Monday Morning Music Ministry

12-11-23

As Christmas celebrations draw closer, people tend to think more about Jesus than they do at most other times of year. … or, anyway, what He might have looked like and acted like during His earthly ministry.

Speaking personally, I am grateful to movies like Passion of the Christ and TV series like The Chosen because, if nothing else, their producers dared show a Jesus who was realistic (as we must assume) – laughing, crying, feeling pain, experiencing betrayal and suffering.

In the Year of our Lord (giving credit where credit is due) 2023, however, the impressions of our childhoods persist. People can be forgiven, to coin a phrase, if their conception of Jesus is of a fair-haired, well-groomed, moon-faced, smiley guy with children always nearby to sit on His lap. Artwork on Sunday-school pamphlets told me so.

Throughout my life I have heard Christians and skeptics alike ask why Jesus “had” to come to earth 2000 years ago – so far back in time, so far away. Believers say their faith would intensify if they could just see Him. Non-believers and agnostics have a similar desire – that if they could just see Jesus, they would believe.

Well, we should remember that the Apostles who lived and ate and walked and talked with Jesus for three years, hearing His teaching, and witnessing miracles… if they betrayed and denied Him, and scattered when things got a little tough, would we be much different? Get real. Remember what Jesus said to Doubting Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.”

But Christmas displays have got me to thinking. Not that Jesus is a plastic Savior-figure for sale at the Dollar Store; nor a blow-up plastic baby-in-the-manger for a lawn display; nor a face on T-shirts of the worship band at the new church down the street. But I wonder what Christianity would be like if Jesus had come to earth in our lifetimes. How would Jesus present Himself?

• We don’t have many “Lords” and “Ladies” any more, so those terms might have to be altered. What is the modern-day equivalent of Lord? It would sound strange – “President God”? Would we be told to address Jesus as “Boss”?
• Very few guilty criminals are put to death these days, and when they are, the Cross is virtually obsolete. Would Christian gift shops sell trinkets of syringes, if that is how Jesus would be put to death, by lethal injection, today?
• Would people wear necklaces with little electric chairs instead of crosses?
• The Great Commission – “Go into all the world and preach the Good News” – would be the same. But today, the spread of communications (and, I’ll admit, employing some 20-20 hindsight in my scenario here) might alter the message of the Apostles and evangelists.
• Today the Disciples would be seen as recruiters and motivational speakers. But if they could know what becoming a follower of Christ entails, even modern sales techniques would present some challenges. Consider:

– Become a Christian! When you commit to follow Jesus, your family might resent you, friends might leave you, strangers might persecute you!

– Become a Christian! Share what you believe and you might lose a job! Neighbors will regard you as nuts!

– Become a Christian! If you heed His call and perhaps go into missions work, you can be harassed, even martyred, like so many Christians in history… and still, today!

– Become a Christian! Among the perks – not certain, but very common – you will be misunderstood, criticized, ridiculed… sometimes by those you love the most!

Those are some of the “perks” of being a Christian. They are not much different than any time in the past 2000 years. But I would suggest, if you think about “Lord” versus “Boss,” and symbols of crosses versus electric chairs, that today’s evangelistic “sales pitch” might be more challenging than in times past.

In fact, everything is more challenging than in times past. As we slouch toward Gomorrah – in the words of the William Butler Yeats poem and the book by the great Robert H Bork – as our culture is ever more engulfed by moral relativism and secularism, the challenges of being a Christ-follower are increasingly stark.

Generally, we live in a post-Christian age. Thank God, literally, the DNA of the twenty-first century church seems to be healthier in the southern hemisphere. Christianity, as it always has, thrives in lands of persecution; believers, that is, one by one, refined by fire. Africa, once the destination of missionaries, now sends missionaries to apostate societies in Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America.

There is hope.

And by the way, regarding the premise I posed at the beginning – “If Jesus were alive today…” Here’s the dirty little secret, which is not so dirty; not so little; not so secret –

Jesus is alive today.

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What does it cost to be a Christian? What DID it cost 2000 years ago, when Jesus was born? Remember the “Slaughter of the Innocents” – the command to slay all baby boys under the age of two; the Establishment’s effort to deny the coming King. Hostility threatened Christianity then… today its stark enemy is indifference.

Click: Rachel’s Lament

8-2-21

I was talking with a friend this week about canals and rivers and cruises; memories and bucket-list kinds of things; and how different our country would have been if canals had asserted their utility and prominence in the face of railroad and highways. (Cleaner, quieter, more picturesque landscapes, at least…)

I have been blessed to have traveled on the legendary Orient Express train; and to have enjoyed cruises through Europe, those that connect great cities and pass breathtaking scenery on fabled rivers). On my bucket list still is a barge trip through France. On first mention it might not sound romantic, but France is still crisscrossed with old canals; and barge excursions wend their way at slow pace through beautiful countryside. Your “pilot” will stop where you want, and go ashore to acquire local produce, meats, cheeses, and wines so every spontaneous meal he prepares is fresh.

My current research into Theodore Roosevelt’s career taught me about an active movement during his presidency. He was a proponent of something that might have been realized if he had served another term. Basically it would have connected America in imaginative ways – joining rivers, expanding streams, building canals. From the Atlantic Ocean to the foothills of the Rockies, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; all would have fed into the Mississippi, making it – and all the other watery constituents – vast, interconnected routes for travel and commerce. Flood protection, irrigation, westward expansion, and trade would be beneficiaries. Locks, reservoirs, towpaths, and muleskinners were legacies.

In Roosevelt’s time a nationwide movement – actually scores of local initiatives, called, in one instance, “Fourteen Feet Through the Valley” – advocated an aggressive, coordinated policy. Unfortunately, lobbies of railroads and highway builders and unions were more aggressive and coordinated. There still are many miles of canals in America, and by greater proportion, around the world, but this grand interstate waterway was not to be. It could have been as consequential, a modern miracle, as Roosevelt’s Panama Canal proved to be. I eventually experienced a canal trip, between two Great Lakes at Sault Ste-Marie (where their levels are different, necessitating canals and locks). Not yet have I been to the Panama Canal.

I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys: I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. Isaiah 41:18

Otherwise on such subjects, and many others, I am naïve, and I will confess that I realized how provincial city boys can be (I was born in New York City) then when I visited the source of a river outside Angoulême, in the Charente region of France. There was a little lake from which flowed a little river, but it appeared to have nothing flowing into it. Except from below. There was a swell of water, as of a fountain, that revealed the point of the source.

I felt like a hick to be amazed at this. As a kid in New York, the only similar thing I ever saw was water swelling from broken sewer pipes or fire hydrants. Otherwise, I thought water came from… faucets. Oh, yes, upstate reservoirs. Oh, yes, magazine pictures of melting snows in mountains, and great waterfalls. But obviously there are many natural springs; we read about them. They don’t require drilling. Bottled water companies subsist on them. But I was 30 before I ever saw one of these underground springs.

There is a spiritual message; there always is (in life, not only here with me). In the Bible there are many “types” of the Holy Spirit, like oil and rushing wind. And water; frequently water. We thirst for Him; we need oases in life’s frequent deserts; we know these things.

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:13,14

The Lord met a woman at Jacob’s Well and impressed her with knowledge of her sins and shame, and the explanation that the water she drew there was nothing compared to what He provides us. The TV series The Chosen remarkably captured that encounter.

Wells that are dug are smaller versions of springs that are sources of rivers. We can be amazed at such sources of water, but do we realize that unless we channel and direct them, neither the source nor the thirsty themselves know where they will lead?

In the case of water, it will flow somewhere. In spite of Greenies’ hysteria about imminent flooding of Kansas prairies, the earth holds just so much water – always has, always will. It might freeze or steam, become rain or alter its courses, even change locations from oceans to deserts over time, but water is finite in its volume. As springs well up, so do vast underground rivers ebb and flow.

As with water, so it is with all components of God’s world. We cannot double the size of the earth; we cannot invent new elements. I celebrate “creativity” but always try to remember the quotation-marks: only God the Creator can create. At best, even in the arts, humankind merely rearranges.

As with water, and springs of wells and rivers, the Source knows not where it will flow, or end, except in God’s omniscience and providence. With the Holy Spirit, the “springs of living water,” we can be refreshed and sustained… but having it become “a well of eternal life” is our responsibility.

Jesus offers to turn the deserts of our lives into gardens. How will we then live? Too many of us choose to become thirsty again, and again, and again, when we can be free of that; and never again be spiritually thirsty.

“There is a river that flows from deep within.” Come to that water.

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I could not decide which of three relevant video music clips to attach today. The inspiration flooded over me to offer three themed songs, of three different traditions.

Click: In the River
In The River (featuring Kim Walker-Smith)

Click: There Is a River
There Is A River – Heritage Singers

Click: Down In the River
Down in the River – Shenandoah Christian Music Camp