Monday Morning Music Ministry

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.

11-4-19

“If being a Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

Sometimes such aphorisms – what I call bumper-strip theology – pack a lot of implications and wisdom.

In many place around the world, being a Christian is illegal, or nearly so. I can tell that this blog is read in some of those countries, perhaps to the peril of those readers.

Will such a thing ever happen in the United States, in Western Europe? Many of us think so – it has happened in societies that were once like ours – and at the moment, if belief in Christ is not yet illegal it is however improper or at best impolite in many places and situations.

When the leader of ISIS recently was killed, we were reminded that one of his countless victims was the young American missionary Kayla Mueller. The Christian woman had been held in captivity for 18 months, a sex slave of al-Baghdadi himself. The man whose Washington Post obituary called “an austere religious scholar” and a shy man behind spectacles, repeatedly raped and tortured Kayla, according to eyewitnesses like Yezidi sex slaves even younger than Kayla.

That description of Kayla says more about al-Baghdadi – and the Washington Post – than it does about Kayla. Almost.

What is scarcely said in the news stories is that Kayla was repeatedly asked, and frequently beaten and tortured, to renounce her Christian faith. This she never did – by ISIS’s own frustrated reports – and it gained her torture, rape, beatings, and death. Photographs of her bruised and lifeless body were e-mailed to Kayla’s parents by ISIS.

She lost her life. By her confession and faithfulness, as a contemporary martyr, she secured a place in Heaven, we can believe.
Correction: she saved her life.

Kayla was not alone, I am sure she would maintain. Every day, Christians around the world are being persecuted, tortured, and killed for their faith.

We smugly think that things in this world are growing brighter and better. Not everything. There were more Christians killed simply for being Christians in the 20th century than in all the combined centuries since Christ, including the iconic grotesqueries of Nero.

This week we noted – did you? – Reformation Day, the commemoration of Martin Luther’s challenge to the Church of the day. He nailed 95 complaints about corruption to a church door in Germany. It spread beyond Wittenberg’s town square; past the triangle of land formed by Hannover, Berlin, and Dresden; through Germany; to Rome and other territories of the Vatican; through the Christian world… and even unto today.

Luther had not intended to leave the Catholic Church – he was an ordained priest – nor establish a denomination, much less see his protest turn into Protestant-ism. Yet the “world system” that had corrupted the people and practices of the Church transformed widespread dissatisfaction into open revolts.

Luther’s reliance on “Scripture Alone” – that is, not mankind’s rules or new doctrines not found in the Bible – was a revolution of the spirit, conscience, and faith. Indeed, Luther was not the first anti-Romish reformer: previous theologians had similar heartfelt critiques… and had been martyred.

Fired, exiled, imprisoned, tortured, killed for their consciences. Luther was to be the next. Hunted and excommunicated, he was hauled before a council in the city of Worms, Germany.

All his writings – books and pamphlets, sermons and essays – were laid on a table, and Luther was ordered to renounce them. Outside the castle, at night, the Church was burning his books.

“Renounce them?” he said in effect, “How can I, when they all quote the Bible and rely on Scripture?”

Further, he argued that they were the result of his conscience, and “no man, no council, no Pope” can force me to act “against my God-inspired conscience.”

It was made clear that he would suffer death if he did not deny his writings. He said “I will not and I can not.”

With his life on the line, and conscious of the blood of martyrs before him, in the hushed council, Luther firmly said, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” Those simple words, spoken in that obscure German town, have rather thundered like mighty artillery through the ages. Indeed for 500 years they have been spiritual and intellectual bombs. They inspired the translations of Bibles into languages of local peoples. They ignited a rediscovery of Scripture. They freed believers from relying on human intercessors when praying or petitioning God. They inaugurated the spread of literacy. They were the underpinnings of democratic movements around the world.

Luther was not murdered; he was secreted away by German princes who likewise “saw the light.” Thrown out of the Roman Church, he married and continued to write and preach. Others who knew him, and many who never met him but were – and still are – electrified by his words, followed.

“Here I stand. I can do no other.” These are the words, perhaps word for word, that the missionary girl Kayla Mueller spoke.

God forbid – which cliché is my hope, but is not a certainty – that any of us will be in the position of a Martin Luther or a Kayla Mueller. It is not an abstract warning: every day Christians are in those positions.

When you have the opportunity, are you however too shy to speak the Name of Jesus? Do you hold back from sharing your faith with a stranger, or a family member, knowing that they might be on their ways to hell? When politicians, from school boards to the presidency, offend the Truth of the Gospel, do you think, speak, and act in opposition?

Do you “stand”? Will you stand? Can you do no other? If being a Christian were illegal, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

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The “Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” words and music by Martin Luther. All my life, tears come to my eyes when I sing, or try to, the last verse: Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also: The body they may kill – God’s truth abideth still!

Click: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

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

10-2-17

This month is the occasion for a grand remembrance. The last Sunday in October traditionally is observed by Protestants as Reformation Sunday, when, on All Saint’s Day, Father Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses – basically, theological complaints – to the castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Extra special is the fact that his act was in the year 1517, so the 500th anniversary is now observed. Half a millennium, roughly 25 per cent of the age of Christ’s Church on this earth. Even unchurched people know the basics of the revolution that commenced with those hammered nails – Luther’s nails ironically recalling the nails that Christ endured as He offered Himself a living sacrifice for us.

I wonder how the church will observe the “anniversary” of the Reformation. I have noticed that package-tour groups are available to cities in Germany and places associated with Luther’s life. More than that, I don’t know. I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Augsburg, Germany, in 1983, the place and 500th anniversary of his birth. In the Augsburg Cathedral I had reasonable expectations of a grand worship service, and a stirring rendition of his great hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

There was, however, a small service attended by mere dozens of worshipers, in a side chapel and a charming but very modest, ancient free-standing pump organ.

Martin Luther is honored only in the breach, as they say, in many of the lands where his spiritual revolution once seized the hearts of men. The reforms of the reform-ation are evanescent; or in dire need of revitalization. Brother Martin is, possibly, in 2017 more of a historical than a theological figure.

I have said that unchurched people know something of his life. That is, to be precise, only to the extent that anyone knows much or cares much about history these days. To paraphrase George Santayana, those who have not learned from history are already doomed. The young Luther, training to be a lawyer, decided after what he perceived to be a life-saving miracle to join the clergy, and became an Augustinian monk. God’s hand might have been in that choice, because there are clear philosophical and theological lines from Platonism to the early Church fathers to St Augustine to Luther.

As a faithful clergymen he made a pilgrimage to Rome, walking from Germany. At the Vatican he was repelled by corruption and open scandals. Even back in Germany, the Roman church was becoming an agency of money-hustling, famously among other acts selling “indulgences” that promised poverty-stricken givers that souls of dead relatives would be boosted closer to Heaven in proportion to their “donations.”

Other offenses Luther identified, such as non-Biblical cosmology, veneration of saints, and Mariology, also led to the 95 Theses. Local Catholic clergy, representatives of the Vatican, and the Pope himself were much displeased, especially as Luther’s critiques gained currency. Germany was a land of greater literacy and ecclesiastical freedom than other corners of Christendom. Rome, already making a practice of suppressing and executing other critics (Luther was not the first voice of protest) sanctioned Brother Martin; demanded that he recant his many writings (including, strangely, those that were quite orthodox); excommunicated him; and sought to imprison him.

Luther was certain that Rome intended to kill him for his ideas, as it had done with previous reformers like Jan Hus in Prague and John Wycliffe (posthumous excommunication of desecration of his remains) in England. But the rising spiritual sophistication of German princes coincided with their growing desire to be free of the Catholic Church’s political and military dominance.

Religion, culture, and politics coincided. So did another great factor: Literacy. The average German could read better, and with more depth, than other Europeans to whom words and ideas were anathema, as so decreed by Rome. Largely proscribed from reading their Bibles and having to sit through Latin church services, Christians outside the German states beheld Christianity as dear to their hearts but largely alien relative to their daily lives.

My Catholic friends will dispute my characterizations of the fervor of Catholics of the day, or of the spiritual hunger of Luther’s fellow Germans and Scandinavians, yet two counter-arguments stand: Luther’s foundation-stone, based on Ephesians 2: 8,9: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God, Not of works, lest any man should boast,” which confronted the authority of the Pope and efficacy of indulgences and putative good deeds. And… the empirical evidence, the speed at which the Reformation spread through Europe. And the world.

A lightning lesson. We will visit some other aspects of the Reformation in coming weeks. When I refer to “literacy,” I mean more than Luther translating the Bible into German, and common believers having access to God’s Word. We must understand:

Suddenly, men and women could read the Bible themselves. And think for themselves. They could write, and publish, and exchange ideas. Literature, poetry, and philosophy flourished – contemporary works, and those of the past – and political ideas were exchanged. Luther became the patron saint of democracy and the Enlightenment (although he must be considered a Pre-Modern, just as his musical disciple J S Bach, two hundred years later, must be similarly regarded, theologically).

Not a Humanist, yet of the Age of Humanism; living during the Renaissance but not a typical Renaissance man, Martin Luther astonishingly bridged the worlds of total subservience to Word of God, and the absolute independence of the human spirit. The soul. By looking back, to the faith of Jesus Himself, he was able to portend the future.

Threatened in the Church’s kangaroo court in the city of Worms – knowing that torture, burning at the stake, and death awaited him – he nevertheless refused to recant any word he had written, any sermon he had delivered, any “thesis” in his list of complaints.

No.

“Here I stand,” he said. I can do no other.”

At that moment one of the great souls of Christianity, and one of the greatest figures in Western civilization, changed the course of history. Fortified by utter conviction, Luther was also secure in the fact that when when one stands by God, one never is truly alone.

Martin Luther challenged more than Rome – he challenged humankind. In the face of authority, in the face of injustice, he challenges us today.

How would we have responded? How do you respond today… because Authority and Oppression are ever present. No less threatening, even more dangerous.

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From the sublime to the ridiculous? Many readers might consider the knee-jerk reactions of football players during patriotic exercises, in relation to Luther. They kneel; he stood. Not an absurd contrast to discuss. We shall take it up.

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Protestantism has spread worldwide. More than one-fifth of South Korea, for instance, is Protestant. Here are the famous SoKo Christian singers “Golden Angels”: –

Click: Where No One Stands Alone