Hymn choices

Did you ever analyze hymns that people choose to sing? There is really quite a bit of difference between a foxtrot ditty and a stately chorale. There are those who refuse to join the congregation singing anything other than a paraphrased Psalm. I love to sing the Psalms, but I have not yet been convinced that God is displeased when we sing the name of Jesus! But that is a different fight than the one I want to pick today.

I remember when the original Trinity Hymnal was published. My friend, Howard Porter, who was the organist at Calvary OPC, Glenside, PA (the church right across the street from Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia), told me that he had a friend who was organist at a Roman Catholic Church in the area. Both men being musicians, Howard loaned a copy of the Trinity Hymnal to his friend to see how he appreciated the classical tunes. When he returned the book, his comment went something like this: "The music is beautiful, but the hymnal contains a lot of grace doesn't it?" I wish all OPC church members would appreciate that--but as a note of commendation, not criticism.

What a great difference there is between "Little Brown Church in the Vale" and "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" just for a quick example. One is full of sentimental schmaltz and the other confronts one with the awesome depth of Christ's love for poor lost sinners.

Contrast "Sunshine In My Soul Today" with "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" for another ludicrous example. One is celebrating how I feel now that I'm saved, while the other is uttering the most solemn devotion to Christ, crucified.

My point is simply that there is too much emphasis on how good I feel or how victorious my Christian life has become. I feel like a hypocrite when I sing the second verse of "Blessed Assurance". "Perfect submission perfect delight, visions of rapture now burst on my sight; angels descending, bring from above echoes of mercy, whispers of love." Those are beautiful words. That is the ideal Christian life. But I need to confess to you that I have never been able to say my submission to the Lord was "perfect". Maybe that's just me. I feel much more honest when I sing, "Jesus, what a strength in weakness! Let me hide myself in Him; tempted, tried and sometimes failing, He, my strength, my victory wins." (Jesus, What a Friend for Sinners).

These thoughts were triggered in my head because of one of the hymns sung last Sunday. "We Have Not Known Thee As We Ought". The fourth verse confesses, "We have not served thee as we ought; alas! the duties left undone, the work with little fervor wrought, the battles lost, or scarcely won! Lord, give the zeal, and give the might, for thee to toil, for thee to fight." That is what I need to sing more often than I care to admit.

My pastor, years ago, pointed out to me the most insidious hymnal editing I have ever heard of in my entire life. It is a great example of why there is an Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The original Presbyterian hymnal included the children's hymn, "Around the Throne of God in Heaven". It flows so simply and beautifully from a description of the blessedness of children around God's throne in heaven into the question, "What brought them to that world above...how came those children there?" And the gospel answer is "Because the Saviour shed His blood to wash away their sin... The final verse celebrates their sanctification by telling us, "On earth they sought the Saviour's grace, On earth they loved his Name; so now they see his blessed face, and stand before the Lamb, Singing, 'Glory, glory, glory be to God on high.'" But when the hymnal was revised, after the church turned sour, they simply excluded the next to last verse. Then the answer to the question as to how those children got to heaven becomes, "On earth they sought the Saviour's grace... "  Suddenly the way of salvation is works, rather than grace. It is what those children did for Jesus, not what He did for them.

Do you see why it is so important to think about what words you are singing?

Angels in disguise

The bible encourages us to bring guests into our homes by saying, "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it." (Hebrews 13:2)

My family would tell me that we have never done that, not because we have never entertained guests, but because no angel would take the kind of disguises we have seen. In fact it may have required guardian angels to protect my family from some of the "guests" we have shown hospitality.

There was the guy who came for dinner and needed Maalox. You need to know that we made it a policy not to give money to transients. If they claimed to be hungry we invited them to dine with us. Raising 6 kids made it seem that one or two more at the table was not a big deal. Anyway, this guy needed Maalox before dinner (it wasn't because of our cooking). Barbara found a bottle in the cabinet and handed him the bottle while I got a spoon. But before anyone handed him the spoon, he put the bottle to him mouth, took a swig, and handed it back. "No, you go ahead and keep it. You might need some later."

Of course there was Kevin Johnson, a young black who was fresh out of prison and needed a temporary residence. He was so charming and lovable that our whole family enjoyed him. We even finagled a job for him, policing the traffic in a roller skating rink. He shocked the socks off us when he answered the phone, "Hello, Keller residence. House nigger speaking." He thought that was so funny that he made a routine of it, until we forbade him to answer the phone. Some time after he moved on, we heard that he fell to his addiction of car theft once again.

One guy pressured me for money so he could get a coat since he was going to be on the street. I gave him my heavy eastern overcoat, and we never heard from him again. We had recently moved to Modesto from Wilmington, Delaware, and I was rather certain I would never need that coat again.

Then there was the family who sent their barefoot kids into the church just after the benediction to ask money for groceries. I went to talk to the father out in the car, and found him watching TV which had been installed so he could watch from the driver seat! We didn't give him money, and he didn't want our hospitality.

Then there was the Cambodian refugee who was so grateful for our sponsorship that he pulled all the weeds from the yard. He left the dandelions, thinking they were flowers or food, I suppose. Needless to say our kids thought this was great. At the dining table he would stop me and insisted on serving everyone before he took any for himself. Maybe he was the angel.

About book covers

Things are not always as they appear. In fact they are seldom as they appear. Those super toys we used to get by mailing box tops to the company turned out to be cheap and tinny. That was our first lesson. Then when Poor Richard warned us not to judge a book by it's cover, we were conditioned to believe him.

Recently we participated in Mobil's reward program. If we buy 100 gallons of gas within a couple months, they would reward us with $50. Since we had already planned to visit family in Tennessee, we signed up. Well we did buy the petrol. And we did get the reward, but it came in the form of plastic. We had anticipated a $50 gift card. But instead it was a club card that needed to be redeemed on line. Well when we went to the restaurant website, we only found obscure little dives, struggling for existence,desperately seeking new customers. So we picked a couple of the most promising establishments that were reasonably near us.

The first one we tried sounded like a charming Irish restaurant not far from our home. But it turned out to be a pub in a mini mall. Barbara was so skeptical of a positive outcome that she sent me to investigate while she stayed in the car. I meekly opened the door, only to find shuffleboard and pool tables with two toughs loitering there. But when I stepped in I could see the bar and some casual dining tables. I asked the proprietor if they were serving food, and he gave me a very friendly affirmative. So I retrieved my wife, and we enjoyed a tasty cuisine of shepherd's pie and a Reuben sandwich. We will definitely try this place again. But once again, things were not as they appeared at first.

The other place we tried as our reward had the word "bamboo" in the name. It was labeled a Hawaiian restaurant. But when we walked in, we found ourselves to be the only diners in this small place in the tenderloin section of Long Beach. The old man who tried to understand our questions was not Hawaiian, but Cambodian. What I understood to be his grandson had tuned their large screen HDTV to an episode of "Spongebob". Once again our situation was not what we had expected. We eventually ordered our food by numbers on the menu and hoped for the best. To our happy surprise it was excellent Chinese-ish fare. When the old guy's nephew returned we found him to be a well spoken and friendly proprietor.
The ultimate surprise in things not being as they appear is found in the biblical warning: "there is a way that seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death."

Garden pests

When we lived in Modesto, we paid a nickel for every tomato worm the kids collected. It's astonishing how much they can eat in such a short time. Capital punishment for these pests was usually a toss onto the hot summer roof of the house. By the time they were baked out there was no carcass for disposal. They must have been 99.9 % water.

So far in our present home, the major offenders are snails. Pitching them into the street is a lot of fun, but it doesn't work for the culprits I find in the back yard. These perps simply get stomped. I put out snail pellets, and many of them meet their demise with slow agony. (Do they actually experience pain?) But mercy at my hands (or feet as the case may be) means the quick and messy death under my shoe.

Last year I planted my first effort at growing a watermelon. To my horror the sprout was barely visible the next day because the leaves had all been eaten, and one of the stems was severed. I loaded the flowerbed with poison overkill, and to my delight the plant even survived this horrific ordeal. In fact we grew a delicious, juicy watermelon which has been celebrated in an old blog post.

This year, among other plants, I put an eggplant in the exact same spot where the watermelon grew last year. I don't learn very quickly, however. I was again horrified to see the leaves disappeared overnight. More stomping and more poison. I'm hoping the little stalk will recover like the watermelon did, but there aren't many signs of hope as yet.

I have lettuce plants under whose leaves some snails have sought refuge, but so far they have systematically been plucked and stomped. Just before the recent rain storm I sowed lettuce seeds under the happy fig tree. I also have two tomato plants that are looking strong and healthy. One even sports two blossoms, and they both show several promising buds. Summer BLTs are already making my salivary glands pump.

I'm glad I'm not a Hindu.

Overwhelming disaster

The great earthquake and tsunami in Japan has overwhelmed more than the Japanese people. Because of the remarkable technology that places these awesome and frightening scenes into our living rooms this great disaster has overwhelmed the whole world. I know it has overwhelmed me.

One of the questions that inevitably arises is, "Where is God in all of this?" But when that question is posed, I know that the author is quite unacquainted with God. I mean the God who reveals himself in the Bible. If by the term "God" we mean the Creator and sustainer of this universe, then the answer to the question is obvious. "The One forming light and creating darkness, Causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these." (Isaiah 45:7)

Unbelief lashes out against God for cruelly dashing into oblivion ten thousand people in one fell swoop. It's mean. It's the act of an ogre rather than a merciful God. I say it is unbelief that throws out those imprecations because they refuse to include the facts revealed by God in his word. "And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Death is inevitable for each and every one of us. If that death comes quietly while we sleep, or suddenly when a tsunami sweeps us away, it is still grim and final. But in fact it is not final! After this comes the judgement. Death is the wages of sin. We brought it upon ourselves. It really is our fault, not God's. The only real tragedy of death is when it happens to one who faces that judgement without a savior. The Christian who is so swept away is immediately swept into the arms of his Savior. Where is the tragedy in that? Unbelief sneers at such theology, but has no explanation to offer, and so concludes that this life is meaningless. Weep for those who are blind.


But if by the term "God" you are thinking of a super being who causes good, fun, pleasant things to happen, and is helpless to prevent accidents and "natural" disasters, then you are talking about a god of human invention. He is really irrelevant to actual history. He lives next door to Santa Claus, and he has no more help to offer than his next door neighbor.

The real question you mean to ask is: "Why would God allow such devastation as the recent Japan earthquake, the tsunami and the pending nuclear pollution?" Well, there is no chapter and verse in the Bible that answers such specific questions. He calls upon us to love our neighbors and do good to all men. Just because He is God, He is not required to answer to any higher authority. He is the highest authority.

But God has made it quite clear what we are to do. He has given the church a commission to tell everyone the good news that Christ Jesus has come into the world to save sinners. The greatest calamity that will ever fall upon men is to enter the final judgment without a savior. That is why we have sent missionaries to Japan for many years. As they have sown the seed in Japan for these many years, they have found the "soil" to be quite hard. There is something of stoic privacy in their culture that prevents them from opening up to admit fear, vulnerability or ignorance. That tendency has been witnessed by all the world through the media during this awful disaster. We saw a woman who survived several days of entrapment in a collapsed building being rescued by Japanese responders. And we have witnessed her polite bow to the crew in thanks for their efforts that saved her life. But then we learned that she was suffering the grief of having her daughter torn from her arms during the tsunami, never to be seen again. She actually had the poise and immense courtesy to bow to her rescuers while shouldering this terrible weight of grief.

But that same cultural detachment has made the Japanese people relatively impregnable to the gospel. I don't want to tell you that this whole ugly disaster occurred as part of God's plan to open hearts of these people. I would have to be God to be able to say that. But that seems to be the actual results in some cases.

Now we are hearing stories of missionaries and Christian friends who drive all night with a pickup full of bare necessities which they bought at Costco to supply churches and schools in and near Sendai, and then return to do it all over again. There are people who, in the past, had been visited by missionaries, now coming out of their homes and shelters to be touched by the love of Christ seen in these men and women who are helping them.

I know that many of us have prayed that God would open the hearts of the Japanese people, and maybe--just maybe--this is part of the answer.

Volkswagen

I'm not into the naming of cars. We usually have a simple utilitarian attitude about cars. It's great to have a piece of transportation that gets us from here to there. That's it. The tube throws advertising at me suggesting that I should have some sort of love affair with the car they want to sell me.

If I did have a sentimental attitude, I probably would have had to name our 69 beetle "Fritz" or something German. It was the best thing Hitler ever gave us. Like the time we drove from Modesto to San Francisco with 8 people stuffed into the bug. Or the time we impulsively bought a 6 foot ladder only to realize we had the bug in the parking lot. We got home with the ladder, but at this moment I'm not sure how we did it. I think it had to stick out the front passenger side window. When we finally had to get rid of the VW (it was mortally crippled), our children never forgave us. All of them drove it one time or another, except for Phil (who never drives) and Jonathan (who was too young when we owned Fritz).

We found the bug in an ad in the paper for a reasonable price. Sometime after we bought it, during an inspection (they do that routinely in the east), we were informed that there was something bogus about the machine. The original owner's manual was in the door pocket, and it indicated more miles than what shown on the odometer. The inspectors knew what to look for, and discovered that someone had taken two VWs, cut them in half, and welded them together. One was wrecked in the front and the other was wrecked in the rear, so some enterprising shop put them together. The bogus part was that they never told us about it. Now even though we felt cheated, we were happy enough with the car that we kept it. The law put a restraining order of some sort on the shop, forbidding them to ever do this again.

When we moved from Wilmington, Delaware to Modesto, California, we had a church acquaintance drive it across country for us. We all used Fritz while we lived in Modesto. We moved it to Carson, and didn't junk it until a few years after that. That is a span well over 10 years.

Of course it was a four-on-the-floor stick shift. And when the clutch went out, we just had to push it a little and drop it in first. We were familiar enough with the whine of the engine to know just when we could slip it to second gear etc. Once when Bobby was late getting to church we found that he had a fire in the engine compartment of the bug. He was just a block away from home, and some guy digging in his yard threw a couple shovels of dirt to douse the flames. The insurance adjuster wrote us a check for the repairs, saying, "I had the same thing happen to my VW. There is a manufacturing flaw in the gas line." We got enough from the insurance company to replace all the burnt lines, and even enough to repair some other parts. The bug came out of it in better shape than it was before the fire. We need to thank God for all small blessings.

We had a Pontiac station wagon for family travels, but there was a holiday when the wagon was not working. (I had recently replaced the gas pump, and when I corked the gas line to prevent leakage during the repair, I forgot to remove the cork.) On this given day--when we had not yet discovered my embarrassing mistake--we gave the family the choice of staying home from uncle Jack's house or traveling in the VW. The bug got a unanimous vote, so we piled in like circus clowns. Phil found a space behind the back seat, somehow four kids sat on the back seat, and Jonathan sat on his mother's lap. We found it necessary to stop for stretching only once. Can you imagine doing such a thing now with the seat belt law?

Spiders

It's not really a love/hate relationship. I would rather say my relationship with arachnids is more of a fear/fascination relationship. Why I'm thinking about this is that I killed a black widow in the garden today. It's not the first time I have done that. Several years back, when we lived in Modesto, we used to grow lettuce. We had some luscious butter lettuce heads in the garden. Before dinner I would pick out a mature head, lift it from the ground and tear off the roots. But on one of those occasions I was terrified to find I had almost touched a large black widow who had nestled herself between the head and the roots of this plant. I pumped a large dose of adrenalin and immediately dropped the lettuce. The spider was dislodged and I stomped it.

Yes, it was a black widow. I know those dames quite well, having done more experimenting as a kid than I should have. My mother was far too indulgent with me growing up. With her permission I had a widow in a quart jar on the mantle. Since we had a stone fireplace, it was a trifle dangerous to house her there. But when she built one of those cocoon balls for babies, mom had the good sense to order me to part with my spider. Even when I was about to dispose of her in a fire, I curiously began to open the jar, but she darted toward the partial opening until I slammed the lid back in place.

When I was a teen-ager we lived in Eagle Rock, and across the street was a detective of the Los Angeles Police Department. He had a Kojak personality, and he even resembled Telly Sevalis with his bald head. Chatting with my dad in the garage one evening, he informed dad that we had black widows in our garage. When my father denied it, Kojak grabbed a big black spider by the leg and turned her over to reveal the red hour glass marking on her belly. "Are you crazy?" my father yelped. Kojak just said, "It can't get me as long as I hold it's leg. Even if it tried it wouldn't get through the callous on my finger." He enjoyed showing how tough he was.

Oh about today: I was trying to free my fountain of a clog of grass clippings. We have a small solar powered fountain where the water is pumped to the top canister and pours out into a series of pans until it gets to the large bowl to be pumped up again. During my cleaning project I noticed webs in that top canister so I reached in to clean them out. But when I discovered these web strands to be exceptionally strong, I immediately knew what that meant. So I looked in only to see a humongous spider looking back at me. I may have touched her! It makes me shiver to think about it. I put my garden gloves on, and went back to smash her. You know, I have, on occasion, used my teeth to help pull off my gloves. I don't think I will ever do that again.