This past week was one we’ll long remember.

From a fatal D.C. Metro crash on Monday, to the deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson, this week was like a history lesson of popular culture for the past 50 years.

From the Tonight Show and Star Search to Charlie’s Angels; from the Jackson Five to Thriller, half a century of entertainment came to an end this week.

Farrah’s golden hair and perfect California teeth were imprinted upon our culture forever, one poster at a time.

We’ll miss Ed McMahon later this summer, when we won’t see him co-hosting the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon.

We knew Farrah was slowly succumbing to the cancer than took her life, and 86 year-old Ed McMahon had been in poor health for several years.

But the death of Michael Jackson has hit many people in personal and profound ways.

Seemingly forever young, with a talent and creative energy that exploded through the television or over the radio, Michael Jackson moved the music and entertainment industry in new and different directions.

Like Sinatra and Elvis before him, as the King of Pop, Michael Jackson single-handedly transformed and changed popular culture over the course of nearly forty years.

Despite never meeting him, millions of people find themselves profoundly touched by his untimely passing.

Journalists are taught to consider proximity when judging the news-worthiness of stories. Three people killed here in this town are much more newsworthy than three hundred people killed in Sudan. This is the simple, sad, truth of being a reporter.

Because of the proximity, the local story gets more coverage.

In many ways, the death of Michael Jackson is an example of this. Jackson’s music has been so close and present in the lives of so many people, that while we didn’t know him, we felt as though we did.

For many of us, Jackson’s music was part of the soundtrack of our lives. From news reports, to the tabloid headlines, we knew more about him, and were closer to him in some ways, than we are to some of our neighbors and people we see regularly.

For those of us under 50, the King of Pop was part of our lives, for much of our lives.

This is the sense of proximity that makes his passing so newsworthy and so touching. This is why the death of someone we’ve never met can affect people in strange ways.

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, had a proximity few of us completely understood.

As we remember this life, I’m reminded of another king, with an even closer proximity – a King that will not die.

Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, has a proximity that few of us completely understand.

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, lives on in his music, while the spirit of Christ lives on in the world today in the Holy Spirit.

And as Michael Jackson’s music seemed to connect us to his creative energy, the Holy Spirit connects us to the creating energy of the Lord God almighty.

Jesus brings the Lord God into proximity for each of us.

Women and men are born, and they die. As the scripture says, from dust we have come, and to dust we will return.

But through Christ, we have access to the creator of the Universe, today, tomorrow, and for all eternity. Death is not a permanent condition. The loses of celebrities, of friends, of family, of all we have, is only temporary. Through Christ, all will be resorted. Through Christ, all are gathered and returned to the heart of the Lord God – a true proximity for all eternity. Hallelujah!

Announcer Jim McKay passed away Saturday. He loves horses, and his passing on the same day as the running of the Belmont Stakes certainly is fitting.

 

When I worked in the bag room of the Golden Horseshoe Golf Course in Williamsburg, the course attracted politicians and celebrities all the time. From Vice President Dan Quayle and other politicians to musicians like Jimmy Buffett and John Denver, and everyone in between.

 

I'd taken my glasses off to wipe the sweat from my soaked face one summer afternoon (the bag room was open to the outside, and never air-conditioned), and when I put my glasses back on, there was a man standing there.

 

"You're Jim McKay," I said.

 

"You're Jim Meisner," he said in that unmistakable voice, reading my nametag.

 

All I could think about was the historic footage of McKay announcing the death of the Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Munich Olympics: "They're all gone."

 

I drove McKay and his grandson up to the driving range and we talked about racecars and horse races, and his love for both. (All the while, I'm marveling over the voice of "the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat," that I'd heard for so many years on ABC Wide World of Sports.)

 

Jim McKay was as kind and patient with a 21 year-old bag groom attendant as he was with his own grandson. He was a true gentleman, who didn't demonstrate an ounce of entitlement, in a resort environment that often led people to behave in the most rude and appalling ways imaginable.

 

Television journalism, sports, and the world can use a lot more people like Jim McKay, and we're all richer for having had him in our living rooms on Saturday afternoons for so many years.

Forty years ago, during another costly, pointless war of choice, Robert Kennedy admitted he made a mistake in supporting the war, and became one of the loudest voices of opposition.

 

"We are entitled to ask - we are required to ask - how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams?"  -- Bobby Kennedy, March 18, 1968

 

Forty years ago Friday, Kennedy was killed. His wife Ethel has endorsed Barack Obama in this year's presidential election: "Barack is so like Bobby ... With courage, caring, and charisma, Senator Obama is leading us toward a kinder, gentler world."

 

This week, Obama secured the party's nomination, picking up the torch dropped forty years ago on that dirty kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel.

Today is the "Day the Music Died."

 

Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash on this day in 1959.

 

Buddy was 22, Ritchie, 17, and Jay P. Richardson, 28. Pilot Roger Peterson was 21.

 

Rock and roll belongs to the young.

 

The night before, Feb. 2, they played at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. The Beech-Craft Bonanza crashed in the early morning hours of Feb. 3. Disoriented by the darkness and snow, Peterson evidently flew the aircraft directly into the snow-covered ground.

 

I visited the Surf Ballroom, in Clear Lake, one crisp, cold, January morning. Looking in the windows I could see the remains of the show from the night before. The stage and dance floor hadn't changed in 40 years.

 

Traveling to Clear Lake, I had to drive past the small airport in near-by Mason City. And beyond the small runway, I could see snow-covered cornfields stretching into the distance, also unchanged in 40 years. I knew that just a few miles away, perhaps not even as far as I could see, the scars from a small plane crash had long-since healed and disappeared.

 

The Surf Ballroom still has photos displayed from that final performance 49 years ago. As I stood outside, looking at the photos, the bitter wind whipped tears from my eyes. I stood where Buddy and Richie and JP stood as they crowded into the car that carried them to the airport, and that cold, cold wind still carried the notes from a song.

Mother's Day Prayers -- May 13, 2007

Invocation:

God of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, God of Eve, Elizabeth, and Mary. On this Mother's Day, we ask that you shine your face upon the mothers. We ask that you come among us as we join together to worship, to pray, and to celebrate you and your creation. We ask these things in your Son's name. Amen.

Prayers of the People:

Holy creator, we ask for the forgiveness that a mother can give. We ask for the peace, the love, and the personal attention that a mother gives.

Dear God, we pray for all who are God's people through faith in Christ, and for all of God's creation.

We pray for the Church throughout the world, that every heart may be sanctified, that all the baptized may avoid evil and walking in the light, lead holy and righteous lives.

We pray for our nation, that our heavenly Father would provide us with trustworthy leaders, and for our citizens, that we may be a people at peace with one another and a blessing to the other nations of the earth.

We pray for our military, that God will shield them from physical harm and deliver them from evil – that they may honorably represent our nation. We pray for their mothers, that they are comforted during this difficult time.

We pray for our Commonwealth, 400 years old today. May Virginia continue to lead the nation and serve as a roll model in so many ways.

We continue to pray for our fellow Virginians in the Virginia Tech community.

We pray for our city, and the children without mothers. We pray for the mothers who have lost children and grand children.

Lord God, hear us now, as we bring our concerns to you. Hear us as we pray for our families and our care-givers. We pray for our community here, that you will comfort the lonely and ease the suffering of those in pain.

Dear Lord, please search our hearts and hear our prayers, both spoken and unspoken, we give them up to you, now. . . . . Dear Lord, we ask that you please extend your comfort and blessings to those mentioned, and those who's names remain unspoken.

We pray for all mothers on this Mother's Day, that they would rejoice in their glorious vocation of self-giving love; that those without children would give thanks to God for their own mothers; and that every mother's home be a place of God's love and peace

On this spring day, we pray for the graduates and the gardeners. We rejoice over new growth and new beginnings.

We thank you for grace, and for the saving knowledge that although Jesus has ascended into heaven, He is with us in His Holy Spirit.

Dear God, these prayers we raise to you with confidence that you will hear us and respond in steadfast love. We ask these things in your son's name, as we pray the prayer he taught us . . . Our Father, who art in heaven – – –

When we filter the reading through yesterday's events, we ask the same sorts of questions nearly everyone asks – why does God permit this to happen or is God powerless to stop it? Or we struggle with the idea that God wants us to freely choose correctly between good and evil.

We struggle to look for answers where there are no answers and despair at the idea of accepting that God simply allows things to happen.

We in seminary believe that God has called us. We believe that God has a plan for each of us. As much as we may believe we have free will, at our core, we believe God has a plan for each of us. I don't know about others, but my sense of call is so strong, I can't NOT do what I feel called to do.

IF we truly believe God's plan for our lives, it's difficult for us to accept that God has a plan for a sociopath or for a innocent victim. Does EVERY person who commits evil or injustice against others go against the will of God, or is it possible some of them are in fact carrying out the will of God?

It's human nature to struggle to find reason in the random.

It's human nature, but not necessarily God's nature. God has a reason, it may not be a reason we understand, accept or want, but God has a reason.

We can lament, or simply give our concerns to God. We can grieve, or we can try to move beyond the pain of this life, and focus on God.

We pray in the Lord's Prayer, "thy will be done," but then we feel a need to know and understand what God's will is.

Each of us can hope to fulfil God's will, as we believe we understand it, but we often don't understand God's will until much later.

Thirty-nine years ago this month, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered.

That evening of April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy stepped in front of a crowd of people in Indianapolis, Indiana for a political rally. He delivered what I believe to be one of the greatest extemporaneous speeches in history.

In his speech, Kennedy quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

The awful grace of God . . .

Children kidnapped and forced to fight in the military, millions of people around the globe trafficked as slaves last year. Children starving to death in one country while others develop childhood diabetes.

Young people gunned down without warning.

The awful grace of God.

Kennedy ended his speech with:

"Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

"Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

Amen.

To read and hear Kennedy's speech, click here:

http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/rfk.htm

President Bush toured Walter Reed Medical Center today:

 

"The problems at Walter Reed were caused by bureaucratic and administrative failures," the president said at the end of a more than two-hour visit. "The system failed you and it failed our troops and we're going to fix it."

 

No it didn't.

 

Republicans cynically fault "bureaucracies," undermine the public's trust in the government, and then the Republicans as a party are free to do whatever they want, (like no-bid contracts to campaign donors in support of a four year-old war.)

 

The fault at Walter Reed Medical Hospital lies at the foot of president Bush and his former Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

 

Don't take my word for it, here's what Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Senior Chaplain John L. Kallerson wrote in a recent e-mail.

 

"Congress is finally giving the money that people have asked for at Walter Reed for years to fix places on the installations and address shortcomings. What they don't want you to know is Congress caused many problems by the BRAC process saying they were closing Walter Reed."

 

The president and the Republican-controlled Congress helped create the problem - including under-funding the VA. Now that the Democrats are in charge, including Jim Webb, who knows what it means to take a bullet for his country, we'll start to see a difference in how the country takes care of the troops.

 

Again, from the Chaplain's e-mail.

 

"Then they did this thing called A76 where they fired many of the workers here for a company of contractors, IAP, to get a contract to provide care outside the hospital proper. The company, which is responsible for maintenance, only hired half the number of people as there were originally assigned to maintenance areas to save money. Walter Reed leadership fought the A76 and BRAC process for years but lost. Congress instituted the BRAC and A76 process; not the leadership of Walter Reed."

 

The president blames the "bureaucratic and administrative failures," that his administration helped to create, while the Chaplin who actually works there says it's the fault of the contractor . . . the contractor hired per the Bush administration's (faulty) assumption that a for-profit company is cheaper than government employees who do the work because they care.

The Chaplain is doing a commendable job of tending his flock. 

             

The president, again, is using US troops as political props.

 

To read the complete e-mail, click here:

 

The Chaplain's e-mail

 

From today's news:

 

"Despite mounting opposition to the war in Iraq as the conflict pushes into a fifth year, Australian Prime Minister John Howard delivered an impassioned defense of his decision to fight alongside close ally the United States.

 

"What Iraq and her people need now is time, not a timetable. They seek our patience, not political positioning. They require our resolve, not our retreat," he told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute."

 

**

Perfect.

 

Australia has around 1,400 troops in the Iraq theater, mostly in non-combat roles.

 

Australia has lost two troops – Private Jake Bruce Kovco was killed when he accidentally shot himself in the head while cleaning his weapon on April 21, 2006. David Russell Nary was killed in a vehicle accident in Kuwait, in November 2005.

 

Prime Minister John Howard says the Iraqi people "seek our patience, not political positioning." He should know. He's an expert at political positioning and political posturing.

 

How about this . . . the USA has led this fight for four years, if Prime Minister Howard is so committed to the war in Iraq, how about he send another 139,000 more troops, and a few Billion more dollars?

 

After 3,000 more Australians have given their lives in the folly of Iraq, THEN Prime Minister Howard will earn the right to speak out about the war in Iraq. Right now, he's just as bad as the rest of the political cowards who have waged this war – asking others to sacrifice while they safely wage a war of rhetoric.

 

Good people continue to die, while cowards like Prime Minister Howard sleep soundly.

 

Because of "allies" like Australia, the war in Iraq was lost before the first shot was fired.

I saw an interesting article online today about the rapture, the second coming, and moderate mainstream churches that are trying to teach other interpretations of the Bible's book of Revelation.

 

From the article:

 

Tim LaHaye, co-author of the "Left Behind" series, said Americans like his books not because of the violence, but because they believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

 

"Surprisingly enough with all the liberal brainwashing they've got in public education, most people that claim to be Christians have a tendency to believe the Bible," LaHaye said in an interview.

 

Moderate Christians will never come up with a story that can compare, he said.

 

"They are just liberal, socialists, really, and they don't believe the Bible," LaHaye said. "What they probably will come up with is a plausible explanation from their liberal standpoint to satisfy their adherents that are reading our series and liked it. But it will be inferior because the story will be inferior."

 

The success of the graphic novels is just one indication of the strength of belief in rapture, Armageddon, and the subsequent second coming of Jesus Christ. A 2006 survey for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 79 percent of American Christians believe in the second coming, with 20 percent believing it will happen in their lifetime.

 

Tim LaHaye's relationship with Jesus Christ is dramatically different than my relationship with Jesus Christ.

 

I've read a number of the "Left Behind" books, but grew weary of them as my faith deepened and my actual knowledge of the Bible grew. I have a serious problem with the "Christian" characters in the "Left Behind" books 'fighting' for God. Jesus didn't fight his attackers, and his followers are supposed to live by his example, right?

 

Along those same lines, Jesus said, "for there shall arise false Christ's, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if [it were] possible, they shall deceive the very elect." (Mathew 24:24)

 

The 'elect' being the believers and followers of Christ.

 

Jesus told us there would be people speaking in his name who would deceive us. Did he mean the un-godly "liberal socialists" or the men on the radical right claiming to be Christians? People like Tim LaHaye?

 

Can you imagine that liberal supporter of the poor, Jesus Christ, calling other people names? Jesus didn't tell us to condemn those with whom we disagree, like self-righteous fools, instead he said:

 

"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." (Mathew 5:44)

 

I'd like to think that the writer of the article cut out multi-millionaire Tim LaHaye's quote professing love for the "liberal socialists" who "don't believe the Bible." Perhaps he keeps it a secret that he's praying for the people with whom he disagrees.

 

Early Christians lived communally, what can be thought of as "socialist." They didn't live in multi-million dollar mountain mansions as Tim LaHaye does. LaHaye certainly lives very, very well for someone who claims he's expecting an imminent second coming.

 

Of course LaHaye's quotes in the article come across negatively, because he was speaking negatively. The feelings he expressed are what's in his heart.

 

"It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles," Jesus said. "What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles, for out of the heart comes evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander; these are what defile a person . . ." (Matthew 15:10, 18-20)

 

LaHaye's name-calling is a sad and bad example of what a follower of Christ isn't supposed to do. His books and his life are an example of how a follower of Christ isn't supposed to behave. But he is a good example of how a false prophet can "deceive the very elect."

 

Here's a link to the entire article : http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070313/us_nm/usa_religion_rapture_dc;_ylt=AkvlkIWHwhsC6R23SEkKLj47Xs8F

This was a touching movie, and I enjoyed it.

But beyond the movie, let me point out a few facts.

 

I saw a 7 p.m. showing in Richmond, Va. on the Saturday it opened. The theater was jammed packed, and I had to sit on the very back row.

 

Across the United States, Amazing Grace opened in 791 theaters, and brought in $4.3 million.

 

The Astronaut Farmer opened in 2,155 theaters, and brought in $4.5 million.

 

On a per theater average, Amazing Grace brought in more money per theater than the number one movie of the week, Ghost Rider.

 

The fact is clear - people want to see movies that have no violence or obscenities but that have positive, uplifting messages.

 

I wonder if Hollywood is listening.