Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-12-23

Progress. We may conclude after the lessons of history, over uncountable generations, and every civilization that has dedicated itself to the ideal… that Progress is a false god. Perhaps a worthy goal in the abstract, but little more.

The challenge inherent in “progress” is the fact that it is an abstraction. A chimera: literally something honored in the breach, a dream whose precise realization is an illusion; something impossible to define or finally achieve.

If we judge and celebrate Progress by prosperity, we ignore the poverty, starvation, and misery around the world. If we call the triumph of diseases “Progress” we ignore cancers, plagues, epidemics, and self-initiated ways of dying. We think it Progressive that humanity is proving itself more compassionate and welcoming… yet dysfunction, abuse, addictions, suicides, failed marriages, depression, and wars touch every country, family, and household we know.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

We think we know better than all of previous humankind – “we” being contemporary, liberal, secular societies – that we have, progressively, learned lessons from previous cultures; we have built on the discoveries of wise people; that science guides us ever upward. Indeed we are aware of many lessons of history – triumphs and disasters – but that does mean we learn from them.

In infantile fashion, we pick and choose from the annals of history, not to learn and see more clearly and improve our ways, but to craft new justifications for our original, base inclinations. The pattern is called Human Nature; the inclination, theological or otherwise, is called Sin. The result is called Self-Destruction.

Of course, it masquerades as “Progress,” so we congratulate ourselves.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

The West is undergoing a radical transformation of attitudes and codes these days. Under the name of Progress, the roles (and even functions) of the sexes are being redefined. Millennia of foundational spiritual beliefs and attitudes are being denied and even outlawed. Totalitarian practices have permeated national governments and local councils, supplanting authoritarianism, which in its turn had supplanted freedom of thought and expression. Murderous Marxism, tried and failed so often, is being recommended in myriad forms… to be tried one more time. And another, and…

We can look to the French Revolution, among many spasms of Progress, for similar experiments. Discontent led to radicalism so severe that the Church was abolished and its properties confiscated. Members of the monarchy, then the aristocracy, then the middle class, were slaughtered: the revolution “ate its babies” before the factions began slaughtering each other. New governments started foreign wars to distract – and conscript – the public. Fiat currencies were invented; a new calendar was devised; women’s rights were proclaimed and quickly suppressed; and new religions were fabricated to replace Christianity – “The Cult of Reason”; “The Cult of the Supreme Being;” and so forth.

Ultimately, this eruption of Progress, like the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” and myriad others that followed, accumulated its most dispositive statistics by the numbers of people persecuted and slaughtered.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

The 20^th century saw history’s greatest advances in knowledge, discoveries, inventions, medicines… and was by far the bloodiest century of persecution, death, and wars of any century. Innovations dedicated to killing. Progress? We believe ourselves kinder to animals; we no longer kill baby seals or slaughter herds of buffalo. Yet we slaughter babies at rates unprecedented in the history of “humanity.”

As the French say, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – The more things change, the more things stay the same. Really, a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes. So perhaps the millions of aborted babies are merely the “new” version of infant sacrifice practiced by “primitive” societies. But in this Age of Progress, we sacrifice to the gods of self-indulgence, convenience, and a “wiser” form of progressive morality. We know better.

In the post-Christian West, our orgy of selfish delusion lives on borrowed time, existing more and more tenuously on the inertia of expired sanity and fleeting prosperity. Our homes were built on solid foundations, but are crumbling. A few people have vague memories, inchoate awareness, of history’s lessons. But… collectively we are different. We know better. If there is a God, He will forgive us; He always has. Right?

I believe the most serious of all sins, theologically and practically, is the Sin of Pride. It precedes all other sins, and enables all other sins. We know better than our consciences. We know better than history’s examples. We know better than God. But…

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Ultimately the human race and, yes, much of the Christian world, has put itself in this dreadful situation. For individuals, where sin abounds, grace abounds much more; yet surely judgment is coming to this world. I am reminded, if you will indulge an extreme shift of reference, of a 1952 movie, Ma and Pa Kettle At the Fair. It was one of a series of movies about a family of rural nitwits, very popular at the time.

In this movie, Ma and Pa were tossed in the town jail, framed by the village harpy. Even the jailer was sympathetic to their plight, and he repeatedly left the jail cell unlocked or ostentatiously dropped his keys, so that Ma and Pa could escape. More dumb then honest, each time they called, “Oh, Sam! You dropped your keys!”

When Sam sighed in resignation and shuffled away, Pa slowly lamented, “I wish we could figure a way to escape from this old jail…”

We find ourselves in cultural and moral prisons these days. Jesus provides our way to escape; He leaves us the keys; He is the key. And we – deserving the jail cells wherein we find ourselves, often of our own making – nevertheless we wish we could figure a way to escape. The keys are in front of us. But…

There is nothing new under the sun.

+ + +

The Contemporary Christian Music singer and songwriter Rich Mullins sang this (caught on amateur video) at the end of a 1992 concert. A few short years later Rich was killed in a highway accident.

Click: Rich Mullins – This World is Not My Home

3-1-21

Let’s discuss children, if you have any; or grandchildren. Or yourself, reader, if you are a young adult with friends or siblings.

You look around and, increasingly, everyday life and its components disgust you. You are bothered, troubled, worried, alarmed. You see the trash and lies being taught in schools – things that were anathema to uncountable generations throughout history; and recently unspeakable within families. What to do? An answer might be Christian schools or home-schooling.

Ah, but outside that cocoon, it is almost impossible for kids to avoid contemporary music. And when you hear ubiquitous songs and lyrics, if you can understand them, the words and concepts often are filthy. Well, there’s Christian radio…

On the other hand, you can’t escape the awful music in malls and elsewhere, invading everyone’s space. Double-down on reality – current events, news, burning issues. But. The news media on TV, in magazines and papers, on the web, it’s all so distorted, one-sided.

TV has entertainment shows, distractions. But… are there normal lives, wholesome situations, depicted any more? Sexual references, gutter morality, blasphemy and cursing, homosexuality… What shows to watch; how to be warned; and can kids avoid TV at all?

Yes, and maybe by edict, but… these same worldly and offensive challenges are everywhere we turn these days, is my point. Standards of morality, politics, “education,” sports, documentaries, the celebrity culture: we are hostages to a suicidal culture of death, its malignant worldview pressed down upon us from every side.

There is an exquisite detail about the nature of this poisonous post-Christianity. I will say what I do not believe. The guilty parties who foment these attacks and serve them up so attractively do not conspire. I don’t believe that twice a year, or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, and Bob Iger secretly congregate and plot the subversion of our culture, or coordinate the attacks on traditional values.

But that is not to say there is not a conspiracy. The Bible foretells the time we now live in. End times? Perhaps; nevertheless times of rebellion and apostasy. It could get worse, and when it does, the noxious “values” that are replacing Biblical morality and rejecting our virtuous heritage will surely precede the fall. Like now.

The second chapter of Ephesians is a letter that talks about the dual nature of the threats we face – the enemies, not enemy.

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air.

The “prince of the power of the air” is Satan. He is in fact lord of the earthly world, roaming about seeking whom to kill and destroy. It is the devil and his influence – his myriad temptations – against whom we do battle. He is the enemy of our souls.

Yet he is one being. His influence is everywhere but his presence is not: there are demons, just as there are angels; and they oppress and attack and tempt. Their work is more manifest.

…the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience [sinners and the unsaved] among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind… were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

In other words, those in high positions have low standards of morality. They exhibit evil intentions for our democracy and our traditions, and – frankly – hate us. They do not have to get together over pizza and plot our destruction. No need to hand out assignments – who will censor this; who will corrupt that; who will cancel what.

How, then, do these people arrive at the same place, share the same perverse goals? They (and of course other millions of deluded souls) have given themselves over to the “world.” The “spirit of the age.” False values, heresies, corruption. And then we see, clearly, that such error descends downward from media moguls to celebrities to members of your school boards.

These challenges to our homes and families are as old as the Garden – heresies and denial of God’s love and guidance; prideful people who “know better” than God. And the challenges are as new as headlines of this past week!

Item: Amazon removes the faith-based biography of Justice Clarence Thomas;

Item: The television services of D James Kennedy, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, are removed from the cable channel Lifetime.

Item: The House passes the “Equality Act” that calls the Bible “bigoted”;

Item: A man who altered himself in an attempt to be a woman (yet has a “wife”) is nominated to a cabinet position by Biden and refuses to condemn counseling three-year-olds to change their sex.

There is no “conspiracy” when pigs wallow in the same mud; it’s what they do. The spirit of the age now rages with the fury of a hurricane.

Our resistance is more necessary, and the stakes are higher, than ever. But Kristi Noem, a Pentecostal and the Governor of South Dakota, said this weekend: “They want to be our shepherds. But that requires that we see ourselves as sheep.”

We are not only more than sheep. We are “more than conquerors,” the Bible says. And Luke 10:19 reminds us that followers of Christ have authority over all demonic forces. It was never more important than now that we exercise that authority.

+ + +

Click: This World Is Not My Home, Rich Mullins

7-15-13

One of the severe downsides of living in a prosperous society is… “What? Downsides? Can’t you see the glass as half full?” (I have never really understood that one. Half is half, period.) “We have achieved the greatest material prosperity in world history. America is the Promised Land for millions, and what people throughout history have dreamed about!”

Yes, all true. We are, on the whole, prosperous, well-off. And happy, even joyful. Just look at some of the signs: an epidemic of obesity proves we are well-fed. Divorce rates, suicide rates, infanticide, all at record levels in human history, indicate that were are happily well-adjusted. We are told that prejudice and hatred still run rampant; “hate crimes” are codified to resist those emotions. Even in the church: how many preachers think we are not prosperous ENOUGH, so now the “Prosperity Gospel” is preached.

And meanwhile, large sections of the church, while absorbed in such “theology,” surrenders its former domains of charity and morality, while governments and courts and media decide standards for the culture. A militant Compassion Police, without uniforms.

As I was saying, one of the downsides of living in a prosperous society… well, I have listed several already. But I think the biggest danger is the tendency of prosperity to dehumanize people. It might be ironic, but tends to be true, that the less we THINK we have to worry about sickness, poverty, hatred, and death, the less sensitive we are to those facts of life. Less aware of their implications. Less worried about those effects on other people.

The less we tend to think about eternal rewards and damnation, the less we think about Heaven as a goal of life’s long, hard journey – that is to say, less long and hard than it has been for the majority of humankind – the more irrelevant Heaven becomes.

Not obsolete, just seemingly irrelevant. What about this anomaly? Do we prohibit complacency and prosperity? Of course not. But it becomes more important a job of the church to increase the preaching about righteousness. Just as patriots, from the Founders to Ronald Reagan, recognized that Liberty is never more than one generation away from extinction.

Believers around the world are bearing unbelievable burdens these days. The last century saw more Christians martyred for their faith than in any previous century. Today, persecution, torture, slavery, displacement, ethno-religious cleansing, legal harassment, and spying are added to the deaths. Many churches in prosperous Western and first-world countries like America argue amongst themselves about Absolute Truth vs relational truth; and whether the Bible’s teachings about, say, homosexuality should be silenced, so to encourage new members to stop in; and whether there is a hell or not.

The remnant – today’s People of the Word – in America have a job that is somewhat easier, but also more challenging, than members of the persecuted church in other lands. In China, North Korea, Pakistan, and other societies, Christians risk their lives to worship and fellowship. They meet in secret places, sometimes each member hiding, then exchanging, one page of the Bible to avoid detection of the whole Book by authorities. Believers in America increasingly do battle with powers and principalities of the air; hard to see, hard to fight.

How many of those foreign believers DO those things for their faith? How many of us here AVOID things that would nurture out faith and service?

If it were against the law to be a Christian in America, would there be enough evidence to convict some of us?

Hebrews, Chapter 11, is nicknamed “the Hall of Fame of Faith,” listing many of the Old Testament heroes who were chosen, who were persecuted, who battled, who overcame, for their faith and their God. But, interesting to note, not every man and woman in the list reached the putative goal or version of the Promised Land. Some were rejected and persecuted, even killed for their faith; yet they fought on.

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on earth” (Hebrews 11:13).

A prosperous America is a fine place, but it can be finer still – as fine as it was in our earlier days – if we keep our eyes on a yet finer place indeed: the life of God’s commands, the Heaven of God’s promises.

+ + +

Today’s musical clip is a musical encapsulation of this message. Sung plaintively, solo, by the late Rich Mullins, it sounds like an ancient biblical strain, or a slave song of the primitive church, or the lonesome sound of the Sacred Harp songbooks in America’s past. But it was written about a half-century ago by Albert E Brumley Sr… and has been embraced by the white and black churches, rural and “mainstream,” in church services and concerts alike. It calls to us. If you “can’t feel at home in the world any more”… maybe your spirit is in a good place.

Click: This World Is Not My Home