Monday Morning Music Ministry

12-8-25

I am preparing a magazine article on what I believe has become the most pressing issue facing America today. I shall focus here on the Biblical and spiritual aspect of the sudden and menacing collapse of what recently appeared to be the dawning of reform and renewal, even revival.

Political reforms were accompanied by an amazing spirit of renewed faith – frequently among the young, and igniting revival in Christian communities. The impact of Charlie Kirk – his life AND death – promised a Great Awakening in America, perhaps around the world.

Almost overnight, the progress and hope, good will and alliances, seem fractured. From many, many sides come distractions. Bizarre unrelated urgencies. Recriminations and bitter feuds between those who recently joined forces. I believe these “speed bumps” and detours are not coincidences. Many of their authors are malignant and are happy to fracture the furtherance of civil peace, progress and prosperity, and the advancement of the Gospel.

I have dug deep, prayed for guidance and wisdom, and… I welcome comments.

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History’s inflection points and paradigm shifts can happen unannounced, catching us by surprise. We often observe the trees but not the forest, as the proverb says.

It is difficult to realize that we suddenly find ourselves today in a time of major, worldwide, and extremely consequential change. At the very least, the trajectories of international diplomacy, cultural assumptions, and even religious understandings are dissolving. Most of us know the elements, but are not connecting the dots. We will be face-to-face with dangerous realities… soon enough.

Christians are at the center of many of those currents, appropriately so because Western societies (home to many of the Faith’s bases) are severely threatened. Ultimately, and importantly, Christianity is relevant to the controversies, conflicts, causes, and conclusions. And ironically it is Christians – for the most part, contemporary Evangelical American Christians – who are the most unaware of their role, the threats they inspire, and the consequences they stoke.

A major source of these disruptions unfortunately has echoes of the sad history of societal turmoil: Israel. Not “the Jews,” not “prejudice,” not “persecution.” Not “the Jewish Question” and all of history’s baggage – and not even the country of Israel, its foundation and existence; but rather its governments’ policies. Eons of discrimination and contemporary, continuous Holocaust tales cloak, and often excuse, the maladministrations and offenses of the Zionist “state.” Plausible blessings and arguable curses have ever been the Jews’ lot, and in our day are intensifying.

Isolating one flash-point of many, I invite attention to Gaza. That strip of sand has superseded “Palestine” as an umbrella-term for lands, peoples, and nearly insoluble dilemmas. Gaza is a non-country (no government, flag, native population, nor identity: an empty place on maps; crowded with 2-million people minus those recently slaughtered). Since the cross-border terror attack on and Israeli festival Gaza is described by every observer as a wasteland of rubble. As previous to the Israelis’ unending ”retaliation,” the Gazans’ access to water, electricity, and food is severely restricted.

A recent survey indicates that 40 per cent of Israelis themselves view their government’s policy toward Gaza as genocide. Sixty-one per cent believe their government intentionally is committing war crimes. It is well-known that the majority of the world’s nations routinely have condemned Israeli policies, not only toward Gaza but the expansionist goals of Zionism. The majority of American Jews disapprove of the Zionist agenda, and many prominent Jews are quite vocal in that regard: Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Glenn Greenwald, and Max Blumenthal represent dissident critics of a new country imposed on the sands of Transjordan and traditional Palestine-Protectorate neighborhoods. Today there is a tsunami of Jewish activists including many “Holocaust scholars” who oppose the genocidal policies and in many cases Zionism itself. (So do Orthodox sects that believe that only the coming Messiah can re-establish Biblical Israel.)

However, despite proponents of expansionist Zionism – those who plan for occupation of the entire Levant, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris and Euphrates; from Egypt to Turkey, and the Israeli Military and Mossad (intelligence service) – the most effective Zionists are American evangelicals.

Many Christians have been persuaded by interpretations of the Bible presented to them. Among the prominent persuaders are leaders who regularly receive subsidies from Israel and its proxies. Without blind support from the Christian Right, especially since the wars of 1967 and 1973, Israelite foreign and military policy would not have triumphed as spectacularly as it has. The 10 most recent Administrations would not have become subservient rubber-stamps to Israel.

Pastors, denominations, and ministries have taught their followers to reject any skepticism about, and cancel any opposition to, all of Israel’s policies, even when its government impedes the sharing of the Gospel. Many Christians have been led to believe that Jews have a “free pass” to salvation, exempted alone among all humanity from accepting Christ as their Savior. By their financial and political support, Evangelicals are complicit in genocide and ethnic cleansing that frequently plant seeds of generational resentment, hatred, and dedication to revenge… not merely against festivals on the border of Gaza but perhaps downtown American cities too.

American Evangelicals rightly have been taught to reject racial hatred, the displacement of entire populations, the assignment of collective guilt, suppression of minorities and their rights, and Supremacy as a governing doctrine of an exclusive class. They boo Nazis every week the swastika appears on TV and movie screens. However, they embrace every mirror-image of these actions and policies when practiced by the Israelite government — consistently, virtually without reservation or second thought. Even gleefully.

Why?

How do they avoid seeing a double standard? Many believe the Bible tells them so. “The Jews are God’s Chosen People.” That should not mean that Israel can practice bigotry and genocide, but it has had the stamp of approval of the American government, which decades ago was characterized as a virtual vassal state of Israeli diplomatic and military prerogatives. And, again, the Bible also approves…

Or thus saith Evangelical leaders.

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Next Week: The Chosen People and Abraham’s Seed – “Those who bless Israel shall be blessed.” An examination, seldom undertaken by contemporary Christians, of what Scripture tells God’s people about… God’s people. Biblical history and recent, though suppressed, history.

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Click: Hallelujah

1-1-24

I wonder what the “over / under” is with New Year resolutions that are kept; that is, let’s say, kept by most people beyond the third week of the year. Or third day? Most of mine are history by the third hour. Resolutions are stronger than intentions, and I shudder when reminded that the road to hell is paved with the latter…

Nevertheless, many of us make New Years resolutions… or we intend to. If in the process we make an inventory of our shortcomings and prioritize our goals, we have accomplished something after all.

This has prompted me to speculate on whether God makes Resolutions. Without being presumptuous or blasphemous or outright ignorant (have I headed everyone off at the pass?) I know that everything in the Bible, indeed His workings as revealed in history, from the Commandments to the Incarnation to judgments and miracles, are reflections of His resolutions… but let us wonder for a moment. 

If God would compose a list of resolutions, at least to remind us of how He works, and what He desires, what would they be?

I think God would resolve not to give up on His people. He is swift to judgment, yet long-suffering.

Salvation is free but will continue to be offered at a precious cost; God will ever grieve for those who reject Him.

God, who revealed Himself through Jesus Christ, will continue to act amongst us, and in us, through His Holy Spirit.

The eternal “I am” will resolve as always never to be the “I was.”

Among other resolutions of God, if we might put His will into our words, would be:

He always will be Without end… He will never change… He will keep every promise… He always will be – He only can be – Holy… He will be righteous, compassionate, and just… He will be faithful in His resolutions and promises.

How will He act? God resolves to communicate with His people through prayer… He will be “the God who healeth thee”… He will punish sin but ever remind us that “He chastises those whom He loves”… He will affirm His rules for a satisfied and joy-filled life through Resolutions already shared, from the 10 Commandments to the teachings of Jesus.

God resolves that His character will not change. We may be secure in knowing that He is omniscient, He is omnipresent, He is omnipotent… He does not only love; He is love… He is trustworthy… He is good all the time, and all the time He is good… He extends Grace to those who love Him – while we were yet revels and sinners He provided a way to be reconciled to Him.

You might notice that none of these resolutions are new. I did not have to “stretch” or imagine attributes of our Heavenly Father. He has revealed Himself; He is Unchanging; He is – let us say part of his job description? – “from Everlasting to Everlasting.” 

We make resolutions to correct our mistakes and try to do better.

God has made resolutions, affirming that He cannot make mistakes; when all is said and done, this year and every year, He is the best that we can imagine.

Let us hereby resolve, ourselves, that we praise His Holy Name and dedicate ourselves to serve Him. 

Happy New Year!

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Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness 

12-25-23

“Wars and rumors of war.”

The Bible foretells of the End Times, and signs of its imminence. God keeps us on our toes, because wars, like the poor, we always have with us. Has there ever been a good war or a bad peace, as many have asked through the ages? I say yes; there may be just wars, and the willingness to do battle is irretrievably part of a nation’s soul.

“If I must choose between peace and righteousness,” Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “I choose righteousness.” Nevertheless, lately I am persuaded to settle for a long wait if people want to find a war to be joined…

Humankind seems not to have “advanced” much through the centuries; neither with children on playgrounds nor adults on battlefields that once were playgrounds. We congratulate each other – that is, fool ourselves – that “progress” is the hallmark of our times. Yet the bloodiest death toll from wars, in any century of the earth’s existence, was in the Twentieth Century, more than in all previous centuries combined. We brag that we – “civilizations” – have finally ended the scourge of slavery; yet there are greater numbers of slaves today than ever in human history. The numbers now are not the faces that flash in our minds: bondservants. But, instead, all manner of children, women, minorities, homeless, voiceless, migrants, the anonymous.

As long as there are power elites; as long as greed outpaces love; as long as hypocrisy can always find a nicer name, humankind will be (in the Bible’s phrase, Proverbs 26:11; II Peter 2:22) like dogs returning to their vomit. Think about what changes have occurred, really, when science develops new ways to save lives… as it also invents new ways to end lives. What a spectacle, when people march to save baby seals and whales, and march for the right to kill babies.

Well, Merry Christmas, anyway. Let the holiday sing.

Some wars are years, or generations, festering; some start on a random morning, or so it seems. But one thing we seldom encounter is peace breaking out. In the midst of a raging war, interrupting a bloody battle. Yet it has happened. Not many people know about the Christmas Truce. It was a virtual miracle during the first Christmas, in 1914, of World War I – the so-called Great War, surely the most useless of history’s many useless wars.

A few months after war was declared in Europe, by almost every big and small nation on the continent, almost a million soldiers already had been slaughtered. Christmastime was come, and soldiers were mired in trenches that were to become so established that for more than two years the battle line never moved more than 30 miles one way or another. In that unlikely hellhole a miracle occurred.

Minor details differ but the dispositive facts are acknowledged: Peace broke out.

Soldiers of Germany, England (Scotland, actually), and France, at night, spontaneously sang Christmas carols… and were joined by their “enemies” who could hear across No Man’s Land… nervous soldiers climbed from trenches to greet their foes, and shake hands… gifts were exchanged, even little trinkets, but also pastries and wine sent from home. They shared pictures of wives and children… more hymn singing… fireworks, intended to illuminate battlefields so to aim the cannons, were now shot skyward in celebration. There were tentative, but successful, attempts to communicate.

Of course they communicated. The languages that night were hymns and Bibles and chocolates and cigars. Handshakes and smiles and tears.

A Merry Christmas. A Holy Christmas. Peace on earth… at least in that narrow 27-mile-long battle line, south of Ypres and east of Armentieres, site of the song about les Mademoiselles, that night.

A British soldier recalled the Christmas Truce almost two decades later: We stuck up a board with a Merry Christmas on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. … Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans did the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.

We and the Germans met in the middle of No Man’s Land. Their officers were also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them.… One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed up to the neck with this damned war and would be glad when it was all over. We told him that he wasn’t the only one that was fed up with it. (Frank Richards, “Old Soldiers Never Die,” 1933)

Another history records: [The British] Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker issued a directive forbidding fraternization: “For it discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys offensive spirit in all ranks. … Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.” (Stanley Weintraub, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce,” 2001)

How much different would the next day have been – how much different would the world be today – if the Truce had held?

Note that chocolates and cigars were only the presents. The GIFTS were hymns and Bible verses – they brought the soldiers out of trenches; not the prospect of snacks or smokes or a soccer game in the snow.

Christmas. God did not intend for Jesus’s Incarnation, the spirit of that Christmas Truce, to be a one-time miracle, but to be everyday life. He intended that we know-and-show that love and fellowship can be normal, not rare. We can be changed by the Holy Day, not be annoyed by yet another holiday.

“You started it!” “No, you did!!!” Wouldn’t it be great if we all exchanged those words happily, about starting love, sharing affection, and living in Heavenly Peace?

Who “started it”? God did.

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If your YouTube video opens in anything besides a man playing a bagpipe, then you need to switch to a desktop to play the video. There is a problem we have not solved yet with the videos on pads and phones.

Click for an excerpt of the motion picture: Joyeaux Noel

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.

Christmas week approaches, and many of try to brush off news stories that Jesus was born in April or November, according to studies; and we also try to cut through the crowded shops and the gift-sale e-mails… hoping that, by focusing on the simple truths and modest imagery of Jesus’s birth, we can connect with the profundity of the Incarnation — God living amongst us. Coming first as a helpless baby.

Two thousand years later, Hallmark has us thinking that to be born in a manger was some sort of Green bonus, the happy family surrounded by squeaky-clean animal friends and shiny angels. More the truth was that the stable was a step up from a dung-heap. Swaddling clothes were essential, else the baby would have been delivered and lain on musty straw, animal spittle, and bugs.

Think of it: Jesus came into this world rejected and despised, and that is how, as a man, He left it.

Isaiah knew it would happen this way. Eight hundred years earlier, the prophet wrote:

“Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid, as it were, our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

The rest of Chapter 53, of course, foretells the Easter story. But I think it is significant, too (otherwise God would not have ordered its occurrence and recording) that we remember the challenges to Joseph, the abuse Mary endured, the difficulties of Jesus’s birth… and His entire life. “Despised and rejected of men.”

Yet this “undesirable” was also THE JOY OF MANKIND’S DESIRING. As sinners today, we still esteem Him not sometimes… yet we desire Him, our souls are only complete when He lives within us!

Here is a performance of that ethereally beautiful movement from Bach’s Cantata Number 147, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It is sung by the group Celtic Women, in an arrangement that is both touching and revealing of how adaptable Bach’s music is. Here are the words the ensemble sings:

Jesu, joy of man’s desiring,

Holy wisdom, love most bright.

Drawn by Thee, our souls? aspiring,

Soar to uncreated light.

Word of God, our flesh that fashioned

With the fire of life impassioned,

Striving still to Truth unknown,

Soaring, dying, ’round Thy throne.

Click: Jesus, Joy of Man’s Desiring