Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-4-19

“If being a Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

Sometimes such aphorisms – what I call bumper-strip theology – pack a lot of implications and wisdom.

In many place around the world, being a Christian is illegal, or nearly so. I can tell that this blog is read in some of those countries, perhaps to the peril of those readers.

Will such a thing ever happen in the United States, in Western Europe? Many of us think so – it has happened in societies that were once like ours – and at the moment, if belief in Christ is not yet illegal it is however improper or at best impolite in many places and situations.

When the leader of ISIS recently was killed, we were reminded that one of his countless victims was the young American missionary Kayla Mueller. The Christian woman had been held in captivity for 18 months, a sex slave of al-Baghdadi himself. The man whose Washington Post obituary called “an austere religious scholar” and a shy man behind spectacles, repeatedly raped and tortured Kayla, according to eyewitnesses like Yezidi sex slaves even younger than Kayla.

That description of Kayla says more about al-Baghdadi – and the Washington Post – than it does about Kayla. Almost.

What is scarcely said in the news stories is that Kayla was repeatedly asked, and frequently beaten and tortured, to renounce her Christian faith. This she never did – by ISIS’s own frustrated reports – and it gained her torture, rape, beatings, and death. Photographs of her bruised and lifeless body were e-mailed to Kayla’s parents by ISIS.

She lost her life. By her confession and faithfulness, as a contemporary martyr, she secured a place in Heaven, we can believe.
Correction: she saved her life.

Kayla was not alone, I am sure she would maintain. Every day, Christians around the world are being persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith.

We smugly think that things in this world are growing brighter and better. Not everything. There were more Christians killed simply for being Christians in the 20th century than in all the combined centuries since Christ, including the iconic grotesqueries of Nero.

This week we noted – did you? – Reformation Day, the commemoration of Martin Luther’s challenge to the Church of the day. He nailed 95 complaints about corruption to a church door in Germany. It spread beyond Wittenberg’s town square; past the triangle of land formed by Hannover, Berlin, and Dresden; through Germany; to Rome and other territories of the Vatican; through the Christian world… and even unto today.

Luther had not intended to leave the Catholic Church – he was an ordained priest – nor establish a denomination, much less see his protest turn into Protestant-ism. Yet the “world system” that had corrupted the people and practices of the Church transformed widespread dissatisfaction into open revolts.

Luther’s reliance on “Scripture Alone” – that is, not mankind’s rules or new doctrines not found in the Bible – was a revolution of the spirit, conscience, and faith. Indeed, Luther was not the first anti-Romish reformer: previous theologians had similar heartfelt critiques… and had been martyred.

Fired, exiled, imprisoned, tortured, killed for their consciences. Luther was to be the next. Hunted and excommunicated, he was hauled before a council in the city of Worms, Germany.

All his writings – books and pamphlets, sermons and essays – were laid on a table, and Luther was ordered to renounce them. Outside the castle, at night, the Church was burning his books.

“Renounce them?” he said in effect, “How can I, when they all quote the Bible and rely on Scripture?”

Further, he argued that they were the result of his conscience, and “no man, no council, no Pope” can force me to act “against my God-inspired conscience.”

It was made clear that he would suffer death if he did not deny his writings. He said “I will not and I can not.”

With his life on the line, and conscious of the blood of martyrs before him, in the hushed council, Luther firmly said, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” Those simple words, spoken in that obscure German town, have rather thundered like mighty artillery through the ages. Indeed for 500 years they have been spiritual and intellectual bombs. They inspired the translations of Bibles into languages of local peoples. They ignited a rediscovery of Scripture. They freed believers from relying on human intercessors when praying or petitioning God. They inaugurated the spread of literacy. They were the underpinnings of democratic movements around the world.

Luther was not murdered; he was secreted away by German princes who likewise “saw the light.” Thrown out of the Roman Church, he married and continued to write and preach. Others who knew him, and many who never met him but were – and still are – electrified by his words, followed.

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” These are the words, perhaps word for word, that the missionary girl Kayla Mueller spoke.

God forbid – which cliché is my hope, but is not a certainty – that any of us will be in the position of a Martin Luther or a Kayla Mueller. It is not an abstract warning: every day Christians are in those positions.

When you have the opportunity, are you however too shy to speak the Name of Jesus? Do you hold back from sharing your faith with a stranger, or a family member, knowing that they might be on their ways to hell? When politicians, from school boards to the presidency, offend the Truth of the Gospel, do you think, speak, and act in opposition?

Do you “stand”? Will you stand? Can you do no other? If being a Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

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The “Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” words and music by Martin Luther. All my life, tears come to my eyes when I sing, or try to, the last verse: Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also: The body they may kill – God’s truth abideth still!

Click: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

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?

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Click: He Lives

1-4-16

Happy new year. Out with the old, in with the new. Happy January. A time for new beginnings. For all those resolutions to be broken!

Many of our days and months have names that were inspired largely by ancient mythologies and pagan customs. Even Easter, for instance, was named for Isis (no, not that ISIS), the Egyptian mythological deity who married her brother Osiris, was also known as Ishtar, and perhaps inspired the word for East. Germanic tribes had a Spring festival (Oestern, a cognate of Easter) that looked eastward, to the sun and fertility.

So it is with what we call January. Its name is derived from the Roman god of beginnings and transitions – hence “presiding” over the end and beginning of the year. One of the few Roman gods not inherited and transmogrified from the Greeks, Janus became an important figure in the mythological pantheon. He lives in more than calendar pages; when I stay in Bologna, my favorite hotel is the Torre di Iano (Tower of Janus), an ancient villa originally dedicated to the god.

Does all this fit with Christianity? Deeper than we might think at first. January is an appropriate time to reminisce, “process,” and look forward. But so is every day of the year! OK, we all need “hooks,” reminders, disciplines. Does God sanction such activities? He does more: He encourages them.

Interestingly, Janus was always depicted as a two-faced god. On coins, in carvings and mosaics, he looked both forward and back. To play Bulfinch and parse the Roman myths, Janus specifically was the god of transitions. Here is where, as always, the God of the Bible is superior to any deities of the world’s mythologies or false phenomenologies. Our God should be, has been, will be in our relations and transitions. He is in our pasts and futures. In truth, He is our past, and our future.

But Christians, today, tend to think less and less of the past. In our contemporary and often post-Christian world, we take the past for granted… or decline to be convicted by its lessons. We might pray ourselves through troubled time; but – consistent with our consumerist culture? – look ahead. Like the right-half of Janus. Hope, confidence, optimism if we can summon it… we have become a people who look ahead.

But we would do well to think a little more than we do about the past. What brought us here? What are the details of our heritage? What have our forebears sacrificed for us? What lessons from the past present themselves to us?

These are important questions! For without understanding our past, our futures are gambles… aimless wanderings… games with no yard-markers, goalposts, or rules. The past is more than prologue: it is certain; the future is uncertain.

And the past is often painful. Parents will know – and all former children will remember – that lectures about a hot stove do little good, compared to the one time that the hot stove actually is touched! We must pay attention to what brought us here, to avoid Prof. Santayana’s aphorism that “those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat.”

There is specific lesson – I would call it, rather, a powerful reminder – from something related to the Christmas season recently commemorated. As we re-pack our ornaments and take last looks at pretty greeting cards, it is important to remember something that we might have overlooked amidst the Christmas music and colorful wrapping paper and cookies. The past often holds a lot of pain. Much distress. Hurts, and sometimes excruciating angst. Life, in other words.

But this is good for us to know. Among the “whole armor of God” you will not find rose-colored glasses. Life is real, life is earnest. Even Christmas was associated with much pain and distress. As we approach the Feast of the Epiphany, it is decidedly an observance of transitions… but not neutral, as those of Janus. It is literally the celebration of the Incarnation: not merely Christ being born, but His introduction to humankind.

Traditions assign the Epiphany to the visit of the Magi; to Jesus’s religious dedication; to the 12th night; even to His baptism. The point is – remembering Jesus as Messiah: God-with-us.

Do you remember that Jesus’s birth was not all angels and harps? It was, for this world He came to save, like painful birth pangs, as a mother in labor would experience. Do you know that one of the sweetest-sounding of ancient lullabies actually is one of the saddest of laments that could be sung?

Matthew, Chapter 2, and historical tradition tell of King Herod’s obsession with preventing a rival to his authority; and when he was convinced that biblical prophecy was close to fulfillment, he ordered the death of boys less than two years old throughout the land. It has become known as “The Slaughter of the Innocents.”

It was symbolic, of course, of the world-system’s vicious resistance to the very concept of a Messiah. The presence of Jesus is a rebuke to those feel no awareness of their sin and dependency, who elevate Self over Revealed Truth. Christ’s enemies are not trivial nor easily dismissed, no matter how surely to be conquered. It was so, then; and it continues to be so, today. The Slaughter of the Innocents – a part of the Christmas story as relevant as the shepherds and angels – reminds us that ugly forces in life tried to keep our Savior from us. And still do.

The most haunting of Christmas carols, to which I referred, is known as The Coventry Carol. It was written in the 1500s, and its plaintive melody is one of the great flowerings of polyphony over plainsong in Western music. “Lullay, thou little tiny child,” is not a lullaby, and does not refer to the baby Jesus.

The carol is a lament by a mother of one of the babies slaughtered by Herod’s soldiers:

Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny child, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
Lullay, thou little tiny child, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do, For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we do sing Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Herod, the king, in his raging, Charged he hath this day
His men of might, in his own sight, All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor child for Thee! And ever mourn and sigh,
For thy parting neither say nor sing, Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Utterly melancholic, as the harmonies are hauntingly beautiful. It is a fitting creation that must be part of our Christmastide observances, and Epiphany. Kings are still in their raging, but Jesus cannot be stopped by debates. He has never long been thwarted by bureaucratic rules. He was not even subject to death and the grave.

This January, look forward, yes; pray God’s blessing in your transitions; but remember the past. Hold to what it teaches. Be nurtured by the blessings it holds. And be thankful that our God is not, in the parlance of world, “two-faced,” but ever faithful.

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The Coventry Carol is so named because this song, in Old English first called “Thow Littel Tyne Childe,” had its origins in a “Mystery Play” of Norman France and performed at the Coventry cathedral in Britain. The play was called “The Mystery of the Shearmen and the Tailors,” based on the second chapter of Matthew. The anonymous lyrics are a mother’s lament for her doomed baby boy. All but this song from the mystery play are lost today. The earliest transcription extant is from 1534; the oldest example of its musical setting is from 1591. It still speaks to our hearts today. Performed here by Collegium Vocale Gent, conducted by Peter Dijkstra, in the
Begijnhofkerk at Sint-Truiden, Flanders.

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Click: Coventry Carol

12-14-15

A guest message by my friend Lucille Zimmerman, a Licensed Professional Counselor with a private practice in Littleton, Colorado. She also teaches psychology and counseling courses at Colorado Christian University.

I woke up with Jesus on my mind.

Many years ago, I felt embarrassed when I walked into a home that had scripture verses or crucifixes on the walls. I thought those people were dorky. Backwards. I had grown up attending church, but it was meaningless. A series of motions.

But after many horrible years of emotional pain, I met someone who radiated love and joy. I began to study the faith that gave him peace: Christianity. I wanted what he had. When I was 27, I fell head over heels in love with my Savior.
 
I began studying the Bible, and realized it was a book you could make sense of. It contained 66 sub-books written hundreds of years apart, but each book supported the other. Then I read books from critics who tried to disprove the historic evidence for Jesus… but those people ended up believing Jesus was real, too.
 
There is more historical proof that Jesus walked this earth than about any person in history. Hundreds of witnesses verified his miracles. He was killed because he was a threat, but this was His plan all along: His blood would be shed for our sins.
 
After three days He rose from the dead and sits with God just like He said he would. Just for fun, pick up a Bible or go to Google and read what Jesus told his closest followers in the Gospel of John, chapter 17, just before He gave His life, and upon which sacrifice we might believe.
 
In the past 23 years I have continued to study who Jesus was. And I am only more convinced that He is the way.

In these days, when 80 per cent of Americans believe another ISIS terror event will happen, soon, on our soil… these days when ISIS has stolen the machines to make fake passports…. these days when our government cannot tell us how many people with Syrian passports were allowed in the US this year… these days when our leaders cannot even tell us how many people have overstayed their visas: the threat is real.
 
It is scary these days. But you can have a more solid peace. When the Columbine tragedy happened in my Colorado community, one of our pastors said you can never be ready for the scary things that happen in this world; but you can be ready nonetheless.
 
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world He gave His only son that whosoever believes in Him would have everlasting life.”
 
You are the “whosoever.”
 
You don’t have to be good, or go to church, or pray a certain number of times a day. If those things were the way, you wouldn’t need Jesus.
 
All you have to is believe. Or want to believe. Whisper a prayer to God and ask Him to show you if this is the truth. The Bible says God honors those who seek Him.
 
If you don’t know Him, I pray this year you would consider it. I can’t think of a better time, when the world is in such chaos and danger, and Christmas is two weeks away.

This can be the merriest, happiest, most rewarding Christmas you ever can experience by following Lucille’s version of God’s plan , and Jesus Christ’s invitation. And if you know Jesus already, consider printing or forwarding this message to friends or family members who do not. A Christmas gift of love!

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Click: Trust

Lucille Zimmerman is the author of Renewed: Finding Your Inner Happy In an Overwhelmed World and What Does God Say About Suffering?
www.LucilleZimmerman.com

12-7-15

“God Won’t Fix This.” This was the four-word headline splashed over the front page of the New York Daily News after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

They printed four small photos, insets of public officials, with their quotations asking for, or offering, prayers. “Thoughts and prayers,” in the current parlance; and the News yellow-highlighted the word “prayer” in each instance. Their copy, on the front page and successive pages of the “news”paper, criticized Republican candidates for offering prayers “and not solutions.”

Put aside for the moment the point of view that prayers to God might be solutions, it was interesting – no, that’s not quite the precise word; ah, yes: disgusting – that the editors politicized the horror by ripping solely into Republicans’ statements. And noting that three Democrat candidates for the presidency did not ask for prayer or invoke God. And not mentioning that President Obama, whatever else he says, routinely assures the nation that “our thoughts and prayers go out” after such incidents. Politics 101? I give ‘em an F.

Personally, my spirit bristles when people talk about prayer and God in superficial ways. Prayer is a powerful tool designed to communicate with our Heavenly Father. “Our prayers go out” is so clichéd – often, but not always – as to weaken its sincerity. If a Christian proposes prayer, having God’s ear, so to speak, he or she should pray then and there. Not the Sinner’s Prayer, not necessarily a rambling list of petitions, but a “Dear God”… followed by the plea or praise… ending with an “Amen,” is sincere, sufficient to most occasions, and effective.

Even Gov. Huckabee, an ordained minister, used to end his TV shows with, “God bless.” Finish the sentence! Is it a request or a demand? God bless what, or who? A pose, a mask; get real!

But I digress. The Gospel According the Daily News was very significant. In journalistic terms, it was symbolic. The tabloid, founded in 1919 and for many years boasting the second-highest circulation in the United States, has fallen like a rock and has been up for sale for some time. Owned by the mogul Mortimer Zuckerman, it was on the auction block for months, reportedly at one point offered for a single dollar… if the new owner would assume the gargantuan debts. No takers. After firing entire department staffs and abandoning categories of coverage, it teeters between going digital and folding outright.

Mortimer Zuckerman’s property was launched by Captain Joseph Patterson, cousin of the Chicago Tribune management. For decades both papers were two of the most conservative and traditional-values organs in the nation. No more. It is tempting to think of cause and effect (crummy stands and low readership); evidently Mortimer Zuckerman does not.

Whether the blasphemy splashed across the paper’s front page was a publicity stunt or not – here we are, after all, discussing it — Mortimer Zuckerman’s disgraceful display is perfectly emblematic of a deep problem in post-Christian America. The mockery of the screaming headline was not so much directed at politicians’ statements, or their failures to join, lockstep, liberals’ solution of laws, laws, and laws, in the face of violence of Islamic terror.

No, the scorn was directed at peoples’ natural reactions to turn to God in crises and troubled times. Candidates, everyday citizens, neighbors, the wounded, the children and families of the dead – they (we) are ridiculous hypocrites or deluded wastrels in the eyes of contemporary society. Today’s reigning culture hates us.

More, the sacred institution of prayer, ordained of God; and God Himself, are the real targets. Scornful, mocking, blasphemous. America, 2015. We have laws – California’s among the strictest – but the impulse to seek God is “futile,” we are told in today’s secular sermons and front pages.

This just in: Next in the parade of the Misplaced Moralists was the News’ neighbor, the New York Times.In its Saturday, Dec 5, print edition, the “Paper of Record” printed a front-page editorial for the first time in 95 years. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger wrote that “America’s elected leaders” should be ashamed of themselves for “offering prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequences, reject[ing] the most basic restrictions of weapons of mass killing.” By the way, the public scolding made no reference to Islam or Muslims, or jihadi terrorism; rather to do away with the Second Amendment, promote “reasonable regulation” and outright confiscation of firearms.

In the larger picture, we have barred God and the Bible from classrooms… and classrooms became incubators of rebellion and false values. We have stripped the public forums of our Christian heritage… and America enjoys (?) drugs, sex, abuse, violence, social dislocation of all sorts.

Some call this coincidence. People like Mortimer Zuckerman and Arthur Sulzberger do. I call it Judgment. “God is not mocked,” the Bible warns. Who are the hypocrites? I remember when Hurricane Sandy slammed New York City, flooded its basements and filled its tunnels, Mayor Bloomberg, who had been on a crusade to remove God from public events and public places, all of a sudden called on churches to come to the city’s assistance. Bloomberg and Zuckerman and Sulzberger, the New Prophets of the Religion of No Religion… until needed.

Is it an empty cliché to say “God has been barred from classrooms”? God, of course, is sovereign. He can be anywhere, and do anything. But He has principles and consistency as part of His person, too. God cannot contradict Himself.

When He became incarnate as the Christ, Jesus returned to His native Nazareth, as recorded in two of the Gospels. Not a happy homecoming: many of the people were scornful of Him and unbelieving of His divinity. Matthew 13:58 relates: “And he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief.” That is the King James translation; in the Aramaic Bible in Plain English direct translation, we read, “And he did not do many miracles there because of their suspicion.”

Could Jesus have performed miracles? Of course. The incarnate Deity was sovereign. Was He scolding the population, petulantly withholding miracles to “get even” or teach them a lesson? Not likely. If He had performed tremendous, showy miracles, many people might have been affected.

But the ways of God are many, and mysterious, and just. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,” saith the Lord (Isaiah 55:9). After all, one lone Centurion who believed was blessed; the woman touching the hem of His garment was healed, and so forth. In contemporary America and its media and Hollywood elite, to reject prayer and a turn to God – by victims themselves – displays our society’s hard heart and stiff neck.

Where does this leave us, in this all-too-common environment of fear and terror? Let us pray: Not in the Councils of the Ungodly. Can we Americans be so arrogant to think that God owes us mercy or pardon, while we offend Him daily in so many ways as a society? Even the non-Zuckermans and non-Bloombergs and non-Sulzbergers among us have become content to place our affection with corrupt things; to put our trust in man’s laws; to have faith in worldly things.

Liberals might scoff and say we need fewer prayers and more rules, but, even objectively, why must they be mutually exclusive? Rather, we need more love and less hate; more sincere hearts than know-it-all heads; more prayers and fewer laws; more God and less government.

“God Isn’t Fixing This”? Can anyone wonder?

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/gop-candidates-call-prayers-calf-massacre-article-1.2453261

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Click: The Faith Of Our Fathers

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?

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Click: Jesus, Hold My Hand

9-29-14

One of the most familiar, and comforting, of Bible passages is the 23rd Psalm. Back when I was young, and prayer was still allowed in public schools, once a week a designated kid read from the Bible, before the Pledge of Allegiance, in home-room observances.

Not by written regulations of the School Board, or under legal threats from the Federal Government (why would it be any of their business?) but by a custom of courtesy, the readings were usually from the Psalms. Not always, but the presence of a few Jewish students prompted the circumspection. And as students were, relatively, free to choose the reading each week, the 23rd Psalm was about Number One on the hit parade. It is only six verses long, which perhaps is another reason why many students chose it.

But why not? It has universal appeal, offering promises to humanity; it is a spiritual palliative – soothing, encouraging, offering security.

I read it again recently. After reading and reciting it perhaps hundreds of times in my life, subsequent to the 6th grade, something struck me as new and challenging. There is one phrase among the promises and word-pictures that stands out. It is from God via the “Sweet Singer” David, so its authenticity is not suspect, but the verse is, at least superficially, of a different flavor.

In the Psalm we are assured that the Lord provides care and shelter as shepherds do; that He lovingly leads us, restores us, comforts us, protects us, anoints us, and so forth. He offers us green pastures, still waters, “paths of righteousness,” protection in life’s valleys, cups that overflow, goodness, mercy, and an eternal dwelling place.

Surely you remember the actual Psalm, especially after all these prompts: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

Have you, too, noticed the passage that is seemingly of a different flavor?

The world has changed much since my childhood days… and yours, too, even if you did not survive the Village School in Closter NJ, as I did. “God is dead,” as the Existentialists say because our culture rejects and dismisses Him. In the same way, Norman Rockwell is dead, relegated to the walls of the cultural Remnant.

We had “enemies” then, at the height of the Cold War. We were ready to survive those enemies by scrambling to the school’s basement and tucking our heads between our knees if nuclear bombs were to fall on the playground. Our society’s enemies now, today, include anonymous killers who want more than to overtake our courthouses. Our enemies want to torture and kill us; by their asservations, to be preceded by attacking peoples’ bedrock beliefs; and then committing heinous and despicable methods of murder. For Christians, it includes bondage, sometimes crucifixion, and beheading. For their fellow, but less enthusiastic, religionists, their promises and practices include bondage and mass executions leading to unmarked ditches. Except for those who are buried alive.

These descriptions are not the usual reports of propaganda (as I recall the dictum that “in every war, the first casualty is truth”). Our self-proclaimed “enemies” brag about these goals and acts, and post videos on the internet.

To return to the Psalm, of course the phrase that stands out is, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” Would it seem that consistent to the entire Psalm, David might have written, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my friends”? Every other promise and description is of peace, joy, happiness. Surely a picnic beside the still waters, near the Path of Righteousness, with our friends whose cups are running over, would fit into the picture.

But David, taking dictation from the Holy Spirit, knew what he was writing. Therefore, so should we.

We shall never be free from enemies. Just as we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death – that is, obliged to endure it occasionally, not switch on the GPS for detours – God is with us. He will protect. Moreover, we should not want to live in a daisy-world (sorry, Norman Rockwell) that is totally unrealistic. We have enemies, and God prepares tables before us in their presence. Why? To confront them, to witness for Truth, to boldly share our convictions, maybe persuade our enemies.

This does not mean to roll over, declaring that their belief systems are peaceful and merely have been perverted. That is moral cowardice. That will only prompt them to laugh louder. NO. God sets our placemats in the presence of our enemies to confront, not to compromise.

The real menu in this imaginary meal with our enemies is their hatred (however, we are determined to bring sweet desserts of love, making our boldness palatable). And – let us not fool ourselves – these enemies might kill us, but the One they really hate is Jesus Christ. One by one by one among us, the enemy hates us in direct proportion to the presence of Jesus in our hearts. Remember how Satan denigrated Job to God: he doesn’t love You, just Your blessings, Satan charged. Well, Satan hates us according to the amount of Christ that lives in our hearts.

For those cultural self-haters among us who abandon religious tenets and civilization’s traditions, supposing that enemies will be appeased… they are mistaken. They will not even be at the virtual table; they will be despised and eliminated with even less thought than enemies expend on attacking those with strong Christian faith.

God wants us to be in the presence of our enemies. That is, not to avoid, appease, or compromise with them. David did not, in his life. Neither did Jesus. We are to contend… to represent Christ. And we are promised to be equipped, comforted, anointed, blessed, and victorious. God prepares a table before us… right smack in the presence of our enemies. Are you hungry?

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

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A song about the everyday enemies of life, behind which is Satan, no less than the enemies on nightly news programs, is by Jami Smith:

Click: You Prepared a Table For Me

9-8-14

History knows two kinds of war, generally: those that are declared, with precise commencements, formalities, and peace treaties; and those that begin from a host of various grievances or jealousies, have hazy – usually multiple – flash-points, and drag on, and on, spreading misery and atrocities over civilian populations no less than enemy forces. Both sorts of war can change the course of history to equal degrees.

The United States – the West; the Christian church – is engaged in the second form of these wars. We are not anticipating it. We are IN it. And we have been for some time. That the “enemy” can be defined in several ways does not diminish the fact that there is one war. And it is not new, although our dim-witted realization, as if awakening from a dream, might be new.

I am writing of Islam, of course. It is instructive, even vital, that we review how we got here. “Past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote.

The hideous barbarism of ISIS / ISIL is the latest. We should call it the Islamic State, as its leaders do, although our own “leaders” believe that would reveal us to be politically incorrect if we call them either Muslims or terrorists. (They are merely “extremists,” you see). We can go back to 9-11; to the various Palestinian terror groups, modeling themselves, by the way, after the Zionist terror groups before 1948. We can go back and back in history.

The history of Islam, or the Mohammedans, as the West used to call them, is as rich in politics and warfare as it is in theology. After the death of Mohammed, probably in 632, Muslim factions started warring, partly as a byproduct of factionalism, but also to spread their religion’s overall influence, expanding in an imperialist mode. Throughout the Levant, to Asia Minor, to north Africa. And to Europe.

Through formal invasions and persistent incursions, Muslims spread into Europe. It was a time after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Civic, military, and social systems had deteriorated, and Islam tried to fill the vacuum. The remnants of the Visigoth Empire were supplanted in modern-day Spain. Pockets in southern France were overrun. Strongholds of the old Byzantine Empire were no longer strong, and Mohammedan armies pushed them back.

For a millennium the Arabs and Islam continued squabbling over men’s minds and men’s land, while over the time also mastering various cultural advances in mathematics, science, poetry, astronomy, medicine, and art. But the doors of Europe and Christianity, whether to knock or kick down, were seldom far from the expansionists’ minds, either.

Around 700 and for roughly a half-century, a fierce battle over the survival and character of Christian Europe was fought on the Iberian peninsula and in southern France. The romanticized legend known as The Song of Roland, a landmark in Western literature, nevertheless tells the facts that Charles Martel, his son Pepin le Bref, and his son Charlemagne, combined through persistent bravery and bloody sacrifice to defend Western civilization.

Not only was militant Islam turned away from Europe, but Charlemagne, in present-day German lands, reestablished the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the inexorable “soft” invasions continued. After a siege on Constantinople roughly contemporaneous with the Battle of Saragossa in Spain, the Bulgarian Emperor Khan Tervel turned back vicious Moslem fighters and earned the title “Savior of Europe.”

Around 900, Moslems attacked the Italian peninsula. Rome was sacked, and an emirate was established in Sicily. Three centuries later a resurgent Mongol empire swept across Eurasia, defeating Moslem strongholds in their path, most notably as far south as in the Battle of Baghdad, 1258… but then its leaders, following the mighty Timur, converted to Islam. The effect was a victory for the consolidation and spread of a militant Islam, from Egypt through Syria to India.

Thereafter, the Islamic Ottoman Empire invaded Western Europe and colonized Greece, all of the Balkans, Romania, Bessarabia, and Hungary, and was stopped only at the outskirts of Vienna. In 1683 a brutal force of militant Islamic soldiers besieged Vienna, which literally, geographically, was a gateway to Europe. Only the fierce rescue by brave Polish, Austrian, and German Hapsburg troops led by the Polish king Jan Sobieski turned back the Muslim invaders.

The Ottoman Empire remained a diminished irritant to European Christianity, and was dispatched after World War I after it chose the wrong side – the defeated Central Powers – and was dismembered. Greece became independent, the British typically gained territories-by-peace-treaties, and Turkey became a constitutionally secular country in 1923.

With that – and buying off Islamic leaders with protected artificial statehoods (Iraq, Iran, Trans-Jordan, etc), trade favors, and other emoluments after both world wars – Western Europe thought that radical Islam was a thing of the past.

But as recent events have shown (including a quiet resurgence of a radically Islamic Turkey), the last century was just a breathing-period. The incessant 1500-year war of Islam against Christianity continues.

I do not apologize to readers for this brief history lesson. As George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Shame on Americans for being generally ignorant about such vital matters. I will go further and wager that most Americans could not fill in the names of many Middle East countries on a blank map of the region. Nor assign the Sunni or Shi’ite loyalties of the players in the current crises, much less Alawite or Ba’athist roles in the conflicts.

(Neither can most Americans identify the role of British and American manipulation of events since the end of World War I, prompted by trade and oil and geopolitical interest, including doing others’ bidding; and usually bungled. But that is another essay.)

The fact – the hard fact – remains: we are engaged in a religious war. And that is very bad news, because America is hardly a religious nation any more.

We are, therefore, losing before we realize we are being attacked. Feeding our lack of conviction is the notion that to recognize Islam’s war on us is to be “unfair.” “Prejudiced.” The political and cultural leaders who feed these concepts are, simply, traitors to the nation, to our culture, and to our faith.

We should recognize them as traitors, and deal with them as traitors. And shame on the American public – traditional Christian patriots – for surrendering. Not just to notions of “Arab extremism” or “Islamic terror,” but surrendering to the traitors who soften or minds and wills.

The United States is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, dedicated to God by countless pilgrims and pioneers in the name of Christ. That does not means we hate or should exclude others, but it traditionally meant that we invited others to live at peace in a Christian nation. Christians like to say “Judeo-Christian” often so they will not be accused of wanting another “Holocaust,” but our values and traditions are Christian.

We are under attack. “We” are not only Americans – Islam does not care so much about our passports. It is not a question of their wanting more real estate.

Christianity is under attack. You can respond by softening your faith. By being “tolerant” of those who wish you dead and happy to help in the effort. Or you can join the historic ranks of forgotten heroes and martyrs like Charles Martel, Pepin le Bref, Charlemagne, Khan Tervel, and Jan Sobieski, willing to die if necessary for Western civilization and for Christianity.

The war, like it or not a real war, is being waged by Islam.

But the real enemy, admit it or not, is our own culture’s loss of faith.

We cannot pretend that — for the first time in history — this condition, a lost foundation of faith, will not be fatal to a culture. We cannot wish this away. We need backbones, not wishbones.

The first battle – or is it our last? – seems to be lost already. How many of us will enlist?

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We are not helpless or clueless if we choose to engage. We have the words of the Bible, and the example of Christ. There is the example of uncountable martyrs and warriors who loved the Word so much – who savored the sacrifices of those who have gone before; and who cherish the dream for the sake of their children – so we might be encouraged. For Christ’s sake, not just our own. An inspiring version of an old hymn of the church, and a rousing video message, by Michael Card.

Click: How Firm a Foundation