That said, I mourn over our unreaction to this unqualifiedly wonderful news and regard our confusion as evidence that we have taken another huge step toward perfect judgment. The outpouring of conflicting opinion is grievously revelatory. What do I mean?

Let us start with the foundation: the norm according to Scripture (see end notes) and all rational historical precedent is this: when a people have been victimized by a bloodthirsty evil low-life scuzz, and when the perpetrator uses all means and opportunities at his disposal to demonstrate his unfitness to live on God’s earth—for, rather than repenting or exhibiting remorse, or even hesitation or second thoughts, he instead TAUNTED, and further threatened those he has assaulted—then NORMAL PEOPLE will have a single, SHARED reaction at news of his demise—especially if by the honored hands of their own military. The ONLY sane response is, “Hallelujah!”

But we have been enduring a range of responses that deviates greatly from the norm, including drunken impiety, boisterous ignorance, guilt-loaded women moaning and castrated men looking for something they’ve lost. We are subjected to blathering attorneys who cannot grasp that the rights of American citizens do not inherently belong to foreign ENEMIES; and we’re reading reports of prating bozos who struggle with the concept that righteousness and wickedness are not the same. We are under a deluge of OPINIONS aplenty because we have lost all covenant cohesion.

So understand this: When the news America hears is that “he’s a harmer bum low-down” (dog) has been executed by God via the hand of one of our Navy soldiers, we are in a setting which fully justifies the expectation of a single, predictable response: the rendering of deep thanks for such a great kindness from the Lord. The only mental reservation we provide for deviation is the one we typically allow for the small number of deviants and defectives among us on any given day. Thus, the sane expectation is for a SINGLE response, which is essentially “Hallelujah.” Therefore, the most significant feature of America’s reaction is its multiformity. We do not HAVE A reaction at all. Instead we have a pouring forth of a plethora of purposeless opinions. The totality testifies that we are suffering from egalitarian tumors on our brain.

This whole exercise of moronic soul-searching, the public second-guessing from the most cowardly of all armchair quarterbacks, and the gushing ignorance drenching the papers and screens—all this desperate “concern” and posturing in the wake of what ought to have been the occasion for our united rendering of gratitude—all of it serves to guarantee one thing: our flailing tongues will effectually tie our hands and arms and cause us to become a target most irresistible to the next evil-minded morons driven by pure envy in the guise of caring about “justice.” Maniacs in waiting abound. We’ve admitted them to our shores, given them welfare and other funding. Our multiple-personality reaction is just a begging of Muslims for more attacks.

It should have been, “Okay, look closely: that’s what happens when you do what he did. Anybody else with similar ideas will meet a similar end, God helping us. Now let’s see, where were we?” Instead we’ve just advertised ourselves as a target most attractive and deserving. If the message of impotence now carried by our media was not stemming from our real national guilt for our very real sins (abortion, perversion, etc.), I’d suggest that the outlets ought to be tried for treason. But we have LOST the ability to understand even what a united, national expectation would look like. We are permanently and pathetically fractured, crippled, lying in wait for the vultures. How painful it is to be that when limitless strength and vigor is but a sincere repentance away.

If we cannot REJOICE together at the destruction of a SWORN AND KNOWN ENEMY, it is because we have broken our covenant beyond repair. We now share NO presuppositions (subscribe to presupp series for more), we have NO unity, we have NO collective values or beliefs, and we are therefore, nothing. There is no United States of America. We have been at war with our Christian history for more than 100 years and have offered no single narrative in its place (how could we when there is none?).

In the meantime, we swelled our shore-to-shore with scores of millions of foreign-born who, unlike all who preceded them, were told implicitly and explicitly that there is nothing for them to adapt to: they don’t even need to speak English. Why? Because NOTHING unites us—nothing whatsoever; not language, not faith, not the past, nor our hopes for the future (that is, anchored, grounded hopes, as opposed to graphic-novel-wishful-thinking). Even the pandering which comprises the whole of political campaigns is fragmented, self-contradictory, hypocritical, focus-group-generated, ephemeral and impossible. (Of course, the unspoken point of commonality is avarice, covetousness and greed. They come for money, period.) I have worked with thousands of immigrants in these last 32 years and I can’t think of one who was aflame with passion for the great principles which came together as the flame in Lady Liberty’s torch. We teach them enough of the Constitution to pass a citizenship test, but they learn from what they daily read that the Constitution, like the Bible in liberal churches, has run out of Viagra and become a flaccid, malleable blob of nothing in particular. One retired Egyptian doctor I recently met told me of his hopes to become a citizen. He had left a one-million-pound luxury apartment on the Mediterranean Sea to join a daughter here in the States. He arrived five years ago but spent nearly one full year of the five in visits back home. He and his wife are supported by various “entitlements” taken from the skin of American-born workers. What happened to the money from the sale of his luxury apartment? When I asked him why it is he wants to become a citizen, he told me unabashedly, “Because I will get about $500 more per month in my check.” There can be NO FUTURE for such a self-hating nation.

The fractured response to the victory of our Navy Seals reveals us to be salt without flavor, fit for you know what. That Americans do not KNOW how to respond to the death of an enemy makes us more pitiful than a vegetarian who is handed a pastrami sandwich from the Carnegie Deli. Useless, futile affairs, both. We have become, in the loss of our national character, of all people, the most to be pitied. Instead of the blood of the Passover Lamb upon the doorposts of our house, we may now see only these words, written though they be, in red: EE CHAVOD. Ichabod!! The glory has departed. We are spiritually dead and psychologically twisted. We have soldiers willing to die in service to us, yet we are unsure if we may be enthused when they are granted triumphs on our behalf. I tell you most solemnly, we have become a people with very few triumphs left in the pipeline. Woe is me—woe to my people. It is over. Ichabod! Ichabod indeed!

I close with two texts for you. The first is from Psalm 58:

The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked. Mankind will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous; surely there is a God who judges on earth.”

One of the errant notions of unbelief which had somehow worked its way in to become a presupposition supporting this week’s grievous display, is this: Because Muslims make false claims about, and have erroneous expectations of their deity, therefore Christians may not make any claims about or have any expectations of the True God. If we did, so the brain-dead reason, we’d be just like them. But sooner or later, I suspect, they will learn that Mt. Carmel cuts through all human history. It isn’t a question of claims per se, but of which God can and will back them up. It was certainly our sins that caused a ten-year delay of justice. But if justice is unrecognized when it finally arrives, if a token of justice is granted by God yet is not met with immediate, profound and sincere gratitude from those to whom it was granted, I fear that it can only mean our hardest lessons are still ahead of us. If you are too sinful to trust God for victory, put away your sin. But if you won’t trust in God for victory, what will you trust? The bad boys ain’t going away, my friends. Whatever we believe it is that will grant us victory, that is our deity. Is it undressing our womenfolk at airports that will give safety and peace? Can we call anything safety and peace that includes undressing our womenfolk at airports? It is in our hesitation to trust and lift up God’s name—the God of Scripture—that we are becoming like the Muslim terrorists. For they are placing their trust in the wrong place and for wrong reasons. Why follow them in their error? Trust in the Lord with all our heart, then watch all enemies flee.

Second text: Proverbs 24:15 says,

“Do not gloat when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.”

Some silly souls think this militates against all we’ve said above. It does not. First, we are here warned about having a bad attitude. But is the bad attitude warned against an appreciation of the enemy’s downfall? That is quite impossible. Why? Because the text is not finished. It goes on to say:

“lest the LORD see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him.”

This text is a warning: if you do “x,” then God will not finish off your enemy. If the enemy’s termination is not to be sought, is not valued, then the passage is gibberish. The passage serves as a warning so that kings who read it wouldn’t miss out on the sweet end of an unrepentant enemy’s demise. Clearly then, the bad attitude in question is SELF-SATISFACTION, a smug and smarmy notion that our power and the strength of our hands have done this. Now that happens to be the very attitude of no small number of Americans who see the whole complex of events occurring under the hand of sovereign man alone. In that light, I ask: how confident are you that we have passed the attitude test?

No. The righteous response to the eye-popping of He Swam a Spoon Ladling is HALLELUJAH! Not more, perhaps, but certainly not less.

sms-MC3-nyc

Certain teachings hold the promise of opening vistas of understanding, enabling us to truly make awful sense even out of what we see today. So I thought it might be well to give a brief treatment of something which ought to be as familiar to thinking Christians as rice is to hungry Asians. I realize, however, that many in Christ are situated where teachers major in minors. Thus, through no fault of their own, children of the King are deprived of essential instruction. This piece is sent in the hope of providing a small corrective, prayerfully equipping a few not to be overwhelmed for want of an interpretive key to today’s events and perhaps equipping others to be more like the the sons of Issachar who can understand the times. On to it, then.

The first and most direct way to grasp the centrality and the character of presuppositions to all human thinking, acting and covenant keeping-or-breaking, is to think of a presupposition as a tuchas. That’s right–a tooshie. Why? Well, because it is behind and under everything a man does, and is with him wherever he goes. He’ll spare no effort to protect it and will develop a number of habits and manners designed to keep it hidden.

Again, a man is just as disposed to offer his presuppositions for scrutiny as he is to submit to a rectal exam on first base at Yankee Stadium during the 7th-inning-stretch. Not likely! Fact is, people prefer the company of those who honor the “no mention of tooshie” rule– not even a casual muttering.

Despite all the obsessive guardedness, healthy men (note: we must specify men because the fairer gender, we are told, has no need for tooshies) often disclose their concern for their tooshies when making their daily food choices—though they may use the euphemism, “stomach.” A man’s public habits and private disciplines, then, coalesce and together testify to concern for and commitment to something he will ordinarily deny exists. In fact, men live their lives as if adumbrated by a cartoon bubble e’er above their heads with the silver-foiled words: “A happy tuchas means a happy man.”

Bringing this metaphorical romp to “an end” (ahem), let me make plainer what I before just hinted at: people are as anxious to change their presuppositions as they are to post their interview with their newest proctologist candidate on YouTube. All this concern, wouldn’t you say?, suggests that men regard the tuchas and the presupposition as matters of the greatest moment.

But with your leave I’ll leave tuchas-talk behind (oy!), in order to call your attention to something a man’s posterior does not share with his presuppositions: Planned or unplanned, like it or not, sooner or later every breathing human exchanges his presuppositions for others. That clearly differs from the one-man/one-tuchas policy. And speaking of “one,” there’s another difference: humans operate with a great number of presuppositions, each tending to operate in assigned spheres of thought and life. Perhaps by practicing the deceit of not having a toosh while actually devoted to it, most folks have become adept at tenaciously holding certain presuppositions which are flatly contradicted by others they cherish. Sometimes the warring presupps live in neighboring apartment!

Also, not all presuppositions function at the same level. Their varying depths can be measured by how much grief and effort will be required should the presupp need to be exchanged. Those which surface when a man is converted by God to Christ are usually the most pervasive, deep and unsettling. I think of one young woman who had swallowed the feminist agenda pretty much as it was dished out, but when Christ claimed her as His own, she entered upon a clearing out of notions and a relearning process which she found dizzying, utterly liberating, and exhausting.

When a supposition has comfortably wedged itself into your worldview to become a “pre,” it morphs into an 800-pound gorilla in your mind’s apartment. Every other piece of information that enters is compelled to find a place in the apartment based upon the arrangement which had accommodated its biggest and baddest occupant. The privilege that goes with adding the “pre” to supposition is fixedness and honor: from the coronation on, each applicant for entry– every thought, idea, belief– is granted admission only on The Xerxes Basis: it must be invited. Intruders are executed, treated as presumptions (presumptions are low-class pretenders to the throne).

Think of how a bricklayer might greet your opinion that the first row of bricks he laid in that wall of 700 rows was crooked, not plum. Of course, if it was the last row laid, no problem! But the first? Then EVERYTHING has to be removed to get at it. That is exactly how presuppositions function in relation to subsequent (and prior) learning. It is easy to see, then, why people are loathe to question the fitness of those first rows. Let sleeping dogs lie!

You might well ask, “if that’s how it is with presuppositions, how would they ever change?” And that question, along with, “How do they change?,” is the $64,000 question, especially for Christian thinkers.

Why? Because Christian thinkers want to live in the fullest possible self-consciousness under God. They realize that is only when they are self-consciously conformed to the image of God they have been designed to be, it is only when thinking God’s thoughts AFTER Him that they can experience the gratification and joy of being a created, redeemed human being.

END PART I

Wanna join us live for a Bible Study in NYC with Pastor Steve Schlissel?

Well, now you can—depending on the meaning of the word,”live.”

Messiah’s announces its maiden effort to bring some new technology into the service of the King: A live-streaming Bible Study at our new internet channel MessiahsMedia*, broadcasting Tuesdays, 7:30 pm eastern. Just visit MessiahsMedia* at that time and we will be there!

And check this out: there is a live-text-chat feature on our channel for viewers to ask questions during the program! (or you can email me directly at MessiahsMedia@gmail.com.)

We will also be archiving the studies for repeat broadcasting at times more convenient for our friends in other timezones. (But for now, if you want to participate in the live Study—be there or be square—Tuesday evening, 7:30 pm Eastern.)

Before you go…it would make a significant difference for us if you’d *click here first*, so you can express your support for Messiah’s Ministries thru Paypal. With every wicked agenda having free shots at our faith, we think it’s pretty important that the faithful sustain those few voices who are shining a light, illuminating the times for us so we may know what to do. Don’t you agree? So please, show your support today? Thank you very much.

*if you have trouble with either link to the live Bible Study above, try this in your browser: http://www.blogtv.com/people/messiahsmedia

Yours and His,

Craig Lawrence Bavinck (I wish!) Brann

12/31/2010

Greetings in our Messiah. Here we are, a full decade—plus one— of years since the world was in the grip of a different brand of fear: Y2K-mania, or, The Error Terror. Born with the favor of a terminal date by which it would be revealed as either malignant or benign, it came in with a bang and left with a thud. Almost hard to believe how an idea, which in its day had garnered considerable respect and prestige—and which had generated enormous amounts of activity, greatly disproportionate to its actual disruptive power—is now so far removed from our minds that we need to be prodded to recall it at all. I think all of us know at least one dude who went bonkazoolie, who devoted himself to proving he’d be ready for the cataclysmic event for which no amount of preparation could prepare anyone (or so they said). No amount turned out to be the right amount. For, at 11:59:59, as a planet held its breath, six billion listened to a tick they had been assured would be tockless, the first left standing at the altar: the tick for whom no suitable tock would be found.

What everyone encountered instead was the biggest anti-climax in a thousand years of history. (I say one thousand because hysteria of a like magnitude and force gripped much of the Western World on 12/31/999).) The only anti-moment of our millennium which might be a fair contender for that top spot was the one caused by the mouse that roared—appearing in a film of the same name. Come to think of it, I wonder if that mouse wasn’t the one commissioned to run up the clock on December 31, 1999. Hmmm.

That midnight stroke of Y2K was so anti-climactic; most of us have determined to set aside no space in our memory vault to preserve it. If we were confessionally honest, though, our stinginess might better be explained by our embarrassment at the wee tad of credibility—just the tiniest bit—we had accorded to the hysterical rumors. We were smart enough; after all, to know all along that Paul wasn’t dead (and won’t we be smug if Ringo goes first, ironically leaving Paul as earth’s only living Beatle), so why permit any tarnish to form on our buttons of pride by chronicling in our own Memorial Library proof of our gullibility, our finitude and other assorted limitations?

But it might be well for us to retain a vivid sense of our credulity as it was shining forth in 1999, a proposition for which I offer two good reasons, that is, two not counting how refreshing a novelty like honesty can be. First, regardless of how transparent we may ordinarily be (or not be) with others, it is essential to be honest before two particular faces: God’s, supremely, and the one in the mirror. There are our temples of truth where guilelessness is required, and only Israelites indeed get to gaze upon the respective countenances profitably, if at all.  Keep in mind, as a motivator, that in no other place, and for no other face, will you be paid such handsome rewards, so handsome that the pain, ever attending upon these (and similar) exercises, is altogether palliated by them. You know—don’t you?—that is only as we become older that we begin to appreciate how delicate yet robust a vintage honesty is. Why, it’s not unusual for individual bottles to require as many as six decades ripening in the cellar (out of sight) before honesty is ready to be uncorked, i.e., before it is drinkable.

The second reason to keep mnemonic flags pinned to that over-eager gullibility which, just a dozen years ago, set out to “party like it was 1999” (well, I’ll be Prince [or, The Artist Called Schlissel]—for, come to think of it, it was 1999!); this second reason, I’ll frame as a dare: I’ll wager (gentleman’s bet) that those most prone to Y2K-fever were also those most sensitive to  and troubled by the hue and clamor of Western Civilization which had begun to “call God out,” saying, “Come, judge us. We dare You.”  What I am saying is, many were drawn to the YU2notOK shtick, not because they were techies or Luddites, but because they heard Christendom begging for judgment, and then figured, “That’s a creative way to deliver it.” It wasn’t because they comprehended or endorsed the technological arguments then being bandied about—how the programming of computers had since Day One reserved two digits in a default position to serve for “19,”—as in 1900, and how no provision (best non-theological use of this word, I submit) was made for the day when the fourth column left of the decimal point would require a “2.” This failure to look down the pike, we were told, would mean the collapse of everything collapsible.

This seemed right and just to many because appearances were amenable to a correspondence. For it is roughly to the time of the computer’s ascent that we might trace the rise of Western arrogance. Though the two did not require cause/effect linking, their chronological commonality was sufficient to satisfy an instinct in search of supporting reason.  The arrogance I speak of here is not of the garden variety, but a special sort of pride—that warned against by the Living God in Deuteronomy 8. It’s the brand seen uniquely among a God-blessed people who, instead of becoming more grateful as God opens the heavens and pours it on out, become more presumptuous, until they become so jaded by the superabundance of His magnanimity that they fail to give heed to that truth employed as a weapon by the Lord Jesus in His wilderness battle with Satan, after His baptism.

It wasn’t only our civilization-wide arrogance, however, which suggested to sensitive ones a propriety in judgment heading our way (or, our heading Judgment’s way). It was also what we might describe as America (here standing for all the West) playing feng shui with that which the Lord God said may not be relocated. This requires a little paragraph of explanation.

We have elsewhere demonstrated that the Regulative Principle of Worship—praise it, love it, adore it as you like—is a fabrication, one which is not biblical in origin, and is so encumbered by contradictions and illogic that, in places where it is zealously imposed, gleg observers will find ironic, iconic instances of the very thing the RPW was invented to prevent: the intrusion into Divine worship of human-originating governances.[1] I mention it now for one reason: Where the RPW stands strong, it serves as a wall, effectively blocking from that Church’s view the correct interpretation/application of Deuteronomy 12. However desirable a thing it may be to rule that, in a worship service, only those elements explicitly commanded by God may be introduced, still, it is not the burden of God or Moses to teach that in Deuteronomy 12. Rather, there we are taught to seek salvation only where God tells us it may be found. And the New Testament fulfillment and analog of Deuteronomy 12 is Acts 4:12. Speaking of Jesus the Messiah, Peter says, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” Jesus’ work may be modeled on the Temple, but the Church’s services in the New Testament are according to the synagogue, which contra the Temple, was without direct, strict, positive Divine oversight. I know. But what can I say? Some people are just terrified by liberty.

Returning to our present concern, it was the rise, not of industrial structures, but of technological wonders that closely tracked the rise of the notion that the benefits “thought” to derive from Christianity can actually be derived from a great number of other sources. This specific thought would become the foundation of a new conception of America, one in which the most we may encourage others to think of us is that we are a religious people; but never do we say we are a Christian people (an astonishing admission of apostasy, I submit, when 200,000,000 of your citizens are Christians!). But of course, the great problem here is that atonement (salvation) will not be found any place God has not put it. And He put it in Jesus alone.

Thus, as various forces combined to lead us nationally further and further from the truth, we heeded the principalities and simultaneously undertook to prevent any possible return to from whence we came. (“When they said, ‘Repent!,’ I wonder what they meant?”—Leonard Cohen.) Our technological prowess became the occasion, not for humble thanksgiving, but for eating the bread we had scattered for a possibly needful and quick return to where we came from. When we most needed wisdom and caution, we threw them to the wind, which is what we may now expect to inherit. It is not as though we’d altogether forgotten Deuteronomy 8 and Jesus’ employment of it. It’s just that we gave it a double mod. Instead of repeating the whole truth, we say, “Technology has enabled us to make so much of so little, that man needn’t live by bread alone; now he can have cake instead.” And—you guessed it—“he can eat it, too.”

So, to be clear, I don’t think we can say the Y2Kers I’ve been describing were wrong. They were just early. For man has not set the stage, but God has. And man has not furnished the theater, but the Lord has. And man has not written the script, but the Terror of Jacob has.

We have been led to a department in which RJ Rushdoony stands as a gigantic gift from God. I submit that he was given to help the church—and the nation—understand themselves and their respective callings correctly. If you understand our times, you understand the enormity of this gift and its tremendous importance. We have come to a place of epistemological self-consciousness greatly resembling the end of an age. One of the things we’ve all been learning (if we’re paying attention) is the unique, incalculably great value of identity. What we have not yet learned is how to identify ourselves! That is one major problem, let me tell you. Have you noticed that all battlefronts are raging over different aspects of the same issue: every institution, every lawmaker, every occasion is being seized and instructed to hasten one project along: the identification of self completely without God. It’s been tried before. Brothers, we have a lot to learn and little time in which to learn it. Wanna ride with me?

We’ll be discussing these things a bit more in days to come, DV. If you want to join us for the conversation, send your end of year gift to Messiah’s (address below). If you want a 2010 receipt, will like Spock for your gift to be so reckoned, and we’ll do a Vulcan mind-meld with you. Just get the scratch in the mail. Or call Craig for credit card donations: 917-757-9297. Or give via PayPal at our site: MessiahNYC.org or simply CLICK HERE. Only givers will be invited back. And that’s only right. Those giving $111 or more may request a copy of The Dictionary of Jewish Words, a small reference work that is both helpful and enjoyable.

In the meantime, we are sending you a short (110 minute) sermon, delivered on the last Lord’s Day of the Year of our Lord 2010. It’s entitled, “Pardon, the Intrusion.” (Simply CLICK HERE to download, “Pardon, the Intrusion.” for FREE!) We treat many topics, including the “perfect obedience” of Zecharias and Elizabeth. I’d like your feedback on our treatment. In it we also attempt to establish Deuteronomy 8 as the critical epicenter, a real determinative voice, one, which holds the scepter for revealing the course of any nation, which had experienced abundant favor from the One True God. According to that passage, our future is not rosy. If we insist on continuing to move away from God and the unique, efficacious, gracious atonement He’s provided, we should begin to feel the thorns shortly. In the future, therefore, I submit the only thing those sensitive Y2Kers we’ve been discussing—the only thing they’ll have been proven wrong about was the date. T minus 7 and counting? Who knows? We only know the count is going down. Oh—we also know Who’s counting.

Let me hear from you. I need to. And it’s reciprocal, I hope.

Yours and His,

Steve

[1] Please accept—for now—this disclaimer as sincere: Despite believing what I’ve written, above, I would also insist that, like Social Security, the sudden and entire dismantling of the RPW would be a disaster, a formula for chaos in the Church, an act of revolution. No need to hunt for contradictions here. They are resolvable once it is allowed that human traditions may in fact be permissible, and may also prove enormously beneficial. It ought to be clear then, that the objection is not against RPW-type worship, per se, but rather against the claims of its proponents to its being a) Biblical, b) the Biblical rule for worship particulars, and c) indispensable.

by Rev. Steve Schlissel

Listen, the Times today made it clear that our response to the TSA’s movement against innocent Americans at airports has the potential to do what can only be done in a country such as ours (was): peacefully change policy. Brothers, there has not been a more important issue smooshed in our faces in our adult lifetimes. Our government is claiming the RIGHT to feel up our women and daughters (not to mention our selves and sons). It alleges that this is necessary for national security. The first thing to understand-as in deeply, so it is completely absorbed: If this is our means of preserving the republic, it means THE REPUBLIC IS DEAD. It means the enemy has won, has triumphed. For here we behold an America which has fully turned us against ourselves, has turned us into something we never were, which we fought and bled vowing we’d never become, into something we stood with all our being against.

We must understand that passive submission to this draconian evil does not demand any argument of the “slippery slope” variety. If “freedom” means men being forced under threat of death or imprisonment to watch their wives and daughters leered at by “agents,” or felt-up and fondled by our protectors, than thee is nowhere our condition needs to go. No slope implications would have the slightest value to a people who have become convinced that the insanity and evil which is now policy can, under any circumstances, be justified.

If this “policy” for our “protection” doesn’t spell “U-N-A-C-C-E-P-T-A-B-L-E” to you, then you need to put your television in the garbage immediately. For that brain is not worth a dime which cannot detect that, those we permit to hurt us in the course of helping us are very few in number, have actually been highly trained (in a manner a bit more grueling than the current TSA crop, whose only challenge is in uttering a coherent sentence after taking off the Puff Bling Headphones-which “fell” out of the last traveler’s bag by accident), and these are permitted to hurt us on a case by case basis, and never without our free consent. Imagine: your doctor says, “This is going to hurt,” which moves you to change your mind and leave. Now, what if he took out a gun and said, “Leaving is not an option. I was just warning you so you wouldn’t ruin my work.”  This TSA takeover of our bodies is not in any meaningful way comparable to any other transaction in which we suffer in exchange for benefit. Does anyone see a difference?

Apparently not enough of us. These clowns are trying to tell us, through Agent NY Times, that a majority of Americans are willing to go along with this invasion. I confess that such a lie reminds me of the wag’s barb, “You can never lose money underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” But I tell you, no matter how low you might rank us on the charts, I have travelled this country widely enough to say with confidence: I don’t believe it for a second. Let’s take it out of lying pollsters mouths and test it by experiment. Bring a random sampling of 100 families to an airport, then calculate the percentage who stifle any emerging objection as they stand and watch our “highly trained professional agents” feel up their women folk, and/or peer in technologically on their nude bodies. Then report the results the next day. You come up with a majority, then I’d say there’d be quite a few more willing to test the idea of whether a federative unity such as we have today is to be properly regarded as inviolable.

To have descended into this pit so rapidly and dramatically-such that too many of us have forgotten what it means to be an American-is painful on every front and looked at from any angle. Those who think it is xenophobic to filter applicants for immigration by any standard, or who object to classifying immigrant candidates into “desirable” and “undesirable,” could only object after first having decided that America stands for nothing in particular.

Yes, multiculturalism has always sacrificed our true history on the altar of make-believe correctness, but it hasn’t always been so clearly displayed how it is wisdom to stand in the truth, and wisdom to preserve that which has made America truly great. Among these things, a tolerant and adamantine Christian faith has always towered above all other components of our history insofar as they are factors contributing to our greatness. Thus for most of our history, while not requiring prospective citizens to convert, we most certainly expected them at least to abide by our Christian laws, whatever they might think of them. But for decades, and with increasing determination, we have been stuffing our nation full of people who see nothing other than dollar signs in our name. They are neither expected nor required to know, nor are they ever taught, the values of our founding fathers or the foundational Text  (I mean the Bible, not the Constitution, though requiring [submissive]  knowledge of that would be an okay start) from which those values were drawn. Freedom is far too expensive and precious a thing to be handled by people whose every value begins with a dollar sign, who see in us nothing except the U$A. Such a population will calculate those offenses we speak of here. It will be strictly pragmatic. It won’t be a case of, “This is un-American!” Why, since Joe McCarthy, I dare say, you haven’t been permitted to think or say of anything that it is un-American! It will instead be treated as, “If I can keep making good money here, well, then, letting uniformed strangers feel up my wife is just a cost of doing business.” What kind of nation can preserve itself, can win its wars, if not a nation whose citizens believe in its values, in its worth? People who live for money won’t be willing to die for freedom.

(I wonder-parenthetically: Is it knowledge of our self-induced amnesia concerning our founding principles, and the tissue-thin loyalty with which we’ve replaced it-predicated entirely on money, viewing the American Experiment as nothing more than a platform for profit-is it this willful exchange of premises, that makes Washington so comically desperate to have “answers” to economic woes which “work” overnight? That is, they poke and stab at solutions like those who know, if the gravy train stops on their watch, there’s nothing standing between them and revolt. Fools! The America built on transcendent values had a people more than willing to stick with her in bad times as well as good! What lessons there are for us all as we rush toward destruction! May God grant us time-and hearts-to learn them.)

And believe it or not, there was a time not long ago, when America’s answer to terrorism would have been radically different from that which we see today. We are completely lost in the mist of pretending that the world is what the elitist snobs at the Times want it to be: egalitarian, and a product of evolution. Bacillus Bullfosis! We are so expert at pretending (men and women are the same, same-sexes marry, the moon is made of green cheese) that we find it easy to believe the PURE nonsense that our national interests and security are inextricably bound up with our willingness to spit on our own integrity, to devalue the least remnant of our honor and to defile whatever lingering integrity has managed to survive the best efforts in history to pollute each and all of us. A people willing to live with this “Airport Assault on Americans” deserve it. But how painful that this watershed change in our self-understanding has come about in nearly self-conscious conformity with Hannah Arndts’s devastating insight concerning “the banality of evil.” The torrents of banality which have been unleashed in a Federal Feel-up Policy (“for our own good”), were birthed not by express national will, but merely, simply and only by bureaucratic folly. It is either supremely fitting, or a complete travesty.

But if we would just return our brains to our bodies for a moment, let us ask if Mr. Morey’s proposal has not found the moment for serious consideration. Put every Islamic nation, and the world’s entire Islamic population on notice. It should read something like this:

“Since we will not attack our own people, and since we will not compromise our freedoms (which the wickedly envious among you fatally hate), and since all our avowed enemies seeking our destruction are freedom-hating members of your sects and religion, therefore, you are put on notice: any attack on American citizens or American soil, which proves by fair investigation to have been perpetrated by Islamic combatants (in this day of post-national combat), will call forth from us this certain and sure response: On the first such attack, we will make a target of the third most holy place as reckoned by your religious leaders. We will turn all our forces and resources against it and do what it takes to remove it from God’s earth. If there is a subsequent attack, we will remove your second most holy site. And if there is a third incident, the only time you’ll see Mecca is when you make the trip without benefit of your bodies. You must understand that we did not breed this sort of terror, though we must respond to it. If you are truly, truly a people of peace then consider this notice an additional motivation to move you toward diligence in seeking it. That means the expense and inconvenience of tracking down and terminating terrorists is hereby, of this day, officially transferred to YOU. You will conduct the investigations, develop sources, seek leads, find the guilty, and punish them. We will not cower in fear and dread. We will not accost our innocent citizens in this most-blessed nation, the beneficiary of Divine favor unequalled in human history. And though we have been unfaithful to Him in many ways, we will turn to Him in repentance now, resolve to live righteously before Him, and ask Him to bless these, our true efforts toward true peace. Should it be His will to severely chastise us for our sins, even to the allowing us to be humiliated before you, at least you will know that we stand ready to accept from His gracious hand that which He knows to be just. But we do refuse with all that could be called certainty to allow you to take from us our freedoms. We refuse to allow YOU to define us. And we refuse always and forever to turn away so drastically from our founding principles as to run roughshod over the rights and liberties which our fathers, for His sake, bequeathed to us. While the outcomes of all things are in the perfect and wise hands of the Fear of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that is, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, you must understand that we stand ready, to the man, to live as His instruments-and if necessary, to die. We do not, like your suicide bombing fanatics, take the initiative in violence. If we have ever done so, we here and now beg God’s mercy and resolve to do so no more. Nevertheless, you must reckon this notice as backed by the earnestness of men made free by the God we meet in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. In the cause of the liberties bestowed by this God, consider us, each and all, along with every resource in our control,  willing and ready to fight for our freedom, and to see that the missions outlined in this notice will not have been uttered in vain. This is a warning more precious than oil if you are wise. Don’t let your religion go up in the smoke of a carelessly conceived plan against a nation ever poised to be a friend, but unmatched in ferocity when wickedly provoked. Be wise. The burden, dear neighbors, the burden to end terrorism is now (as we say) in your court.”

If it’s that, or being a pimp to those you’re bound to guard, which would you choose?

So, back to us. You want to stop terrorism? First, know and understand that you cannot preserve freedom by depriving your citizens of it. Second, know that, though death is not in all cases desirable, nevertheless there are worse things. Third, it is better to bring death to those who are trying to kill you than it is to cooperate with them in your own annihilation. Fourth, not all religions are equal. I say this with rather considerable knowledge of the failures and sins of the Christian Church throughout her history. The simple thing Americans must remember is, Christianity’s atrocities occurred when she was being untrue to her principles. In complete contrast, it is when Islamic believers (NOT “zealots, an attempt by the NYT Royalty to exploit terrorism, turning it into a weapon in the Royalist war against Christianity by asserting that it is any intensely believed religion which poses danger-Bacillus Bullfosis! Intensely believed Christianity results in orphanages and hospitals, in service of others even unto self-sacrifice) start to believe Islamic principles that the blood gets to flowing-not their own blood in service to a mankind made in God’s image, but the “blood of the infidels,” that is, everyone who isn’t them. Think of the forbearance demonstrated by Christians (past propriety, I judge), abiding sacrilege and dishonor of all things revealed as holy, compared with the instant death threats when Mohammed gets cartooned. If you are looking for a common threat, it is not in “any two religions intensely believed,” but rather in that intolerance demonstrated in mega-doses of hypocrisy spewed by leftists and the cannon-shot and suicide bombings of their Islamic counterparts.

The assault on our wives and daughters contributes nothing toward our safety when compared to that which we’d gain by adopting profiling as policy. THINK, THINK, THINK!!! If, as everyone knows, it is Islamics who pose the threat, why are we told that feeling up twelve years-old Swedish-American virgins and humiliating 90 year-old Italian-American grandmothers are the necessary steps to preserve our freedom? Why not rather step up the intensity of scrutiny applied to Muslims? Answer that! Right. It is because (we are told) to go against a particular group is UnAmerican. In other words, we say, “If we were to treat our enemies as if they were our enemies, that would be terrible, unfair, contrary to the very freedoms for which we fight and live. It would be, in effect, to cease to be America. It is totally unacceptable.” Where have I heard that before?

Well, what then? What shall we do? Of course! Why didn’t we ALL think of it together? Since we know, as a rule, who the enemies are who seek our destruction (and you don’t need 100%  to find a valid rule, for rules admit of exceptions), we must therefore try all the harder to pretend that our enemies do not bubble up out of Islamic incubators. Nah! Where in the world did you get that idea? Oh, you say it is because that, nearly to the man-to the man and to the ultimate in degraded woman-they have without significant exception belonged to one particular group, one identifiable group? Well, all the more reason to pretend! But since we must do something, then let us attack our friends. No! Let’s go one better: let us attack and turn on ourselves! Let us treat US like our enemy! Why “sin” against one group by inconveniencing them, or mildly offending them (if innocent)? What’s that? Oh, silly. It doesn’t really matter if every combatant wanting you dead came from that group. Far better for our nation if we continue in our denial, and confirm it by literally violating  all your own loyal soldiers instead. Put their wives bodies on display and tell them it’s for their own good. And don’t dare be rude to a Mohammedan! But if a loyal American objects to your hands feeling up his 15 year-old daughter, “Nail him! Who does he think he is? After all, this is for his own good,” they mutter.

Today we have become something we would have rightly abhorred had it been told us of any other people. To blithely and passively submit to a government which claims, “The only way we can protect you is by defiling you,” puts us back to Prima Nocta (which many learned of via the film, Braveheart). Do not scoff at the comparison. We all understand that there is a difference in degree. Too few of us understand that there is NO difference in kind. This is a crisis we are facing, as ultimately determinative of who we really are (or, what we really have become) as any crisis we’ve had in the last 60 years.  The drama taking place at America’s airports truly is, in a multitude of meaningful ways, a terminal issue.

________________________________________________________

Did you know you can support Messiah’s Ministries with the click of a button?

At a 9/11 Memorial Service near Ground Zero in Manhattan, I was challenged by the speaker. No, I wasn’t challenged to become a better person, a more responsible citizen, or even to win friends and influence people. I was simply challenged to remain in the room and feign attention.

The speaker was a police officer, and no doubt a fine fellow. He spoke as a representative of “Cops for Christ,” or some organization with a similar name. I remind you that I was experiencing ADD at the time. I can only tell you that when the speaker began to mangle a perfectly fine experience around a miserably distorted theology—a theology which appeared to be about half his own invention, with the other half something he caught, like a communicable disease, from the carrier, that Christian cultural subset we call Americanity.  As he began to relish the role of misplaced pulpiteer and bad theologian, I began to relish the idea of quietly stepping out of the room and onto the veranda.  I led myself along the path of my temptation and delivered myself from the evil. Writing poetry in the shadow of a Brooklyn Bridge, which appeared close enough to touch on that still September evening, beat by far my having to further endure the doctrinal beating going on inside.

Later on, I thought of how someone might confront me, asking me if I think I’m so great that I couldn’t learn anything from that no doubt fine fellow. I knew very well that this would have been an invalid criticism, for I not only affirm theoretically the truth of Maimonides’ maxim that we can learn something from everyone, but I rigorously practice it as a religious precept. I enjoy learning from all.

But if that’s so, how do I explain my absenting myself? It took me a few days to be able to articulate an answer, even though no one asked. (Being defensive is best practiced when no one is challenging you, I’ve found.) The problem that night was this: A representative of, say, an organization like “Cops for Christ,” ought to make it his business to tell people how faith in Christ makes for better cops. And failing that, I really don’t know why such an organization can claim a right to exist.

No doubt, the problem of which I speak can be traced to that component of the American Baptist Culture which regards “full-time Christian service” as the specific calling sanctioned by God as special or “worthy.” With preachers as the only members of the Christian community with real distinction (hovering above missionaries, Christian-school teachers, and Sunday School bus drivers, in that order), should you find yourself occupying some other space on the terrain, you will form an organization of Christians unfortunate enough to have missed “the call,” and who find themselves like you, on the outside looking in. Then, the only thing needed is to come up with a name—which is usually as easy as naming your profession and adding “for Jesus” or “for Christ.” Then you look for opportunities for real Christian service, which, of course, means preaching.

But that is as perverted as me being a Police Chaplain, for example, and using my time to teach those I’m ministering to about “Progress in Crime Detection Techniques Since Sherlock Holmes.” That isn’t what I’m there for!

Until American Christians recover the true Biblical teaching about calling, until they know for a certainty that the employment path down which God has led them is God’s providential direction for them to glorify God in that area, then I will probably find many more opportunities to visit the veranda. And what a pity that is.

Before there were unions, we seem to remember, there were guilds. And guilds were concerned not merely with wage and fee-setting, but also with insuring that the highest standards of the craft were maintained, the best techniques employed, by its members. And a result of a recovery of calling will necessarily be that organizations with names like “Cops for Christ,” will be obsessed with proving that Christians make the best cops on earth, and they’ll be able to tell you why. The same will hold true for firemen, accountants, sanitation men, plumbers, truck drivers, toilet cleaners and politicians. To form a Christian organization around these or any professions must always and only be an attempt to let the world know that God is being glorified in those professions by equipping, via His Holy Spirit, His consecrated servants in that area of life, to be the most spectacular examples in the field.

If that isn’t what they are about, then I fear I’d probably have to say (if I would be honest) that listening to them imitate preaching when they are called to be “x”—well, that means I probably would not be learning anything from them, at least until they get over their confusion about callings from God. Until the day they understand what God wants from them as cops, I’ll be on the veranda. How could I not respond when I hear it so clearly calling me?

________________________________________________________

Did you know you can support Messiah’s Ministries with the click of a button?

I’ve heard comedians draw howls as they sought atonement by offering to their audience a self-deprecating confession, admitting they watch infomercials. “It occurred to me that I didn’t, in fact, own a knife that could cut through my shoe.” Not to be outdone by their high-tech electronic counterparts, direct-mail marketers dreamed up a print equivalent: 12 to 16-page advertisements, always in a widely spaced courier font, with blue underlining here and there and red “hand drawn” (haha) arrows and comments sprinkled on the must-see, panic portions. Though designed to take less time to read than is required to watch an infomercial, it has to be more humiliating to be caught being ensnared by these. That’s why, so far, not even comics have copped to it. Well, somebody must read them.

Enter a Reformed minister from Brooklyn. Hey, if the reason you continued past the above paragraph was to joy in my degradation, you can stop here. It’s true. I read one. Okay? But believe me, it wasn’t for the intellectual stimulation. I mean, I didn’t get past page one without understanding that the typos and grammatical embarrassments were not there because the author had to rush this news to me (which is the case, friends, with my newsletters—when they come out [and one is coming out very soon!]).

These ‘’mercial-letters’ (the “info” in them cannot justify calling them ‘infoletters) often tout political causes, and if not, it’s health they’re allegedly after. Whatever the topic, there seems to be a correlation between number of pages and the depth of the pool from which they are written. If you cross page 12, you can be sure you have a conspiracy being exposed by writers at the deep end. Funny how this proves true whether the “urgent news” is uncovering a political or a medical—or a politico-medico-conspiracy.

Though the news sure was made to sound urgent! It told of the USA being “on the Verge of the Most Devastating Financial Meltdown Any Nation Has Ever Seen.” By itself, a perfectly credible statement. But the next sentence tipped the hand by ascribing the coming crisis to “BUREACRATS” (sic, including all upper case text in a font thrice the size of the body text) “and Fat Cats” who don’t want me to know what I have a feeling this person is going to offer to tell me—for a price.

As I read on (please, don’t make fun of me; I’m very sensitive—and I did it for you, anyway), I was repeatedly told about a book I was going to receive free (strings first mentioned on page 14!) which, if I “could find it today, would cost at least $100 to $150.” If I could find it? If I would want it, an appointment should be made for me to see the whitecoats.

Like much in the world of conspiracy theorists today, no effort was made to relate “b” to “a,” much less to consider that one ordinarily follows the other. It seemed enough for the author to posit conspiracy: he expected credulity for having invoked the magic word. Never mind that the conspiracy he was exposing began 240 years ago with men whose children would not live to see the second stage put in place. Sure. That makes SO much sense! But I trust you get the point. I won’t turn this into another 16-pager.

I’ll only tell you that 16 was the number of pages in which our author railed against the “unbacked” dollar (I agree, by the way), the Federal Reserve system, and assorted “fat cats.” Along the way he claimed that every US President who has spoken out against the conspirators “has experienced multiple assassination attempts!,” though “Andrew Jackson was fortunate enough to escape, but Lincoln…Grover Cleveland…and John F. Kennedy were not so lucky.” Lincoln was a constitutionalist? Kennedy spoke out against these conspirators? As I said, the water gets pretty deep at page 11 (where these excerpts appeared).

The clincher—you should have guessed—came after all these pages. (Those pages included one where he lamented that, though he wanted to tell me all about “the scandalous details of America’s monetary history,” he “simply didn’t have the time or space.” But I kept thinking, “If you hadn’t used a wide-spaced courier font…”) It was then, when you are about ready to pay a great deal to insure an end to this, that he told what it would cost to discover all these important secrets, and how, for the same price, I could learn how to transcend the corrupt dollar system and store up things of real value, not this fiat, bogus, worthless government toilet paper with presidents pictures on ‘em, which are just plain ol’ garbage.

The cost? That will be $99, please.

It took me three seconds. Then…WHAT?? 99 pieces of government toilet paper with presidents pictures on ‘em? THAT is the way you found around the conspired system you’re revealing? I have two words for you and your 16 pages: OY VEY! Now I know, I shouldn’t have confessed to reading this. Because, as easy as I get paper cuts, no matter how I folded, stapled or mutilated this peck of pickled paper, I couldn’t get it to cut through my shoe.

The curmudgeon was so right: you cannot lose money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Even if it is fiat money you’re not losing.

________________________________________________________

Did you know you can support Messiah’s Ministries with the click of a button?

Beloved family of Messiah,
Thanksgiving greetings in the  name above all others. Several of us have been delivered from that lugubrious shadow cast over the Christian life by the so-called Regulative Principle of Worship. It was originally intended to be a help, enabling Christians to live happier lives in their Christ-won liberty by keeping them free from unwarranted claims imposed by some tradition. It eventually showed itself to be little more than an invention of men which had been designed to protect us from inventions of men.

When it behaves itself, the RPW is indeed helpful, especially if the subject under discussion happens to be: What elements may be justly included in Divine worship? But the RPW,  like the traditions from which it first sought to save us, was itself imposed as a template to regulate the consciences of those same ever-harassed Christians. We might call it “The Babel Syndrome,” this human propensity to erect bureaucracies which become, in time, dedicated to the eradication of the purpose for which they were brought into being (as one old wag put it). A careful study of the decline of the great American Republic into its current Federal Mass Mess will reveal that parallel errors were at work in each entity. It seems that decentralization itself is the motif of faith (cf. 1 Samuel 8), and faith is hard to sustain. Everyone seems convinced that God needs all the help we can give Him and that such help must come from a centralized source. No one seems willing to believe that such centralization, regardless of the moniker that’s slapped on it, is invariably going to become a competitor with the True God, offering, as He does, salvation in exchange for loyalty, fealty, faith.

Thus, it was barely enough time to breathe from the Magisterial Reformers to the bureaucratizers. Even the Reformed were soon given to idle and speculative studies which tended increasingly to be devoted to the justification of respective Confessions of Faith rather than the exposition and application of the Word of God. The identical scholastic spirit which had taken possession of the self-important Romish elite just before the Reformation, took up residence in the halls of Geneva’s progeny right after it. It led them to become obsessed with such earth-shattering issues as supra- vs. infralapsarianism.  The main difference between the groups was that the post Reformers lacked an Erasmus to serve as a mirror for their madness through cutting satire. Consequently, they continued to take themselves much too seriously.

Then-as we noted men are wont to do-they set about to set in stone and then enforce the early policies which were really only suitable for the transition from Roman excess. Thus the RPW, like any self-respecting federal agency, began claiming jurisdiction wherever it could get away with it.

The calendar had been its first haunt of choice. That was quite understandable. Rome’s version of the follies had begun when they discovered how effective and beneficial calendrical modification was in weaning the newly converted barbarian hordes from their stubborn  idolatrous ways. “Instead of sacrificing pigs to your totem poles, what say we have a parade in honor of St. Columba?” “Capital idea!,” they all cried out in unison. But the good old Babel Syndrome must have lighted upon monks in a committee meeting one day. “Hey,” a young apprentice-monk said, “if it worked so well with those two holidays of theirs, let’s try applying a Christian significance to every day!”  And, because committees work this way, the motion passed and what started out as a clever (even ingenious) solution to a problem soon became a new problem by its own enormous weight. It took a Reformation to point out to people that however many days of sacred assembly you might find in the Old Testament, making every day a saint day or holy day has the same effect as underlining everything-that is, it’s identical in value to underlining nothing.

The RPW struck its early advocates with the same kind of force  that struck our young novice member of the Pagan-Day Replacement Program Committee. “What a splendid idea! Here are these Catholics who went overboard by making every day a holiday. Let’s clean up the whole problem with one shot by adopting a principle that will wipe the whole calendar clean.” And since the Regulative Principle of Worship functions on a negative basis, it was just the gimmick to do the job. Understand: The “negative basis” is like the way a Compact Disc Club works. Unless you tell them explicitly that you do not want their CD that month, you will get it. So the RPW said, “Unless God tells us there’s a holiday, there can’t be one.” Except for Lord’s Days, of course, the calendar was left pretty bone-picked clean. (I don’t know how the Europeans endured this back and forth rocking. Perhaps this explains their current mental state?) The neatest trick, though, had to be how the Regulativists dispensed with the entire Old Testament calendar of feasts. It was like, “God forbid that someone might think we have our faith from the Jews.” O, perish the thought! No matter what Romans and Acts and John might teach.

This negative basis thing really helped that RPW. Since it could be invoked anytime a practice might be said to lack express warrant from God, and since the number of things God has not warranted is potentially infinite, the Bureau of Weights, Standards and RPW was very busy.  For all its help and all its success, however, it was left to Christmas to become the OK Corral where the RPW would finally meet its match. When you blend Americanity with Keyensian economic policy (which depends entirely on consumer spending, with no debt or deficit high enough to be called “enough”), and throw in the sappy, effeminate yearnings of a population routed and ruled by egalitarianism, you’ve a formidable foe ready for a real showdown with any principle that preached self-denial in any form.

All these factors and forces have brought us to the present day, where the most interesting outcome has to be this picture: the offspring of earnest RPW-ites now finding themselves in the embarrassing (but instructive) position of having to argue in favor of the explicit celebration of  Christmas. This has come about because our national change-of-religion has arrived at the punch-list stage. Appointed sweepers roam the cavities of culture searching for anything which might remotely suggest the existence of a God or a particular God’s keen involvement with the founding and growth of this nation. When such a remnant is discovered, someone is appointed to “feel offended” and the courts are on permanent standby to provide the needed therapy for the poor victims who were obviously compelled against their will to hear a salesman say, “Merry Christmas.” That Kwanza greetings are still safe bets seems not to afford comfort to any-not even Regulativists.

All of this was to say, since we found that God is pleased to treat us as mature children of His, allowing us to exercise discretion and measured judgment in selecting which holidays we’ll celebrate and, within abiding parameters, just how we’ll celebrate them-since discovering this, many of us have spoken of Thanksgiving as our very favorite annual holiday.  Honestly, even Regulativists had a very hard time convincing other Christians that thanking God with special depths of gratitude one day each year was an evil He could barely abide.

All I wanted to add was this: I know some of us love Thanksgiving for its obvious apologetical potency. All these atheists get absolutely tongue-tied when you ask them just Whom they are thanking! I’m sure one or two have already tested alternate names, like, Acknowledgment Day (no help at all), Eating Day (ma nishtanaw ha yom hazeh mikol hayomim?), Turkey Day (plain stupid), or even Moment of Silent Meditation Day (har har hardy har har).

Delightful as it is to see atheists squirm-especially in the midst of their new campaign, by which they will convince moronic Americans that ethical behavior need not be dependent on belief in a deity (uh-huh)-there is much more to appreciate about this day. For one thing, for many of us who are first generation believers, this is a day when many discover their supposedly unbelieving family is less opposed to a prayer of Thanksgiving at the set table than at other times. All of us who starve for commonality in Jesus with our family members will recognize what I’m talking about. Additionally, Thanksgiving is also unique because it is not a Lord’s Day, yet it seems to cut through so much of our commercial body-armor to create a true feeling of specialness, which is, after all, the essential component of the sacred. To have a sense of sacredness penetrate into this pseudo-secular culture of fraud is a positive triumph of God in Christ. I’m not opposed to the proposition that God has shown an interest of pity in our Thanksgiving celebrations, permitting them to retain a modicum of dignity and sobriety rarely experienced by the vast majority of Americans. Thus, in nearly every home, on Thanksgiving we find a day where openness to truth may be at its annual cultural high-water mark. That is something every Christian can rejoice in.

But I just wanted to add this one thought: it is good to thank the Lord. It is good to enjoy Thanksgiving for no other reason than that we get to nationally, and family by family, give thanks to the God Who created us, Who sustains us, and Who is faithful to save. No other nation has ever been as obligated to thank God as we are. How wonderfully normal this is! What do you think about forming a committee to make every day Thanksgiving Day?

Yours and His,

Pastor Steve & Family

wishing you a most blessed Thanksgiving Day, as well as Advent Season

by Steve Schlissel

I ordered some office supplies on eBay to save some dough. When I saw the shipping charges, I said to myself, “There goes the savings.” So, seeing how the vendors name was “twoguysfrombrooklyn,” I decided to deal with it Brooklyn style. And since he was a real deal Brooklyn boy on the other end, he played his part to perfection. While this seems like a simple exchange, it’s actually a highly complex and tightly choreographed way of relating, filled with cultural presuppositions and overtones. Okay, maybe it isn’t, but any sociologist will tell you the climax happened when he acknowledged that NYC is the best. I thought I’d share with you: A New York Moment in Cyberspace.

Dear twoguysfrombrooklyn,

You guys killed me on that shipping AND insurance. I coulda picked the stuff up myself! I’m in Sheepshead Bay. Waddaya tryin’ to do to me?

Dear schlissel,
Hi. Actually, it was my business partner who shipped this to you while I am out of town—coincidentally, in New York! I was walking him through the shipping but he must have hit the insurance button for some reason… Anyhow, I am going to refund your shipping cost. How’s that? I’m still in New York, leaving back for CA tomorrow. If you don’t mind waiting a day, I will take care of it for you then.
Thanks for being patient—in the end, you’ll come out ahead, since you won’t pay any shipping.
Thanks,
Paul

Dear twoguysfrombrooklyn,
I got your message about refunding the s&h to me. You are right—I can’t beat that. And it shut my mouth. Thank you very much! You know, when I saw your note, I realized that I mistakenly assumed you were still in Brooklyn. Apparently, for some inexplicable reason, you moved. Well, I’m the only one of my family of six who stayed. But folks like you made this place better. Thanks again.
steve schlissel

Dear schlissel,

Hey Steve-
No problem. I’m jealous that you still live in NY and I don’t! I’m still here in NY until tomorrow. I visit every two months to see my father who still lives here. This evening I went to see West Side Story on Broadway. As great as it is to live out west, there is nothing like seeing a great Broadway musical, and after, a piece of Thick, gooey New York cheese cake. Back to your order—I’ll be leaving to CA tomorrow afternoon and on Thursday I’ll take care of your shipping charge. For a fellow Brooklyn-ite, it is my pleasure!
Take Care-
Paul

Dear twoguysfrombrooklyn,
I have a fresh Junior’s cheesecake in my fridge right now. If you ever get the urge and need someone to set the pick, I’d be glad to get down to dekalb and have them send one out your way. Just say the word—er, the woid.

steve

schlissel@aol.com
i saw west side story 11 times in the movies when it came out. “Keep away from my seester!” Ha!

]]> http://www.schlissel.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=170 0