Monday Morning Music Ministry

2-15-13

Can God make a rock so big that even He cannot lift it? That age-old wise-guy challenge from skeptics is supposed to stop believers in our spiritual tracks. But it is a syllogism, more correctly a syllogistic fallacy. It does not confront the Creator of the Universe in an existential contradiction, but rather exposes puny human minds, especially the smug skeptics (and more than a few of us believers, too) unable fully to comprehend the vast, all-encompassing, limitless powers of God.

It is, besides, a fallacy built on the inherent strictures of language and linguistics. And a philosophical “gotcha” whose purpose is not seeking truth but annoying the faithful. Christians, if they engage in certain debates, should rely more on the “God is God” response: if we could explain EVERYTHING (especially to hostile people), well, God would not be God, because we would be obviating the necessity of His being. No, I am grateful for mysteries.

Skeptics are not at all concerned with God, anyway; nor rocks; nor our souls, except to introduce viral doubts. The character Matthew Harrison Brady in the play “Inherit the Wind” delivered a great line that is constructive: “For my part, I am more concerned with the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks.” Or their size or weight.

Oh, rocks count. So do mountains. I heard someone say this week that if mountains were nice and smooth, they would be impossible to climb over. It’s hard enough! – but those crags and rough peaks and jagged crevices, when all is said and done, make it easier to climb over than a vertical, smooth monolith. Yes, we are talking metaphors here.

God’s metaphors and similes, Jesus’ parables and analogies, fill the Bible, for the benefit of our emotional comfort as well as our spiritual understanding. Many of them are related to rocks and mountains. And many of them address the old conundrum I quoted above – the powers of God, and our thoughts about His imputed limitations.

I was frustrated recently by the inability to sublimate certain troubling thoughts in my consciousness. Did you ever have trouble falling asleep because you can’t get something off your mind? I realized: I can do funny things with my eyebrows and tongue, even make my nostrils flare, and make children laugh. I can cross my eyes and, somehow, make the pinkie of my foot shift atop the toe next to it, without using my hands. These all involve muscles. The brain is a muscle. Why can’t I make IT stop doing something when I want?

We remember things, even when we don’t want to; and sometimes we are annoyed that we forget things, also when we don’t want to. In these things we are reflections of God – imperfect reflections, that is. Which confirms our humble status before the awesome magnificence of God. You see, I am remembering the metaphors.

We must climb mountains. But God talks to us of His faithful people moving mountains. We surely are impeded by “rocks” in our path. But we all know of one stone that was miraculously rolled away in the Bible. We talk about “fiery trials.” But we are assured that God has been there for His children to endure the fiery furnace, and be delivered. He created mountains, rocks, and fire. I am quite happy to know that God saves us from such physical and metaphorical challenges; I don’t have to know HOW, except by the lights of my limited understanding, my faith, and the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

Speaking of our limited understanding, here is syllogism that skeptics seldom point to… because it reveals a loving God, not a confused self-contradiction. Can an all-knowing God be aware of your sins, and yet forget them?

How can that be? It can’t… unless you are God. As rocks thrown into the sea of forgetfulness, He promises to forgive – and forget – our sins when we repent. A God who knows all, can “forget” something? Yes. Is there much better news laying around?

It is useful for us to remember: Sometimes when we pray, and pray, and pray again, about some matter of guilt or sin, we can be reminding God about something He forget and promised not to hold to your account.

Finally, countless sermons and prayers and hymns have dealt with the other spectrum of a worry we have about God in our imperfect minds: not that He will forget sins, but the chance He might forget US! “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior”; the Bible account of Blind Man Bartimaeus, worried that the Lord will not notice him; the doctrine of public confession, so when the roll is called up yonder… and so on.

As believers we know that God cannot forget us. It is a mystery that He can cancel His memory for the sake of His children’s salvation; and it is joy unspeakable that His memory reaches down to the humblest among us. And remembers. Not only on Judgment Day, but every day, every moment in fact, he remembers our needs, and cares for us.

Remember the rock in that skeptic’s riddle? How thankful we should be that there is NO rock that represents our burdens that He cannot lift and roll it away.

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A great song about God’s forgetting, and remembering, is “He Will Remember Me.” A standard gospel song of Black and White churches alike, it was associated with Albertina Walker, the Sensational Nightingales, and the Staples Singers, as well as the Statesmen and the Blackwood Brothers. It was written by E J Bartlett, mentor of Albert E Brumley. Bartlett also wrote “Everybody Will Be Happy Over There,” “Just a Little While,” and the greatest camp-meeting song, “Victory in Jesus.” This link to a video is priceless session of “Gospel Legends” letting loose over the profound message of the lyrics, “O yes, He heard my feeble cries, from bondage set me free; And when I reach the pearly gates He will remember me.” Featured are the great Rev Donald Vails, Jessy Dixon, and the Barrett Sisters… and a hundred other joyful souls.

Click: He Will Remember Me

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”?

2-3-13

It seems that every innovation and new device that jumps out at us from aisles at electronic departments is, yes, wondrous and miraculous (until next year’s Consumer Electronics Show convinces us how outdated and useless they are) but all seem to share a few aspects. Yes, they tend to be smaller than the toys they replace; and, yes, they usually are more expensive than their predecessors. But I am thinking of something else.

New phones, new computers, new bells, new whistles, every i-thing that comes down the pike all tend to isolate us more and more. “Personal” is the common adjective in the descriptions, if not the brands. We can talk faster, do extra things, command more, multi-task… ultimately hunched over, closer and closer to the screen of each new device. At almost every restaurant I visit these days, I see a family of four or five who are all absorbed by their phones, smart or otherwise. They communicate only to place their orders and, perhaps, offer a belch or two. Otherwise, dinner is the screen and whatever.

Curious. We communicate more, but socialize less – ultimately, communicate less in the traditional and, I believe, worthwhile sense.

The “Friends” mania is analogous: similarly confusing and seemingly self-contradictory. Facebook now opens my home page with a question up top: “How are you doing, Rick?” It is relatively obnoxious to me, because I have a sneaking suspicion the question is insincere. If it is Jeff Zuckerberg himself who invites the response, I seriously doubt that he would much care either way how I answered. (For the record, I am tempted to reply, “How am I doing WHAT?”)

And Facebook Friends largely are an odd species to me. People I knew before Facebook was spawned, well, they ARE friends. But I constantly get “friend requests” from people I never heard of, which could be flattering except that I have heard that some people assemble numbers of Friends like Chicago politicians assemble voting rolls: neither acquaintanceship nor even pulses matter. Now there is a company that markets an application that informs us when somebody DE-friends us. Neologisms atop irrelevancies.

Somewhere, someplace, someone is writing a research report on an American culture that has become so desperately lonely that society finds comfort in manufacturing friendships that are immune from human contact; people obsessed with maintaining such artificial interaction; and a form of paranoia that fears the suspension of such counterfeit “relationships.”

Like a king, I may live in a palace so tall, With great riches to call my own.
But I don’t know a thing in this whole wide world That’s worse than being alone.

We are not merely being seduced by the novelty of toys, I think; nor engaging in faux-communication that will pass after a season. Given the chance, contemporary Americans deal with relationships in a new manner that, in fact, suits us just fine: somewhere between wary and disdainful of human contact. The New Normal is the Old Abnormal.

Sooner or later solitude, whether voluntary or forced, will catch up with our souls. We are not meant to fly solo. Before that time comes, our culture will cripple itself and interrupt the dynamic emotional flow that once characterized the American spirit. And eventually we will discover that it is not about the difference between being, say, a social animal and an introvert. Nothing so superficial.

Some time we, as individuals and as a culture, will confront the difference between being alone and being lonely. Even in the midst of multitudes.

Once I stood in the night with my head bowed low, In a darkness as black as the sea.
My heart was afraid and I cried, Oh Lord, don’t hide Your face from me.

The coldest emotion we can ever experience is the sense of loneliness, of no one nearby – no one to understand, no one to listen, no one to care. But to BE alone? That is a state of mind as much as physicality. You can have memories and books and music – things that are prized comforts – but they take you only so far. Then you have family and friends; they can be the most precious , and irreplaceable, blessings imaginable. The only thing better is the knowledge, and the perceived presence, of God by your side.

I learned something about the value of friends some years ago, and I will bring it forward, re-cast to recent events, because the lesson is the same. And it is one I need to remind myself of, every so often; too often. Through tough times, friends will call, friends will write, friends will pray, friends will send cards, friends will visit, friends will even communicate on those new little e- and i-devices. So another friend, a skeptic, once taunted me – “You talk about Jesus all time, how He helps you here, and ministers to you there. But listen to yourself – all your comfort has been coming from friends, not your Jesus!”

And my reply – as all our realizations and replies should be – “That IS Jesus bringing me comfort. My friends are just His messengers.”

There is a place where we may overcome loneliness, a place where no one stands alone. Let us all find it, and all realize it, and all embrace it.

Hold my hand all the way, every hour, every day, From here to the great unknown!
Take my hand, let me stand, Where no one stands alone.

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The poetic lines above are verses from the classic gospel song by Mosie Lister, full of profound meaning, lessons for us all in troubled times; and an emotional tune with majestic chord structures and modulation. Performed here by the Gaither Homecoming Friends – yes, “friends”! The composer is in the audience, introduced at the end of the song.

Click: Where No One Stands Alone

1-21-13

On January 20, 2013, less than a month shy of the day we met 40 years ago, Nancy Marschall was taken off life support. My wife was a strong Christian, an amazing mother, and possessor of a modest personality that everyone loved. Her shyness masked a robust faith that touched and inspired uncountable people. Many of us would have defined ourselves by the ailments she endured: a diabetic since 13, she sustained several heart attacks, a heart and kidney transplant, thyroid cancer, legal blindness, toe amputation, broken bones, celiac disease, several strokes, dialysis, and, last week, a ruptured stomach ulcer that saw her lose 14 units of blood, outpacing transfusions. She experienced miraculous healings, and some healings by doctors’ hands. Other healings, she is experiencing right now.

For a long time she was unable to exercise, as you might imagine. But she exercised her faith. While waiting 18 weeks for a heart and kidney transplant, she overcame her shyness to pray with patients waiting with her at Temple University Hospital. Then she held services. I assisted, and she recruited our children Heather, Ted, and Emily, to participate in the services and room visitations, and pray with our counterparts in recipients’ families. Our faith was strengthened too as we dealt with heartache, unanswerable questions, grief, and shared joy. We witnessed healings, and helped lead people to conversions, in a ministry that lasted more than six years.

I could write many tributes to Nancy… or share how her life was a tribute to her Savior. Rather, recalling the “great cloud of witnesses” in Heaven who watch us, according to Hebrews chapter 11, I will quote from one of the many articles and media stories about Nancy, additional witnesses so to speak, and her affect on people on behalf of Christ.

“Giving Heart To Those Awaiting A New Life At Temple University Hospital, Nancy Marschall Leads Weekly Prayers For Patients On The Heart-Transplant List. Not Long Ago, She Was In Their Place,” was the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 28, 1999. By Ellen O’Brien:

Nancy Marschall got a new heart and a new kidney on Valentine’s Day, 1996. Naturally, this is not something she would forget.

But Marschall does more than remember, when she wakes up every morning, that she’s still around at 45, and that – yes, again – she has a whole new day to live. Once a week for the last three years… she goes back to the seventh floor of Temple University Hospital, where she spent what may have been the longest 18 weeks of her life – the floor known officially as the Heart-Failure Care Unit….

“We’re just trying to open ourselves up to what God would have us do,” Marschall said, by way of explanation. “He’s just leading us.” Last Sunday, 14 patients and family members piled in to the prayer service, filling the little room to bursting – white, African American, West African and Asian, all of them speaking of life in very, very simple terms. “Our health is out of our hands. There’s nothing we can do any more,” Marschall said.

But still, she said, there is God to rely on: “He’s here. He’s with us, and nobody can separate us.” She was sitting in a wheelchair near the door, with one foot propped up in a plaster cast. She’s had diabetes for 30 years, which can numb the extremities, so when she broke a bone in her foot, she continued to limp around on it for an extra week, unaware of the injury.

The room where the Marschalls lead their service is small and modern, high off Broad Street, with a line of windows that curve into a bay. Three philodendron plants hang like leafy green globes in the sunlight…. When Marschall was waiting for her heart, patients couldn’t leave their rooms without an intravenous pole – and a hospital nurse to roll a heart-monitor along beside them. But not all the change is good: Now the wait is growing longer because the number of heart-failure cases is increasing every year while the number of heart donors has stayed the same.

“When people would go down for transplant, we’d say we’d pray for them. But did it really happen? . . . I just felt God speaking to me. And Rick had the same call,” Marschall said. “We’re talking about Christ, and the love of God, and the change He can have in our lives,” Marschall said. She added that she prays for guidance in this new missionary role: “I don’t want to mislead people.”

“We try to point everything to a better relationship with Christ,” Rick Marschall added. “We’re Christians, we’re not deists [or mere feel-good cheerleaders].”

In fact, until the transplant, the Marschalls attended services at the Pentecostal Christian Life Center in Bensalem every Sunday, and they still consider themselves part of that congregation, although they’re otherwise engaged now on Sunday mornings. … “I think we’re just like everybody,” Marschall said. “When there are things or burdens upon you, you tend to pray more. When things are going well, you tend to do it less.” Personally, she thinks this is a human trait that God understands.

At Sunday’s prayer service, the last hymn was “Amazing Grace,” but the tape that the Marschalls had brought along – to guide the impromptu choir – failed to include the second verse. This was a verse that Rick Marschall found particularly meaningful. As the tape rolled to the end, he urged everybody on: “Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come. . . .”

The sound of singing rose, strong and healthy and enthusiastic. You could hear it out in the hall…

Out in the halls, indeed. And far beyond. For the first time in decades, Nancy is now healed and whole and pain-free. I imagine she will look around Heaven for her granddaughter and our own stillborn baby, and the many people she inspired through the years, unless, of course, they see her first. In my picture of Heaven, all those wonderful reunions will have to wait a moment until Jesus stops hugging her as He whispers, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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Christians often refer to death in a biblical way. It is not a euphemism like “passing away,” but the literal situation – “home-going.” Those of us who remain cannot fail to be a little jealous of sick people who become well, the lonely who embrace their Savior, the troubled who find peace. It is the home prepared for us, a place with many mansions, joy unspeakable and full of glory. This picture finds musical expression in the Negro spiritual based on the tune of the second movement of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” Performed here, with beautiful images, by the London churchboy’s choir Libera.

Click: Going Home

12-31-12

One of the great Sunday pages of the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz shows Linus walking outside while it is snowing. He looks up, he catches snowflakes on his hand… and goes wild when he sees that two are identical. He rushes to show them off, but before his sister Lucy, or Charlie Brown, or anyone else, can see them, the snowflakes have melted. Good grief.

What would have made that discovery special, of course, is that we are told that no two snowflakes are exactly alike; of the uncountable snowflakes that fall, or have fallen, their crystalline, geometric appearances are all unique.

This seems miraculous, when we think of it. It IS miraculous. There is no logical, structural, organizational reason it that it must be so, but it is. God could have made snowflakes standard-issue; or of two basic designs; or any finite number. But He chose Infinity for that category in nature – a unique way, to my way of thinking, to reveal Himself. A unique way, but not rare: there are many things in nature that are astonishing in their variety. Consider:

Rainbows arrange themselves by the color spectrum, but we never see the same display in the same place, and they vary in full arcs, portions, double arcs, in different intensities.

We never see clouds that are identical in the same sky, or miles apart, or years apart – even moments apart. They constantly change.

Despite the best efforts of breeders, no two flowers are ever alike. Compare roses, plumerias, tulips, not to mention wildflowers, and you will always find differences of coloring, size, intensity. A rose is NOT a rose is NOT a rose…

The distinctive colorization of birds, even the patterns on peacocks’ tail-feather displays, distinguish them from other species, but are always different – from nuances to brilliant features – from bird to bird.

Famous markings on many animals, like leopards’ spots; giraffe markings; stripes on tigers, zebras, and tabby cats, are like trademarks we instantly recognize. Yet from animal to animal, no two are alike.

And with humans: we each have only two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and hair on our heads – a small number of features that constitute our appearance – yet among the world’s 7-billion souls there are no doppelgangers. The idea that we all have a “double” somewhere is a fiction.

God’s infinite variety is wondrous.

We can choose the same patterns in all our ways, but we humans tend not to. When you think of it, when we create (that is, invent) things, almost immediately a march toward standardization commences. Someone comes up with, say, a Model T Ford, or a Hostess Twinkie, or an iPod… and right away the factory assembly lines stamp out clones by the millions.

Humans tend toward the same in their goods; uniformity in their practices; conformity in their ideas. Do tastes in fashion change? I maintain that is merely a seasonal adjustment in a new set of orthodoxies. The same with musical trends, slang phrases, interior-decorators’ colors, widths of lapels and ties: on the surface we want to be different, but we rush to the same, same, same, individually or in our groups.

Years change – which is what brings me to these thoughts – and time marches on. At New Years’ times we feel obligated to look back and look forward. We look at the same old world, and behold the things that really don’t change, magazine cover stories to the contrary notwithstanding. Some things shouldn’t change; in other areas we are stubborn. It is frightening to consider how little human nature has changed when we think about the wars and brutality and oppression and abuse and the things we do to one another. Sin.

But God, the Unchangeable, declines to stop changing the physical world – the miracle of creation – in which He, in unfathomable mercy and kindness, has placed us. Creation is for His pleasure, but it pleases Him to please us.

And surely there is a message beyond an amazing God choosing to create eye-candy for His children. If we would only notice it more often. Every bit of creation – every different element and aspect – is a manifestation of a God whose love for us is as limitless and infinite, and distinctive, as the numberless snowflakes and rainbows and flowers.

My prayer for us all in 2013 is not only that we stop and smell the roses, but that we stop and BE the roses.

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Like roses among thorns, a profound message can grow in the weed patch of pop music. Such was the case in the late 1960s, another troubled time, when a pair of songwriters approached the jazz icon Louis Armstrong with a spiritual but not sectarian song, certainly not jazz, “What a Wonderful World.” The first rule in the creative process often is that there are no rules, and a classic recording, a perfect marriage of lyrics and meanings and vocal style and personality, was their result. It is worth a listen in this New Year, especially for the spoken introduction by Satchmo (“Pops”) before he sings.

Click: What a Wonderful World

12-3-12

Surveys tell us that an awful (and I do mean awful) lot of people are buying into this Doomsday Scenario. You know, the 12-21-12 Farewell Party supposedly devised by the lost civilization of infant-sacrifice folks, the Mayans. The prophesy is found in pictograms carved into a stone, a very small fragment of which was rescued from a gravel quarry. How coincidental, or not, that someone writing a book salvaged this message from centuries past, just in time for a book he was writing. And what a coincidence, or not, that the due-date for the evaporation of the universe, after all these centuries, is right about now.

There are, supposedly, many other dire predictions from many other cultures, all with the same date circled on their calendars. Or virtually so, because many of these fortune-tellers had no conception of the Christian calendar, or months and years. Ah, skeptics like me are told, it is not about dates, but how the celestial bodies line up. OK, I get it. Folks could divine future events, even to precise moments – the same folks who were incapable of surviving as societies, much less inventing doorknobs. I might be straying from the fine points of documentary evidence, but you get my point.

Scientists today could be busier enumerating new varieties of nitwits infesting our society, than tracking the veracity of such theories. There are many adherents indeed, and among them are, perhaps not surprisingly, scientists, who are no less immune than others in subscribing to crackpot nostrums. Among them, also, are many Christians, who should know better.

Near the top of many reasons why Bible-believers should not pay attention to a word of this nonsense is God’s familiar injunction that “No one shall know the day or the hour” of the end of things. Not angels, not even the Son, will know. It is God’s prerogative.

Isn’t it odd that so many people caught up in this mania are also worried about the future of the economy, and the Middle East, and, oh, the football season, so fervently? The “fiscal cliff”? Hey, forget about it!

The Doomsday Scenario is nonsense — just a diversion like news about celebrity infidelities, and tabloid stories about dogs who play chess.

To step even further back, however, there is an extra reason to put the “Fiscal Cliff” in a more proper perspective. I reckon that America’s economy went off a cliff a long time ago. Policies, corruption, irresponsibility… we can see now that there were no exit ramps. It was inevitable. The only question is how hard the crash will be. But there are even more serious cliffs we are headed toward at 80 miles an hour, chatting on our cell phones, and scarfing down fast food. Driving at night. With our lights out. And with bad brakes.

Christians: what about the moral cliff? How rotten have we let society become on our watch?

Parents: what about the “nuclear-family” cliff? Do we honor the family unit, do we keep our households intact, do we set good examples, do we teach discipline and exhibit leadership?

Businessmen: are we good stewards of the resources we manage, and the welfare of our employees?

Civic leaders: does the government help or hinder average citizens? Are you continuing the Founders’ visions of letting free people make free decisions? Are you penalizing success in today’s economy?

Celebrities: are you good role models for your audiences? Do you promote moral values and decent behavior? Do you realize the impact you have when you traffic in sex and drugs and self-indulgence? IS it all about money?

Clergy: is it more important to dilute your message in order to attract and keep church members; or, rather, to hold high the gospel message – sometimes hard, always uncompromising – and trust the Holy Spirit, that Truth will draw all unto it? Do you really think that watering down the Word will inspire youth to trust it… or trust you, in the essential matters of life?

We have been driving toward, and over, many “cliffs” in America for quite some time. If you remember thinking you had a smooth ride back in the day, maybe it was because we have been, for some time, sailing through clear air, where there are no bumps in the road. But there will be a hard fall. A dead end.

Oh. Back to “knowing the day and the hour.” If you read carefully, the Bible DOES teach that we can know when the Lord signals the End of Time.

Here it is: When we least expect it.

So forget the Mayan Calendar, and think “larger” about Fiscal Cliffs. Let the Bible be your calendar, let the Bible be your roadmap.

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Often you will hear, in apocalyptic movies and even TV commercials, the music of Carl Orff. So we shall not disappoint here. “Carmina Burana” was composed in Germany in 1935-36, a cantata based on the poems found in medieval works by Benedictine monks from roughly the 14th and 15th centuries. The first movement is titled “Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi” or “O Fortuna,” lamenting the hopes and disappointments of worldly desires. The performance in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is by Andre Rieu and his typical, and typically impressive, cast of thousands.

Click: O Fortune

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

9-24-12

“Regrets, I’ve had a few…” Such words imply a summation, and we humans often stop on the path to wipe our brows and rest, and think about what got us there. There is not one among us who does not think about the What Ifs or the Missed Opportunities, but we seldom give thanks for the wrong decisions we avoided or the opportunities that might have led to grief.

The saddest situation attends those whose regrets outnumber the joys. And sadder still is when people sigh and believe that such is their fate, or that it is too late to change their life’s profile, so to speak. While anyone has one breath remaining, this is a cruel lie.

One of the Bible’s great subtexts is that it is never too late. And the application is in every sphere of life, not a theological corner. (Eventually we all will realize that theology is not a corner of life but the entire room, the broad landscape. Other “important” aspects of life are actually corners and compartments.) That is, it is never too late to receive, and accept, God’s favor. Salvation is offered to the vilest sinner. Think of the worst person you know, or history’s cruelest villains. Not one person will be shut out of Heaven, or receive God’s forgiveness, if that heart seeks God, repents, and accepts Christ as Lord and Savior. The Bible tells us so.

If that seems unjust, it is because you look at things, still, from a human’s point of view, instead of God’s. All Heaven rejoices, as you will too, some day in Glory, when a sinner is saved. And for some detail, or by some perspective, or after altered circumstances, you or I might be that vilest sinner. Shudder that you might be voted off the island of Eternity. Even St. Paul called himself “Chief among sinners.” We are well off when we are aware of our faults

… AND when we are aware of our opportunities. It is never too late. I have friends of great accomplishment who nevertheless regret that they have not mastered new languages, or learned to play instruments, or mastered the arts of painting. Yet any of these things can be done in short months. We all have the capacity to write a poem that will move the hearts of millions, or write The Great American Novel. Or – no less significant, essentially, to our lives – to come to a truth, share a thought, touch another person’s soul, that will “make it all worthwhile.”

Acts and deeds, concepts and creations, all may ennoble us; but the important matter to our self-regard, at least, is that we realize it. God confirms our worth so that we may affirm our courses. We need not be condemned, or condemn ourselves, by either the taunts of unfulfilled dreams or the dubiety of the Now, that things will never change.

To pull back from the brink of blather: Orlando Gibbons, almost four centuries ago, wrote and set to music the simplest illustration of the encouragement that our life’s glory can come even at the last moment. And cancel all the rest, which is prep-time after all for what might be our most satisfying acts. The simple song is about the silver swan, a gangly and sometimes mangy, always awkward – in fact absurd-looking – water fowl. Yet geese can be sillier, right? In the song, at one moment the bird rises to elegance, becomes handsome, and sings a beautiful note which it previously was never capable of “unlocking.”

His lesson, for sinners, for creative minds, for fellow and average humans, is that we are forever capable of that Moment, that act; and that we should never judge ourselves by false standards, or the consensus of the rabble all about us. More fools now live, than wise.

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approach’d, unlock’d her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more.
Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

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The very brief, but very profound, madrigal from the Restoration Period. The haunting and beautiful tune helps fuse this to our consciousness. An early example of polyphonic harmony:

Click: The Silver Swan

9-3-12

Labor Day weekend. The end of summer… Schools back in session… Once upon a time, it was the “new television season”… The beginning of the presidential campaigns (I wish it WERE only starting now, instead of two hundred weeks ago)…. Anyway, these few days are called many things, but they are also regarded by many, many families as the Festival of the Empty Nest. Many young people are going off to college for the first time.

Leaving home, whether it is to dive into life, or for the intermediary step of a college career, or the military, or a job opportunity, is a Rite of Passage. For parents and children alike it is, or should be, the essence of Bittersweet. All of a sudden, 18 years or so seems like a blur; everyone becomes conscious of unfinished projects and unshared words; but the clock is ticking, the calendar is calling, and life awaits.

I watched the Republican convention this week and wondered about the rising class of future leaders. Impressive speakers, comparatively young to be national leaders, boosted the candidate, but also, as part of their assignments, introduced themselves to a national audience. I thought, here are people who might be on the scene four or eight years from now, or 20: should they hold back with their searing testimonies or impressive personal stories, until “their day in the sun” arrives? Of course not!

That day might never come. Or, the way to assist its advent is to tell all, show all, be all, right now. It is a lesson framed many ways: “Carpe diem” – seize the day. “Never a second chance at a first impression.” “Strike while the iron is hot.” “We pass this way but once.”

I saw this as a lesson to be applied in family situations when kids leave home, too. Having regrets should not equate with not letting go. And every one of us should say all that we can, express everything, without reservation. Children can juggle the loss of the family’s pod-like security and the excitement of independence. However, their parents will always be as close as a phone call, e-mail, text, or an ATM.

For parents there is no way properly to describe the mixed feelings of the mixed blessing. You will miss the daughter or son – for many of us, despite the contrary assurance of worldly logic, a crater suddenly exists in our everyday lives. But we are wired as parents to possess an indescribable joy in seeing our children take their next steps into the world. Spread their wings. It is RIGHT. It is what you have prepared your child for – even if not yourself, fully – these 18 years.

Being a parent was never easy. Right? Then how is it that the hardest part comes when they leave our homes?

I’m not sure science has ever analyzed tears. Maybe one of our budding students will win the Nobel Prize for such research. But there are tears of pain, of regret, of sorrow, of bitterness, of lost opportunities, of lost love and found love, and surely tears of joy. The tears that parents (and, I can remember back that far, children too) shed during these rites of passage are of a special composition. Distilled, they somehow confirm to us God’s loving “wheel” of life – “there is a season,” He tells us. Whether a little scary, or seemingly sudden, or a guarantee of big changes in our lives… we must seize the season too.

“Letting go?” Think of it as spreading your arms in fond farewell, so that they can be open to receive, when the next season comes.

+ + +

I have never heard a song, or read lyrics, that more beautifully reflect the bundle of emotions in the Rite of Passage of children leaving home (in this case, a college student). “Letting Go,” by Doug Crider and Matt Rollings.

She’ll take the painting in the hallway,
The one she did in junior high.
And that old lamp up in the attic,
She’ll need some light to study by.

She’s had 18 years to get ready for this day.
She should be past the tears; she cries some anyway.

Letting go: There’s nothing in the way now,
Oh, letting go, there’s room enough to fly.
And even though she spent her whole life waiting,
It’s never easy letting go.

Mother sits down at the table,
So many things she’d like to do.
Spend more time out in the garden,
Now she can get those books read too.

She’s had 18 years to get ready for this day.
She should be past the tears; she cries some anyway.

Letting go: There’s nothing in the way now,
Oh, letting go, there’s room enough to fly.
And even though she spent her whole life waiting,
It’s never easy letting go.

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For a music video of this song, amazingly performed by the amazing Suzy Bogguss (wife of Doug Crider), click:

Click: Letting Go

8-27-11

Life happens. As they say. So does death, which merely is to repeat oneself: “Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure,” Theodore Roosevelt said, after his son Quentin was shot down over France.

How do we respond to death? Or to the mystery of life? Ironically: how to cope with death’s certainty and to life’s fragility? Sometimes we “lose it.” Sometimes we see through a glass darkly. Sometimes those of us left behind proceed headlong into the business of life. Sometimes we pray to discern God’s will. Sometimes we meditate upon His Word.

My idea is that God does not always hand us multiple-choice quizzes. Sometimes we can do all these things together. They are not mutually exclusive responses.

But always we should trust in His mercy. This is HARD sometimes, fighting the tendency to lean to our own understanding. “His wisdom, yes,” we want to cry; “but where is the mercy?”

Almost exactly a year ago our family was saddened by a miscarriage my daughter Emily suffered, and I wrote a message that attempted to collect my thoughts. This week my other daughter, Heather, lost her baby. Emily and Norman’s came early in her pregnancy; Heather and Patrick’s daughter Sarah, however, was born and died after nine days. The challenges of a 24-week-term birth eventually overwhelmed Sarah’s wracked little body. And I am thinking of a friend this week whose nephew drowned, was recovered but was unconscious, and died after several days .

Our natural minds tend to take over when we try to understand the ways of God.

It is a natural idea that, say, God wants the little baby in Heaven more than He wants her down here. But if that were the entire story, we should wonder why a few days of life, which ultimately adds grief to parents’ joy, can be part of His plan. Yet it is. That we cannot understand it all means, basically, that we are not God, and His mysteries are just that: mysteries. There is sin in the world, so there is death in the world. But after our questions and cries and withdrawal, the mysterious ways of God are to be accepted, embraced, and trusted.

One thing is certain. We shall be united with the living God, and re-united with the healed Sarah, in Heaven some day. We will look around for her, and when we see her, we will have to wait one more brief moment to embrace her, because she will be in Jesus’ lap and in His arms, and then He will pass her to us.

+ + +

Some of my meditations on these subjects are well reflected in the lyrics of a gospel song from a few years ago. It is not a line-for-line representation of anyone’s actual thoughts over a baby’s death; not anyone I know. But surely many people, from casual Christians to devoted believers, entertain some of these thoughts. Please listen to the moving performance, and watch the tender pictures. And meditate.

+++

Click: The Mystery Of the Wonders You Perform

8-6-12

Recently I heard a world-famous preacher talk about God’s promises. Actually, it was the wife of a world-famous preacher, who had developed quite a thriving business with her own ministry. These days it seems that evangelists and big-name ministers are not just called to preach the Gospel, but called to be the wife, or son, of a big-name preacher. Prosperity often follows.

Actually, that was the topic – prosperity – of this evangelista, who shall remain nameless. But Victoria Osteen is not the only prophet of the Prosperity Gospel these days. Many of my brothers and sisters in the Pentecostal churches, and in other corners of Christianity, frequently preach about prosperity, “seed offerings,” the blessings that await the faithful – under the general, spiritual umbrella of “receiving God’s promises.”

Content warning: I do not intend to join the debate, here, on the theology of what should be a more active discussion in today’s American church. I want to address our response to the promises of God, not whether people are wasting chances for nice homes and cars, or whether people are wickedly twisting the words of the Bible, or whether naiveté or agendas have driven new translations and understandings.

For my own part, the plausibility of God’s intention to shower me with material things was shaken years ago when the magazine of a favorite evangelist printed a chart that explained the “hundredfold return” that Jesus promised. It explained by simple arithmetic how dollars given as offering would return in dollars that were, well, one hundred times greater. A sure bet.

Mark 10:28-31: Then Peter began to say to Him, “See, we have left all and followed You.” So Jesus answered and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My sake and the gospel’s, who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time – houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”

Hmmm. Christ’s fine print included sacrifices that do not mention money; results in this life and the next; persecutions might be numbered among the “dividends”; and a warning against expecting anything by formula. It IS called the Hundredfold “Return,” not “Reward.”

So much for not joining the debate, but I do urge us all to think about God’s promises for a moment. God had made many promises to us, His children. Many more than we realize. More than most of us ever… take advantage of? … receive? With terms like that we stray close to presumption, a sin. Not petitioning God to do something, not expecting, but presuming He will do something; and as it turns out in the circumstances of believers, it translates to Him do doing something we want. Not usually the mode of the Almighty.

Bookstores are full of biblical “Promise Books”… and should be. Indeed, God has made many promises. In fact, besides the history and commandments, we can say that the entire Bible is “God’s Promise Book”! Some of God’s promises are conditional, of course. But His greatest promise – eternal life bought by the substitutionary death of His Son – is unconditional. Jesus died while we were yet sinners, and we are free to accept or reject this unspeakable gift according to His grace.

How often do the evangelists talk about OUR promises, in between “calling in” those of God? Every one of us, maybe in different ways, have made the same promises to God – when we received Christ into our hearts; when we have been hurting; when we have sought forgiveness; after we have sinned; at times of confusion; when crises have hit; during challenges in the areas of health, finances, career, loved ones; and so forth in an endless list. When we recite the Lord’s Prayer or the Creeds, we exchange promises with God. The mere act of repentance – a frequent thing for Christians – is tantamount to making a promise.

… and how often do we break our promises to God? How many times do we sin? The thoughts, words, and deeds, even of “saints,” are not perfect. We break our word to the Creator of the Universe, the master of our souls. Often. And we have the audacity to call God out about what we perceive to be His promises to us? God cannot lie, no… but let us be a little humble about this Promise thing. As Micah wrote, He has showed you, oh man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

Does God want us to prosper? I say that it is not inconsistent with His will. But I have a friend who once said to me, with tears in his eyes, “I KNOW if I were rich, I would lose control of myself in a lot of ways, afford the sins I used to lust over… probably kill myself in the process.” If this man was correct about himself, it would be a merciful God who would prosper him in radically different ways.

Farther along, we will understand the finer points of theology. But we can receive the spiritual blessings of justice, mercy, and humility, right now. That is a solid promise we can take to the REAL bank.

+ + +

Part of a Christian’s humility is accepting that we will never know some things… or know them “farther along.” Here that great old hymn of faith is sung in a living-room setting – complete with flubbed lines! – by three of the most beautiful singers, and beautiful voices, in music today: Suzy Bogguss, who opens and sings the verses; Matraca Berg; and Gretchen Peters on the mandolin. A prosperity of talent! (With the line, “And still we wonder why others prosper…”)

Click: Farther Along

7-30-12

Does God have a sense of humor? Speaking personally, I get grouchy whenever I hear the lame responses like, “Just look in the mirror!” or “Check out the platypus!” These lines are facile and obvious – but they are also spiritually offensive. God created you; He created the mirror; and He even created the platypus, according to His will. Humor is a matter more serious than glib wisecracks.

Whether God has a sense of humor is to some people an open question, but ultimately a silly question. Existentially, God has a sense of humor since senses of humor exist in the world. How it is manifested is a bit problematic – something to add to your long list of “questions to ask the Lord on your first day in heaven.”

In fact there are few biblical instances of God laughing. When He does, it’s usually in derision: laughing contemptuously at the wicked or the condemned. Returning to the existential, it is not intellectual presumption to assume that if Jesus wept (see the shortest verse in Scripture) He surely must have laughed too.

Biblical examples of laughter are few and far between, although we don’t need a description of God actually being mirthful (the Chortling Bush? ) to know that humor has a place in His plan. Consider:

Jesus saying, “Let the dead bury the dead” – a sarcastic challenge to one’s perception.

Similarly, Jesus’s almost visual depiction of the contrast between a speck in one person’s eye and a log in another’s – exaggeration to make His point.

Jesus, again: In the middle of a scathing tirade, He resorted to a ridiculous allusion to paint a contrast, when He compared people’s hypocrisy to someone who strains a gnat out of a cup, but is willing to swallow a camel.

The Savior’s nicknames for His disciples – Peter the Rock, a pun; “Sons of Thunder” – reveal a playful use of humor.

The writer J C Lamont has speculated on the humor in the biblical account of God appearing in some human form and wrestling with Jacob… and resorting to sneakiness to win! He bested Jacob in the area of his putative strength, which is not only a just result, but a humorous ending to that significant chapter in Jacob’s life.

Cartoonist and educator Mark Dittmar sees a graphic use of “black humor” in Paul’s criticism of Judaizers in Galatians – in effect, “Why stop at circumcision? Let them castrate themselves!”

Mark’s wife Lynn can’t resist seeing humor in God speaking through Balaam’s ass – choosing a most ridiculous vessel when something less startling would have sufficed.

We cannot ignore examples of laughter in the Bible – Abraham’s barren wife laughing when she received the news that she would conceive… and her son’s very name, Isaac, meaning “laughter” in Hebrew.

As I recalled nicknames of the Disciples, my mind raced to some prominent names in the church. Is there humor here? –

The first Chief Rabbi of the modern State of Israel, a dignified Torah scholar, nevertheless was named Rabbi Kook;

The most respected Archbishop of Manila, who, after his elevation by Pope Paul VI, and (as is customary) using his last name in his new title, was Cardinal Sin;

Is there any humor in the fact that one of the most corrupt and licentious of popes – fathering two illegitimate children – was Pope Innocent VIII?

In American Evangelicalism, one the cheeriest uplifters and bearers of glad tidings in his crusades was nevertheless named Moody;

At a time when the public was skeptical of televangelists congenitally having boasted and swaggered, there was Jimmy Swaggart;

At a time when the public is skeptical of television ministries’ obsession with money, a prominent TV preacher is named Creflo Dollar;

At a time when the public is skeptical of ministries’ ethical standards – whether donors are being swindled – there is the popular (but very ethical) Chuck Swindoll;

At a time when the public is skeptical of television preachers making questionable claims and popping off on every subject, there was Pastor Peter Popoff.

As it is written, you can’t make this stuff up.

Many are the attributes of God and the names of the Christ in the Bible, and on posters sold in Christian bookstores: Alpha and Omega; The Arm of the Lord; The Author and Finisher of Our Faith; The Faithful Witness; The Good Shepherd; The King of Kings; The Lamb of God; Lord of Lords; Messiah; Prince of Peace; Bright and Morning Star; Balm of Gilead; Our Passover; Rock; Rose of Sharon; Wonderful Counselor; Son of God; Savior. And so on. But one of the most essential often is overlooked – “essential” because it reflects the Essence of Christ.

Friend.

We have become conditioned by generations of paintings and movies and Sunday-school lesson-sheets that portray Jesus as everything from grim to moon-faced mystical to well-coiffed and white-bread. But if Jesus could weep, He surely smiled. And if He loved His friends, and strangers, enough to figuratively climb up on the cross to suffer and die… certainly He cared enough to be a friend, in the best senses we can think of.

We should know the Jesus who smiled, who laughed, who connected with people by a soft word and perhaps a joke, who put His arm around someone in good humor. He was more than familiar with the first verse of Proverbs, chapter 15: “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” He was a Man of Sorrows, the Bible tells us, and therefore humor must have been a special language to those who identified with Him in sorrow.

Just as using “Abba” (in effect, “Daddy”) as another name for God that allows a greater intimacy, let us all see Jesus more often as Lord and Savior… and Pal. He IS a friend like no other.

+ + +

If Jesus is our Holy Friend, then the comforting old hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” can occasionally be a little more informal, a little more accessible to us! Here is a Dixieland-Rock-Funk (OK, you come up with a better category) version by the great Bart Millard, moonlighting from MercyMe.

Click: What a Friend We Have in Jesus

7-23-12

Death by Pop Culture. The last thing Aurora, Colorado needs is the last thing the world needs in response to the multiplex murders: politicians and news crews infesting the community, imposing hugs on survivors, and “standing together,” whatever that means. Haven’t those people suffered enough?

In America, bizarre killing sprees have become part of the contemporary socio-entertainment complex, down to the killers identifying with fictional villains. A dark night has risen, when people are more willing to adopt psychopaths as role models, eager to endure obloquy, or even self-immolation, than to work toward positive personal achievement.

When people don’t believe in an afterlife, they are happy to grab what they can in this life. And when the culture glorifies violence, and makes celebrities of monsters, the path is clear for too many deluded souls. America has become in many ways a culture of death. Abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicides can all be seen as manifestations of this. As the thought is father to the deed, ubiquitous violence (10,000 violent murders, realistically staged on TV, seen by the average adolescent) begets violence – but the older sibling is a generation of desensitized children.

What we probably need less than staged hug-fests after such horrific events – a few words for cameras and then flights home, mission accomplished – is one more column, sermon, or blog. Nevertheless here it comes. But I have a bit of a different viewpoint that many others might have.

At one time I was an editor at Marvel Comics, and although Batman is in the DC Comics universe, I was close enough to the genre that when the first volume of the DC Archives reprint series was published (now scores of books covering the major characters in their significant periods) I was asked to write the introduction. The essay was about the origin of Batman, the book comprised of the very first stories. I knew Bob Kane, who created the character; Jerry Robinson, who created the Joker, was a good friend. And so forth.

For that essay I thought and re-thought the premise of the iconic character, and the unique premise, a costumed hero without super-human powers. The dedication to justice, fueled by the irresistible motif of revenge. Frank Miller, and then other cartoonists and moviemakers, have accelerated these basic aspects to warp-speed. The Batman stories and movies have been, to me, largely excellent works of art and craft, even politics. The controversies – not the least surrounding The Dark Knight Rises – have reinforced thematic preoccupations with justice and integrity, and toward a society free of violent threats.

Through all my experiences in the comics world, extending beyond Marvel and DC to the Thundercats cartoons and superheroes with European publishers, I never was completely comfortable with the superhero genre. (I also wrote Disney comics, and I never knew why talking ducks seemed more reasonable to me. For another time…) Specifically, I always wondered, and still do, why a formula dependent upon men and women in tights, and who needed fantastic powers instead of their own wits to solve problems, appealed to the American public. Would history conclude that Americans were so insecure that they needed to invent heroes whose powers they could never assume themselves – thousands of costumed attendees at San Diego Comic-Con to the contrary notwithstanding? And further (we apparently see it now in the person of James Holmes) why do so many kids think the villains are cooler than the heroes?

Why does America lack heroes, but embrace “superheroes”? It is ironic that so many people shelled out major money for tickets to see a movie about a superhero, and after the shooting we hear of so many stories of REAL heroes in the audience: those who shielded their spouses, dates, and kids, many of them sacrificing their lives.

Meanwhile, friends have been writing about the movie. Batton Lash, a wonderful cartoonist himself, says that The Dark Knight Rises… to new heights of excellence. Dr Ted Baehr, of Movieguide, reviews the movie and says that themes of redemption are powerfully positive. Just so.

But I have come to the point of asking new questions about the role of popular culture as society is affected in (invariably) subconscious ways. Mankind is evil, and every culture has honed violence, oppression, and death to the same, or greater, degree than its moral, artistic, and spiritual standards. We understand that. And many great works of art have dealt with conflict and resolution. Also understood. And somehow people are drawn to tales of extreme threats, actions, and retribution. But which is the chicken and which is the egg – does popular culture lead, or reflect, the public’s ethos? It is a question that will never be answered but should always be addressed.

But to my friends in the comics and the Christian worlds, I propose that it is time we stop hiding behind mantras that “good ultimately triumphs,” no matter how much blood through which audiences must wade. To invest a story with incredible acts of evil by incredibly evil villains, strung out through incredibly graphic depictions, all toward a conclusion where the bad guys are vanquished – but frequently with a “conflicted” message and subtexts of no resolution at all – is just window-dressing, maybe conscience-salving, for the glorification of violence.

Is violence in itself bad? No; to paraphrase what Theodore Roosevelt said about guns, the relative moral value depends on the character of the user. But we should be aware that technical brilliance, in a culture that has become known for technical brilliance and little else, is a short yardstick. And if we have to weed through, and sit through, hours of violence, to discover moments of relatively positive messages, it might be a small prize at the bottom of the proverbial box. “But the kids love the action movies! They are going to see superhero flicks anyway!” – we get back to the question of the chicken and the egg again.

(It’s like a joke I heard years ago about a man with sexual urges who went to a psychiatrist for help. The doctor showed him ink-blot pages and asked what the man saw in them. “That one looks like a door, with a keyhole, and, oh, what’s going on in there!” “This one looks like a window shade pulled closed, and I’ll bet I know what’s happening there!” And so on, until the doctor said, “Well, it’s pretty clear – you have an unhealthy obsession.” The man responds: “ME? You’re the one showing me all those dirty pictures!” The point is that the creative community needs to ask itself whether it leads audiences to higher planes; or whether there are seeds of unhealthy appetites they cultivate, instead. Does Art imitate Pandering?)

As a Christian in God’s community I am secure that this vale of tears is short; as I wrote above, justice will prevail in the end; His justice. But as an American in our culture I am hugely depressed. We cannot turn back the clock. We are not going to re-establish prayer in schools, for instance. The divorce rate is unlikely to change; broken-home statistics are troubling; abuse of women and children, and trafficking, will not go away next week; drugs and sex and violence will continue to “sell.” Those in positions of influence in the media and the celebrity class will continue to make excuses for the New Morality. The culture of death inexorably will march on.

Do I want these things to change? I pray every day they do. But I know that a just God invariably acts… justly. Does America deserve mercy? Pity, yes. But mercy, really? To quote a bumper-strip of questionable theology but persuasive logic: If God does not mete out justice to America, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.

In the meantime we may turn our hearts back to Aurora. God doesn’t need photo-ops to hear our prayers over the situation. And I am convinced most of the local people do not either. If we can re-dedicate ourselves to praying for the living; if we can pray for the potential killers in our midst – if we can share Bibles and tracts and personal prayers, and not just comic books and action-flick DVDs, with kids we meet; if we can affirm God’s standards of justice, and not Batman’s or Spiderman’s… this senseless multiplex murder spree might itself rise to have some redemptive legacy.

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An uplifting comment by a brother who lost a sister at Aurora put wind in my sails. He was devastated, of course; but he said he was grateful that he had an opportunity to tell the world for a moment what a wonderful person his sister was. He is anchored; she is memorialized in an inspiring way; and we are left with a unique perspective on grief. “Standing together” might include crying together –a theme we have visited here recently – and that can be healthy too. In 1692 Henry Purcell, in his opera The Fairy Queen, wrote the heartfelt lament, “O, Let Me Weep!” It is touchingly sung here by the counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky and his ensemble Artaserse.

Click: Oh, Let Me Weep

7-16-12

Madison Square Park. An almost magical piece of Manhattan, an oasis of greenery, specialized flower gardens, benches, fountains, statues, and winding little pathways. On sunny but cool, clean-air, New York City Spring days, as it was when I visited recently, it seems Heaven-like, miles and maybe ages away from urban bustle.

The original city planners of grid-like Manhattan streets mercifully retained old Broadway, which cuts diagonally through the island, creating numerous triangles of arterial anomalies. They can be small, like Herald Square to the north, one-fifth of an acre; or spacious, like Madison Square Park. Bordered by Broadway, Fifth Avenue, 23rd Street, and Madison Avenue’s terminus, the Park is larger than six acres. In its neighborhood were the first two Madison Square Gardens; P. T. Barnum’s Museum; the pioneering Fifth Avenue Hotel and A. T. Stewart Department Store; the iconic Metropolitan Life Building; and, at its southern end, the Flatiron Building. During the 1880s the Park hosted the tallest structure in New York City: the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty, placed there for visitors to climb, in a plan to raise funds for the statue’s base and erection in New York Harbor.

It sounds idyllic and is indeed full of history, but when I grew up in New York City, Madison Square Park suffered from neglect. And when I taught at the nearby School of Visual Arts in the 1990s, it had become an ugly, smelly, unsafe place to be. So on my recent visit to New York, I was happily surprised to see the results of a decade-long project and conservancy by the city and neighborhood groups.

Fortified with an appropriate park-bench repast – pushcart hot dogs – I sat back and enjoyed the place and time, not quite sure that place and time did not elude me, albeit engagingly. Was it a remnant of the old days that an evident homeless couple sat on a nearby bench, chattering and sharing an old piece of bread? But a mom or nanny passed by with a high-tech baby carriage, and I thought, That child is entering a nicer world than if she were here 20 years ago. And a young woman sat down on another nearby bench and started playing the guitar and singing songs I could not quite hear. All seemed beautiful. The way a city should be?

I was briefly blinded by the reflection of the sun on the gold facing of the old MetLife Building. I was aware, suddenly, of a man sitting next to me. It seemed he knew what I was thinking; but after all, I had been looking around earnestly, taking note of all I could. He shared my appreciation of nature’s glory that afternoon, and then commented on the same things I had paused to notice.

The old man and woman I had dismissed as forlorn homeless drifters? He said that they were, indeed, homeless; and neither had found much happiness over their long lives. But they met in the Bowery Mission downtown and became the best of friends, even falling in love. What made the world look away, they somehow found attractive in each other; and there was not a happier couple in all of Madison Square Park.

The baby in the bionic carriage? Her parents had split in an ugly scene, the father never to return and the mother addicted to an assortment of drugs. The relatives caring for the baby girl would not be able to continue for long. The young woman singing with her guitar, hoping for coins to be dropped into the shoebox? The words to her song – all of a sudden I could discern them – were about a hopeless life, lost love, and what she called her death-sentence of AIDs.

“So you are saying,” I asked the man, “that nothing here is as pleasant as it seems? Is there darkness behind every image?” No, he answered – just look at the joy in the homeless couple I showed you. And you do well, he told me, to have your spirits lifted by a beautiful day, and signs of happiness. But life’s problems, unlike a city park, cannot be solved by paving the pathways and planting some flowers – anyway, we cannot stop there. Accept the improvements, take heart from the joy… but remember that people still hurt, people still hurt each other, people still need Words that will transform their souls, not merely adjust their daily routines.

He swept his hands across the landscape of the park, and then, upwards, to the thousands of apartment windows that overlooked Madison Square Park, behind each a separate story. I could hear, and I quickly saw, that the man was crying, tears glistening on his cheeks. I looked up at the windows, knowing that his wise words were meant to remind me to appreciate the “good,” to see the “special” that was seldom readily apparent; but never to lose sight of hurt and pain and heartache: the needs of our neighbors.

I looked back, and of course the stranger was gone. I didn’t bother to look around or behind me. I believe angels visit us; and even Jesus can bring messages – “as you do it to the least of these, you do unto Me” applies to the love that lies behind the compassion shown through, say, bandages or meals. My visitor’s words lifted me up, not let me down, that afternoon.

Jesus wept (it is recorded in John 11:35) when He approached the dead Lazarus. We cannot believe Christ was affected by death, because He was about to raise the man back to life. And He knew that after a short time He too would die… and overcome death. We may wonder whether Jesus wept because sin had claimed another life; “the wages of sin is death,” and that He had come that people might have life and have it more abundantly – weeping over peoples’ wasted opportunities. Or He might have wept over the grieving friends and relatives of Lazarus, who scarcely realized that Jesus was in their midst. The Lord and Giver of life.

They became victims of their own superficial perceptions.

Jesus wept, and I believe He still does. People are still lost in sin, hurting, hurting each other, and needing the Word. Will they find it through sunny afternoons and fragrant flower gardens, or will they hear it from us? We should weep, too.

I have cried many more times in my life since becoming a Christian. Tears of joy, yes, but also of burning conviction. And seeing hurting souls I never saw – that way – before. Sometimes the most eloquent prayers we can pray are wordless. “He Understands My Tears,” a songwriter wrote. Another song states it well: God sometimes washes our eyes with tears, that we might better see.

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Yet another gospel song carries this theme – and illustrates the eloquence of Jesus’ weeping. Have you ever noticed how teardrops, just like raindrops, when you look closely, can reflect whole new visions of the world, a different reality, multiple images, brighter colors?

Click: Tears Are a Language God Understands

7-2-12

A number of years ago I was working on a book, a three-part biography of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, and country-music superstar Mickey Gilley, who all are first cousins to each other. A friend offered me his unused condo in Montgomery, Texas to get away for research and writing one summer. Since Lewis lived in Mississippi, Swaggart in Louisiana, and Gilley in nearby Pasadena TX, it made geographical sense.

Once settled, I took out the Yellow Pages to chart the location of Assembly of God churches for all the weeks ahead, intent on visiting as many as I could. East Texas was in every way new to me, and I wanted to experience everything I could. I was born in New York City… you get the picture.

Well, the first church I visited was in Cut and Shoot, Texas. That’s the 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 in Waxahachie TX 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. Yet I was treated like family as if they all had known me three decades. It was the Sunday before July 4th, and a fellow named Dave Gilbert asked me if I’d like to go to his farm for the Fourth where a bunch of people were just going to get together and “do some visitin’.”

On the Fourth I bought the biggest watermelon I could find as my contribution to the get-together. 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 barbecue smokers with chimneys, all slow-cooking beef brisket. (Every region brags about its barbecue traditions, but I’ll still fight anyone who doesn’t claim low-heat, slow-smoked, no sauce, East-Texas BBQ as the best) There was visitin,’ after all; 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 the porch of their house. 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 and his saxophone, later in the summer, opened for Gold City Quartet at a local concert. But everyone else sang, too. In some churches, in some parts of America, you’re just expected to sing solo every once in a while. You’re not only 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 a folding chair, and I thought, “THIS is Heaven.”

Recently I came across 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.” There were cameras at this one, this video, but it took this city boy back to that Fourth of Ju-lye, finding himself amongst a brand-new family, the greatest barbecue I ever tasted before or since… and the sweetest songs I know.

Click: The Sweetest Song I Know

6-18-12

Christians believe that God created the universe, provided a plan for His children to spend eternity with Him in Paradise, sends healing and other miracles, counts the grains of sands in the world and the hairs on our heads… but how is it that many Christians have a hard time believing that God is able to keep His own promises?

Many otherwise sincere and faithful Christians betray a flawed faith (I can attest to this, because I am always doing it) when they pray. For instance, how often do we pray, with a heavy heart, for forgiveness for some thought or act? And again. And again. And again. Do we perhaps think that the number of our petitions equates to the seriousness of the sin… as if God needs coaching. What are we doing? Is every subsequent prayer a signal that we think God doesn’t have enough forgiveness to go around?

If God is all-powerful, shouldn’t we think that He is able to do some of the simplest things He assures us He can and will do? God promises to forgive. The fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. He is faithful to forgive. The only qualification in the Bible is that God asks us to forgive others for transgressions in order to receive His forgiveness. He promises to throw our sins into the sea, as it were, far from His remembrance or His sight. Can an all-powerful God actually forget things as if they never existed? Yes, when He wants to.

Otherwise, we remind God of something He forgot! Do you want to do that?

When we accept Jesus, His Son lives in our hearts; His Holy Spirit takes up residence in our lives. When we have Christ, and are truly children of God, flawed yet redeemed, God looks at us in a new way. When He sees us then, He sees Jesus. So does the devil. That’s why the enemy attacks us in proportion to the “Jesus” we invite into our hearts, and show, and share.

That means, no matter how guilty we might be at times, or how ineffectually we might pray, When God looks at us He no longer sees a sinner; He sees Christ. When God looks at us He no longer sees an addict; He sees His Son the Savior. When God looks at us He no longer sees a cheater; He sees our brother Jesus. Do you call yourself Weak, Sinner, Rejected, Betrayed?

That’s funny. God call you Beloved.

Oh, we might look the same that we used look to each other, but not to Him. We might occasionally act the same, but God has provided a script whereby we might be forever free of the consequences. And He wants you to know that He respects a repentant heart… but you only have to read that holy script of His once. Then, go, in peace.

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Asking God to remind you of who you are, in His sight, is the theme of Jason Gray’s song. It will help you “put away the old person” you are.

Click: Remind Me Who I Am

6-11-2012

One of my favorite books in the world is one I re-read every few years. One of the reasons it is a favorite book is a favorite chapter. (Sometime I would like to edit a book and call it “Chapters” – to ask people to nominate favorite chapters of favorite books, because sometimes an author strikes a chord, composes a masterful scene, captures a special feeling, standing even higher than the whole book.) Anyway, for me, “The Piper At the Gates of Dawn” stands out from the rest of the Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. I am no fan of the Disney commercialization, but the original book, and this chapter, are magically unique. Grahame draws readers into a special world.

Nurturing my interest and affection, I recently read a book by Grahame’s widow Elspeth (I’m sorry: her name could not be anything other than Elspeth), an obscure book now, but written after she was widowed. She shared stories of her family, and of the creation of Wind in the Willows. And the book offers some previously unknown drafts.

In the course of her story, she quoted an appreciation by Clayton Hamilton, a professor of English Literature. He tells a story of visiting the Grand Canyon, seeing a copy of Grahame’s book in a gift shop, and surprising the owner, who had been waiting years for some customer to express affection for her favorite book. In that unlikely setting she was doubly gratified that her customer was actually a friend of its author.

Fans of certain books have an automatic kinship. And I value anyone whose fond instincts draw him to the world that Kenneth Grahame created. But even Grahame realized there were other worlds: he loved the world of nature (real nature, not just that of Toad Hall); and the world of childhood, as he created and defended in his other books The Golden Age and Dream Days. Read what Prof. Hamilton said of the Grand Canyon:

“Having seen it, I am relieved of any desire to see it again. It is the most gigantic chasm in the surface of the earth and is, of course, impressive because of its immensity…. But it is a lonely place, devoid of any human interest. Nobody, in historic or prehistoric times, has ever lived in the Grand Canyon. Though many of its pinnacles and buttes take on at times the look of towered castles, they have been sculpted only by uncounted centuries of wind, and show no touch of mortal hands. That dizzying immensity is empty of all human memories, and offers nothing to stimulate the sense of drama or romance.”

It is not hard to summon pity for people like Prof. Hamilton. My guess is that Kenneth Grahame would have disdained his cold sense of wonder. I do. Theodore Roosevelt (another fan of Grahame) beheld American landscapes like the Grand Canyon and unilaterally preserved them by the millions of acres, so that future generations, even Hamilton’s descendents, could be awestruck by the beauty of God’s creation. In their pristine states. Even if their pinnacles were formed not by men or even winds alone, but by God.

The humanistic phase of human history, where we float now, elevates the human mind and its accomplishments, but unfortunately is unable to separate human passions from that which guides us. It is the dark side of freedom, the residue of democracy – human nature, which never changes on its own, generation to generation. Religion, philosophy, and politics aside, humankind tends to lose something in exchange for greater “self-expression”: the acknowledgment of a marvelous Creator God; finding pleasure in His amazing works; and the enjoyment of His handiwork. In the beginning, it was created for our delight, too.

I have just returned from a three-week trip in which I experienced snow in the mountains of Colorado and 107-degree heat in the Nevada deserts. Bright red sandstone was the coincidental theme: a friend took me to Red Rocks, high above mile-high Denver; Red Rocks is the name of an area north of Las Vegas, similarly dotted with sandstone monoliths and buttes. And my son planned a day in the “Valley of Fire,” so called because its endless stretches of sandstone are so brilliantly hued as to resemble, from a distance, flames.

I have been blessed to visit many of the world’s great cities, and I marvel indeed at buildings and monuments and statues. But I have been doubly blessed to have visited many scenes of God’s handiwork. Sorry, Prof. Hamilton: it is not an “either/or” situation. The natural world of nature’s God is awesome because He intended that we be awestruck. If “towered castles” impress you, remember that it was God’s children and their God-given talents that made them. God still wins, buddy.

The evangelist Ellen G. White put it in perspective: “The flowers of the field, in their endless variety, are always ministering to the delight of the children of men. God Himself nourishes every root, that He may express His love to all who will be softened and subdued by the works
of His hands.

“We need no artificial display. God’s love is represented by the beautiful things of His creation.”

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Is there any more beautiful musical expression of these thoughts than the old hymn (with glorious nature videos)? –

Click: This Is My Father’s World

5-21-2012

On the heels from a week at the Christian Writers Conference in beautiful Estes Park CO, I come away with a heart exultant from fellowship, encouragement, and creative interaction with creative geniuses (some of them not yet published, but surely to be, soon). We also had reports and prayerful consideration of the cultural and spiritual crises facing Christians in this broken world. Human trafficking, persecution of believers, orphans in desperate situations… these “we will always have with us,” but as followers of Christ we cannot fail to respond.

I actually wonder whether Americans know what “hard times” are. I have been through some difficult patches, but I cannot say that I have known Hard Times in the sense that every previous generation in history, virtually everywhere in the world, has experienced.

I have been sad, but not in sorrow. I have been in debt, but never destitute. I have had regrets, but never grief. How many of us can share such relatively comfortable testimony? In my case, to whatever extent I rightly judge my insulation, it is largely due to my standing as a Christian — receiving joy that passes understanding — but we also have to credit modern life, in America, with /its technology, medicine, and general prosperity.

Hard Times do come in America, but somehow all the wars and crises have the lengths of TV mini-series, and if not, the public grows impatient. The public has a sound-bite mentality. We used to face our challenges; but now we are distracted with the modern equivalents of the Romans’ “bread and circuses” — pop entertainment, push-button gratification.

In many ways this indicates that we are not advancing as a culture. I’m not sure we are “going backwards,” either, because that might actually be beneficial. Giuseppi Verdi (yes, the composer otherwise known as Joe Green) once said, “Torniamo all’antico: Sara un progresso” — “We turn to the past in order to move forward.”

I got thinking of Hard Times in America when I pulled an elegant old volume off my bookshelf. “Folk Songs” was published in 1860, before the Civil War. This book is leather-bound, all edges gilt, pages as supple as when it was printed, a joy to hold. The “folk songs” of its title refers not to early-day coffee houses, but to poems and songs of the people, in contradistinction to epic verse or heroic sagas; the way the German word “Volk” refers to the shared-group spirit of the masses.

Many of the titles are charming: “The Age of Wisdom,” “My Child,” “Baby’s Shoes,” “The Flower of Beauty,” “The First Snow-Fall”… However, such sweet titles mask preoccupations with children dying in snow drifts, lovers deserting, husbands lost at sea, fatal illness, mourning for decades, unfaithful friends. No need to guess the themes other titles from the index:”Tommy’s Dead,” “The Murdered Traveler,” and “Ode To a Dead Body.”

It reminded me that people 150 years ago were not gloomy pessimists: they were not. But Hard Times were a part of life, and therefore part of poetry and song. On the frontier, life could be snuffed out in a moment. In the imminent Civil War, roughly every third household was affected by death, maiming, split families, or hideous disruption; yet anti-war movements never gained traction; life went on. Abraham Lincoln almost lost his mind over an unhappy love affair; his wife likely did lose her mind when her favorite son died in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt’s young wife (in childbirth) and mother (of a kidney disease) died on the same day in the same house. Hard Times? Close enough, we would agree.

Also before the Civil War, a composer named Stephen Foster wrote a song called “Hard Times.” He is barely recalled today, sometimes as a caricature, but he might be America’s greatest composer. He wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” “Old Black Joe,” “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginia,” “Way Down Upon the Swannee River / Old Folks At Home,” “Oh, Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Beautiful Dreamer”… and “Hard Times, Come Again No More.”

This last song has been resurrected lately to a certain repute, or at least utility. In some circles it has become an anthem for charities and lamentation of poverty. Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, even the Squirrel Nut Zippers, have sung it. It has taken on the air of a secular anthem. But in fact, although Stephen Foster did not embed a Gospel message in the lyrics, he had written many hymns in his life, and — if we can turn back our minds to the world of 150 years ago — it is clear that the Hard Times he wrote of were the world’s trials, to be relieved in heaven. It is clear that the “cabin,” and its door, in the song are metaphors.

Here is a memorable video to evoke the reality of life’s Hard Times, the promise heaven holds, and the beauty of Stephen Foster’s music to you. The seven singers are from the amazing project of a few years ago, “The Transatlantic Sessions” — singers and musicians from America (US and Canada), Ireland, and Scotland singing old and new “folkish” songs in a living-room setting.

Listen to the wonderful performance, the amazing music, and the important reminder that we should keep Hard Times in perspective… but also that God provides a joyful relief from life’s disappointments when they come. By and by, they will “come no more.”

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The singers are, left to right, Rod Paterson, Scotland; Karen Matheson, Scotland — hear her incredible soprano harmony on the left channel; Mary Black, Ireland; Emmylou Harris, US; Rufus Wainwright, his mother the late Kate McGarrigle, and her sister Anna McGarrigle on the button accordion, all Canadians. The other musicians are fiddler Jay Ungar — he wrote the haunting “Ashokan’s Farewell: tune of the PBS “Civil War” series — and his wife Molly Mason on the bass.

Click: Hard Times Come Again No More

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh hard times, come again no more.

Chorus:
‘Tis the song, the sigh, of the weary,
Hard Times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times, come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times, come again no more.

(Chorus)

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times, come again no more.

(Chorus)

There’s a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o’er:
Though her voice would be merry, ’tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times, come again no more.

(Chorus)

5-14-12

Last week my little corner of the country, mid-Michigan, made the news. Actually, after living here for five years, I still cannot describe the geography well. Some news-readers and weathermen describe the area as “central mid-Michigan,” or “northern southeast Michigan,” or “west of the ‘thumb’,” and “south of the Upper Peninsula.”

But it wasn’t difficult for a freakish thunderstorm to find it last week. Almost 10 inches of rain fell in a five-hour period. Power was out for 15 hours. Experts called it a “Once in 500 years storm.” It was five solid hours of lightning and thunder, very strange, like in a cheap horror movie. I suffered a basement flood, damaging some of my archives and collection of thousands of books and hundreds of boxes just down there. This despite a rather comical – I can say now – routine of trying to keep the rising water from a dead sump pump, by candlelight, one pot at a time. The Little Dutch Boy I am not. Eventually I lost the race with the rising water and leaking walls.

What could be worse?

Well… my neighbors who lost everything. Nearby basement apartments where water on the ground burst through their windows. A friend whose bedroom had water up to his chin. Dozens of cars in town completely covered by water. A tractor-trailer on the interstate (this is what made national news) that was stuck in a flooded underpass, and the driver had to be rescued after climbing atop the truck’s roof.

They all had it worse. No matter how bad things get for any of us, we can always find someone who is worse off. Sometimes that truth is a reality-check about our own conditions. We should not always be Whine connoisseurs. Sometimes this truth inspires sympathy toward others, a good thing. It is a reaction common to the human condition that we wonder whether our suffering (or pain or disappointment or betrayal or sickness) is unique to us. My family started a hospital ministry after my wife’s heart transplant, and we frequently were asked the question by patients and members of their families, and survivors after a death: “Why me?”

I eventually came to a revelation that the question, as natural as it is, is partially misdirected. We walk through this vale of tears; disease and sickness exist around us; there is sin in this world, and humanity suffers the consequences; and “the rain falls on the just and unjust.” Sometimes, a lot of it.

“Why me?” I suggest the real question should rather ask, “Why me – why does God love me so?” or “How do I deserve His favor?” or “While I was yet a sinner… and despite my continual rebellion… God sent His Son to die for… ME?” — Why me?

This is the real meaning of the real question we should cry out every day. It brings a very humbling perspective. While there are possible reasons for “Why did my house get flooded?” or plausible factors behind “Why does someone’s heart fail?” – there is NO answer to “Why me, Lord? How do I deserve You?” … except the answer of His loving Grace.

Let THAT answer flood over us all.

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A musical treatment of this perspective is expressed in the classic gospel song written by Rusty Goodman, “Who Am I?”

Click: Why Me?

5-7-12

Did you hear enough about the Titanic last month? I didn’t! I actually was surprised that there were not more memorials and anniversary events on the hundredth anniversary of its sinking. It is something that will forever attract people’s attention – fascination, always-fresh horror, disgust, and admiration.

There was another anniversary this past week – of the formal service, a century ago, in honor of one of the ship’s greatest heroes, and most forgotten men.

Major Archibald Butt had been military aide to President Theodore Roosevelt and, after TR’s retirement, to President William Howard Taft. “Archie” was a remarkable man, a combination military aide, social secretary, confidant, political scout, diplomat… and friend. He was like a family member to the Roosevelts. He was just as loyal to Taft, and one could add the trait of protectiveness, for the hapless Taft was narcoleptic, negligent of many duties, careless about political maneuvers. Archie often interceded with whispered advice or behind-the-scenes discretionary moves.

As 1912 approached, many Republicans, disappointed with Taft, wanted Roosevelt to run again. The growing animosity between TR and Taft placed Archie Butt in an excruciating position: he was devoted to the person of Roosevelt, loyal to the office of Taft. Soon his nerves began to wear. President Taft almost insisted that Archie take a leave from office… perhaps join his friend Francis Millet, the famous artist, for a trip to Rome.

Butt and Millet made the trip, and worked their way up the continent to return to America on the marvel of the age, The Titanic.

Some interviews with survivors included:

“When the order to man the boats came, the captain whispered something to Major Butt … the Major immediately became as one in supreme command. You would have thought he was at a White House reception. A dozen or more women became hysterical all at once, as something connected with a life-boat went wrong. Major Butt stepped over to them and said, ‘Really, you must not act like that; we are all going to see you through this thing.’ He helped the sailors rearrange the rope or chain that had gone wrong and lifted some of the women in with a touch of gallantry. Not only was there a complete lack of fear in his manner, but there was the action of an aristocrat.

“When the time came, he was a man to be feared. In one of the earlier boats, fifty women, it seemed, were about to be lowered, when a man, suddenly panic-stricken, ran to the stern of it, Major Butt shot one arm out, caught him by the back of the neck and jerked him backward like a pillow… ‘Sorry,’ said Major Butt, ‘women will be attended to first or I’ll break every damned bone in your body.'”

Another survivor said, “The boats were lowered one by one, and as I stood by, my husband said to me, ‘Thank God for Archie Butt.’ Perhaps Major Butt heard it, for he turned his face towards us for a second and smiled. Just at that moment, a young man was arguing to get into a life-boat, and Major Butt had a hold of the lad by the arm, like a big brother, and telling him to keep his head and be a man. Major Butt helped those poor frightened steerage people so wonderfully, so tenderly and yet with such cool and manly firmness that he prevented the loss of many lives from panic. He was a soldier to the last. He was one of God’s greatest noblemen, and I think I can say he was an example of bravery even to men on the ship.”

Another interview read:

“His last goodbye was smilingly said to Miss Marie Young, formerly a music teacher to some of the Roosevelt children. Miss Young had frequently met Maj. Butt at the White House. She was on the last boat to leave.

“‘Maj. Butt escorted me to a seat in the bow,’ she said …. ‘He helped me find a space, arranged my clothing about me, stood erect, doffed his hat and smiled and said Good-bye. And then he stepped back to the deck, already awash. As we rowed away we looked back, and the last I saw of him he was smiling and waving his hand to me.'”

Roosevelt and Taft alike were devastated. At the memorial service for Archie, in Georgia, Taft could hardly keep his composure. He said something that any person would be proud to have said about him: “When I heard the ship had sunk, I knew Archie must have perished. As long as there was one other person alive on deck, Archie Butt would have made sure that person received preference to himself.”

We are reminded of Christ’s words, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life…” In Archibald Butt’s case, there also was the matter of duty. His story, and others, provide some of the compelling reasons that The Titanic disaster will always speak to us.

Another story that has lived in legend is that the ship’s band, a string quartet, played music, heroically, calmly, almost stoically abstract, until The Titanic sank beneath the icy surface. They played the old hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Again: What were people made of a hundred years ago? Would we see their like today? Perhaps: we remember Todd Beamer – “Let’s roll!”

Then, as now, and throughout human history, the God component always seems to be a part of these stories. “Nearer, my God, to Thee.” That old hymn was on President McKinley’s lips when he died of an assassin’s bullet; and countless others have been blessed by the words.

“If on joyful wing, cleaving the sky,
Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upwards I fly,
Still all my song shall be:
Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

Births… death… times of crisis and stress… It only feels at those life-moments that we are closest to God because… we are. Better put, He is closest to us. Best put, at those moments we make ourselves aware of His presence. He is always there.

Have you ever wished that sometimes God would shout instead of whisper, when we need reassurance, or guidance? The real problem is not with His voice, but with our ears, our hearts. The next time you face a crisis – God forbid it be as grave as The Titanic’s passengers, but if so, may we all comport ourselves as honorably as Major Butt – hear His words. Remember His promises. Listen for His sweet music.

The Titanic fared ill against an iceberg. But many of its passengers were standing on a solid rock nonetheless.

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Here is an amazing performance of the haunting melody of this classic hymn. Andre Rieu, soloist and conductor of more than 400 brass players, a large orchestra, and a larger chorus.

Click: Nearer, My God, to Thee

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A friend has written a book, to be published soon, about The Titanic’s fateful voyage, through the prism of the unique social conventions – afternoon teas and society’s customs – that largely disappeared from our culture when the great ship did. It is an informative book, and useful (recipes and info about tea) from a recognized expert, Penelope Carlevato.

Click: www.TeaOnTheTitanic.com

4-30-12

I had a friend in college named Danny Platnick. A brilliant but very quirky guy. He never failed to surprise us, his friends, with flashes of brilliance and quirkiness, and sometimes the most random things, which often challenged us to be more random, usually unsuccessfully.

One day we were all talking in the dorm lounge about our homes and families and backgrounds. Our college was in Washington DC; Danny came from Bluefield WV, which seemed light-years farther away than the actual few hours’ drive. We all started to exchange photos of our parents and siblings and homes. Danny pulled a picture from his wallet and passed it around. It was a plain picture of the side of a house, only two windows showing. No front door or back porch. No particularly interesting landscaping.

“Is this your parents’ house?” we asked. “No, it’s the side of my neighbor’s house,” Danny replied. Everyone who had shared photos of front lawns, and fancy cars in the driveways, and swimming pools out back, asked how that snapshot represented his house.

“That’s what I see when I look out my bedroom window,” Danny answered. “This picture reminds me of home.”

I am embarrassed to admit that it was years before I realized that this was not quirky, but wise and almost profound.

My niece Liza – Elizabeth Jane Marschall – died this week. She was born almost 27 years ago with severe birth defects, including cerebral palsy that doctors reckoned froze her at a three-month developmental level all her life. She was not expected to live past a few years, but she did, nurtured by loving care and God’s mysterious grace. She experienced pain in her time; many surgeries and braces; and constantly was connected to tubes and monitors. Medically, she was not inanimate but was termed insensate. Yet she smiled, responded to her mom and to her caregivers, and to expressions of love.

Some churches call the death of a Christian a “home-going,” and so it is. Believers will not just begin the “journey home” to be with Jesus when we die; we already are on that journey.

Liza is healed now, happy, whole, before God’s throne. Unlike some Christians who, perhaps, think too much about certain things, she never had the ability to speculate about angels and wings and harps and being reunited with pets. But now she knows what Heaven is like, and we shall experience paradise for eternity too, some day. And it will be better than anything our imagination or scholarship can suggest.

“In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Jesus assured us. “If it were not so, I would have told you.” This is recorded in John, 14:2. “I go to prepare a place for you.” Without much effort, I can almost imagine Jesus pulling out a snapshot of “home” – Heaven – and showing me a very, very comforting scene indeed. We need frequently to remind ourselves of God’s home, even if we are not quite there yet.

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One of the most beautiful messages, and tunes, you will ever hear – and one of the most touching performances – is “Going Home,” in this clip. The unlikely pairing of a classic musical theme (the Largo movement of Antonín Dvorák’s Ninth Symphony) and Negro spiritual lyrics, this performance is by the amazing Norwegian singer Sissel Kyrkjebø. Backed by an orchestra and church choir, she performed the song in Røros, a charming Norwegian town in the middle of a UNESCO Heritage area.

Click: Going Home

4-23-12

This week, two iconic figures of American culture, both of whom made their marks in the 1970s, died. Chuck Colson was a powerful political operative, convicted felon in the Watergate scandal, and then a leading force in the evangelical church. Levon Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas; played various – and “fused” – forms of country, folk, blues, and gospel music; was a major member of “The Band” that backed Bob Dylan; and became an inspiration to two generations of singers and songwriters.

There is no case to be made for “ideological bookends,” or the irony of two enemies in the culture wars: that is not the fabric I wish to weave. These two men did not face off 40 years ago; Levon, for instance, was not even a part of any major protest movement in the pop music of his day, otherwise a common association.

The lives of these two men, different as they were, offer, I think, powerful lessons for countrymen they leave behind. Their names were seldom paired in a sentence before this week, but should be in a certain way.

They showed us that how you live is important. But how you die is more important.

Colson’s story has become the stuff of legend (in fact, his autobiography, Born Again, was made into a movie): powerful Washington lawyer; connections; joined the Nixon Administration, where his official duties included communication with lobbyists and interest groups, and political strategy, and his unofficial duties included dirty tricks and monitoring “enemies.” He was involved in Watergate and the cover-up, but was convicted of complicity in a break-in and scheme to discredit an anti-war opponent. Colson served time in prison.

Having read C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity, he gave his life to Christ. He witnessed to other inmates in jail. Colson founded Prison Fellowship after his release, and ever after toiled for prisoners’ rights, visitation reform, assistance to families of prisoners, and chapel programs. He founded an institute to enable Christians to be informed and effectively work in today’s society. He became an ardent, and thoughtful, foe of post-modernism. Prison Fellowship, as an evangelical outreach, is active in 114 countries; my son-in-law’s father ministers weekly in Ireland as part of the team there.

Levon Helm, in another corner of the culture, worked in many fields of music as a singer, mandolinist, drummer, and composer (“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”). His dedication to roots music began in the 1960s and ‘70s. He also acted in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “The Right Stuff.” Battling painful cancer of the vocal cords for more than a decade before his death this week, he continued to perform until a couple months ago. Sometimes without singing. Sometimes digging deep, from somewhere, finding the strength and the pipes to sing some lyrics. Amazing. As always.

More and more he came to concentrate on old-time country, gospel, mountain music, and rural blues. This son of a cotton farmer represented something I have long held about the value of tradition, race, and nationhood: no matter where you roam, or how much you explore, or what faraway places you might live in, the best journey is that whose end is right where you started.

Chuck Colson returned to his Savior. Levon Helm returned to his musical roots. What really united this unlikely pair, in my eyes, was that they each completely sold out to the things they loved and knew. Their passion knew no bounds. They each died in the saddle, so to speak – Chuck’s brain hemorrhage came while he was speaking to a church group; Levon performed at his house (“Midnight Rambles”) in Woodstock right to the end. How many of us have that passion… and live with that passion?

We cannot be too sad when people like this leave us. They lived worthwhile lives to the fullest, enduring much even amidst their joy. No less a person than William F Buckley, for instance, doubted and mocked Colson’s conversion at first. Helm felt betrayed by members of The Band and sometimes met resistance to his mixed bag of roots music. But in a sense, passionate fighters like these men did not just die – they LIVED. How they lived is important, but to the rest of us, how they died might be more important.

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A predictable number in Levon’s stage show was the great Carter Family gospel song “No Depression in Heaven.” Purposely, the lyrics were ambiguous about economic or emotional depression – because neither will be there, in God’s place. Here is a stage version from a couple years ago with Levon on the mandolin and the great Larry Campbell among backup, and Sheryl Crow on lead vocals. Great lyrics.

Click: No Depression in Heaven

4-16-12

The gifts of God. Spiritual gifts. The Bible talks about such things. Sometimes even dedicated Christians can lull themselves into thinking that spiritual gifts are activities we are drawn to, ways in which we like to serve, that we then ask God to bless. The twelfth chapter of First Corinthians, however, lists nine specific spiritual gifts of God. One is Faith. Now, if we have the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we have imparted faith. And we can summon faith, to an extent, in our own spirits. But… faith is also a GIFT. When we feel weak, it is not an admission of more weakness, but of assurance, to ask God to grant a gift, an extra measure of faith. He offers it, all the time.

My good friend Melanie Bayless Veteto is our guest today, with a special message on this special subject:

Today my daughter Hazel asked, “What gifts did God give you, Mommy?” She was probably talking about my ability to draw a rainbow with the colors in the proper order, or my highly developed skills that involve scissors, paper, glue, and glitter (both “gifts” particularly impressive to a seven-year-old whose favorite color is pink) but I was happy to interpret her question in a spiritual way. She got me thinking about our spiritual gifts.

Now, I have a sister with a Divine gift of administration, and another with an indisputable gift of helps. My husband has the gifts of evangelism and teaching (and yet, I’m the professional teacher in the family), and my mom has that of hospitality; both of my brothers have strong leadership gifts and my step-dad has the gift of mercy.

But me, my darling Hazel-girl? My gift is faith.

We are all blessed with this one, if we believe that the Holy Spirit lives in us. Even so, some of us have an extra measure of confidence in the One who guards our trust. We have an assurance that in the end, the wrongs will be made right because that’s the promise of the resurrection; we have an assurance that all things will work out for our good because in the end that’s what the scripture says; we have an assurance that what is unseen is the real story of our souls, and that what is seen is only a shadow of our lives. In short, we have the assurance that our faith in God is not misguided and our hope in His word is not misplaced. We know it. We believe it.

I vividly remember the day I received the worst news of my life so far: my father (biological) was dying of metastasized stage IV melanoma. In the events surrounding his final weeks and death I remember driving, driving, driving and desperately looking into every car, and on every face, hoping to see evidence that I was not the only one daily living out one of the worst human situations I could imagine. In spite of my very serious efforts, I never saw anyone else’s pain during those upended weeks. But today, on an ordinary day in my life, I see pain all around: I have a friend who is suffering the collapse of her marriage; another dear one who sits at the hospital bed of her severely handicapped sister, holding her hand and watching her heart fail; another whose daily life is centered around the care and whims of a contentious spouse; an inspiring former pastor who is battling cancer (the cancer seems to be winning); a family whose son is facing diseases that make adults grow weak in the knees; another whose world cannot seem to straighten out no matter what good is granted it, and . . .

… you get the picture. Every day we face the worst situations we can imagine. The human condition is wrought with pain, suffering, and misunderstanding. We really don’t need to look too hard to find it. That is our story.

But here is our song: take heart. Have faith. The story isn’t over yet. Our souls can find strength when we hold fast to what we have been taught about God’s faithfulness, to what we have seen Him do in our past, and to what we have known deeply in our spirits, those assurances granted to us by the Faithful One. Wrongs will be made right, even if we don’t understand it now, and our gift of faith is especially proven in those moments of shadowy, earthly distress and discomfort. If we have faith enough to believe in a Savior, we can find faith enough to trust in His goodness.

My sister (the divinely administrative) sang this beautiful and favored hymn in a clear voice at our father’s funeral. Its message is hope. Its beauty lies in singing praises to the One who gives us song and voice during all our times, including (but not limited to) the run-of-the-mill and the dark and difficult. We sing because we know the eternal outcome is going to be all right.

Therefore, take heart, dear friends. Have faith. Be assured, blessedly, that though your story is difficult, messy, and human, your song will come as you hold fast the faith.

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One of the great gospel songs of the blind poet Fanny Crosby (of the 9000-or-so hymns and poems she wrote) is Blessed Assurance. Sometimes called This Is My Story, This Is My Song. This moving version is sung by thousands of attendees from around the world at the youth rally of Korean Campus Crusade for Christ 2007 in Busan, South Korea.

Click: Blessed Assurance

4-9-12

Happy new year! That’s one way to feel about the first day after Easter. “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” is how Christians of the first centuries would exchange greetings. All things are made new, after the Resurrection. But then, every day should bring the realization of a new life in Christ!

I have been thinking of the first times I heard about Jesus. Too early to remember an exact day, because I was fortunate to be born into a family of believers. “Church-goers.” As a child I had a standard faith – I use the term because it was only in my twenties that I came to an intense, personal knowledge of biblical truth and relationship with Jesus: born again. Yet, early on, seeds were planted; Bible stories were told; verses were memorized; prayers were said; hymns were sung.

Seeds. A good metaphor at Springtime. Not many committed Christians in our culture can say that they only heard about Jesus for the first time in the their twenties or forties. (Hearing the “hard truth” of the Bible, in this culture, is another matter… for another discussion). But almost every new believer will say he or she “returned” to the faith. Seeds, when planted, sometimes lay dormant, but can always sprout.

A “standard” church-going kid, I went through my wise-guy period of rebellion against God in my high-school years. Never an atheist, I veered toward agnosticism, and yapped a lot of skepticism in classes and to friends.

In the cafeteria, there was a kid who was kind of a loner. Not the newspaper-headline kind of loner, just a guy who always pretty much kept to himself. He was a pudgy kid, I don’t think an object of bullying or anything, just kind of private. One day he called me over to where he was eating, alone. I never really had talked to John Frost (what were his parents thinking?) before then.

I remember being impressed, a really nice kid, good conversations, a clever guy. Before I knew it, as natural as anything, he was talking to me about Jesus. He shared a little, but no grilling of me, no “decision” challenge. Every once in a while, thereafter, we would share lunch – I’ll admit that he did more of the inviting than I did – I would share dessert, and he would share Jesus.

I will tell you that Johnny’s quiet witness, as we can call it, had a greater impact than the substance of what he said… or so it seemed to me. The fact that a stranger would do this, non-confrontationally, randomly, bravely, and – what else? – in the purest form of Christian love, impressed me. Later on, it inspired me. How to be gently bold.

Seeds. Can you remember who first told you about Jesus? Most likely it was a parent or grandparent (am I wrong to want to suggest “mother or grandmother”)? Was it a random song on the radio or Christian cartoon on TV? Was it a Sunday School teacher? Almost all of the “yes” answers would still have to trace back to parents who placed us in situations where we could see or hear… where seeds could be planted. Parents, take note.

I certainly can remember the first “hymn” I learned. It is still one of my favorites, not only because of its profound though simple message, but because it always transports me back. “Jesus Loves Me” puts me in the place where God first said Hello to me, where I had an inkling of a loving Savior, where I could believe that I belonged to Him, and where a book called the Bible could hold answers to my questions. Yes, Jesus loves me!

Is that song one of the “seeds” of your faith? Can you remember who first shared Jesus with you? And early, middle, or late in life, did someone else come alongside you to nourish those seeds? In my case, it was a guy named Johnny – a real Spring Frost; maybe an angel – who chatted comfortably about the greatest truths of history, and the neediest needs of my needy heart, in the corner of a high-school cafeteria.

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Click: Jesus Loves Me, This I Know

4/7/2012

RE-POSTED BY REQUESTED. From March 29, 2010, a great Easter-Sunday message.

Here is possibly the most unique, certainly a most memorable, version of the Easter story you might ever see. A little account of a kid’s Easter pageant. Father and son; death and resurrection; humor and Truth.

It is pianist Anthony Burger a few years ago talking about his five-year-old in an Easter pageant. Ironically, not long after this, Anthony himself died, suddenly, at the keyboard on a gospel-music cruise. His life was a mighty testimony… and so was his little boy’s story.

Click: We Shall Behold Him

3-19-12

Over in these parts it’s been a month of pressure, joy, challenges, stress, brokenness, prayer, deadlines, surprises, anticipation, worship, assessment, re-assessment… in other words, not very different than most months; and probably not much different for you. That is, if we want to see things that way – which is a constant temptation.

Looking back on yesterday, do you remember the bad or the good? Thinking of last week, do you remember the frustrations or the joy? Go back a month: do you remember disappointments or promises?

But do we remember Jesus? He, too, was always there. We try to remember Jesus. In any one day, He’s the Jesus of the pressure; He’s the Jesus of the joy; He’s the Jesus of the challenges; He’s the Jesus of the stress; He’s the Jesus of the brokenness; He’s the Jesus of the prayer; He’s the Jesus of the deadlines; He’s the Jesus of the surprises; He’s the Jesus of the anticipation; He’s the Jesus of the worship; He’s the Jesus of the assessments; He’s the Jesus of the re-assessments. And more: of needs, and of healing, and of relationships.

I invite you — especially so that we all don’t start a typical week the typical way — to remember also that He is Fairest Lord Jesus.

Simple: just the loveliest, lovingest, lover of our souls. He’s everything to us… but how often do we just luxuriate in his love? Fall back — trust Him to catch you — and commune for a moment with the Fairest Lord Jesus.

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Enlarge the screen, turn the lights out if you can, watch this music video, and realize that the most beautiful scenes in God’s creation cannot compare to the actual beauty of our loving Savior.

Click: Beautiful Savior

3-12-12

Sixteen years ago, when my wife Nancy was waiting for her heart transplant, our family was led to start a ministry on the Heart Failure floor of Temple University Hospital. Many stories, many salvation decisions, many laughs and tears, many healings, and many mysteries — the sweet God-mysteries — came from the six years we wound up serving patients and their families.

One guy, a rough-cut, white-haired old Italian laborer from New Jersey, was gruff or friendly, depending on his whim. It was usually gruff when we invited him to makeshift services. Vinnie could often be found on the treadmill — I began to suspect that he didn’t need a heart transplant, but was on the floor in some witness-protection program. Some weeks the treadmill was in the solarium, where we held our services, so he occasionally hung around the back door or sat by the window, looking out over Philadelphia, waiting for us all to leave.

Vinnie finally did get his heart. The donor program found a perfect match… on paper. As sometimes happened with heart transplants we witnessed and lived through, “everything” was right, yet Vinnie suffered a stroke on the operating table. He made the usual return to the floor for recuperation, but burly Vinnie started wasting away. He couldn’t move most of his body; he could barely speak; he couldn’t get out of bed, much less hop on the old treadmill.

One Sunday I stopped in Vinnie’s room before our service in the solarium. I small-talked and finally said I had to leave. “Are you going to have the music?” he managed to ask — that’s what he called our services. And I took a cue from the look in his eye. I kidded him: “Hey, buddy, don’t you go anywhere. Church is coming to you this morning.” Everyone who had gathered in the solarium, Nancy and her sermon notes, my kids, even strangers and staff that morning, crowded into Vinnie’s room, spilling out into the hallway. Music and monitors somehow fit in, too, all around his bed.

We opened with prayer, and, in the quiet room, I asked Vinnie if he had a special request. He managed to whisper a gravelly: “Yeah. Can you sing that sparrow song you always sing?”

“His Eye Is On the Sparrow” is based on the sweet promise of Matthew 10:29-31. We often worry about our circumstances – but are we not worth more than sparrows? Even those small birds cannot fall to earth without Father God noticing… and caring. How much more does our Heavenly father love us?

Do YOU always sing this song, or the joy behind its meanings? Do you always remember the promise? Old Vinnie didn’t make it long after that bedside music that he reached out for. But the tears on his face showed that he was at peace with the One who, ultimately and in His loving way, watched over him.

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If big problems or “little things” loom up this week… remember the words of Jesus and, here, the voices of Selah: blessings that will bring you through.

Click: “His Eye Is On the Sparrow”

3-5-12

This week Andrew Breitbart died. Wait, he didn’t just die; it is reported that the 43-year-old “dropped dead while walking outside his house” in Los Angeles. Hyperactive to the last minute, his friends – and opponents – cannot imagine a news cycle these days without his influence.

He was a political activist. Wait, he was more than that: a provocateur, a professional blogger (having helped jump-start the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post before his array of “Big” Breitbart news aggregation sites), the guy behind the expose´ of ACORN and Congressman Anthony Weiner. Unlike most commentators who have reviewed his Roman-candle career, we would like to examine not what he was, but how he got there.

Breitbart was reared by adoptive parents in tony celebrity neighborhoods around Hollywood. He attended Tulane University because of, not despite, its reputation as the nation’s Number One party school. He was a social and political liberal, poster boy of excess. But he followed the news. When Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Andrew watched the hearings and thought a decent man was the victim of what Thomas himself characterized as a “high-tech lynching” because he was Christian and conservative.

Andrew’s worldview turned on a dime. A natural contrarian, perhaps, he viewed political correctness as a putative form of censorship; he espied a cultural war on Christians (even if some Christians did not) and traditional American values; and he enlisted, often as an army of one, in the fight to redeem the culture. He got involved in politics, the media, entertainment, and business. As a human whirlwind, in a few years he inspired liberals to become conservatives, secularists to become crusaders, the indolent to become activists, defeatists to become optimists.

But our look at his life is not about his politics, but his passion. Sometimes wild-eyed and wild-haired, he was a “gonzo” journalist. He said things, and showed up places, and pushed ideas that “normal” people don’t. Thank God for “abnormal,” passion-filled, warriors who believe what they do… and do what they believe. They populate lists of martyrs, and they substitute for the timid amongst us.

They say that converts make the most rabid believers, whether in religion or the realms of addictions. Breitbart converted – a congenital self-assured type, he was open to truth, and converted without ever looking back.

Wait, it wasn’t just him. His father-in-law experienced a similar conversion. Same paradigm, different story, same family. Orson Bean is the famous polymath – actor, comedian, author, raconteur – who has been a show-biz fixture since the 1950s. Movies: Anatomy of a Murder; Being John Malkovich. Stage: Never Too Late; Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? TV: hundreds of appearances on The Tonight Show and To Tell The Truth, also The Twilight Zone; Desperate Housewives. Recordings: Charlie Brown in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Books: M@il for Mikey.

Breitbart’s father-in-law Orson Bean has recounted his own conversion, from a blacklisted actor to a familiar face; from obsessions with sex, alcohol, and drugs to being “clean”; from a trendy scoffer to a born-again Christian. His is a great story, one he recounted in the extremely engaging book, M@il for Mikey.

Wait. If a Christian-conversion story can ever be “normal,” Orson’s is not one of those. We hear many converts say that they developed an “emptiness within,” or created a “void” in their souls by their choices. Orson has a very different, and very unique variation – blue-ribbon theology from this vaunted wit: In a column he wrote called “An Emptiness Only the Holy Spirit Can Fill” (for one of the Breitbart sites!) he posited:

“[When people have used up the temporary highs of sex and drugs and booze and fame and wealth,] they’re still left with a hole in the middle of them that the Creator stuck there, knowing that eventually they’d feel the urge to fill it and do what they had to do to seek Him out.”

In other words, God PUTS this void, this longing, this emptiness in us all… so that we will seek Him. It’s like the Andre Crouch line about Without problems, we couldn’t know how to solve them. It’s like the evangelists’ plea not to be jealous of angels, because they can never know what it is like to be redeemed, to see the light, to convert, to gain a passion, to know what Amazing Grace is.

One of Orson Bean’s revelations came through reading C S Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Another astounding exegetical book of the 20th century is John Stott’s Basic Christianity, a similar book of intellectual blessing. As quoted in a recent issue of Trak Magazine, Stott once said:

“Every Christian should be both conservative and radical; conservative in preserving the faith, and radical in applying it.”

My friend Dan Kimball loves holding up the Ramones as a band, less concerned with success than the sheer joy of making music. Passion! So was the free-spirit Orson Bean in sharing Christ: conservative, radical, passionate. So was his son-in-law Andrew Breitbart, on fire in everything he did, from national issues to texting friends about movies.

So was Jesus. Conservative and radical. And passionate enough to stick it to evil and sin and death, to virtually climb up onto the dirty cross and die for us.

Wait: Jesus’ death substituted for us, but God forbid that we let His love and commitment substitute for our own passions and actions. Get out there! Have you been converted? Do it!

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Orson Bean is even careful to specify Jesus, not Father God (Who sent His Son for this reason) as the answer to the “hole in the middle of us all.”

Click: There’s Just Something About That Name

1-16-12

A friend, Marti Pieper, has a unique ministry. A Christian writer and editor, she writes daily messages and Facebook posts with the simplest messages of what she is praying for that day, or situations people find themselves in, or that they might be facing.

No more, no less. Just sharing what is on her heart. I call them “under the radar” needs of people, for they are common – all too common – needs, and therefore often escape our attention. Even if they pertain to ourselves.

Some of her simple prayers are that she is “praying for those who need a way out”; “praying for those in uncharted territory”; “praying for those who are still waiting”; “praying for those who are learning to be still”; “praying for those who are returning good for evil’; and “thanking God for the little things.”

Such reminders, whether to our own situations or prompting a Christian sensitivity to those around us, in their quiet way usually speak to more urgent agendas than many of the “crises” we face. But then, sometimes we all have a way of putting our concerns into cubby holes – emergencies and predicaments, those categories at one end; or nagging, everyday headaches at the other.

But I suspect that God does not differentiate much between these, in the manner of one sin being as offensive as any sin in His eyes. That is, I cannot believe that He categorizes His responses to our prayer requests. We are His children; He responds as a perfect Father. The cries of our hearts must be all the same to Him.

It is more the case, rather, that WE categorize our prayers. Have you ever been too guilty to ask full forgiveness? or reluctant to lay everything before God (who knows all anyway)? or convinced that some things are too trivial to become petitions? If so, we are virtually breaking a commandment, because the Bible instructs us “in EVERYTHING by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6).

A propos of nothing, except Marti’s Attitudinal Ministry, and some news stories about drug and alcohol statistics, I got to thinking this week about people struggling with addictions. The “larger” factors on the radar screen are that God can deliver, and we can lead cleansed lives. But the “common” aspects of addiction include struggle, backsliding, and temptation. It is tragic when people, even believers, think that these so-called minor issues are not important; that, having experienced deliverance, they cannot admit to the presence of echoes; that knowing the answers does not keep the questions from their minds. AA has it right; alcoholics remain alcoholics – some people just stop drinking.

None of these thoughts are technicalities: I believe they represent basic life principles. I believe it is a mistake when Christians say, as we often do, “OK, I get it, God; I’ll take it from here,” and we wipe the dust from our hands. In fact the proper response after answered prayer is to stay on our knees, and confess to our continuing need for Him – continued reliance – not some sort of liberation from Him.

Sometimes a proper prayer is to confess our inability apart from God, and to plead that old temptations simply be removed. In that regard, it is a sign of strength (even though we can beat ourselves up, thinking it is otherwise) because that is showing faith in Him and what He can do, instead of pride in our selves. “Lead us not to temptation”; “deliver us from evil.”

A great musical exposition of this principle is the song by T Graham Brown, “Help Me Turn the Wine Back Into Water.” The miracle at Feast of Cana is the reference, of course; but these lyrics acknowledge that another miracle of God could be deliverance from addiction… and yet another, from the same miracle-working God, could be that He just run interference in the middle of situations.

“I’ve tried to fight this battle by myself,
But it’s a war that I can’t win without Your help….
I shook my fist at heaven for all the hell that I’ve been through;
Now I’m begging for forgiveness and a miracle from You….
And now, on my knees, I’m turning to You, Father –
Could You help me turn the wine back into water?”

In truth, the “large” and “small” battles are the same: they are all battles, and in the wars of life we cannot win any of them without God’s help, His continuous help.

Be “praying for the small battles of life.”

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Here is T Graham Brown’s powerful lament – another reminder to Christians of God’s irony that only our complete surrender leads to our victories.

Click: “Help Me Turn the Wine Back Into Water”

12-26-11

The two men were good friends, “brothers” with the same sense of humor, who shared interests, and who could finish each other’s sentences. Ed was passionate about politics, but Kenneth was totally apolitical, so disagreements on that score never arose. Kenneth was also areligious – somewhere between agnostic and intellectual hipster – so the fervent Christian Ed found a challenge in his friend. Kenneth never objected to debating or receiving tracts or casual points or heavy witnessing. But he never cared much either, one way or the other.

Ed moved away from their “zone” of neighborhood contacts and frequent lunches. Several states (geographical, not psychic) separated them. Their friendship and common profession mandated continued contact, but, as these things usually go, they spoke less frequently.

After one quiet stretch, Kenneth called Ed and learned that an enormous amount of “life” had occurred since their last chat.

Ed went down a sad checklist: his work had dried up, and money was scarce. His wife was extremely sick with multiple ailments, and there was no insurance to cover the situations. Ed’s mother was dying in far-off Florida, and on the way to the train station he was rear-ended at a red light, and his only car was totaled. “Those are just the highlights,” Ed joked in their typical fashion. “It gets pretty grim after that. But we’re OK now.”

“How are you OK?” Kenneth knew that Ed was being serious here.

“Well, it was a series of amazing events, really,” Ed said. “My wife is in pretty good shape now – the doctors were good and performed terrifically, but in a couple of instances they saw healings they couldn’t explain. After the first hospitalization, a friend in church who is an insurance agent told me that my business activities, though slim, actually qualified us for a group plan. We signed up, and there was full coverage for the later surgeries, not even a ‘cap.’”

Kenneth slipped into his old mode: “So, don’t tell me, your mother rose from the dead.”

“No, she died, but I was able to be with her in time and share a beautiful Good-Bye. While I was gone, some friends in church whose house is so big they almost have their own Zip Code, took the kids in and drove them to school each morning. And the car? Yes, it was totaled, but our pastor lent us his van – an extra since his daughter went to college, for as long as we needed it.

“God seemed to provide at every turn.”

Kenneth was silent for a moment. When he spoke, it surprised Ed slightly. “You know, you’re always saying how God provides this, and Jesus answered that. Why don’t you listen to what you just said? The doctors were good, on their own. Your friend was looking for an insurance commission. It was friends who offered their house to your kids, not Jesus. And the van was a spare in the driveway. It was your FRIENDS who did these things for you, not Jesus.”

Now Ed was silent for a moment. “No… it was Jesus,” he said. “He was just working through my friends.”

Christmas is over, but the Gift remains. No, let us put it the proper way – Christmas is over, and the Gift remains! Hallelujah! A gift can be seen as neutral, by itself. Its significance derives from who gives it; the intention of the giver; the attitude of the recipient; the use to which the gift is put. Christ was God Incarnate, God with us, our means to forgiveness, salvation, eternal fellowship with God. We accept Jesus into our hearts. But what we DO with this Gift from God is the real significance.

Jesus “in our hearts” is not to hide Him, but to make Him part of our relational DNA, an aspect of our new selves. It can happen. He shines forth, He affects our natures. We show Him, we share Him. That is the real gift – the miracle of Christmas. You don’t have to hunt ancient or arcane scripture to see this happen.

Just ask Ed.

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Joy Williams has written an anthem about what it means to be a Christian. First, to accept Him. Second, to “be” Him to other people. That’s not a long list. But Joy puts it so beautifully.

Click: Do They See Jesus in Me?

12-5-11

Storms of life are to be expected, and in a way are even promised by God. The rain falls on the just and unjust. This is – in God’s providence – entirely compatible with the verse that “all things work for good… for those who love God.”

Sometimes we feel like “taking on” that storm, letting the raindrops sting our faces. Sometimes we pray for an umbrella. Sometimes we plead for a mighty fortress, for we wrestle not just against men and princes, but against powers of the air, for which storms are metaphors.

Yet we need to remind ourselves that as horrible as a storm can seem, God is above all these things. Sometimes behind those things, like the sunshine behind the storm clouds. And more than that – much more! a great comfort! – we know the Master of the wind and the Maker of the rain. He can calm a storm, make the sun shine again.

You know the Master of the wind. And He knows you.

“There’s many a true word spoken in jest,” and a good friend, Mike Atkinson, proves it jest about every day in a site everyone should visit and subscribe to, “Mikey’s Funnies.” Recently amidst the wise humor and humorous wisdom was some straight-out Good Words that puts the truth of this in a simple and direct fashion. Brilliant:

“Stop telling God how big your storm is. Tell the storm how big your God is.”

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The words “Master of the Wind” above are the chorus lines of the great Gospel written by Joel Hemphill. And the site for the terrific “Mikey’s Funnies” is www.mikeysfunnies.com — be sure to catch the ministry Mike supports, too, the Marine Recruit Letter-Writing Campaign.

Click: The Master of the Storm

11-21-11

Thanksgiving. Let’s see… that’s the one between Halloween and Christmas. “Turkey Day!” The day before the big sales. Autumn decorations – think yellows and oranges. Football! Those big games out in the crisp air, or – one after another – on TV all day long.

Once upon a time, Thanksgiving was a day of observance, set aside to thank God for His gifts. Now, the mention of God is an indictable offense in public schools, as proscribed as teaching that Christian Pilgrims gathered to give thanks for bountiful harvests. The closest children can be to a spiritual aspect of this “holiday” (holy-day?) outside the fortress-walls of their homes and churches, still, is a vague acknowledgment of Mother Nature. Thank… who? For… what?

So it is that Thanksgiving has become one more holiday in an annual American cycle where every month has the possibility of a long weekend built in (August is the slacker). But I invite us to step back a few steps, even a few years. Let us think about Thanksgiving.

When the Pilgrims had their feast, and prayers, it was indeed to raise praises to God for peace with the natives, for establishments of their communities, for a bountiful harvest. When George Washington proclaimed Thanksgiving, it was to bless God for the successful Revolution and for the foundations of a new nation. When Abraham Lincoln issued the first of the unbroken string of presidential proclamations in 1863, it was to ask forgiveness of God, and to thank Him for protection through a Civil War. In a Thanksgiving Proclamation of Theodore Roosevelt, he said: “The things of the body are good; the things of the intellect better; but best of all are the things of the soul,” and he besought Americans to respond to God’s gifts with gratitude and to fight for righteousness.

Without disregarding any of those ideals and values (contemporary culture is doing that, very well, by itself) I wonder if we can step back even further, so to speak. And thank God for more than harvests and prosperity and victories. Think about it – we thank God for Jesus (um, that’s our Christmas compartment); we thank God that Jesus died for our sins (check: Easter)… and so on.

Surely we don’t need a special day to thank God for being God (but Thursday will do), or to thank Him for things we don’t often think about.

This week I received a stunning video, produced by the group TED (Technology, Education, Design), forwarded to me by my friend Mike Atkinson. It features the imagist Alexander Tsiaras, and the title is Conception to Birth. Tsiaras has photographed, filmed, and recreated the development of a baby in the womb, and through the birth canal, to delivery. We see the tiniest cells and the most detailed pictures of beating hearts and evolving, folding brain components. He opens with an explanation of what we will see, and how he did it; and he closes with details of the miracle that is the human body, and the implausibility (for he is a mathematician, among other things) of the wonderful workings of the human body.

How do we react to such acts of God? The voluble scientist Tsiaras keeps returning to the words “Divine,” and “Divinity.” For me, I was awestruck. In my dank past I was one of those “blob” adherents regarding the unborn. Eventually, like Ann Coulter, I came to realize the logical challenge inherent in the question: “Why is it called Birth Control and not Blob Control?” And after watching this video several times, my additional reactions are also wonderment, and tears.

And can we not all respond to things we take for granted – life, the miracles of our bodies, everyday protections, health, simple blessings, friends, and communities of believers – with Thanks?

Maybe, this year, we can keep the decorations in the closet; the dinner-table harvest-sentiments at bay; and some of the football games at low-volume. And “automatic” prayers. At least for a little while… let us Think before we Thank.

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This video, likewise, should not be compartmentalized for, say, “Sanctity of Life” Day. Life is sacred every day – and this vid shows us how we all got here, surely a miraculous thing to contemplate every day of the year. If the video does not link, Google for Tsiaras and “Conception to Life” and you will find it. Its production is, itself, a miracle… for it brings us closer to the Creator God. By the way, I particularly appreciate the background music as the speed-motion development of a baby is shown: Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria. Glorious indeed.

Click: Give Thanks For the Divine Spark

10-10-11

Steve Jobs died this week. For many years to come, the assessments of his remarkable career will scroll down the screens of our lives. In fact they will be innumerable as his inventions and innovations. For he did not teach people how to speak, but he taught how to communicate in new ways. And how to compose, to organize, to perceive, to create, to share… to dream in new ways. He simultaneously enabled people to realize the existence of new horizons, and believe they actually could reach them. At the same time he developed of array of devices that drive people into “virtual” monastic cocoons.

Things he did in the tech world were not only innovations in concept or manufacture: they were seeds planted, sure to grow and grow… perhaps even in ways that America’s Dreamer-in-Chief would never have dreamed.

But another reason he will be written about with increasing avidity is the simple reason that, ultimately, very little was known during his lifetime about his lifetime. He was very private, which is refreshing in this celebrity-addicted culture. What do we know of the man apart from Apple, the iColossus catalog, Pixar? It is reported that Jobs was adopted, and that his natural father, an immigrant from Syria named Abdulfattah Jandali, never was able to receive responses from Jobs after reaching out by many letters and e-mails. Turning from the preceding to the following generation, Jobs fathered an illegitimate daughter whose paternity he denied for years, even swearing in court that he was infertile. He eventually acknowledged being his daughter’s father.

We know that he was a college drop-out. We know that he married Laurene Powell in a Buddhist ceremony at Yosemite. We know that they had three children. Some people are drawn to the fact – in this economy such things have relevance – that Apple did not start or subsist on government handouts and bailouts. We hear that he left at least four years’ worth of new ideas and agenda items as a part of his legacy. But we also hear that he was a workplace monster, employed police-state tactics (on his staff, not the competition), and not only outsourced from the US to China, but that Apple’s exclusive factories in China were disgraceful, overcrowded sweatshops.

Speaking personally – and I love everything in the App Store – two impressive things about Steve Jobs’ life (personal, not professional) are that when he was fired from his own company in its “down” days, he persevered, believed in his visions – in himself – to the extent that he not only roared back, but roared back at the helm of his own, former, company. Further, at least from meager accounts, it seems that in nervous start-up days, periods of risky experimentation, good times, public skepticism, several setbacks, triumphs, wild adulation, harsh criticism… his wife and children always believed in him. Sycophants, stockholders, nor investors cannot replace such a thing. Without it, a man fights insecurity, emotional emasculation, and uncountable stumbling blocks in life. Jobs evidently was blessed in ways that were not apparent to the public.

Perhaps it was that precious gift that led to reports we have of Steve Jobs’ last days. The writer Walter Isaacson was chosen by Jobs to write a biography, knowing his days were numbered. And from what that book will tell, a priority of Jobs’ last weeks was to draw a few friends, but especially his wife and children, around his deathbed.

Isaacson quotes Jobs in his last meeting: “I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

And a friend, Dr Dean Omish, quoted one of their last conversations to The New York Times: “Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done’.”

Would billions of MAC users and iPhone, iPad, iTunes users (and on and on); would they exchange their toys and tools for the chance that Steve Jobs could have been closer to his kids, that he could have “been there” more often? It is an artificial alternative: it’s not a choice anyone has to make, but it sets us to thinking. It set him to thinking in his last hours. There were choices he made.

We come into the world naked, and we leave just about the same way. “Accomplishments” and resume aside, we just have our family on one side of the line, and eternity on the other. I don’t know the state of Steve Jobs’ soul. If biographers and friends write 100 books, I still would not know: that was between him and the Supreme Friend we can know, Jesus. Surely during his 56 years Steve Jobs had that choice presented to him.

Neither do we know the answer to a question that ought to challenge us. When he said, “I want my kids to know me,” and having kids was “10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done,” were those the satisfied words of a man writing the codes of his last earthly chapters? Or an anguished cry of a smart man who could program everything except his own peace?

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This video is a tender song about that last but most important question we will have to answer. It is not the old hymn of the familiar title, but a recent song with an age-old challenge… and a tender invitation.

Click: Tenderly Calling

8-22-11

I currently am reading Timothy Keller’s book The Reason for God – rather overdue on my part – and enjoying his manner of sharing the Gospel with his congregation at Redeemer Church in Manhattan. “Enjoying” is an insufficient description – I am intrigued, challenged, provoked.

The book wastes no pages before listing Keller’s responses to contemporary culture’s main “problems” with what he calls his orthodox Christianity: hewing to scripture, stressing personal salvation, the centrality of Jesus. Many of the questions he confronts are variations of a basic challenge to the existence of God Himself. It is not new; it has been asked by skeptics, non-believers, and anguished doubters throughout history. “How can I believe in a God who…”. The sentences end with questions about “allowing” sickness, “overseeing” brokenness and hatred, “watching Christians kill each other.”

Keller brilliantly parries the arguments of those who claim a better, or “higher,” morality than the Bible’s; and who maintain that the natural state of the universe, and the universe’s inhabitants, can admit to no God of any sort.

I would like to linger a moment at what I feel is a proper response to the traps and trappings of a culture that tries to wash God out of the fabric of society, which is a related topic. Many well-meaning Christians are seduced by the argument that we are so inferior to a Just and All-Powerful God that we must, therefore, feel inferior to an indiscriminate degree, and adopt inferiority in all manners. This attitude is not humility, but error. It can make people insecure about their standing as children of God; it can make them susceptible to arguments for a more “logical” conception of God. And this, after all, is the oldest lie in the Book.

It could be that contemporary culture’s problem is not a faulty belief in God, but a mistaken understanding that He believes in US. Of course I do not mean that He has abdicated His throne. But He believes that we can overcome, we can be more than conquerors, we are citizens of Heaven.

We can know this is true because, when we have accepted Jesus into our hearts, God does not see us any more in our sins. He sees Jesus instead, the Jesus within us.

God does not look upon our dirty rags. He sees the blood shed on the cross, under which we are covered.

God does not dither over our quirks, transgressions, and shortcomings. If we are truly repentant and are born again, He sees the Holy Spirit that lives within us. That is why God sent the Holy Ghost!

When we spiritually see God’s viewpoint aright, we should be embarrassed ever again to do other than to boldly approach the Throne of Grace. Not to presume upon God, but to recognize our status as joints heirs with Christ!

How many Christians spend a lot of the their prayer life (or abandon it altogether!) reminding God over and over and over again of things He has already forgotten! For when we repent in the name of our elder brother Jesus, God has said He will throw our sins into the Sea of Forgetfulness.

Does God believe in US? The plan of salvation, the work of the cross, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, would be wasted if He did not! Strive to be worthy, and claim your inheritance!

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Click: God Believes In You

8-8-11

Life happens. As they say. How do we respond? Sometimes we see through a glass darkly. Sometimes we proceed in blind faith. Sometimes we pray to discern God’s will. Sometimes we meditate upon His Word.

My idea is that God does not always hand us multiple-choice quizzes. Sometimes we can do all these things together. They are not mutually exclusive.

Some of my recent meditations are perfectly reflected in the lyrics of a country song from a few years ago:

The Mystery of the Wonders You Perform

Oh Lord, you know that I’m not one to bother you with little things,
And you and I have never been too close.
But we’ve always been on speaking terms, I’ve watched your way of doing things,
And tried to understand you more than most.

No, I haven’t gone to church the way I ought to,
But I always thought you knew in my own way I worshipped you.
While even your own children doubt, and fail to understand
The simple way you go about the things you do.

I’ve seen the doubt upon the face
Of loved ones, as they sadly placed a wreath of flowers on a tiny grave,
And wondered why a child is brought into the world
To only live a little while and die, you could have saved.

But I believe that in your eyes this little child was something special
And you wanted it to be with you, no doubt;
So with outstretched arms you beckoned, so simple, that I reckoned
They can’t understand the way you worked it out.

Once I saw a young man growing till he neared the age of knowing,
Then I watched as something happened to his mind.
No doctor could correct it, it was just as I suspected,
And I marveled at your way of being kind.

They tried everything in vain, and I was there when they explained
To the family, how he slipped into a trance.
I guess you looked into the future, watched him turn his back upon you,
Loving him so much you couldn’t take the chance!

It took a lot of love to die for sinners such as I,
And I guess that’s why you’ve never given up on me.
You understood when some denied you, even when they crucified you,
Knowing all these things were meant to be.

The stable’s such a simple thing, no wonder there were few who came
To see a king the night that you were born.
And I’d ask one favor if I can, help me to better understand
The mystery of the wonders You perform,

The mystery of the wonders You perform.

Writer: Jerry Chesnut, copyright 1970.

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Please listen to the moving performance, and watch the tender pictures. And meditate.

Click: The Mystery of the Wonders You Perform

8-1-11

As I write this, as you read this, the “debt deal” – negotiations about the debt ceiling, the possible national bankruptcy, the gargantuan deficits, problems with the onerous tax code – are being solved. Or not. Or there will a crisis in the markets soon. Or not. Or America’s credit rating will be downgraded. Or not. If so, it will have long-term toxic consequences. Or not. Forget my dateline – I am certain that if you read this 10 years hence, or 25, the problems and the arguments and the crisis will be little changed. Except, perhaps, for the worse.

At best, the solutions of this “debt crisis” – and I don’t know the details, even if an agreement is signed; and I wonder whether the negotiators themselves really will understand what they hammer out – will be a tip-of-the-iceberg tinkering with numbers that represent a fraction of the problem. The monster has a foot in the door, and maybe we will clip a toenail. The choices in this crisis are like many of the choices in this contemporary world, this Brave New World, the post-modern and Post-Christian era: the choices being Bad and Worse.

So the long, gray twilight of interminable foreign wars, foretold by George Orwell and so many others as hallmark of national decline, will be reflected in endless scenarios of edge-of-the-cliff, floating over the waterfall, brink-of-disaster financial wars. To acknowledge such things is not to trust God less. He can ache for revival in our land, but it is not in His nature to force it. He will bless it, of course, if we bring it about.

To acknowledge such things, however, is to trust, not doubt, the Word of God. These types of events are prophesied in His Word, and have preceded the destruction of every civilization the Bible, and history books, have ever discussed. “American Exceptionalism” does not mean that we are somehow excepted from judgment, from the consequences of our own actions.

The blooming flowers of the Enlightenment (whose leading lights like Isaac Newton in science, and Johann Sebastian Bach in the arts, were devout Christian) and Constitutional Republicanism were beautiful and hearty in mankind’s garden for a time. Then the noxious weeds of Marxism, Darwinism, and democracy spread, seeking to choke out what they may. We are seeing them succeed, for most peoples are now complicit in the New Age proposition that the state can be God, that the state can play the part of God, that they state can judge like God, that the state should compel its subjects to a) subscribe to certain beliefs and b) respond to the state’s requirements anent those beliefs.

Literature’s grand portrait of the mordant but prescient skeptic, Vanya Karamazov, spoke the truth to our own times – Dostoyevsky saw it coming – “If we regard God as dead, anything is permitted.”

Implicit in the US and Europe today is the idea that there is no God. Oh, the modern State says, if you want to believe in a God, we will allow you to. Within limits. Never in history has there been such a complete but bloodless invasion and surrender of a culture. Western Christians have tossed away their crowns and affixed shackles to themselves in only a few generations.

Meanwhile, the reminders of the real New World Order will grow grimmer and closer to home every single day. The evidence is no longer abstract or theoretical. It is becoming things like deciding between medical bills and mortgage payments; like daily news stories of Christian persecution home and abroad; like a runaway ruling class harassing us in myriad ways. Once we worried about planes being hijacked to Cuba; now we fret about politicians hijacking our future.

More than a century and a half ago, the greatest American songwriter wrote a song, Hard Times, Come Again No More. It was not the most famous of Stephen Foster’s many popular tunes… but it has grown to have tremendous impact in our day. It has been recorded by a wide variety of singers and choirs, in different styles. Curiously – or not – it has taken on the status of an anthem in Ireland. Foster is being claimed as Irish-American, although he was born outside Pittsburgh. But we are happy to share him: this song, especially, speaks these days to our common reactions to hard times and hard news.

The Irish, put down for so long in their history, had a brief period in the sunshine with the “Celtic Tiger” of a business boom. Now the Irish are laid low again – economically if not in spirit, for I have been there and have seen certain seeds of rebirth. Even as the Church reels from shameful scandal, there is a revival afoot in small and home churches.

It is not pessimistic, not even fatalistic, but provides a sort of therapy to identify with the poor and downtrodden, and to know where we might be coming from… if we are, somehow, able to revive ourselves. This video is of the Irish singer Tommy Fleming singing Hard Times to an enormous auditorium. Watch the audience, more than him: holding hands, swaying, smiling – leave it to Irish to make an anthem of a dirge.

“Hard times, come again no more”? You know, this is at base not an economic question, but a spiritual one. Its answer is still ours to make.

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The video of the audience joining Tommy Fleming and band singing Stephen Foster’s Hard Times, Come Again No More.

Click: Hard Times, Come Again No More

7-18-11

My daughter Heather does something that, frankly, startled me the first time I saw it. When she was young she started talking to God.

I don’t mean praying, she did that too. I don’t mean talking about God, she did that too. When she was alone, puttering around her room or walking through the yard, she would talk to God. Like she would talk to friend… which He is. Like He was there… which He was, and always is. Small talk, thoughts, even things to laugh about. Life.

She didn’t “hear voices.” God was her friend, and she talked to Him as a friend would.

I think the contemporary church has lost a lot of the traditional reverence for God that once was commonplace. But at the other end of the spectrum – and, remember, God is a spectrum as wide as the east is from the west – I think we have also lost some of the intimacy that God offers us, and desires with us.

“Friendship with Jesus, fellowship divine! Oh, what blessed sweet communion – Jesus is a friend of mine!” goes the gospel song.

Too many times we see prayer as a fire-extinguisher, behind glass to be broken, and used at times of crisis. Or, we remember to pray especially when we have praise, or to give thanks… that is at the other end of the spectrum, too. But God is jealous, I believe, of the “middle” in our lives. He wants us to talk to Him not only during troubles or joy, but in between, at all times.

“Jealous”? Yes, I believe that. God desires to hear from us, continually, in all circumstances; to commune with us. I have often reminded myself (maybe not often enough) that if I turn most often to God when things are going bad, maybe it’s within God’s nature to send some “things going bad” my way. I don’t believe that is the case with sickness or disease, no, but there are many things we think are trouble at the time, and might indeed be difficult, but when we look back at them, we see that we drew closer to God or learned wisdom. Or prayed more.

Better to keep that communication going, and maybe God won’t need to rattle our cages as often! Is that faulty theology? It has been true in my life, and for my life. How about you?

Don’t be a stranger. Your Friend is close by, and He’s all ears.

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A song on this theme is Dottie Rambo’s I Just Came to Talk with You, Lord, I believe one of the last songs written by this gifted singer/songwriter before her death in 2008. It is emotionally performed by Sheri Easter.

Click: I Just Came to Talk With You, Lord

6-20-11

Theodore Roosevelt, about whom I currently am writing a biography, began his own autobiography – the story of a crowded life and successful careers – with the sentence “My father was the best man I ever knew.”

Surely, no man could desire a better epitaph. Such an assessment by one’s children is worth more to one’s soul than material success or inventories of accumulations. Even the plaudits of peers or hoped-for “posterity” are fickle and, in the end, worthless. Fathers who have earned the loving respect of children do not need such things; and without the sincere regard of one’s children, other things seem meaningless.

These are universal truths. It matters little whether you meditate on them from the perspective of being a father or being a son or daughter; whether your father has passed on or is still with you. I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that if you are reading this, you have a father. And let’s say that you cannot quite quote Theodore Roosevelt about your own dad, think for a second about words attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to be around him. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

There is, in the Bible, a concept called the “Scarlet Thread of Redemption,” where the person, and the work, of Christ, is seen in countless prophecies, references, allusions, allegories, types, numerologies, before His coming, apart from His immediate incarnation. So it is – or should be – with our families, and our fathers. We cannot be free of examples and influences, words and advice. We cannot even escape what every generation of human history but our own has believed in: bloodlines, tendencies, inherited talents. “We are our fathers’ children” is meant to convey the inevitable patrimonies we inherit.

In the rare and sorry cases where fathers are not the role models we wish for – like some Dickens characters – it is still wise for us to learn and know about our families’ pasts. For correction, for reproach, as curatives. In my own case, I can state a variation on TR’s tribute: my own father was the best friend I ever had. Every project I do, I wonder how he would like it; every week, I start to reach for the phone to share something he would find interesting. But he has been gone for more than a dozen years.

But this is not about my father, or me as a father; or your father; or – stick with me – even on Father’s Day, any mortal fathers. God did not put any qualifiers on the Commandment. “Honor your father and your mother.” Nothing about “if” this or that; or “after” they have proven themselves. Think of another famous Father in the Bible – remember when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac: a father should sacrifice his son??? God intervened, of course, when Abraham showed his obedience, and then our minds rush forward – along the Golden Thread of Fatherhood – and realize that we had a picture of our Heavenly Father willing to sacrifice for the sake of history’s children, all of us, uncountable numbers except to Him, “for He so loved the world.”

As good a man, as good a friend, as we have in this world; or try ourselves to be, or ever hope to be, is nothing compared to the love of Father God. In this regard, every day of the year should be FATHER’S Day. And at the end of our days, if our children can say (doubly paraphrasing), “Well done, good and faithful father,” then we are blessed indeed.

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I have chosen a memorable and beautiful song, “Going Home,” to illustrate this message. It has been a Negro spiritual, hymn, and folk song; its tune is taken from, of all things, Antonin Dvorak’s 9th Symphony (which, in turn, had relied on American folk melodies). Clearly, it sings of death… but in the context of that precious tradition I spoke of, of family-generations not being separate things, but close parts. One day we shall not only share eternal life, but be reunited with mother and father who, the song says, “are waiting there; expecting us.” The performance is by the astonishingly impressive London boys’ choir called Libera. This will move you.

Click: Going Home

5-30-11

Hey, Soldier. Or Sailor, Airman, Marine. Late servicemen, fallen or passed on.

It’s Memorial Day. Your day.

Back when all the holidays meant something – and meant something different – this began as “Decoration Day.” When people decorated military graves, or commemorative statues, or monuments and plaques.

That’s why I’m addressing you as one group, and anonymously, because Decoration Day was designed to memorialize, to remember and honor, dead servicemen and women. All of you. You know, on the Fourth of July we celebrate our independence; on Veterans’ Day we honor the retired military among us.

That’s the way it was supposed to be. Decoration Day was changed to Memorial Day, maybe because the act of placing flowers and flags was becoming an empty gesture. Or simply wasn’t being done that much anymore. Whatever: most Americans think of it now as “the beginning of summer,” the vacation season. So, backyard barbecues have replaced parades and cemetery services.

Maybe that’s what you fought for, and many of you died for. “The American Way of Life.” My dad didn’t fight in World War II because he hated the Nazis or Japs like the government told him to; he didn’t even believe that Main Streets in the American heartland were about to be invaded. He volunteered and served because it was his duty. That’s another old-fashioned concept.

The dirty little secret about history is that the best fighting forces have met success not because they hated, but because they loved. You American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines, in your graves through the land – throughout the world, sometimes buried where you fell – loved the flag, loved your people, your homes, your Main Streets; and you loved the concepts of duty and honor.

Most of you guys are probably like my father, and would tell me that you just “did what you had to do,” and most of your kids are probably like me, in awe of dedication and sacrifice. You would tell us to honor the people in uniform right now, and we do.

I am aching to ask you questions, if I could: is it different now? Today we fight enemies so far from our shores, toward a victory that has not been defined. So often fulfilling missions to build roads and schools and deliver classroom computers, when back home here, where many military spouses are on food stamps, there are American communities in need of roads and schools and classroom computers.

I know one thing that’s not different, because I have met some of the returning service people today, and have seen them on TV too. The uniforms still grace good people; people who have a sense of honor and duty; brave people who serve because service is honorable.

So maybe if anything is different now, it’s not the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines; and maybe, when all is said and done, it’s not so much the service they are asked to perform. Maybe the biggest difference is what kind of America they have been fighting for, what Main Streets they return to. I pray they are not much different than those of your day.

… but it was you men and women, now in your graves and represented in those memorials, who brought us to the point where we can even discuss these questions. You didn’t give us Freedom – God did that – but you all defended it. You knew the difference, and you did it well. Often it was brutally difficult, and usually it was far, far away from your homes.

So I’m going to tell you about trips we will take, many of us, this Memorial Day. Not as far away as your places of service and sacrifice. Some of us are not close to our relatives’ military graves, but all of us are close to some military grave or memorial. I am going to suggest that we, the living, pick some flowers or buy some flowers, or get a little flag, and visit a military cemetery. Or any cemetery, and then look for a military emblem on the stone. Or a town’s war memorial. We are going to place a “decoration,” maybe a thank-you letter or a prayer, to brighten your memory and honor you… whoever you are. We are going to pray thanksgiving for your service. For those of us who cannot get out, we are going to make that trip in our minds.

I look forward to visiting the grave of a stranger. I will symbolically shake your hand, and salute you. You represent much that was great about America. You represented us. God bless you.

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Many songs – patriotic, traditional, military – could follow this message. I have chosen this old Johnny Cash recitation that decorates the memories of our late military members with the colors red, white, and blue.

Click: That Ragged Old Flag

5-16-11

I am rounding out the week at the Colorado Christian Writer’s Conference in Estes Park. One of the two such annual events chaired by Marlene Bagnull (the other is in Philadelphia in August), this conference is a magnet for veteran writers, aspiring writers, editors, and publishers. It overflows with practical training and teaching, but not the least of its offerings –- and blessings -– is the spiritual uplift.

Despite this economy, registration was higher this year then last year. Creative people are more passionate about telling God’s story (“Writing His Message,” from Habakkuk 2:2) than ever! And there is a message to tell.

The theme of this year’s conference, for the morning and evening sessions and keynotes, was the crisis in the culture, writers being engaged to save our nation.

It struck me that over the course of the week, no matter what the focus, there was a unifying theme. Of course the decaying culture, and other obvious headlines, connected the dots of all the talks and presentations. But an underlying subtext –- one that should grieve us all -– became evident in spite of ourselves.

To speak about decline in morals and the media… we recognize that children are prime targets.

To speak about human trafficking… children are the victims.

To speak about the AIDs crisis in Africa… children suffer as the infected AND as orphans.

To speak about the persecuted church worldwide… children are the battleground of cultures suppressing Christianity.

In America – drugs: children. Education: children. Pornography: children. Poverty: children. Homelessness: children. Broken homes: children. Abortion: children.

It is a cliché to say that children are our future. But clichés are clichés because they are, first of all, true. However, children do not HAVE to be the first-in-line victims of a culture in decline. But they are. They cannot defend themselves; they believe what the culture tells them; they are the most vulnerable.

Let us remember the children -– care for them, protect them, cleanse their environment. If one generation messed up, maybe the best thing we can do –- not the only thing, but surely the BEST thing –- is beg forgiveness and leave them a better world.

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Here is a tender lullaby Slumber My Darling, written more than 150 years ago by a man I am increasingly persuaded was America’s greatest composer, Stephen Foster. It is performed by Alison Kraus, (amazing) vocals; and YoYo Ma; Mark O’Connor; Joshua Bell; and Edgar Meyer. The images are by the amazing Beanscot Channel.

Click on: Slumber, My Darling

5-9-11

The Bible never intended that Mothers Day be so close to Easter, there having been no Hallmark Cards or ProFlowers 2000 years ago. But as long as Easter is not diminished, anything that reminds us all of the special role of mothers cannot be bad.

Easter even provides special connections for us to think about. So does Christmas, the birth of Jesus, the Son of Mary. But at Easter His closest friends denied Him… but His mother did not. The foot of the cross was mostly empty except for scoffers and Roman guards… and His mother. Even (in theology whose reasoning we hear but whose blinding love we cannot quite comprehend), for a few hours even God in Heaven forsook Jesus so that the wrath for sin could be transferred from us to Him… but His mother did not forsake him.

As a man I can only guess about the love and emotions that are present in the bonds that a mother feels toward the child she bears. I know how great “second best” is – the bond that exists between child beholding mother.

No such relationship is typical, and no mother is ordinary, so if I share a couple of things for a moment here, I do not claim to speak for anybody. In fact, I invite anybody to think upon how their relationships with their Moms were different, not similar. They have to be different, because every mom is special; and all moms are exceptional.

We hear about Soccer Moms. Mine I call a Fifties Mom. She grew up in the Depression, in a family that struggled. She married after the War. In the ‘50s our family moved to the suburbs. Cookie cutter? Sort of. Many times I have gotten together with people my age, and before long we talk like we are sociologists: “Dysfunctional.” Family tensions. Parents who smoked and drank and partied, sometimes too much. Couples who fell into the required stereotypes of the era.

All that was true in our house. Regrets, I’ve had a few… and caused a few. In other words, life happens. Did the moms who survived the Depression and never knew whether their fiancés would return home from war… did they indulge their children too much? The question is, for me, whether I would have done so too. But shame on me for the years I ragged on Mom for drinking and smoking (even, yes, shame on her for no longer being the Mom I knew when my kids were young, because of the drinking) – but shame on me for not sufficiently remembering so much else. We can all dig deep and come up with similar:

I was reared in church. Every “life question” I had, my father would generally say, “you’ll figure it out,” but my mother would generally try to explain it in terms of Jesus. Not always logical, but I got the point. When I get emotional singing hymns, I think it’s because my mother did. If I choke up when the flag passes by, it’s because she did. I remember, when we didn’t have enough dinner for seconds all around, she never took another helping for herself. When it snowed and I had a paper route, she drove me around house to house. She never failed to ask, when I was away at college, what church I was going to, and if we could read from the same devotional every night, even when she knew I had put the Bible aside for awhile.

These are not clichés, or empty Hallmark sentiments. They are a fraction of the woven emotional fabric between a Christian mother and son.

I’ll tell you how empty these memories are not. At the end of her life, Mom was placed in a Hospice program. Hospice is meant to make dying easier, not to heal you. She was in a hospital bed at home, insensible, about 60 pounds, displaying several of the “signs of impending death” that the brochure told us to watch for. A couple chips of ice is all she ingested for several days. Then one night – I was sleeping at the other end of the living room – she stirred and mumbled. Eventually, more. In the next few days she was praying, reciting Bible verses, and signing hymn choruses.

… all in her sleep, or coma state, or whatever it was. She grew strong. She lived another year. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner, where she ate solid food, talked and joked. She walked around the house, with a walker, but all for the Hospice workers to say, “This is one of those stories we can’t explain…” Best of all, my kids met their clean, sober, “real” grandmother after all.

Strangest (?) of all, by the way, for all the Sunday School lessons and church choirs and youth groups in her life… after she “recovered,” as I just recounted, she could not recite a fraction of the things she did when she was reaching out for that bonus year from a coma. Couldn’t do it. Didn’t know how she did.

The Bible talks about “hiding things in our heart.” We do that, or we allow the Holy Spirit to. If you are a mother and do so, there is no way that you are not planting things in your children’s hearts too at the same time.

“Fifties Moms.” Like in the old TV sitcoms. Well… we all kind of liked those old TV sitcoms, didn’t we? And we miss those days. Maybe the black-and-white culture wasn’t so bad.

All that “stuff,” those stereotypes about Dysfunctional Families? Maybe that was the “fruit” (not speaking biblically in this sense) that some family trees bore. But fruit drops from trees, and shrivels, and dies. Maybe we should look, on Mothers Day, not so much at the fruit, but at the seeds our Moms were so determined to plant.

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Here is a song about my Mom, whom I miss every day. When Cynthia Clawson sang it, she didn’t know she was singing about my mom, and maybe yours too, but she was:

Click: My Mother’s Faith

4-22-11

For a few days, those two thousand years ago, the scoffers – the religious leaders who conspired to have Him arrested, sentenced in a kangaroo court, and put to death – they laughed and said, “See? All those claims were false! He was not God! If He were God, He could have called down ten thousand angels to lift Him from the cross! He did not lift a finger to save Himself!”

Of course they were right… about not saving Himself. He lifted not a finger, in order to save US. And even them, the ones who condemned Him. But for a few days they seemed correct.

We know now, as they should have, that countless prophesies were fulfilled in that Man’s life. But that did not make Him God. He claimed, in that mystery of mysteries, that He and the Father were one. But that claim alone waited to be shown. He was betrayed, tortured, abandoned, crucified; yes, suffered without complaint. But that did not prove at all that He was God. He died and was buried, according to the Scriptures, and that… No, we must stop there. He died.

Jesus died. He was a dead man. He was as dead as Lazarus had been. His body was treated and prepared for burial as dead bodies were. It was wrapped, completely, in burial cloths. He was dead. The life was out of Him.

Isn’t it easy, sometimes, to forget the meaning of those few days between the Crucifixion and Easter? Those days — just as much as the prophecies and the miracles and suffering and death and words of forgiveness — those days have as much to do with pointing to Jesus as GOD, as all the familiar factors do.

Those scoffers said, “He saved (or healed) (or raised from the dead) others -– let Him save Himself!” Well, it was the God-in-Jesus who raised people from the dead… and when He left that tomb, it was proof to the local folks -– and to every inch of mighty Creation! -– that Jesus was God. Jesus IS God.

Because unless Jesus rose from the dead, He was not God. Everything else about that life is a statistic or a coincidence. Details. If there is no Resurrection, our faith is in vain.

In parts of the Old World, and in the Old Church, routine greetings between people are: “He is risen!” “He is risen indeed!” … and not just on Easter Week. A good habit.

But as you think of the audacious, outrageous miracle of a resurrected body, with the Divine promise that we, too, may one day overcome death, and know this truth now, I challenge you to put aside traditional, nice Easter thoughts. Of peace. And of what the holiday has become. Don’t reject the traditions, just put them to the side for a moment.

Because in a very essential way, Easter is not only a day of peace. When Jesus the Christ emerged from that tomb, it was not just so Thomas could touch the wounds. It was not just so Peter could have a second chance (third? fourth??) as a disciple. Jesus walked out, in a whole and glorified body, to meet each one of us, face to face. “Here I AM.” He challenges us: “I am alive. Now what?”

Now what???

What it means is that we must be changed as profoundly as He was on that day now called Easter. Shame on us if we think, “Rose from the dead. Yeah, well, that’s what gods DO.” In that sense, Easter is not just a Day of Peace. It is the most dangerous day of the church calendar; it is the most dangerous day of our lives.

Because nothing should, or can, be the same, after we meet the Resurrected Lord, the Not-Dead Jesus, the God-with-us. It must transform us, and everything we do and think or live, or we are as dead as He briefly was.

He is risen. He is risen indeed! HE’S ALIVE!

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Click: He’s Alive!

4-18-11

The Lenten Season draws to a close. Through 40 days and 40 nights, I have been trying to think of this traditional observance in non-traditional ways. We can do that – for instance by identifying with what Jesus “took up” in His sacrifice, as well as what He “gave up” by His sacrifice – and be faithful to scripture.

But on Palm Sunday, when I think of Jesus entering the gates of Jerusalem, I come, myself, to a dead end of this exercise. There are not too many fresh ways to see those events. We know that He entered in humble and even seemingly absurd ways, like riding a donkey, in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, verse after verse after verse.

We know that one reason Jesus was hailed by crowds was because some people hoped he would be a revolutionary leader to overthrow the Romans. Frankly, He had been preaching for three and a half years, so most people would have known that Jesus was an unlikely guerilla fighter, few of whom storm a city on a donkey. No, the exuberant reception probably was due more to buzz about this man who walked on water; created wine and lunches from nothing; healed the blind, the deaf, and the crippled; and raised people from the dead. The grumblers in the crowd knew – and resented – that He also was wiser than they about the law, and that He claimed in fact to be the fulfillment of the Law.

We know all that. And there are not many ways to bring new interpretations to the events of Palm Sunday.

…except if we try to imagine ourselves to be the people on the Jerusalem streets, waving palms and laying them before Jesus in honor. And if we can try to go BACK in time 2000 years, let us also imagine ourselves a few days later also, as this same Man we cheer is now in shackles, under sentence of death.

Palms, and an old robe or two, whatever the local traditions of honor, were the cheapest things possible to lay down before Jesus. So were shouts, even hewing to the literal meaning of “Hosanna” and references to the Messiah. “Talk is cheap.” If we really wanted to honor Jesus, if we really believed He was the promised Messiah, the proof was not showing up at a party-like parade, but acting like we believed it, later in the week. And we scattered. A few of us denied even knowing Him. Some of us even demanded that He be put to death. And enough of us joined in, laughing at Him, spitting on Him.

Palm Sunday, in those lights, seem like a cruel joke. Must it not have seemed so to Jesus? It’s not like the fans who were at the gates showed up at Pilate’s, defending their Savior, losing the Barabbas-vote by a slim margin. Those former fans were not there; or if they were there, their real beliefs finally were on display.

Are the people who were waving palms, and shouting for their Messiah – their “personal savior” – different than we are? What makes them different? What makes us different? It can’t be that WE know how the story ended: prophetic details were clear enough to those people. And Jesus claimed, and repeatedly proved, who He was, right to their faces.

No, Palm Sunday is one of the most difficult times of the year for believers. Not only for what was about to happen to Jesus, physically; but perhaps for what has NOT yet happened to our hearts, spiritually.

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Click: Hosanna

4-11-11

Very much a Lenten story.

The sister and brother-in-law of a friend of mine are missionaries in Mexico Their agency is called Last Frontiers, and this is story about their family’s life this week.

Ed and Denise Aulie work primarily with indigenous peoples of Mexico -– specifically the Nahuatl of Veracruz, and the Ch’ol of Chiapas. They also speak in congregations throughout Mexico, giving studies of God’s Word. They are church planters, and they also minister through literacy training, medical service for the sick, agricultural work, and construction of homes for woman who are alone.

They have worked in the mission field with indigent Mayan and Aztec tribes in Mexico for more than 30 years as a married couple; all their children were born in Mexico. Through the years they have mentored many young people who now serve across the world, including in the US, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, China, India, Yemen and Iraq.

Their story, this week, is about one of their own children, however. Ed will tell the story:

Over the years we have seen many a mangled bicycle lying on the ground, with a sheet covering the rider. We have seen crowds gather around a toppled donkey cart with a child or grandfather lying nearby, having been hit by a vehicle. Yet we never thought that one day it would be our son lying in the oncoming traffic lane after being hit by a car at full speed.

Finally, would YOU ask God to give you the grace to give “The Pardon” to anyone in your life, whether they are waiting for it or not? Don’t let a sword hang over that person’s head a minute longer.

“Be merciful as your Heavenly Father is merciful.” [Luke 6:36]

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I believe that the meaning, and to major extent the essence, of the Easter story is in Ed’s letter. The purpose of the Incarnation… the offer of pardon for our sins… the role of forgiveness… sharing the Good News. The meaning, and to a major extent the essence, of the Easter story is neutralized in our lives if we keep it as a historical episode from 2000 years ago. It is not only relevant for today. It must HAPPEN every day, in each of our lives.

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Click: I Can Only Imagine (Puedo Imaginarme)

If you are interested in the ministry of Last Frontiers, click its name on the MMMM Recommended Sites list on the right. You can learn about their missions, their news updates, their support opportunities.

2-14-11

One of the only constant aspects of this old world is… Change. That is not irony; it is history. And it is not our dreaded fate; it is our lot to make of it what we will.

Two weeks ago we speculated, here, about the implausible, if not unthinkable – entrenched Arab leaders resigning and fleeing with their lives. But it has happened, and it might happen yet again. Hundreds of thousands of angry protestors, and their first act (after all-night jubilation on the streets)… was returning to Liberation Square in Cairo with brooms and garbage bags. Go figure. The predictable, in this new world, is the Unpredictable.

It is the case in America, too, down to the personal level. In a land of plenty, there is want; in the world’s most powerful economy, there is unemployment and insecurity. But the new security is not Insecurity – it does not have to be that way. And it is not a case merely of deciding to reclaim our personal destiny in the face of so many of life’s new challenges. It is a case of remembering that God is not only in control of our destiny – our careers, our families, our lives – but that He is our destiny. Our destination.

The singer Lynda Randle has pointed to the perils of accepting Jesus as Savior without making Him Lord. Two different things, each requiring a response from us. The first aspect affects our eternal destiny; the second can influence our everyday destiny, day by day, in this old world.

Mother Teresa put it another way: “God has not called us to be successful… He calls us to be obedient.”

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The songwriter Charles D Tillman popularized great Gospel songs like Old Time Religion, Life’s Railway to Heaven, and I Am a Poor, Wayfaring Stranger. Another of his classics is the song When I Get To the End of the Way, which beautifully reflects the message today. Its words are profound.

Here are the lyrics, after which you can click on a great version sung by Lynda Randle, sister of Michael Tait (of dcTalk and currently lead singer of The Newsboys).

When I Get To the End Of the Way

He loves me too well to forsake me,
Or give me a trial too much;
All His people have been dearly purchased,
And Satan can never claim such.
By and by I shall see Him and praise Him,
In the city of unending day;
And the toils of the road will seem nothing,
When I get to the end of the way.

Click: When I Get To the End Of the Way

1-24-11

January 23 is this year’s Sanctity of Life Sunday.

So as not to compartmentalize the observance, opponents of abortion point out that the date, each year, is the Sunday that falls closest to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe vs Wade. Therefore an extra reminder is provided of the unsettled, and unsettling, issue in the midst of our body politic: legalized, and frequently taxpayer-subsidized, abortion-on-demand.

It was my privilege, several years ago, to manage an interview with Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” of Roe vs Wade. She is now a born-again Christian, deeply repentant of her role in a major American paradigm shift. She knows at least – let me say “she knows at most,” for God’s grace is the major factor in all we do – that she is forgiven.

We all can be forgiven of all things, and we all should always remember that. In the “abortion debate,” one of the things less useful than a spirit of judgment is a rush to judgment, by proponents of any viewpoint. Something that is admitted by most couples who agree to, or women who undergo, abortions, is that there is no such thing as the absence of guilt. But we should never believe, nor never counsel anyone, that there is no possibility of forgiveness by our own Heavenly Father. And therefore none of us, His children, should withhold mercy to repentant hearts.

So my thoughts are not “holier than thou,” as the saying goes. In fact, I am probably “less holier than thou.” Which is another way of saying that we all fall short of the glory of God. My opinions and convictions, as with so many things where the Holy Spirit has needed to drag me, have changed over the years. Thank God He never gives up on us.

Those who fall least short of His glory, however, are the unborn. Defenseless, unoffending, not able to speak for themselves – but occasionally able to cry before their lives are terminated – babies are sacrificed, not to assorted pagan gods as in ancient cultures, unless those gods are named convenience, avoidance, confusion, selfishness, numbed conscience. The culture and, God help us, the State, call them not human beings, but fetuses, blobs, tissue, and choices. The inherent contradiction is evident when we realize that schools don’t teach “blob control” and phamacists don’t dispense “fetus control pills.”

This week, a Philadelphia abortionist in a public and busy practice (a reported $15,000 a day business) was in the news. He, his wife, and several assistants were charged by a grand jury with eight murders – specifically, a woman and seven babies born alive and killed by scissors severing their spines. There are other charges, such as transmissions of disease and health violations, including a gory clinic, urine and blood stains on waiting-room furniture, and multiple fetuses displayed in jars. “Doctor” Kermit Gosnell is a Black man, to whom – one wishes to believe – the disregard of human life, the arbitrary reclassification of who exactly is human and entitled to what rights, ought to have mattered especially.

Shame on him and the angels of mercy on his paid staff. Blood is, literally, on their hands. On the other hand is, plausibly, society’s hand. Take note: The abortion mill was raided because it was suspected of writing illegal prescriptions for patients. The grand jury report blamed the murders on “lack of oversight.” The charges speculate that the nearly 6000 abortions performed between 2004 and 2008 were never fully investigated because the patients largely were “poor and of color.”

Abortion horrors, unfortunately, are not new. But in our culture, this
indictment tells us the new standards of morality:

The clinic was raided not because of murder and infanticide, but because it was suspected of making money by padding prescriptions.

The crux is not lack of conscience, no: “lack of oversight.”

And these procedures continued, an average of five aborted babies a day (if Gosnell worked on Sundays too) not in dark hiding, but in a street-corner clinic, name on the door and listing in the Yellow Pages, unmolested – not because he hid his activities, but because to inquire too closely was politically incorrect.

There will be tears of “compassion” from lawyers, for the mothers who didn’t want to be mothers (and let us not forget fathers who did not want to become fathers). But somehow, as always these days, not many tears will be shed for the thousands of children who are missing, never given the chance for their faces to appear on milk cartons, much less to have their own names, or graves.

Do we doubt that God “chooses life,” by which construct we all should too? Psalm 36:9 reminds us that God is the One who gives and sustains life. The most devastated forest, after a fire, somehow soon is repopulated by bugs and flies and creatures. The tiniest blade of grass, with no sunshine and little water, eventually will break through a cement walkway.

How, is the question.

Life, is the answer.
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Not only are babies not “choices,” but our response to questions of life
should not be open to choice, either. Some things, even in America, 2011, cannot be left to standards of convenience or selfishness. Affirm life.

A tender but powerful song by Tommy Walker, sung here in a moving video by the great Paul Baloche, caps the message for this particular day of the Sanctity of Life’s continual observance.

Click: He Knows My Name

We tend not to think about all the aspects of Jesus’s life. We think about His ministry, His teaching and parables, His prayers, often enough: or so we should.

But when we think of His life, sometimes we are prejudiced by Sunday-school pamphlets, and greeting cards, and the holiday industries, to compartmentalize the events in His life – to view them as the settings and backgrounds for the really important stuff.

But it is not only surprising, but important to our faith, to think about all the aspects of Jesus’s life. It is very significant, for instance, that He came into the world pretty much as He left it: despised and disregarded; acknowledged for who He was by hardly anyone; a mere handful of people with Him at each event (but His mother, always there); in a borrowed stable at His birth, in a borrowed tomb at His death.

To think about these aspects confronts us with many things. One, at the Christmas season, is this: the simultaneous humility and grandeur of the incarnate God. For there was no “arc” to Jesus’s life, no “career” in the modern sense. He didn’t become flesh and dwell among us to incorporate a ministry, to establish a denomination, to build a business – even a religious, spiritual, faith-based organization as we call things today.

He came to save humanity from its sins, to offer the way to salvation, to redeem creation as the One True Way. Therefore His birth is very similar to His death… and it should cause us to think not just about what He did, but who He was.

Isaiah had prophesied: “…unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Notice that the “shalls” refer to the triumphant Jesus – still prophetic? – the “is” word referring to a child, to a son. Since Isaiah lived hundreds of years before Jesus, these logically could have been “shalls” too.

That aspect is for us to think about today. No less important than the words of Jesus or His coming reign… is the PERSON of Jesus. We all have had children, or have been children! Of course God wanted us to identify with His incarnate Self in the most powerful – and the most tender – way He could. A baby. A son.

He SHALL be called mighty; He SHALL be our counselor. But right now think of Him as a baby.

Hold Him in your arms. Love Him as He loves you.

Beautiful imagery accompanies a tender new song called “For Unto Us a Child is Born.”

Click:  For Unto Us a Child Is Born

Rick Marschall was on the editorial staff of the “1599 Geneva Bible Restoration Project” (Tolle Lege Press, 2007)

Another early Christmas message. But the best Christmas and Easter and Annunciation and Ascension messages can, and should, be shared every week of the year. Down with pigeon-holing.

There is a powerful song about a heart-wrenching story that was in the news in 2002. Britain’s Independent newspaper reported at the time: “For 30 years, Samir Ibrahim Salman had made his way dutifully to his task as bell ringer and caretaker at the fortress-like stone and wooden church revered by millions as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.”

Salman “crossed Manger Square to get to the church to climb the steps to the fourth-century bell tower as he did every day of the year. “Minutes later, Samir was struck by a bullet in the chest. It was an hour before an ambulance could reach him but by then, he was already dead. The Palestinians claim he was killed by an Israeli – the Israeli army says they did not fire a shot near the church. Samir, who was mentally disabled, may have been unaware of the danger.”

It was a time when Palestinian fighters, running from advancing Israeli troops, took refuge in the church. They and 40 Franciscan brothers, four nuns and approximately 30 Orthodox and Armenian monks were trapped in the basilica complex. There were also disputed claims about damage to the holy site built over the reputed manger where Jesus was born.

This story about hatred, violence, and bloodshed in Jesus’ hometown, perhaps over the spot where He was born, has resonance this Christmastide.

I shared with some friends that I would be writing this message. “Why make a martyr of an Islamic person, especially at this time of year?” some responded. “Why cite a song that talks about ‘Palestine?’” asked others. “That’s provocative!” However, Salman was an Arab, but not Islamic – he was a Palestinian Christian. How many Americans realize that Bethlehem has been governed by a Christian mayor and majority Christian council; and that there is a higher percentage of Christians there than in Israel? Concerning ‘Palestine,’ Bethlehem is not even in Israel but in the West Bank, under the Palestinian Authority with Israel’s full sanction.

But I want us to return again, remembering the Christmas season, to Nativity Square in Bethlehem. Samir Ibrahim Salman lay there alone. He died in the pool of his blood, maybe instantly, maybe slowly… no one was brave enough (or simple enough, as he was) to go out in the open. He had been beloved of the town, and special to the church, because he rang those bells as a volunteer every day of the year for decades, different bells for different occasions, serving Christ and his neighbors.

I do not lament only the hatred that shatters the calm of Bethlehem, or the peace of Jerusalem. Christians today are being slaughtered by the thousands, and driven from Iraq, which the US has “stabilized.” Jeremy Reynalds has written a news story revealing the truth for Assist New Service: http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2010/s10120042.htm

And in a brilliant but deeply disturbing report for World Magazine, Mindy Belz provides details of the US military’s (and NATO representatives’) answer to a question about whether persecuted Christians would be protected in Iraq. By us. Their answer was “No.” Under Saddam Hussein, 1.5-million Christians lived in relative security; today, fewer than 400,000 Christians remain in Iraq, many in fear.

Protected by the US? By our military security? “No.” Mindy correctly calls this “extermination by any other name.” http://www.worldmag.com/articles/17400 If American Christians betray Christians in Iraq (and China, and Myanmar, and…) we are not merely ignoring the wrong, or decrying the wrong; we’re on the side of the wrong.

Back to Bethlehem, where God chose to come in human form to reconcile ALL men unto Himself. This holy ground is where God chose to fulfill His promise from ages past, that through Him “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

Who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed the simple Bell Ringer of Bethlehem? To those of us who are ignorant of the issues, who blindly perpetuate stereotypes, who support missions we don’t understand – and don’t support missionaries we ought to – we can shudder at the thought that we might have been closer to the triggerman than to the Bell Ringer that morning.

But as children of God, we have been given the ministry of reconciliation, to be ambassadors to a fallen world – peoples of all faiths, and no faith. Now THERE is a peace treaty! For the little town of Bethlehem, for everywhere.

Click: The Bethlehem Bell Ringer
(words are below)

Rick Marschall

The Bethlehem Bell Ringer
Carl Cleves / the Hottentots

An ancient church in Bethlehem,
A target in a battle of men,
Stands on the ground where Christ was born
Trapped inside the eye of a storm

Soldiers move from door to door
Mortar fire, it’s all-out war.
Army tanks patrol the street,
They treat civilians with conceit

Oh Jesus, please, help Palestine
Turn all that blood back into wine
Oh Turning Wheel, Divine Design
Please bring peace to Palestine

Samir Ibrahim Salman
Fulfills his task the best he can.
Each day at dawn he tolls the bells,
While all around the army shells

He walks across the Manger Square
For thirty years he’s lived near there,
A simple man who spends his time
In quiet prayer at Jesus’ shrine

Upon the roof a sniper aims
His bitter heart with hate inflames
Samir walks slow, his back bent low
And is struck down by the bullet’s blow

For many hours Samir lay there
Bleeding on the Manger Square.
No ambulance permitted near,
And so the bell ringer died here

An ancient church in Bethlehem
The bells of peace won’t chime again
The people now all live in fear
Grieving wails are all you hear

Oh Jesus, please, help Palestine
Turn all that blood back into wine
Oh Turning Wheel, Divine Design
Please bring peace to Palestine.

A little departure — not a “religious” message; but, I hope, a spiritual one!

It is to share a moment with you who are engaged in creativity. Nobody run for the exit, because in a way, we all are so engaged. I thought of this because I was on the phone this afternoon with a friend, and I bollixed up a couple of things having to do with numbers… typical for me, stupid things. Some of us typically mumble things about “right brain, left brain,” but working in the creative arts is not always the same thing as exercising creativity!

Many of my friends are writers or cartoonists, and what I am about to say is common to them, and to musicians and poets and singers and painters and composers and actors and photographers. And public speakers. And counselors. And designers. And decorators. Teachers. Pastors. Charity workers. Those entrusted with law-enforcement. Ministers, by definition. Even accountants (ha) and politicians making claims and taping commercials (ha ha) have to be creative. Certainly mothers and caregivers, a thousand ways every day.

… Actually, you can’t name a human activity where creativity does not come into play. And if you think you have found someone, or some profession… surely that person ASPIRES to write or perform or draw in private time. Or to receive that mysterious, soul-satisfying sustenance from enjoying the works of people who do — which is, just as real, a Bond of Creativity.

All of this is commonplace — banal if it is in fact so universal — except that we don’t always realize it. We don’t appreciate it in others, but anyone who creates some work of art, on any level, bares his or her soul to a world that can reject or ridicule or despise it. Yet we do what we do because we have to. We have to share it; we have to “let it out”; we have to touch someone we probably will never meet. The cliched creator who lives a hermit-like existence is actually the most open and vulnerable of God’s creatures.

Create… creatures… Creator. Here we bring a message full circle. If we fail to appreciate creativity in others, surely a lot of us tend to miss the creativity in ourselves. It is there, it should be encouraged, and, as a principle of life, must be exercised to be healthy and strong. Some people believe that to say that humans “create” anything is blasphemous — that only God can create anything. I think that is true if you are playing word games.

God has given us, among His unique gifts, sparks of creativity. Anything we “create” is therefore an extension of His grace and His glory. J S Bach began every one of his works with the words, “Help me, Jesus,” and ended every work with the words, “To God be ALL the glory.” Nothing we can create is apart from Him.

Illustrating my message is a secular song, not by Bach but by the singer/songwriter Lacy J Dalton. It perfectly catches the creative process — the inchoate passion, the unquenchable dreams, the insane struggles, the breakthroughs; the success that is not always commercial, but measured by the “Aha!” moment in whatever pursuit you choose. Her metaphor is the singer/songwriter (the best art is inescapably self-referential). 16th Avenue, Nashville’s street of dreams where recording studios and performance stages abound, is her metaphor of the world. Oh, she nails it. Aha!

Appreciate your own creativity this week, and that in others. Celebrate it. Exercise it. And remember its source — the One who is reflected and honored in what you do.

Click:  An Anthem to Creativity