Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

NUMBER EIGHTY-TWO
Ichthus 2005

Saturday, January 22, 2005
Today’s headline in the Faith & Values section of the Herald-Leader:

Ichthus sets its ’05 lineup

"Ichthus" is the Greek word for fish. The fish became a symbol in early Christian art, almost a code word, because the Greek letters spelled out the initials for a simple Christian creed, “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” It is still kind of a code word, appearing on license plate holders, bumper stickers, sweatshirts, coffee cups, etc., etc., and in ads for Christian businesses.

In Lexington Ichthus is the name of our annual Contemporary Christian Music Festival. This year’s theme is “Let It Rain.” The promoters admit the theme is “darkly humorous” since last year’s event was preceded by three days of heavy rain that turned the site into a mud hole and traffic into a nightmare. Reading last year’s accounts, I was reminded of the passage in Dante’s Inferno where he arrives at the third circle of hell to find it “filled with cold, unending, heavy and accursèd rain; its measure and kind are never changed. Gross hailstones, water grey with filth, and snow come streaking down across the shadowed air; the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.” (Canto VI. 7-10)

No doubt the promoters see their theme as a vote of confidence in God. They have followed the old Arab proverb, “Pray to Allah but tie your camel” by putting in many improvements including 1.5 miles of gravel roads since last year. I can’t imagine they are not praying daily for good weather proceeding and during the big show on April 21-23 this year.

My admittedly jaundiced eye sees a contest shaping up between the 450 prophets and priestesses of Oompah! (god of Christian Rock Music) and Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, John, Peter and Paul (and incidentally, the God of thunder, lightning and rain). 20,000 CCM devotees will gather on the hillside south of Lexington, to rock and roll with the cream of the Contemporary Christian Music crop. Jehovah God will be there in the lofty intentions and words of the songs, but Oompah! will reign supreme in the music. And in this venue, the music is everything.

This looks to me like an ideal time for Jehovah God to say what he thinks about rock and roll Christianity. Last year’s weather disaster could have been a fluke, two years in a row might be a real sign.

The “worshippers” will hear a nice chat on Friday evening from Mike Breaux. Breaux is famous for doubling the attendance of Southland Christian Church with his personal style and come as you are approach. He has moved on to bigger and better things at Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Illinois, “One of the nation’s most influential megachurches.”

The crowd will thrill to the likes of Relient K, Tobymac, Audio Adrenaline, and Skillet. They will hear rockers Pillar, Tait, Kutless, Barlow Girl, Thousand Foot Krutch, Sanctus Real, and hip hop artist John Reuben. Add the Newsboys, Michael W. Smith, and Worship Stars (what a marvelous world CCM is where one can become a Worship Star) Charlie Hall and Todd Agnew and you have a sterling lineup for the celebration of Oompah!

Stay tuned for more as this breaking news develops.

NUMBER EIGHTY-ONE
Kipling & The ACLU

An Email to a Contributing Columnist of the Lexington Herald-Leader

Mr. Michael Kennedy is a University of Kentucky geography professor and a member of the UK Board of Trustees. His column claimed, “ACLU protects the rights of all.” It is filled, from beginning to end, with misinformation about the ACLU, the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, Conservative Christians exercising their first amendment rights, and abortion.

My email was not printed since the professor’s views were an admirably comprehensive statement of the Herald-Leader’s editorial position and news room biases. They are a lot like cockroaches, loath to turn on the light in the kitchen. It was sent to Mr. Kennedy but he was too busy to answer.

Mr. Kennedy,

Your splendid commercial for the ACLU reminded me of the last verse of a Rudyard Kipling poem:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:--
That the Dog returns to his vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

You didn’t mention it, but we do have an established religion in America – Secular Humanism. It has been busy for at least 50 years rooting out every memory of the Copybook Headings of our Founding Fathers. For the most part it has banished God from the public square, the school, the business, the courts, and the government. The ACLU has been at the cutting edge of this fight. Due to their efforts, and the efforts of those who think like them, the moral foundations of the Republic have become about as solid as a bowl of Jell-O.

It is very rare that reading the H-L generates a good feeling but I see your column as good news -- soon the ACLU will have worked its way out of a job. Already most men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins. Soon a woman will be able to freely, with good conscience and full social approval have her inconvenient baby murdered in her womb. Soon a man will be able to freely, with good conscience and full social approval marry his boyfriend (or even his poodle or his cat). And in neither case will the ACLU be needed to defend these free choices from all those narrow-minded Bible thumpers.

Already Christians have been arrested for the hate crime of reading the Bible in a public gathering of homosexuals. Right now folks like you are working with the FTC to ban the reading or preaching of the Bible on the public airwaves. Day by day, the established religion of Secular Humanism gets stronger and stronger.

Of course there will be a price to pay. When man makes himself god, eventually the reality of the true God comes back to bite him. Make no mistake about it, God is there, He is not silent, and He does not proudly carry an ACLU membership card in his wallet. If God thinks about the ACLU at all I suspect he regards them with the same disdain he had for the 450 prophets of Baal who faced Elijah on Mt. Carmel -- numbers don't impress God. 400,000 loyal ACLU card carriers (or 4 million for that matter) don’t change the truth.

By the way, if you have an inside track with the ACLU, would you ask them to take me off their mailing list? Years ago I subscribed to Brill's Content. When it went belly-up they gave the last three issues of my subscription to Mother Jones who apparently peddled it to the ACLU who have been filling my mailbox with diatribes against John Ashcroft and President Bush ever since 9/11. For your information, and for the information of the ACLU, abortion is murder, same sex marriage is an abomination, and President Bush is not the American equivalent of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein.

Thanks for brightening my day by reminding me of my favorite poet,

Jerry Sweers

Note; As I get ready to publish this Weblog, I come from watching the inauguration of President Bush. I can report that God was there, sitting in front row seat and leading the applause with considerable enthusiasm. This will no doubt give the ACLU the jim-jams and inspire them to new and more energetic efforts to eliminate God from public life. So I guess they may still be quite a long way from working themselves out of a job.

NUMBER EIGHTY
Closing The Circle

There is a small black and white film made by Charles Eames the Designer/
Architect called "The Powers of Ten." It begins with the camera looking down on a grassy knoll in the English countryside observing a dozing man and woman on a blanket. They have finished a picnic and the warm sun has put them to sleep.

As the camera begins to move higher, a narrator describes what the viewer is seeing in a matter-of-fact voice. The broad countryside soon comes into view...then the curve of the earth and quickly the whole earth fills the screen. Almost immediately the earth begins to shrink as the camera picks up speed exponentially. In less than three minutes the viewer is taken to the edge of the known universe. Then the direction reverses and the return trip goes past the original starting point all the way to its final destination in the nucleus of a skin cell on the back of the man's hand.

It was the film-maker's intention to create a small visual parable about a
mathematical reality. Is it possible that he also may have opened the door just a crack into an understanding of one of the ways God may see things? Imagine God, a hundred feet above the airport runway in Phnom Penh Cambodia one afternoon in 1975.

A small plane is standing on the end of the runway, its engine running, ready to take off. Inside are twenty orphans from the World Vision orphanage in the city. Nearby two men in flak jackets are in earnest conversation. They are next to sand bag barricades that protect them and the plane from incoming rockets.

Move higher and see the countryside, it is in flames. The City is under siege by the Red Cambodians. There is constant gunfire, rocket explosions and the ugly black smoke of fires out of control as far as the eye can see.

Move higher still and see a whole nation in the agony of war. The old order is being destroyed; a new order designed by fanatic Marxist ideologues is coming into being. The weak, the educated, the politically experienced and the uncooperative are being ruthlessly eliminated.

Once more move higher still. See the whole world standing silent, disbelieving, apathetic. Higher yet and all that disappears and only the blue and white beauty of the earth hanging in space can be seen-with no sign of the hate, destruction, and death marring its surface.

Drop back down to the starting point and move lower. See Minh Tien Voan--a Cambodian Christian educated at the University of Georgia, trained for business with Gulf Oil. He directs the work of World Vision in Cambodia.

Minh's wife and two small children are on the plane. Stan Mooneyham is pleading with Minh to join them. But he will not. "The people will need us Christians when the country starts to suffer," he says, "I must stay and help."

Later, when the American Embassy is evacuated under heavy fire, Minh will again turn down a seat, this time on a U.S. helicopter. Still later he will seek refuge in the French Embassy until pressure from the conquering army forces all Cambodians to leave.

Move closer, into Minh's heart. In the first terrible days after the fall of the city, he will rejoice to see his Buddhist father and all his family become believers in Jesus Christ. When it is clear that he will be hunted down and executed by the Red Cambodians, Minh will head east, towards Viet Nam.

In the Mekong river town of Neak Luong Minh and a friend will turn aside in their flight to distribute scriptures to the despairing people. They will be captured by soldiers, bound and killed by a blow to the head with a hoe. It will be four and a half years before Minh Voan's wife and daughters hear the story.

It will be a man named Yin Rebina who will come up to Stan Mooneyham on the street in the Provincial Capitol of Kampong Song in what will then be called Kampuchea. "I am a Christian," he will say, "I know you. I saw you many times before 1975 in Phnom Penh. Do you know what happened to Minh Voan?” Stan does not so Yin Rebina will tell him the story of Minh's death.

At this point, perhaps God will smile, reminded that "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church."

NUMBER SEVENTY-NINE
Bad News & Good News

I am thinking about two events this year that have good news tucked into the bad news. They both came at the end of the year.

The first is the earthquake off the coast of Sumatra that generated deadly Tsunami’s that reached out 5,000 miles and have so far killed at least 150,000 people in 12 countries including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and India. Right now they estimate there are over 5 million persons without homes, food, or anything but the clothes on their backs. It is a natural disaster of major proportions--so big it has crowded the war in Iraq off the front pages and out of the TV News programs.

The pictures of the devastation are unbelievable and heart-rending. How can there be any good news here? It is small, but the good news is that the New York Times, CBS, CNN and their friends and relations in the blue state media have not been able to find any way to blame President Bush for this misery. Instead of the usual endless stream of reports designed to discredit the President and get us out of Iraq, we are seeing reports of a true natural disaster – and of compassion, concern, caring and commitment to help those in great need.

The second event is local. Merlene Davis is the Designated Whiner For The Victim Class in Lexington. Writing weekly in the Lexington Herald-Leader she is the Bluegrass voice of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, Charlie Wrangle and Cynthia McKinney. Merlene is a black middle-aged housewife and mother with a gift for finding bad news for her black Brethren and Sistern in almost any event or situation and laying the blame squarely on the white folks, particularly the conservative Republican white folks. Next to Joel Pett, the resident political cartoonist who can’t draw, she generates the most and the angriest mail from conservative readers.

Recently she has done several columns on her own health – she went to the Doctor and found that she has lung cancer. How can there be any good news in that? A person’s first reaction is to give her a big hug and promise to pray for her -- and that ought to be the first reaction. But the small good news is that for the first time in her journalistic career, she has come up against something she can’t blame on the white folks – and her writing about it is pretty good, maybe even excellent. She is revealing that buried in this aggravating one-note nag there is a real human being. More power to her and may the prayers of her readers for her now be as fervent as their letters of condemnation have been in the past.

In even the darkest cloud, it is possible to find a silver lining. This is true in both the small things and in the most important thing of all. Frederick Buechner, in “Telling The Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale,” puts it this way:

“Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start. Thus is seems to me that this is also where anyone who preaches the Gospel has to start too—after the silence that is truth comes the news that is bad before it is good, the word that is tragedy before it is comedy because it strips us bare in order ultimately to clothe us.”

In his little book, “The Knowledge of The Holy,” A.W. Tozer spells it out more fully:

“The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at most cannot concern him for very long; but even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled upon one another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.” (This is the bad news.)

Tozer goes on then:

“The Gospel can lift this destroying burden from his mind, give beauty for ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden. (This is the good news.)

May you truly behold God, high and lifted up, in the midst of whatever bad news may come your way this year. And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all in 2005.