PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Words of the Prophet…Echoed in the Wells of Silence”.

By:  Ron Woodrum

 

     Recently, while listening to a local radio station, I heard some lyrics that I had not heard for many years.  My mind recognized the message of the song immediately, but also recognized that the eery voice I was hearing was not the original authors.  The song had be recorded by a new artist, in a very powerful new style.  The words went like this:

 

“And in the naked light I saw

Ten Thousand People maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sounds of Silence

 

‘Fools’ said I ‘you do not know

Silence like a cancer grows

Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you’

But my words, like silent raindrops fell,

And echoed-in the wells of silence

 

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon gods they made

And the signs flashed out its warning,

in the words that it was forming

And the signs said,

‘the words of the prophet are written on the subway walls,

and tenement halls

And whispered in the sounds of silence'”

 

     Those were the words of Simon and Garfunkel, written back in the sixties, being reintroduced to a new generation by the haunting voice of Disturbed.  I immediately thought of Malachi.  When it comes to the words of the prophet…There words go forth with the goal of disturbing the sounds of silence.  They too are often received with people hearing without listening, while they bow and pray to gods of their own making.  Those words echo in the wells of silence…and before long only become a whisper, that no one seems to have “ears to hear!”.

It made me think of another modern day prophet, at least for a time-Bob Dylan.  Back in the late 70’s Bob Dylan i.e. Robert Zimmerman, after studying prophecy about the end times, was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, and embraced him as Lord and Saviour.  His first album, following his conversion was Slow Train Coming, that had a charted hit-Gotta Serve Somebody.  Bob also demonstrated his genuineness, I am told, by assisting Campus Crusade for Christ, for a time, in reaching youth at our Colleges.  But the controversy by secular fans wanting to hear old Dylan favorites, and Christian fans wanting to hear only the new Christian stuff caused riots that caused the new convert to withdraw his enthusiastic embrace of Christianity, at least publically.  But before he did, he released several new Christian albums with titles, Saved, Shot of Love, and Oh Mercy.  On the latter Dylan, in true prophetic style, spoke to his generation about a great evil that only God, through Jesus Christ could make right.  His song was Everything Is Broken.  The lyrics went something like this:

 

Broken lines, broken strings, broken threads, broken springs

Broken idols, broken heads, people sleeping in broken beds

Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking

Everything is broken!

 

Broken bottles, broken plates, broken switches, broken gates

Broken dishes, broken parts, streets are filled with broken hearts

Broken words, never meant to be spoken,

Everything is broken!

 

Seems like every time you stop and turn around

Something else just hit the ground

 

Broken cutters, broken saws, broken buckles, broken laws

Broken bodies, broken bones, broken voices on broken phones

Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin’

Everything is broken!

 

Everytime you go out someplace

Things fall to pieces in my face

 

Broken hands on broken ploughs, broken treaties, broken vows

Broken pipes, broken tools, People breaking broken rules

Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking

Everything is broken!

 

Dylan would have fit well in Malachi’s generation.  As a Messenger of the Lord, that was his message to his generation.  They had returned from exile.  The Temple and City was rebuilt.  They had experienced a short-lived revival.  But now it seemed as if “Everything was Broken”.  They were weary of the Lord, and now Malachi tells the priests and the people, that God is tired of their “broken-faith” that has resulted in everything being broken!  It was time for them to return to Him so that he could do for them, what all the kings horses and all the kings men could never do for Humpty Dumpty, He could put them all back together again.

 

Several years ago, papers in England were writing about the condition of their nation.  They were speculating on what is wrong?  Whose to blame for the condition that had changed the landscape of their beloved country.  They continued to ask the question-“what is wrong?”  G.K. Chesterton wrote the editors a letter.  It simply read, “I am”-signed G.K. Chesterton!  As we listen to the message of Malachi, those that have ears to hear will respond with that same message.  Others will only hear “the echo, in the wells of silence”.

 

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Knowing who you REALLY Are”.    

By:  Ron Woodrum

 

     In 1975, two years before his death, Charlie Chaplin was visiting France.  He visited nearby Monoco, and while there entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.  He thought he was a shoe-in to win the prize money, and everyone would have a good laugh.  Charlie came in third!  Most thought the best explanation for such a low finish was due to the fact that all his movies were in black and white, and in real life his genuine baby blues may have made him look less like Chaplin than at least two others in the contest.  Coming in third in your own contest might just cause you to suffer an identity crisis.  In the book/play by Arthur Miller, Death of A Salesman, the family, the only ones to attend the funeral of Willy Loman, who has committed suicide, are trying to make sense of it all.  Bif, one of Willy’s sons comes to this conclusion-he says, “Willy had all the wrong dreams…he never knew who he was!”.  Knowing who you are, and living in light of that is the key to success and satisfaction in life.  The story is told that about Joe Louis, boxing’s heavyweight champion of yesteryear that proves that point.  Louis was heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949.  During his time of military service in the U.S. Army he was driving with a fellow G.I. in a truck.  He was involved in a minor collision with a large truck.  The driver of the larger truck got out and started yelling and swearing at Louis.  Louis just sat in his seat and kept on smiling .  His buddy asked him, “Why didn’t  you get out and knock him flat?”  Louis responded, “Why should I?”  “When somebody insulted Caruso, did he sing an aria for him?”  The truck driver did not know who he was insulting.  Had he known it was Joe Louis he would not have likely felt so free to curse and yell at him.  He would have likely treated him dramatically different!  On the other hand, Joe knew who he was-the best boxer in the world-and therefore he had nothing to prove to anyone!  Not even himself.  Many others would have been tempted to fight back, or at least return insult for insult.  But Louis was secure enough in his identity to understand that such a response would only be degrading.  The truck driver’s opinion of him was not the one that mattered.  It was irrelevant to who Joe was.  He had a proper self-understanding.  That controlled his life actions.  So it should be with all of us.  But as we read the story of Jacob we see him living out a life that doesn’t seem to fit who he really was meant to be.  He was the grandson of the great Obedient and Faithful Abraham.  The one who had proven his faith in God by willing to go on a spiritual journey, “going but not knowing where he was going”.  He lived the life of a pilgrim, believing the promises of God, though he never got to see them come to fruition in his lifetime.  Then too, his father was Isaac.  The beloved miraculous son of Father Abraham.  Isaac was a type of the Lord Jesus Christ when he was the offered sacrifice on Mt. Moriah, foreshadowing the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.   W.H. Griffith Thomas, in his commentary on Genesis calls Isaac “the ordinary son of a Great Father, and the Ordinary Father of a Great Son”.  But for most of his life Jacob never saw himself as Great.  He never knew who he really was.  He spent all his life trying to get ahead.  Trying to be someone he wasn’t.  Entering into conflict with others, trying to come out on top, striving to get the desires of his heart, no matter what it did to relationships, or how it made him look.

He needed a crisis-experience to get him to see who he was now, and who he could become if he would make the right life-changing decisions.  Most people do not know that the Athiest Christoper Hitchens has a brother Peter, who is a dedicated believer who has dedicated his life to defending the Christianity that his brother was so determined to destroy.  But he was not always such a Christian.  Both he and Christopher had been brought up being exposed to the genuine Christian faith.  Both of them, in their own way had turned away.  Christopher had become an antagonistic athiest.  Peter had chosen the life of wealth and pleasure, not seeing any need of the faith that they had been exposed to as youngsters.  He was indifferent to them, not really antagonistic.  Then one day he encountered a picture, in an Art Museum, that gripped his heart, and was a Divine call to come back to the faith he had been given the opportunity to embrace, but deserted for life in the “far country of riotous llving”.  While in an art museum in Europe he was drawn to the picture The Prodigal Son, by Thomas Hart Benton.  He looked at the painting.  It shows the Prodigal Son coming home too late.  His father’s house was in ruins.  His father is dead and gone.  The fatted calf is lying in the side yard, just a skeleton of bones portruding out of its shallow grave!  That painting hit Peter like a ton of bricks!  He tells of his own appraisal and reaction to that painting in his book The Rage Against God.  He writes, ” He has come home too late.  Nobody has seen him from afar and run joyfully to meet him.  There will be no forgiveness, no best robe, no ring, no music or dancing.  He stands in his shabby clothes, with his poor roped suitcase…He is gaping with his hand to his mouth, at the ruin of his family homestead-ruin caused by his own greed and wastefullness.  He looks as if it is just dawning on him that he is stupid and cruel and without hope.  The light is failing in a chilly sky beneath wind-whipped twisted clouds.  Instead of a fatted calf, there is a stark white skeleton, the skull horned, lying in unattended grass.  We can guess grief, resignation, and failure has overtaken the family during his heedless absence.  Who can he blame but himself?  The desolation is infinite.  As I looked at that picture I was reminded of the melancholy remnants and ruins of my own Church, out of which I had petulantly stomped out of, I felt the same as that prodigal”.  He had a crisis conversion.  He turned back to his Heavenly Father.  Rediscovered the faith he had forsaken.  Returned to serve God in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ!  He did his best to convince his Athiest brother to do the same before he did of cancer.  As far as we know he was unsuccessful.  But Peter discovered who he really was, and who he could really become in Christ.  Todays message, from Malachi, takes us back to Genesis.  We get a better understanding of what God meant when He told the nation of Israel how He loved them.  He defined and illustrated the nature and nurture of that love, as illustrated in the Father of their nation, Jacob, who found out that he really was Israel-“he who has found power for life in God”.  For the first time in his life he knew who he really was.  His identity was a gift, a gurantee, a gratitude, and a genuine identity in God.  So is ours.

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “How To Get a Solid Grace-Framed Agenda for the New Year”.

By:  Ron Woodrum

 

     I want to begin this perspective with some advice, as I often do, from one of my favorite authors-Frederick Buechner.  He writes, ” it is mainly for some clue to where I am going that I search through where I have been, some hint as to who I am becoming or failing to become that I delve into what used to be”.  He continues, “There’s alot to love about a New Year.  Good food.  Celebrating with family and friends.  I love the unmarked calendar, the eager anticipation from 365 days of ‘who knows what may hold’.  I value the opportunity to both recollect the past year, doing an inventory of sorts, and to anticipate the New Year!”  How true!  The first day of 2017 is a great opportunity for us to remember and to anticipate. Remembering is a vital practice for a growing spiritual life.  Our sense of who we are is really a collection of memories of sort.  Press the erase button and we don’t really know who we are anymore.  Life and a healthy identity is unimaginable without a vivid memory.  Why not find a quiet place today and ask God to walk with you over the year.  Revisit the challenges and trials that have made you stronger.  Face honestly your bad choices and failures and falls.  Learn from them, asking guide to guide your steps around those incidents next year, and give you His strength for the battles you cannot avoid.  How have you grown and become more or less like Christ this past year?

But while you are at it, take time to look forward too.  A rear-view glance in the mirror is important but you can’t drive forward without looking ahead!  I don’t mean resolutions-I think that New Year’s tradition needs a good burial! I think Christians should replace it with New Year’s Anticipation.  Anticipation, with remembrance, is as vitally an important spiritual exercise as the other.  In the Biblical mind the future Grace of God is always breaking into the present to let God change our lives for the better, for our good, and His Glory.  As you face the New Year, if you must resolve, resolve to do less trying to be what God expects you to be, and start trusting and resting in what God has promised to make of our lives, if we will turn them over to Him.  The word “promise” comes from the latin word “promittere”.  It comes from two words-“pro”- meaning “forth” and “mittere”- meaning “to send”.  Prosmises are God’s packages of Grace sent from the future; they are declarations which annnounce the coming of a reality that does not yet exist today!  But on the guarantee of God they will!  He promises.  How would our lives and world be different If God’s promises took shape in the present moment? Where would you like for God’s promises come alive in your life in a new way this New Year?  That is what Buechner calls “a solid grace-framed agenda for the coming New Year!” 

Let me share a poem by Mary Fairchild called A New Year’s Plan.

 

“I tried to think of a clever new phrase-

A slogan to inspire the next 365 days,

A motto to live by this coming New Year,

But the catchy words fell flat to my ear.

 

And then I heard His still small voice

Saying, ‘consider this simple, daily choice:

With each new dawn and close of the day

Make new your resolve to trust and obey.

 

Don’t look back and be caught in regret

Or dwell on the sorrow of dreams unmet;

Don’t stare forward anchored by fear,

No, live in this moment, for I am here.

 

I am all you need. Everything I Am.

You are held secure by my strong hand.

Give me this one thing-your all in all;

Into my grace, let yourself fall’.

 

So, at last I’m ready, I see the way.

It’s to daily follow, trust and obey.

I enter the New Year armed with a plan,

To give Him everything.  All That I Am!”