Is Your Pulpit Out of Tune?

The messenger who had gone to summon Micaiah said to him, “Look, the words of the prophets with one accord are favorable to the king; let our word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.” – 1Kings 22.13

            Queen Elizabeth I did not have a Twitter account.

            Instead, when Her Majesty wanted to communicate matters of state to a mass audience she would send her tame bishops into various influential pulpits with instructions to preach her latest policy. The queen referred to this practice by the cynical term of “tuning the pulpits.”

            When King Ahab decided to go to battle his court prophets piped obediently to the tune he called: Go up, for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king. Zedekiah even soloed on the horns with an improvised jazz riff about a gory victory. In the midst of this martial harmony, only Micaiah the son of Imlah sounded a sour note. His descant sang of scattered sheep and thumped out a backbeat of defeat. The king sent him to sing solos in solitary confinement but the campaign ended in Ahab’s funeral dirge. The deadly arrow of what R. G. Lee dubbed the nameless, aimless bowman became a conductor’s baton for the orchestras of Israel: Every man to his city, and every man to his country! The country/western wailer even worked in a line about stray dogs and hookers.

            Politicians and plutocrats always welcome the words of a well-tuned pulpit. The powerful people of any age bestow prominence on preachers prepared to sing their secular agendas, and threaten discordant heralds with social exile. This is not an age for sycophants but for Spirit-filled servants who dare to sing Scripture-soaked truth to a selfish society. Personal play-lists have no place in Christian pulpits.

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” May God grant the church ears to hear the drumbeat of truth so often drowned out by the disco rhythms of public opinion. Tune your pulpit to the music of the spheres and you will dance with angels long after the top-forty ditties of the day have faded into defeat.

What's Your Neck Verse?

What's your neck verse?

We've all heard about having a "life verse," that single crisp chip of Scripture that we seize - or that seizes us - as a motto for our personal Christian pilgrimage. But what about a "neck verse"?

In September of 1598 the English playwright Ben Jonson killed fellow-thespian Gabriel Spencer in a sword fight. Queen Elizabeth's gendarmes threw him in jail and sentenced him to death. He escaped hanging, however, when he invoked an obscure medieval statute which held that the condemned could beat the rap by reading from the Bible in Latin. Johnson, with his classical education, managed the task handily. History does not record the particular passage he considered appropriate. Legal slang dubbed this the "neck verse" - a verse you read to save your neck.

What 's your neck verse? 

With your head in the noose and the hooded hangman's hand ticklish upon the lever, what passage would you offer to pay the price of pardon? A few suggestions: 

He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. - 1 Peter 2.24.

And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins,and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. - 1 John 2.2

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. - Corinthians 15.3

Given Jesus' stern warning that angry words sit on a spectrum with murder as its logical conclusion, we all stand branded with the same blood that Johnson spilled on his sword, the same blood that stained the hands of Cain in evidence of a curse he had as a legacy from his father, Adam. Satan, the accuser of the brethren, has us cold on the evidence of our Adamic DNA and our individual fingerprints on the numerous exhibits of depravity. But our "neck verses" lay claim to another kind of blood that ran free from the cross where the sinless Son of God suffered on our behalf. And just to be sure, the sign above the cross proclaims this truth not only in the Greek and Latin of the learned, but in the Hebrew of the everyday folks.

Before the Great White Throne, with my heart on display and my head in a halter, I will cop to all charges then quote my neck-verse, and walk forth free for all eternity.

What's YOUR neck verse?

Traghettore

            This is the season when American football coaches get fired. Playoff losses and bowl game defeats drive NFL clubs and NCAA programs to ditch their skippers and cast about for a captain who can restore their battered glory.

Italian professional soccer has a term for such a turnaround coach, the guy who seizes the helm of a floundering franchise and pilots it to success: traghettore. It literally means a ferryman. In the Inferno, Dante uses the word for Charon, the boatman who shuttles doomed souls across the river Acheron to their assigned circles of Hell. The poet calls this sailor “the boatman o’er the livid lake.”

            Christian storytelling reverses this role and depicts Christ as the traghettore of the redeemed, the fearless mariner who navigates agitated waters to reach the haven of rest. In John 6 the disciples battle a gale on the Sea of Galilee. When Jesus appears, “they willingly received him into the ship; and immediately the ship was at the land whither they went.” Paul had a somewhat different experience with the divine traghettore. In Acts 27 the apostle comforts his shipmates, frazzled after days of fighting Euroclydon. God has promised him safe passage despite certain shipwreck. “There shall not,” Paul promises, “an hair fall from the head of any of you.” In the end, the mariners and crew reach land, some of them surfing shoreward on broken bits of the shattered ship. In the case of Jonah, the traghettore orders His disobedient prophet overboard and rescues him in a lifeboat fashioned from the belly of the leviathan.

            Three different storms and three different experiences but all with one result: The traghettore brings the storm-tossed to safety. Sometimes Jesus stills the storm; sometimes He harnesses it, calling the castaways to ride ashore on the shivered timbers of their own schemes; sometimes He prepares unlikely vessels to reroute a single sailor’s God-forsaking GPS. Whatever the tactics the strategy stands unchanged: Jesus our great pilot guides us to God’s chosen port of call. Unlike Charon, the cruise-director of the damned, Jesus is the turn-around coach, the traghettore who steers us safe to salvation.

            Whatever tempest tosses you today, look to the Pilot and not to the problem; trust the steersman and do not fear the storm. You may suddenly reach shore; you may wade waterlogged through the blast and brine; you may go down to the depths to find a submarine salvation, but you will not drown. Calm your seasick soul with the confession of the old hymn, “The billows may sweep o’er the wild, stormy deep/But in Jesus I’m safe evermore.”

Breakage and God's Promises

You may have given - or received - a gift card as a Christmas present. Warning: It's breakable.

The retail industry has a term for unredeemed gift funds: breakage. While the company that issues the voucher cannot renege on the deal, statistics indicate that Americans trash roughly eight billion dollars each year simply by failing to claim what rightly belongs to them. The individual who loses, forgets about, or merely chooses not to use, a gift card has bigger problems than being out a few bucks. Something called a "dormancy fee" can actually reduce the monetary value of the card. If the owner simply closes out the card, she may find that her credit score takes a hit.

The gift card's promise, then, may be broken, but never by the issuer, only by the recipient.

You do not have, explains Our Lord's half-brother in James 4.2, because you do not ask.

God's promises, it appears, are breakable, not because God breaks them, but because we do.

I shudder to think how many of God's promises, God's blessings, God's riches lie stashed away somewhere, tucked into the pages of my Bible like a forgotten check in an old book, stuffed in some jumbled bottom-drawer of my brain, or tacked to my soul's bulletin board between a faded list of New Year's Resolutions and a menu of church activities.

James also admonishes us that we must ask in faith, never doubting.

I wonder if my low faith-balance results from the dormancy fee created by my own slumbering faith. A spiritual audit might indicate that my prayers suffer from low credit because I zeroed out an open line of promise that I could have presented before the throne of grace.

If any of you is lacking in wisdom (or just about anything else, I imagine), ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given to you.

Whatever problem you face, whatever need you confront, whatever demand you encounter, remember: You do not do so without resources. Prayer bankruptcy never occurs due to a low bank balance; checks written on Christ's account never come back marked "insufficient funds." Don't break God's promises; ask.



For more information, see the Investopedia article, "Breakage."