Monday Morning Music Ministry

7-4-21

This title might seem blasphemous to patriots. Those who know me and my works and my essays know that for the old red, white, and blue I would cheer three hundreds times, and I have.

There are many among us these days who would offer three jeers for the red, white, and blue. And do so, every day, in many ways.

“My country right or wrong”? Yes, I will defend the flag and our American heritage; and most of you readers do, too. But is not a trio of random colors that we revere, or the mere fabric on which those colors appear. Rather it is the fabric of our republic – the warp and weave, literally, of what made us Americans – that we defend. Or we should.

If those 50 stars represent, instead of separate states, let us say the hallmarks of contemporary America, will we yet rise and defend stars that stand for abortion, loss of free speech, threatened denial of firearm ownership, open borders, censorship of the Bible in public places, government weaponization of tax agencies, legalized drugs, gambling, and perversion, monitoring of “hate speech” and free assembly…?

The Revolution-era Patriots would not have fought for such things. They rebelled against far milder intrusions by the King! Their “lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor” meant more than accepting attacks upon our country, as today’s Christian Patriots go along and get along… not wanting to hurt the feelings of those who despise us. Happy Fourth of July.

This Christian column will turn to Christian things. Many of us have referred to Alexis de Tocqueville’s long visit to America in the 1840s, and his brilliant writings, his analysis of why America is unique in world history. Shame on us, not many of us have read him; shame on me, I did not until recently. But for all of his examination of immigrant groups, laws, fertile resources, and social traditions, he returned again and again to the bedrock strength of the American character: religion.

“America will cease to be great when it ceases to be good,” he wrote in that regard, and how community churches and Christian faith undergirded the American character.

Is Christianity dying in America? Is Christianity an essential component of American greatness? Have our iconic wood-frame churches and beautiful cathedrals become mere social clubs or museums? How many pastors and priests preach “inclusion” instead of the Gospel? How many homosexual rainbow flags fly with – or in the place of – the American flag or a denomination’s Christian flag?

Jacques Rivière once observed to the poet Paul Claudel that “Christianity is dying…. We do not know why, above our towns, there still rise those spires which no longer [host] the prayers of any one of us…. Surrounded by railroad stations and hospitals, and from which the people themselves have chased [the faithful].”

This describes too many churches, too many places, too many people in America today.

These very days we hear government officials bleating for trillions of dollars to take care of those in need. We listen to commercials where companies brag about spending millions (our money, of course) on the poor and disadvantaged. Whatever else these initiatives are – they are battles in the war on religion.

Jesus desires that His children have a heart for the poor. God ordained His church to exercise charity. And the Founders of this nation said – many times, in many ways – that without a religious spirit, a republic is doomed to fail. They would not have dreamed of having a government rob those initiatives from its citizens.

Thank God, the poet Claudel responded to Rivière with brilliant clarity: “Truth is not concerned with how many people it persuades.”

As an aphorism, that is valid; but the question that confronts us on July 4th is, How many people in “Christian America” care about the Truth any more? America no longer argues against Truth, but tends often to ignore it. Truth has become irrelevant. We remember that a lady outside Constitution Hall, as it is known today, anxiously asked Benjamin Franklin as the Framers left one evening, “Sir, what have you given us?”

You know Franklin’s answer: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Note well: He was not differentiating between the American Constitution and Monarchy. The Framers were careful to design and bequeath a Republic – structured, limited, balanced, representative government. In the style of Athens, Rome, and, yes, the Bible blueprints for a society, as those men frequently invoked.

NOT a democracy, which was despised and feared by Athens and Rome and the wise Framers. There is a difference, and today’s mobs not only blur the distinctions: they have declared war on order, tradition, and the religious spirit – Christianity and its role in our civic life.

I ask again, for serious thought: is this what we should salute as the flag passes by? If we shed a tear, is it for the America of today… or what America used to be?

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Click: Red Skelton’s Pledge of Allegiance

10-3-11

It is a good thing to remember things we celebrate, especially the words and phrases surrounding them, at times of the year not associated with them. And I don’t mean “Christmas in July” used-car sales. Every day of the year we should be astonished anew by the Easter story, the miracle of the Resurrection. Or by the powerful mystery of God’s intervention in the course of the history and in the lives of His children, to become flesh and dwell among us, which deserves better than to be categorized as a theme of Christmas time. The “fact” of it, and the “why” of it, should be cause for daily, not yearly, celebration.

In the secular world, our civic life, the same threat of lassitude exists. We relegate so many observances and speeches about the American Revolution (if noted at all) to the Fourth of July, that we tend to consider the topic covered for the rest of the year. This penchant unplugs the healthy recollection of our heritage’s great audacity, however, and can suck the life out of patriotism.

The Founders did not merely want to be independent of England. It was about more than import duties and having a voice in the British parliament. Christian Patriots caught fire. They realized that America, a land set apart, could be a society set apart too: the world’s first experiment in self-government, a Republic (not a democracy, which is a subject for a thousand posts), and, when we read the documents of the time, a civil society built along biblical principles. Even “deists” – fewer in number than modern textbooks claim – looked to the Bible for blueprints.

Revolution? Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Significantly, he wrote this after the Constitution had been adopted.

These concepts have spiritual connotations and implications. For instance, the Roman lawyer Tertullian, after his conversion, defended persecuted Christians in Nero’s time, defiantly saying, “We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed.”

That the American Revolutionaries were largely of the comfortable classes – merchants, traders, lawyers, landowners – is instructive. They had grown prosperous during British rule. They easily could have remained comfortable without rocking the boat. The lower classes, no less freedom-loving, might be seen as having “nothing to lose” by rebellion. Yet patriots of all stripes knew what was at stake. They were willing to lose their comfort, their relative freedoms, indeed their heads, if they lost… or even during the precarious process of winning.

This stark choice was not a hazy implication of their actions. They boldly closed the Declaration of Independence with the famously defiant pledge: “With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

What Tertullian said of early martyrs, and Jefferson said of citizen patriots, must be the standard of today’s Christians. We must be willing to give all and lose all for the sake of the gospel; to spend and be spent, and to realize that persecution in some degree and at some time will visit us.

Some colonial patriots did lose their homes, businesses, and lives. What did it gain them? The answer is, knowledge of worthy sacrifice for a noble ideal, and liberty for their fellow citizens and descendants. What do Christians gain by “losing all”? That answer is, gaining Heaven.

But then, in one of the Bible’s puzzling points, we occasionally read that the saints who “go before” can gain treasures in Heaven; some will have “crowns.” Do we serve Christ in order to win gifts and prizes in the afterlife? No! This is one of the great truths of the end times – In Revelation 4, verses 4, 10 and 11, we read, “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.”

In other words, we gain all – eternity with Christ – by losing all. And if God graces some souls with “crowns” for having served Him in special ways, we will want immediately to lay them back at His feet!

Truly it takes losing it all, and being willing to lose all, in order to gain everything. That is true in a nation, and it is true in a kingdom – God’s kingdom. Let us appreciate that truth on more days than patriotic holidays, and at more times than in occasional sermons. It is how we should conduct our lives, daily.

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This video features the great Jessy Dixon, gospel singer, songwriter, and preacher, who died this week. The song is “I Have Everything,” precisely to our theme today. His amazing performances will be missed – what a talent he had.

Click: I Have Everything