Monday Morning Music Ministry

Easter, 2024

Every Christmas, Handel’s Messiah is Top-Ten in peoples’ lives. In concert halls, churches, and community sings; on radio and TV we hear the oratorio, or at least the familiar “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” and the “Hallelujah” Chorus. Even if only once a year, this is a good thing, culturally and spiritually.

Handel’s masterpiece encompasses, as its simple title proclaims, the entire life of the Savior, from prophesy to Resurrection. Handel lived his life in Germany, in Italy, and thence to England where he generally is embraced as a British composer. Messiah actually was first performed in Dublin. I was privileged to see his writing desk on display in the Writers Museum in the Irish capital.

More provincial than Handel was his landsman Johann Sebastian Bach, born the same year, 1685, only a few miles away, although the two musical titans never met. Bach’s musical reach, however, arguably is greater than Handel’s geographical realms; as great as that of any mortal who ever hummed a tune or wrote a melody.

They may be compared – just as Christmas and Easter may be compared in the business of our lives – but if their works may be compared, it is unfortunate that Bach’s supernal religious works probably are less celebrated than Handel’s Messiah. Anyway, less “familiar” to the ears of average folks, especially during holidays. This is regrettable, because Bach wrote music of astonishing power, musically and of deep emotional import. The B minor Mass; Magnificat; more than 200 cantatas; motets; and two Passions, St John’s and St Matthew’s.

It might seem like I have begun with a predictable tangent before I have even begun this Easter message. But, no; I want to draw attention to the amazing way the human race’s greatest composer presented the Easter story. I wish it were better known to people: more familiar.

For Holy Week vespers services in Leipzig, Germany, Bach wrote the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion, which were each performed in the St Thomas and St Nicholas churches on alternate years for decades. Three other Passions apparently have been lost. Bach wrote about 1800 pieces of music in his lifetime, and about 1200 are extant. Approximately half of his output was Christian music.

His Passions were series of cantatas to be performed during Holy Week, and in parts during services. They were similar to oratorios or operas but without costumes or drama – singers were assigned roles, and there was a musical “narrator.” The straight biblical narrative was distributed among soloists (evangelists and individual figures including Jesus, Peter, and Pilate) and choirs (various crowds, high priests, Roman soldiers, and Jews). We can appreciate the spectacle that the congregation beheld: a combination of church and theater, Greek-style drama and opera, music and voice, emotive performances.

Two broad categories commend Bach’s favored Passion (possibly the work of which he was proudest of all his compositions), The Passion According to St Matthew.

Musically, it is a succession of amazing melodies, alternating gentle beauty, then tense drama, then profound emotion. It has musical motifs and phrases interlaced, reflecting the underlying themes and meanings of events during Holy Week. The combinations of solo instruments and voices; unique combinations and harmonies; and grand choruses of voices and full orchestral power are impressive.

All is outpaced, of course, by the spiritual message, the meaning of every scene and biblical phrase, and the skill of dramatization – the masterful presentation of the events – and the spiritual significance of every element. This is not a mere recitation of happenings, or a reading of Bible verses. The “Narrator” guides us, but Bach’s composition is a stunning re-creation of the agony and ecstasy of the Crucifixion story. By the verses and voices, the St Matthew Passion provides the points of view of all the participants and observers – including God, by quoted Bible prophesies; Jesus, by His words; and even us, dramatically through the eyes of the crowds in Jerusalem.

History came to call Bach “The Fifth Evangelist,” the accolade bypassing even his spiritual mentor Martin Luther, because of his clarity of spiritual understanding and the power of his musical talent. Some 15 years ago I wrote a major biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, and with every fact I researched, every work I listened to (and listened again and again) my awe increased. He was, in the end, a theologian who could write music, the greatest that humankind has produced or heard. It will be savored as long as men have ears, in the words of H L Mencken.

My friend the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Edmund Morris wrote me a note wherein he called my Bach biography superior to his own study of Beethoven, if you will permit me a little boast (well, I don’t give you a choice). However, he averred that I painted a portrait of Bach as being too much of a Christian; that spirituality was not a major component of Bach’s character. I am afraid that this opinion reflected more of Edmund than it did of Johann. For all of the old German’s success, Bach confessed that he was proudest of being a follower of Christ; then, a husband and father in his community; then, a music-maker.

And here we meet the Easter theme. We must all be proudest – first importance in our lives; the focus of all we do – of “knowing Christ and Him crucified.” The Easter story, the dramatic Passions, should be read and listened to and meditated upon, every week of the year, not only during Holy Week.

Indeed, the message of the cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, should be the themes of our lives. Church “days” are useful to help us focus, motivating our faith and devotion, reminding us of how the Savior of our souls suffered on our behalf. His sorrows and pain were endured to fully identify with broken humanity. His death was a substitute for the punishment we deserve as sinners.

God became flesh and dwelt among us, a sublime mystery. And – you know the story – His Incarnate Son’s resurrection from the dead is to show the promise of our eternal life. Unspeakable glory awaits us.

You can experience the story in what may be a new way. I recommend that you set apart a couple hours, open the link to the music video below, and let the story of Passion Week, the genius of J S Bach, and the mastery of conductor Karl Richter bathe your soul. The artistry of the performance matches the innovative music of Bach. Orchestra and choir are in a stark setting here. A giant cross above and behind the musicians changes its position amid bright and dark lighting, reflecting the tones of the unfolding Biblical text. I pray that you find the time to savor this.

And have an even more blessed Easter.

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Click: Bach St Matthew Passion BWV 244 Karl Richter in parts

3-25-24

Mama, I just don’t understand the things in Jerusalem this week. There are strange things happening every day. I am scared, very scared. And just a week ago, on the Sabbath, I was wild with joy, as I wrote you afterward. I write to you now about more recent events.

Maybe you have heard all these things. Or maybe not; maybe it will all be forgotten in a fortnight. I don’t know.

You remember how I wrote about this man called Jesus, the preacher and healer everybody talked about – some called the Messiah, including himself – how he finally entered Jerusalem. I wrote how the people, almost the whole city it seemed, welcomed him and cheered him.

Yes, I was in that happy crowd. I called his name. I put my cloak on the ground before him. I waved palms to honor him. Maybe you heard – he rode on a donkey. Some thought it strange, but you and I talked about how many ancient words and prophecies were fulfilled in his life and the things he did. Too many to number! And this was one of them, the humble king choosing to come as a servant.

Then. Day after day, it was like a nightmare. The Jewish elders accused him of blasphemy. Some people started to doubt who Jesus said he was, and made up stories about the miracles. The religious leaders made demands that the Roman rulers arrest Jesus. They threatened a revolt in the streets.

Pontius Pilate went along with their demands, and the people became a mob, convinced of all the lies being told. The Romans arrested Jesus, but that was not enough. Pilate offered the mob to pardon Jesus, but that was not enough. Jesus was thrown in jail, but that was not enough. In the public square, Jesus was stripped and whipped until the skin on his back was like bloody ribbons, but that was not enough. Usually, for the Romans, that is a virtual substitute for the death penalty, but that was not enough. The religious leaders and the mob screamed that Jesus be nailed to a cross until dead.

Pilate made a show, washing his hands of responsibility… but that was not enough.

No one spoke for Jesus. His mother wept, but all his friends scattered and claimed they never knew him. I am ashamed to say that I hid, too, and was silent. You know who else was silent? Jesus himself – he just quietly suffered. Mama, I just don’t understand.

I did watch as he carried that heavy cross to the Hill of the Skull outside Jerusalem. I watched as they nailed his wrists and his ankles to the wooden cross and raised it. I watched for three hours as he writhed in pain. He finally spoke a few words. You will be interested in things he said – he prayed to God that his tormentors be forgiven, for they know not what they do.

There were two other crosses, one on each side – condemned men. One mocked Jesus; the other called him Messiah, and begged forgiveness. Jesus uttered that the man would be with him in Paradise.

Jesus looked down on his mother, and said “Behold, your son.” Her sorrow was wrenching. Then he looked, it seemed, into my eyes too! And it was like he saw into my soul. It was like he saw all humanity. It was like he looked toward eternity.

Just before he died, he said, “It is finished,” and I wondered whether he meant his life… or his mission, his purpose. Maybe we will never know. Will this all be forgotten? It looks like the religious leaders, the government, maybe Satan himself, have won.

Mama, I don’t understand any of this. A week ago, the only things that many of us could think of were his teachings, his miracles, his healing. His love. And now… this. Please don’t condemn me. I went along with the crowd. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they? I went along with the government rulers. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they? I went along with the religious leaders. They couldn’t all be wrong, could they?

I must go to you, and let us search the scriptures together. For I seem to remember that he foretold that he would overcome death. And we have been taught that the Messiah would suffer the punishments for sin that we deserve. And he said he would rise again.

But, Mama, I have to tell you that he did die. I saw it. The skies turned dark and the earth trembled. It felt like all of creation groaned. A Roman centurion looked up and called him the Son of God. But they took his dead body from the cross. They prepared it for burial. They put him in a tomb, and they sealed it.

Mama, two days have passed, and he has not come back to life.

There are strange things happening every day, but Jesus rising from the dead is not one of them. Mama, I just don’t understand.

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Click: O Sacred Head, Now Wounded – Bach’s St Matthew Passion

9-18-23

There have been a few small denominations that discouraged music in worship, just as there were sects that outlawed sex. For similar reasons those groups seemed to perish, disappear… and are missed by few.

Music is a part of humans’ souls. Mysterious in its way because not everybody has the talent to create tunes… or perform well… yet we all respond to music. Those who “can’t carry a tune” (and some people cannot) still enjoy listening. The most hardened people find their hearts softened when they hear a familiar melody. Songs are composed to win lovers and to send boys to war; to bond and to bind; to remember… and, by diversion, to heal and forget.

I am not aware of a survey, but I figure that 95 per cent of songs are love songs. Tennessee Ernie Ford once was asked why he sang so many Gospel songs and not more love songs, and he answered, “Gospel songs are the greatest love songs of all.”

Instrumental music is, to me, the most mysterious, and profound, of all music… all of all the arts. Abstract, yet specific in intent. And musical notation is a language all its own – a universal language. Composers who begin their work with blank staves… and finish with “sounds” that can move us literally and also move us to tears and smiles… perform a kind of miracle.

Johann Sebastian Bach took those blank pages, and before beginning to compose any work, wrote “Jesus, help me” at the top of the first page. When the composition was finished, he wrote “Thanks be to God” on the last page, acknowledging his source and strength of inspiration.

Quirky denominations aside, all cultures, in their social and religious practices, have relied on musical expression. The Bible overflows with descriptions, and endorsements, of joyful music. In Genesis 4 Jubal is identified as the ancestor of “all those who play the lyre and pipe.” Elsewhere, Elisha commanded, “Get me a musician,” wherewith a blessing was delivered. David, the “Sweet Singer of Israel,” ministered to Saul by playing music at night, much as Bach’s Goldberg Variations were composed to soothe those who sought rest.

Martin Luther, the great reformer and preacher, was also a composer (for instance of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God) and he defended music in church: “The devil does not need all the good tunes to himself!”

Some of the most important American historians are those who have studied and recorded (including literally) the folklore and folk music of the American past. I was privileged to know (and play music with, even past his 100^th birthday!) the legendary Wade Mainer, whose banjo-picking style influenced Earl Scruggs years before the Bluegrass Sound was born. To hear his stories of rural North Carolina, and hear the songs he and his wife Julia (whose stage name back in the day was Hillbilly Lilly) sang together was like walking through history.

A friend recently reminded me of the excellent book and movie Songcatcher, about those who kept those musical traditions alive. One of the characters mused about the “thread” of a favorite song, perhaps “a touchstone with the past – a remembrance of all the singers who had ever kept a story alive on the strength of their music, and that singing the ballad was a chance to join that chain of voices stretching all the way back to across the ocean to the place where the families began.”

Yes, music hath charms. It is the case, of course, with mighty hymns as well as humble folk tunes. May I provide an example?

Here is a video of a performance of the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee, which was composed in 1841. Its meaningful words were set to music by several people through the years, including Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame). Its words were on the lips of President William McKinley as he died of an assassin’s bullet – imagine an American president today having this as his last thought? – and by legend, as The Titanic sank, Theodore Roosevelt’s former military aide Archie Butt directed the ship’s musicians to play it.

In this video, André Rieu conducts his Johann Strauss Orchestra, plus 400 brass players and a hundred singers in a performance of Nearer, My God, to Thee. The audience of thousands is a mixed, international group in an open square in Maastricht – and the hymn is performed without words, the singers chanting. Does the audience miss the significance? Not counted by the emotions, and tears, on listeners’ faces!

To hear this hymn, even once, impresses the powerful words on one’s mind, carried by the music. And the reverence of this elaborate performance… confirms the Power of Music.

In words written in 1697 in William Congreve’s play The Mourning Bride, “Musick hath Charms to soothe the savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.” And it can lift souls, and carry us somehow Heavenward too:

Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee! E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
Still all my song shall be, Nearer, my God, to thee; Nearer to thee!

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, Darkness be over me, my rest a stone;
Yet in my dreams I’d be Nearer, my God, to thee; Nearer to thee!

There let the way appear, steps unto heaven; All that thou sendest me, in mercy given;
Angels to beckon me Nearer, my God, to thee; Nearer to thee!

As Bach, “the Fifth Evangelist,” said, “With devotional music, God is always present in His grace.”

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Click: Nearer My God To Thee

1-28-23

The great comedian Norm Macdonald, who died last year, was a confessing Christian. And his faith grew stronger even as his life-situation grew “worse.” He died of cancer that been diagnosed 10 years earlier and few people knew – he did not share his slow, impending death with even close friends.

Sometimes, occasionally at abrupt moments, he asserted his faith, and even upbraided people who scorned the Gospel. At other times he could be as raunchy as some other comedians (but usually funnier), yet he admitted in serious interviews that he read the Bible and was a believer. There was one thing he wrestled with about a loving God, however. When asked, he would answer simply, “kids with cancer.”

It is the type of question that many well-meaning portions of humanity ask, too. The British writer Christopher Hitchens achieved some of his celebrity by writing a book God Is Not Great. We can note that many skeptics and agnostics like him often criticize the nature of God… but not always God Himself. Hitchens did not write, There Is No God, So It Doesn’t Matter Whether He Is Great Or Not.

Ministers and priests can display a similar ignorance, if not oafishness. Especially in the materialist West, uncountable sermons and books and fund-appeals have centered around the topics “Why do good things happen to bad people?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

At worst, these ministers and priests engage in diversions, because Belief does not depend on your rewards. Believe me, God’s Truth does not depend on your opinion of it.

I believe the major theme of the Bible can be summarized this way: God is not not so much concerned about us scurrying around being “good” or “bad,” but He very much cares that we be obedient. Good and bad – and salvation; eternity with Him – will then fall into place. “Life is real; life is earnest,” the poet Wordsworth said, however, and it is impossible not to be touched and challenged by some things, for instance what troubled Norm Macdonald.

I want to share related thoughts inspired this week by two new friends of mine.

The five-year-old son of one friend’s friend is the cutest little boy you can imagine. Innocent smile, happy surroundings in photos of him, recent photos, as his smile remained, but showing him thinner and thinner, and losing his hair. Then, still smiling, sitting in a bed, totally bald, with the appearance we know in cancer patients.

She learned that the boy and the family has left for St Jude’s, an incredible hospital where, among the research and healings, parents are sometimes told those awful words, “There’s nothing we can do any more,” which these parents were told, now taking their boy on his last trip.

Why? Why? we ask. Life, much less death itself, is not supposed to work that way.

That boy, as he comprehends what’s going on, might ask that himself. Parents, comedians, you, me, all of humankind, cry out – all too often – with this question. When my eldest daughter was young she asked a variation of that old question, “Why are there bad things in God’s world?” A little older and she would have said “evil,” which is the root of bad things.

My answer was and is not cheery, but it is true. There is sin in the world, and sin corrupts and corrodes. We have all sinned – fallen short of the glory of God – and there are consequences. Trees do not sin, neither do oceans; neither, we can feel sure, did that five-year-old cancer victim. God promised to walk with us through the valleys of the shadows of death… not to pluck us out, but to be with us.

My other new friend shares a hundred points of contact, but I learned that in one of her past lives she was an opera singer. Not in the shower, like me, but on stages like La Scala. With Pavarotti, receiving her spray of roses next to him. I have been to the Met (the opera house, not the ballpark) and the Paris Opera, but still dream of sitting in the sixth row at La Scala and just hearing singers.

So, the connection. Talking about great sopranos, and then hearing about this little boy, my attention converged on a favorite soprano, the Bohemian Magdalena Kožená, and a performance of hers from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. In the video below, it is paired with scenes of distress, illustrating the theme in that portion of the presentation of Christ’s suffering.

Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears! See, here before you, heart and eyes weep bitterly. Have mercy, my God!

… are the words. It is a proper prayer, not cynical nor rebellious, for in Bach’s personal and creative world, he also knew the “end of the story” – Joy. No matter our sufferings and anguish, no matter our bitterness nor grief, He loves us. It’s the text and subtext and “end of the story” of the entire Bible, too.

A happy ending.

We can know God… but only so much. If we understood all, we would be God. But the important thing, through all the sorrow and mystery, is that He knows us.

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Since preparing this message, we have learned that the little boy has died. We add prayers for “the peace that passeth understanding” promised to those who are in the Lord.

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Click: Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott

12-12-22

This weekend I attended a performance of Messiah, the famous oratorio by Handel. Inspiring, always. Familiar, too. The musical miracle of Handel’s many great works, all three hours or so composed in about 23 days, invariably is heard this time of year, in concerts, on radio, even in snippets on TV commercials.

It is associated with Christmas but Handel intended, and lyricist Charles Jennens arranged Biblical passages, to tell the whole story of Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Incarnate Lord, Jesus. That is, not his “biography” but the dramatic glory-story from prophecies to the Millennial Kingdom.

I mention the words and concepts of the masterpiece because many people assume it is only Christmas music. As we shared here recently, the songs of salvation should never be filed away for one day or one holiday season – because that would mean they are neglected for the rest of the year. God forbid!

Handel, the “Greatest of English Composers” (1685-1759) was in a sense three different men: The German Georg-Fridrich Händel, born in the Saxon town of Halle; the popular composer of Italian operas Georgi Federico Handel; and the English George Frideric Handel. He settled in England, serving occasional patrons and arranging his own concerts. His string of operas (the fad of the entertainment world then) gave way to religious oratorios through the years. He became more and more religious as he grew older.

It is often misstated that he was brought to England by the Georges, kings of Hanoverian birth. But he did execute many works for them (they craved the association) and among his early works in England (1717) was a commission for King George I, the Royal Water Music. The Royal Fireworks Music is equally famous.

Händel was born in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, slightly more than 100 miles from Bach’s town of Eisenach; and attended Martin Luther University. Händel and Bach, the two masters of Baroque composition, were aware of each other, but never met. They were born only months apart, and Händel outlived Bach by nine years. Ironically, they both suffered from blindness at the end of their lives, coincidentally treated by the same eye surgeon. Tragically, the doctor was something of a quack.

Händel, once nearly bankrupt in England, was relatively wealthy by the end of his life. He was always generous with his resources. He had financed the new organ that had its first use in the debut of Messiah. Händel conducted that first performance, and annual concerts (in London) occurred every year until his death, all the proceeds going to his beloved charity, the Foundling Hospital.

Messiah was first performed in Dublin, in the New Music Hall. Significantly, two choirs were engaged: from St Patrick’s and from Christ Church (Trinity) – a symbolic bow to Catholic and Protestant “harmony.” Its initial presentation was over-subscribed; the crowds trying to enter resulted in SRO, and advance-ticket holders were turned away. Händel offered to conduct a second performance to satisfy the demand.

Among his many great works, Messiah was beloved of Händel. When he was close to death, his last prayer was that he lives until (and die upon) Good Friday – which would coincide with that year’s performance of Messiah. God granted this wish, by hours. The version we know today was enlarged in scope by Mozart; the oratorio has been touched by history’s greatest masters.

At this season, with such magnificent music, it is virtually impossible not to think of “other things” during the moments we pause to listen to the music… and the words. Oddly, the church where I attended a performance this weekend was in Flint, Michigan. “Oddly,” I say, because a news story was published on Friday that by some metrics or other, Flint was judged the worst city in America among almost 500 in the survey.

But in that beautiful church, hearing talented amateurs sing and play, proclaiming and believing the promises and reality of the Savior of humankind – unto us He was given – all the news and noise of the neighborhood and the world melted away.

The reality of a God who sent a Messiah to our world while we were yet sinners, must overcome the “reality” of this corrupt world.

And, for Christ’s sake (literally) do not pack away that truth in some box, to be forgotten the rest of the year.

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Click Video Clip (one short passage from Messiah, the prophecy of Isaiah, 600 years before Jesus’ birth): Unto Us a Child Is Born

12-13-21

Certain holiday songs are appropriate on certain holidays, naturally; and others seem inappropriate at any other times of the year. “I’m Dreaming Of a White Christmas” might soon be labeled as Politically Incorrect, but in the meantime would be out of tune, so to speak, if sung in the middle of August. But… we always can dream.

Similarly odd, or anomalous, is the incidence of songs that are relevant at any time of the year but are relegated to one season only. Shoved into the storage closet, as it were. Handel’s The Messiah is an oratorio about the entire life of Jesus, from prophesies 700 years previous to His birth (in Isaiah) to His Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and Ascension. Its performance is appropriate at any, and all, times during the year. But it is consigned to the Christmas season, and seldom heard otherwise, even in parts.

And some holiday music, church hymnody, shifts outside its logical boxes.

One of the most significant musical pieces (and indeed, sermon topic or cited prayer) is what has come to be called, from its Latin name, the Magnificat. It is the very simple, very brief prayer offered by Mary concerning one of the most profound events in the history of humankind: the Incarnation. God became man to dwell among us.

The angel Gabriel visited Mary and told her she was chosen to to bear the Savior, who would be conceived as a miracle by the Holy Spirit. Overwhelmed, humbled, and full of Grace, she knew the prophesy that a virgin would conceive, and… her prayer was a reaction that the Messiah would be her son.

Her cousin Elizabeth, herself pregnant with the future John the Baptist, visited her. As recorded in the first chapter of Luke:

When Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, [her] babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit… “As soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.”

And Mary said:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant; For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me, And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel, In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers, To Abraham and to his seed forever.”

Many thoughts and blessings and lessons can be inspired by that simple but profound prayer. Imagine her thoughts… her humility… her responsibility… her coming sorrow (for she knew the whole of prophecy, from Scripture)… the favor of God Almighty.

One aspect we might note is how the unborn child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped for joy at the mention of the coming Messiah. A lesson, surely, to those who deny the humanity of the unborn.

I mentioned the “shifting” days of observance in church and holiday music; surely Mary had nine months until the birth of Jesus; yet Advent, properly named for what is profitable to contemplate, is an appropriate time to think about the Magnificat – how Mary confessed that her soul “magnified” the Lord.

Just as deceptively simple but utterly profound – in a musical context – is the Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach. If you are not familiar with it, and if you have ever listened to Handel’s The Messiah, I really urge you to open the video performance linked below. Very much shorter than Handel’s oratorio – surely an “oasis” you can find amid holiday busyness – it is a miracle composed by the greatest of humankind’s music masters.

I devoted attention to its multiple aspects in my biography of Bach (who has been called “the Fifth Evangelist,” and, had he been Catholic, would have been declared a saint). And I spoke about this work at the magnificent 150-year-old St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Flint MI at their Bach Festival some years ago.

As a musical genius but also as a Bible scholar, Bach’s exegesis of Mary’s prayer, employing no other text, sometimes focuses on one word (e.g., “Magnificat”) or two; “Omnes Generationes” takes Mary’s awe-struck realization that “all generations” will call her blessed. Groups within the choir sing “all generations” over and over, high and low, over each other, in tender harmony… and one has the impression of the hosts of Heaven raining down praises.

Any mere description is unworthy: it must be heard. Bach composed it in 1723, shortly after his appointment to St Thomas Church in Leipzig. Our video features a performance in an old church, and on period instruments of Bach’s day.

May I suggest, in this Advent season, assisted by the supernal music of Johann Sebastian Bach, that we pause to contemplate the miracle – and God’s miracle plan – of this season. The Creator of the Universe emptied Himself to become human, to remind us that He knows our sorrows and joys and hurts and hopes; and that He offered this Son as a sacrifice against the price justly required for our rebellion and sins.

No, I don’t fully understand it either. But God is LOVE, after all.

And when I hear it, I leap for joy too.

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Click: Magnificat

11-15-21

Charles Dickens opened his book A Tale of Two Cities with the famous words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” William Wordsworth assayed societies’ turmoils and wrote, in The Prelude, “Bliss was it, in that dawn, to be alive; but to be young was very heaven!” And the author of Ecclesiastes, probably Solomon, wrote “There is nothing new under the sun,” less philosophical than Dickens; and more fatalistic than Wordsworth.

We live in times now that are fraught with turmoil. From major power struggles around the world, “wars and rumors of wars” – to acrimony in Washington and even echoes of hatred and destruction in unlikely settings of school-board meetings and downtown neighborhoods.

Do we live today in such a zone of a dichotomy? – are these the “best of times”? Well, things are generally more prosperous than in the past; literacy has increased; medicines and procedures are saving lives. These things are mostly true in our country and around the world. We have sent humans to the moon and maybe, soon, to Mars.

Signs of progress are all around us.

But what word should we apply to other “signs of the times”? – unrest around the world; revanchist empires; slavery and human trafficking; genocide and abuse; religious and political repression; increased drug use; divorces, suicides, and homelessness; broken homes… REgress? Surely not progress.

Humankind needs a different yardstick, or a different dictionary – or a different value system – when science concocts ways to protect and prolong life… and develops means to end life before birth, and with the elderly, in advance of natural death. Governments seek life elsewhere in the universe, yet encourage the snuffing of lives in the womb. Or deny that a heartbeat in the baby is life.

And so forth. “Vanity, vanity; all is vanity,” Solomon continued in his indictment. “Meaningless.”

If we – humankind; not merely our immediate neighbors – ever are to redeem our species, what we call Civilization, it will require a revolution (or counter-revolution, actually) of our souls, our standards, our values. Values: what is valuable to us?

This week I was corresponding with friend Nicole LeBlanc, a gifted pianist, who issued challenges for people to list favorite works of Beethoven in several musical genres. Next came thoughts of the reasons for our affections; and then of the interpreters of his works. I have internalized such questions, the reason why I have several recordings each of all the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. We respond to differences in instrumentation, tempi, dynamics, interpretation.

How can we listen to the musical miracle that was Bach, or be moved to tears by works of Mozart – who first composed at age five, and wrote supernal melodies as easily as other men perspire – and think that the world has progressed beyond them?

Such thoughts returned me, from a different route than beholding the spread of nihilism, to a consideration of “progress.”

Question: Which scenario leads to greater enjoyment, richer appreciation, more satisfaction to your soul and mind: hearing Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony (or insert any great work of art) only once in your life as often was the case in centuries past; or having access to DVDs and videos by the dozens, and listening to the music several times a year, for years and years? It is a challenging question, with implications.

In fact, in the question we can substitute any work of art, fine wine, or travel adventure. Does saturation equate with increased enjoyment, intellectual enrichment… progress?

I am a free-enterprise capitalist, and I endorse democracy (like Churchill, I suppose: democracy is the worst form of government unless you consider the rest. I suppose.) Yet since I recognize that human nature is corrupt, I regret civil architectonics such as capitalism and democracy that let humankind work its will. Eventually they must produce harm.

Potential great artists and composers spend their careers designing advertisements and writing commercial jingles to seduce our better judgments. Their works will remain in the culture about long as the fortunes they accumulate producing the ephemeral material. Ah! Some might say that daVinci and Michelangelo also spent their lives and their talents on commercials, too – advertisements for God, commissions for the church. Is it any different?

Yes, is the answer; yes.

We return to the question of standards and value-systems. It is worthwhile to devote your life to an ideal; a noble truth. It is the proper calling of humanity to praise God for the gifts He has given us… to return those gifts, in my view. We advance humankind by recognizing what is true, what is noble, what is right, what is pure, what is lovely, what is admirable. We should think about such things.

These things that are excellent and praiseworthy, and not selfish or short-sighted, these things will save the earth and benefit our fellow creatures. This is progress.

Finally, I return to “creativity.” In so many ways we are like the animals, but… we have the spark of creativity. And that is why it is a shame to waste it on the promotion of transitory things. We are to be “imitators of Christ,” Thomas à Kempis urged, writing of spiritual ways.

I wrote here recently that we actually cannot create anything, as God has created all, and this is a finite world: maybe we can only rearrange. Yet, in what we call creativity, we can in a way imitate God. A solemn privilege! We can imagine, we can dream, we can explain. We can take blank paper, white canvases, and rough chunks of stone… and bring forth works of art and beauty and understanding. We can not, and need not all be Beethovens. But we must, all of us, dream and “create.”

We too can touch souls, and change hearts. To appreciate other artists, and to translate God’s profound messages and love for others through our works – and not to cheapen our talents, throw them away, or use them for selfish and hurtful ends here in the 21st century – now, that would be progress.

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Surprise! You might be expecting a passage of Baroque music or a great poem. But I am going to share a country song, one that expertly captures the essence of creativity – from loneliness to sacrifice to devotion to resonance. We can all relate! The Christian songwriter sings of the iconic 16th Avenue in Nashville, home to studios, publishing offices, and dreams. The songwriters around him relate, too, by their expressions.

Click: 16th Avenue

10-31-21

Christian Patriots in America increasingly seek a figurative wishbone. But it is a backbone, not a wishbone, that we need, faced as we are by contemporary challenges.

The end of October has been appropriated as a secular holiday despite its origin as Hallowe’en, the holy evening before All Saints’ Day. It is not a national or a legal holiday, of course, but it rivals the others – I believe every month but May has a “legal” holiday that allows for three-day weekends and used-car sales; and most have been shoved to Mondays for such reasons.

Reverence and reflection are no longer justifications for these holidays. Easter and Thanksgiving have been sanitized and renamed on school calendars. The birthdays of Washington and Lincoln have been subsumed by a “presidents’ day” that equally honors Millard Fillmore and Warren Gameliel Harding. And October’s real bank holiday is being changed from remembrance of Christopher Columbus to any ethnic group with a pulse except White people.

The national neutering of meaningful observances has not quite reached the other significant event related to the last weekend in October: Reformation Day. It has been reduced to a relatively obscure celebration in America, although October 31 is indeed a national holiday in many European countries.

Reformation Day is associated, of course, with Martin Luther. October 31 was not his birthday, nor the day he cited as having a revelation that the Christian Church had become corrupted in certain ways that required reforms consistent with Bible tenets. It was the day, rather, that the professor and monk finally was motivated to list his critiques – there were 95 of them he called “theses” – and affix them to a cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany. It was a common practice to post announcements and invitations to public debates.

Most people know the outlines of his story. He was not the first devout Catholic to dissent from some Vatican practices. Popes had mistresses and children; political intrigues and nepotism were rife; and the sales of “indulgences” promised alleviation from punishment for souls not quite good enough to enter Heaven.

Holy hucksters actually used the slogan, “When the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

Such things appalled the theological student Luther. He was informed by Bible passages that faith alone, not works or devices of humans; and that Scripture alone, not added rules and schemes, assured people of their standing with God. As a monk he could read the Bible (in Latin, the only language the Church allowed), and everyday worshipers were forbidden to read it.

For a hundred years other reformers had similar observations, but people like Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, Thomas A Kempis, Peter Waldo, and Geert Groote spoke their minds, and were routinely excommunicated, persecuted, and often tortured and burned at the stake or dismembered.

Luther wanted to reform the Church, not start a revolution. He wanted Roman Catholicism to be purified, and did not intend to start a denomination. But his cause was taken up by other clergy members, and by princes who wanted to be free of Rome’s political control.

I desire here to do more than honor the beneficial spiritual and cultural revolutions Luther indeed inspired, which included translating the Bible into the language of the people, writing memorable hymns, and animating the movements that spread literacy and promoted democracy – for the responsibilities of the Individual were seeds he planted that sprouted in Enlightenment thinkers and republican governments.

What I want to recognize, honor, and emulate is the towering figure of Martin Luther, the example he set as a man of conscience who exercised integrity when he was threatened.

When he was a called before ecclesiastic judges in the city of Worms, he was aware of his lost position as a priest and a professor; his excommunication form the Church; and the likely sentence of death. In Washington’s Museum of the Bible is a letter he wrote the previous night, addressing his impending execution. He had been chased, accused, condemned, and charged with heresy and causing civil unrest.

Luther was given a “lifeline”: to retract his writings, withdraw his complaints, recant his beliefs… renounce his conscience and the truths of the Bible. Like Galileo, he could have acceded to ignorant lords and fallible fools, and continued his life and work. But… “I can not, and I will not, recant. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”

At that moment uncountable forces of Christianity and Western civilization were in a crucible. The course of history would have been very different if that brave man had compromised.

His example, his answer, “Here I stand. I can do no other,” should be a watchword in the battles we face today. That example, that answer, must be our response… no matter what issues confront us, threats we face, sacrifices we risk, or costs we must pay.

You refuse to compromise your position on racist trash in schools? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

You deny the government’s demand that it asserts control over your body? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

You oppose new standards of sexual morality and threats to our children? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

You dare believe that abortion is murder?” “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

You are willing to risk the criticism of family and neighbors, to be called a “hater,” to hurt peoples’ feelings? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

You will speak out against churches that are “accepting” of new religion or no religion, bending its message to excuse sin? “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

Some brave protesters – “protestants” – lost their jobs and friends and sometimes their lives. Some, like Luther, were protected by people inspired by his integrity. Some lived to take his message to the arts and philosophy and governments as they formed themselves.

… and some, today, lament that Luther’s integrity – his examples, his answer – is a thing of the past. Have people of faith, parents, citizens, patriots, given up?

Would you renounce the things you believe, the things you once thought were true? Would there be enough evidence of your beliefs that would even let the world accuse you in matters of right and wrong? What is worth losing your integrity for – in the end, what do you stand for? Or will Christian Patriots learn to say:

“Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”

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Please watch this clip of Luther’s answer, from the powerful 1953 movie:

Click: Here I Stand.

4-19-21

Life goes on.

Easter is over; Memorial Day is next; Summer begins; will the lockdowns end? Oh, those politicians. Oh, those riots, Oh, those headlines. Best if I ignore TV news for awhile. Before we know it, school will start up again… or will it? I wonder if we’ll get more free checks by then?

It doesn’t always take “bread and circuses” to keep us distracted. Modern life, even without pandemic frenzy and political upheavals, presents a full agenda.

Life goes on; the sun rises, we tend to business, the sun sets, and we sleep till tomorrow. Things please us, and things alarm us… but there’s always tomorrow to worry, and, maybe, fix things. It has always been that way, right?

Just as it happened in the days of Noah, so it will be also [in the last days]: they were eating, they were drinking, they were marrying, they were being given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Jesus looked ahead to our times, and (in Matthew and, here, in Luke 17) spoke about complacency, sin, self-delusion, and people taking false comfort in the meme “life goes on.” Who did He think He was, the Son of God or someone, thinking He could prophesy? What gave Him the authority to warn people?

How much worse it will be for those who never really know the Truth – never heard it, or honestly never had it presented to them. But for Christians who came through Easter, who have known the Truth, who have “accepted” Jesus, how many go through the year in effect saying, “Jesus died… Whatever.” Or “He rose from the dead… Whatever.” Or “I’ll go to Heaven, no worries” … and then eat, drink, marry, give in marriage. Whatever.

The suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus gave humankind, in effect, a “Get Out Of Jail Free” card. That is so casual a view as to be near blasphemous, unless we realize how basically profound it is. As the saying goes, Salvation is free, but a great price was paid.

What Jesus said about the days of Noah, and our days, is that people putter about, doing this and that, when great things portend, if we would only see them. But we don’t.

Did Jesus die for your sins? Act like you know it, and thank Him!

Did Jesus rise from the dead? Act like it transforms your life too!

Did Jesus send the Holy Spirit? Act with guidance, wisdom, and power!

The Atonement was Jesus trading the punishment for your sins for the chance to live a life of love and service. The greatest deal in history, excuse my casual language again. It does not deserve a “Whatever” from those who have been redeemed.

If you do not act like your life has been transformed by Christ’s grace then, in fact… you have not been transformed.

One of the few things Jesus asked in a response was that we share the news of what He did. Can it be possible, then, to share without showing great enthusiasm? If you had a cure for cancer, and a friend or stranger had cancer, would you not share that? Even if it were “uncomfortable”? Even if they ridiculed you for trying to save their lives?

“Whatever”… and shrugging your shoulders cannot be your response.

We can have a thousand responses. But I suggest three:

1. Come (again?) to know the Truth – Jesus embodied the truth: “I am the way, the Truth, and the life.”

2. Repent of your “Whatevers.” In the St Matthew Passion is the prayer “Erbarme Dich” – Have pity, my God, for the sake of my tears!
Look here, how bitterly my heart and eyes weep before you.
Have pity, my God.

3. Share! “Go tell it!” Love others. Stay above the mundane. Rebuke the Whatevers. “Go into all the world…”

Life goes on. Act like it!

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Click: Have Pity on My Failings
J. S. Bach – “Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott”

1-25-21

Where do we go from here?

This is a question many Christians are asking about current events, at the time of this writing; and very roughly calculated, about half the American population wonders the same. In fact the question is pertinent after many elections, momentous events, and ends of wars.

The “ends” of elections and events and wars often settle matters in a strict sense, but in a broader sense usually bring about new questions and challenges. Therefore members of the winning side may just as earnestly ask Where we go from here; just as aimlessly or with similar uncertainty.

We often fool ourselves about matters of finality, most often because we yearn for finality. Wishing, of course, does not make things so. Fate does not wait upon our polling; God’s will is exercised without regard to our opinions. An example is the meaning many people ascribe to “commencement exercises” – as to mean “OK! That’s over!” Patient families, and parents paying tuition bills, might see it as that. But “commencement” means “beginning,” not wrapping up. So the wheel turns.

And so it is with elections. Campaigning ends; perhaps officeholders change desks; and often a new agenda is advanced. On paper, that’s “where we go from here.” But the larger matter, especially now, is where a group of followers goes. Where is a movement headed? Do believers casually adjust their firmly held beliefs? Should they?

My context, of course, is the recent election. And my honest concern is the status and direction of those Christians who experience a deep moral dilemma about the results and the implication of the results. I am one of these.

As a student of history I am reminded, often in spite of myself, that very little is new; that crises are not as bad as they seem; that a long-range perspective commands our attention. “Nothing new under the sun,” Solomon wrote. Yet logic dictates (and, yes, history too) that sometimes things are as bad as they seem. Sometimes… worse. Being accepting, or phlegmatic, can have negative consequence, from self-delusion to social disaster.

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. Sometimes, contra Dr Pangloss, this is not the best of all worlds. Sometimes compromise is not the best solution – when, at times, compromise leads to more division and turmoil, counter-intuitively, than “peace.” And peace is not synonymous with righteousness.

“Can’t we all just get along?”

No, we can’t.

Rodney King’s lament spoke for a time in America, and struck a chord. Now we voice a lament for a generation; at an earlier time we faced choices about freedom vs Communism. Today the questions are asked of us about the basic assumptions and commitments of American society and Western civilization. This is not a crisis of flavors of the month.

By many standards we are no longer a Christian culture. “Post-Christian” is not a construct to be regarded abstractly, even against cultural shifts as consequential as Medievalism to the Renaissance, or Neoclassicism to the Romantic Era. It is the result of the seductive slide from Modernism to Post-Modernism to whatever our current state of intellectual and moral anarchy ought to be called. The West, and much of the world, has been moored and sustained by the tenets of Biblical morality and, especially, Christianity, for millennia.

Disruption was always threatened, and the defense of morals, ethics, law, art, and liberty not only resisted corruption but strengthened the ethos. Heresies, however, morphed into political poisons like Socialism and Communism. Doubt begat regression and relativism. Self-indulgence – as promised by history’s inexorable cycles – brings self-destruction.

The nexus might be in these very days, the cultural equivalent of particle acceleration. Portions of society have been shedding traditional morality; capitalism has given way to the welfare mentality; things as basic as a person’s sex and a family’s security are not just questioned but demonized. People call wrong right, and right wrong… as the Bible predicted.

We know we are at a rare moment in history when this cultural rot subsists not in isolated pockets of society, but in the platform, promises, and practices of a major political party (or, eventually, both of them). And dissenters who once were stewards of universal values are lectured about “unity” – which means uniformity. Once again, by history’s example, lecturing quickly becomes coercion, then repression, then oppression. We already hear calls from the victors for “re-education centers” for those needing to be punished for having ideals and beliefs.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, we are told in Romans 12:2.

Every word is important: “Pattern” reminds us that the evil that men do right now is not random, and is roaming about seeking whom to devour. The devil has a plan as surely as God does. And “conform any longer” illuminates what has happened to us, but encourages us to recognize the freedom we have to break that bondage of darkness and sin.

The next part of the verse makes sure we are not left wanting in this admonition: But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

This is our “Get out of jail free” card. In Christ we are new creations. We can render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s… but those things do not include our souls.

Where do we go from here? We stop conforming – to the cultural rot all around us. We defend our faith, our families, our future – they are in the balance. We commit to deflect the slings and arrows – putting on the whole armor of God – and realize that our mortal enemies might be in our very neighborhoods and favorite entertainments.

Do not conform, but be transformed. Reject the pattern of this world; renew your mind! And test the spirits of “unity” – unify with abortionists, idolaters, and secularists? God forbid!

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Click: Have Mercy, O God, For My Tears’ Sake

6-29-20

After many statues have been yanked down, marble figures broken, bronze artwork twisted, heads of memorialized people broken off, bodies and pedestals spray-painted with obscene words and Communist slogans…

And after so many windows broken it looks like memorials to Kristallnacht; after streets and stores and buildings covered with obscenities and slogans; random cars laid waste by clubs and tire irons; mothers and children terrorized; fires set in stores and dumpsters…

And after sections of cities have been occupied, stores looted of TVs and apparel in the name of civil rights for a dead man, after grocery stores and toy stores, many started by black people struggling to make a living…

And after police are told not to counter the anarchy, after police are killed, and after officials from the White House down to local mayors talk tough – or don’t – and the jungle is thereby encouraged to spread its savagery…

WHAT IF –

What if the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the museum is the next to go?

What if the next target is the Lincoln Memorial, slogans spray-painted all around, paint splashed on the Great Emancipator?

What if the Washington Monument is next, obscenities around the base, and then, maybe by drones, the top of the monument felled?

What if Mount Rushmore is defaced from the top, paint and acid dribbling down over the “evil” faces?

What if the House and Senate are shot up, rushing guards; if the Library of Congress is set afire? What is that long-feared attack on Times Square finally happens? What if the Statue of Liberty is the target by planes or drones, and explosions and fires in its base? What if headstones and memorials are defaced at Arlington National Cemetery?

What if… the targets shift to your town, your city hall, your police station, your schools, the car in your driveway, your front windows…

What if the nihilists continue to deface and burn churches, from across the street from the White House to… your neighborhood?

Or…

WHAT IF –

Those in “authority” sweep the “zones” and arrest the vandals? What if they look at news footage and video tapes and know who to prosecute? What if people who destroy public property pay for their destruction? What if the Department of Justice files amicus briefs on behalf of shop owners, business people, small entrepreneurs, and average citizens, against mayors and governors who prevented law enforcement, and aided and abetted the destroyers?

Further, what if police were allowed to be police again? What if police funding were restored and increased? What if deluded citizens stopped defunding and started defending?

What if Christian “leaders” stopped making excuses for savagery in the streets, and in their basements? What if Christian worshipers started to find preachers who started reading the Bible instead of Marx, who would look for lost souls instead of hiding criminals?

What if God would (in effect) apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah, in any event I mean give America one more chance?

WHAT IF –

America doesn’t deserve it?

In fact, we don’t. We have, as God spoke in II Chronicles, turned away and forsaken My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you; and served other gods, and worshiped them… And God would uproot them from My land which I have given them… And as for this house [which we may see as America, once dedicated to Him] which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and this house?’ Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, who… embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore He has brought all this calamity on them.

Many Christians know, and quote, over and over, an earlier passage in II Chronicles: If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

That is a very big if in there. What if God really wanted Solomon to beware – and for us to be warned – what calamity we may bring up ourselves?

How many ways we have strayed from Him!!!

What if He is a God of justice?

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Please view the music video this week. It is the instrumental version of achingly beautiful Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (“Have mercy Lord, My God, for the sake of my tears”) by Johann Sebastian Bach. The violinist, Lisa Batiashvili, speaks before her performance about the street violence and downed airplanes, everything in between, in her homeland. The audience, Dutch people on their boats in Amsterdam Harbor, share the intensity of the sacred music.

The words in Bach’s full version ask God for mercy and plead for His forgiveness –
Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears!
See here, before you, heart and eyes weep bitterly.
Have mercy, my God.

Click: Have Mercy, For the Sake Of My Tears.

4-8-20

It is a Christmas tradition to burn the Yule log in the fireplace… or, more likely these days, watch a video loop on TV. Take a rest from preps, sack out with egg nog, stare at the log…

I suggest we do a similar thing this week, before Easter, but with more purpose and reward. Besides: we are quarantined. What I suggest is perfect for these days.

The Coronavirus has us in a contemplative mood, anyway — or should — and here is the perfect storm. To think about what really matters in our lives and families… and to think about the most important spiritual matters we can face.

I recommend two musical presentations of Holy Week — the “Passion” of Jesus Christ; His arrest, persecution, trial, torture, and death on the cross. As many people traditionally listen to Handel’s “Messiah” at Christmas, these pieces should be more familiar to us.
The St John Passion and St Matthew Passion were written by Johann Sebastian Bach almost 300 years ago. The greatest story ever told, by the greatest composer who ever lived. Utterly profound.

Bach used instruments, choir, and soloists to tell the story — narrators; singers in the roles of Jesus, Pilate, and all; but no costumes or drama… beyond the words themselves, many straight from the Gospel accounts. Matthew stressed the unfolding events; John focused on the personalities, and the love of Jesus.

I recommend these versions, maybe the best on video for all the unique reasons for contemplation: Karl Richter (with the Munich Bach Orchestra and Choir) was one of the supreme interpreters of Bach; famous and talented soloists; and… the video productions are works of art in themselves.

The “St John” interpolates views of the singers and musicians in church with ancient works of art depicting the events of that week.

The “St Matthew” is an astonishing presentation — a stark performance stage, with an huge cross hanging from the ceiling, subtly changing its position according to the portion of the story; changes from bright light to dark shadows; singers facing front or each other, and soloists mirroring their characters’ words throughout. Stunning and meaningful.

Both versions have English subtitles.

I wrote a book on Bach about a decade ago, joining a long line of people grateful that he ever lived. History has called him “The Fifth Evangelist” — not a pope; not Luther. He was a Bible scholar and teacher, not merely (?) the greatest musical figure of the human race. His music is supernal, still. And never more powerfully than in his two Passions (and his Mass in b minor) (and his Magnificat) (and more than 200 cantatas)… You get the point.

But try to set aside time, for yourself and your family, to watch, listen and meditate. Especially this week — to focus on the One who sacrificed Himself that we might not know death, but have eternal life.

St Matthew Passion: click here

St John Passion: click here

1-21-19

January 21 is the anniversary of my wife Nancy’s death. It often seems easier for people to say “passing” instead of “death”; and with many people, about many situations, “passing” is perfectly appropriate. Not like passing, say, over the River Styx. In Greek mythology, that river separated the living from Hades, or hell, and grief was associated with that last journey.

In Christian typology, we pass from this life to Heaven, to Paradise, to Eternal Life. It sometimes has been corrupted by fictions of Limbo and Purgatory, but those way-stations are not in the Bible. Believers can be assured that upon death we will be in the presence of Jesus; standing before the Throne.

Sometimes it is called the Great Hope, also known as the Blessed Assurance. During Nancy’s long illness – several heart attacks, then transplanted heart and kidneys – she started a hospital ministry, praying with patients and their families, and conducting weekly services. This was on the Heart Failure floor of Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia.

She waited four and a half months for a new heart after being listed. The ministry – a family ministry on the floor, with my children and me fully participating – continued for many years. Nancy could identify with hurting patients, because she also was plagued with diabetes, celiac disease, cancer, five mini-strokes, amputation, dialysis. The counsel of people who have shared your pain or problems always resonates.

Remarkably (no, for Christians, “predictably”) we saw conversions, a few miracles, family members and casual visitors touched in vital ways. Jews attended our open services. Blacks loved the Southern Gospel music we sometimes would play; rural farmers discovered the blessings of Black spirituals. One woman whose husband died after transplant told us she believed that her husband’s heart failed just so he would wind up at Temple and attracted to our services, where he became a Christian. A “God thing,” she thought. That is not biblical… but those were the sorts of emotions and testimonies.

I could write this message about hearts around Valentine’s day, too; but the messages are universal. Also… Nancy received her new heart, ironically, on Valentine’s Day. That became her new birthday, but we also remember much on the day of her home-going.

“Home-going” is what some Christians call it. Properly. Other terms were natural about Christianity and salvation… when confronting heart failure. “Give your heart to Jesus”… “Create in me a new heart, O Lord”… so many verses. It made it easier, or frequently more challenging, to construct messages or offer a prayer. But, oh, the church services (funerals; “home-goings”) we discovered, for instance in the Black churches – “preach-offs,” joyous singing and dancing. The ecstatic prayers and songs of the Pentecostals.

One focus of Nancy’s ministry was to enforce and reinforce the point that “head knowledge” was not enough for a child of God. Passing a quiz, reciting Bible verses, even merely attending church gain you nothing in themselves. We had emotional adherents who had never been to churches in their lives; one big fella cried when he confessed to never having prayed, publicly, in his life… before he did so in our fellowship. But Nancy did not feed them weak milk.

“You must do more than know things in your head,” she said. “You must know in your heart… believe deep down in your heart.” That Jesus is the Son of God; that He died for our sins; that God raised Him from the dead. Heart knowledge.

That basic message, the “old, old story,” is all that humankind needs. Head knowledge will follow. Good works will be the result of a redeemed life. The “fruits of the spirit” come in the life of a born-again believer. But Nancy preached about the nature of those “fruits,” what the next steps were after one’s spiritual heart was transplanted.

The heart, even more important than the mind, is the first change in the life of new-born believers. An ancient German hymn is titled, “Heart and Mouth and Deeds and Life.” Tending to those things is not only a road-map for Christians, but wisdom for the lives of every person. In all aspects and ramifications.

Nancy tended to those matters in life, and was an example. Christ’s example, of course; the light unto our paths.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a cantata, number 147, based on those words. It is one of his most profound, and contains several passages that are commonly heard today. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” for instance, is the 10th movement Chorale:

Jesus remains my joy,
my heart’s comfort and essence,
Jesus resists all suffering,
He is my life’s strength,
my eye’s desire and sun,
my soul’s love and joy;
so will I not leave Jesus
out of heart and face.

Let us remember, from the Beatitudes of Jesus: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

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Click: Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben

1-14-19

What impresses people these days? Rather, let us think about how we are impressed in contemporary society… how we measure success… how “success” conflates with validation… and how we let ourselves be seduced by twisted value-systems.

Ratings? Polls? Fads? The newest trends, dance moves, drinks, celebrities and their endorsements? “We like sheep have gone astray…” In contemporary life it seems like everybody salivates for the latest cultural marching orders.

We should not be surprised by a chintzy value system when the values being pursued are debased. In tragic synergy, we have lowered our standards; the core aspects of our civilization are cheapened; and they in turn inform the next generation. A downward spiral.

Exhibit A, among myriad bellwethers: throughout history (until the Modern Age in Western civilization), virtually all artistic expression was expressed heavenward. Praising God, celebrating His works. Canvases, sculpture, music, architecture. I am ready for nit-pickers: music sometimes was social; art could also be purely decorative. Ancient sculptures to their small-g gods? – still religious in nature. Architecture from, say, public buildings in ancient Greece? – Plato commended artists to reflect the spiritual Perfection that he discerned in the world; Aristotle taught people to strive for the Golden Mean, less abstract, but as spiritual.

But since the Modern Age, coalescing during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, mankind has elevated Self instead of God. We have turned inward – all the while convincing ourselves we are turning outward, with broader visions, and universal sympathy.

Works of art now “explore” ourselves; “explain” our problems; depict our low estate; obsess over our contradictions, flaws, conflict, and doom. Social scientists can say – and artists say, when they process the situation – that confronting problems is the first step to solving them. That analysis is glib, not profound.

There is no way to traffic in humanity’s misery without making it attractive, or at least compelling. Movies, for instance, have to make evil and corruption glamorous, if not inevitable, in order to sell tickets.

At one time, men and women – who knew quite well the problems of the world and the flaws in human nature – dealt with such basic challenges not by depicting awful things in ever starker details, but by glorifying God, employing Biblical standards, discerning His answers for this troubled world.

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the man with the muck-rake was to be scorned – a man who forever focused on the mire and mud, never looking up.

It is sadly inevitable, absent superhuman enlightenment and discipline, that a civilization that empowered the Individual, encouraged literacy, and expanded democracy, would eventually replace God with Self. “Self” is human nature, which all but naive sociologists would agree is flawed. Our various communities cannot help but be flawed as a consequence. Art is debased, government is corrupted, tradition is discarded.

Again inevitably, when disaster impends, mankind in this “value” system tends not to reform but to justify. To double-down. To blame everything and everybody except… our selves. The fault, if we would stop and see it, is not in the stars, but in our selves, that we are underlings.

When Rome began its decline and fall, its leaders reacted to warning signs by distracting the populace with, famously, bread and circuses. And the Roman population, from nobles to citizens to slaves, were happy to be seduced.

The sad proof of our depravity – of the rotting core amid material glitz – is what we celebrate in art. The sensual; self-gratification; the banality of evil. These barometers reveal the reality of broken homes and broken lives; a multitude of addictions; abuse and oppression. Yet we look down, instead of Up.

A re-discovery God and His ways is not the best solution to mankind’s sorry state… but the only solution.

Revival will only come if it is sought. Salvation of the soul is still offered by God to hurting people, as always. But to understand the redemption of a society, we can advance, ironically, by looking backward. If we are not immediately impressed by God Himself as we behold the range of artistic expression, we are mightily impressed by men and women… who gave themselves over to God in profound ways.

A lost paradigm, but not irretrievable.

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Click: Bach: Air On the G String

11-26-18

We enter the Advent season, the time preceding Christmas. It is not too early to think about some of the aspects surrounding the birth of the Savior… however, if we judge by shopping malls and newspaper ads, Christmas was upon us before Halloween.

It is never too early, or an inappropriate time, to contemplate the birth of Jesus, is it? But it is interesting to note that the ancient Church observed an aspect of Christmas more profoundly than it did Jesus’s birthday. Throughout most of Christendom for 2000 years, the Feast of the Visitation, or the Annunciation – when the Holy Ghost passed over Mary and the Savior was conceived – was regarded with more services, messages, and accompanying prayers and worship, than was Christmas. Oddly (it would seem to contemporary minds) Christ’s Mass was a minor observance.

Similarly, the Resurrection of Christ – named Easter after a pagan rite; and whose calendar date was fixed more by various secular customs than Biblical history – was a solemn observance, certainly. But Ascension Day, 40 days after the Resurrection, when Christ physically rose to the heavens, was an important day on the church calendar. Today it is barely noticed in many churches.

The Ascension, even more than the miracles of a Virgin Birth or rising from the dead, definitively affirmed the Divinity of Christ. He was sent by the Father; He fulfilled prophesies; yet in the Ascension He was again One with the Father.

Notice that we are talking about miracles in every case. Christians, I notice, can become jaded about such things. “Miracles? Of course!” but how many Christians actually believe that miracles of God still occur; and how many assume they are extinct? Some denominations teach that miracles were MEANT to expire in the “Apostolic Age” – to ignite the first generation of believers who could kick-start churches… but “no, not for today.”

If people don’t believe in miracles… they are not going to pray for them. If people think they are mere artifacts of millennia-old religious folks… they will start to believe that the Bible is not reliable, after all.

In a certain way, the Bible is a book of miracles – supernatural events, supernatural solutions, supernatural lessons.

I think of a list I read once: The Bible is a book about a man made of clay; a rib that turns into a human being; talking animals; a floating zoo; a talking bush; food falling from the sky; sticks that turn into snakes; 900-year-old lifespans; a woman made of salt; Samson’s magic hair; a man who lived in a fish; the Sun standing still for a day; blowing a horn and shouting at a wall, making it collapse; magically multiplying foods; healing mud made with spit and dirt; men walking on water…

Nonsense and legends… or true miracles? Shouldn’t we all have a more awesome regard of Scripture? Regarding the “dusty relic” or “naive legends” dismissals of Bible miracles, contemporary Christians who think they are too mature for such stories should think about this –

If you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, how do you square the fact that HE believed in Biblical Creation, and Adam and Eve, and Noah’s flood? Was He delusional? stupid? naive? … or was He God-made-Flesh, the Messiah?

We are talking about the Christmas season. The Visitation, the Annunciation – the Virgin Birth – is a fact not optional for believing Christians. It fulfilled uncountable prophesies, but, more, as is said about the Resurrection, if it is not true, our faith is in vain. Poof.

One of the most beautiful passages in Scripture is Mary’s prayer, when the Holy Ghost came upon her. I suppose many women would think they had a bad dream; or, alternatively, they might be boastful, unique among all women. But she was humbled to her core. She was not to be the Mother of God as she is sometimes called, but properly the mother of Jesus, blessed among all women. Mother of the Word made flesh who dwelt among us, destined to save His people.

Mary’s prayer is called “the Magnificat,” after a Latin phrase in the prayer (“My soul doth magnify the Lord”). Profoundly moving; with precise spiritual perspective in her heart… and, through the ages, in our hearts too. Her acceptance of a miracle speaks to us. Here is the prayer, found in Luke 1:46-55; and I offer perhaps the greatest of its musical presentations, by Johann Sebastian Bach.

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked on the humble estate of His servant. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for He who is mighty has done great things for me; and holy is His name. And His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with His arm; He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble estate; He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty. He has helped His servant Israel, in remembrance of His mercy, as He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.

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Click: The Magnificat

10-8-18

There is a coming conflict in America, a war – a civil war – whose first battles are being waged already.

The contentious nomination, debate, and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice has merely accelerated the bellicosity. We are living through a rapid decline in society’s civility, which reminds us that most of history’s civil wars commence as “civility wars” – when factions no longer reasoned together, and have abandoned good will toward their enemies who yesterday were merely opponents.

Judge Kavanaugh’s victory will not change this devolving dissolution; nor would his Congressional defeat have interrupted the trajectory of toxicity. America is in a fateful vortex; no longer a slippery slope that so long was warned. The bizarre acceleration is stark when we recall that the nomination, hearings, and confirmation of another judge – of virtually identical background, resume, clerkship under the same Justice, service on the appellate bench, and judicial philosophy – encountered opposition, but was approved amid comparative calm. Eighteen months later, there were cries of apocalypse and unprecedented angst.

It is as if a bandage has been ripped from a festering, not a healing, wound.

I truly believe that a conflict is coming, and as I said, already here in many ways. This does not mean I welcome it; although I am increasingly convinced that difficulties must be endured and burdens borne, because if one “side” hates, our other side must love, or hate, and otherwise engage… but cannot ignore. Because in that hatred, the secularists hate not only us, but tradition, religion, the Constitution, the heritage of societal norms, the family unit, and nature’s apportionment of gender aspects.

This is not overstating the case, either as concerns fact or prediction. The French Revolutionaries were not content to behead members of royalty (then nobility, then clergy, then merchants, then the middle class) but introduced new calendars and clocks. No matter that their “bellyful” of “reforms” were short-lived, nor that history recorded that such revolutions turn on themselves as they collapse. And, by the way, in their deadly futility usually usher in reactionary counter-revolutions.

I am not an alarmist, except to the extent that alarms need to be sounded.

We cannot turn the clock back, even a couple of years. There will be no more civil debates in primaries or elections any more. There will be no more inaugurations or confirmation hearings without violent and obscene protests, complete with arrests. There will be no more debates, in town halls or national television, without gratuitous accusations whose bases in fact are now regarded as peripheral.

Democracy has failed. The Republican (dictionary meaning) form of government has been subsumed.

The coming conflict is a civil war more desperate than most. The War Between the States was largely geographic but today the divides are within towns, job sites, neighborhoods, classrooms, even families.

We can understand things a little better if we examine one issue that both characterizes the crisis, but also animates it. Let us call it the New Scarlet Letter.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eponymous novel, the Scarlet Letter was “A” and stood for adultery. The book superficially was an indictment of Puritanism but was a metaphor for the nation’s hypocrisy, the sin of slavery in his day. Today there is a new “A” that fuels debate, challenges traditions, overturns norms, confronts conceptions of morality… and divides families. It, too, has enormous consequences, far-ranging implications. That “A” is Abortion.

Abortion has become the litmus test of candidates (now on the Left, no longer exclusively the Right); the bottom line of political activists; the symbol of the New World. I believe if Judge Kavanaugh adhered to ALL the views he advanced, but declared a commitment to abortion on demand, his confirmation would have been Springtime in Washington. “A” is the new password to the virtual future.

About the New “A,” it is interesting to me to read comments along the “personally opposed, but…” and “abortion is regrettable but government should not be involved” arguments… So I can imagine how these people might have responded at other times in history:

“I am personally opposed to slavery. But it is too well established… the slaves are better off than in their previous lives… they could not successfully thrive in society outside the slave system… it is not my job to interfere with their owners’ property…”

or

“I am personally opposed to discrimination against Jews… it is none of my business, however, if other people do… a lot of people believe that Jews are not actually humans on our level, and who am I to force my views on them… prejudice would not necessarily lead to discrimination; discrimination would not necessarily lead to violence; violence would not necessarily lead to arrests; arrests would not necessarily lead to deaths – that is not who we are… Jews want freedom? Well, I am free to do what I please, too…”

But right is always right, no matter the consequences or personal inconvenience to us. Slavery took a war to end (and it still is rampant in the world – which does not suggest that we be resigned to live with it, but that we maintain integrity and fight in new ways); abortion is not right merely because many people support it. I once supported it, to my everlasting shame. The new Scarlet Letter is not right or wrong based on a poll taken yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

Abortion is wrong because it kills babies.

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Click: Komm, süßer Tod

7-16-18

That we live in an upside-world ought to surprise nobody who has even a cursory relationship with history and tradition. Our age is often called “modern times,” but according to philosophers and cultural anthropologists, the Modern Age ended after the Renaissance; after the Enlightenment came Postmodernism, in which many people we currently are mired… but we are past, or below, that. Clearly this is a post-Christian Age; but is has also been described as Post-Post-Modern (yes), Nihilistic, and so forth.

I raise these definitions not because there will be a quiz in in-boxes tomorrow. We are better off if we understand where we are in the sweep of time, to what twigs and leaves we cling as we helplessly ride the rapids of time.

Why? Perhaps we can discern the evidences of madness that beset us; perhaps the better to resist. In my biography of Johann Sebastian Bach a major goal of mine was to pain the absolute centrality of faith in that composer’s life. It is almost impossible to understand the genius of Bach, and his music, without understanding the role of faith in his life.

His jobs were not merely at churches where he wrote to order. He was as learned as professors of religion; he had a large library of Christian books; he taught Catechism; two-thirds of his approximate 1800 compositions were church music; and his secular music was virtually always dedicated to God.

It is how life was in Germany of the 1700s. And his fellow Protestants took their cues from Martin Luther and other Reformers of the 1500s. Remember, Luther rejected the term Modern, and declared Reason to be the enemy of Faith.

The son of friends recently returned from a bicycle semester in Europe, 11 countries. We had an evening enjoying his photos, including the great town square in Prague, where there is a statue of the great Reformer Jan Hus, bound to the stake before his immolation as a martyr for the faith… a hundred years before Luther. (From my visit, years ago, I assumed that it was the spot where he was put to death for his faith, but that was in Konstanz; the great Bohemian was commemorated in his home city.)

In those days people died for their faith. Today, they still do… mostly in what we call the Far East and in the Middle East and south of the Equator. Not so much in Europe and America. Here we largely, at best, endure annoyance for our faith; or complain to each other.

Some, like the Masterpiece Cakeshop decorator, are not asked to die for their faith, but probably would. At moment people like Jack Phillips sustain abuse, vandalism, and sacrifices to their businesses and home lives. The most our culture forces, at this moment in time.

I bring up Bach’s livelihood and terms like the Dark Ages because, as noted, it can be a healthy thing to realize how different we are than those of earlier generations. In the days of Bach, Luther before him, and especially back to the Dark Ages, churches were at centers of every community.

The center? Yes, for prolonged worship, several days a week; for municipal events of all sorts requiring space; for schooling and civil ceremonies. And many churches, especially cathedrals, took decades and even centuries to build – and every citizen took on duties. Often when a day’s work was done in fields or shops, people ate and hurried to put in long hours – willingly – for carpentry work, masonry, sculpting, stained glass arts, and so forth.

It is what they did. And desired to do.

And in ages where illiteracy was common, the churches also “spoke” the Revealed Word of God – every color of vestment or altarpieces, every carved lectern, every sign and symbol in elaborate tapestries and stained-glass windows… MEANT something, telling the Gospel story, representing Biblical truths, reminding worshipers of the lives of saints and martyrs.

In other words, as Henry Adams noted in his great book Mont St-Michel et Chartres, the “Dark Ages” where not so dark at all. One of the only times in human history – certainly the last time in Western Civilization – when an entire culture was of one mind in matters of heart and head; when societies were unified in belief and purpose.

I was reminded of this when I came across a video of singers and musicians gathering to rehearse a performance of Vivaldi’s great Gloria, in Venice, in a cathedral, at night, dedicated in a haunting performance. Chilling, and a little taste of people gathered just more than 300 years ago at the School for Wayward Girls, where Vivaldi was Music Teacher and Priest. The profound liturgical words likely date from the Fifth Century.

Appropriate association: it was in 400s that Christianity largely had been swept off the European continent. At outposts like Hippo in northern Africa, Augustine kept the scriptures alive; and in far-off Ireland Saints Columba and Patrick kept Western Civilization, and scholasticism, alive, in shrouded monasteries. Slowly, Patrick made missionary journeys to Germanic lands, converting the Vandals who previously had chased and slaughtered Christians, from Rome and elsewhere.

Look, if you can, at this video of performers gathering in Vivaldi’s place to perform Vivaldi’s sacred music. You will get a taste of times when spare times of people were devoted to serving, and praising, God.

And note the great sacred environment, also a symbol of forgotten times. Today, in this Post-Christian Era, we have tunred many churches into museum, empty of spirituality. And we have turned museums in today’s equivalence of sacred places – venerating the art of music of earlier Christians into exhibitions and concerts.

An upside-down world.

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Click: Gloria

4-2-18

The arcane vagaries of the church calendar are not necessarily negative. Jesus was not born in December; and the observance of Easter is on different dates each year, and across various Christian sects. If the changeable dates oblige us to focus more on the events and their significance, and less on the secular-tending aspects – Holy days, not holidays – that can be a good thing.

Occasionally Easter coincides with April Fool’s Day, a secular day if there ever was one; a tradition devoted to pranks, whose origins are appropriately shrouded in obscurity.

There is another association between Easter and a silly practice that is more profound than would first seem.

The late Anthony Burger, remarkable Christian pianist, told the story of his young son in an Easter pageant in Sunday School. The boy had the unlikely role of Jesus – unlikely because he was probably the youngest of the children in the play; but his only acting assignment was to emerge from the tomb.

On the evening of the performance, the nervous parents and the curious audience waited – and waited – for “Jesus” after the Resurrection moment to walk out of the tomb. And nervously waited long moments more. Then, finally, in the portrayal of God’s miracle-working power, but also a testament of the beautiful innocence of childhood, the boy leaped from the cardboard tomb and yelled…

“Ready or not, here I come!!!”

Laughs, relief, sympathy. And – “out of the mouths of babes.”

In a real sense, Sunday-School pageants aside, that virtually IS what Jesus said when He conquered death and emerged from the tomb. Uncountable prophecies were fulfilled; He confirmed His role as Messiah; Satan was defeated; hope was extended to a humankind that had chosen sin and death; new life was proclaimed; eternal paradise in the presence of this resurrected Jesus was available to all.

Salvation is free, but a price must be paid. That holy anomaly is explained not only in the terrible sacrifice of the Incarnate Savior. There is a price still to be paid by you and me, beyond what Jesus “paid.” It is inherent in the ironic truth in the symbolic shout –

“Ready or not, here I come!” That actually is what Jesus meant; what He virtually said.

As the Bible teaches, we must believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God; and confess with our lips that God raised Him from the dead (Romans 10: 9,10). Not as easy as it sounds, but… Ready or not, we must make those decisions.

To be a New Creature in Christ, we must be, well, new creatures. Changed attitudes, new priorities, a rebirth. Ready or not, we must make those decisions.

Believing, confessing, and forgiving – oh! Forgiving, as we need forgiveness ourselves! – and yielding to the tugs of our new best friend, the Holy Spirit who will guide us and inspire us and empower us. Ready or not, we must make those decisions.

So the child’s deceptively simple transference of the “Ready or not, here I come!” game teaches us a profound lesson.

During Lent, this year, there was another game in e-mail threads and social media that diverted eyes from the truth and power of the Resurrection, rather than focusing our proper attention. And this was frequently perpetrated by “Christian” sites and “experts.”

You might have seen them: articles about Who killed Jesus? Was it the Jews or the Romans? Have the Jews been smeared by anti-Semitic charges? What does the Bible really say? What have recent historical studies suggested about Roman law in their courts and Jewish rules in their temples…?

Academic pabulum, scholasticism that diverts.

God killed Jesus. To put it another way, Jesus virtually scrambled up the cross.
Jesus’s “killing” was God’s plan, set out long before. His Will was done, and Jesus the Messiah – even Jesus the Man – submitted willingly. A sanctified suicide, in its way, for our salvation. Nit-picking about Roman laws and politics, Jewish traditions and rules, does little but to move the focus from the Savior’s vicarious act to take our sins upon Himself.

These “experts” seek to persuade us that it was not that “God so loved the world…” but that “Roman authorities and Jewish leaders so shaped events…” This view is evil. We should not consider for a moment that the most heinous acts of cruelty and suffering, the shedding of Holy Blood, was – Ready or not, here comes the truth – anything but an act of love.

The most extreme form of punishment was endured so that we would not endure it ourselves at the hand of a Just God. For God so loved us. And when Jesus emerged from the tomb we were graced with the means to avoid eternity in hell – which brings up another fairy tale of this season, a church leader’s reported intimation that there IS no hell. This is for another discussion, but Jesus’s death and Resurrection were in vain if this were so.

In the meantime, welcome the risen Savior with open arms! But be “ready” for the implications of the New Life.

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Without denying the undeniable joy of the Resurrection, I have tried to suggest today that in the freedom of the New Life comes a spiritual responsibility that is profound, for our own souls and those of our families and friends. In that sense, the tears of former life are mirrored in the tears we shed as born-again believers for the unsaved, and tears of joy as New Creatures in Christ.

Therefore I chose this video clip, “Have Mercy, My God,” from Bach’s “St Matthew’s Passion.” Julia Hamari, solost; Otto Büchner, violin; Karl Richter conducting the Munich Bach Orchestra and Choir.

Have mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears! See before You heart and eyes that weep. Have mercy, my God. / Erbarme dich, mein Gott, um meiner Zähren willen! Schaue hier, Herz und Auge weint vor dir bitterlich. Erbarme dich, mein Gott.

Click: Heart and Eyes That Weep

12-11-17

Sometimes we plan for something, and when it happens it seems anticlimactic. When surprised by something special, however, we usually are more impressed. That happened to me in one of the great moments of my life – the cultural-me, anyway – when I first visited Venice.

I anticipated uncountable sites and sights. Indeed I was rewarded with the many canals; the obligatory, and necessary, gondola rides; San Marco Square and the basilica’s gleaming face; Giudecca, by legend the Jewish quarter on an island across from the city; the Murano glass works; and I even rented the famous Room With a View (which is nothing to write a postcard home about, either as a room or for its vistas).

Not on my bucket list or its Venetian equivalent was anything related to Antonio Vivaldi, the great composer of the Baroque period. So I was surprised when walking along a canal-hugging sidewalk (yes, they exist) I turned a corner and was face-to-face with a sign marking the birthplace of Vivaldi; a modest sign on a modest house.

I almost dropped to my knees, animated by the unexpected encounter, in reverence.

Vivaldi is one of history’s great composers. He was a major influence in the music of his day. He absorbed and in turn influenced the characteristics of the Italian school, and the Middle-European and German schools (indeed, it was in Vienna where he died). His music made its way far north to Saxony, where no less a figure than Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed several of Vivaldi’s works.

A major contribution of Vivaldi was his codification of the Concerto Grosso and its trademark construction – solo-and-orchestra; three movements, fast-slow-fast. He wrote more than 500 such concerti in addition to many other compositions. Detractors say that, rather, Vivaldi wrote one concerto 500 times.

But letting yourself be bathed in his music chases away that idea; and you will be joined by Bach and others in your admiration. Leonard Bernstein helped fuel the Vivaldi revival in America.

The reason for this little historical tour is related to our title: like strolls through Venice, I cannot stray far. Vivaldi was a composer, but he was a priest first – nicknamed “The Red Priest” for the vivid color of his hair. He served as the director of music in a Venetian church, the Pieta; and very specifically was teacher and concert-master at the church’s Orphanage. In starker reality it was a home for wayward girls, as society once described unmarried pregnant women.

Women, many of them “girls” in terms of their tender ages, were cared for and housed by the Pieta, and they were educated in various arts and letters. And they learned to read, sing, and perform music. Through the 1700s’ first decades, they were the charges of Fr Antonio Vivaldi. Hence, a voluminous catalog of compositions, and many concerti that showcased solo instruments for talented young women.

Again, there is point beyond general history I wish to share. It resonates at Christmastime, and has relevance in this season of discussions (and scandals) related to women, of their relative subservience or assertion of rights, and their dignity. An extreme extension of a male-dominated society in Vivaldi’s time was not allowing women to perform, sing, play instruments in church; and soprano parts were supplied by castratos – castrated boys whose voices remained as boys’ sounded, even into their adult years. This was especially prevalent in France and England. At the other end was Germany, where its churches, even before Reformation, broke ranks by mixing German with the Latin, and sometimes employing women as singers. Bach did.

Vivaldi had to do so! As Director of Music in an all-women institution, exceptions were granted. The Red Priest must have been as good a teacher as he was composer, because the female musicians and singers of the Pieta were renowned.

There are many pieces of church music associated with Christmas. The Magnificat, many chorales, hymns, and popular carols. The Gloria is not, specifically, Christmas music, but that is because its spare and sweet words – “Glory to God in the highest” – are appropriate, and appropriated, throughout the church calendar. But it is performed and sung, within the church service or independently, with particular meaning during this Advent season.

Following are the English words of the Gloria. And if you are able to click on the video, you will see Vivaldi’s Gloria – possibly the most joyful and profound of the many written by many composers – performed in Vivaldi’s church, the Pieta. And, as in his day, the musicians and singers are all women (in period dress, playing period instruments, to assist our imaginations).

You will notice that the singers are arrayed in the balconies, many of them behind wrought-iron facades. This was the era’s compromise with keeping women “separated,” supposedly to keep worshipers from being distracted (ancestors of senators and movie moguls in the congregation?). OK… at first glance they appear to be in cages, but as I have explained, those women were actually liberated. To sing, perform, praise. Men, too, often were in such locations in churches – simply a practice of the time. In fact, in many churches the organ loft, with singers and musicians, was behind and above the congregation. The focus was forward, to the altar, symbols, Host, etc.

In the context of their time, Vivaldi and his female charges were iconoclasts, pioneers in the free, and equal, and of course welcome exercise of talent and worship.

If the female performers at the Pieta had commenced a tradition that continued and spread elsewhere, women might have had more freedoms, sooner won, and more broadly exercised, across the West. (Remember that, except through the influence of guilds and arcane means, even the men of 1715 Venice did not vote, either.)

Can we agree that the point of social progress is less about unfortunate timing, and more about ultimate justice? In spiritual perspective, it is not whose voices sing praise, but what they sing. And to Whom they lift their voices in that awesome church – “Glory to God in the highest!”

Glory be to God on high And in earth peace, goodwill towards men, We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee, for thy great glory O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.

O Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesu Christ; O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

Thou that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the Father, have mercy upon us.

For thou only art holy; thou only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father.

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You will notice something besides the floral ironwork behind which the choir sings in the Pieta. The performers are dispersed, widely around the great basilica’s perimeter. This was not an uncommon practice of the time. I noted in my biography of Bach that many churches had their anthems and choruses performed this way: in Salzburg the great early-Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber wrote several pieces for as many as 40 “parts” – singers, choirs, musicians scattered here and there, high and low, seen and hidden. For worshipers in the congregation, it must have seemed like prototypical Surround Sound!

Click: Gloria

10-30-17

I recently have been thinking, and writing about, the Protestant Reformation, whose anniversary is October 31 – the 500th anniversary, and traditionally observed on All Saint’s Day, when Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses (arguments, theological complaints, debating points) to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Regular readers here might be tired of these reflections, but on the other hand, “hits” and “shares” and comments have increased, to use internet indications of response. Speaking personally, I think that, as with other spiritual topics, it is good for us continually to contemplate certain things.

So: back to Luther on this birthday party of sorts. Readers will know that I revere Brother Martin as a biblical scholar whose dedication opened his mind to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. That his clarity of thought was what the church, and Western civilization, needed at that moment in history. That his personal bravery was a thing to admire, and is an example to beleaguered believers in our day.

And that we need to compile, and dedicate ourselves to engaging, 95 theses – at least – today.

But I will finally address the significance of Martin Luther and the Reformation from a different perspective. Yes, he sparked a spiritual purgative, even a catharsis, in the Church that he never intended to split. I want to consider the secular aspect of Martin Luther.

Lost in the ecclesiastic disputes is the fact that Martin Luther was a transformative figure in Western Civilization. Apart from theology. Let us appreciate his contributions to culture, and where we might be, or might not be, today without him.

He stood for the individual against the state – the Establishment of the day.

He elevated the role of Conscience and personal responsibility.

He advocated turning the Church’s role in every life and institutions to the opposite – bringing Christian sensibilities and priorities into civic life.

He democratized worship: under Luther, services were held in the local languages; singing was permitted by members of the congregation; women became participants in services.

He translated the Bible into German, and encouraged other translations into other languages. Of “the people.”

He championed the “priesthood of all believers” based on the Bible (I Peter 2: 5-9 and other passages) – the assertion that believers do not need intercessors to approach God; not fathers or nuns or pastors or even saints or Marys.

Also citing the Bible itself, he led to the disposal of man-made additions to scripture like Purgatory. Contending with the Book of James, but citing the Letter to the Ephesians, he recalculated the Catholics’ reliant view of works in God’s (ultimate) judgment unto salvation… and saw that by grace, through faith, we are justified; and that, instead, good works flow from a pious heart.

He held that Salvation was not mere “fire insurance” (i.e., avoidance of hell) but a thing much to be desired, and that Christians can have the assurance now, not dependent on prayers of survivors, their offerings, candles, beads, or lists of good deeds.

He encouraged literacy, was responsible for home libraries throughout Germany, which spread the concept of schooling and the education of women.

The German princes who hid Luther from persecution and death were emboldened to assert their independence from Rome and the political arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The “Germ theory” (no pun) of political liberty such as led to the American constitution, fostered in the forests of Germany, was godfathered by Luther.

He challenged other extra-biblical traditions of the Roman church. Priests marrying – after his excommunication, he married and had children. Mariology – he denied the divinity of Mary, arguing that the temporal mother of Jesus was not the Mother God, and pointed to scriptural accounts that an incarnate Deity in the person of Mary would not have done.

He was not perfect, and Luther immediately and violently silently stopped any such talk, even that he was a Prophet. He was an imperfect man but for the shed blood of Christ. He sometimes was intemperate; he had a bawdy sense of humor; he was prejudiced against Jews of his day; he drank and argued more than, perhaps, he should have.

And he was not a revolutionary, by design anyway. He was forced to rebuke his followers for excesses against Catholic churches and clergy. (In his wake was Rome’s Counter-Reformation… spawning what history knows as the Counter-Counter-Reformation.) In his aftermath was the Concordat, which made peace between German princes of Catholic, Lutheran, Pietist, and eventually Calvinist communities. Yet religious differences contributed to wars like the Thirty Years War in the 1600s that left one-third of the German population dead. Luther would have deplored such things.

Yet even the deplorable conflicts sorted things out throughout Germany and the remnants of the old Holy Roman Empire. Independence, literacy, increased liberty, and a stable middle class all followed. As part of universal education, musical instruction was promoted in and outside the church. Johann Sebastian Bach, although his birth was 200 years after Luther’s (and in the small town where Luther had hidden from assassins) was a virtual disciple. It is he and not Luther whom history has called “The Fifth Evangelist” – but Bach was a firm and learned Lutheran.

Christians, even adherents of the Roman Church, therefore still have much to learn from Martin Luther’s theses, his debating-points. But citizens of Western Civilization, indeed the world, are also indebted to the teachings, the boldness, the influence of this priest from the small German town. He was no special priest, he would tell you; but however no less a priest than the Pope himself in God’s eyes.

All that was left, in his teachings and the examples of his life is… that what he did was not in vain. That we, today, exercise the fidelity to scripture, a mature understanding of grace and faith, and the boldness to stand, as he did – a humble servant who declared his conscience “captive to the Word of God.”

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Today’s clip is not a music video but a full-length movie. The magnificent 1953, award-winning (and two-Oscars nominated) “Martin Luther.”

Click: Martin Luther

10-23-17

America, 2017. When our story is written we will note the bizarre nature of our national discourse at this frozen moment in time. Serious and silly. Aggressive and passive. New values and no values. Decadence versus… degeneracy.

The Wasteland of the Free?

What I have called Soft Anarchy accelerates. I do not assess based on an overheated stock market, but by spiritual, moral, social markers. Let us look at events clogging the news headlines. Harvey Weinstein and the tsunami of rumors, revelations, and regrets – America’s new Three Rs. The death and accolades surrounding Hugh Hefner. The continuous confirmation that Bill O’Reilly is a sleazy boor.

Two latecomers to the anti-Weinstein party have caught my eye. Scott Rosenberg, whom I once knew peripherally in the comics business, has come come out in sackcloth and ashes, confessing that he was well aware of Weinstein’s loathsome habits for years.

Almost 25 years ago, I had a Yugoslav friend who wanted to establish a publishing beachhead in America, and recruited me as a partner. The venture would have been called Spring Comics, and for various reasons including my disinclination to be a pawn instead of a partner, I faded from the enterprise. He hooked up with Scott Rosenberg. Soon afterward, he wanted to sue a cartoonist acquaintance of mine whose idea (about cowboys and Indians vs invaders from outer space) clashed with his own similar idea. My Yugoslav friend wanted me to do all I could to support that claim, but I could not join the claim, based on my knowledge of the timelines of their concepts. My foreign friend – up to then, a better and older friend – bitterly dropped me like a nuclear potato. But he soon took Scott Rosenberg as a partner.

The two “went Hollywood,” produced a movie about cowboys and aliens; and TV series; and books, if I remember. Then – gee, what a surprise – they had a falling out: attorneys, lawsuits and counter-suits. Did they deserve each other? I left those angels to dance on the heads of pins.

But last week Rosenberg went public with tales, and tears, about his eventual relationship with Weinstein. He knew (a phrase repeated again and again in his mea culpa: “I knew,” “I knew”), but the benefits of membership in the Friends of Harvey club had been too seductive for him.

The director Quentin Tarantino issued a similar confession, also recently – he knew, he knew (even that his girlfriend Mia Sorvino was sexually assaulted by Weinstein) and he did nothing. These men and others have cited all the familiar excuses designed to exonerate themselves. They knew, they whispered to others, they sublimated, they feel bad now. I have friends who admire Rosenberg’s newly minted “apology,” which is a repulsive farce: whether they are sorry for his inaction or their inaction (sorry that Weinstein got caught, that is) is immaterial.

None of the saints with dirty faces like Rosenberg and Tarantino in their “confessions” ever admit what they should have done: confront Weinstein himself. They would have lost work; been kicked off the gravy train? Likely so. But today’s hollow confessions condemn, not excuse, them.

The new “O’Reilly Factor” Talking Point should be How can anyone be surprised about Bill? Night after night the FNC host alternately leered at women and demeaned them. Calling male guests by their last names was merely rude; calling females by their last names was distasteful. The manner in which he treated Lis Wiehl on his TV panel and especially on his mercifully canceled radio show, where she was a sort of co-host, was a recurring nightmare of a predator on display. The $40-million “settlement” recently revealed says all we need to know.

The recently departed Hugh Hefner widely has been praised as a free-speech pioneer and – bizarrely – credited with raising the status of women in our time. I never met him, but have many mutual friends because Hefner first dreamed of being a cartoonist, and routinely attached vellum overlays to cartoon submissions with his little changes suggested in pencil. Ultimately, of course, he was not a cartoonist but a successful and gold-plated pornographer.

The objectification of (airbrushed) women – and, in ultimate irony in his magazine’s tribute issue, a “transgender” being – did not free women, or men, from voracious and predatory sexual perversion. It dignified and codified such things. Sexual Revolution indeed. And its curious prophet! Even as a young boy, naturally curious about such things as found in Playboy, I wondered about this obviously gay man posing amid mammaries and strangely dressed, or undressed, women-as-ornaments. He evidently thought that pipes, silk pajamas at three in the afternoon, and Admirals’ caps were… sexy? Manly? He established a sexual landfill, not a Sexual Revolution.

The ways of nations – even nation states, their boundaries, their thrones, even their treasures – come and go. It has always been thus. But our hearts and souls are eternal; our civilization, the children we bear, and their security, are things that must take priority in our daily lives. We are warned against the lifestyle of eating, drinking, and being merry.

My point is that the pig Weinstein, the bully O’Reilly, and the smut peddler Hefner, could NEVER have succeeded for a week if America were not receptive or envious of them; or willing, vicarious, partners. Not only customers, but junior Weinsteins and Hefners. America has been a fertile field just waiting to be planted with seeds of destruction. These things do not surprise us from behind and force attitude adjustments. If Playboy offended people, there never would have been an Issue 2. If the facts about Weinstein were stated and circulated early, decent people would have boycotted his movies before the next popcorn was popped.

The activities of Weinstein and O’Reilly, long condoned and ultimately encouraged or rewarded, were blatantly egotistical fingers thrust at the world, not individual women. When all is said and done, pathetic people like them have problems with pride more than sex. “Pride goeth before a fall…”

Shakespeare correctly observed, “The fault… is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Jesus said (Matthew 7:13-14), “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

It is not difficult, really, to see the Right. For many it is a challenge to do the Right. It should be the opposite, but this is America, 2017.

Which returns us (did you expect otherwise?) to this month’s theme, Martin Luther and the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Brother Martin saw the Right – fetid corruption at the highest levels of the Church. He knew what was right – to create the conditions for average believers to read the Word of God. He calculated the risk of Righteousness – a world-system that threatened him with excommunication, torture, and death for his convictions.

Instead of merely (merely?) standing tall in the face of the most powerful forces of his day, Martin Luther, 500 years ago, composed a checklist of complaints about the Church, the spirit of the times, and the world in which he found himself. Ninety-five “theses.”At first, his was a lonely voice.

How many Theses would you compose today? How many complaints about our contemporary world?

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This Sunday is the traditional observance of Reformation Day, commemorating Luther’s posting of the 95 Theses on the Church door at Wittenberg. Get thee to church where this is celebrated; or think anew, be rededicated, to Reformation.

Click: “Reformation” Symphony by Mendelssohn

10-16-17

You have heard the expression, “It all depends whose ox is gored,” or maybe you haven’t. It is the basis of a common-law precedent, and even a couple of Biblical references. Back when just about everybody had some beast of burden for a little farming or transport, or I suppose for eventual food, we kept oxen or cows or old horses.

If a horned ox injured another, or a person or property; or was injured somehow itself, the bedrock question of adjudication and responsibility – and an owner’s attitude – often boiled down to depending on whose ox was gored.

Outrage was relative; demands for justice were dependent on whether you were the aggrieved party – or owner – or, well, had no control over what a dumb beast did on its own…

The phrase in other words meant and means that our reactions often relate to how much we will suffer inconvenience or liability. Your ox? Get over it. My ox? I demand compensation!

The formal term for this attitude, most exercised in religion and philosophy, is “relativism.”

In broader terms today – taking it, as our culture does, to its logical extension – relativism is a moral disease that infects religion. The contemporary church, in many of its corners, defines Right and Wrong not by traditional biblical revelation, but by what is thought to be right and wrong in each situation – an ethical lapse also known as Pragmatism.

In the legal world, neither the 10 Commandments nor even English Common Law are called upon as they once were, by common consent. What seems right? What can be explained away? What is convenient? Who can say what’s “right” and “wrong”? These attitudes echo in our courtrooms.

When people reject standards and values, there are, by definitions, no standards by which they can live, or will be governed. It is what American society has slipped into: Soft Anarchy.

Relativism? Sex scandals in politics and the entertainment industry? The left howls when preachers and newsmen (for instance) are exposed; and the right drives the stories of political leaders and major entertainers committing atrocious acts.

Relativism? Political and financial corruption are decried by the right and left… selectively.

Relativism? The sanctity of life… attitudes toward war and military action… which Constitutional amendments or principles to champion or ignore… how God’s earth and Creation itself is to be respected… when protest is legitimate or crosses the line… all “depend on whose ox is gored.”

It is hard to remember that at once time the world – the West, the United States – had values and standards that nearly every person honored. If they did not believe them all, they were anyway observed in the breach. A priori ideas were first defined by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, but the idea of theoretical truths whose validity is independent of deduction or experiments, extended back in time past Kant, to Luther, to the Magna Carta, to Augustine, to the Gospels, to Plato, to the Old Testament – the Decalogue.

Once, despite all the other problems and challenges to humankind, societies operated on accepted truths, agreed-upon principles, “givens.” That is hardly the case in America, in the West, any more. Soft Anarchy. That we roll along, deluded that we advance, is more inertia than progress.

I mentioned Martin Luther, and have in recent essays, and will again until the 500th anniversary month of the Reformation has passed. His revolutionary life (I am ever more persuaded that he was a revolutionary, not simply a reformer) was more than the nexus of previous centuries’ growing contradictions and the world’s future vistas of faith, democracy, literacy, and liberty.

More? Yes – more, to us, than these possibly abstract principles. Luther’s imminent persecution and death; the challenges to his mind and his conscience; the affront to his relationship with Christ – the “free exercise thereof”; where have we heard that, since? – were on trial that fateful day 500 years ago.

He defended himself before the Holy Roman Emperor, to representatives of the Pope, to influential princes present in the court… and to us, 500 years in the future. Would he recant (deny) his writings? As legend tells us, he said:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted; and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot, and will not, recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.

Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me.

These words, properly, should thunder through centuries, down to us.

But how many Christians, say, think abortion is murder, but fail to do anything for fear of offending their neighbors? Or are outraged that the Bible has been taken from schoolrooms, instructions, and the courts, yet are too timid to act? Or are bothered when their churches stray from the Word of God, but label their own lack of response “not wanting to rock the boat”?

Our oxen are being gored every day, friends. What are we doing about it?

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Click: “I Can Do No Other”

10-9-17

We observe the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, of Dr Luther nailing his 95 Theses (complaints to be debated) on the Church Castle door in Wittenberg, Germany.

What momentous forces collided in that sleepy burg! The Holy Roman Empire was shattering; Medievalism was ending; Humanism and the Renaissance were dawning; literacy was sprouting, and with it the seedlings of personal freedom; the arts fiercely bloomed; the Enlightenment was nigh; European land wars and incredible maritime exploration commenced – both of them fueled by nascent commercialism and appetites of a growing middle class; serfdom was yielding to feudalism… and in turn, soon, to democracy and republicanism.

In the death-throes of the Old Order, hoary courts and royals entrenched themselves by  committing atrocities of race, religion, and conscience. The Church of the humble Savior had grown opulent and gaudy: corrupt. To finance the construction and ornamentation of St Peter’s in Rome, schemes like the selling of indulgences – buying late relatives spots in a fictional rest-stop to heaven called Purgatory.

We have outlined this, and I have lost some subscribers, presumably because I mention 500-year-old theological disputes (which objections I do not dismiss strictly on the basis of the vintages). But let us look beyond theology!

Martin Luther was the prophet of a new age. He stood for the individual in the face of organized power. He stood for popular culture, if I may go there, because he reformed the church’s trappings – the Bible for everyone to read; German, not Latin, scriptures and liturgy; congregational singing; priests who could marry; and so forth. He stood for scripture; “Scripture alone,” he bellowed to councils and popes.

He stood.

That, to me, is a notable takeaway from the life of Martin Luther. He was a Reformer, but also a Revolutionary.

In America there is a controversy over people kneeling during the National Anthem. To me, ironies abound: On matters of conscience, Luther stood, he did not abjectly kneel. Viewed from another angle, the press and the liberal Establishment in America (not to mention the NFL) condemned Tim Tebow for kneeling instead of dancing silly after touchdowns. A short prayer to God. However, countless black players are praised for kneeling symbolically to criticize their country. Consistency, thy name is not America 2017.

Luther, standing, was extraordinarily brave. There is a letter in his hand, written the night before his trial, in the Museum of the Bible that is soon to open in Washington DC (I saw it in Steve Green’s traveling exhibition). In the letter Luther calmly assumes he will be put to death and instructs his friend how to dispose of his possessions. And he asserts, once again, his “stand” for truth and for his conscience as informed by the Holy Spirit.

The Individual had come of age in humankind’s history. In Luther’s mature view, he realized that he stood for a world of more, not fewer, responsibilities – something that is scarcely appreciated today.

The crisis of the age – and for many ages – was upon Luther’s shoulders. Ironically (as we may think in the 21st century) Luther fit no mold. He was a Medievalist, not a Modern, even in the dawning days of Modernity. He really did not want to break from the Catholic Church, much less have a denomination rise in his name; but merely desired to reform it. And as the Age of Reason approached, he proclaimed that Reason is the enemy of Faith.

Yes, this New Man, harbinger of a new era and individualism – he considered Reason the enemy of Faith. So he was not a simple contrarian – he had clear but complex standards, living by them; and was prepared to die for them.

Martin Luther would die for what was sacred to him. In 21st-century America we have become a society where nothing is sacred but pleasures of the moment. Life is disposable, increasingly so, at birth and at death. Drugs supply counterfeit tastes of heaven, and our cultural heritage widely is mocked. Our civic life has devolved to games of “gotchas” and revenge. Self-indulgence and materialism are the new religions.

To the remnant and faithful, crises await our contention. We no longer have to wait, surprised when a serious life-dilemma confronts us. But we are at one of those moments in history when crises are unavoidable… and likewise our engagement is unavoidable, every one of us.

I cry for our culture; I cry for what we have squandered of our religious heritage, Western civilization, and our intellectual patrimony.

And I cry, too – every time in my life, I think, when I sing the last verse of my favorite hymn: Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever!

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Click: The “Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

11-28-16

I was a young boy in 1961 when I heard on my transistor radio that a Russian “cosmonaut,” Yuri Gagarin, had orbited the earth. A few years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik – the first man-made satellite – into earth orbit I remember being amazed at these scientific developments, as I was aware that the American government was scrambling to keep pace.

I was aware because 1957 had been declared the International Geophysical Year, and that all sorts of school programs and textbooks had begun posing the challenge to nervous 12-year-olds like me the rhetorical question: “You don’t want us to fall behind the Communists, do you?” So kids seriously thought of doing their physics and chemistry homework, and dreamed of being astronauts instead of cowboys or G-Men.

In my naiveté, after hearing that radio news bulletin, I scrambled for pencil and paper, as if this moment would be lost to history if I didn’t write the name of Yuri Gagarin. I recall that I could only phonetically scrawl, “Eeuree Gaggarin.”

Ironically, many people have forgotten Gagarin and Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, Gene Cernan, and many others, including astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders, who read from the Bible to earthlings during a lunar mission. Even President Obama seems to have forgotten a lot of the mission of space exploration, as he transferred many American capabilities to Russia.

There is no more Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Twenty-five years ago many nations of Eastern Europe and the “Warsaw Pact” foreswore Communism, with hardly a drop of blood shed. Other nations have discovered freedom – sometimes with steps forward and back along the way – and the very latest movements are toward nationalist pride, and the rejection of centralized control.

Winds of liberty blow across the globe. Except in spots like North Korea and Cuba.

These memories returned this week when Fidel Castro died, aged 90. He was 90 in human years – some would say “inhuman years.” He kept alive ancient strains of selfish totalitarianism, a regime built on hate and resentments rather than love and constructive fellowship. Democracy might not be the panacea for every society, but you can be suspicious of the leader who cloaks his tyranny in mantles like “peoples’ republic” and “democracy” when self-determination is forbidden.

I was 10 when a TV in the local bowling alley was turned to the news, and the anchor warned parents against letting their children see the disturbing footage… so of course I gazed intently. Black and white movies of Havana streets with dead bodies and pools of blood. “Batista flees” was a headline I remember in the New York Daily News about the dictator, scarcely less brutal or corrupt than Castro would be, whom Fidel routed. My father quoted the New York Times description of Castro as an “agrarian reformer.”

A year or two later Castro declared himself a Soviet-style Socialist and visited a United Nations General Assembly session in New York. He famously stayed in a shabby hotel uptown; trashed his rooms; and embraced Soviet leader Khrushchev. I attempted one of my first caricatures and political cartoons as a budding artist – it was a natural subject because Castro dominated the news in those days. The bay of Pigs invasion. The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Through the years he settled in as the hemisphere’s resident dictator, often shunned on the world stage and frequently accommodated by neighboring and worldwide economies.

My wife, as a girl, had neighbors who fled Castro and had their sugar lands confiscated. I worked summers in college at a factory manned almost exclusively by Cuban émigrés. Many of them – some, doctors and lawyers whose credentials were not yet recognized in the US – told me with tears in their eyes of murders they witnessed at the hands of Castro’s police; and telling me earnestly how they appreciated freedom and loved America probably more than I did. I eventually met Fidel’s sister Juanita, whose shame and abhorrence of Cuban Communism was not matched by the other sibling Raul.

Cuba remained grindingly poor during Castro’s term. He would bleat, and international leftists continue to maintain, that the US embargo was the cause. This was palpable nonsense. It was a policy not to engage in trade: not a blockade. Canada, other Latin countries, all of Europe, and of course the Soviets traded all they could; and provided aid to Cuba.

Three points are dispositive, especially as the media now will be awash in rosy nostalgia for the eccentric guy with the beard.

First, Cuba was, and remained, poor for precisely the same reason that the citizens of Socialist economies in Latin America, in Africa, and around the world, suffer poverty. Stifled initiative, inherent corruption, and artificial allocation of resources.

Second, there are thousands and thousands of Cubans who had their property confiscated or their businesses shuttered. My wife’s neighbors were sugar growers before they fled the island. Neither Cuban citizens nor American investors ever received compensation, even almost 60 year later. THAT is why Washington refused to “normalize” relations – that, and the righteous rage of hundreds of thousands who emigrated to the US with nothing their lives.

Finally, Castro summarily executed many opponents; imprisoned many more; set criminals and mental defects on boats alongside multitudes who braved the open sea in flimsy boats. His defenders in Noo Yawk and the media point to universal health care and free college in Cuba as glories of Castro’s regime, but have been unmoved for decades by closed churches, spying on Cuban citizens, and the denial of political activity.

Stooges like Jimmy Carter and John Kerry weep tears for Castro; popes like John Paul II and Benedict, surprisingly, visited him, and the current wearer of the Shoes of the Fisherman admired the dedicated Cuban atheist. Other people, the usual gang of leftists, love Castro for reasons of their own (romantic?) but more likely, and frankly, would be in favor of closing Christian churches in America, too; and suppressing political dissent, as in that promised land.

In a sense, Castro had more integrity than his apologists in America: you can trust a Communist to be a Communist. Liberals will excuse any offense if there is lip-service paid to “education,” “health,” or redistribution of someone else’s property (except their own). Castro was a wolf in wolf’s clothing, worse than Jesus’ memorable warning in Matthew 7:15.

And as Kipling wrote,
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”

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Click: Komm, Susser Tod

8-22-16

There are many worldviews by which people live today, as there always has been in all societies. The difference in contemporary America, I think, is that the majority of citizens have no idea of what a worldview is, or whether or not they care about operating under any established and consistent precepts.

Even Christians, including dedicated and fervent church-goers, often fail the test of worldview standards. Many Christians love God and believe in Jesus, but as if in the world but not of the world, know more what they oppose than what they should defend. As we recently noted, most people these days are not so much ignorant of history as indifferent to its relevance.

In the political realm, partisans on the Left know their socialist and Marxist dogma, even if they reject the labels. On the Right, there are patriots who love liberty and know the Constitution. In the vast Middle, well-intentioned people are malleable, their opinions inevitably shaped less by events than by the media and the culture.

This situation in America and the West was foretold by Aldous Huxley in a letter to George Orwell (both notable futurists and dystopian thinkers) in 1949: “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than [sticks] and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”

The Bible, inevitably, put the same thought – the same prediction – most clearly: “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (II Timothy 4: 3-4). Indeed, we love our servitude.

Counted among those “teachers” are not only members of the educational-industrial complex, but also politicians, role-models from popular culture, and… “people of the cloth” – ministers, preachers, priests, rabbis.

I am pessimistic about the future of American civilization (as well as of our “democracy,” republic, and government) because we are the inheritors of at least 500 years of a corrupted worldview. The worst aspects of a cultural secularization were unlikely to have coexisted with theocentric virtue. America was a “last best hope” of mankind, not for democracy’s sake – never an ideal of the Founders and Framers – but of a virtuous society. Respect, self-respect, order, justice, charity: these were among the characteristics recommended, and recognized, by Pilgrims and Great Revivalists; by our civic architects like John Adams and James Madison; by admiring observers like Alexis de Tocqueville, who retained enough equanimity to state: “When America ceases to be good, she will cease being great.”

One of the infections of the half-millennium cited above is the belief in progress, a hallmark of the Modern Age. Most Americans will think my definition, and certainly my analysis, is loopy. But that shows how pervasive this worldview has become. Earlier societies and civilizations, however, neither believed in the inevitability of human progress nor its efficacy, if they thought much about it at all.

Inherent in the concept of progress, and history’s plodding march “forward,” is perfectibility. Once that belief is subscribed (and we have made a fetish of it in the West), then it naturally follows that laws can be passed, rules enforced, behavior modified, all to achieve perfection. In society; in individuals. Justice. Heaven on earth. Utopia.

Of course, this leads not to progress but to schemes, warring factions, and, for example, the parade of monsters of the past century who consigned millions to servitude and battlefield slaughters. Secularism, the glorification of Self, will do that. Human nature without its restraints reveals the worst, not the putative best, aspects. We have arrived at the 21st century thinking we know better than all societies, in all of history – better than the Word of God – about the structure of the family, the role of authority, the sanctity of life, and a host of such truths. Gosh, we’re great.

I cannot decry progress in certain areas by certain characterizations. My late wife, a diabetic since the age of 13, would not have had a 14th birthday party if not for medical science. I could not be enjoying Bach as I type a message that (still magically, to me) will be read by thousands of people. I am not an all-in Luddite.

But our conceited conviction that, quoting Dr Pangloss from Voltaire’s “Candide,” this is the best of all possible worlds, is as self-swindling and ridiculous as, well, Pangloss himself. It might just be the case that the world will never host a greater philosopher than Plato; no better sculptors than Michelangelo and Rodin; no better composers than Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. The works of Rodin and the Viennese masters do not vitiate my point, but encourage us always to create and emulate. Not be perfect, because only God is perfect; but to create as He inspires us to be creative. (I mention Rodin, having last week stood in awe before sculptures in the Rodin Museum…)

The most pernicious effect of this modern malady is that we humans make a god of perfectibility: to the extent we can think, innovate, reform, and devise according to a faith in Progress, we commensurately surrender faith in God. We have replaced it with a faith in humanistic progress, in humankind’s perfectibility, in our selves.

Foolish us, we are doomed to fail. If you can lift your gaze from the muck – the bread and circuses as well as the disintegration of our social fabric – you will see how well the seduction of Progress’s inevitability and modern definition is working.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served… or the gods… in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

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Purcell’s Funeral Sentences

5-2-16

The great composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived between 1685 and 1750, universally is regarded as one of the great music-makers of the human race; certainly on almost every critic’s list of the great composers of all time.

Bach received additional plaudits when in 1977 the Voyager spacecraft was sent to nowhere in particular except up, with the hope that, hurtling beyond the solar system and maybe the galaxy, it might some day intersect some civilization in a remote part of the universe. Perhaps, it was hoped, aliens would discover and understand something of mankind from the spacecraft’s unique payload – a copper and gold alloy disk with images and music, estimated by its designers “to last a billion years.”

Among the playlist of global music, Bach was the only composer represented thrice: the Second Brandenburg Concerto, first movement, performed by Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Orchestra; the Gavotte from the Violin Partita No. 3; and the Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 were chosen to represent humankind’s creative profile.

At the time, biologist Lewis Thomas was asked what he would have nominated for this message to unknown civilizations about humankind. “The complete works of J.S. Bach,” he suggested. “But that would be boasting.”

Such are the sorts of tributes due to Old Bach, among countless heartfelt tributes when trained musicians and common laymen and everyone in between have their hearts melt and their souls stirred by his music.

Bach himself saw his music – and his entire life – as a tribute, instead, in all humility and with his priorities straight, to God Almighty. He was aware, but not vain, about his music-making gifts, gifts from God. Therefore his talents deserved to be raised up to God. In his life, he was first a Christian; second a family man; third, a man who made music. He made music, wrote music, composed music, taught music, was an innovator of music, breathed music, as did his family tree of 40-odd Bachs before, during, and after his own lifetime.

More than half of his approximately 1800 compositions (1200 of which survive) were of Christian focus: cantatas and chorales, motets and masses, Passions and Oratorios.

Yet for all his mighty “secular” works of keyboard and organ pieces, suites and concerti, songs and fugues (whew!)… he viewed all of them, too, to be written as unto the Lord. He knew the Source of his inspiration, and the One to whom credit was due.

Bach began virtually every composition, even his secular music, with a blank paper on which he wrote, Jesu, juva (“Jesus, help me”) on the upper left corner of the first page; and Soli Deo Gloria (“To God alone the glory”) on the bottom right corner of the finished ending.

His was a personal relationship with the Savior, not a professional duty even when he was employed by churches.

Such “bookends” were as anointing oil over all of Bach’s creative work. So did he begin and end his days – and his life – with such petition and praise: “Jesus, help me” and “To God alone be all the glory.” With or without the mode of music, such dedication speaks to us through the years.

The “S.D.G.” (his occasional abbreviation) should have a special meaning to us today. Most people of the 21st century, understand “God,” and understand “glory.” But it is hard for us, in contemporary times, to understand how a man like Johann Sebastian Bach could say, and mean, “alone” in that Credo. Can we?

Emerging cultures and emerging churches have compartmentalized every aspect of life, including God, and arguments are made that God would have it that way. Not so! “Personal fulfillment” is the artist’s goal in today’s world. But to Bach’s worldview, such an idea was an offense.

God “alone” is the source, the content, and the goal of artistic expression. Alone.

These prayers, and the prioritization of “ALONE” when we thank God, is how we should live, and how we should pray. Not (virtually) “thanks for helping me in this way or that way, God”; but “Thank you for being my inspiration, my helper, my right hand, my goal… my all in all.”

When we are too busy to pray, we are… too busy. We all know this, yet it happens. But if – at least – we start every day with the brief “Jesus, help me” as Bach began his compositions; and if we ended every day with “To God alone be the glory,” we will be in appropriate frames of mind.

We will start dwelling on the profound and proper life-truths of those simple prayers. We will not escape from their gentle but deep implications. We will expand on them in our active thoughts, and in our subconscious moments. We will hide those words and their implications in our hearts.

The truths spoken to our lives will become like… tunes we cannot get out of our minds. Like many of Bach’s themes. Musical and spiritual.

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The second movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite:

Click: Bach’s “Air”

4-11-16

What would you call the age we live in? When I was a child, we were told that the Machine Age had been superseded by the Atomic Age. But that was marketing of sorts. Anyway, nuclear energy and the ability to incinerate the planet have become mundane topics. We might be in the Computer Age, but that term soon will sound as musty as new-fangled “horseless carriages” and “talkie movies” that once inspired awe.

I think we all flatter ourselves that we are blessed to be “modern,” up-to-the-minute (if not quite hip). So is this the Modern Age?

Actually, philosophers and artists maintain that the Modern Age ended long ago, followed by Post-Modernism… which has also ended. Eclipsed by – Post-Post-Modernism? Some people use this term. Do you get the feeling that we have just taken our seats at the stadium, and the game is already in extra innings?

My preference, and it seems very logical to me, is that our age is best described, in perspective of history’s grand sweep, as the Post-Christian Era. Some people would dismiss that as being too theocentric… but in view of the cultural, artistic, intellectual, economic, even diplomatic, and yes, religious, core of two millennia: yes, “Post-Christian” describes where we are.

“Modern” and its permutations are terms that tend to elude us. Whether the Renaissance was the last whiff of Classicism or the dawning of Modernism is debated. But we must go back in history that far. Luther was the last Pre-Modern. The Age of Reason was on the horizon in Europe, espied from the platform of Humanism. Yet Luther, the last Medievalist, held fast to the proposition that “reason is the enemy of faith.”

More than two centuries later, Luther’s artistic disciple Johann Sebastian Bach summed up the heritage of the Gothic, Renaissance, and early Baroque eras. Intending to summarize more than innovate, he was not seduced by potential acclaim nor his effect on the future. In fact, he was rejected by the first “Moderns” in Rococo Europe. Bach’s scientific contemporary, Isaac Newton, was representative of the Age of Enlightenment.

I am aware (all too aware, because it is clearly counter-factual) that many schools today teach, when they teach at all, that Enlightenment scientists and philosophers freed Western Civilization from the shackles of religion and superstition. That’s what “enlightened” meant, right?

Wrong. Philosophers like Pascal and Locke; scientists like Galileo and Newton; and creators like Bach and William Blake, all saw the substantial advances in their fields as confirming, not disproving, the existence of God and His plans. Newton concluded, it has been said, that we live within the space of God’s mind. The poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ And all was Light!”

But then, 50 years or so later, the mad swirl of Romanticism, revolution, industrialization, and social turmoil broke forth as like a lanced boil. It has not healed; the burst dam has not been mended. We have had Marxism since the 1840s, Darwinism since the 1850s, wars and rumors of wars since the 1860s, and the Industrial Revolution that brought many blessings but also brought poverty, injustice, dislocation, and wage-slavery instead of less pernicious traditional slavery.

Many people have not yet come to full realizations about the enormous disruptions caused by elements of contemporary life specifically of the past 200 years. As people became educated; climbed the ladder of prosperity, or were crushed under it; and earned the new commodity of leisure time… religion became less important.

People relied less on God. And for those vulnerable souls who need God’s blessings, the Modern State and its Socialist and Marxian manifestations are there, attempting to substitute for the Church. These tendencies have multiplied and accelerated. Not only the Dynamo (Henry Adams’ term for the Machine Age’s deity, supplanting the church) but the arts and ever-more secular philosophers, all worked to convince people that God was dead.

God has indeed died, in the Nietzschean sense that society no longer acknowledges Him, depends on His Word, worships His Son, or serves Him.

This is true. The inclination of sinful souls to reject God finds comfort in a culture that makes it safe to reject Him. Denominations even twist scripture and call evil good. Humankind’s soul is no less dark then ever, wars are more brutal, and the world hurtles toward unprecedented chaos, envy, and strife.

The Secularists have an answer: that we distance ourselves even further from God and His Word.

We have itching ears, as the Bible foretold – we hear what we want to hear. We invite cultural enablers.

We are happy to revel in wine, women, and song – or what seduced the decadent Romans, called “Bread and Circuses.”

How do we respond to all the biblical prophecies, all the warnings of our wise forebears, all the lessons of fallen civilizations gone before? We laugh and ignore the certainty of calamity.

The anti-religious impulse of scientists, of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Relativism, Secularism, the negative effects of finance capitalism and repressive Socialism, the pollution of the earth and of our minds; indeed, human nature unfettered for the first time in history – where has it gotten us? Where are we headed? Adherents of those false gods should repent, as should we ALL.

Given the signs of the times and biblical prophecy, those who reject God ought to repent or at least desperately HOPE there is a God. For their alternative ideas have not worked, but rather have brought the world to chaos. Welcome to the brave new world of Post-Christianity.

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Our Click this week is a song by Merle Haggard, the iconic American poet, songwriter, and singer who died this week on his 79th birthday. Of the many genres he mastered, God and Country predominated. This song is among his best. Sadly, it is as pertinent now as when he recorded it, 1971.

Click: Merle Haggard – Jesus, Take a Hold

Easter 2016

An early Easter message. Appropriate, because I would like us to wrap Good Friday, the “world’s three darkest days,” the Easter Resurrection, and the Ascension all in one meditation. Besides, the Easter story was foretold many years before Jesus’s Passion – throughout the Old Testament, most comprehensively and accurately in the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. That’s an even earlier telling.

The essentials of Jesus’s life on earth are scarcely questioned any more, except by the intentionally scornful: which means that some people do not doubt, but rather reject. The fact of His Resurrection, on the other hand, is a dubiety to some. It is interesting to consider that people saw the risen Christ after the tomb, and yet not everyone believed. They believe Jesus somehow came back to life, but not that He was divine.

Many did come to faith. But even the Jewish historian Jospehus recorded the facts of Jesus’s life and ministry and miracles and resurrection – that Jesus mingled with people for 40 days – yet never came to belief himself. It is not unusual, frankly, to imagine people, even ourselves, to hear about a miracle, possibly witness one, and yet… shrug. Or consider it “one of those things we can’t explain.”

This happens, and it says less about a Resurrected Savior than it does about our stubborn, contrary, or lazy human nature.

Yet there were many records of That Week.

Jesus not only performed miracles, He was a miracle. Everything about His birth, life, and ministry were prophesied. He did amazing things; random things, sometimes, to bring blessings or to prove His divinity. He spoke amazing words, unassailable lessons. He was God incarnate; fully God and fully man, who loved and sorrowed, laughed and wept, ate and drank and traveled. He read minds, calmed storms, and healed the sick.

Yet vulnerability proved to be His major miracle. During His last week, He emptied Himself of divine prerogatives.

He went to Jerusalem, knowing death awaited. And more: scorn, insults, lies, torture, painful crucifixion. It is said that death on the cross is the most excruciating of slow deaths. Myself, I believe that the betrayal, denial, and abandonment of His friends was more painful than His physical end.

As a man, he prayed fervently, we know not all. As God, He willingly bore the humiliation and death, speaking only words like “It is finished” – it being the plan established before the foundations of the world: that this holy Incarnation would satisfy the substitutionary death we all deserve. If we believe and confess this belief, we are saved. Another miracle.

Our contemporary world wants us to believe strange things… strange lies. Not only that there is no God, but that there are no sins. Only mistakes and bad choices. And that medicines, or therapy, or education, or the government will make everything OK. Humankind has asserted mastery of our own souls for several centuries, ever more intensely, inventing reasons to reject God and deny His fingerprints on creation. Lo and behold, the past century was the bloodiest freaking 100 years in history, starring the most savage monsters a secular world could imagine.

Were the events of Holy Week in vain? Christ, with calm determination, fulfilled His destiny. He entered Jerusalem to public acclaim, preserving His humility. By the end of the week the Jewish zealots and the puppets of the Roman government caused people to scream for His murder. It happened… after what we mentioned: humiliation, injustice, abandonment, torture, and death that, perhaps, no mortal among us ever has endured.

He hung on the cross for three hours, comforted, at least, by His beloved mother who did not leave Him. He died; a spear was thrust in His side; the centurions affirmed His death; He was taken to a tomb, washed and prepared for burial, wrapped in cloths. A large stone sealed the tomb, guarded by Roman soldiers with special instructions.

Then, the three darkest days of humankind. What were those like, in Jerusalem? His enemies were satisfied that Jesus, the major troublemaker, celebrity, pretender in their eyes, was finally gone from the scene. But His followers – who should have known better, since they knew scripture and His prophesies – nevertheless despaired. They went into hiding: perhaps His fate would be theirs?

There are records of an earthquake, of stormy skies – of nature groaning – of the veil in the temple spontaneously ripping in two. Could His followers been more despondent and terror-stricken? What days they must have been!

But… Easter dawned. Jesus rose. He lived. He lives. Mary, having met Jesus in the garden, became the world’s first evangelist of the Good News when she ran and told the cowering Disciples.

The rest, to coin a phrase, is history. But it is not quite history as we know it. His story, literally. Mary and her friends saw, and believed. The Disciples, first scared and skeptical, believed, and saw, and believed in ever greater numbers. Jesus, in a transformed body, preached and blessed and taught and performed miracles. More people believed. Within a generation there were churches, gatherings of devout believers, not only in faraway Rome, but in pagan outposts like the island of Britain.

And after 40 days, the final prophecy fulfilled – more than a miracle, but the confirmation of His divinity – the bodily Ascension of the Christ into Heaven. “It is best for you that I go away, because if I don’t, the Holy Spirit cannot come. If I do go away, then I will send the Advocate, the Comforter, to you.” Thus, Christ in us.

But remember That Week. If you are ever tempted to think that your faith would be stronger “if you only could have seen the things of that week,” or if you hear others say that… remember that His Disciples, who lived every day with Him for three years, scattered like autumn leaves. Remember that people who had witnessed miracles wound up demanding His death. Remember that many who saw Him after the tomb still were skeptical.

You can believe in miracles – or not – but believing in Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; confessing His Resurrection; and inviting Him to live in your heart and life, is the summation of This Week, and the Gospel itself.

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Have you listened to Handel’s Messiah at Christmastime? Even if you have not, I invite you to listen to an equally great masterpiece. The St Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach tells the story of Easter week. On (coincidentally) this week of Bach’s birthday, number 331, I offer a link to one its greatest performances, conducted by Karl Richter. The art direction is stark! Appropriate, but note the changing backgrounds, the over-arching cross, the mood reflecting the spiritual import. With English subtitles. Three hours, 22 movements. Be prepared!

Click: Bach: St Matthew Passion

3-21-16

St Patrick’s Day is over, a mini-holiday in the commercialized America that likes to observe at least one holiday a month. The truth is, the American economy might collapse if it were not for our periodic celebrations, three-day weekends, and “holiday” sales.

Approximately one-fourth of all retail sales are in the Christmas season. When you consider the hoopla and commercials built upon Presidents’ Days and Easter Bunnies and Halloweens, you can believe that without formerly Christian holy days and once-patriotic commemorations, our economy would collapse.

Where, once, Christian observances and patriotic anniversaries inspired us, now their superficial and counterfeit shades prop us up.

St Patrick’s Day is in that category. Bins of discounted green plastic hats, and the few remaining posters for green milk shakes, confirm this. Sic Transit gloria mundi. Until next year. Until the next holiday – bunnies and peeps hot on the trail this season. Some Americans even assume that “Saint Paddy” was one of the fictional or dubious Catholic saints, like St Christopher and St George.

But Saint Patrick was real, and is real.

St Patrick knew persecution. There understandably is some obscurity about a man who lived in the late 400s, but two letters he wrote survive; there are records of his deeds; tremendous influences surely attributable to him are still felt; and he did die on March 17. These things, and more, we do know.

He was born in western England and kidnapped by Irish marauders when he was a teenager. As a slave he worked as a shepherd, during which time his faith in God grew, where others might have turned despondent. He escaped to Britain, became learned in the Christian faith, and felt called to return to Ireland. On that soil he converted thousands, he encouraged men and women to serve in the clergy, he worked against slavery, and quashed paganism and heresies. Among his surviving colorful lessons is using the shamrock to explain the mystery of the Trinity, the Triune God, to converts.

He was an on-the-ground evangelist – possibly the church’s first great evangelist/missionary since St Paul, planting churches as far away as Germany – and he preceded much of history: living more than a hundred years prior to Mohammed; 500 years before Christianity split into Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy; and a thousand years before the Reformation.

I am not Irish; I am American. And my background is not at all Irish; it is German. But propelled, I am eager to admit, by a remarkable book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill, I have learned about a gifted people who, not unlike other ethnic groups, endured persecution through generations; and learned about a land that was repository of many tribes, not least the Celts, until its craggy Atlantic coast became the last European stand against pagan barbarism. Those tribes became a people, and their land virtually became, for quite a while, the defiant yet secret refuge of literacy and faith, in lonely monasteries and libraries.

As Lori Erickson recently wrote in a series on St Patrick for Patheos, “In the eighth century, Celtic Christians created a masterpiece of religious art called the The Book of Kells, a book whose vividness, color, and artistic mastery reflect Christian traditions laced with Celtic enchantment. The Book of Kells is an illuminated Latin manuscript of the four Gospels. While scholars don’t know for certain, it was likely created on the remote island of Iona off the coast of Scotland, and later brought to the monastery at Kells, Ireland.

“Made from the finest vellum and painted with inks and pigments from around the world (including lapis lazuli from Afghanistan), the book is almost indescribable in its loveliness, with designs that are convoluted, ornate, sinuous, and dreamlike in their complexity. Some scholars have called it the most beautiful book in the world,” she wrote. I can add that it can be seen as an early graphic novel.

It is on display at the magnificent Trinity College Library in Dublin – whose famous, cavernous, multi-balconied library room is akin to heaven for bibliomaniacs like me – and surrounded by back-lit photos and displays of enlargements, it sits in an environment-controlled case, one page at a time turned every few months. To behold that book, so magnificent in its reproductions, in its reality, was one of the great experiences of my life.

The Book of Kells is awesome for what it is, surely one of the greatest artistic achievements of the human hand, head, and heart. A majestic monument to faith, all the more remarkable for being anonymously produced, unlikely by one person; possibly by a virtual army of creative souls. The Book of Kells is significant, too, for what it represents:

The tenacity of faith; the triumph of trust; the assumption of lonely devotion in the face of worldly temptations and the world-system’s persecutions; the joy of creativity; and obedience to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Knowing Him; making Him known. Not incidentally investing artistic beauty along the way… and having obvious, visceral, evident fun in the process.

Back to Saint Patrick. When the ancient masterpiece we behold as The Book of Kells was created, the man Patrick who bravely and no less tenaciously fought for the gospel on that beautiful soil was already, himself, 500 years in the past. The church has been blessed with famous saints like Paul and Augustine; and those who touched souls for Christ but never were designated saints subsequently, like Martin Luther and J S Bach; and many, many saints who mightily served Christ in obscurity, like the monks who made The Book of Kells, and uncountable missionaries and martyrs.

Saint Patrick, born a pagan, made a slave, once a fugitive, was transformed by a knowledge of Christ. He taught us how to overcome challenges, listen to the Holy Spirit, formulate a vision, and change the world. Not just his world; but the world ever after.

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For more than a millennium a hymn, set to the haunting Irish tune “Slane,” and using St Patrick’s teaching in the words of the 6th-century Irish poet Saint Dallan, has spoken to the hearts of believers and non-believers: God is our All-In-All: Be Thou My Vision. It is performed here – with obvious and profound extra layers of meaning – by the blind gospel singer Ginny Owens.

Click: Be Thou My Vision

2-22-16

Some of the most pleasant travel experiences of my life have been atop the ancient wall surrounding the small city of Lucca in Tuscany. I have stayed in the Medieval town a number of times in my life, perhaps a dozen Autumns. High, thick walls once surrounded many Italian city-states. Built for safety, as boundaries, some even encasing apartments; today many are gone or survive as random portions, as relics of previous times and expired functions. But Lucca has Italy’s only complete and intact ancient wall.

On its top, it is wide enough for several lanes of traffic, but it strictly is for pedestrians, who encounter cobblestones and bricks, with many old trees and inviting benches. A favored restaurant is built into the wall at one of its road-portals – La Mura (“The Wall”). On many Autumnal mornings I betake myself to the wall’s long, circumferential boulevard – “Passegiata della Mura” – and jog. More often, stroll. Invariably, see the mists rise from plowed fields as the morning sun kisses them; listen to the city of red-tiled roofs come to life; smell the stoking fireplaces of wood and chestnut shells.

Such thoughts came back to me recently with the latest chapter of the controversy over a possible wall to be built, or not, along America’s southern border. On the endless carousel of debaters, the surprise figure on the horse this week was none other than Pope Francis.

He issued a version of President Reagan’s eloquent defiance of Communism in Berlin (however, before a structure scarcely begun): “Mr Trump, tear down that wall!”

While we are paraphrasing, I will borrow from Gertrude Stein and suggest that “a wall is a wall is wall.” And just as Theodore Roosevelt said that a vote is just like a rifle – that its usefulness depends on the character of the user – we surely can say that walls, throughout history, are functional, of course, but are totally neutral apart from their architectural purpose… which can be transformed anyway, as Lucca’s wall has been.

So, Lucca’s wall, once a standard architectural defense, then a symbol of independence in more political and trade-oriented times, is now a tourist attraction. The Great Wall of China, a Wonder of the Old World and a rare man-made structure that can be seen from outer space, likewise now attracts more photographers than invaders. On the other hand, the Berlin Wall, mentioned above, was a literal city-wide outdoor prison wall, trapping a population in Communist East Berlin. And seldom spoken about in America is Israel’s crude, and effective, cement curtain that cuts through the West Bank.

American objections to porous borders and uncountable illegals incited a papal protest that presumably was metaphorical (walls of separation in our hearts vs. bridges of understanding); presumably. The Pope did not mention Donald Trump by name, but said that “any man” who would propose such walls “is not a Christian.”

Many Christians and conservatives rushed to document the 50-foot high walls that surround the Vatican, which is, though small, a city-state, an independent country. Surrounded by a wall, and with some of the toughest citizenship requirements in the world. And the same folks scurried to Bible concordances and found examples of God sanctioning, even commanding, construction of walls.

Throughout the Bible: walls for defense; walls as parts of temples; walls to interrupt migrations and preserve spaces. Not much different from the sweep of history’s other religions, societies, cultures. So this sudden turn in the immigration debate directs us to far more logical place… and a far more pertinent question than Francis asked.

The Pope declared that people who “build walls and not bridges” are not Christians. No one, least of all Francis, is talking about the essential issue, the real offense. The Jesuit pope should understand, and emphasize, that what makes someone a Christian is belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Since he addressed the theological aspect.

What makes someone “not a Christian” is rejection of Christ’s incarnation, substitutionary death, Resurrection, and Ascension. NOT somebody’s opinions on immigration laws, walls on the US border (or the Vatican’s), or other political issues.

With all due respect, one can be a Christian and have bad ideas, Francis. I believe it is your dogma that having “good” (?) ideas, doing good deeds, yet not professing Christ is yet a pathway to salvation, according to recent press reports. But it is not the Bible’s teaching. The Church, by such statements, is opening itself up to charges of asserting the Works Doctrine. Is approval of a California border fence enough to qualify to “be a Christian”?

Aside from, excuse me, anti- or extra-biblical theology, there are practical questions. If the Pope is concerned about conditions in Mexico, so horrible that millions flee northward in desperation, would not the better act as a Church be to help alleviate poverty and misery in Mexico? There are few Catholic countries with more extreme anti-clerical histories, aside from the excesses of the French Revolution. Insurgents blamed centuries of Church corruption and oppression.

Make things right WITHIN Mexico! So that people will want to stay in places where they were born… and the Church can fulfill its mission… and the US not be threatened and burdened. I have also been to the Vatican many times; the immense wall is about the ONLY thing there that is not opulent, extravagant, even gaudy. There are funds available, I am sure, in the Vatican Bank.

Back, however, to the main point, of pivotal importance: “The man who says such a thing is not a Christian.”

The man who said THAT clearly places his politically correct definition of good deeds ahead of what Jesus and the Disciples and the Holy Bible say about the requirements for salvation. Did the Pope mean, “That’s not how Jesus would act”? or even “That man is a bad Christian”? Very different matters. The Pope usually is aware of his words even when not Ex Cathedra or Infallible. The border towns that suffer violations, the victims of financial burdens and crimes in America – I used to live in San Diego; ask me about them – are they to be defined as “not Christians” when they resist invasions of their neighborhoods and homes?

This Pope did not recognize the metaphorical wall built around the island of Cuba when he hugged its leaders and ignored the Christians in Cuban jails. Or when he was on US soil and was quieter about the issue of the proposed border fence. And he somehow missed the opportunity to scold political leaders he met here about the ongoing horror of abortions, the killing of babies. Mother Teresa had done so… right to the faces of Clinton and Gore, when they were in office and they met her.

Or was Mother Teresa “not a Christian”?

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Click: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

1-25-16

Last week’s essay on “worshiptainment,” Worship Music That Is Neither, excited quite a bit of notice and debate across the spectrum. It was picked up by many websites and newsletters, posted and re-posted on Facebook, and promises to be, I am told, the subject of sermons and small-group discussions.

In the essay I addressed the form of musical worship that has overtaken many mainstream-denomination, independent, and “mega” churches. Worshipers singing hymns have been replaced by performance musicians; organs and pianos by guitars and drums; hymnals and songbooks by words roughly projected on screens. Worshipers now are audiences. Congregational singing is optional, effectively discouraged.

I have been in uncountable churches where MCs tell everyone when to smile, when to clap, and to repeat “Good Morning!” if not yelled loudly enough. Dissent from such was the thrust of my essay.

The problem – my point – is that what is represented as free-form worship, in their own way, is more regimented than Medieval chants or sitting under Jonathan Edwards sermons. Congregants do not feel parts of a congregation, communicants cannot commune, and some people who go to church to find their still, small corner… find no corners. Some people yearn for church not for pep rallies, but needing to weep quiet, sincere tears; or to lay on their faces, as it were, at the altar. Not smile on cue, wave, and jump in place. To go out and face the world refreshed, not to see face-painters and cappuccino stands in the parking lot.

We should be discomfited by more than music and worship paradigms in large swaths of today’s church, however. A virtual Tower of Babel within the church it seems, but is not necessarily bad, nor unprecedented. In ancient times, the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity developed along local preferences and traditions. Resistance to Papal authority actually began centuries before Luther. During the height of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and, yes, the Counter-Counter-Reformation, churches affixed themselves to varying worship modes.

… but, within Christendom, they were modes and styles – very seldom, aside from the role of the Pope, dissension about basic doctrine. Luther, in fact, did not want to leave the Catholic Church. J. S. Bach, the “Fifth Evangelist,’ hymnist of the Protestant Affirmation, was proudest among his 1800 works (approximately 1200 of which have survived) of his B-minor Mass – a Catholic mass.

And so forth. With few exceptions (Salem, the Inquisition) the internal battles of Christendom – the Thirty Years’ War; Tudors vs. Stuarts in England; the “Troubles” in Ireland – are tattooed with religious arguments and justifications in history books. But almost all of these were political or economic or military or geographical or personal wars, fought under the convenient banners of Christian exegeses.

I have been to Northern Ireland. I have spoken with many who survived the Troubles. Many who are now reconciled, many who buried relatives killed by those they now call friends. Virtually none fought over transubstantiation vs. consubstantiation, back in the day. People simply preferred to hate. Christ’s love covered all… when it was accepted.

My point is that all these groups, over history, that I have named (including the Orthodox communities, about we in the West know little) were remarkably similar in worship settings. The peripheral things (hate, politics, rivalries) clearly and ironically were separate from the central spiritual core.

That is, worship was to the same God, the same Savior, using the same Bible… and virtually the same worship. The early “Church Fathers” met, and prayed, and fashioned creeds – to codify the basics of Christian belief; to combat heresies, and to spread the Word. Similarly, they designed a template of worship – to, likewise, have the worship service address, in its part after part, the essentials of the faith.

There is a Logic to Liturgy.

Liturgy is the order of service, designed to address and remind worshipers of the essential doctrines of faith. You can listen to recordings of recreated services of the 5th-century churches, and identify the orders, and even the (translated) words of the service, if you were reared in a 20th-century liturgical church. The orders, words, chants, prayers, invocations, responses of the Catholic Mass of 500 years ago, are substantially as today (or pre-Vatican II); substantially as services in Lutheran, Anglican, and High Episcopal services.

I have visited churches throughout Europe where I did not know the local language, yet I knew the liturgical melodies, and the order within the services, as if I did. I knew what was being prayed, celebrated, petitioned. That is how it has been… and, I submit, should still be.

In liturgical churches these traditions survive, even if sometimes barely. In Evangelical churches, there might be free-form worship, but usually in a prescribed format each Sunday. Quakers have had their own traditions. And Pentecostals frequently invite the Holy Spirit to move over a service.

So, I understand, and I hope readers do, that my unease with contemporary worship music is not based on reactionary devotion to ancient and dry music (which traditional music of the church is not!). We see that, for 2000 years, Christians at all times and in all places have inherited and exercised the essence, if not the forms, of worship.

What is new in our times, in Post-Modern services, is content (or, today, the dearth of content) – has changed or disappeared in many churches. To many observers, it honors God less, and “self” more; it is less about the message of Jesus and more about the massage of ego.

I know the complaints about traditional church music, about liturgy. About dry sermons. About “everything from the book.” I know the complaints because I shared them. When I was young, I noticed that grownups in pews around me droned through the Settings – the printed orders of service. Those routines seldom changed; virtually only on Communion Sundays or a few holidays intruded.

Everyone could recite the long petitions in their sleep. I know. I saw it on Sunday mornings. I still can myself, never setting out to memorize the passages. Just like ministers and priests (you see it on TV, maybe when the Senate is called to order, or a president is buried) reading prayers. Shouldn’t they be familiar enough with God by now to pray extemporaneously?!?

So. I concluded, and many still might, to reject ordered tradition, to conclude that rites can become rituals can become rote. Empty repetition. Spiritually empty. Sure: that is the danger.

But, today, my argument is – and it has taken us a generation or two to recognize this – that spontaneity can grow just as empty.

“Free form worship” can become as programmed as printed liturgy.

“Forced spontaneity” is an oxymoron. It is what we bring, not what we receive, that makes for worship.

Contemporary “praise music,” un-programmed services, and the Post-Modern church can grow just as cold as anything. Colder, when Jesus is absent from the Focus as well as the Form.

If many parts of the contemporary church have morphed from hymns to concert performances, I fervently pray that those talented musicians simply would perform in concerts! Many of them do; more of them should. Worship in church is different than attending a concert, no offense meant. There is a Logic to Liturgy.

And there is a 2000-year-old tradition to resume.

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No organ, no church pews. But, performance that is inclusive. Worship and praise that worships the Lord and praises Him… and uplifts musical worshipers. The great gospel song of Fanny Crosby. Blind nearly since birth, she began writing hymns at age 40, and wrote approximately 8000 before she died. Her music has blessed worshipers in church… and concert-goers in great auditorium like London’s Royal Albert Hall. A BBC concert.

Click: To God Be the Glory

1-11-16

Solomon, who seldom got things wrong, wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun,” in Ecclesiastes. The French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The subject of such aphorisms, and much of the world’s wise sayings, is not, say, the weather, or taste in fashion. It is human nature.

We humans, most of us, have shinier toys, and live in somewhat more comfortable homes, than of generations ago; and eat more food, or in more variety, than did our ancestors.

Yet we still bash each other’s heads in at every opportunity: the last century was the bloodiest in world history. We still get sick and die, and in general terms plagues and poxes merely have been replaced by heart conditions and cancers. And stress, and psychological disorders, and addictions – the demons of the 21st century.

We complain about the same things that the ancients did. I am reminded that Mark Twain said, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” It is probably true that the early Egyptians and Chinese and Athenians and Romans and Persians and Mayans complained about their bosses, spouses, landlords, scheduled events, children, shoddy footwear, and mothers-in-law.

And when human nature got more serious about things… well, there always has been cheating and jealousy and theft and lying and murder. Pride and arrogance. And, more constant than any of these things, brokenness, hurt, the need for forgiveness. The need for a Savior.

God provided that Savior, and He inspired love and forgiveness, sacrifice and charity; all in precious scant supply now as forever, thanks, once again, to the fact of human nature.

Recently it occurred to me that we have scarcely progressed from the essential afflictions of our distant ancestors in another important manner. I love these revelations, because I maintain that the human race requires periodic lessons in humility. In important things, and in the many trivial things that are the mortar of the important things. These wake-up calls can even be amusing, but are wake-up calls nonetheless.

Many of us consider the “cult of celebrity” a normative cancer. You know: movie stars, singers, and sport stars vs heroes. Skewed standards. Truly this is a contemporary phenomenon, because protean antecedents of our times’ celebrities – painters, composers, poets, artists – often dedicated their work to God and were fulfilled by serving Him. “Less of me; more of Him.” In researching my biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, I continually was struck by how utterly humble he was about his work, his accomplishments, his “celebrity,” in contradistinction to his God.

When we think we in America have been liberated from the trappings of royalty, repressive social and economic systems, and checks against free thought, is when we swindle ourselves most extravagantly, however. A very common denominator illustrates this the best.

We frequently hear complaints from, say, sports fans about ticket prices and athletes’ salaries. In the proverbial next breath the same fans often admire those salaries (“hey, if the owners didn’t have the money, they couldn’t pay it, right?”). Of course, owners – just like shop or factory bosses faced with higher labor costs – pass it along to the consumers. In sports, fans themselves pay those obscene players’ salaries by accepting higher prices for cars and candy bars and shaving creams that sponsor the games. Ticket prices for cold, hard seats. And stratospheric fees, parking costs, merchandise, and absurd prices for hot dogs, popcorn, and drinks.

The same with concert tickets, apparel festooned with logos, and advertised items hawked by celebrities paid millions to sell them to us gullible consumers. Little different than “tributes” paid to robber barons in the Middle Ages. Except that we willingly put these exalted peoples’ feet on our heads. We have thrown off royalty – oh, yeah? look at the faces on supermarket tabloids. We do them honor; we practically worship them. Plus ça change…

Compounding our foolishness, we are supremely inconsistent. Half of the people in America grouse about oil company profits – usually citing income, not profits – and ignoring research, development, costs of operation and such. In contrast, I have heard nobody offer anything other than admiring whistles over George Lucas’s $4-billion sale of the Star Wars franchise. Who do we think is funding that crazy purchase?

Neither any resentment, ever, of the rapid and mammoth wealth accumulated by Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. “Oh, but they made things that people need.” Yes. Like… oil products and gasoline?

Why do people hate – yes, hate – the CEOs whom Michael Moore tells us to hate – “oh! those big houses!” – but have no problems with actors being paid $20-million and more per film? Most of the money paid at the gas pump goes to government taxes, not the gasoline or research or development or executives’ salaries. And a portion of every movie ticket is obeisance to the glamorous stars. In effect, a celebrity tax. Few complaints.

These are only a few reality-checks about our value systems. And, as I said, some reminders that human nature has not changed that much.

Returning to the spiritual aspect of our lives, more important than any of this. We think we have graduated from a society where highwaymen once lurked behind trees, whereas a multitude of internet pirates lurk behind our computer screens today. Wall-street cheats. Our jails more crowded than ever. Nothing new under the sun.

No, in God’s world we need to remember the old days, good or bad, by better or worse standards.

But there were times in human history when the vast majority of artists and writers and scientists acknowledged God as behind everything, the Maker and Redeemer. And they sought to honor Him in all they did. Common people toiled and sometimes suffered, but always consoled themselves in the ministrations of the Holy Spirit. Communities were built around churches, and the Word was central to everyone’s lives. Prayers were lifted daily – often continually throughout the day – and church attendance was weekly, or sometimes daily. Jesus was at the center of peoples’ lives, in all classes, in villages, towns, and cities.

But we know better in the 21st century. We are smarter – smart enough to dismiss God from our lives. We are happier – at least we pay more for things that promise to make us happy. We live more comfortable lives – if we would slow down for a moment to enjoy them once in a while. Our religion, as a society, is something we are so comfortable with that we don’t feel the need to “force” it on others… even our children.

Maybe the French got it wrong. The more things change, it might be that the worse they become. Is there anything new under the sun? Well… we still need a Savior.

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Some people think that the greatest creation of Franz Josef Haydn was not one of his 104 symphonies; or a string quartet, the genre he molded; or the mighty oratorio The Creation. Here is his Mass For Troubled Times, an astonishing, stirring, church piece, one of 14 masses he wrote. We live in troubled times, no less than his 1800 Vienna. Let it minister to you – traditional Latin words, in Kyrie; Gloria; Qui Tollis; Credo; Quoniam; Sanctus; Et Incantus Est; Et Resurrexit; Sanctus; Benedictus; Agnus Dei; Dona Nobis Pacem. Conducted by Grete Pedersen in a magnificent Oslo church.

Click: Mass for Troubled Times

7-13-15

Johann Sebastian Bach began composing virtually every one of his pieces, even secular music, with a blank sheets on which he wrote, Jesu, juva (“Jesus, help me”) on the upper left corner of the first page; and Soli Deo Gloria (“To God alone the glory”) on the bottom right corner of the finished score.

I try to do the same thing with my writing, even secular writing. A posted note, or prayer, before I begin anything. Even if not a Christian piece, still, a prayer for inspiration, and that my work not be displeasing to Him. And at the end, to God – alone – the glory, that I have made something. “Made something of nothing,” an aspect of the creative process that forever astonishes. The notes are good discipline, but primarily a proper view of things.

I acquired a similar habit when I was a cartoonist, from the example of the cartoonist TAD, Thomas A Dorgan, who died in 1929. The legendary social satirist and sports cartoonist was an observer of human nature, and in his panels depicted everyday people kibitzing, wisecracking, and commenting on the simplest things. TAD developed his own slanguage, and was famous for coining terms like “hot dog.”

The best way TAD found for being an honest and dispassionate commentator was to be removed from the presumptions, prejudices, and pride of his characters. Over his drawing board he tacked the legend, “Don’t Kid Yourself,” to keep him honest. He knew that if he were to consider himself above his everyday cast of characters, he would be cooked. Humility.

I keep Post-It notes around my office, too; stuck to the top of my computer screen. “Don’t Kid Yourself.” Do I think something I do is pretty good? Wham! No… it’s likely from God; and hey, I’m not so great after all.

Is there a theological message in these creative hints? You bet. We are to be humble before our God. To my readers who are Christians, and those of you who are not, I will spare both camps, and not turn to a concordance for verses on being humble before the Lord. The scriptural admonitions do not refer only to imagining ourselves before the Great Throne. We are to know our place when we pray, when we seek guidance, when we ask forgiveness. In every circumstance.

What about “boldly approaching the Throne of Grace”? That refers, again, to knowing our place – saved and redeemed – but NOT presuming anything more from the Creator of our souls. God forbid.

We tend to presume, we believers. We will be children of the King, not Kings of children or anyone else. Many of the rebels we can think of in the Bible – the Hebrew children building a statue of Baal; the money-changers in the Temple – were just short of being total mutineers. They stayed close by; they grafted their own “improvements” on what God ordered; they thought they knew better than God. In many, many ways we all tend to go off half-cocked in our “walks,” thinking we can do different works than God intended… or better works than He willed. The sin of pride.

Mother Teresa was never so wise as when she said, “God does not care about our success; He only wants our obedience.”

Jesus told us to be “salt and light” – to preserve the Truth, and present it to the world with savor, as salt does; and to be a light showing forth the Father’s love, as cannot be hidden under a bushel. These words in the Sermon on the Mount were directed to individuals… indeed, to you and me no less than to the multitude.

I believe we have lost sight of the fact that Jesus came to save us; I mean you and me as individuals. Sometimes we get caught up in causes and works. For God, yes; for the Kingdom, yes. To His glory, yes. But. He wants us to be Salt and Light. Not necessarily to be leaders. Or speakers. Or committee chairs. Or cheerleaders. Or fundraisers. Or professional singers. Or even writers of blogs. Not solely.

These things can be good… are good. And the Holy Spirit is promised to endow preachers and teachers and evangelists, and those with hospitality gifts and everyone in between. But these are gifts, to be accepted, and used, as gifts, in humility.

These are tough “memos to self,” especially when our times are so fraught with threats and peril; a dying world, and Truth under attack. “Who do we think we are?” was a plaint from Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent in the “Marriage” “Equality” case – arguing in the name of Humility against a finger-snap ruling that flouted thousands of years of humankind’s traditions, many cultures’ sacred beliefs… and God’s law.

In all spheres of life, we need to return to looking out for Number One. When that means us, we are reminded that Jesus came for us, as individuals, not merely our causes and works. Oh, crusades will come; tribulation bids it. Be we need properly to be equipped.

When “looking out for Number One” means the real Number One – God Almighty – let us not kid ourselves. We must, in true humility, ask Jesus for help, seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and give God alone the glory. Soli Deo Gloria.

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… and in humility, let us maybe hold back on dreams of enormous projects and great works; and desire, first, one-on-one communion with our Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ. He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing. He speaks to you; listen.

“In the Garden” was written in 1912 by C Austin Miles. It is sung here by the Avett Brothers.

In the Garden

5-4-15

Let us toss a pinch of cosmic pixie dust this week to the Hubble Telescope, the latest toy – a term I use with deep, proper, appropriate reverence – that allows us to view the universe more clearly. To appreciate creation better. To renew our sense of awe. To understand God more fully?

Not really, no. The stunning images of the universe we have received for 25 years allow us to see God’s handiwork in ways that scientists throughout history could never dream, and dreamers could never explain. At best – which is very good – the images we are graced to receive from Hubble’s penetrating gaze remind us of a God who is all-powerful, bigger than our biggest thoughts, and audacious to a degree we cannot comprehend. But… we don’t automatically understand Him better. I “understand” Him less, in fact, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In sixth grade, the father of my friend Eric Wells took a group of neighborhood kids to New York’s City’s Hayden Planetarium for Eric’s birthday. We beheld, there, that era’s best representation of the infinite heavens, the projection of an enhanced night sky on the planetarium’s interior dome. Under thousands and thousands of virtual stars and planets, I leaned over to Mr Wells and said, “It makes one feel rather insignificant, doesn’t it?” I later heard that the remark impressed him, but I was either swiping a Peanuts gag, or simulating one. (I was destined for a life in comics. More than a life in astrophysics. Believe me.)

These images do, however, make us feel insignificant. Even if we are on the “inside track,” knowing God, satisfied with the mystery of creation and God’s ways – that is, not having to know every detail of matters that are wholly God’s domain – and grateful to be part of His plan. Even then, as King’s kids and co-heirs with Christ, we are still awestruck by the majesty and mystery of Creation.

Are we Luddites, living in happy ignorance and distrustful of knowledge? Of course not. It is an exciting time in history, to look heavenward, as did Adam and Eve, or the Neanderthals Ug and Glug did, or as the impressionable wise men in Egypt and Greece and Phoenicia, or as did uncountable poets and philosophers and lovers, and ask “What is there? What more is there? Do we see what we think we see?” For the first time in history, humans nudge a little closer to seeing, almost feeling, the reality of unknown worlds.

Like the first Enlightenment thinkers, we appreciate science for opening paths to God. (This is contrary to what our schools teach about the Age of Reason, ostensibly when science “liberated” itself from superstitious religion.) Science should not make us greater skeptics: it should bring us closer to an appreciation of God’s greatness; better to behold His handiwork; to advance civilization by rational incorporation of spiritual inspirations. Newton saw things that way. As did Bach. Their main goals were to explain and glorify God by the scientific tools they employed.

Other questions, like How did the universe start, and When did it begin, almost seem like setting off stink bombs at a debutante’s ball. The questions are real… but ultimately more silly than profound. The “Big Bang,” only recently a rock-solid explanation of creation, is now undergoing a sort of scientific recall. Second thoughts. New facts. Matter and anti-matter, once the property of science-fiction writers, has now been appropriated by PhDs and professors. Good for them. Carbon-dating, for instance on the Shroud of Turin, is now being reassessed too.

I have always thought that the more detailed the explanations were of the Big Bang, the more they simply sounded like mumbo-jumbo restatements of the Book of Genesis anyway. All the saints and sages who have discussed of the universe’s origins inevitably are stymied. The universe started… when? And what was it the moment beforehand? Creation started as an atomic particle exploding? What surrounded it before the explosion; who caused the explosion? The universe is expanding? Into what? How far? What is beyond that? Who started all this? If “nobody,” then…

When your head stops hurting, you will affirm that unanswerable questions do not prove the existence of God by themselves, but abstract skepticism – ultimately, rebellion – surely does not disprove God’s existence. I’ll take Awe. I don’t often quote Matthew Harrison Brady, who inherited the wind, but I am persuaded to be more concerned with the Rock of Ages than the Ages of Rocks.

“Have you not known? have you not heard? has it not been told you from the beginning? have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is He that sits upon the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers; Who stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in: Who brings the princes to nothing; He makes the judges of the earth as nothing. Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth: and He shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble. To whom then will you liken me, or shall I be equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold Who has created these things, that brings out their host by number: He calls them all by names by the greatness of His might, for He is strong in power; not one is missing” (Isaiah 40: 21-26).

It pleased the Creator God to fill this mysterious void with billions of galaxies, colorful, ever-changing, intriguing. It pleased Him to create a species of beings in His image, and fill our world with wondrous animals and plants and mountains and seas. It pleased Him to embrace us with love, and provide a means of salvation so that, wherever and however, we will spend eternity with Him. And it pleases us that He ordained science, which confirms His greatness and omnipotence, more and more frequently. Thank you, Hubble. Happy birthday!

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Click: Adagio by Tomaso Albinoni

4-3-15

Some non-Christians, and many Christians, are a little confused about the term “Passion” when describing the final week of Jesus’s earthly life, the pre-risen Savior. Normally, being passionate is a good thing, something we all seek or endorse.

In fact Passion is from the Latin, patere, meaning to suffer. It describes an emotion at the extremities of enthusiasm or sorrow. Diderot, father of the modern dictionary concept, described Passion as “penchants, inclinations, desires, and aversions carried to a certain degree of intensity, combined with an indistinct sensation of pleasure or pain.” The fine line between joy and aversion, desire and rejection. (The passion fruit is not a putative aphrodisiac; when sliced in half, the pulp encases seeds bundled in the shape of a cross.)

Advising students, “Be passionate about what you pursue,” and Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ are different sides of the very same coin.

And so, on Holy Week, we may pause at the supernal St Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach. Listen to it. Learn from it. For Holy Week vespers services, Bach wrote the St Matthew Passion, performed in Leipzig’s St Thomas and St Nicholas churches on alternate years, for decades. He periodically made improvements to this, possibly his most favored of approximately 1800 works he composed.

Bach employed a “surround-sound” structure in the St Matthew Passion:
stereophony. At St Thomas Church, certain movements were performed from the
east organ loft, the “swallow’s nest” opposite the main musician’s gallery at the
west end of the church, a double-choir structure “that produced a splendid and
festive effect.” Smaller groups of musicians and singers performed from the church’s many corners; worshipers heard music coming from every direction.

The structure of Bach’s Passions were strictly traditional; he changed little of the form he inherited. The straight biblical narrative was distributed among soloists (evangelists and various soliloquentes, or individual speakers including Jesus, Peter, Pilate, et al) and choirs (various turbae or crowds: high priests, Roman soldiers, Jews, etc). The Passion’s flow was dotted by narration, hymn strophes, and contemplative lyrics, “madrigal pieces” of free verse, mainly delivered as arias. One can begin to appreciate the spectacle that audiences beheld: a combination of church and theater, Greek-style drama and opera, music and voice, costume and acting.

Bach revised the St Matthew Passion several times through the years (his best works were repeated in his churches, and performed elsewhere, just as he occasionally performed works of esteemed contemporaries), and, of his manuscript scores that survive today, none bears such respect as St Matthew. In 1736, at least, he considered it his most significant work. His autograph score shows loving attention, written in red or brown inks according to the biblical and dramatic libretto sources; calligraphy in careful Gothic or Latin letters; and preserved as an heirloom. In fact it appears that a later accident, perhaps a spill, damaged portions of some pages, and Bach lovingly repaired those sections with paste-overs.

For half a century after Bach’s death his musical style was out of style, and he slipped into relative obscurity. Eventually, however, the floodgates opened. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe discovered Bach’s music and described it: “Eternal harmony carries on a dialogue with itself on what God felt in his bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” The composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a Lutheran converted from Judaism, was awestruck by the St Matthew Passion and staged a legendary performance on Good Friday, 1829. Its revival was repeated, and Mendelssohn brought his enthusiasm for Bach to England, where Felix was a favorite of the German-descended Queen Victoria (of Saxon and Hanoverian royalty).

Since then it is performed regularly, everywhere and at any time through the year. However, it is most appropriate during Holy Week. Its parts were performed on
separate nights of daily services between Palm Sunday and Good Friday, each re-creating the events of Holy Week – Jesus’s entry to Jerusalem; the contention with the Jewish Sanhedrin and Roman authorities; the Last Supper; His betrayal; the trials and persecution; the Crucifixion.

… The Passion that Christ endured for us, willingly taking on Himself the punishment and death we deserve as sinners who have separated ourselves from God.

As I have recommended before, if you are a person who listens to traditional hymns or Handel’s Messiah at Christmastime, or even if you are not, you will profit from setting some time aside and listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and absorb its musical grandeur, its setting, its cultural history… its meaning. No less today than when it was first performed 275 years ago. Or when events took place, 2000 years ago.

Bach took the same care that the early evangelists, or recipients of their Epistles, might have shown to ancient events and texts. It is notable that history came to call Bach “The Fifth Evangelist,” the accolade bypassing even his spiritual mentor Martin Luther.

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A performance of the Passion based on St Matthew’s Gospel. The great Bach interpreter Karl Richter conducts the Munich Bach Orchestra and the Munich Bach Choir. With English subtitles. This production is a work of art in itself: an appropriately bleak but very expressive setting. The cross, overhead the performers, grows lighter and darker responding to the dramatic narrative.

Click: Bach’s “St Matthew Passion”

3-24-14

At Christmastime many people listen to Handel’s “Messiah.” Some of us listen to excerpts; some listen to the entire work. Some people attend performances at local churches or watch television broadcasts. For some people it is their only exposure to Baroque music during the year… and for too many, sadly, their only exposure to church music. Yet, in the words of the Sursum Corda portion of the liturgy, it is meet and right so to do. In all times and in all places – or, as often as possible – we should commune with our God. And that should apply to Easter as much as Christmas; with other supernal music as much as the traditional “Messiah.”

If we would wade into the waters of debate about the relative importance of dates in the Christian calendar, we would be reminded that over the centuries, Christmas was a relatively minor celebration, at least compared to Easter. (And that the Feast of the Ascension – marking Jesus’s physical rise to Heaven, completing the affirmation of His divinity, closing the theological circle of the Incarnation, begun with the Virgin Birth – was once more observed than it is in today’s churches.)

A propos these observations, I offer a suggestion that we all reverently replicate the consideration we give to Easter, and the attention we pay to the “Messiah,” by something new this Lenten season. Lent should be more than giving up chocolate, anyway!

Additionally, Lent gives us 40 days (that is, more than the week or so that Christmas affords) to enjoy music, and contemplate this season, concerning the most profound event in the history of humankind.

Let us avoid the temptation, for a time, to watch and wait upon events that explode in our midst, as compelling as are Russian osmotic invasions, or the perplexing disappearance of passenger planes. Let us look inward and commemorate an event 2000 years old but as immediate as the seconds and minutes of our fleeting lives.

I suggest we listen to one of the greatest creative works of the human race, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Passion According to St Matthew.” The word Passion refers specifically to the rejection, betrayal, suffering, humiliation, torture, pain, and death of Jesus. That we should focus on these details indicates no prurience: that any person, much less the Son of God who could have waved it all away, endured such things, for us, ought to inspire our devotion.

So the “St Matthew Passion” enables us to understand, to internalize, to enrich our faith. There is a link below to an astonishing performance. I commend it, to watch in portions or in one dedicated private time. If you cannot, I will still explain why it is beneficial, and how art can serve our appreciation of the gospel.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the Passion story is based on Matthew chapters 27 and 28. Christian composers, as early as the eighth century, but mainly in the 16th-18th centuries, wrote Passions to be distinct from other church music. Passions used large ensembles, sometimes two choirs, orchestras, and organs. They were dramatic presentations, with “narrators” and soloists. Sometimes they were performed outside churches, occasionally in costumes and with dramatic action, a halfway-house to oratorios or opera.

In Bach’s version, he declined costumes but achieved great drama. In our video link you will see a stark and spare performance stage, singers in simple suits or dresses. There are no props; it is not in a cathedral. However you will notice profound symbolism in the changing placement of the singers; the colors that light the performance stage; and the illuminated Cross that floats above the performers – changing shades, morphing from dark to light to dark.

This video – made in 1971, and conducted by the legendary Bach interpreter Karl Richter – is an immense work of art in itself.

You will be grateful that the text, translated to English, is on the screen. When subtitles do not appear, it is because singers are repeating phrases. This impactful video allows you to appreciate the myriad of subtleties Bach used to emphasize the STORY of the Passion, behind the lyrics and melodies. Words are biblical passages, or the librettist’s paraphrases.

Take note of the highlighting of meaningful words, by orchestral emphasis. Notice that solo voices have keyboard accompaniment; Jesus has keyboard and strings… except for His dramatic cry “Why hast Thou forsaken me?”

Notice the music (instrumentation and style of play) reflecting singers’ hope, sorrow, or desperation.

Notice the musical (and the camera’s) emphasis on words like “Barabbas!” and “kill Him!” and “crucify!” Notice Bach’s use of musical devices – pulsating rhythms for tension; short bursts by the flutes to suggest tears; upward modulation when hope is displayed.

Note the repetition of musical themes (popular church tunes) by the choruses to unify the narrative themes.

This is a monumental work of art.

The “St Matthew Passion” was considered by Bach to be his most significant work. It was first performed in Leipzig at the St-Thomas Church in 1727, and many Holy Weeks thereafter; he frequently revised it. His autograph score shows loving attention, written in red or brown inks according to the biblical and dramatic libretto sources, and employing calligraphy in careful Gothic or Latin letters. He preserved it as an heirloom.

Baroque music and Bach’s genius temporarily were out of fashion after his death in 1750, and the “St Matthew Passion” was never performed again until 102 years after its debut. Felix Mendelssohn had discovered it, conducted a condensed version in Berlin… and the Bach Revival, which has never stopped, began. Mendelssohn, a Jew converted to Christianity, found his Lutheran faith much strengthened by Bach’s work.

Other famous Passions of our time include the play in Oberammergau, a small Bavarian town of two thousand inhabitants, half of whom stage and act in the seven-hour re-creation of Holy Week events. The play has been produced every ten years since 1634 when the town, threatened by the bubonic plague, collectively prayed for mercy and vowed to share with the world this portion of the gospel story if they were spared. In Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, every July the Canadian Badlands Passion Play is presented in a thirty-acre canyon bowl that forms a natural amphitheater. And of course many people watched the movie “The Passion of the Christ” a decade ago.

None can be more powerful than Bach’s version. If you are unfamiliar with, or dislike, “classical music,” this video will not kill you. If the hairstyles or once-cool eyeglasses of 1971’s performers look squirrely, just imagine how we would look to them; or how a magical capture of the actual 1727 debut in Leipzig would look to us. Or how the original suffering and death of Jesus, nearly 2000 years ago, would have seemed if we were there…

… ah! THAT is the art of J S Bach. This performance of the “Passion of Jesus Christ as Recorded by St Matthew,” DOES bring us back to the amazing, profound, and significant events of our Savior’s willing sacrifice for us. It is REAL. All the elements of Art – not just music and words, but the nuances of staging – drive the meaningful messages home. To our hearts.

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Click: Bach’s “St Matthew Passion”

The conductor and musical director of Munich Bach ensembles, as noted, is the great Karl Richter. The members of the instrumental and vocal ensembles are more numerous than in Bach’s more intimate times. This performance is longer than three hours (and was originally performed in segments during the weeks of Lent in Bach’s churches) but I beg you not to make it “background music.” The staging – the arrangement of the singers, the lighting, especially the position and illumination of the cross that floats above all – is profoundly significant.

1-27-14

There is a difference between happiness and joy, and the difference is not just one of grammar or philology, but of theology – that is, the nuances can hold lessons for our lives. At the least, let us consider the two words and take away some things that we might pass on to others, or remember ourselves in future reading or conversations.

The real distinction can, “unhappily,” be a bit frustrating to ascertain, as dictionaries these days tend to be sloppy. Too many dictionaries help us this way: “Happiness, n. The state of being happy.” And “Joy, n. The emotional result of being joyful or cheerful.” These should be moved in such dictionaries to the “D” section… for “Duh.”

Dictionaries I consulted helped when synonyms for Happiness included Bliss, Blessedness, and Bliss (in other words, an emotion on the path to Joy). A definition for Joy I found wrote, “A feeling of extreme happiness” (also holding happiness relatively subordinate). So… general consensus is that Joy is the superior state of emotion.

Years ago my daughter Emily had the insight that Joy (her middle name, by the way) corresponds to spiritual matters; and Happiness – no matter how extreme or elevated – is a human emotion related to our worldly, temporal, and indeed temporary pleasure. No matter how valuable: contentment, satisfaction, gratification.

To further validate the primacy of Joy, we recall some Bible verses:

“I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). Not mere “happiness” in Heaven; it falls short of Joy.

James 1:2-4 says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” Here is an example of Joy being more mature, more efficacious, than mere Happiness.

And finally the most familiar Bible verse about Joy: “The joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). We recall, too, the admonition to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord”; “happy noise” would sound very superficial!

In America’s civic life we recall that the Founders proclaimed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as a right. Later politicians elevated “happiness” alone as a right, not the freedom to “pursue” happiness. A tremendous difference, since governments have taken to defining the meaning of happiness. Even more egregious, re-calibrating a Happiness Meter for its citizens, and announcing why everyone should be resentful of their lot.

So Happiness has become the secularists’ Holy Word.

Whittaker Chambers once wrote about this attitude adjustment: “The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.” Too true… and another example of the fact that if lines are being blurred between church and state, the guiltier party is the government, usurping the prerogatives, outreach, and role, of established religion.

(Actually. A point of clarification. This can go on for longer than a blog message in itself, but for the record: I often think that “established religion” has been a major enemy of God’s heart and humankind’s souls. Not always, but often. Better we should seek personal relationships with Christ than with “Organized Religions.” Just sayin’… this is what I meant.)

The phrase “pursuit of happiness” has become a part of everyday discourse. In the same manner, many recognize the strains of Beethoven’s great “Ode to Joy” without knowing its meaning – or understanding the words, as it is Friedrich Schiller’s German poem set to music. In today’s little lesson, these words can inspire us. They remind us that Beethoven was a profound Christian, in a direct line from Johanes Kepler (not a composer but subscribing to the Pythagorean theory of “music of the spheres,” and Plato, who saw musical harmony as a reflection of heavenly perfection) in his “Harmony of the World” (1619). Enter the Enlightenment!

Today, schools teach that the Enlightenment was when smart guys threw off the shackles of religion and superstition, and let Reason illuminate mankind’s affairs. This was not so. Kepler, a skeptic about church laws that persecuted Copernicus, was nevertheless a believer, a bit of a Christian mystic. He devoted himself to seeing how mathematics and science proved God’s existence. The same with Isaac Newton. And, on the continent at the time, the musical scientist, Bach. After him, Haydn and Mozart, profound Christians… and Beethoven, whose ego was astride everything he surveyed, except Christianity: he was a humble believer.

Here, some of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” that Beethoven chose for the chorus to sing in his revolutionary Ninth Symphony. Take joy from the words!

And – to drive home my modest points in full blast-furnace fashion – try to click on this video clip. This performance is by a Japanese ensemble in an outdoor stadium. Not counting the audience, you will see 10,000 singers and musicians joining, in German, in a scale the composer would have relished, to transmit Beethoven’s genius… Schiller’s thoughts… and powerful reminders of the Joy of the Lord.

Do you fall down, you millions? Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek Him above the starry canopy, Above the stars He must live.

Joy is the name of the strong spring In eternal nature.
Joy, joy drives the wheels In the great clock of worlds.

Escape the tyrants’ chains, Generosity also to the villain,
Hope upon the deathbeds, Mercy from the high court!
The dead, too, shall live!

Brothers, drink and chime in, All sinners shall be forgiven,
And hell shall be no more.

A serene departing hour! Sweet sleep in the shroud!
Brothers—a mild sentence From the final judge!

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Click: Ode to Joy

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NOTE: WordPress, through whom we create and format the MondayMinistry blog, recently informed me that we have passed the 200th message mark with them; previously MMMM was a weekly e-mail blast for subscribers. But the “anniversary” marks the milestone of when our webmaster Norm Carlevato came aboard. He receives the raw manuscript each week, pours it into the right formats, attends to the details of links and subscribers… all as a volunteer. So are we all — this is a ministry — but Norm routinely goes Above and Beyond in this work, amidst his other activities and large family. I am profoundly grateful for his service and his friendship. We are approaching, after four years, 70,000 hits. Someone is watching! And Norm helps it happen.

9-16-13

Either God exists, or He doesn’t.

The question this statement poses, among uncountable other speculative, philosophical, ontological, and even religious questions, is THE most basic and most important that can be asked of human beings, or any beings.

As someone who is secure in the answer, I was confronted by the question this week in a way that never escapes anyone’s imaginings. The Voyager I spacecraft, NASA announced, has left the friendly confines of our solar system. Not the universe, of course, for that ends… well, we are not quite sure where. But Voyager has crossed the border of our Sun’s “bubble” of “plasma” – charged electrons in “empty” space whose density changed, though differently than expected, when Voyager passed over the line into interstellar “space.”

The inherent limitations of conceptualizing scientific facts, no less than imperfectly understanding scientific theories, has us turn to inverted commas and air-quotes. I will save electrons, myself, by dropping all these quotation marks. But we should keep them at the ready, because they represent the intellectual crutches we often need when discussing such things. We – humans – know more and more every day; by one estimate, every eight months we discover and learn more things than in all of mankind’s previous history. Yet even with Voyager the assumptions about the density of outer-space electrons, in these otherwise empty-seeming neighborhoods of the universe, have been revised. Interstellar plasma is acting differently than scientists predicted. And brand-new questions about magnetic forces in space, not just as carried by solar wind inside the solar system, have presented themselves.

My brain starts to hurt too, despite the thrill of such data. Perhaps we will learn more when Voyager reaches its next sun’s neighborhood. Be sure to stock up on provisions, if you plan to wait for that news; that will not happen for another 40,000 years. Such is the vastness of our universe.

By then, Voyager probably still will be hurtling along, but its information-gathering and transmitting facilities expired. Interestingly, the probe, which was launched in 1977, has computers far less complex than of any smartphone today. It records data on… yes, an 8-track cassette. And it sends that data back to earth by a 20-watt signal. By comparison, a radio station near where I live has a thousand-watt transmitter, and can be heard for a range of 25 miles or so. Yet, we launched Voyager, it observes, and we learn: a modern, and more peaceful, turn on Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

Amidst this week’s tsunami of news of wars, rumors of wars, crises, corruption, killings and beheadings, revolutions, disasters of weather, economies, and human folly, we have this news that takes our minds (and I hope the imaginations of our spirits) to other things. Out of this world. Almost by definition, eternal things. If you didn’t see photos or artist conceptions, or movies of distant solar systems and planets, watch the video whose link is at the end of this essay. We inevitably are in awe.

In awe of what? There is that question again. If God doesn’t exist, the theories of atheists and agnostics and secularists about when the universe was formed, why it was formed, and how it was formed are interesting (or not) only as speculation.

Although theories abound, no one comes close – absent the God Proposition – to advancing any sort of a definitive idea about when the universe began (including the question of what was here previously, wherever here is); how large the universe is (when the question includes “what, then, lies beyond its borders?”); and how, just how, then, did we get here? There are scientific ideas… that often change. And these questions are lights-years from the larger question facing scientists: Why?

The fact that no human has, by oneself, answers for such questions does not automatically prove the existence of God. There is no proof, which is why it is called Faith. But it does suggest a universal prerequisite, humility, when one addresses such questions without what I call the God Proposition.

My explanation of why many “intelligent” (yes, I will resurrect the quotation marks) people reject God is that we all of us have a latent desire to BE God, to be in control of our situations, to have all the answers. Unfortunately, among the primitive, including sophisticated primitives, this leads to superstition. At the other extreme it leads to oppression, destruction, and death; that is, when clever and resourceful men presume to be gods, the eternal temptation consumes. Never has a mortal been able to benignly control others – an oxymoronic concept anyway – when none ever has been able to control his own self, and the “base passions” of our spiritual DNA… absent the God Proposition.

More than the rudimentary computer systems on Voyager was something of greater significance. In the hope that the craft might meet some alien civilization in a remote part of the universe, it carried a unique payload – a copper and gold alloy disk (estimated by its designers “to last a billion years”) with greetings in 115 earth-languages; some images of our species and schematic maps of earth; and music. The first selection was a recording of the Second Brandenburg Concerto, first movement, by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed by Karl Richter and the Munich Bach Orchestra. Among the playlist of global music, Bach was the only composer represented thrice; the Gavotte from the Violin Partita No. 3, and the Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 were the other pieces chosen to represent humankind’s creative profile.

Biologist Lewis Thomas was asked what he would have nominated for this message to unknown civilizations. “The complete works of J.S. Bach,” he said. “But that would be boasting.” I love the (proper) tribute to mankind’s greatest music-maker, but it is interesting that our greetings, our physical likenesses, and our greatest artistic expressions were sent aboard Voyager, in hopes of telling the Universe about us.

… but, significantly, the designers and programmers chose to skip the crowded narratives of human history that are filled, like this week’s headlines, or any week’s headlines, with war, cruelty, murder, and oppression. A half-truth can be no different than a lie. We wanted to show what earth is like, what humanity has done. We just wanted to sanitize the story.

But in my view, there comes that “God Proposition” once again. The dirty little secret, deep down in all our souls, is that our natures are sinful, and many humans have tended to kick and scratch and resist God… but there is also a part of us that yearns for the God who sees good things, and has created good things, and wants to share good things. Part of us – because God planted such yearnings – seeks the good: sometime, occasionally, we have the same impulses as our God.

We don’t need to understand every little (unknowable) thing about the universe and God; we do need to accept Him. It should not be difficult! We cannot be God, no matter how hard some will try. And though we know Him imperfectly, and even love Him imperfectly, we can rest assured that He knows us, and He loves us, perfectly.

Just look at the stars and the galaxies and the universe, fellow voyager.

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I chose another of Johann Sebastian Bach’s immortal works, the second movement of his Third Orchestral Suite, BWV 1068, commonly known as “Air On the G-String.” Images are from NASA probes, including from the Hubbell Space Telescope. N.B.: the text’s passage about Bach’s music aboard Voyager is adapted from my biography of Bach published by Thomas Nelson, 2011.

Click: Bach’s Air On the G-String

4-22-13

George Beverly Shea, who provided the theme music, in a real way, to the faith of several generations of Christians, died on Tuesday, April 16, 2013.

He lived to the age 104. One hundred and four was the a number that had many people talking when they heard of Bev Shea’s passing. Yet other numbers are more significant. Two hundred million is the approximate number of people before whom he performed his hymns, live, through the years. Sixty-five is how many years ago he joined Billy Graham’s ministry. Seventy is the number of albums he recorded. Ten is the number of Grammy nominations he received.

And “countless” is the number of people who profoundly were touched by Bev Shea’s sincere renditions; and countless the number of souls he ushered into Heaven through his music ministry.

So 104, by itself, is not a significant number. A form of an old joke addresses the chronological milepost: “Just reach 103, and be very careful!” But the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote: “The value of life is not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them; a man may live long yet very little.”

Bev Shea’s career is a testament to a life of value, lived yielded to the Holy Spirit. His part in the story of the three men who were the core of hundreds of crusades – more than 60 years of friendship with each other, and friendship with Jesus – is remarkable. Those men were Bev Shea, singer; Cliff Barrows, musical director and host; and Billy Graham.

Many great preachers and evangelists have surrounded themselves with music and musicians, knowing that between heartfelt hymns and catchy gospel songs, there was “bait” enough to attract people not yet secure in their faith. Martin Luther had Johannes Walther… and J. S. Bach, 200 years later. Dwight L Moody had Ira Sankey, and Fanny Crosby’s hymns. Billy Sunday had Homer Rodeheaver. Billy Graham himself admitted he never would have had a successful ministry without Bev Shea’s singing. Graham’s own singing talents were charitably described by Bev as sustaining the “malady of no melody.”

Many advertisements and handbills for early crusades read, “BEV SHEA SINGS… Billy Graham will preach.” Indeed, it seemed the cart approached the horse when the unknown fledgling preacher Billy Graham knocked on the door of Bev Shea’s office at WMBI, Moody Bible Radio in Chicago, and asked the famous singer to join him. Bev accepted, reminding more than a few people of Jesus calling a diverse group of Disciples.

For all of Billy Graham’s powerful sermons and tremendous influence, one cannot envision one of his crusades without music, without Bev Shea. The associations are many: the altar-call hymn, “Just As I Am”; the inspiring “This Is My Father’s World”; the sermon-in-song “The Ninety and Nine.” Bev himself was responsible for the tune to “I’d Rather Have Jesus’; and he wrote words and music to “The Wonder of It All.” The music at an early crusade in Los Angeles was responsible for the conversion of cowboy star Stuart Hamblin… whose own gospel songs “Until Then” and “It Is No Secret (What God Can Do)” subsequently became crusade favorites.

One of Bev Shea’s signature songs is regarded as the world’s favorite hymn, after “Amazing Grace” — “How Great Thou Art.” Today, many people think it is a centuries-old standard, but it was only in the 1950s, at a Billy Graham Crusade in New York’s Madison Square Garden, that Bev Shea first sang it in the form we know today. Audience reaction demanded multiple encores on successive days, and an extended booking for the nightly crusades. The hymn had originated as a poem and an unrelated folk tune in Sweden and had traveled to Christian communities in Germany, Russia, the Ukraine, England, Canada, and the United States… until, with Bev Shea’s variations and powerful performance, it caught fire.

The astonishing appeal of Bev Shea is due only in part to his velvet-toned bass-baritone. It is more than his straightforward presentation of classic hymns, which, sung by any other voice in the 21st century, might have seemed anachronistic. It is not even fully explained by his courtly presence, so manifest on platform and in private, whether with a few personal friends or multitudes of fans.

I believe Bev Shea’s appeal, ultimately, was his lack of guile, using a word the Bible warns against. “No shadow of turning.” He simply introduced Christ. Technically speaking, Cliff Barrows introduced Bev Shea, Bev Shea introduced Billy Graham, and Billy Graham introduced Jesus Christ, all yielded to the Holy Spirit’s direction, according to their respective God-given talents.

That explains his life. To explain his death, I cite my friend Jim Watkins, who recalled the gospel song written by Bev Shea, and referred to that lifetime of friendly partnership with the crusade team: “George Beverly Shea, Billy Graham’s featured soloist for 60 years, is now realizing the full extent of his famous song, ‘I’d Rather Have Jesus.’” It was time, and Heaven is sounding sweeter right about now.

Well sung, thou good and faithful servant.

Cliff Barrows, Rick Marschall, Joni Eareckson Tada, George Beverly Shea, Joni’s mom Lindy

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I got to know Bev Shea when working on a proposed PBS documentary on gospel music, for producer Don Stillman. Days spent at the Cove with him and Cliff Barrows, Billy Graham staff, even Joni Eareckson Tada, were precious. At the crusades, Bev Shea sang and seldom spoke. When he did introduce a song, however, he spoke from his heart, as this vid from a performance, probably early 1960s, attests. A portion of his testimony. And his classic song…

Click: I’d Rather Have Jesus

3-29-13

We listen to Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” at Christmastime (even though the piece is about Christ from ancient prophecy through His Passion and Ascension to Heaven, and therefore is appropriate at any time of year). Less often do we listen to Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio’; a shame, because it is stunningly grand and inspiring.

Perhaps the facility of arranging background music when the Yule Log burns, or when trees are decorated, assists the popularity of “Messiah.” I suggest that ANY excuse is appropriate to listen to the two Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach – the St Matthew and the St John.

I will suggest, and provide a link here, to the more modest (shorter) and unjustly obscure “Easter Oratorio” of Bach. But it is beautiful, moving, and masterful in its presentation of music, harmony, lush instrumentation, choral and solo movements. This version features original instruments, sometimes unfamiliar but fascinating to our ears, in the setting of a Baroque-period church.

Originally written by Bach as a cantata for Easter Sunday, it is appropriately festive, because it begins with the empty tomb – its first title was “Come, Hasten, and Run!” In other words, share the news that Christ has risen! Mary, after all, was the first evangelist of them all, spreading the good news.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

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Click: Bach’s Easter Oratorio

2-11-13

This is the Age of Specialization. If you don’t agree, look at the Yellow Pages (oh, OK, or a Google search) for local physicians. You will find categories for ailments and body parts – left and right; upper and lower – you never heard of. The same with, say, magazines. They say print journalism is dying, but “niche publishing” flourishes: serving every interest, hobby, and need.

I think of all us accept that God has some specific gift, a certain talent, apportioned to each of us. Surely we sense an aptitude we might have, as we proceed in life; we must. And, I hope, we all pray for guidance and grace as we exercise God’s career counseling, so to speak.

But do you ever wonder whether we short-change ourselves, and neglect more of God’s blessings, when we pursue one “gifting”? After all, the Bible lists nine spiritual gifts, given at different times to His children, when needed for their benefit and His purpose. I believe he has created us all as multi-talented, potentially multi-tasking, budding “polymaths” – people of many interests, capacities, and knowledge. For our fulfillment, and His glory.

The German Enlightenment philosopher (and dramatist, and critic, and, well, polymath) Gotthold Lessing made this point about the arts – about human creativity – when he dissented from Horace’s classic prescription “as painting, so poetry.” In other words, Lessing said, every art form has its own language, structure, and standards; and should be liberated from other forms. In his day, the 18th century, this was a strange concept, and is why his book “Laocoon” was revolutionary.

Stick with me! There is a theological point, and a life application. In Lessing’s play “Emilia Galotti” he takes to another level his question about whether our creative urges and emotional investments must be focused, or may be generalized, in our lives. A painter in the play asks whether Raphael would have been as great an artist if he had lost his hands.

It is a question that is not meant to address discouragement over a handicap, or whether Rafael would have merely retired to a life as a fishmonger. The implication is that we all have the creative spark; we are all capable of sensibility and creativity; and what we have to SAY is what matters. Whether it gets expressed in art or music or poetry or literature or dance; or charity or service or individual devotion, is a mere detail. We might not be blessed with a Rafael’s singular talent for dramatic composition and depiction, or a Bach’s intuitive mastery of melody and harmony… but creative urges, the talents we possess, have similar potential. And can be just as powerful in their expression.

They are from God, after all. He gives us gifts, and expects us to use them. He gives us direction, and instructs us to follow Him. He gives us commands, and He wants us to obey them. To quote Mother Teresa, God does not need us to be successful; He wants us to be obedient.

What is our job – not only our profession – in this world? What would God have us to do? And should we restrict ourselves to just one of the many tools He offers us? The singer/songwriter Stephen Hill thought about these things. He wrote a simple song with impactful lyrics, “Will He Look At Me and Say ‘Well Done’?”

When we imagine that day, that meeting, it can make things clearer for us now. Heavenly perspective. The light burden of great opportunities. The amazing array of gifts God has spread before us.

A week before Hill died last year, he wrote on his Facebook page: “Jesus said a lot of great things. He did a lot of great things. He changed the course of history with His words and deeds. The best thing He said was to love God and everybody else. We can’t judge, and that’s hard. Loving people doesn’t mean changing them. That’s even harder. I hope He gives me a break when I see Him face to face. I also hope that He forgives the mistakes I make in my zeal. Love and forgiveness. Love and forgiveness. Love and forgiveness. I’ll let God change what He wants to in other people. Change me first, oh Lord.”

Be open to the MANY ways God can change you. If you don’t sing, write. If you don’t write, paint. If you don’t paint, preach. If you don’t do anything else, love. And forgive. Be creative. You are made in the image of the Creator.

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Stephen Hill was a Baptist preacher, singer, songwriter, session musician and singer; a humble servant of God whose musical talents were immense, not easily categorized. In this song he turns blues chords and all manner of minor notes into a joyful message of encouragement. He performed this in the Netherlands in 2008.

Click: Will He Look At Me and Say “Well Done”?

12-22-12

An early Christmas present. If you are one of the many celebrants who finds joy or solace or peace, each season, by playing Handel’s “Messiah” or letting the TV screen show the never-ending burning Yule log, here is an alternative.

Thanks to uncountable technologies, and innumerable traditions, you can enjoy a marvelous musical and spiritual experience by watching, or just listening to, the “Christmas Oratorio” of Johann Sebastian Bach. One of the greatest pieces of music in Western culture, in or out of churches, Bach’s oratorio is a full composition, like Handel’s, in many parts. There are full orchestra and full choir movements, solos, narrations, and instrumental sections. The words are from the Bible’s story of Christ’s birth; the music is some of the most stirring you will ever hear.

The very first part, “Exult! Rejoice!” (Jauchzet, Frohlocket in German) is an astounding cascade of choir and orchestra led by the motif of tympani drums’ notes.

Like the “Messiah,” it is in several parts and lasts almost three hours. It originally was performed in Bach’s St Nicholas Church, and some nights in St Thomas Church, in Leipzig, in 1734-35, essentially through the 12 nights of Christmas, in parts, beginning on Christmas Day.

Of several excellent performances on the web, I have chosen to share a recent video recorded at that very St Nicholas Church. See the grand Baroque setting as it appeared when first performed… listen to the period instruments, simulating the actual sounds of Bach’s music… enjoy the camera’s examination of the church’s details, and the community’s reverent models and landscapes of the Christmas story.

There are no English subtitles of the German texts, but you know the old, old story! You will hear the names of Jesus and Mary, Abraham and Old Testament prophets, and references to God and angels. The order of the six constituent cantatas’ subjects are: the Birth; the Annunciation to the Shepherds; the Adoration of the Shepherds; the Circumcision and Naming of Jesus; the Journey of the Magi; the Adoration of the Magi. I thought it better to be “home” in Bach’s own church, and to see the re-creation of a Baroque celebration, than to choose a performance-only video, or one of the versions with one old painting on display over the entire performance.

I hope this brings extra joy, special comfort, and stirring inspiration to you this Christmas season. Bach has been called “the Fifth Evangelist,” and works like this illustrate why. Georg Christoph Biller leads the Thomanerchor and the Gewandhausorchester Leizig.

Click: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio

11-19-12

I had planned to write today a version of my annual Thanksgiving message – subsection B, the rant about how “Thank You” and “You’re Welcome” have become abused, misused, and confused terms these days. So, you will have a year to notice how people might still utter “thank yous” but how the responses are, these days, almost always “Thank YOU,” or “You bet,” “Sure thing,” or “No prob.” All of which invite us to think about the value of sincere thanks and heartfelt responses, social habits, and the meaning of it all. If there is a meaning.

There is a meaning, but it is worthwhile to think about social graces that expire, and why.

Instead, today, I was knocked off course by an e-mail I received from a friend; in fact, several recent e-mails. They have touched me, especially as I make the obvious link to the essence of Thanksgiving: giving thanks.

I have been rocked recently by professional and personal events, the personal matters mostly due to (and not to be mentioned in the same breath as) health crises of my wife. She has been in the hospital for almost three weeks, and this is, I think, her seventh hospitalization this year. We have had blessings and travels during the “good” periods lately, but this year has been visited by several mini-strokes, pneumonia, kidney failure, and grim diagnoses about her 17-year-out transplanted heart.

Nancy’s faith is strong, but I think she is getting sick and tired of being sick and tired. Through it all, the support of family and friends has been a comfort. And a hundred little things that are not little: the concern and indulgence of my agent and publisher; prayers from unknown and surprising places; and so forth. People who do not just say, “I’ll keep you in prayer,” but, having the face-to-face opportunity, pray right in the moment. Friends who, when they say they are willing to drop everything and help, mean it; and we know they mean it.

And the e-mail I received this morning, from a friend who did not even know of Nancy’s recent crises:

Dear Rick, I’ve been praying every day for you and for your family. I know I didn’t write to you after your grandbaby died, and I feel bad about that, but I don’t want you to think that means I don’t love you, because I do. It’s easy to pray for you. I would find it hard to forget!

But something about the season of Advent changes all that. Words start to flow like milk and honey! … If you have some time, I’d love it if I could call you and have a good talk. If not, don’t worry, I get that! But consider this message a hug and an expression of genuine friendship and great regard. My brother in Christ! It’s just so great that God loves us, and love is just such a cool thing!

Well. Is there better medicine that that? And I don’t mean to disparage the precious notes and calls from other friends, from brief “I’m thinking about you,” to long letters, all precious. A friend in Arizona with whom (I regret) I don’t speak to as often as we used to, reminds me that Thursday of every week he prays for me and my family. Another friend is bursting with news she knows I want to hear, but gives me space and a prayer that the space is occupied with blessing. Reaching out in such ways is what friends, especially Christian friends, DO.

In the family of God, NOTHING is more precious than the fact of family: we are brothers and sisters in Christ, children of a loving God who has graced us with salvation and a promise of eternal life, with Him in glory.

And part of that blessed truth is that we have a promise… but we don’t have to wait for the promise to fulfill itself in Heaven. We can know it now, and in the midst of trials, share the love of Christ in a way that the world can hear about but never FEEL, Hallelujah.

This is something we don’t often enough gives thanks for in and of itself; at least I don’t. It is a wonderful gift of God, and truly a gracious thing, because we hardly deserve it. While we were yet sinners, God visited humankind and sent His Son to assume the guilt for our sins. On this Thanksgiving week, I picture it like this: our natural selves rebel and insult God in many ways, uncountable times, and God’s response is almost like “Thank you.” Huh? “I am sending my only-begotten Son as a sacrifice for your transgressions. Believe on Him.”

That is not exactly a “Thank you,” of course, But as His “You’re welcome,” before we even repent, it is a form of advance-“Thank you”… and it merits from us a lifetime of continual “Thank YOUs” and “You’re welcomes,” and praises and gratitudes. And thanks. Of the most profound sort.

What my friend this morning showed is the proof that Christ lives in us. That is to say, such expressions as she made is evidence of the Spirit-filled heart, for we are told that in such things it is not us, but the Christ who lives within us who enables us to do such things.

I am reminded of the mirror-image, an insight Nancy had during our hospital ministry after her transplants. When Satan attacks us, it is not us whom he hates – for, clearly, he has little regard for us – but he hates the Christ within us. The more Jesus in our hearts, the more he attacks.

Abraham Lincoln set aside the third Thursday of November for the nation to gives thanks to God. He summed up sentiments of previous leaders, and anticipated powerful proclamations from some of his successors in the office. Indeed we should give thanks to God for our bounties and harvests, our material blessings. But Lincoln also admonished, and people like my dear friends remind me, that we must remember, and cannot help be thankful for, the Author of those blessings. How He works in our lives; how He lives in fellow believers; how He can, and should, inhabit our works.

Thank God.

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The moving hymn “Now Thank We All Our God,” appropriate this week and every week of our lives, has an interesting story behind it. The best hymns do. It was written by Pastor Martin Rinckart during the Thirty Years’ War. In the Saxon town of Eilenburg, the site of battles and pillage and plagues, he was the only clergyman who survived to minister to the ravaged populace. At one point he performed 50 funerals a day, and the year he wrote this hymn, 1637, he performed more than 4000 funerals. Nevertheless, in the midst of it all, he wrote “Now Thank We All Our God” for his family. Was there any way to summon peace and praise in such circumstances, except by the Holy Spirit? “Nun Danke alle Gott” was used as a theme several times by Bach, and was – and should be – a vital component of church worship ever since. It was translated into English by Catherine Winkworth in 1856.

Click: Now Thank We All Our God

6-6-11

In the time we have been doing these weekly messages, I occasionally have referred to the fact that I was in the process of writing a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach – the “Christian Encounters” of history’s greatest music-maker.

Several people have written, asking What ever happened to that book I was working on? Actually, it was published last month by Thomas Nelson Publishers.

This week I will pass along a couple excerpts from the new book, Johann Sebastian Bach. I pray they have relevance to you in the week ahead. We can take away profound lessons from this man, who was an example of someone graced with talent, yet totally humble in desiring to turn those gifts back to God. Artists should “express themselves” and “be transparent” so their audiences can know “where they are coming from”? Such motivations were unknown, or repugnant, to men and women of Bach’s time. Their efforts – indeed their privilege – was to serve the Savior. That was fulfillment.

Bach began virtually every composition, even his secular music, with a blank paper on which he wrote, Jesu, juva (“Jesus, help me”) on the upper left corner of the first page, and Soli Deo Gloria (“To God alone the glory”) on the bottom right corner of the finished ending. His was a personal relationship, not a professional duty, with the Savior.

Such “bookends” were as anointing oil over all of Bach’s creative work. So did he begin and end his days – and his life – with such petition and praise: “Jesus, help me” and “To God alone be all the glory.” With or without the mode of music, such dedication speaks to us through the years of Bach’s relevance today.

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Not every believer has had a Road-To-Damascus moment like St Paul’s, nor a terror-filled lightning storm in the Thuringian forest (where Luther vowed to study for the priesthood), nor directly contended with Satan (as Luther, in the famous legend, threw an inkwell while translating the Bible in the Wartburg Castle, Eisenach).

Sebastian Bach modestly was born into the Lutheran faith, died a committed Lutheran communicant, and, by all evidence, never experienced any spiritual doubts or crises of faith. His employers were largely ecclesiastical, and his few “secular” (court music) postings always included Christian music in their assignments. Fully half of the music he wrote was Christian. He managed musical staffs at his churches, and he taught Christian education. He was not an ordained pastor, yet the degree of his daily study, and the examinations he was obliged to pass, proved him the peer of clergy. He was indeed one of the most equipped and effective “preachers” of his age. He has been called “The Fifth Evangelist.”

Humble about his gifts, and determined that all his music was unto the Lord, we can see, as he surely did, that the “secular” Orchestral Suites and the Brandenburg Concertos and the Musical Offering and the Goldberg Variations and the suites for harpsichord and ‘cello and violin and flute – and the toccatas and trios and passacaglias and fantasias and fugues – were all spiritual compositions. Just without words.

Is this not the perfect blueprint for any Christian? Willing to forsake worldly acclaim, this modest servant of his Savior thanked God for the talents with which he was mightily blessed… and used them for the propagation of the Gospel, the souls of his fellow man, and the glory of God.

The glory of God alone.

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Any piece of Bach’s music, Christian or “secular,” could give us a spiritual boost to start the week. I have chosen for you a beautiful transcription of his famous “Air on the G string” from his third Orchestral Suite. Brief, supernal, played touchingly by the electric violinist Vanessa-Mae. The videos are pictures, somehow appropriate, of God’s other corners of Creation (for Bach was a force of nature, one of the crowns of God’s creation, surely), taken from the Hubbell Space Telescope.

Click: An Ancient Model Speaks to Our Future

3-14-11

The events of recent days should persuade even the most cynical and least alarmist among us that we are in fact living in a “page-turning,” if not “chapter-ending,” moment of world history. Endemic economic troubles, from budget crises to virtual national bankruptcies; street protests resulting in governments’ instability and regime changes across the world; devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, with incalculable tolls in terms of life, infrastructure, and health, there and elsewhere… we are indeed on the cusp of a new world.

The old order changeth, yielding place to the new;
And God fulfills Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Many of the changes we see, such as the overthrow of dictatorships, are harbingers of hope. But many other changes clearly suggest the contrary – the unleashing of anti-Christian persecution; long-term economic downturns; serious challenges to health and recovery in Japan. Human beings often hope for change, but when it brings insecurity and misery we are constrained from embracing the New without praying for wisdom, and discerning God’s hand.

We have entered the season of Lent. Is there a temptation to avoid looking inward and commemorate an event 2000 years old, when we feel the need to watch and wait upon events that, instead, are exploding in our midst?

The opposite should be our reaction. And the coming observance of Easter is splendid timing.

As with the woman who anointed Jesus with precious oils, disasters and troubles of the world we will always have with us. But we serve God’s purposes when we honor Him by drawing closer in communion, when we enter into His suffering that He endured to identify with our suffering (o sweet mystery), when we contemplate the Passion of His sacrifice, death, and resurrection. We will make the world a better place by achieving these things ourselves… and sharing them with the world.

It is a custom to “give something up” for Lent. I am going to suggest to you something different from chocolate and sitcoms. Give up two hours of your life this week, in advance of the Easter season. Set aside the time, shut out possible distractions, and prepare for an exposition of Christ’s suffering and death that will touch your soul. You will do your understanding of Christ’s sacrifice and your devotion to the Cross a favor to watch the video you can click to, below.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s setting of the “Passion” story (Jesus’s intense emotions and sacrificial suffering) is one of the great works, not only of church music or the Baroque period, but of human creativity. Based on Matthew chapters 27 and 28, the St Matthew Passion was in the form of a once-common performance vehicle, the “musical passion.” Christian composers, as early as the eighth century, but mainly in the 16th-18th centuries, wrote Passions to be different from other church music. Passions used large ensembles, sometimes two choirs, orchestras, and organs. They were dramatic presentations, with “narrators” and singers. Sometimes they were performed outside churches, and sometimes in costumes and with dramatic action.

In Bach’s version, he declined costumes but achieved great drama. In the version you can download below you will see a spare performance stage, singers in simple suits or dresses. There are no props; it is not in a cathedral. But you will notice great meaning in the changing placement of the singers; the colors that light the performance stage; and the lighted Cross that floats above the performers – changing colors, morphing from dark to light to dark. This video – made in 1971, and conducted by the legendary Bach interpreter Karl Richter – is an immense work of art in itself.

You will be grateful that the text, translated to English, is on the screen. When subtitles do not appear, it is because singers are repeating phrases. This impactful video allows you to appreciate the myriad of subtleties Bach used to emphasize the story of the Passion, behind the lyrics and tunes. Take note of the highlighting of meaningful words, by orchestral emphasis. Notice that solo voices have keyboard accompaniment; Jesus has keyboard and strings… except for His stark, solo cry “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” Notice the music (instrumentation and style of play) reflecting singers’ hope, sorrow, or desperation. Notice the musical (and the camera’s) emphasis on words like “Barabbas!” and “kill Him!” and “crucify!” Notice Bach’s use of musical devices – pulsating rhythms for tension, short bursts by the flutes to suggest tears, upward modulation when hope is displayed. Note the repetition of musical themes (popular church tunes) by the choruses to unify the narrative themes. This is a monumental work of art.

The St Matthew Passion was considered by Bach to be his most significant work. It was first performed in Leipzig at the St-Thomas Church in 1727, and many Holy Weeks thereafter; he frequently revised it. His autograph score shows loving attention, written in red or brown inks according to the biblical and dramatic libretto sources, and employing calligraphy in careful Gothic or Latin letters. He preserved it as an heirloom.

As Baroque music and Bach’s genius temporarily was out of fashion after his death in 1750, the Passion was never performed again until 102 years after its debut. Felix Mendelssohn had discovered it, conducted a condensed version in Berlin… and the Bach Revival, which has never stopped since, commenced. Mendelssohn, a Jew converted to Christianity, found his Lutheran faith much inspired by Bach’s work.

Other famous Passions of our time include the play in Oberammergau, a small Bavarian town of two thousand inhabitants, half of whom stage and act in the seven-hour re-creation of Holy Week events. The play has been produced every 10 years since 1634 when the town, threatened by the bubonic plague, collectively prayed for mercy and vowed to share with the world this portion of the gospel story if they were spared. In Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, every July the Canadian Badlands Passion Play is presented in a thirty-acre canyon bowl that forms a natural amphitheater. And of course many people watched the recent movie The Passion of the Christ.

None can be more powerful than Bach’s version. If you are unfamiliar with, or dislike, “classical music,” this will not kill you. If the hairstyles or once-cool eyeglasses of 1971’s performers look squirrely, just imagine how we would look to them; or how a magical capture of the actual 1727 debut would look to us. Or how the original suffering and death of Jesus, nearly 2000 years ago, would have seemed if we were there…

… ah! That is the art of J S Bach. This performance of the “Passion of Jesus Christ as recorded by St Matthew,” does bring us back to the amazing, profound, and significant events of our Savior’s willing sacrifice for us. It is real.

A better understanding of what He did for our sake will make us better stewards to minister to the world – especially in these horrible times – for His sake.

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Click: The St Matthew Passion — Johann Sebastian Bach

This will be a complete performance, in many segments of various lengths; a total of about two hours. Each segment will automatically move to the next. If you desire a full-screen (and one does not automattically pop up), click only this icon, once, at the beginning: the “joint arrows” that point right and down; that, when your cursor hovers over it, is called EXPAND. Click that for a full screen of the video. It is from the amazing YouTube channel of SoliDeoGloria.

The conductor and musical director of Munich Bach ensembles, as noted, is the great Karl Richter. (The members of the instrumental and vocal ensembles are more numerous than in Bach’s more intimate times. The accessible profundity is akin to Bach’s, however, without doubt) Soloists are Peter Schreier as narrator; Walter Berry, bass; Julia Hanari, contralto; and Helen Donath, soprano. You will notice, of course, that this a Lenten subject; it will bring you right through the Crucifiction.

The quotation above is by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Passing of King Arthur” from Idylls of the King.