The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for January 28, 2022

“Do not let God speak to us” (Exodus 20:19). That’s strange. With signs and wonders God had rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, led them through the Red Sea on dry ground, and now their Savior says, “I brought you out,” here’s how I want you to live, the Ten Commandments.  Their response, “Do not let God speak to us”? In worship Sunday, you may use the refrain, “Lord, have mercy.” Change that liturgical response to “Do not let God speak to us”? 

Let’s look more closely. “Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightening and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:18-19). It says, “all the people saw.” Of course, they saw “the flashes of lightning” and “the mountain smoking,” but they “saw the thunder” and saw “the sound of the trumpet”? The Israelites heard words but much more. One scholar explains that the Hebrew word for “word,” dabar, does have intellectual content; you hear and think. The word is also “filled with power which can be manifested in the most diverse energies. This power is felt….” (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, IV, 92). They had a “surround sound” experience, a literal mind, body, and soul experience that scared them to death. No wonder they said, “Do not let God speak to us.”  

Going to church, I’ve never had the Israelites’ experience. The prophets did. “Woe is me! For I am lost,” was surround sound terror (Isaiah 6:5). Moses did. “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). God comes to His people in loving kindness, mercifully. The most basic meaning of the Hebrew word dabar is “back” or “background.” Behind the words you’ll hear Sunday is the unfathomable power of the Creator of the universe, but He reveals Himself to us as “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made” (Psalm 33:6) but He comes to you not in earthquake or wind of fire but with a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). In the peace of Christ, “Lord, have mercy upon us.” 

The Meyer Minute for January 27, 2022

When Justice Breyer’s retirement was announced yesterday, Diane and I knew the national media would be in a feeding frenzy for every tidbit of news about the retirement and President Biden’s nomination for the seat. Here we go again, the national media modelling obsession about worldly things.   

Malcolm Muggeridge: “The world’s way of responding to intimations of decay is to engage equally in idiot hopes and idiot despair. On the one hand, some new policy or discovery is confidently expected to put everything to rights: a new fuel, a new drug, detente, world government. On the other, some disaster is as confidently expected to prove our undoing. Capitalism will break down. Fuel will run out. Plutonium will lay us low. Atomic waste will kill us off.” We Christians think, “How true Mr. Muggeridge is,” but in the decline of Christianity in America, in the struggles of our congregations and denominations, don’t we often mimic the world, coming up with some program of hope or some prognosis of decline and despair?  

The word “Christendom” means the blending of Christian faith with governmental power. You saw it in the Middle Ages, the pope using political power. You saw it in our history when Americans blended faith and government, confusing the kingdom of God with the kingdom of this world. According to Mary Beard, a prolific writer on Greek and Roman society, Christendom replaced the Roman Empire. Maybe she got that from Mr. Muggeridge. “It was in the breakdown of Rome that Christendom was born. Now in the breakdown of Christendom, there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew (avoid, abstain from) the fantasy of a disintegrating world and seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal, the reality of Christ.” 

“Can this really be what life is about as the media insist? This interminable soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, whose old, discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not.” The world’s news is important to us because the futility of the world’s ways should drive us to Jesus Christ. “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me” (John 5:39-40; Muggeridge, The End of Christianity, in For All the Saints, III, 323). 

The Meyer Minute for January 26, 2022

“We know precious little about God,” said Professor Francis Rossow, “but the little we know is precious.” That precious little is that the mysterious God speaks to us in Christ and His Word. This revelation shapes our thinking and gives us certainty, most needed in our uncertain times. Below is a prayer from the second century A.D. Although it comes from a work of fiction, the prayer does represent Greek and Roman religion, and the prayer’s uncertainty about the deity contrasts with the certainty you and I have from the Word of Christ. 

“O queen of heaven—whether you are bountiful Ceres, the primal mother of crops, who in joy at the recovery of your daughter took away from men their primeval animal fodder of acorns and showed them gentler nourishment, and now dwell in the land of Eleusis; or heavenly Venus, who at the first foundation of the universe united the diversity of the sexes by creating Love and propagated the human race through ever-recurring progeny, and now are worshipped in the island sanctuary of Paphos; or Phoebus’ sister, who brought forth populous multitudes by relieving the delivery of offspring with your soothing remedies, and now are venerated at the illustrious shrine of Ephesus; or dreaded Proserpina of the nocturnal howls, who in triple form repress the attacks of ghosts and keep the gates to earth closed fast, roam through widely scattered groves and are propitiated by diverse rites—you who illumine every city with your womanly light, nourish the joyous sees with your moist fires, and dispense beams of fluctuating radiance according to the convolutions of the Sun—by whatever name, with whatever rite, in whatever image it is meet to invoke you: defend me now in the uttermost extremes of tribulation, strengthen my fallen fortunes, grant me rest and peace from the cruel mischances I have endured. Let this be enough toil, enough danger…. But if some divine power that I have offended is harassing me with inexorable savagery, at least let me die, if I may not live.” (Lucius Apuleius, Metamorphoses, XI, 2; tr. J. Arthur Hanson) 

“On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.” (Lutheran Service Book, 575) 

The Meyer Minute for January 25, 2022

Hear our prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from our petition. Nations are preparing for war. Tens of thousands are armed. The machines and technology of destruction are ready. Who can withstand the destruction that may be imminent? You, O God, who are enthroned of old above the highest of heavens, have decreed that the governments of this earth are for the protection of the people You have made, that every nation is to promote good and hinder and punish evil. Let every citizen know what You require, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with You. Guide our leaders in ways You only know and only You can accomplish so that wars and rumors of war lessen. As we watch this present exercise of worldly will and might, amidst suspicions and fears, accomplish Your will for the physical care of all people, Your righteous people and those who do not yet honor You. We earnestly pray that our nation, all our people and our leaders, will work so that Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, your Name be hallowed and we may live peaceful lives in which Your kingdom comes.

We pray for inner calm to every humble person who knows that Your kingdom is not of this world, that You have given and continue to give Your love to us for our eternal life. Your still, small voice does not come into our hearts through worldly power and might, but by the words of Your Son whose Spirit lives in our hearts. We pray Your Spirit will speak the eternal to everyone fearful of the present. To people whose lives may be taken, to those whose homes and livelihoods may be destroyed, to spouses and families of those in danger for the protection of fellow citizens, and to those of us who solider by prayer and encouragement, set our hearts on Your love for us, on the promise we will know Your love in the coming life of heaven, experiencing Your love in greater ways than we know Your love now in this life. Amidst distress, give us assurance. In things temporal, sustain us with confidence in the eternal. You have revealed Your love so that we might have peace. “In God the Lord, whose word I praise, in God I trust and will not be afraid.” Amen.

The Meyer Minute for January 24, 2022

The temperature was cold Friday morning, 6 degrees, so I decided to warm up by frying some eggs. Rattling around looking for a frying pan, Diane called from the other room, “What are you doing?” “Looking for a frying pan, but I just found it.” A few minutes later she heard new noise. “What are you doing?” “Looking for a spatula. Oh, here it is.” She came into the kitchen, looked at the counter, picked up a little bowl, and gave me a questioning look. “That’s to melt the butter for my toast.” Here’s her punch line. “I know more about your workbench than you know about the kitchen.” True. “She opens her mouth with wisdom” (Proverbs 31:26)

“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way. They are heirs with you of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7). “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Isn’t it revealing that the Bible often speaks of Christ and the Church as bride and groom? “This mystery is profound” (Ephesians 5:32). 

After my most satisfying eggs, Diane started cleaning up the kitchen. She wasn’t going to trust it to me. “You don’t put the frying pan in the dishwasher?” I asked. “Not one with a coating.” Then I put that little bowl, the melted butter bowl, in the dishwasher. “Not that way,” she said, and she put it in properly. “She looks well to the ways of her household.” “An excellent wife who can find?” (Proverbs 31:27, 10). Well, I can find her. All I have to do is start bumbling around in the kitchen.

The Meyer Minute for January 21, 2022

Drive to church this weekend, park the car, walk into a building used an hour or so for worship, hear music that’s been rehearsed, Scriptures and sermons…is it like going to the local university or museum for a lecture? We easily assume our church routine is like that of the first Christians. No, not at all. 

“The first believers met together in the private homes of individuals…. The gathering of Christian believers in private homes (or homes renovated for the purpose of Christian gatherings) continued to be the norm until the early decades of the fourth century when Constantine began erecting the first Christian Basilicas. For almost three hundred years the believers met in homes, not in synagogues or edifices constructed for the sole purpose of religious assembly.” (Bradley Blue, “Acts and the House Church,” in The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, II, 120-121)   

Can you imagine what that was like? I can’t, a small group of believers meeting in my home.  Not a small group of our congregation that meets in my home; no, the congregation is in my home. And some others come too. That solitary Christian whose husband and children don’t believe. That slave, one of those people respectable folks don’t bother with. In the first century they would have come to your house to join in fellowship, worship, and the Christian meal. I am so used to my own experience of life and church, it’s hard to imagine what it was like for the first followers of Jesus.  

We institutional church people have a habit of going to the Scriptures to get guidance for Christian living and church programs. Far better is Bible study that pulls us up short, that shows how cocooned our American experience of church is. We’ve institutionalized following Jesus. Turn my focus, turn our congregation’s focus just a few degrees off Jesus and toward the life and programs of the church, and we can end up miles away from heart and soul devotion to Him. It’s subtle, something the old wily foe knows how to do.  

The Meyer Minute for January 18, 2022

The gray, cold days of January… You’d like to go south for sunshine and warmer temperatures. Snow and shivers, layers of clothes and slosh… we hope for spring. 

What is Christian hope? If I were the pastor of a congregation, I’d have that question in the back of my mind. Making hospital or nursing home visits, Bible classes and Sunday School, meetings…I’d pull that question out and slip it into the conversation. “What’s your hope?” I suspect the answers would be all over the place. 

These wintry days, I’m plugging away on the 1 Peter commentary. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3). What, then, is our hope? It is not, at least in 1 Peter, the resurrection. 1 Peter never talks about the resurrection of our bodies on the Last Day. Just as interesting, he only mentions the resurrection of Jesus 3 times. Much more, ten times by my count, he stresses the time when Christ will be revealed in glory. Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile,” and Peter would agree, but even Paul’s great resurrection chapter, 1 Corinthians 15, sets the resurrection in the context of the Last Day. “Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (15:23). 

Nothing wrong with our little hopes. See them as ripples of our central hope, seeing Christ in glory. Now He is unseen, known by faith, but “when he appears, we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Near the southwest corner of our home, a place protected from cold January blasts, where the winter sun sometimes shines, a few spring bulbs have already popped up. “Hope in…” (Psalm 42:11). How do you finish the sentence? 

The Meyer Minute for January 17, 2022

Some quotations for this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. From columnist David Brooks: “A long-term loss of solidarity, a long-term rise in estrangement and hostility. This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down. What the hell is going on? We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics…. Some of our poisons must be sociological – the fraying of the social fabric…. And some of the poisons must be cultural…. But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Over the past several years and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more anti-social and self-destructive ways.”  

“Nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Over 2000 years ago, the Roman Republic teetering with problems like America's today, a politician named Marius and his supporters hastened the end of the Republic. “Marius’s tolerance of the violence and intimidation his allies wielded served his immediate interests, but he lacked the ability to control where events would go…. Marius’s inclination to save the Republic from the electoral violence his allies had perpetrated was not a service to Rome that all could agree was necessary. This showed that the politics of consensus was dying. And Marius, isolated and ignored, could only sit in his beautiful house near the Forum and watch it fade away.” (“Mortal Republic,” 118)     

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.” (Robert F. Kennedy, the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968) 

“Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:14-15). 

“No creature is hidden from his (God’s) sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13). 

The Meyer Minute for January 14, 2022

I find that Scriptures most grow my faith when I struggle with an unspoken problem in the Bible story. For example, the Gospel lesson many of us will hear this Sunday recounts Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana, John 2:1-11. The evangelist tells us the point of the story. “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.” The problem to me is that the whole story is past tense. The disciples believed in their time; do we in our time? 

Old theologians said saving faith has three parts: knowledge, assent, and confidence. In our time we can know the story of wedding at Cana and we can agree about believing in Jesus, but it’s a far different thing to have confidence in Jesus when our own “wine” is running out, when health, bills, relationships, you name it, fill our thoughts. “Why, we often ask in our prayers, hast Thou made it so difficult to find Thee? Why must we encounter so much anguish and travail before we can catch a glance of Thy presence?” (Abraham Heschel, “God in Search of Man,” 155). “Please, sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us?” (Judges 6:13). “Lord, where is your steadfast love of old?” (Psalm 89:49). 

When Mary told Jesus that the wine had run out, He answered cryptically, “My hour has not yet come.” I doubt Mary knew what Jesus was really saying at the time, but in our time we know. Jesus’ “hour” was His death and exaltation. “When Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1; see also John 7:30, 12:23, and 17:1 about Jesus’ “hour”). Where’s our sign? The crucifix on the wall of your home. Where’s our hope when we’re running out of “wine”? The marriage feast that will have no end.   

The Meyer Minute for January 13, 2022

I’m still unpacking from our move back to Collinsville. Yesterday I shelved some old theological journals from my great-uncle, Rev. Henry Meyer, pastor at St. John’s Lutheran Church and School in Country Club Hills, Illinois, from 1929 to 1971.  We used to call it “Coopers Grove.” Stuck in an old magazine was St. John’s financial report for the year 1963. 

The church paid Cook’s Office Equipment $1.53 for staples and $21.29 for ink, stencils, and correction fluid. Bettenhausen Hardware got $25.75 for repairing a water leak at the school. Fred Nietfeldt got $13.48 for paint for the picnic building. Melvin Dehning got $7.07 to buy baseballs for the school. There’s more, but two things about this old report jump out. First, such changes in our lifetimes! And yesterday the news reported inflation is up 7% from last year. Second, something more concerning. 

How we fund our congregations and schools has changed. In 1963 the general fund took in, round numbers, $22,500. Personnel expenses were about $16,000. Utilities: $1800. But here’s what concerns me. Of that general fund income, $22,500, almost $20,000 came from Sunday morning envelopes. Picnic receipts were almost $1000. Tuition: $600. Most congregations today can’t depend only on Sunday morning offerings. Historically our parochial schools didn’t charge tuition. The $600 tuition receipt was probably a non-member. Today the income from picnics, sausage suppers, rentals, bequests, etc. is a bigger source of income than back in 1963. If you face up to declining church membership and attendance today, look at the average age of churchgoers, analyze the percentage of donors providing the biggest percentage of gifts, and look at our increased reliance on earned income, like tuition, you should be concerned about the financial well-being of the institutional church after you and I have gone to heaven. 

“Oh, you say, ‘God will provide?’” God does. He doesn’t always print money, but God always gives insight, just as He gave insight to Joseph about the economic future of Egypt. “There will come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt, but after them there will arise seven years of famine… Gather all the food of these good years that are coming and store up grain… That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine” (Genesis 41:14-36). What's the moral of this Minute?