Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-21-13

On January 20, 2013, less than a month shy of the day we met 40 years ago, Nancy Marschall was taken off life support. My wife was a strong Christian, an amazing mother, and possessor of a modest personality that everyone loved. Her shyness masked a robust faith that touched and inspired uncountable people. Many of us would have defined ourselves by the ailments she endured: a diabetic since 13, she sustained several heart attacks, a heart and kidney transplant, thyroid cancer, legal blindness, toe amputation, broken bones, celiac disease, several strokes, dialysis, and, last week, a ruptured stomach ulcer that saw her lose 14 units of blood, outpacing transfusions. She experienced miraculous healings, and some healings by doctors’ hands. Other healings, she is experiencing right now.

For a long time she was unable to exercise, as you might imagine. But she exercised her faith. While waiting 18 weeks for a heart and kidney transplant, she overcame her shyness to pray with patients waiting with her at Temple University Hospital. Then she held services. I assisted, and she recruited our children Heather, Ted, and Emily, to participate in the services and room visitations, and pray with our counterparts in recipients’ families. Our faith was strengthened too as we dealt with heartache, unanswerable questions, grief, and shared joy. We witnessed healings, and helped lead people to conversions, in a ministry that lasted more than six years.

I could write many tributes to Nancy… or share how her life was a tribute to her Savior. Rather, recalling the “great cloud of witnesses” in Heaven who watch us, according to Hebrews chapter 11, I will quote from one of the many articles and media stories about Nancy, additional witnesses so to speak, and her affect on people on behalf of Christ.

“Giving Heart To Those Awaiting A New Life At Temple University Hospital, Nancy Marschall Leads Weekly Prayers For Patients On The Heart-Transplant List. Not Long Ago, She Was In Their Place,” was the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 28, 1999. By Ellen O’Brien:

Nancy Marschall got a new heart and a new kidney on Valentine’s Day, 1996. Naturally, this is not something she would forget.

But Marschall does more than remember, when she wakes up every morning, that she’s still around at 45, and that – yes, again – she has a whole new day to live. Once a week for the last three years… she goes back to the seventh floor of Temple University Hospital, where she spent what may have been the longest 18 weeks of her life – the floor known officially as the Heart-Failure Care Unit….

“We’re just trying to open ourselves up to what God would have us do,” Marschall said, by way of explanation. “He’s just leading us.” Last Sunday, 14 patients and family members piled in to the prayer service, filling the little room to bursting – white, African American, West African and Asian, all of them speaking of life in very, very simple terms. “Our health is out of our hands. There’s nothing we can do any more,” Marschall said.

But still, she said, there is God to rely on: “He’s here. He’s with us, and nobody can separate us.” She was sitting in a wheelchair near the door, with one foot propped up in a plaster cast. She’s had diabetes for 30 years, which can numb the extremities, so when she broke a bone in her foot, she continued to limp around on it for an extra week, unaware of the injury.

The room where the Marschalls lead their service is small and modern, high off Broad Street, with a line of windows that curve into a bay. Three philodendron plants hang like leafy green globes in the sunlight…. When Marschall was waiting for her heart, patients couldn’t leave their rooms without an intravenous pole – and a hospital nurse to roll a heart-monitor along beside them. But not all the change is good: Now the wait is growing longer because the number of heart-failure cases is increasing every year while the number of heart donors has stayed the same.

“When people would go down for transplant, we’d say we’d pray for them. But did it really happen? . . . I just felt God speaking to me. And Rick had the same call,” Marschall said. “We’re talking about Christ, and the love of God, and the change He can have in our lives,” Marschall said. She added that she prays for guidance in this new missionary role: “I don’t want to mislead people.”

“We try to point everything to a better relationship with Christ,” Rick Marschall added. “We’re Christians, we’re not deists [or mere feel-good cheerleaders].”

In fact, until the transplant, the Marschalls attended services at the Pentecostal Christian Life Center in Bensalem every Sunday, and they still consider themselves part of that congregation, although they’re otherwise engaged now on Sunday mornings. … “I think we’re just like everybody,” Marschall said. “When there are things or burdens upon you, you tend to pray more. When things are going well, you tend to do it less.” Personally, she thinks this is a human trait that God understands.

At Sunday’s prayer service, the last hymn was “Amazing Grace,” but the tape that the Marschalls had brought along – to guide the impromptu choir – failed to include the second verse. This was a verse that Rick Marschall found particularly meaningful. As the tape rolled to the end, he urged everybody on: “Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come. . . .”

The sound of singing rose, strong and healthy and enthusiastic. You could hear it out in the hall…

Out in the halls, indeed. And far beyond. For the first time in decades, Nancy is now healed and whole and pain-free. I imagine she will look around Heaven for her granddaughter and our own stillborn baby, and the many people she inspired through the years, unless, of course, they see her first. In my picture of Heaven, all those wonderful reunions will have to wait a moment until Jesus stops hugging her as He whispers, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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Christians often refer to death in a biblical way. It is not a euphemism like “passing away,” but the literal situation – “home-going.” Those of us who remain cannot fail to be a little jealous of sick people who become well, the lonely who embrace their Savior, the troubled who find peace. It is the home prepared for us, a place with many mansions, joy unspeakable and full of glory. This picture finds musical expression in the Negro spiritual based on the tune of the second movement of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” Performed here, with beautiful images, by the London churchboy’s choir Libera.

Click: Going Home

4-30-12

I had a friend in college named Danny Platnick. A brilliant but very quirky guy. He never failed to surprise us, his friends, with flashes of brilliance and quirkiness, and sometimes the most random things, which often challenged us to be more random, usually unsuccessfully.

One day we were all talking in the dorm lounge about our homes and families and backgrounds. Our college was in Washington DC; Danny came from Bluefield WV, which seemed light-years farther away than the actual few hours’ drive. We all started to exchange photos of our parents and siblings and homes. Danny pulled a picture from his wallet and passed it around. It was a plain picture of the side of a house, only two windows showing. No front door or back porch. No particularly interesting landscaping.

“Is this your parents’ house?” we asked. “No, it’s the side of my neighbor’s house,” Danny replied. Everyone who had shared photos of front lawns, and fancy cars in the driveways, and swimming pools out back, asked how that snapshot represented his house.

“That’s what I see when I look out my bedroom window,” Danny answered. “This picture reminds me of home.”

I am embarrassed to admit that it was years before I realized that this was not quirky, but wise and almost profound.

My niece Liza – Elizabeth Jane Marschall – died this week. She was born almost 27 years ago with severe birth defects, including cerebral palsy that doctors reckoned froze her at a three-month developmental level all her life. She was not expected to live past a few years, but she did, nurtured by loving care and God’s mysterious grace. She experienced pain in her time; many surgeries and braces; and constantly was connected to tubes and monitors. Medically, she was not inanimate but was termed insensate. Yet she smiled, responded to her mom and to her caregivers, and to expressions of love.

Some churches call the death of a Christian a “home-going,” and so it is. Believers will not just begin the “journey home” to be with Jesus when we die; we already are on that journey.

Liza is healed now, happy, whole, before God’s throne. Unlike some Christians who, perhaps, think too much about certain things, she never had the ability to speculate about angels and wings and harps and being reunited with pets. But now she knows what Heaven is like, and we shall experience paradise for eternity too, some day. And it will be better than anything our imagination or scholarship can suggest.

“In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Jesus assured us. “If it were not so, I would have told you.” This is recorded in John, 14:2. “I go to prepare a place for you.” Without much effort, I can almost imagine Jesus pulling out a snapshot of “home” – Heaven – and showing me a very, very comforting scene indeed. We need frequently to remind ourselves of God’s home, even if we are not quite there yet.

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One of the most beautiful messages, and tunes, you will ever hear – and one of the most touching performances – is “Going Home,” in this clip. The unlikely pairing of a classic musical theme (the Largo movement of Antonín Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony) and Negro spiritual lyrics, this performance is by the amazing Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø. Backed by an orchestra and church choir, she performed the song in Røros, a charming Norwegian town in the middle of a UNESCO Heritage area.

Click: Going Home

4-22-11

For a few days, those two thousand years ago, the scoffers – the religious leaders who conspired to have Him arrested, sentenced in a kangaroo court, and put to death – they laughed and said, “See? All those claims were false! He was not God! If He were God, He could have called down ten thousand angels to lift Him from the cross! He did not lift a finger to save Himself!”

Of course they were right… about not saving Himself. He lifted not a finger, in order to save US. And even them, the ones who condemned Him. But for a few days they seemed correct.

We know now, as they should have, that countless prophesies were fulfilled in that Man’s life. But that did not make Him God. He claimed, in that mystery of mysteries, that He and the Father were one. But that claim alone waited to be shown. He was betrayed, tortured, abandoned, crucified; yes, suffered without complaint. But that did not prove at all that He was God. He died and was buried, according to the Scriptures, and that… No, we must stop there. He died.

Jesus died. He was a dead man. He was as dead as Lazarus had been. His body was treated and prepared for burial as dead bodies were. It was wrapped, completely, in burial cloths. He was dead. The life was out of Him.

Isn’t it easy, sometimes, to forget the meaning of those few days between the Crucifixion and Easter? Those days — just as much as the prophecies and the miracles and suffering and death and words of forgiveness — those days have as much to do with pointing to Jesus as GOD, as all the familiar factors do.

Those scoffers said, “He saved (or healed) (or raised from the dead) others -– let Him save Himself!” Well, it was the God-in-Jesus who raised people from the dead… and when He left that tomb, it was proof to the local folks -– and to every inch of mighty Creation! -– that Jesus was God. Jesus IS God.

Because unless Jesus rose from the dead, He was not God. Everything else about that life is a statistic or a coincidence. Details. If there is no Resurrection, our faith is in vain.

In parts of the Old World, and in the Old Church, routine greetings between people are: “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” … and not just on Easter Week. A good habit.

But as you think of the audacious, outrageous miracle of a resurrected body, with the Divine promise that we, too, may one day overcome death, and know this truth now, I challenge you to put aside traditional, nice Easter thoughts. Of peace. And of what the holiday has become. Don’t reject the traditions, just put them to the side for a moment.

Because in a very essential way, Easter is not only a day of peace. When Jesus the Christ emerged from that tomb, it was not just so Thomas could touch the wounds. It was not just so Peter could have a second chance (third? fourth??) as a disciple. Jesus walked out, in a whole and glorified body, to meet each one of us, face to face. “Here I AM.” He challenges us: “I am alive. Now what?”

Now what???

What it means is that we must be changed as profoundly as He was on that day now called Easter. Shame on us if we think, “Rose from the dead. Yeah, well, that’s what gods DO.” In that sense, Easter is not just a Day of Peace. It is the most dangerous day of the church calendar; it is the most dangerous day of our lives.

Because nothing should, or can, be the same, after we meet the Resurrected Lord, the Not-Dead Jesus, the God-with-us. It must transform us, and everything we do and think or live, or we are as dead as He briefly was.

He is risen. He is risen indeed! HE’S ALIVE!

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Click: He’s Alive!