Monday Morning Music Ministry

4-12-21

Lately a lot of politicians begin their answers with the word, “Look…” or “Listen…” appearing to say something clear and direct. It usually is the opposite; a deflection. Like “C’mon, man” – a way to substitute for an answer.

But we all do it, or similar things. We tell our children to “look away” from something harsh or rude, usually correctly. We might claim to “look in the other direction” when confronted with unpleasant facts, or decisions we want to avoid. Body-language experts watch our eyes, the way we look up or down, or glassy-eyed, to discern our actual intentions.

“The eyes are the windows to the soul,” Jesus paraphrased in Matthew 6, citing Proverbs 30:17.

We draw too quick a conclusion, however. If we look away… refuse to acknowledge things… maybe, then, pretending things don’t exist, we can fool ourselves. Perhaps fatally.

Are we ostriches who hide their heads in the sand? If we look away do we become immune, and escape the consequences of that we avoid?

Of course I am not talking about a household accident, or a lesson a child needs to learn, or wise advice when we can offer it, even if uncomfortable. I address those like me who perceive that we are living an extraordinary times – extraordinarily troubling and dangerous. In society, within families, in the culture, in education, in politics, in the church world… many of us are shocked and grieved and anxious about the trend of events.

Argue back. Fight back. Lose friends, make allies. Pray. And, for many who have grown weary, sometimes the best (easiest?) (safest?) (holiest?) thing to do in the face of a tsunami of attacks is… to look away.

Doesn’t the Bible talk about a “remnant”? Should we gather our children as a mother hen gathers her chicks? Should we only fellowship with the saints?

Those are answers, but sometimes the wrong answers. I will return to “looking,” and the eyes God has given us – spiritual sight as well as physical vision.

Recently we discussed Easter, and how the miraculous Jesus looked down from the cross and, I believe, looked into my eyes, and yours, and humankind’s, into our souls. The crowds who greeted Him, then screamed for His death, scattered before Calvary – not caring to look.

When Jesus came out from the tomb, defeating death, he immediately began looking. For you and me. I wrote this week, in effect, He was saying “Here I come, ready or not!” He looked for people to forgive in the weeks that followed, and invited witnesses to look upon Him.

On Ascension Day, when He was seen to rise to Heaven and be seated at the right hand of the Father (confirming His divinity) it was required that witnesses look upon that transformation.

We should not look away from some things. We cannot look away from all things. We must look at more things, good and bad, straight-on. They will happen anyway. So, continuing the metaphorical part of this, don’t turn away from some challenges and problems. Look at them, understand them. Deal with them.

Go a step further, you and your eyes. Look FOR things. If we indeed live in parlous times, seek what is evil, what is harmful, what carries dangers. It is the first and best step to protect your and your family. And redeem the culture. And honor God.

LOOK! Don’t “look away.” Seek and ye shall find… the courage, the strength, the answers. You will find Jesus, if you look for Him.

Why do I think these details are important? I am afraid that we too often take Jesus for granted. Yes, God’s Son. Yes. rose from the dead. Yes, forgives our sins. But nobody can have a relationship with someone with looking that person in the face. Right?

A helpful hint. When things are strangely dim, or confusing no matter how hard you focus, or “look” hopeless; when things seem too dark; and maybe you don’t even know where to look…

Turn your eyes upon Jesus. He has been looking for you, and at you, all along. Meet His eyes.

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Click: Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

4-4-21

He’s Alive.

Those two words are the most consequential in humankind’s long history, or ever will be.

He’s Alive.

For Christians, these words overshadow everything, for if there be no Resurrection, our faith is in vain.

He’s Alive.

For believers in any, and every, other religion, there is not one founder or leader about whom it is claimed that once dead, that figure came back to life.

He’s Alive.

For agnostics and atheists, you simply must confront the Biblical record, eyewitness accounts, and words of people like the historian Josephus, who recorded acts of the risen Christ.

He’s Alive.

For the skeptical, if you think the life, ministry, and resurrection of Jesus was a hoax, tell us how Christianity spread like wildfire after the Resurrection; and why so many people – including 11 of the Disciples – would endure their own torture and death… for a hoax.

He’s Alive.

For the wise, study His words, and explain how Jesus was anything but one of these: a brilliant swindler; a delusional fool; or… the Son of God.

He’s Alive.

For the logic-minded, calculate the odds of multiple hundreds of prophecies and predictions, written over centuries by many hands in many lands, that came true to the finest detail and timing.

He’s Alive.

For those who don’t “believe in miracles,” like the acts He was recorded as performing, or that He fulfilled by rising from the dead, start counting the number of other things you can’t explain in life, but “take on faith.”

He’s Alive.

For those who are tempted to think that this God or this Jesus might have been real once upon a time, and acted 2000 years ago, but not now…

Talk to someone whose life has been transformed;

Talk to someone who suffered awful depression, but now lives joyously;

Talk to a sinner who has turned from his or her ways;

Talk to someone who endured a fatal disease or injury… and has been healed;

Talk to an addict who now is “clean”;

Talk to someone who hated… and has learned to love;

Talk to someone who could not forgive, and was touched by someone else’s forgiveness;

Talk to someone who carried oppressive burdens of guilt, but now feels free;

Talk to that little baby who smiles back at you;

Talk to…

Well, talk to Jesus. He will answer you if you listen. He will lead you if you need. He will love you as if He has known you all along.

… because He has. He’s been waiting. When He left that tomb, by some sort of miracle, He came out looking for you.

He’s alive.

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Click: He’s Alive

3-2-20

Despite being shrouded in religious symbolism and tradition, Lent also is a part of Christianity that largely has no Biblical sanction nor institution. That is to say, the holidays and succession of observances were not established by Jesus, the Disciples, St Paul, nor the churches of the early evangelists.

In fact, there are myriad definitions of Lent, numbers of days of Lent, whether Sundays are counted or not, what constitutes holy fasts, what meats can be eaten, what colors of church vestments and displays should be assigned, what parts of the liturgy should be sung or suppressed, even when Lent ends. As many definitions as there are Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox traditions… and of course different views within Protestantism and Orthodox churches. Denominations like the Mennonite church, for instance, traditionally did not observe Lent at all.

Is the observance of Lent a corruption of Christian teaching? No! It is not even obliquely related to anything pagan, as can be deduced from Christmas, Easter, and other holidays. And Lenten practices are informed by the suffering and death of Jesus; the Passion; the meanings behind the largest aspects of Easter (the atonement) to the smallest (reminders of the significance of every “station” of the cross that Jesus carried to Golgotha).

If Lent is not a corruption of the holy aspects of the period preceding Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and the horrible events of Holy Week, certain observances of Lent can be corrupt. When people “give up” broccoli, or even chocolate – perhaps things they already hate, or things they might indeed love; you have heard them all – it trivializes the acts of the Savior.

“How can self-sacrifice, or discipline, be bad?” we are asked. “And if we lose weight, or spend time in better ways than going to the movies…” is a sentence that does not need to be finished. Dieting, better use of your free time, less video-gaming, can all be done any time (or all times) during the year.

Jesus Christ did not suffer and die for your chocolates or your video games.

I am going to suggest something in place of sacrificing something for Lent. Since the precise details of Lenten observances are not in the Bible, I might feel secure to propose a different way to recall, even “imitate” (in the view of Thomas à Kempis) Christ’s Passion.

Instead of giving something up for Lent, can we take something up for Lent?

Jesus sacrificed His life, but He also gave us something very real: salvation. He renounced earthly pleasures, but He also gave us a supreme picture of service. He endured rejection, betrayal, and torture – which can remind us of how much He loved us, even while we were yet sinners – yet are we only to dwell on these things… or be inspired to lives of fellowship, reconciliation, and love?

He died… that we may live.

Should we think of taking up things – not only the cross, which after all we are commanded to do – and not merely sacrificing this or that for 40 days?

In the spirit of the Lenten season, and Christ’s Passion of which we are mindful, forget the chocolates and video games, and take up something.

These might be word games, of course: To take up something might be seen as a sacrifice; fine. And, as with New Years resolutions, or Lenten sacrifices, we can also “take up” something all the year ‘round. Also fine! In a sense, the life of faith is to see things, and act, in upside-down manners sometime. We need new perspectives. Do we really belong in a life of the world’s old ways of seeing and doing? We should yearn for a place where dead men live, and rich men give.

Take up charity work. And do it as privately as possible. Share something about Jesus to someone. Especially if you are uncomfortable doing so. Think of someone you have resented, and write a note saying you forgive them. And then… forgive them.

Take up something, not because it’s traditional when the calendar says so. Take up something out of passion – your passion – and not automatically.

TAKE UP something for Lent. For Christ’s sake.

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Click: I Don’t Belong (The Sojourner’s Song)

1-5-15

Life has been likened to a game through the ages by saints and sages, by poets and even pastors. We are warned on one side against a game of “eat, drink, and be merry,” because one day we die. Or sometimes we properly are reminded that like some sports, life can be a very grim game indeed. Me? Sometimes I see life as a grand chessboard. Unfortunately I see myself a checker, not a chess piece. Gulp.

Today we think of our lives as vast jigsaw puzzles, not at all illogical.

See how the pieces fit: babyhood, youth, adolescence, nonage, adulthood, dotage. They usually fit together well, although some of us, putting this puzzle together, really have to search for the piece that depicts maturity. But into each life also come pieces that represent curiosity, hope, disappointment, joy, sadness, grief, happiness, greed, ambition, pride, modesty, temptation, sin, desires, charity, unforgiveness and forgiveness, envy, intellectuality, faith…

Have I left any pieces out? Surely. But I have not only described life’s jigsaw puzzles of me and you, but everyone who has, or has had, a pulse, on this earth. Those pieces, in my analogy, will be of different shapes, some of mine larger than yours; some of yours smaller than his or hers. We all, when complete, form different pictures.

And we know, don’t we, that even the kindly old lady down the street has had bouts with envy or pride. “There is not one amongst us in whom a devil does not dwell,” Theodore Roosevelt once wrote to the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson; and we note he metaphorically used a lower-case “d” in “devil.” He continued, “It is not being in the “dark house,” but having left it, that matters.”

In the same way as the kindly old lady we all know, or TR’s Everyman, there are awful folks and hardened criminals who have tender spots, and are capable of conversions. Think of Ebeneezer Scrooge; of St Paul who, as Saul, persecuted Christians; of John Newton, slave-trader who saw the light and write the words to “Amazing Grace”…

But I want to suggest that no life, no matter how long, or how many pieces make up the picture, is or complete without a piece I did not list above. Did you catch that? Can I give you a hint? – it is shaped like an “L.” Ah! There are a couple holes in the jigsaw puzzle of completed lives.

See the missing piece, shaped like an “L,” for Love.

We have all experienced love, even the most miserable amongst us. We have expressed it and shared it – given it away – some of us more than others. But it is a common and irresistible force. To humans it is mysterious because, as serene as it should be, it can also bring heartache and disappointment. It can be the basis of charity but also frustration of broken dreams.

There is a reason that 95 per cent of songs have love lyrics. Even “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” is a love song, about dashed dreams. So are the melancholy lieder of Franz Schubert, and the many grief-toned piano sonatas of the perpetually lovelorn and frustrated Beethoven.

OK… that “L” piece fits there. One more hole in life’s jigsaw puzzle. It looks like an L-shape could fit there, but a little differently. Maybe, turned around a little bit, it looks like a “J.” Yes, J for Jesus. Now our life’s jigsaw puzzle is a complete picture.

Those similar-looking pieces, L and J, in fact make any life complete – especially puzzled lives, to reinforce my metaphor! They are the most important of our lives’ components. Indeed, we are not complete without them. We occasionally might flatter ourselves that we are pretty good puzzle-masters; and perhaps so, occasionally. But we are not puzzle-makers, and cannot be. God plays that role.

I sometimes wonder if Love did not exist, could we imagine it? Like a color that might exist but we’ve seen; or a seventh sense: hard to imagine what we cannot imagine. God’s Love, expressed in the Person of Jesus. He loved us so much as to create us and place us on this beautiful earth; loved us so much as to be forbearing as we humans have sinned and rebelled generation after generation; loved us so much as to share the Truth, offer forgiveness, to open Heaven’s gates…

… loved us so much as to lower Himself to the form of a human, His Son, to share our sorrows, show us the Way, and to offer healing and salvation to those who believe on Him; loved us so much as to remain amongst us in the form of the Holy Spirit, to guide, comfort, and empower us. To have His Son take our sins, our deserved punishment, upon Himself – could we imagine such love? And all this, while we were yet sinners?

Surely this love – our puzzle-piece “L” and the similar-shaped “J,” signifying Love and Jesus – can make the puzzles of our lives complete, whole… making sense.

Look at either one, and if you really can’t understand them fully, just accept them and fit them into your life’s picture. Each one is a piece that passes understanding.

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“The Love of God” is a traditional hymn performed here by the three brothers Aaron, Nathan, and Stephen Nasby, The “NCrew,” their band called Eli Eli. It is a hymn that comes as close as any to defining the indefinable, indescribable unspeakable mystery that is God’s love. There is a legend that a madman in an asylum once heard the song through his barred window and wrote the words of the third verse on his wall. Somehow the plausibility of that story reflects the love, the peace, that passes understanding.

Click: The Love of God

By Leah C. Morgan

He’s only 10. He’s not a threat. He’s rather ordinary, but the girls in eighth grade who ride his bus target him as the object of their ridicule. Day after day, they humiliate and torment him, and there’s no one to care. The school is contacted but nothing changes. The boy cries, inside and out, his agony overtaking him.

Then one day, right about the time people out there are celebrating God’s love come down, talking about Advent, and the visit of an advocate from heaven, a new ninth-grade girl moves to the area and starts riding his bus. She sees the cruelty of her peers. She doesn’t care much about impressing them. But she becomes outraged, incensed with their behavior.

She is moved with compassion for him and comes to sit with him in his misery, right beside him, on his seat on the bus. She associates with him, the outcast. She smiles at him and identifies with his suffering. At Christmas time, the greatest gift appears in the most unlikely forms, the shape of his tormentors.

And the unthinkable happens.

The girls who had picked on him begin to ridicule the new girl and punish her for showing him kindness. They tell her she’s ugly. This one, who is beautiful like an angel. But she is unflinching, unmoving. She stays by his side taking his pain, absorbing the blows. And the faces of the tormentors contort with rage, their mouths spewing out hatred. The angel girl, the one surely sent down, begins to laugh.

She looks on at the ridiculous, outrageous scenario, the mean girls angry at kindness, and she laughs. She laughs and laughs, inflaming the bullies even more until one of the girls grabs the heaven-sent one by her long beautiful hair, and bangs her head against the bus window. Over and over they hurt her for loving him and he is as helpless to save her as he was to help himself. Is there a God anywhere to stop the injustice? Even his savior is subject to this evil?

At this very moment, the principal of the school walks by the school bus window. She sees the abuse and rushes to help.

Finally, the boy is heard. After months of humiliation and scorn, someone listens. In fact, it really does seem that God has listened, as though He heard his cries and sent a representative of Himself to hurt alongside him and bring a rescue. It sounds a great deal like the Christmas story itself.

This encounter happened yesterday in our neighborhood, and is the greatest Advent experience of the season for me. It is the most picturesque. My niece, Eden, is the one putting on the Christmas robe, playing the role of the suffering, humble Savior, loving the outcast, defending the weak. Her example of love has brought Christmas down to me.

UPDATE: 12.23.14 – Christmas keeps coming down, falling like love. The mother of the angel-girl lives with her daughter, and knows too well that she is very human. Mom cheers her compassion for the boy, but is concerned for the hostile relationship between her daughter and the angry girls. She pleads with her daughter to consider their struggles, to see them as needing love every bit as much as the boy.

The daughter considers this as she enters her home after school. She reaches for the door, and hears the taunting girls behind her: “You’d better go home! You better run!” She whirls around to face them. They throw down their backpacks, readying for a fight.

She looks into their angry faces and says, “I want to apologize.”

The girls’ jaws drop so low, they nearly make contact with the backpacks on the sidewalk. “What?”! They demand an explanation.

“I was really mad at what you were doing to that boy on the bus, but that didn’t give me any right to call you animals. You’re people with feelings too,” said the very human, heaven-sent one.

The girls answered, talking together at once. “It’s okay. We’re sorry too. Maybe we could be friends? You seem like a really cool girl.”

And today, the one “giving” Christmas, received a Christmas present from an apparent former enemy, because she “looks like a princess.” Pink lipstick.

This is what Jesus living in us is meant to do. Love the unlovable. Pierce the darkness of hatred with the blinding light of love.

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This tender but powerful guest essay, a true story just days old – no: actually 2000 years old – was written by our friend Leah C. Morgan. She writes about beauty, laughter, and life here and after as witnessed from her home in Western Maryland. Your comments can be directed toleahcharlenemorgan@gmail.com. The music video is by Joy Williams.

Click: Here With Us

6-23-14

A lot of Christians think about Heaven in the same way that agnostics sort of hope about the afterlife, and even as assorted Hottentots of the world’s pagan cults think about appeasing the gods. That is, that good deeds might earn the way to eternal life.

Just act nice, nothing more? Jesus didn’t believe it, and told us so. I have gotten to think about numbers – the numbers of times the Bible tells us that our hearts matter more to God than our deeds. The number of times Jesus and the apostles affirmed it. The number of good deeds we’d have to do to persuade God that unbelief doesn’t matter.

Numbers.

A big number, 2000. Two thousand years since Paul wrote: “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Charities, nice; but they do not equal Heaven. If so, Jesus could have saved Himself some major grief. Or 500. Five hundred years since Christians rediscovered Ephesians 2:8,9 – “For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”

Two thousand years, five hundred years, are a lot years to neglect when thinking about the Bible’s truths. Here are other numbers for Christians to think about. Forget good deeds like charities. Think about sins. We all sin. Yours might be small ones, but let’s count some.

Do you sin once a day? Think an impure thought, or hold onto an unforgiveness? Maybe a white lie? Share a little gossip? Don’t pray when you know you should? Fail to whisper a Christian blessing when someone needs it? Anything you don’t confess?

Let’s say you do any one of these things just once a day – which would make you a virtual saint among all the rest of us, but, anyway… that one sin a day makes for 365 a year. Over 10 years, that’s 3,650. If you have, say, 30 more years to live, that’s more than 10,000 sins.

On the other hand, if you commit these sins, even “little” sins, once an hour during your waking hours – still not an absurd standard – that’s a total of 160,00 sins. For 30 years. Let’s count starting at, say, age 12, and go until the statistical life expectancy of an American female, 82. That would add up to more than 400,000 sins. Careful: transgress a couple times an hour, and you’ll wind up a millionaire… in the sinner’s lottery.

Viewed in that statistical perspective, you’d need a lot of good deeds, a pile of charity receipts, to face eternity fearlessly, right? Well the good news – the Good News – is, we don’t have to pile up numbers of this OR that on scales of justice. Not about this. Confess with your mouth, believe in your heart.

But let’s not put the math books away yet. It is human nature to think we must do good deeds… and don’t get me, or the scriptures, wrong: We SHOULD. And we DO. When Jesus lives in our hearts, we want to do good, we cannot hold back from taking joy in good deeds. Charity becomes our response, not our “meal ticket”!

Final numbers-crunching, for those who want to: on the general basis of the mathematics above:

In your waking hours, each day, you have approximately 250 opportunities to do those good deeds – kind thoughts, helping hands, reassuring words. That’s if you show charity only every five minutes. That’s 1,750 times a week.

Expand those “good deeds” plus the time-frame: if you raise your children aright, if you pray with a hurting soul, if you seek God when He wants to talk to your spirit – added to the others, at the same pace, would approach 100,000 chances to do “good deeds” every year.

You see it coming, math wizards: Live a normal lifespan, have the love of Jesus in your heart, do good deeds because obedient and joyful Christians are good-deed-doers… and your are in the neighborhood of 7-million acts of love. The root meaning of “charity,” they’ll tell you in other classrooms, is “love.”

So, you do the arithmetic. Count the acts of charity, planning for the payoff. Or lose count of the acts of love, knowing you’re already “home,” knowing “all these things shall be added unto you.” We don’t love because we have to. That’s not love! When we act charitably from the overflow of our hearts, God’s showers of blessing will follow.

Numbers. Did you ever count the number of raindrops in a Spring shower? Not too easy, not too practical, not possible! Yet God’s response to our acts of love will be “showers of blessing” – oh, for the showers we plead!

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Speaking of numbers, and “showers of blessing,” here is a choir from churches in Chennai (formerly Madras), Tamil Nadu, India, singing an old favorite, and reassuring, hymn.

Click: Showers of Blessing

2-24-14

I have a great new friend, and in the process of getting to know each other, she has been condensing portions of her life story into what she calls “Reader’s Digest versions,” as do I, and we return, and will, to share details. Life is about the stories, of course, not their titles. I have come to appreciate, in literature and not only in conversations, that the gift of revelation is in storytelling, but the gift of self-revelation is in our choice of labels, titles, and summaries.

So – setting aside, here, the conversations with a friend, but in larger senses – I have been thinking about the codes we all use, whether short stories tell about great narratives, or a phrase can represent great truths. A major risk we face is “reductio ad absurdum”: oversimplification. I have observed, in the Christian context, that some churches today “reduce” certain messages of God to present, in effect, the Six Commandments (or so) instead of 10; or, worse yet, repackage what effectively becomes the “10 Options.” Or, you know, Jesus’ “Suggestions From the Mount.”

But the opposite risk is to pile on, adding to the gospel: over-intellectualization. Martin Luther called Reason the enemy of Faith. With encyclopedia versions instead of Reader’s Digest versions of biblical truths, we can lose God’s Word in the weeds! The simplest message is the most profound. What doth the Lord ask of us? I am reminded of a conversation between Jesus and Peter.

“Do you love me?” he asked Peter, recorded in the 21st chapter of John. In fact, He asked Peter – the impulsive, the quick and often presumptuous apostle – “Do you love me?” three times. We should note that He did not challenge Peter with the agendas of contemporary Christianity: Do you know Me? Do you serve Me? Do you defend Me? Or even, Do you work for Me?

“Do you love Me?”

Jesus asks us the same question. Don’t be quick to answer, “Why else would I be serving others and doing good works and attending church and praying? I do these things because I love You! Of course I love You!” If that is the nature of our answer, we get the order of importance reversed. And we should realize that Jesus really, simply, merely asks us a Yes or No question.

It is not only greed and sin that lurk in the verse that warns, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26). It surely can refer to Christians who fall short in nurturing their souls, who interfere with the Spirit’s nurture of their own spirits, because they scurry about like wind-up Christians. In love with projects, and worship services, and meetings… and maybe, not quite so much, in love with Jesus.

“Do you love Me?”

Christians who were once messed up and found their Savior… can mess themselves up again. For “churchy” reasons. This is sin, too; and grieves the Heart of Jesus. We need to look beyond the Reader’s Digest and bumper-strip versions of the Gospel, and likewise strip away the ponderous rules and restrictions of men – the barnacles on Jesus’s fishing-boat – and be still. Be still and know that He is God. Listen.

Listen to the question Jesus asks. Listen for the Heartbeat of the Savior.

Then, although both things are profitable to our troubled souls, we can discern the difference between our personal cries in certain situations for the peace of God… and the life-long Love affair we should desire with the God of Peace.

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An anthem about the bare-bones, essential priority of loving God, in spite of everything else in our lives, is the powerful “Yet Will I Sing,” by Audra Lynn Hartke, singer and worship leader at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. Graphic slideshow by beanscot.

Click: Yet I Will Sing