I have yet to find my equilibrium after the Charlie Kirk killing. I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. I didn’t follow him. I heard him speak one time at an event in which Ravi Zacharias was the keynote speaker, but I never watched, or listened, or read anything from Charlie Kirk online. I didn’t agree with his Republican apologetic, though I couldn’t have identified anything Charlie Kirk specifically said before his death.
Since his death, I have heard and read testimony of his love for Jesus. His wife, Erika, publicly forgave his killer in an ultimate act of sacrificial obedience to Jesus.
Charlie Kirk’s legacy will always be that of a follower of Jesus and a staunch Republican, friend and defender of Donald Trump, who maintained political views opposed to mine.
I am a born again Christian. I believe in the death of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of my sins and his resurrection from the dead. I believe the Bible is the word of God and His revelation to mankind. I read the Bible daily. I believe there is only one path to God, and that is through Jesus Christ. I go to church every Sunday, and I am involved in Wednesday evening and Saturday morning Bible studies.
I have been a Christian for 45 years. The fundamentals of my faith have not changed in that time, but I have gone down some side roads from which I had to retreat back to a more orthodox faith. I was tempted by the prosperity gospel, and I once embraced an Americanized Christianity verging on idolatry.
Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God has not changed during my life (or at any time since the foundation of the earth), but I have changed often, as I have had to adjust my thinking, confess my sin, and allow my mind to be transformed by God’s Word and the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life.
I am a work in progress, of course. I have yet to arrive at any final destination, but I look forward with yearning for the day when I see Him face to face, and I will know as I am fully known!
I used to believe that all true Christians should (and therefore must) believe all of the same things about everything. That makes sense in a rationalistic way because we all have the same Holy Spirit, and we all read the same Bible, so we all should believe exactly the same things about everything. Right?
I recall today the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate award from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In back in 1968. When I was 8 years old, Laugh In was a hip variety show of biting political humor that was mostly lost on my young mind. The award was a dubious honor ceremoniously presented each week to public figures, corporations, and government agencies for ridiculous “achievements”.
The Fickle Finger of Fate suggests the unpredictable and arbitrary nature of luck or destiny. As finite human beings, we don’t control our fates, and we cannot know the twists and turns that await us in the future.
The award has an ironic backstory. Star Trek was moved from the coveted 7:00 PM spot to the dreaded 10:00 PM “death slot” by NBC to make room for Laugh In. The hip, comedic variety show, however, was popular only for a relatively a short stint from 1968 to 1973 and has largely been forgotten by all but impressionable young minds.
Star Trek, on the other hand, went on to become an iconic science fiction series. It was ahead of its time, and it became a hit in off-network syndication, inspiring sequels and movies for almost 50 years.
Fate is certainly a fickle thing. Driven by polls and ratings to attract the largest audience, NBC obviously did not foresee the lasting success of the Star Trek brand. They also did not expect the short-lived lifespan of their cutting edge variety show that replaced Star Trek.
As Christians, we don’t believe in fate, of course. We don’t believe in random chance. We believe in God who designed and ordered the universe and established our place in it.
The future, however, is equally unknowable to us. As the writer of Ecclesiastes said thousands of years ago, “God set eternity in the heart of man, but not so that he can know the end from the beginning.” (Ecc. 3:11). The Prophet Isaiah said it this way,
“’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'”
Isaiah 58:8-6
God famously, but lovingly, rebuked Job for insisting on understanding things he could not fathom. As with Job, we are invited to have faith and to trust God, but we have more reason for hope and trust than Job, because we know our redeemer lives. He rose from the dead!
We understand that God can be trusted because of His willing demonstration of love for us in emptying Himself to become a man and laying down His life for us. We have no option but to trust Him, but we know we can trust him because of His love for us that He demonstrated on the cross.
Still, we easily are easily swayed and influenced by external pressures. We may think that we understand the times when we are only blowing in the shifting winds of “fate” (powers and principalities that want to blow us off course).
Paul says these powers and principalities are operative in the world. They are “spirits of the age” that play us like instruments if we are not grounded in the Word of God and led by His Holy Spirit.
Jesus used the phrase, reed blowing in the wind, when he addressed a crowd that went into the wilderness to see John the Baptist: “Did you you go to see a “reed swayed in the wind?” (Matt. 11:7-18)
John the Baptist was not just a curiosity. He was not a fleeting personality (like Rowan & Martin) with no lasting importance or purpose. He was the messenger of the Messiah, foretold by the prophets preparing the way for Jesus, the suffering servant who would take away the sins of the world. John was an agent in God’s eternal plan, and Jesus was (and is) the key figure in that plan.
Though he was foretold by the Prophets, no one knew exactly how things would unfold – not even God’s own people. In fact, they didn’t recognize God’s Messiah or receive him when he came. (John 1:11). Crowd of common people were drawn to Jesus, but smarter and more prestigious religious leaders were not.
Many have come, and many have gone. Many have claimed to be the harbingers of promise and special knowledge in their times, but many have proven wrong in their predictions.
The reality is that we do not know what we do not know. We must ever remain open to letting God’s Word shape us and direct us, and we must ever remain attentive to allow the Holy Spirit to guide us in applying His Word in our times.
Even now, smart people – including learned, religious people – believe and act as if they know the times. It is the same in every age and every generation, but we are easily swayed and blown by the winds of fate and human influence that seek to drive the course of history not always in ways that are aligned with God’s plan and purposes. To that generation, and to ours, Jesus said:
“They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: ‘We played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.’”
Matt. 11:16-17
Human tendency is to trust ourselves. The smarter we are, the more we trust in our own ability to figure it out. Perhaps, this explains why so many scientists and PhD’s are atheists. Perhaps, this is why so many of the religious leaders in the time of Jesus were blind leaders of the blind. Perhaps, we are susceptible to the same error.
We don’t know the end from the beginning. We don’t know God’s thoughts unless He reveals them. God doesn’t dance to the tunes we play. Our tunes are often just riffs on the spirits of our age changing as those spirits change their tunes that we follow.
I reflect on these things as I think through changes in the winds influencing the evangelical church in my lifetime.. We need to be grounded in the Word of God and in tune with the Spirit of God. (See Hearing the Voice of God for Today) if we are not, we become reeds blowing in the wind.
A few weeks ago, I created a short list of issues on which Evangelicals (my tribe) have swayed in the political winds during my lifetime. I have done some research to confirm and correct my intuitions, and that exercise has confirmed my suspicions that we have, indeed, been reeds blowing in the political winds over the last 60 years. Following are just a few examples.
As often happens with me, the things I have been listening to and reading have converged in a meaningful way. Whether we attribute these “convergences” to God’s presence in our lives or dumb luck, pure happenstance, or “coincidence” is a matter of speculation and faith.
Whatever you want to call it, I take special notice of these things. I pay attention. I take them seriously, and they become signposts on my journey through life.
Perhaps, I am just being a good attorney. I am trained to find harmony and contrast in nuanced fact patterns and to apply legal principals to them. Finding harmonies and contrasts and applying spiritual principals to them operates in the same vein. That’s the way my mind works.
Yesterday, I listened to an interview of Jonathan Pageau by Justin Brierley. Pageau is an interesting character and a critical thinker. His recent conversation with Brierley inspires my writing today.
Raised in Montreal influenced by French Catholicism in a French Baptist Church community, Pageau has moved over to Eastern Orthodoxy by way of 4-year and 3-year stints in the Congo and Kenya. He has an undergraduate degree in postmodern art. He returned from Africa to obtain a degree in Orthodox Theology and Iconology from Sherbrooke University in Quebec. Along the way, Jonathan Pageau has become a cutting edge Christian thinker who is in demand as a speaker.
One line of discussion caught me ear in the interview with Justin Brierley that I want to explore. The subject touches on post-Enlightenment, neo-religious thinking and the proof of God.
I became an adult in 1978. I actually met the first George Bush at a political rally in Iowa in 1980. I supported Anderson in the primary because of his anti-nuclear stance, but Ronald Reagan won the primary. The first presidential election I voted in was 1980 when Reagan was elected to the White House.
By 1989, I was in law school (married with three children). I don’t remember Ronald Reagan’s exit speech from the White House. Life was pretty full for me then, but I have heard it since then, and I read it again tonight. These words I have copied from that speech as it is published on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum website:
“You know, down the hall and up the stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the President and his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning. The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that’s the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.
I’ve been thinking a bit at that window. I’ve been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one — a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, ‘Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.’
….
The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
Ronald Reagan’s shining city is the United States of America that I grew up with. Tall and proud, blessed by God, and teeming with people in a grand melting pot from every nation in the world. The harmony and peace were not always evident, but freedom stood firm against any assault.
“And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” My ancestors entered those doors at various times between the late 1700’s and late 1800’s with the will and heart to make better lives for themselves.
Many people come here today with the same hopes and dreams, but our windswept shores were rocked by 9/11, and “the freedom man” was cowered. We have retreated behind self-protective ideologies and our light is waning behind the walls of our fear.
Perhaps, my favorite band over the past several years or more is Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange). I am a sucker for a good mandolin solo, and Andrew Marlin is a virtuoso of tasteful mandolin solos sprinkled effortlessly and seamlessly at the right times over compelling melodies, poignant harmonies and simple but profound lyrics.
One of my favorite Watchhouse songs is Wolves. It tells a new story. I will leave the embedded video of a live performance of the song with the lyrics to follow and some hope that we can find the harmony to our the values that once made us a better nation.
There she stands, so tall and mighty With her keen and watchful eye And the heart of a mother Holding out her guiding light It’s a hard road to travel It’s old rock from end to end The sun, it rises on her brow And sets upon the great expanse
Everything’s so great, can’t get better Makes me wanna cry That I’ll go out howling at the moon tonight
There she stands, so tall and mighty Her gaze facing the East At her back our doors are closing As we grin and bare our teeth On the wind the wolves are howling She cries to draw them near Well turn around, turn around my darling Oh, the wolves are here
Everything’s so great, can’t get better Makes me wanna cry But I’ll go out howling at the moon tonight Yeah, I’ll go out howling at the moon tonight
Navigating by Faith 