, or intending to pray, for revival. “God can work miracles”… except when He chooses not to. Nowhere in the Bible does He force revival on an apostate people.

God has surprised His people, often, with blessings, but there is no Biblical record of the Lord rewarding sin and rebellion.

So… have we run out of time to act? And redeem the culture? Aha – that’s where my deficiencies at math are a blessing.

If we see ourselves as the new “one per centers”… I like the odds.

“One person, with God at our side, constitutes a majority.”

Old Testament prophets were so challenged; and learned its truth. Luther claimed this; and John Knox; and Brother Andrew.

And we can remember what Abraham Lincoln said – he whose statues still stand in our parks, and in our hearts – that “it is not so important that God be on our side; what is important is that we be on God’s side.”

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This video clip is unique: a short film produced by The Christophers service ministry when America when in a similar crisis today’s. We meet Father James Keller in the living room of Jack Benny, of all people; and other stars of the day discuss their concern for the values of America, the Bible, and the Declaration of Independence.

Click: You Can Change the World

5-18-20

Occasionally things happen in history – I mean catastrophic turns – where the old saying about inability to see the forest because of trees, is taken a step further. These rare moments are not events like an invasion; neither a slow evolution, say, from serfdom to democracy; nor the relentless spread of an epidemic across the globe. A creeping four weeks is no different than a speedy month, is it? – and that is not the type of catastrophic turn I address.

When I was in college I had a professor who taught World History not by chronology nor region, but by category topics. They all were fascinating. One class looked at world history – different eras, different societies – through the lens of epidemiology. How did diseases, plagues, and pandemics change history and the course of civilizations? They certainly did, and often. In the 1600s a plague killed one-third of some European lands; the Spanish flu a century ago reportedly killed 100-million souls around the world. More American soldiers died of the flu in World War I than died in battle.

In those times, all through history, plagues were plagues and influenza was influenza. I want us to consider the possibility that our current situation might be a “virus-plus.” Is there an invisible enemy, a coronavirus? It sure seems so, and many have died of diagnosed conditions; I am not a flat-earther.

But this might be the world’s first plague where the fear of it causes more serious problems than the infection itself. Yes, deaths. But our spinning globe has virtually ground to a halt. The harm represented in that metaphor will be seen by future generations, if we survive, as perhaps worse than simple, cold death statistics. Families, careers, livelihoods, social disruptions, international anarchy, countries losing their freedoms, even wars might be the next chapters.

All this we know. And death vs disaster arguments must yield to logic and a larger sympathy. Many people are gripped by the belief that mere citizens of various nations are not threatened as much as the actual human species is threatened. Really?

I have become convinced that over-reaction has replaced caution among our leaders; and that panic has replaced prudence among our neighbors. Scratch a liberal official with rule-making power and a totalitarian pops out. In my state the governor decreed that DIY stores can sell hammers but cannot sell paint. In many states you can openly operate a marijuana shop, but are forbidden to hold church services. Neighborhood clinics have to restrict services medical exams, but abortions are allowed in those types of clinics.

This is the first epidemic in history with an agenda.

That is not the fault of the fuzzy little virus.

Your mind is not affected if you can wonder at the implausible and changing stories about the origin and the rotating lies as the virus spread across the earth.

You may well wonder at the timing, the US in a healthy and dominant position, dropped to its knees… as an election approaches. How – and why – we went from the healthiest economy in world history, to 1930s-depth depression. In weeks.

You should wonder why politicians welcome illegal immigrants, untested; and tolerate feces-covered vagrants by the thousands, yet you and I, law-abiding hermits, have to mask-up, stand in lines, submit to testing and testing.

You should question, as my friend Sarah Phillips recently did, about the massive imposition of imminent DNA collections, retinal and finger scans, cell-phone tracking, and smiling assurances from Bill Gates and other leaders (elected by whom?) that every detail of our activities – plus that of our bloodstreams through mandatory vaccinations – will soon be seen by people we don’t know. Calm down.

It is very possible – I am persuaded very likely – that we are under attack. Not by guns or bombs. Nor even by those furry viruses.

Am I being paranoid? That is not my style, usually… but even paranoiacs can indeed have people conspiring against them. Ah: conspiracy theories. I have a friend who recently ridiculed skeptics as being “conspiracy theorists.” In the same message – I kid you not – he floated his belief that President Trump is signaling an army of goons (?) by the colors and directions of the stripes on his ties every day.

I have a happy suggestion, if you have read this far and think I am crazy. There are some things that may safely distract you from deadly coronas:

* If you are alarmed by death tolls, spend some your precious emotional energy on ending the drug epidemic – yes, epidemic – in this country. That, you can affect. Straighten up the kids under your roof. Maybe drug cartels will dry up, too, with no customers – what a concept.

* If you are concerned about death tolls, think about the fact that hospitals are restricting, or forbidding, “elective” matters like cancer operations, mastectomies, scans, and other procedures — or patients are encouraged to self-deny — and people die. The stats about fewer cancer diagnoses, screenings, and diabetes complications these recent months are nothing to celebrate. Our masters decree that we shuffle morbidities, a fake-numbers game. Because the side-effects of shuttered businesses and lockdowns include more domestic violence and suicides.

* Stop acting like pickpockets, larding corona laws and regulations with back-door funding for abortions and legal weed and gun confiscation. Be honest, and lose in the courts of public opinion, if you dare.

* Resist freeing convicted felons from prisons and arresting hair dressers, pastors, and barbers, throwing them in jail.

* Show some outrage – if you feel any – about policies that leave hospital ships empty but pour infected people into nursing home beds. Wake up to the fact that in some areas, 80 per cent of “virus” deaths are in nursing homes.

* Realize that hospitals are encouraged to check COVID-19 on death forms, even when primary causes were other, and prior, conditions.

* Google a copy of the Constitution. Read it, and the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments. Check off the rights that have been violated recently, and violated with coercion. There will be many… and there will not be fine-print exclusions for influenza. Remind yourself that reportedly more people die in a normal “flu season” than have yet died from COVID-19. Remind yourself a second time of this fact. We don’t stop the world every flu season.

Finally, among those rights that have been violated – and politicians continue to ramp it up – are Freedom of Assembly (allowing crowds of… how many???); Freedom of Speech (social media routinely censors us at increasing rates); the Right to Bear Arms (laws are proposed to restrict gun ownership – because of a virus???)…

And. Freedom of Religion. Christians, People of the Book, are not dopes. We don’t sneeze on each other, even in normal times. We render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s – like respecting suggestions from experts and elected officials. Sure. We also live with consequences. We trust the Lord; we trust our God-given intelligence.

And we cherish our God-given rights.

Churches ordered to close? Worshipers drive to parking lots, listen in cars with closed windows to their church’s radio services, hungry for a minimal sense of community – and are arrested?

If the British Redcoats, those civilized gents 250+ years ago, had tried any such thing, Americans would have said three words: Lock and Load.

Yes, holding our Bibles and guns, Christians and patriots have to keep their spines from being infected by this “virus-plus”; we have to be discerning and consider whether this is all just a “Plandemic,” as I recently wrote; we must calculate the risks of responsible activities – as with a thousand other daily activities in life – and maybe we should regard the incessant and absurd carping of visible, not invisible, enemies in our midst…

And take our country back. The current epidemic is bad enough. A second pandemic — infecting our spirit — would be catastrophic.

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Click: I Know Who Holds Tomorrow

7-4-16

Our recent essay concluded with a question posed by the successful Brexit vote, wherein the United Kingdom voted to end its membership in the European Union, and the certainty that many other countries soon will do the same. That question is this: If the current mode of virtually unbridled democracy had existed on July 4, 1776, how different would that world, and our world, be?

Men gathered from 13 colonies in Philadelphia to air and share their grievances. The Mother Country had dismissed their concerns, levied taxes, and arbitrarily stationed troops throughout the colonies. An emerging people – a nation of newly minted, self-conscious Americans – had chased off their lands the armies and representatives of the Netherlands, France, and Spain; pacified or cowed numerous native tribes who previously had squabbled among themselves for the same pieces of earth; and generally adopted English as the common and legal language.

In short time there arose common bonds of affection within the colonies, also trade and “commercial intercourse,” and the shared values of daily life’s fabric. Many “Americans” believed that the Crown and Parliament owed deference and special status to these British colonies. So did some prominent Britons, like Edmund Burke, whose “Conciliation With the Colonies” is still a literary classic. But London answered with less, not more, deference.

Eventually the leading figures of politics, government, business, trade, and society gathered in Philadelphia. They knew it was not to compose another letter, another petition, to the Crown. They had schooled themselves in biblical history, Greek democracy, Roman law, the Magna Carta and English Common Law, and philosophers of the Enlightenment. They were a remarkable collection of intellects, representing yet other luminaries of American history who did not attend these sessions, but supported the deliberations.

Those deliberations were no mystery; there was no shroud of secrecy, no imminent surprises. Their councils were idealistic… but grim.

The men who gathered were not, strictly speaking, suicidal. Yet they all declared – they so agreed and announced to the world – to “pledge their lives, their fortunes, their scared honor” to declare independence, to formalize nationhood.

Independence. It is a word that should still cause inchoate swelling of pride and even defiance in the descendants of those rebels, 240 years later. It is, strange but true, the motivation of the Brexit campaigners in the UK, and the nationalist movements in a dozen other European nations right now. The establishment press and political elites are trying to argue for 2-out-of-3; or claiming that voters were unprepared for the vote; or… any desperate evocations they can muster of King Canute of legend: the futile inability to order back the crashing ocean waves.

Ironically, King George III is reincarnated in the Bureaucrats of Brussels. It is the critique of Kafka and the jibes of Jefferson, however, that animate the workers and middle classes of traditional Europe these days. The soul of Sobieski, martyrdom of Martel and others who, over 15 centuries, battled to keep Europe Christian and white. But today we remember the Declaration of Independence.

The question I have posed is not rhetorical: if the document that was introduced to England and the world on July 4, 1776, in all its literary and ideological brilliance, had not been a manifesto and call to arms, but rather a Brexit-like Referendum, what would have happened? If Parliament had bound itself to the results of such initiatives, well… just think.

Historians agree that the colonies of ’76 were fairly divided in their passions: roughly one-third each loyal to the Crown, favoring independence, and indifferent. Alexander the Great felt no such restrictions; nor the Roman legions; nor waves of conquering Vikings, Huns, Mongols, Vandals, barbarians, Saracens. The European imperial powers for centuries enforced their worldwide hegemonies by means ranging from suzerainty to brutality.

Athens would have voted to be free of the Spartans; India attempted plebiscites against British rule; Zionists resorted to terrorism to establish Israel and in turn Palestinians employ bombs when ballots are not available.

Let us return to July 4. If the Declaration had been a Writ of Attainder against the King (more pacific Colonists did try to cast it so), there might not have been battles of Monmouth and Saratoga, nor the stirring examples of Valley Forge. No Yorktown, no Lafayette or Steuben, no heroes like George Washington. We cannot know these things.

But we do know that a list of grievances, not a declaration of war or even a “declaration of independence” was nailed to a church door in a German village in 1517. Martin Luther’s 95 “theses” were, basically, opinions, complaints, and pleas for reform within the Roman Catholic church. Luther was a priest in that Church, and had no desire to start a revolution.

But Christian reformers, German princes, and God Himself had other visions. The Protestant Revolution, in substance and in effects, has been as profound as the famous battles at Thermopylae, Marathon, Hastings, and Waterloo.

But I am not asking us, even on July 4, to turn to history books. Let us turn to our Bibles. Scripture tells us that we are pilgrims and strangers in this world – indeed a world of woe, a “vale of tears” – but we are Citizens of Heaven. Nevertheless, here we are now, and we are commanded to be, if not “of” this world, to be obedient residents in it. Uncomfortable passages for Tea Partiers of 1775 and today alike, but we “render unto Caesar” and recognize the Divine Right of Kings; and read that God ordains the positions of those in positions of power.

More dilemmas, especially for Christians in democracies. And more reason for us to search the scriptures and seek spiritual guidance. All the time. To pray, not just over jobs or romances, but in EVERY question affecting our daily lives… and our country’s future.

We should adopt the mindset that every choice between candidates is also a spiritual question. Every ballot item – referendum – presents us with spiritual choices. Electing representatives who decide questions of education policy; judges who will rule on abortion; presidents who send us to wars, or not – these are all decisions that God would have us consider prayerfully.

“Consider prayerfully” is not an empty cliché – well, yes it is, if we allow that. The problems in America virtually all stem from Christians surrendering their prerogatives. We have lost our way, insecure in our faith, ignorant of our heritage. Otherwise we would be throwing bums out of office, overturning noxious laws and regulations, and storming courthouses.

Whether it is time for a Convention of States (as per Article Five of the Constitution), civil disobedience, or armed resistance if, God forbid, things get that bad, Christian Patriots should think about a new Declaration of Independence. Read the old one, write a new one!

Better yet, Christians should act according to a Declaration of DEpendence… dependence upon God Almighty. Among other things, that will make America great again.

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Click: Looking For a City

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