Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-28-23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A happy ending.

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

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

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Click: Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott

8-8-16

Have you ever called out to God in a moment of crisis? Or, better put, how often have you cried out to God in a moment of crisis?

Of course we have all been there, and it will not change. God, after all, did not promise to keep us from life’s troubles. He just promised to be with us through them.

Christoper Hitchens, famous as an apologist for atheism, once wrote, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Hitchens, who died of esophageal cancer soon after writing those words, wrote books and articles against God, and debated across the continent with the fervent Christian Dinesh D’Souza. None of us can evaluate the emotional wrestling-matches he endured with himself (and his God) – he evidently was touched by a widespread “Pray for Christopher Hitchens Day” in September of 2010. But I shudder to contemplate if he was tempted to cry to God… but was deterred by pride.

If a reliance on God (please: no “higher being”; no “man upstairs” – I mean the God of the Bible) is a basic yearning of every person’s soul, then we must admit that pride is a universal stumbling-block to exercising that reliance. How common is the realization that we turn for help… when we need help? The logic of it does not mitigate the embarrassment: “God, it’s me again. Sorry it’s been awhile…”

Too often we pray fervently in times of crises, and pray casually – or not at all – when blessings are flowing. Human nature.

God knows it is human nature. That is why He provided ways to counter that aspect. Communication, constant communication, which He calls “prayer.” And the testimony of our hearts, which He can read, and knows better than we ourselves do.

God seeks communication with us – and half of that is hearing from us. He takes joy in every manner of our turning to Him. He is grieved when we do not. In Micah 6:3 we have the picture of a God who is offended and hurt when we ignore Him: “O my people, what have I done to you? How have I wearied you? Answer me!”

So. If God receives pleasure when we seek Him and communicate through prayer, and if we generally tend to seek Him and pray only when things go bad… wouldn’t it be in the nature of a loving God to “allow” some “bad” things to buffet us?

I do not believe that He sends sickness or disease on His children – the Lord of the universe is not a child abuser – but in order for us to see Him as “an ever-present help in times of trouble,” there must be trouble. Following that, He will answer, and help, and communicate what we need to know: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17); “Thou, LORD, hast not forsaken them that seek thee” (Psalm 9:10).

Is God at work in our lives when crises and problems beset us… when those happen to be the only times when we seek fellowship with Him? Is this good theology? I don’t know. Just sayin’…

Think about it. If God desires to hear from us, but we ignore Him except when trouble comes… Well, my advice is to not tempt God. Keep those lines of communication open. The voice of experience: then blessings can flow your way.

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Here is a heartfelt spiritual song that briefly illustrates the anguished call to God we all experience at times. It is one of the very last songs that a feeble Johnny Cash recorded, but one of the most powerful of messages about asking God’s help:

Click:  Help Me, Lord

11-10-14

Families of certain traditional observances pray before every meal. This is probably less common than in the past; I do not know. I migrated from a faith tradition where rote prayers were recited, to an exercise of spontaneous thanks; from leading or corporate prayers, to an individual thanking God. Usually the latter prayer has a correlative effect of letting the meal cool, but God will see that many are cold but few are frozen.

My sisters and I, in unison, recited the sing-song verse (that did not, actually, rhyme perfectly): “God is great, God is good; and we thank Him for this food. Amen.”

As I grew up I understood quite clearly that such thanks were due God even when we had boiled beef tongue, or liver and onions, waiting. It is the principle of the thing; another meaning of “good taste.” In that spirit I never failed to pray, sometimes to myself, when dining at my mother-in-law’s table, years later. If you ever had one of her meals you would understand why most of my silent prayers were lifted AFTER I ate what I could.

Back to topic, which is not so much an early Thanksgiving meditation as to offer some thoughts about “God is great,” as per the childhood prayer.

God, being God, and as much as He reveals of Himself, surely is great. Our understanding is imperfect, partly because He reveals Himself through scripture and in the Person of His Son… and yet we have but the smallest, most fleeting, impression of who He is. We see as through a glass darkly, as with many things. Yet, though we might someday understand Him more – let us say as the angels in Heaven see and understand – that will still fall short. If we were to know Him fully, we would be as God, and that will never be.

His mysteries are to be wondered at, not jealously coveted. I like it that way (which is just as well, because that is cosmic reality). SEEKING to know Him better, wanting new ways to please Him, desiring His will so that I might obey more and more – these are the sweet assignments of the believer.

Can we see these mysteries and sometimes-hidden attributes of God, the continuous revelation of His character, as a definition of Great in the context of that childhood prayer? – “God is great, God is good”?

Indeed we can. And that goes beyond the reminder of very different meanings of “great” and “good.”

That childhood prayer, despite its innocent simplicity, addresses the crux of the contemporary debate about the existence of God. That debate is, I believe, the defining proposition of Western Civilization’s crisis. We are, without doubt, in a post-Christian society. Nietzsche first posited the question, “Is God dead?” not as theological argument, but to observe that when God is no longer the motive force behind a civilization’s standards and judgments; when mankind ceases to acknowledge Him in the arts, in law, in morality, in education, in science… He is, very much in effect, dead to that culture.

Christians must resuscitate God in our culture: not that He needs our assistance, being God; but so that we assert His rightful place in our affairs, so that we properly honor Him again, because it is, as the old liturgies used to say, “truly meet and right so to do.” After all, when we let our foundation-stones crumble… well, you don’t have to be an architect to know how houses can fall.

So, believers, it is our duty to fight back against the creeping (galloping?) secularization of our society.

I ask you notice something, however, that is inherent in that childhood prayer. Remember this as you assay the issues (and, believe me, this issue underlies EVERY worldview topic you can think of) or discuss matters with skeptics and agnostics and atheists and secularists and relativists. Many of those folks begin their arguments with “How can there be a God who…” or “Why would a loving God permit” this or that.

When people begin their arguments about God in those ways, notice that they are not denying the existence of God: they are complaining about His ways, or His attributes, or how He doesn’t follow the scripts that skeptics would lay out. They are not demanding that you admit there is no God, even as they might think that such is their belief (or non-belief)… they are just annoyed that He is not fitting their own job descriptions.

Truly, if people did not believe in God, or a god, at all, they would simply go home to their knitting. What difference would it make? So even if they do not realize it, they basically – deep down in their hearts – acknowledge a God. We should talk to them, and pray for them, with the attitude that these people are already on the road, and just need guiding hands.

A case in point that we should think about is the late skeptic Christopher Hitchens, who made a career in his last years, before cancer claimed him, doing roadshows with Dinesh D’Sousa debating the existence of God. Hitchens’ best-seller at the time was a book titled “God Is Not Good.” Blasphemous? Just short, maybe, but my point is that the title automatically supposes – rather than denies – the existence of God. Skeptics like Hitchens are only lingering at the Suggestion Box, perhaps, we pray, on their way to the sinner’s rail.

A hymn that I think could be the theme-music of this message is reportedly America’s second-favorite hymn after “Amazing Grace.” As such, “How Great Thou Art” often is assumed to be an ancient hymn, but it is barely 125 years old. A poem written by the Swede Carl-Gustav Boberg was translated into English by Stuart K. Hine. Its origin is the account of Boberg walking home and beset by a sudden violent storm. When it cleared he was not only grateful for his safety but impressed by the suffused sunlight, birdsongs, and distant church bells. At home he wrote the familiar words so loved by many.

Its tune was from a Swedish folk tune that is so elemental that it has similarities to later songs like the gospel “Until Then,” and, ironically, the march “Horst Wessel Lied.” But “How Great Thou Art” wended its way from Sweden to Germany to the Baltic states (Estonia, principally), to Russia, England, and America. It was still largely unknown to the church community in the US when it was sung by George Beverly Shea at a Billy Graham crusade in Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1957. Cliff Barrows has reported that it was sung more than a hundred times during that crusade, and possibly was the reason the crusade services were extended and held over.

It has been a standard ever since, not only of the Billy Graham services, but of church meetings, funerals, camp meetings, and concerts.

Attractive tune, certainly. The song’s structure “builds,” and makes an emotional impression. But surely the impact derives from the message – the song says what we cannot otherwise easily put into words. When our hearts burst, when our minds are excited, when our lips fail us… then sing our souls, How Great Thou Art!

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Here is one of the impactful renditions of “How Great Thou Art” you will ever hear (and that would rival Bev Shea and Elvis and Carrie Underwood and hundreds of others). RoseAngela Merritt singing the hymn a cappella in St. Anne’s church that was built next to the Pools of Bethesda in Jerusalem, where Jesus healed the crippled man. The site, and acoustics, the emotional rendering, are outstanding.

Click: How Great Thou Art