Monday Morning Music Ministry

9-28-20

I am old enough to remember when every morning, in public school, we would have Bible readings. They were rotated among students who were willing to read and lead; and most of the readings were Old Testament Psalms, in deference I suppose to the Jewish kids in class.

I am old enough to remember being confused and resentful about the prohibitions, when such things became illegal.

And I am not too old to still feel sad about the “enlightened progress” achieved by that “reform.” I was not too young to realize – because I asked them, actually – if the Jewish kids minded the readings, or the once-a-week recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. No, none of them did. I even had a classmate whose family was “artsy” and forthrightly atheist. Kyra never minded, nor appeared warped by hearing Psalms read; certainly she never spray-painted graffiti on the school, or set fires in the library.

But the war against prayers and the Bible were only the early signs of America’s suicidal tendencies. I knew, despite my youth, that some adults predicted that these impulses would lead to, some day, attempts to eliminate any form of religious expression; a generation of young people rejecting traditional values; the denigration, not only of religion, but of patriotism, “family values,” mutual respect, and civility.

Will those times ever come; will those prophets ever be able to say, “I told you so”?

Oh, wait…

From people “offended” by Christmas displays in front of town halls, to objections to saying “Merry Christmas” to strangers (by the way: So what?) to arrests of Christians, and firings from jobs, many dots are being connected in many ways along the slippery slope.

This summer, committees at the Democrat National Convention made a show of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and pausing… silent… where “under God” would have been spoken. Almost every evening, for months, we have seen people on the streets of American cities and towns burning and stomping on the flag.

I call the current situation the “Purge of Allegiance.”

Disloyalty to the American flag and our larger nation and Constitution might technically be legal – sometimes I too am sick of what this society has become – but I would be willing to suffer the approbation and consequences. The street scum today might be aware of Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” Their version is, “Give me a sandbox to soil.”

Renouncing allegiance to one’s country is a step away from having no allegiance to a religious faith or cultural traditions at all. While you are thinking about that, anarchists are leaping to agree. Next on the downward spiral: Having no standards means just that – no standards of right and wrong. Going back to Aristotle and heretics and Relativists of recent centuries, “What’s right for me is right,” period. Anarchy.

American churches, with some exceptions, have bought into this new way of thinking. It is not new, of course – lies as old as the Garden of Eden. We are smarter than God, you see.

The American political system is surrendering to these forces in a hundred large and small ways. Patrick Henry never said, “Give me licentiousness…”

The American culture not only welcomes these awful events, but encourages them and profits from them. An actual curse of capitalism.

Let us think about what the Obama Administration ridiculed only a dozen years ago, those of us who “cling” to our guns and Bibles. While we still can. And thinking, further, about that ragged old flag and the time-honored Pledge…

How close is America becoming, at its (new) core, something that we, too, regret and despise? God forbid.

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Click: Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag”

9-21-20

Growing up, to the extent I did, in suburban New York City, in the little town of Closter NJ, I remember that at the corner of one of our parks was an enormous bell, probably used in Colonial times to warn residents of British troops approaching (a Closter farmer was our own Paul Revere) or to call volunteers to fight a fire.

It was not a bell whose shape probably comes to your mind. It was circular, metal perhaps five inches wide, like a gong but without the gong-bell in the center. This was an enormous metal ring, like a circular (rather than triangular) dinner bell that must have been heard for miles. My friends and I could never find anything big enough that we could lift that would sound a tocsin, as alarms were called.

Through the centuries, communities relied on substantial bells like that for various reasons; and the frequency or pattern would provide signals to residents. Churches, of course, ring bells to call people to worship, and during the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are lifted. Carillons were invented to play music in concerts. Eventually electricity brought alarm clocks, amplified sirens, cell-phone alerts, and other efficient saboteurs of the good old days.

But the concept of “alarm bells” lives on in culture, in literature, in our consciousness. Sometimes we view events as they seem, but sense that they seldom are hopeful harbingers, but dangerous signals. Predictors of bad things ahead; seeds that will sprout ugly weeds, not beautiful flowers.

“For whom the bell tolls.” Ernest Hemingway took the title of his novel from an essay by the mystical theologian John Donne (1572-1631). Donne, in his Meditation XVII, “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” addressed the ambiguity. Events, customs, announcements, traditions, expectations might be very different than we confidently think… and different observers will have different opinions and conclusions.

We all have separate views of life, and therefore, Donne (who was near his own death when he wrote these words) reminds us of two things. The surety that God is in control, and all will see Him, followed by the end of delusions. Second, Donne’s famous aphorism that “no man is an island.”

By the first point he reminded us (even if Hemingway neglected this aspect) that our understanding is insignificant compared to God’s omniscience. In the second point he observed that the human race is organic; that when something dies or is degraded in one place, the rest of humanity suffers. When reforms and enlightenment and “progress” occur here, people there, so to speak, also will benefit.

I invite you to view the long-brewing but sudden-occuring nihilism and violence, destruction and death in American cities and towns, and see them hear them, as alarm-bells.

The “demonstrators” (what kinds of fools are we to be persuaded by the media’s gentle characterization of vandals and criminals?) might indeed think that the alarm-bells they set off are announcing a brave new world. I am sure that their ringleaders and puppet-masters do. Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, that is; not a pending utopia.

Here are Donne’s passages, in contemporary words:

Perchance the bell tolls for someone so sick or so deluded that he doesn’t even recognize that the bell announces his impending death. Maybe I am that deluded person, deluded that I am better off. Others see me in reality, know I am ill, and have caused the bell to signal my own death, but I am ignorant of it.

Are we dying – as a culture – and do not realize it?

And then:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Rioters and vandals, attacking statues of Jesus and Mary and saints, are not offending brass and stone, but storming Heaven. That is how they see it. Why do Christians not see it, too, and erupt in defense?

Looters and shoplifters vandalize stores, and empty them – often minority-owned shops – and are not stealing sneakers they need; but flail at capitalism itself.

Those who terrorize a city for a hundred days, and occupy police stations… are telling the truth when they declare that your police, your homes, your lives are next.

These things look like news clips and headlines, but they are alarm-bells.

The veneer of historical bad guys’ statues is long gone. When churches are covered in obscene graffiti; invaded and set on fire, the object of these domestic terrorists is not some dead general, but the Living Savior.

Hear those bells? Do they toll for them… or for us?

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Click: When They Ring Those Golden Bells

9-7-20

I have told this story before. On this Labor Day weekend, I remember a simple BBQ, but one of the most profound days of my life. A holiday far away from my home… but very close to my heart. It happened on a Summer holiday more than 20 years ago.

Is this an America that is disappearing?

I was working on a book back then, a three-part biography of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis; evangelist Jimmy Swaggart; and country-music superstar Mickey Gilley, all first cousins to each other. My good friend Maury Forman offered me his unused condo in Montgomery, Texas to get away for a bit of a personal research and writing. Since Lewis lived in Mississippi, Swaggart in Louisiana, and Gilley in nearby Pasadena Texas, it made geographical sense.

Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages (remember them?) to chart the location of nearby Assembly of God churches, intent on visiting as many as I could through the summer. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could.

Well, the first one I visited was in Cut and Shoot, Texas. That’s a town’s name; you can look it up. A small, white frame AG church was my first stop that summer… and I never visited another. For one thing – coincidence? – I learned that a member of the tiny congregation was the widow of a man who had pastored the AG church in Ferriday, Louisiana, the small town four hours away where, and when, those three cousins grew up in its pews. She knew them all, and their families, and had great stories. Beyond that, the pastor of the church in Cut and Shoot, Charles Wigley, had gone to Bible College with Jerry Lee Lewis and played in a band with him, until Jerry Lee got kicked out. Some more great stories.

But there was more than that kept me there for that summer. In that white-frame church and that tiny congregation, it was, um, obvious in three minutes that I was not from East Texas. I was born in New York City. Yet I was treated like family as if the folks had known me three decades. A fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for a barbecue where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”

I bought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the pot-luck. Well, there were dozens and dozens of folks. I couldn’t tell which was family and who were friends, because everybody acted like family. When folks from East Texas ask, “How are you?” they really mean it. There were several monstrous barrel BBQ smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll fight anyone who doesn’t admit low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas BBQ the best) There was visitin,’ surely; there were delicious side dishes; there was softball and volleyball and kids dirt-biking; and breaks for sweet tea and spontaneous singing of patriotic songs.

I sat back in a folding chair, and I thought, “This is America.”

As the sun set, the same food came out again — smoked brisket galore; all the side dishes; and desserts of all sorts. Better than the first time. Then the Gilberts cleared their house’s porch. People brought instruments out of their cars and trucks. Folks tuned their guitars; some microphones and amps were set up; chairs and blankets dotted the lawn. Dave Gilbert and his brothers, I learned, sang gospel music semi-professionally in the area. Pastor Wigley, during the summer, had opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert, playing gospel music on the saxophone. But everyone else sang, too.

In some churches, in some parts of America, you are just expected to sing solo every once in a while. You’re not expected to – you want to. So into the evening, as the sun went down and the moon came up over those farms and fields, everyone at that picnic sang, together or solo or in duets or quartets. Spontaneously, mostly. Far into the night, exuberantly with smiles, or heartfelt with tears, singing unto the Lord.

I sat back in the folding chair, and I thought, “This is Heaven.”

I have grown sad for people who have not experienced the type of worship where singers and people who pray do so spontaneously. From the congregation. Moving to the front. Sharing their hearts. Crying tears of joy or conviction. Loving the Lord, freely. If you have not… then visit a church where this is commonplace. Even witnessing it is an uplifting balm to the soul, where there is freedom and joy in singing spontaneously.

I attach a video that very closely captures the music, and the feeling – the fellowship – of that evening. A wooden ranch house, a barbecue picnic just ended, a campfire, and singers spontaneously worshiping, joining in, clapping, and “taking choruses.” Smiling, hugging. There were cameras at this particular get-together, but it took this city boy back to that holiday weekend, finding himself among a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.

And I think to myself, nervously shedding a tear… “THIS is the America we are losing.”

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Click: The Sweetest Song I Know