AnderspeaK
Praising God or Each Other?
Theologian Karl Barth and Trappist monk Thomas Merton had an ongoing argument over whose music is played in heaven. Barth insisted upon Mozart, and Merton backed Bach. They finally came to an amicable compromise summed up in a quote from Barth:
In Heaven, when God is with the heavenly host, they play Mozart; when God is absent, they play Bach.
Whenever we worship, God is indeed with us, and our worship mood must reflect that reality. God’s nearness is comforts us, but not necessarily so; it can trouble us as well.
An anonymous poet wrote:
We pray that our prayers should have power
To bring comforts, the greatest of which must be
To keep the Lord God in His Heaven above
Leaving us to our own will, most free.
What greater comfort to our ways could we ask than that we simply be left undisturbed? We hold our own favorite ideas of what is good—usually, what is good for us—but our ideas of good must always be surrendered to the good that God chooses for us.
God has a plan for us as a people and as individual Christians. Our walk in faith is a matter of daily adjusting ourselves to his plan for us. God’s providence is perfect, and we choose either to live aligned with his providence or up-and-against it.
If we think of God as being “far away” or “off in his Heaven,” we will pray differently, think differently, and worship differently than when we think of him as being immediately near.
If God is distant, like the master who “goes abroad” in the parable of the talents, then we are simply left to our own plans and devices until he returns.
Let us always be mindful then, that he is near, and what a difference that makes in our discipleship. The nearness of God bears a mark on our prayers, our decisions, and our worship. Our prayers are expressed through the language of intimacy in the tones of two or more who are closer than brothers or sisters. Our decisions are no longer a matter of personal wisdom but of divine guidance discerned through prayer. Our worship is less a collection of statements about God than a celebration of his immediate presence—God with us.
Our songs of praise are sometimes a proclamation about God: A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; and other times an address to God: Lord, you are more precious than silver. In the first case, our songs are addressed to one another or even to the world. To whom are we singing when we sing They will know we are Christians by our love? We address one another. Even the Doxology (Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below…) sounds more like an invitation to praise than praise per se. We are talking to each other or to the world, and the correct response is, “Yes, great idea—let’s do praise him!”
Alternately, we address God directly: “I love you Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you,” or “ Holy, Holy, Holy. . .all the saints adore Thee,” or “How great Thou art”—all within which we address God directly.
As all prayer and praise must be God-ward or else we are just talking to each other about how much we like to praise God. There is certainly room for both kinds of song. We need to be proclaimers of the mighty works of God just as we need to address God directly with praise. If we emphasize proclamation alone, we tend towards a self-congratulatory worship style, saying in effect: “Oh how we love Jesus. Aren’t we terrific!” To emphasize praise alone does no real harm, but to do so risks the loss of real depth in our proclamation. As one lover-and-critic of praise music put it, “Praise music is four notes, three words, and thirty minutes long.” Even so, if it addresses God with heartfelt praise, it is most exactly like the music of heaven itself.
For anyone bothered by the music being “too repetitious” or the lyrics “too insubstantial,” I would quickly encourage you to listen again to the final chorus of Handel’s Messiah.
The eternal songs of heaven must begin with us, here and now, for God is indeed with us. †
THANKSGIVING FACTS & MYTHS
Ah, Thanksgiving! The time of year when we rightly turn our hearts toward the virtues of gratitude and generosity. Unfortunately, popular opinion and revisionist historians have changed the traditional ideas about Thanksgiving into a narrative of colonial domination.
Question: What do Jennifer Lawrence, John Quincy Adams, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Gere, Sally Field, Ulysses S. Grant, Christopher Reeve, Clint Eastwood, Sarah Palin, Alec Baldwin, Bing Crosby, Dan Quayle, Hugh Hefner, Benjamin Spock, Orson Welles, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George W. Bush and 20 - 30 million other Americans have in common?
Answer: They are all descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and their Mayflower ancestors have been dishonored, maligned, vilified, and disparaged by widespread misinformation. Let's look at some of the erroneous current assumptions about the Mayflower Pilgrim/Indian relationship. This is America's primary origin story, and has a profound influence upon the national psyche. (continued from page 1)
1. Fiction: The Mayflower Pilgrims gave the Indians smallpox-infected blankets, wiping out 90% of the indigenous people of New England.
Fact: This scenario, taught in schools and colleges from coast to coast, is chronologically impossible. The Mayflower landed in November 1620, two to four years AFTER the war and epidemic that decimated the New England tribes in 1616-1618. There is no historical evidence of smallpox aboard the Mayflower. The first recorded smallpox outbreak in New England occurred in Boston in 1633.
2. Fiction: The Pilgrims would have died of starvation during the first winter if the Indians had not taken them in and fed them.
Fact: The Mayflower anchored at Provincetown Nov 11, 1620. Other than one violent encounter, they did not meet any Indians for over 4 months, during which time half of the passengers died of the ‘general sickness’ (probably scurvy) not of starvation. The Pilgrims met their first Indian, Samoset, on March 16, 1621, then Squanto, Massasoit, and the Pokanokets on March 22, 1621. On that date, the Pilgrims and Massasoit signed a peace treaty that both sides honored for over fifty years. The Pilgrims had adequate food, and in fact fed their Indian visitors on numerous occasions.
3. Fiction: The Indians lived in universal peace and harmony before the coming of the Europeans.
Fact: There are numerous first-hand reports showing many Indian tribes were in a state of perpetual war, building federations and empires, competing for territory, exterminating trading competitors, taking slaves, sacrificing humans, and torturing captives. The forgotten Tarratines War, which had a devastating impact on the situation in New England in 1620, is a well-documented example.
4. Fiction: The Pilgrims came ashore in 1620 as an invading army, raping and pillaging. They massacred the first 700 Indians they encountered, then sat down for a Thanksgiving feast with the survivors.
Fact: The 52 Pilgrims, (14 adult men, 4 adult women, and 34 children) who survived the first winter were peace-loving God-fearing people who made friends with the Pokanoket Indians they met in the spring of 1621. The Pilgrims and the Pokanokets lived in peace and harmony with each other until 1675, over half a century. In 1675, the Indians declared all-out war on the settlers, in one of the bloodiest conflicts, per capita, in American history.
There are many positive and uplifting facts about the 50 years of friendship at Plymouth Plantation 1621-1675, as the two cultures laid the foundation for the evolution of American democracy and the American mind and spirit, an important step in humanity's progress toward realizing the essence of the American Dream - Liberty, Justice, and Abundance for all.
Early Christians in America made plenty of mistakes, but theirs are no more horrible than our own today. Let us thank God that his Providence has led so many people to faith and authentic gratitude and generosity, and may we embody those virtues in greater measure with each year!†
Researched and compiled by Andrew C. Bailey for the documentary/book/screenplay project: THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS: Freedom and Friendship at Plymouth Plantation.