Monday Morning Music Ministry

12-6-21

How can a loving God permit school shootings? … or genocide? … or painful illnesses? … or abuse, human trafficking, family turmoil, betrayal, cruelty…?

We hear these questions all time. And, perhaps, we often have asked these questions ourselves. We are only human.

“We’re only human” is part of the answer. When we choose to sin, or so often (and euphemistically) make mistakes, we are part of the old, old story of allowing corruption, enabling error, and inviting sin into the world around us.

The comedian Norm MacDonald died recently. He succumbed to cancer after a 10-year battle during which he told nobody about it. His death was a surprise even to his closest friends. He was brilliant, and presented himself as a bundle of contradictions. He pretended to be unlettered, but was an intellectual and well-read. He acted impulsively, but was a student of his craft. And despite occasional coarseness, he was a Christian who frequently professed his faith.

He did say that he struggled with the question of a loving God “permitting” horrors in our lives… this vale (valley) of tears.

Believe me, there are things I do not understand… but I have come to realize that God asks us to obey, not understand. Translation: to have faith. There is sin (brokenness, disease, corruption, heartache, tears) in the world because, well, we sin. If we ask “why?” to some of these dilemmas, maybe we should pray in from of a mirror, and “understand” a better perspective. Because when we pray such prayers at times of disasters, we are – in effect – blaming God.

Time out.

Job, who endured much personally; that is, not as an observer, nevertheless declared “Though he slay me, I will put my trust in Him.” God, after all, is not only God at the end of the storm, but through the storm. Yet, though we walk through the valley (remembering Norm MacDonald’s question) of the shadow of death… God is with us. Can He deliver us… can He plunk us on a mountaintop trail instead?

But His promise to be with us is the best. God not only promises the best for us, He is the best. We must trust in His plan for our lives. The beautiful, talented quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada once said to me, “God permits what He hates, to accomplish what He loves.” Her life proved Him; my wife’s ordeal and ministry lived that; by grace, through faith, believers are saved.

Have we answered the question about a loving God and school shootings or genocide? My soul is satisfied, despite many, many things in life I don’t understand. As much as I might regret it, I never will understand.

When we lost our first child near full-term, I didn’t understand it, nor how God “allowed” it. In my stupid rebellion, I did not stop believing in Him, but I remember praying defiantly, “OK, I will obey You, God, from here on; but I cannot love You any more.”

By His mercy, I failed at both promises. The first because I am human, and He granted me free will, mercy, and forgiveness; and the second, because He is that persistent, mysterious, tenacious lover of my soul.

Maybe we instead should ask, How can a righteous God permit flawed sinners like me to gain forgiveness and salvation? Huh?

+ + +

Click: How Can I Keep From Singing?

2-26-18

Even since last week the “gun debate” in America has intensified, taken on a new tone. What’s next?

“We need to change hearts, not laws.” Cliches generally become cliches because they are true. Laws are useful; often necessary, but raise false hopes and can be cruel tricks if people believe they will bring Heaven on earth. And the extreme of firearm confiscation or severe restrictions will only remove hardware… not hate.

I can write a book, or deliver an hour-long sermon, but my counsel for ending gun violence and similar social maladies can be summarized simply. Not Washington; not Congress; not the President; not laws; not armed guards. Simple… but not easy:

America, stop glorifying violence. Hollywood, stop making movies that preach violence – and guns – as the tools of justice (and stop the hypocrisy of those same actors rallying against the violence that makes them rich). Christians, stop letting your kids go to such movies, and play such video games. Choose.

America, stop destroying your families. Girls, stop having babies and start having weddings; men, start respecting yourselves and your girlfriends – wait until they are wives. Churches, teach your children standards. Black Church, why are 75 per cent of your teenage moms single? White church, why are your divorce rates as high, or higher, than in the general population? Choose!

America, get off drugs, get off drink, get off the cell phones, start eating together. Guys, pull up your pants and wear your baseball caps straight, and not inside the house. Teenage girls, stop trying to look like women your moms’ age when you go to the mall. And moms, stop trying to dress like teenage girls. CHOOSE!

America, stop the secularization. Re-institute prayer in public places; return Bible readings to classrooms. I am not ancient, but I remember opening each day with Bible readings in the public school. Did it “save” anyone? Maybe not, but it implied “values” to all. The Jewish kids read from the Old Testament, and one Hindu girl read from her holy book; two kids from atheist families were allowed to read or stay silent or however they felt comfortable. Choices.

A nation that is raised – as ours now is, make no mistake – not on DIFFERENT values than previously, but taught that there ARE no values; that nation is doomed to die. And worse than die, its children are consigned to respect no rules but their own. When they do not respect themselves, they cannot respect others – which I believe is why there are so many PC Thought-Police today: at our core, we all still desire rules and standards, so secular nonsense is imposed by elites. “Do as they say…”

A generation ago, “stiff-necked bigots,” as we were called, predicted that if we disconnected God from our nation’s formal workings, our nation would fall apart at the seams. “Hurting the feelings” of minorities, atheists, etc., became more important than affirming our own standards. We predicted that if heritage and tradition became loathsome values… that we risked raising a generation of self-indulgent, morally loose, selfish kids who largely were more interested in pleasure, even drugs and alcohol and sex, than the earlier generations of kids who made American great, and sustained that America. Silly predictions?

The answer is easy. “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord” (Acts 3:19). Easy… but not simple. Holy behavior, often empty, is not the true way to Jesus, but Jesus truly is the way to holiness.

Do-able? America just has to decide between a return to morality and Biblical values; repenting of personal and social sins; giving up immorality and self-indulgence, leading to a safer, happier, more just society – or deciding for more of what America has become. Arguments, hate, lack of trust and respect. More shooting, more guns. If fewer guns, then more knifings. If fewer knives, then other forms of ugliness, pick ‘em. Hatred can be very inventive, as we see.

The answer is sincere changes of hearts. Brother Billy Graham, who recently died, was represented on TV by clips of his quotation of the simple Bible truth: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life” (Matthew 7: 13,14).

Without making such a simple choice, America’s fate is to endure more rot in society, more anguish, more mothers’ tears and fathers’ grief; more bitter fights within families. Worse Thanksgiving dinners and family picnics… more, and worse, school shootings.

These are the bitter fruits of the seeds we choose to sow.

+ + +

Click: Hide Thou Me

2-19-18

Another week, another school shooting. Or so it seems; the news media and politicians recently cited 18 deaths by firearms on American school properties in the first six weeks of this year.

Well, it turns out that most of those were parking-lot encounters after dark, between adults; or accidental discharges barely near schools, and so forth. Four angry, and ugly, assaults – but I am not saying “only four,” Any is too many.

The gun issue is one of many in contemporary America where hyperbole has overtaken rationality. Everyone – I think on both, or all, sides – readily adopts exaggerations and logical extensions and, lately, personal invective, to press their points.

What once was abstract is individual, and we see it in the “gun debate” as much as in any other area, and even among people who never encountered danger or grief. We can of course be passionate about issues without being touched personally. But I know the real root cause of our heated debates these days in America – that are more heat than debate.

It is the Slippery Slope. The term in logic indicates the danger of granting one point, in fear of losing the entire argument. To open the door a crack threatens to destroy the entire house, given time.

The Slippery Slope is more than a debating term. When it is used today, even when not called by name, people in effect indicate distrust of the opponent. In the gun debate, for instance, many defenders of the Second Amendment believe that any compromise will be seized upon, leading to… seizure of all firearms. “Give an inch; they’ll take a mile,” and it did not help rational debate when a Democrat officeholder a few years ago admitted that, yes, she would not stop at each restriction.

We can avoid slippery slopes by not even going near the slopes.

For instance, the solution to the “gun problem” in America is simple.

Not “easy,” but simple. Questions and answers:
For two centuries we have had virtually unrestricted access to firearms, and virtually no mass slayings and “senseless” attacks. Why?

Is it because guns are more sophisticated and deadly? Nonsense. Everything exists in the context of its time. Daggers are more convenient than dueling swords, yet there were not mass stabbings when they were readily available.

Speaking of knives, if the automatic reaction of many people – ban all guns – were a solution, should we look at the growing numbers of mass killings around the world by weaponized cars and trucks, and, yes again, random stabbings, and… ban cars and trucks and knives?

Such scenarios depend on slippery slopes, to propose and dispose… and will never lead to solutions.

It is self-swindling delusion to look to Washington for the answer to these problems, and almost everything, these days. “Why doesn’t the president act?” “Why doesn’t Congress DO something?”

Let’s explain something to America: Shut up. Washington is not the answer to everything… cannot be the answer to everything… and, as often as not, is the answer to nothing; unable to have the answers. Washington is not our savior.

We already have a Savior. And now we are face to face with our solution. Remember, I said “easy,” but not simple; not simple to make happen. Not in America, 2018.

Guns don’t make kids shoot. Hate makes them shoot. Listen to people shouting about laws and calling for more guards and more psychologists and more counselors. Where is Jesus in the middle of it all? Can you hear anyone calling for Him? For more God?

Some of the “simple” solutions in next week’s message.

+ + +

Click: Hard Times, Come Again No More

12-17-12

Like a recurring nightmare, we hear once more of carnage and senseless violence, a bizarre attack and unanswerable questions; and a school yet again is the setting. A lone perpetrator, but a million mysteries. Worse than only hearing the news, we see these days the anguish and fear, the confusion and panic; we see distraught children, and we see the tears on the cheeks of mothers.

Before those tears dried, there were calls from some quarters to change laws and outlaw guns. But on the same day a school in China was invaded, children injured at the hands of a knife-wielding maniac. Arsonists have, throughout history, claimed the lives of men, women… and children. Innocents. History’s pages are, in some ways, chronicles of the slaughter of innocents.

Would that we had the power to outlaw hatred and evil, not just guns and knives. Then we might be spared seeing mothers’ tears… and mothers themselves might be spared the constant fears, and all-too-common realities, that continuously, cruelly plague them as protectors of their precious children.

Mothers’ tears must burn like acid. I write as a man, a father, who cannot imagine that special maternal bond. We grieve for mothers as well as their lost children in these nightmarish situations. What I have been slowly comprehending, as time goes on, is the news footage of events around the world, seemingly different, is more and more alike to me. Mideast terrorism, wars in Afghanistan, genocide in Africa, religious persecution everywhere, and random attacks in our own neighborhoods: I used to listen to statistics, see the weapons, read the demands or justifications, the “claims of credit” of armies and groups. They all become as white noise. Now I only see, more and more, the tears on the cheeks of grieving mothers.

Are the tears of a Palestinian mother any less sacred, after a missile strike, than the tears of an Israeli mother after a bus bombing? An Afghan mother whose village has changed “sides” every week for months – are her tears less precious when one faction or other patrols her streets? A Christian mother in Pakistan loses her child to Muslim zealots; a mother from an African tribe loses all her children when a rival tribe sweeps her village; mothers all over the globe lose their daughters to traffickers and slave masters – do we harvest those tears to weigh and measure them… against what? The humble teardrop is a leveling agent.

There was one mother in history who shed such tears, and in fact witnessed almost all these varieties of separate, horrible atrocities happen to her son. She experienced grief a hundredfold, for her son was persecuted, taken from her, framed, tortured, abandoned by almost everybody except her, and murdered. She witnessed it all. The woman who cried those tears was Mary. It is a risky thing to attempt to quantify grief, but hers was unique because she KNEW these things would happen to her son – and to her – 33 years in advance.

Mary was chosen to be the one who would fulfill prophecy, a virgin who would bear the Incarnate God, sent to humankind to assume our sins and suffer the punishment we deserve. Mary knew these Old Testament prophecies, and she listened to the angels who visited her. When she in turn visited her cousin (who was pregnant with John the Baptizer), Mary spoke the classic “Magnificat”:

My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. Because He hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me; and holy is His name. And His mercy is from generation unto generations to them that fear Him. He has showed might in His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. …

Christians remember Mary’s prayer in the Advent season. We remember the promises of God, knowing they are blessings. We meditate upon the ways of God, as Mary ultimately had to. And we are confronted by the obscene vagaries of life, as Sandy Hook mothers must.

There is sin in the world. A loving God gave us free will, desiring that we experience life. He did not create us as angelic robots. Such beings cannot know sorrow nor joy. Redemption and salvation cannot be experienced by beings who need them not. No angel could ever sing “Amazing Grace” with tears of joy streaming down the cheeks.

But with life, in all its fullness, come the other tears, to which we return in sadness; and, can we all agree, in confusion and bitterness and at times unspeakable grief. There is no escaping it. It is human nature to feel these emotions, even when we trust God fully. In our seasons of pain we can try to understand human nature, and sometimes hear people apologize for it. But our attempts to understand are futile.

In that futility – beyond the fundamental proposition that it is a sinful nature – we must recognize on the other hand that God’s antidotes are easy to understand. He knows our sorrows, He understands our weaknesses, He feels our pain, He identifies with our losses, He has sent the Holy Comforter on whom we can call, He offers us peace that passes understanding.

Let us pray that weeping mothers and grieving families find that peace, and draw closer to, not farther from, God at these times. To lose faith, after losing a child, would intensify the unbearable misery of those who suffer.

It has long been warned that if God were removed, so to speak, from America’s classrooms, that trouble, danger, and evil would fill the void. This week one Adam Lanza entered a school to fill that vacuum. And all the mothers’ tears alone cannot wash away the horror.

+ + +

Mary cried tears of joy and tears of grief, as the mother of Jesus. May the timing of the Sandy Hook school massacre in the Advent season find some little connection as we contemplate the tears of mothers. The beautiful and profound new Christmas song “Mary Did You Know” is coupled with images of Mary and her Son. They are moments of birth and joy, pride and love, loss and death, and are from the movie “Passion of the Christ.” As is well known, these are difficult images to behold, so this is a Warning to Viewers; yet the scenes correctly portray the grief of one mother who witnessed, not just learned about, the massacre of her Son.

Click: Mary, Did You Know