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?

+ + +

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

8-13-18

Years ago our family worshiped at a neighborhood church in Connecticut. By “neighborhood” I don’t imply small; it was where a lot of our friends spent their Sunday mornings… and Wednesday nights, and Saturday mornings for Bible studies, and many weekend evenings for fellowship and book review groups. A thriving church.

The pastor had been converted to a fervent Christianity in his youth by Billy Graham; and, ironically, when he “graduated” from the church he joined the staff of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in North Carolina. He was a wonder pastor; more, a great teacher.

One of the adult Sunday School classes was in his office. Changing topics and lessons, but my wife and I were in the sessions about some of the Pauline letters – the Epistles of Paul on his fascinating and varied missionary journeys.

My wife and I had recently, in a different church and under different teaching, become Pentecostals, believing in – accepting – the Gifts of the Spirit as described in the Book of Acts; listed in I Corinthians 13; and elsewhere in the New Testament. We had traveled to crusades held by Jimmy Swaggart, the great R W Schambach, Kenneth Copeland, and others; and some couples in this new fellowship had, with us; and were intrigued by ministries of tongues, healing, wisdom, prophecy, and such.

There are 12 such “Gifts of the Spirit” listed carefully in the first letter to the church at Corinth. Now, this new church of which I speak, was not a Pentecostal church; it was Evangelical Free. And the good pastor was not Pentecostal, evidenced by his answer to the question posed by one of the couples, “What do you think of the 12 Gifts of the Spirit?”

He answered, “Well, they are in the Bible, yes; but I have a problem with several of them.” Wise-guy Rick immediately asked, “Howe many of the 10 Commandments do you have a problem with?”

My timing might have been that of a wise guy, but my point was, and is, serious. I know (believe me; from hundreds of discussions and debates) I know the arguments of the anti-Pentecostals – that the Gifts of the Spirit were specific “ministry gifts” for the First-Century Church; that such miracles were withdrawn by the Giver of the Gifts after the Apostolic Age, after the Apostles were all martyred. And so forth. Of course the Gospels say no such thing; the Books of Acts recorded miracle-gifts throughout; there is no hint of expiration-dates in the Epistles of Paul and other writers; no warnings in the Book of Revelation. In fact John wrote there of the End of Times, not the End of Gifts.

Beyond my spiritual snarkiness just concluded, I do not, here, want to litigate the question that will be solved to our satisfaction when we arrive in Glory.

But I do want us all to consider the manner of Christian religiosity that my tale represents. All of us, me too, and conservative and liberal Christians; Catholics and Protestants; evangelical and Pentecostal and fundamentalist and “seeker” and post-modern and Orthodox; in other words, all human beings… practice at the altar of a Pick-and-Choose belief system.

In a way, of course, that is another way to describe hypocrisy; but few of us intend to be hypocrites, especially in matters of core beliefs. These days, it is explained away as “relativism” in many places, in the way (it seems to me) that skin cancer could be called an itch. Now, I recognize that this dilemma is not restricted to religious beliefs, but political affiliations or even patriotic fervor do not have rules that are strict.

“Strict”? Yes. We – in the 21st-century West – scarcely regard our spiritual affiliations as requiring strict adherence. As recently as a century ago, this would have been regarded as anathema by most of those spiritual affiliations – denominations.

My daughter, a youth pastor, has been hired by churches where she was not required to know denominations’ doctrines, yet was obliged to teach children. Not Luther’s Catechism in a Lutheran church, not Calvin’s Institutes in a Presbyterian. Sort of like joining the Boy Scouts without having to be a boy… oh, wait.

To take to its logical extension, what is the point of systematic theology? God gave humankind the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions. Jesus taught; He did not propose debates. When He healed and forgave, He said “Go thou and sin no more,” not “Hey, whatever; go for it.” When talked about the necessity to be Born Again, He did not say, “No one gets to Father except through Me… and Buddha and Tuesday Meditation classes and Oprah.”

The culture seduces us; and the double-edged swords of modernism and intellectual vanity, and secularist education. And the mistaken trust that everything in life is either settled democratically… or according to whatever the heck feels right to us.

Think of every challenge that might confront you, or disaster that might threaten you. You might pick a certain reaction, or choose a way to respond… but the serious things in life are not defined – cannot be defined – by a pick-and-choose acceptance or rejection. Life is real; life is earnest, as Longfellow tellingly wrote.

And nothing is more real than the disposition of your soul for eternity, and your respect for the word of God.

+ + +

For Nancy

Click: The Church’s One Foundation