11-20-01
One of the Scripture verses I like to sing is the first verse of Psalm 92: "It's a good thing to give thanks unto the LORD, and to sing praises unto Thy name, O Most High; to show forth Thy loving kindness in the morning and Thy faithfulness each night." The musical version can be punctuated with three claps as we say "ninety-two." With all the false belief that has engulfed our world, it becomes imperative that we know what's in the Bible. When I think of the Pilgrim Fathers on that first Thanksgiving of 1621, I recall the pictures of them carrying the holy book, though I don't think it was the King James Version. That translation had been done in 1611, but was associated with the crown from which the Pilgrims fled. As I recall, it was the Geneva Bible prepared earlier by Swiss Calvinists. Certainly that was the version of Puritans who formed the colony of Massachusetts. They felt that their theocracy was another Israel in this New World. And Puritanism left its imprint on America even faintly to this day, and more so in the negative recollections.
I recall a series of historical lectures back in '76, as the U.S. became 200 years old. The professor said that the Pilgrim's pre-natal vision of a the chosen people in another land (as a new Israel) was changed during the Revolution into that of these new Adams in this north American new Garden of Eden. But I think the older Israel notion still lingers with us. Maybe it's why we have always favored the Israelis as a nation. They actually achieved what we felt we might have been. Another verse I've learned to sing (from the inmates) is 1 Peter: 2:9; "For we are a chosen generation, a royal, priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people to show forth the praises of Him who has called us, out of darkness, into His wonderful light." Of course, that refers to a spiritual nation (the Church) that exists within this temporal U.S.A. of which we are also citizens. I'm uneasy about patriotism that's expressed by prayers being offered from religions not based on the Bible. The assumption is that all are made to the same God. But is it the One that our founding fathers had known. If so, would we use the Talmud, Koran, book of Mormon or Dianetics for the presidential oath of office someday? I could tolerate the Catholic Bible with those 14 more books that we call "apocrypha," since they're in my Jerusalem Bible which I love yet ignore the extras. But Biblical faith has been the fount of freedom that is America. Are brides carrying any other book to the altar? It represents the truth upon which they want to establish their homes, as a family Bible is then kept (and read) through the years. I still have the one awarded to my late father by the United S.S. Class that he taught at 1st UMC. Though it's the old KJV, I still read it some. However, Niece carries the New KJV to church and I like it even better. She grew up a Baptist and they always take their Bible to worship services, even though there are some in the pew racks nowadays. The pattern is so much like those Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. What a heritage they left for Americans!
I heard Dr. Dobson on AM 1400, saying that Congress has set Dec. 4 as their Day of Prayer. He said that folks across the land should want to join in. I hope it will get more attention from the media as a time for repentance and seeking the LORD. That reminds me of a correction the Lord gave me in my teaching of the inmates: that Yahweh doesn't refer just to the Father as I had been thinking. But LORD (Yahweh) means Father, Son and Holy Ghost. I use the word Trinity only with Christians, since it isn't from Scripture and may alienate Jews or Muslims. So YAHWEH is our triune deity: the "I am" at that burning bush where Moses took off his shoes, all the "I am" figures Jesus Christ gave of Himself, and the "I am" of Sabbath (innumerable heavenly hosts). I thought I'd found how to express all that by spelling GOD in capitals. But now I've seen that Muslims do the same referring to Allah, a name not from Scripture. There's a strange contrast in the other two theistic faiths: that Jews believe Jesus was crucified but never rose from the dead while Muslims don't believe He arose because He wasn't really crucified. So both miss the Gospel, the truth that He's alive forevermore and finally coming again for His church.
Some national leaders were talking this morning about the war on drugs as being a part of this war on terror. That's something I'm happy to hear expressed. There seems to be a close link since Al-Qaeda is known to thrive on drugs sold out of Afghanistan. One said that if Iraq could be shown to have ties to that trade it would give us another strong case for going after Saddam Hussein as soon as the victory is clear in Afghanistan. Mention was made of our own war on drugs here in America being something of a failure, so maybe this is the way to renew it globally.
Here it well into the new year and I haven't added a thing to this column. Above I see that giving up the nursing home was about to happen. Well I switched from delivering papers to leading a Jesus Sing each Friday following Rotary. Since I get dressed up for the Club meeting, I take advantage of my better appearance by going there were I already know so many folks from the years of delivering to residents. A nice crowd is attending so they must appreciate it, though I do most f the singing myself. The Home provides me a PA system and that's really all I need. What a contrast it is to have nearly all ladies after ministering at the prison to all men. They are younger and the ladies older too.
I got into post-modernism in my column and as I watch the investigation of last November's fiasco down the Florida election, I'm seeing it as evidence of this new era that seems to imlement Murphy's law, "if anything can go wrong, it will." Back in WW II days the word was snafu. Then in the computer age it became glitch. Now it's chaos, which has been established statistically as scientific fact or the reality of this post modern age. Right now we're seeing news about that US submarine that surfaced beneath a Japanese teaching boat causing it to sin at the cost of nine lives. I just heard what the sub skipper uttered when he heard the loud sound as his vessel shuddered from the impact, "Jesus, what in hell was that!?!" Maybe that's descriptive of post-modern experience. Even our Christmas night ice storm here in southern Oklahoma seems to fall in such a category. Everything looked so beautiful with the ice covering it, but when things started falling everywhere, yuk. A tree split on the east side of our house and the half that fell hit upstairs hard enough past midnight to make Niece think there had been an earthquake. Talk about deconstruction, fragmentation and system deterioration, we had it. So I see that storm as my own initiation into being post-modern, which resembles the coming of the Lord to me.
John, my son, sent me an article debunking post-modernism, equating it with a pilosophical movement back in the twenties called Dadaism. The article named several "prophets" of this pessimestic perspective whose names I had never heard. They were French art critics, which is not the context for me. And I only use the term as decriptive of our human situation in this present age, not as offering any answers but only descriptive of what we are facing. The one I first followed in using it was theologian Thomas Oden, younger brother of my brother-in-law Tal and noted sholar world wide. Since he spent time studying at the Vatican, I've taken note of how the Catholic church took it's stand against modernism way back in 1907. Now the attitude of Pope John Paul II is not nearly as adamant toward post-modernism from what I read. So it must be a sort of corrective of the excesses of modernism, a designation I'd learn to abhor from childhood days in church. Modernists were those who seduced true believers with their lies according to Methodist preachers way back in the thirties. Even when I went to seminary in the early fifties, it was still a suspect term. So post-modernism sounds to me like the funeral for that false faith called modernism. It would seem to leave the door wide open for "Jeus Christ the same: yesterday, today and forever" as Hebrews asserts. That doesn't equate with Christianity as the one true religion, because the New Testament speaks only of the Kingdom of GOD instead of a new religion. Thus, Hebrew faith is the Bible's theme from Abraham ever after; faith in the one GOD, Yahweh and His son Yeshua. Israel (wrestlers with Yahweh) are the chosen ones to reveal the divine design so the church is a new (true) Israel, founded on twelve Apostles replacing twelve tribes and a higher Moses with the same of Moses' successor proclaiming a heavenly law above the old law. That makes me call myself "heavenly Hebrew," especially to the inmates to which we minister.
I hear that Gladiator may win an award and that Tom Hanks may be chosen best actor, but neither excites me any. Yet one thing on TV did. CNN had the question posted "How many Oscars did the movie '2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY' win? It was one of my favorites, though I seldom watch movies anymore. But I don't recall that 2001 got any Hollywood award. That opening scene of a space station with the Blue Danube waltz playing while a shuttle craft docked so flawlessly (the way Atlantis did yesterday with the ISS) is a sign to me of the culmination of that age of modernism. Those were the days when science was fitting everything together successfully even though the movie plot was a defiant computer, HAL, who caused the death of all but one astronaught on that voyage to Jupiter. But the musical theme from "Thus Spake Zarathustra" with it's apocalyptic ta, ta, ta taaa, was portending this post modern-age into which we're all being ruthlessly hurled. The neatness and order of science has been shaken by chaos theory, which calls into question the whole scheme of cause and effect. It was a long time coming, beginning with the French mathmatician Blaize Pascal, who developed a way to calculate probability (for gambling purposes) back in the 17th century. Then in 1927 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg (who later became a Nazi) showed that the behavior of sub-atomic particles is not absolute but somewhat random. Thus probability is the most we can know rather than certainty in the laws of nature. It was called "the Heisenberg uncertainty principle." Albert Einstein, who studied stars and galaxies instead of electrons and protons, was caused to utter his famous dictum "God does not play dice with the universe." But quantum theory confirmed Heisenberg's finding and probability has now become the theme of post-modernism, where an ethos of harmony and accord has been replaced with framentation and chaos. That "unified field theory" that Einstein yearned to know is now seen as a modernist illusion. I think of what Noah said to Da Lawd in that famous movie "The Green Pastures:" everything dat's been nailed down is a cummin loose. And that's what happened in the flood story. In my Jerusalem Bible the note on Genesis 7:11 (and all the fountains of the great deep were broken up) reads "chaos returns," referring to the opening verses about the earth being without form and void. Those numbers 7:11 sound a little like gambling, where chance is king. Did you know that the soldiers gambling for His garments was one feature of Christ's crucifixion mentioned in all four Gospels? It was important as a fulfilled prophecy, just as this post-modern era may also be. I read on the Internet how Speilburg's "Jurassic Park" was a movie based completely on chaos theory. You recall that it was a colossal amusement park on a Pacific island where living dinosaurs had been cloned from tissue samples found. But the whole affair turned into a disaster as a post-modern movie. The same was true of "Titanic," though I never saw the show nor read any such philosophical assessments. Both shows were about huge gambles taken and the losse suffered. I recently viewed the Challenger II launching in '85 that was based on mere probability of success. It exploded 90 seconds later with the loss of seven astronaughts. And I've heard many times from boyhood of that super ship Titanic being compared to a tower of Babel. They calculated that it couldn't sink, but it did. So our legacy from the 20th century is "relativity" (Einstein's word) and "uncertainty" (Heisenberg's term). Yet the Gospel is more vital and significant than ever in such an age because we know Jesus Christ. We are not awash in relativity and uncertainty. He's the same "yesterday, today and forever" as the book of Hebrews boldly states it. Hallelujah!