The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for July 26, 2012

Here’s hoping that you’ll suit up and participate in the Olympic spirit!  We’re going to watch amazing athletes.  Not a one got to the Olympics by being unfocused and undisciplined.  Dreams of gold can’t be realized without incredibly long hard days and years of focused training.

 

David Francis had that kind of spirit.  He wasn’t a world class athlete, just a college baseball player in the late 1860’s.  But when David Francis put on his business suit, his focus and discipline rivaled any Olympian. Senator Harry Hawes said, Francis “was a big man who had big conceptions…and did big things.”

 

More than anyone else, David Francis was responsible for the first Olympics held in the western hemisphere.  They were held in St. Louis in 1904 on the new campus of Washington University, just a few blocks north of Concordia Seminary.  The stadium and gymnasium for those games are still in use, named after David Francis.  Said Senator Hawes, “He invited the nation and the nation came; he invited the world and the world came.”

 

Do you ever get weary of people who talk about their vision?  I’m indebted…and so are you…to people who work long and hard to realize their vision for the good of us all.  That’s an Olympic spirit we can all put on.  “Faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26).

 

Next week Diane and I are going to take some time off.  No Minute.  We do thank you for reading these little offerings!

 

The Meyer Minute for July 25, 2012

“Deliver us from evil.”  That’s a sound bite prayer, perfectly suited for these days.  Hideous crimes…ever-present fear of terrorism…accidents and illness…brutal summer heat…and for many people simply a weariness of the rigors of life.  “From evil, Lord, deliver us, the times and days are perilous.”

“Deliver us from evil.”  This sound bite is prayed to a specific God.  It’s not like people shouting out, “Oh my God!” when something terrible happens.  “Deliver us from evil” is not shouted in shock to some generic God but prayed by believing children to “Our Father who art in heaven.” …to the Father who made us and assures us of His love in the Bible. …to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ...to the Father in heaven, meaning He’s able to do eternally more than any earthly person…to “our” Father, meaning that no one frightened by what might happen or weary of the ordeal is alone; we children of the Father are together in prayer.

How He answers this prayer remains to be seen but it will be seen.  Remember, it’s the “Lord’s” prayer, the resurrected Lord.  Evil slowed Him down but didn’t defeat Him. One day we will be delivered.  Isaiah had prophesied that a Savior would come who would “know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.” (Isaiah 50:4)  Jesus comes today and gives us that word, “Deliver us from evil.”

 

 

The Meyer Minute for July 24, 2012

She slips off every morning to do it.  Diane and I usually sit together to read the papers over coffee, but sooner or later she slips away to indulge her habit. In the evening she sneaks off to do it again.  At first a few hits made her feel good, but the habit is insatiable.  A few hits are no longer enough; she wants more and more every day. My wife is a blogger.

A blog being an online diary of sorts about anything, Diane’s slogan is “Much Ado about Everything.”  When she first became addicted, she wrote about the Iraqi soccer team and all sorts of people, Iraqis included, visited her blog.  More and more hits feed her blogging habit and, I must confess, I now read her too.

Sinful human nature likes to complain, and a constantly heard complaint is the bias of traditional media.  The Spirit of Christ offers future heavenly blessings but also motivates us to contribute here and now to society, not complain.  Are most of us sitting in our easy chairs complaining about media…or moving our mouse to get informed?

So Diane goes off to her blog, Respublica, and comes back to tell me about the hits. I’m learning things not on TV.  What a great time to be involved citizens!  “Faith without works is dead.”  (James 2:26)

 

 

 

 

The Meyer Minute for July 23, 2012

The massacre in Aurora raises the perennial question, why did God let this happen?  The bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 9-11, the Holocaust and other genocides, Jerry Sandusky and other child predators…  Why does God let these evils happen?

Some people have adopted the principle of living by sight, and so for them God may well not exist and the claims of Christianity about Jesus are obviously not true.  After all, if Jesus is the world’s Savior, things should be better now than they were 2000 years ago.  Other people also live by sight but only to a point. What these people experience in the here-and-now world is interpreted according to some kind of faith, for Christians that is trust in the promises of God in the Bible.  Paul lays out this basic distinction in 2 Corinthians 5:7, “We walk by faith and not by sight.”  Still, the question remains for Christians, why does God let evil happen?  The answer cannot be known on this side of eternity.  Even if we did know the “why,” it wouldn’t ease the loss, the grief, and the shattered and scarred lives of those who remain.  Some people have concluded that the question is not “why” but “how,” how do I handle this?  How does a person of faith reconcile what he/she sees with the good promises of God?

The truth is in the middle, not only in what we see and not only in blind faith in words on Bible pages.  The answer in the middle takes both into account, takes them into account seriously, and the truth in the middle begins to resolves the tension between faith and sight.  In the middle is Jesus.  The terrible things of life are “now”; the fulfillment of the promises is “not yet.”  They come together for us now in the person of Jesus, who Himself was a victim of evil but through His suffering gives a promise of deliverance that awaits fulfillment.  “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.  If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.  But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.  For as In Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”  (1 Corinthians 15:19-22)

I’m told that African-American preachers are fond of saying, “God sits high but looks low.”  Psalm 113:4-7, “Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?  He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap.”  Whatever the “why” of evil things, the answer to “how,” how to reconcile sight with the promises of God is the One who sits high but comes low to deliver us, Jesus Christ.

 

 

The Meyer Minute for July 20, 2012

“We pray for the victims and their families” is routinely heard in the media after some terrible event, and such sentiments about prayer are being heard after the horrible massacre last night in Colorado.  It’s interesting that many in media who go to great lengths to strip Christian references out of their reporting allow non-descript references to prayer. 

One thing I have not heard is encouragement to pray for ourselves after such a terrible event.  The common talk is why such a horrendous crime happened, what it says about our society, and analyses of people and the outward event from every imaginable perspective. Doesn’t this also invite introspection?  A thread through much liberal thought is that people are basically good and that given the right things in life people will show goodness.  When someone veers from goodness, there must be some cause that a better society could fix.  If that’s a person’s view, then what’s left?  Prayers for those devastated by the deviation from goodness but no introspection that each of us might not be as good as we like to imagine.  However, a person immersed in the Bible finds much more to pray about than just the victims.  Yes, to be sure, prayers for those families going through unbelievable grief; I don’t mean to minimize that.  A person of the Bible also prays for himself, for herself, that living in a culture that doesn’t take sin seriously for what it is, each individual’s rebellion against our Creator and Judge, a culture that imagines we can improve society without grace from above… Living in this setting we pray God’s Spirit to steel us to the reality of sin and evil and evil people.  “I pass through trials all the way, with sin and ills contending; in patience I must bear each day the cross of God’s own sending.  When in adversity I know not where to flee, When storms of woe my soul dismay, I pass through trials all the way.”  (Lutheran Service Book, 716, 2)

“Deliver us from evil.”  Martin Luther explains that last petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “We pray in this petition, in summary, that our Father in heaven would rescue us from every evil of body and soul, possessions and reputation, and finally, when our last hour comes, give us a blessed end, and graciously take us from this valley of sorrow to Himself in heaven.” (Small Catechism)  Sitting in front of a TV or monitor to get analysis of today’s terrible news is woefully inadequate compared to going into your prayer closet for a long session, no commercial interruption.

 

 

The Meyer Minute for July 19, 2012

Hail Adonis!  If you lived 2000 years ago in the Roman Empire, chances are good that today, July 19^th you’d be celebrating the Festival of Adonis.

 

Adonis, according to mythology, was a beautiful youth who loved and was loved by the goddess Aphrodite.  Adonis must have been a real eye-catcher because he was also loved by Persephone, the goddess of the underworld.  To end the goddesses’ squabble, Zeus decreed that Adonis spend part of the year in the underworld with Persephone and the rest with Aphrodite in the realm of the living.  The Festival of Adonis was the yearly celebration of the marriage of Adonis and Aphrodite, a celebration that always turned to sadness because Adonis had to return each year to Persephone and the realm of the dead.

 

How different is the One who says, “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last.  I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades” (Revelation 1:17-18).

 

Hail, Adonis? You’re not missing anything there, but you are if you don’t hail the One is the resurrection and the life (John 11:25).

 

 

The Meyer Minute for July 18, 2012

My cousin sent me the “Older than Dirt Quiz.”  How many of the following 25 can you remember?

 

“Blackjack chewing gum

Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water

Candy cigarettes

Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles

Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes

Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers

Party lines

Newsreels before the movie

P.F. Flyers

Butch wax

Telephone numbers with a word prefix

Peashooters

Howdy Doody

45 RPM records

S&H Green Stamps

Hi-fi’s

Metal ice trays with lever

Mimeograph paper

Blue flashbulb

Packards

Roller skate keys

Cork popguns

Drive-ins

Studebakers

Wash tub wringers

 

If you remember 0-5, you’re still young.

 

If you remembered 6-10, you’re getting older.

 

If you remembered 11-15, don’t tell your age.

 

If you remembered 16-25, you’re older than dirt.”

 

I’d like to give credit to the person who came up with this quiz, but I don’t know who’s responsible.  Actually, I’d like to blame that person.  I remember far too many of those things.

 

“Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12).

 

 

The Meyer Minute for July 17, 2012

Here’s a word seldom heard in our day and age, obedience.  A few weeks ago I was browsing in the gift shop of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and came upon a book by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, “Priests for the Third Millennium.”  Being in the seminary business, I bought the book to get his take on what kind of clergy the church needs in this 21^st century.  Besides, he grew up in St. Louis, is fondly remembered, and wore a Cardinal’s baseball cap long before the Pope gave him his other cardinal hat.

Cardinal Dolan wrote, “It is precisely in obedience that we are most countercultural: in a society that urges us to keep all options open, not to be tied down, always ready to move on to something more attractive, to place conditions on all pledges, to protect our own interests above all else, to move up and make more, to demand rights and resist restrictions – we pledge complete obedience to one man and one confined area of God’s vineyard.  That’s obedience.  That’s countercultural!” (77)

Bible passages about obedience are many.  Luke 2:52 reports 12-year-old Jesus “went down with them (his parents) to Nazareth and was submissive to them.”  In Gethsemane Jesus prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).  Paul writes that Jesus “being found in human form…humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:4).  In Deuteronomy 13:4 Moses told the people, “You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice.” Samuel told Saul, “To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Samuel 15:22).  Just before the ascension, Jesus gave the Great Commission saying, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20).  And there are many more.

I wonder how our culture would change if we took obedience to God more seriously.  “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)  Cardinal Dolan: “However, as much as we recognize its pivotal importance, obedience is one of the most difficult virtues to practice, because it goes against a power that makes the neutron bomb look like a Bic lighter: the stubborn, proud human will.”  (76)  

 

The Meyer Minute for July 16, 2012

A bit of a mystery here on campus, a large sweet gum tree, maybe 30 feet tall, fell over.  There were no high winds or lightning strikes that forced it down.  The trunk didn’t crack, as is usually the case when a large tree goes down.  Instead, the trunk just crumpled near its base.  When I stuck my hand into that crumpled bottom of the trunk, I could feel some rot, only some.  It seemed to be a healthy tree, filled with leaves and green gum balls on every branch.  Musing why the tree went down, Diane remarked in an off-handed way that that’s how it goes with some older people.  They are active, flourishing, seem to be well, but inside the years have taken a toll and suddenly and surprisingly they are gone. 

Who can assume unlimited earthly tomorrows?  “You so nor know what tomorrow will bring….  You ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” (James 4:14-15)  Orient every remaining day to your Creator.  “The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.  They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God.  They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green, to declare that the Lord is upright.” (Psalm 92:12-15)  And just as we have planted scores of new trees on campus to replace the old ones, play your part in raising up young people to carry on God’s work and praise when you have been summoned home.  “One generation shall commend Your works to another, and shall declare Your might acts.”  (Psalm 145:4)  The fallen tree gives poignancy to that favorite verse, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”  (Psalm 118:24)  Especially on Monday!  

 

The Meyer Minute for July 12, 2012

Hi!  I’m Drew, the newest member of Opa’s writing team.  I’m 16 months old.  My Daddy and Mommy are moving into a new house.  I like it.  It has a big back yard.  Riley and I can run and play in it.  Riley is my dog.  It has a big basement.  We like that, too.  The other day I didn’t want to leave our new house and go back to our old house.  I sat down in the front yard and threw a tantrum.  I will not go!  It was an “Occupy” moment.  Do you big people ever do that?  We will do what I want!  Daddy and Mommy said, “OK, have it your way.”  They got into the car and started to drive away.  They were letting me have my way.  I was horrified!  Their car was going down the street!  My eyes got big and popped out of my little head.  Then it stopped.  It turned around.  They came and got me.  I was so happy, so, so happy!  I was glad to let them pick me up and put me in my car seat.  I have been nice ever since.  That is my story.  I e-mailed it to Opa.  He can edit my story and send it out.

Opa here.  Thank you, Drew, for your story.  I know that you won’t remember this incident years from now but it’s now in the public record.  Years from now you can read this.  What happened is a teaching moment about how God deals with people.  In Romans 1, beginning at verse 24, the Bible tells us that God deals with all people just as your parents dealt with you.  If we big people are bound and determined to do something, God lets us do it.  Then we find out what happens when we get our way and don’t follow His will.  His purpose is to teach us that we sinners need to listen to Him and obey Him.  He knows what best is best for us His children.  He’s always coming back to us, He comes back again and again, comes back gently, comes back to us with forgiveness, and, best of all, comes back to pick us up with His everlasting arms and take us on the right way in this life and finally to our eternal home.  Drew, your story is a little glimpse of how much your parents love you and a teaching moment how much our heavenly Father loves us.  He is patient, always waiting and hoping that we’ll see that He knows best.  Great story, dear Drew!  I’m proud you’re on our writing team!