The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for May 31, 2024

“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27).

Politics has an important place in our constitutional republic, and the rule of law is essential as we work toward a “more perfect union,” but it’s not peaceful. The Trump trial and other news may well upset you. Certainly there are troubles from the world in your personal life, finances, health, relationships. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? asked the psalmist (42:11). The genius of the First Amendment is the acknowledgment that we Americans have two sovereigns; the government is one but not the only sovereign of our lives. Our other sovereign is freedom of conscience to worship God as we will. With all the rancor and partisanship in our land, only our Lord can lead us to say, “It is well with my soul.”

If your church uses the standard lectionary, Sunday’s readings will be about the Sabbath. “The Sabbath was made for man,” says Jesus (Mark 3:27), meaning that times away from the world and meditation upon Jesus restore us. “Return, o my soul, to your rest; for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. For you have delivered my soul from death” (Psalm 116:7-8). “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength” (Isaiah 40:31). “He said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves” (Mark 6:31-32). “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). “You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you” (Isaiah 26:3).

But we must go back to the world, and we should. That’s the second great commandment, to love our neighbor (Matthew 22:39). But we are different after Sabbath times. We go back refreshed and ready to serve.

The Meyer Minute for May 28, 2024

Should the truth of Memorial Day ever leave our daily attention? Doesn’t the work of “a more perfect union” remain our duty today?

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far about our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Meyer Minute for May 23, 2024

Memorial Day is an important part of what Benjamin Franklin called America’s “Publick Religion,” today we say, “Civil Religion.” “This ‘Publick Religion’ taught a creed of honesty, diligence, devotion, public spiritedness, patriotism, obedience, love of God, neighbor, and self, and other ethical commonplaces taught by various religious traditions at the time of the founding. Its icons were the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the bells of liberty, and the Constitution. Its clergy were public-spirited ministers and religiously devout politicians.” (John Witte)

America’s Civil Religion is not as compatible with biblical Christianity as it once was, making it an even greater opportunity for Christian witness. Our church used to have a short service every Memorial Day at the church cemetery. It gave us a Christian lens to view the sacrifice of those who died in the service of our country. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,” Jesus said (John 15:13). For whatever reason, we no longer have that service. Many churches do not worship on Thanksgiving or New Year’s, and don’t mark civil observances with Sunday prayers. Are we letting our light shine?

In 1630 John Winthrop preached, “We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill.” Centuries later Ronald Reagan said in his farewell address, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life… In my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.” Our Lord Jesus says, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

In his first inaugural, Abraham Lincoln said, “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” May the Word of God sanctify your Memorial Day and every civic observance.

The Meyer Minute for May 16, 2024

Permit me to venture this thought: Without awareness of what’s going on in the lives of people outside your every Sunday come to church folks, your congregation will slowly decline.

Close to home research from George Barna: “Only 6% of Christians have a biblical worldview.” That is being passed onto children. “Five beliefs central to the Christian faith are being widely rejected by children in the 8-to-12 age range.” 1. “The Bible: “America’s children are receiving an inadequate introduction to the Bible.” 2. Absolute Truth: “While a robust 97% of 8-to-12-year-olds believe that there is an identifiable difference between right and wrong, a paltry one out of five (21%) believes that absolute moral truth exists.” 3: Means to Salvation. “One out of every three preteens (36%) believes that the means to eternal salvation is by confessing their sins and asking Jesus Christ to save them from the consequences of their sin. That is the same proportion as found among adults (35%). 4. Life Purpose: “Only one-quarter of preteens (27%) identified knowing, loving, and serving God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength as their chief purpose in life.” 5. Success: “Only one out of six (17%) consider the most accurate definition of life success to be consistent obedience to God.”

Barna: “Children are intellectual and spiritual sponges in their preteen years. They are desperately trying to make sense of the world, their identity, their purpose, and how to live a meaningful and satisfying life. Parents, in particular, have a duty to focus on and invest in the development of their child’s worldview, which is simply their decision-making filter for life. If parents do not fill that vacuum, other sources—such as the media, the schools, and even the child’s peers—will influence that worldview construction.” (Culture Research Center, Arizona Christian University)

I’ll bet you the family farm that I can find young parents in our congregation who don’t have a Christian worldview. Sense of urgency, anyone?

he Meyer Minute for May 13, 2024

Our town of Collinsville has a fine Main Street, filled with restaurants and businesses. One business specializing in quilts has the clever name, “O’ Sew Personal.” That name reminds me of one of the sweetest stories about mothers in the Bible.

A man named Elkanah had two wives. (Some men did that back in the days of the Old Testament. In our New Testament times, it’s only one man and one woman. One man, one woman symbolizes the union of Christ with His bride the Church). Wife Peninnah teased and mocked wife Hannah for not having children. A pious woman, Hannah took her heartbreak to the Lord in prayer. Rev. Ken Klaus of The Lutheran Hour used to say that when you pray, sometimes the Lord’s answer is “yes.” Other times the Lord says, “no, but I’ll give you something better.” Well, the Lord did give Hannah a child, Samuel. In profound gratitude to God, Hannah literally gave Samuel back to the Lord. When Samuel had been weaned, Elkanah and Hannah took him to live with the priest Eli in Shiloh. Now, here’s the sweet verse. “Samuel was ministering before the Lord, a boy clothed with a linen ephod. And his mother used to make for him a little robe and take it to him each year when she went up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.” (1 Samuel 2:18-19). O’ Sew Personal!

There may be some philosophizing and theologizing about motherhood, but I suspect most people observed Mother’s Day by thinking of the little, personal things that mom did for us. Sewing. Cooking. Disciplining. Worrying. Loving. And for many of us, leading us to Jesus and His Church. The first great commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Hannah knew that. Making a little robe for her son was honoring God’s second great commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18; see also Matthew 22:34-40). If you think of our relationship with God as vertical, the little, often unnoticed things we do for family and others, is the horizontal. Both are true worship of God. O’ Sew Personal!

The Meyer Minute for May 9, 2024

“American religious belief and practice have been overtaken by a spiritual ennui and drift” (Brent Orrel, The Bulwark). Fancy word, “ennui.” It means, “a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction: boredom” (Merriam Webster Online). That describes the disheartened spirit of many congregations, just going through the motions.

Sure, there are cultural explanations, but I believe we pastors could do more. Not only talk about resurrection, we should speak much more about Christ’s Ascension and what it means for us in the challenges of everyday living. In Romans 6:1-11, Paul says Christ was raised, that’s history, and we will one day be raised, obviously that’s the future. What’s now? “We too might walk in newness of life.” That’s about you and me; but where is Christ right now? He is ascended, exalted, Lord over all, leading us by His Spirit (see Romans 8:9-17).

N.T. Wright: The Ascension is “a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer is that the church expands to fill the vacuum.” It would be revealing to study church publications. How much do they promote what the church is doing versus talking about Jesus? Wright: “Only when we grasp firmly that the church is not Jesus and Jesus is not the church—when we grasp, in other words, the truth of the ascension, that the one who is indeed present with us by the Spirit is also the Lord who is strangely absent, strangely other, strangely different from us and over against us…only then are we rescued from both hollow triumphalism and shallow despair” (Surprised by Hope, 109. 112-113).

Leonard Pitts, Jr.: “Small wonder the church is shrinking. And yet, even when they feel let down by the church, seekers don’t stop seeking. Note that Gallup also reports that…as many as 87% of us still profess belief in God. That’s a minor miracle. You might even call it good news. And it speaks to the challenge – and opportunity – facing every preacher watching a congregation dwindle…. Yes, the church is shrinking. But they know God is not.” (The Miami Herald, in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 7, 2021, A11).

Today is Ascension Day. How is your church observing it? And not just today, pastors, please preach Ascension throughout the year!

The Meyer Minute for May 6, 2024

“Is America a Christian country?” That’s the title of a new Bible class series I’m leading at our church. It is NOT about contemporary politics, but about the history of church-state relationships in our country.

God’s people in the Bible lived under various forms of government, theocracy, anarchy, monarchies, and dictatorships, but not under democracy or a republic. In England, Anglicanism was the established state religion. “English ecclesiastical law formally required use of the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible and of the liturgies, rites, prayers, and lectionaries of the Book of Common Prayer. It demanded subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith and the swearing of loyalty oaths to the Church, Crown, and Commonwealth of England. When such ecclesiastical laws were rigorously applied…they led to all manner of state controls of the internal affairs of the established church, and all manner of state repression and coercion of religious dissenters.” (John Witte, Jr., Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, 51)

Given their European experience, dominant Christian groups in the thirteen colonies (Congregationalists, Quakers, Anglicans, Protestants), gave legal preference to Christianity, aka Protestantism. “In eighteenth-century America, government patronized religion in a variety of ways. Officials donated land and personalty (moveable property) for the building of churches, religious schools, and charities. They collected taxes and tithes to support ministers and missionaries. They exempted church property from taxation. They incorporated religious bodies. They outlawed blasphemy and sacrilege, unnecessary labor on the Sabbath and on religious holidays. They administered religious test oaths.” (Witte, 53)

You might think that’s appealing, but here’s another quotation, this from the 1641 charter of Massachusetts. ‘If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death.” What it meant to ‘have any other god’ was spelled out by another law that warranted the death penalty for anyone who cursed or blasphemed ‘the name of God, the Father, Son or Holy Ghost.’” North Carolina excluded Jews and Catholics from holding office.

Spoiler alert: The Constitution of the United States (1787) did not establish a “Christian” nation, although most Americans at the founding were Protestant Christians. What’s Christian in America today? You and I are, but to be effective we must know both the Scriptures and American history.

The Meyer Minute for April 18, 2024

I wasn’t in a cranky mood last week when I wrote about Jonathon Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” To review, Cell phones became smart phones in 2007. The Internet became omnipresent. 2009 came “the new age of hyper-viralized social media.” And in 2010 phone cameras made it easy to take selfies.

“The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood….” What you do at that time “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,” Mr. Haidt wrote. Suddenly children “spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families.” They withdrew from “embodied social behaviors’ essential for successful human development. It left them not noticing the world.”

Ross Douthat of the New York Times wrote about it. In his column, “Can Those on the Left Be Happy?” he cited a child development scholar, Candice Odgers, who is critical of Haidt’s book. Douthat: “The tone of the review suggested that kids really ought to be a bit depressed… And for an answer to this unhappiness, with neither Providence nor scientific socialism available, Odgers turned to the therapeutic process, lamenting the dearth of school psychologists to help kids process ‘their symptoms and mental-health struggles.’” Good psychologists can help, but is that the best our secular culture can offer? Seems so.

Peggy Noonan thinks Haight’s book might galvanize action on something we all know is a problem (Wall Street Journal, April 6-7, A13). Might it galvanize congregations to action?  Parents to model faith at home? Douthat: “This seems like where a good portion of the American left finds itself today: comforted by neither God nor history, and hoping vaguely that therapy can take their place” (New York Times, April 7; Sunday Opinion, 2). “One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts” (Psalm 145:4). Do we care enough to act?

The Meyer Minute for April 15, 2024

I’ve asked this question several times in sermons: “If I would call on you, could you recite the Ten Commandments?” I didn’t do it, but you could see the fear. One woman at the door said, “I got to the Seventh Commandment.” Was she above average?

Almost every day in Lutheran grade school, we stood at our desk and recited, Bible passages, catechism, and sometimes hymn verses. I assume that’s still the practice. Memory work is a biblical command. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children…” (Deuteronomy 6:4-7).

Reality check: After grade school, I forgot much I had memorized, and Seminary didn’t resurrect much memory. What resurrected old passages for me, and what got me to memorize new passages and hymns, was the work of being a parish pastor. Hospital visits, nursing home visits, leading devotions, teaching classes, preaching… Those aren’t times for opening a book and reading at people. Like a medical doctor, a spiritual doctor should look you in the eye and speak from his head and heart.

It’s not surprising we forgot what we memorized in youth. After all, we went on to live life. But our forgetting weakens personal faith and the vitality of the church. Without a memory soaking in Scripture, you have at best general truths, not the strongest defense against temptation. “Did God actually say?” (Genesis 3:1). Satan cast doubt about words from God. So also, he quoted Scripture when he tempted Jesus, “It is written…” (Luke 4:10-11). Why wouldn’t that be his strategy today, less to attack general church truths and more to undermine the biblical bases of faith?

Memorized passages are “the sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17). I wonder, how can the church make memorization a life-long spiritual habit? “Grant that we may so hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them that, by patience and comfort of Your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen” (Collect for Grace).

The Meyer Minute for April 11, 2024

This worries me. Peggy Noonan’s weekly column featured a new book by Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Picture kids on phones. Adults too.

Background: Cell phones became smart phones in 2007. The Internet became omnipresent. 2009 came “the new age of hyper-viralized social media.” And in 2010 phone cameras made it easy to take selfies. “By 2016 one survey showed 79% of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28% of children 8 to 12. Soon teens were reporting they spent an average of almost seven hours a day on screens. ‘One out of every four teens said that they were online ‘almost constantly,’ Mr. Haidt writes.”

Here's the burden on my heart, and I hope yours too. “The tidal wave came to these children during puberty, when the human brain is experiencing its greatest reconfiguring since early childhood. In puberty, as brain researchers say, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together.’ What you do at that time ‘will cause lasting structural changes in the brain,’ Mr. Haidt writes. Suddenly children ‘spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching or even making eye contact with their friends and families.’ They withdrew from ‘embodied social behaviors’ essential for successful human development. It left them not noticing the world.”

“Signs of a mental-health crisis quickly emerged. Rates of mental illness among the young went up dramatically in many Western countries between 2010 and 2015. Between 2010 and 2024 major depression among teens went up 145% among girls, 161% among boys. There was a rise in disorders related to anxiety as well.”

Mr. Haidt quotes a 14-year-old girl. “I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily.” (Wall Street Journal, April 6-7; A13)

Much more to say but for now, what’s the church doing?