As I continue my reads of ‘Live Not By Lies” by Rod Dreher and “The Gathering Storm” by Al Mohler one thing becomes abundantly apparent.  Culturally speaking, in the United States of America now, Christians are indeed strangers in a strange land.  That phrase is a variation of something Moses said long ago about the Israelites in Egypt.  The analysis of these two men as to how we got here and how we find our way out is simultaneously remarkably similar and remarkably different.  Both share a conviction that the church no longer has significant authority in our culture and society.

My current devotional reading (here is today’s installment) has spent the last week or two discussing God’s and Christ’s authority – over everything.  As I have thought of that it has occurred to me that Jesus’ authority was never granted to Him by any earthly authority – Jesus simply claimed His authority.  His followers acknowledged and respected His claim, but He was in fact crucified because the authorities considered His claims not only false but treasonous.  Jesus, also a stranger is a strange land, came into that strange land and did not try to earn His authority by that land’s rules, but rather simply took His authority by virtue of who He was.

Right now, in many parts of the world, the church has placed itself under the authority of the government around it.  This is particularly obvious with covid.  Way too many churches have way too willingly simply accepted government forbidding their meeting.  In many cases the church would have forgone meeting anyway as a measure of community charity and therefore have conserved resources by not fighting the various orders.  But such does not change the fact that in so doing they have conceded authority to the government.  In His crucifixion Jesus also submitted to the worldly authority, but as He did so He made it most plain that it was His choice. (“It is as you say.“)  It is also worth remembering that Jesus gave us His authority.  I wonder if we are living up to that?

Read More

I was writing a letter to a friend in prison yesterday.  Can you imagine how strange the view of the nation must look to someone in prison right now?  Their access to information is quite limited, particularly with covid.  Even the television they have, which is the worst way in the world to get actual information, is quite limited.  We have it bad enough out here, but in there…

These are turbulent times – not so much politically but generally.  Regardless of how the POTUS race has ended, our essential government composition is changed very little.  But covid has created so many issues regarding the extent of government power, the freedoms of religion and assembly and so forth that the ground underneath us seems unsure.

With covid, we are left with TV as our primary form of entertainment.  Yet TV seems to go out of its way to make us feel unsteady.

Then, personally, reading Dreher and Mohler currently with their visions of a church at war with the world, the ground gets shakier.  The history of the west is the history of the church building a solid foundation on which our civilization rests and now the church seems to be at odds with that civilization.  Not a good feeling.

Read More

Last night’s appearance by the host on MSNBC was infuriating.  Not because he was so heavily outnumbered, or because they disagreed, but because the other panelists were so friggin’ patronizing.  They spoke to him as if he were a child that just could never quite understand.  Living in California as I do, one encounters such patronizing quite often.  It is wearying.  A little while ago, my feed reader turned up a headline that talked about “Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris” as if such were a fait accompli.  I was torn between a curse and a sigh.  The overwhelming covid restrictions in Los Angeles County just add to one sense of melancholy.

It gets harder and harder to stay positive and stay focused.  But then not for the first time, God intervened by making subtle use of the “random” setting on my music player as I walked this afternoon.  Up popped a speech by Winston Churchill.  Nothing we are experiencing comes close to those early months of WWII in Great Britain.  Nonetheless, the words moved me.  They are worth sharing.  Here from The International Churchill Society, with a brief prelude:

October 29, 1941
Harrow School

When Churchill visited Harrow on October 29 to hear the traditional songs again, he discovered that an additional verse had been added to one of them. It ran:

“Not less we praise in darker days
The leader of our nation,
And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim
From each new generation.
For you have power in danger’s hour
Our freedom to defend, Sir!
Though long the fight we know that right
Will triumph in the end, Sir!

Almost a year has passed since I came down here at your Head Master’s kind invitation in order to cheer myself and cheer the hearts of a few of my friends by singing some of our own songs. The ten months that have passed have seen very terrible catastrophic events in the world – ups and downs, misfortunes – but can anyone sitting here this afternoon, this October afternoon, not feel deeply thankful for what has happened in the time that has passed and for the very great improvement in the position of our country and of our home? Why, when I was here last time we were quite alone, desperately alone, and we had been so for five or six months. We were poorly armed. We are not so poorly armed today; but then we were very poorly armed. We had the unmeasured menace of the enemy and their air attack still beating upon us, and you yourselves had had experience of this attack; and I expect you are beginning to feel impatient that there has been this long lull with nothing particular turning up!

But we must learn to be equally good at what is short and sharp and what is long and tough. It is generally said that the British are often better at the last. They do not expect to move from crisis to crisis; they do not always expect that each day will bring up some noble chance of war; but when they very slowly make up their minds that the thing has to be done and the job put through and finished, then, even if it takes months – if it takes years – they do it.

Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must “…meet with Triumph and Disaster. And treat those two impostors just the same.”

You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination. But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period – I am addressing myself to the School – surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.

You sang here a verse of a School Song: you sang that extra verse written in my honour, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter – I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: “Not less we praise in darker days.”

I have obtained the Head Master’s permission to alter darker to sterner. “Not less we praise in sterner days.”

Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.

“Never Give In…Never Give In…Never Yield