Piano Forte 3.27.2025

     Most weeks I spend at least a couple of hours playing the Piano. It is a welcome break from the brain-breaking work of preaching to sit down to play and sing a few favorite tunes. I have tablatures scattered over “my” piano; some hymns, some old-fashioned rock’n’roll, classic singer songwriter things. It is a relaxing break during the busy days. 

The technical term for the instrument whether grand, baby-grand, upright, or spinet is fortepiano. This Italian name means “soft-loud.” It describes the basic technological breakthrough that ushered in a new phase in the development of Western Music. Prior to the invention and development of these instruments by Bartolomeo Cristofori and Gottfried Silbermann the defining characteristic of most keyboard instruments both harpsichords or clavichords which distinguished them from organs was that the musician did not have the ability to control the volume or tone of the instrument in any other way than how she struck the keys. Composers such as J.S. Bach were able to create beautiful and timeless music largely by using time signatures, harmony, and playing technique to inject a complexity in the music which was otherwise impossible. The illusion of increased or decreased volume was a brilliant substitute for what the available instruments could not yet do. It is because of the giftedness of the Baroque composers that much of their music transcribes so beautifully to more technologically advanced instruments allowing their music to scale otherwise unobtainable sonic heights. 

    The genius behind a fortepiano comes from using multiple strings to sound each tone, and then including multiple mechanical means of muting or softening some of the strings dedicated to each tone. Yes, they used pedals, but that was the means of achieving the end of decreasing the volume of a given tone by preventing its full volume to be heard. Again, it is a tribute to composers such as Bach that they were able to do compositionally what later composers were could do mechanically. 

Now the question. What does this have to do with preaching? Two things, one of which is particularly germane the other a piece of trivia. First, the trivia. March 31 is the day upon which Johann Sebastian Bach was born. I usually celebrate by listening to some of his larger choral works. If you are a novice and wish to listen to a bit’o Bach this month I would recommend Vikingur Olafsson’s 2023 recording of the Goldberg Variations. He pays on fortepiano what Bach originally wrote for clavichord or harpsichord demonstrating both Bach’s genius and his own mastery of the instrument. 

    Now the primary issue. When one plays the piano not every note or chord in a song should be struck or played at the same volume. Doing so often violates the express intent of the composer or song writer. In the modern world where we mostly listen to some form of recorded music, volume is often a function of the listeners pleasure or context. As written, volume is a part of the intended compositional structure of a piece of music. Sometimes when we listen to a performance, either live or Memorex we are struck by the sense that the musicians are shouting at us. Regardless of how loud they actually play, or we play back, we feel like we are being force-fed. We don’t have the time to comprehend the notes because the space between them is overwhelmed by presentation. No one LIKES TO BE SHOUTED AT ALL THE TIME! It doesn’t matter if we read it on the internet, listen to it on the stereo, or hear it in Church. One volume all the time wears out the auditor of any song or message. 

    Preacher, you have control over the presentation of your message. What is the point of expending labor over a text to prepare a sound Biblical sermon, and then presenting it as if you had no control over your own tone, volume or pacing? Preachers need to have a fortepiano—soft-loud approach to delivering the message we are called to preach. There are times when we need to raise our voices or change our tone. We might make people cringe or laugh. Some might become emotional while others detached. The point is that your approach to the preaching moment needs to be as intentional as the writing of the message. 

    For this to occur requires that you, the preacher think through the presentation of the message during the process of composition. The exegesis of the passage itself will provide both a sense of rhythm as well as tone and color, as well as suggesting modulation in volume.  As the text determines the shape of the sermon and prescribes its content it should also be allowed to provide guidance as to how the message will be preached. This textual guidance should provide insight into the English words you and I choose as well as the syntactical structure and other elements we will add to the message.  In this sense a sermon is like a musical score—except most preachers don’t even think about “performance” until they are way past preparation—at which point it may be too late. 

    Throughout my preaching career I have been constantly expanding the amount of material I take into the pulpit. When I was young (and presumably quick thinking) I could use a minimal outline and fill in the “score”. As I have grown older and have increased my concern for the content and presentation of messages, I have concluded that a fuller manuscript allows the preacher to be more careful about presentation, choosing clearer and more precise wording than extemporaneous preaching allows. Do I add phrases, include expansions, and even omit material? Yes. But a fuller manuscript provides more secure guardrails for the entire sermon. I finally decided that there is no point in being precise in the study if I’m going to “wing it” in the pulpit. 

    Some examples. A sermon from a Pauline text should not be too chatty—unless it is one of the sections where he congratulates, introduces, or cajoles members of his team. On the other hand, the doctrinal matters he considers should have a different tone from the personal sections of a letter. Sermons from the parables of Jesus should draw more upon story-telling and narrative techniques. You can preach any of these forms the same way at the same volume, and people may very well “understand” what you are saying, they may “get” the passage you are preaching. It is only through preparing to play the score of your sermon that you, the preacher, can have a measure of control over the intellectual, emotional, and volitional reaction of your congregation. This is not mere manipulation, rather it is simply thorough preparation. 

    Do I hear someone mutter “Well, where’s the Holy Spirit?” Right here. In the text, in the preacher, in the congregation, in public worship, in private preparation. If He’s not in your study don’t expect Him to show up in the sanctuary. Most of those who “depend on the Holy Spirit” actually presume upon Him and the results, should provoke apologies. Not from the Spirit, but from the preacher who presumed too much. 

    Every week as I write these essays my conviction is simple. Preaching is a high and holy calling and every single one of us who is called to it, can get better at it. As far as we can tell the “Old Bach” (J.S.) had limited exposure to the technical advancements of keyboard instruments in his life. His Musical Offering BWV 1079 was said to have begun whilst at Potsdam visiting his son Carl Phillip Emmanuel who was in the employ of Frederick the Great. The King provided a theme for him to expand upon, he sat at one of the Kings fortepianos and extrapolated a brief extemporaneous theme. He told Fredrick it would only be possible to expand further by spending more time upon the royal theme. So, he took that theme home, sat at his own instruments and composed the final great work of his life. Bach knew that even geniuses should work hard at their vocation. 

Complaining vs. Correcting 3.20.2025

    There is difference between merely complaining and providing correction. The former is often a matter of self-aggrandizement or grandstanding. The latter, compassionate guidance. Being called by Christ and following Him means trying to adhere to a different, higher standard. Because each of us are culturally, socially, and locally conditioned that “high” standard will be slightly different for each one of us. As Christians we have determined that the Scripture is our standard of believing, and when it is possible to know it—the lifestyle of Jesus provides our standard of doing. 

    Hence the title of this week’s essay and the pressing need to try and understand Jesus’ approach to “right living.” The issue is fairly stark. When we look at the Gospels, Jesus spent a great deal of time correcting people of all sorts. His disciples, women visited by wells, Demonized men, women, and children, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians—even the occasional Roman. Despite all this interaction Jesus was not a complainer. He did not carp or rail when confronted with hypocritical or sinful behavior. In fact, He seemed to be the most compassionate with those who were the least “righteous.” And we find this difficult. Very difficult. Nearly impossible. 

    So, the question before us, particularly in our exegesis and through our preaching is “How can I correct like Jesus without falling into the trap of becoming a complainer?” It won’t be easy. In the richest nation in human history, with more perks and fewer irks, Americans in general and the American Church in particular has made much of our discourse a constant whine—a parade of perennial complaint which falls on increasingly inattentive ears. The problem with complainers is that they become boring and those who are confronted by them apathetic. 

    Correction should be a learning experience. That means that for those who preach and teach our correcting should be a teaching experience. Far too often it is not. We meanderingly complain without the slightest concrete notion of any effective change that we might suggest. People know we are upset, unsettled, or even angry—often angry—but even if they wanted to accept guidance from God’s Word and His Church they can’t, because we don’t offer it. 

Consider the following passage. It contains both complaint—by Jesus’ enemies, and correction by Jesus Himself. 

“Matthew 12:1   At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. Matthew 12:2 But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” Matthew 12:3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: Matthew 12:4 how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Matthew 12:5 Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? Matthew 12:6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. Matthew 12:7 And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. Matthew 12:8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”” (Matthew 12:1-8 ESV)

 This passage is well known and emblematic of the difference between Jesus and His opponents. Notice the following: 

▪ The complaints of the Pharisees were personal as much as they were behavioral or Biblical. 

▪ The response of Jesus focused upon Biblical precedent, expecting His audience to be knowledgeable about His response. 

▪ The Pharisees were interested primarily in preventing an action, Jesus in promoting an attitude. 

▪ In this instance Jesus goes beyond the complaint to offer a transformative theological and ethical corrective. 

    From this passage we can draw some reliable extensible conclusions about how we should balance the need to correct with the temptation to complain. It begins with Scripture and how we use it. The Pharisees primarily viewed scripture as a stop sign. Clearly, that could not have been the content of their whole theology, but in practice it appeared that way because just about everyone, at one time or another would offend them. Even Jesus. For Jesus the primary use of Scripture was to positively transform a person’s belief system. He knew that thinking right led to doing right and that the opposite could not be guaranteed. The outcome of the Pharisaic approach to Scripture was not in and of itself legalistic, but it tended that way due to human nature. It is easier for us to blame, shame, and complain than to encourage, recalibrate, and help. 

    Next, we need to pay close attention to how Jesus corrects. He generally does so without deepening the conflict. He didn’t fight even when He was right, even when He could. WHY? Because He didn’t need to, and conflict did not further His aims. A culture of complaint tends towards a culture of constant conflict. The Judaisms of the Second Temple period are a case study of how constant complaint between those who basically believed the same things devolved into persistent bickering. This bickering was so pronounced that at least one group, the Essenes, withdrew from society and transformed their complaints into pleas for God to destroy their enemies. Instead, we hear Jesus whose approach was to correct whilst decompressing, to teach without His lessons becoming childish, ineffective moralizing. 

    A final observation. Jesus was playing a long game. The Pharisees, scribes, legal-theorists, aristocrats, and busybodies would not leave Him alone, yet His tone rarely changed. There were times that He would even congratulate His questioners when they got this or that point right. For Jesus being right was not the point. He was not trying to “score.” He was not trying to win some intellectual battle with His peers. He was trying to transform the world. 

    He was able to bring transformative change, not by “being right” but by being God. Not by winning, but by losing. Not by victory, but through submission. As we move through this long and reflective time leading to Holy Week, we need to be ever mindful of the ultimate outcome. Regardless of what went on in that grain field, there was going to be a cross. Answering every critic, responding to every complaint, validating every whine may have made His adversaries feel good, but Jesus was not in the “feel-good” business.  He was in the redemption business which is the longest game of all.

Around the Bend 3.13.2025

     We can anticipate what may be up around the bend, but we cannot actually know. All we can really do is guess. We cannot have absolute certainty about the future. The certainty we can have and upon which we should base all other convictions is the certainty we have in Christ and His complete work.

     We will have His work upon our minds during the Easter season. We will look to Him as the guarantor of all those things we can anticipate but not know. We will consider the words of Jesus, His sacrifice, and His resurrection. In a sense, His passion was the ultimate blind spot of humanity. No one saw that one coming. As much as people tried, they could not really imagine the impact of His gospel and what it would mean for God-in-flesh to peek into our otherwise unforeseen future. The promises made and expectations shared could never really anticipate what Jesus would do. It was not fully understood until after the resurrection when Jesus provided the keys to understanding all the Biblical testimony to His coming, His vision, and His mission. 

    For our purpose and in this space putting our limitation into a broader perspective is important. We need to plan diligently if we are to preach well, and that planning must be kept in proper perspective. The preacher stands between God and congregation to vouch for the trustworthiness of God. We base our future words and deeds upon God’s past actions and the promises we find in scripture. We are only able to do that because Jesus Himself has bridged the gap between faith and sight. 

    It is tempting during disconcerting and frustrating times to read into the Biblical story issues it does not discuss and to wring from it echoes of what we already think, feel, and believe. The Biblical story is filled with hope but the truths the Scripture contains are often hard. Sin is not a soft subject, nor salvation. The temptation to elevate our field of vision to that of Scripture is best addressed by the diligent work of exegesis. A proper hermeneutic first looks behind and into the text before trying to project forward. In doing the hard work we establish an appropriate distance between our desires and Gods. In doing that hard work we have a guide for possible applications of the text. A guide to which we do well to adhere. If we forget or neglect what the author and/or speaker intended, we tempt ourselves with a knowledge that inappropriately appropriates the vocabulary of faith whilst using familiar words differently. We can never see around the next bend and much of what the New Testament says about any possible future is discussed in terms of responsible Christian behavior amid the temptations of our fallen world. The Bible clearly teaches us what we are expected to know. We are expected to know Jesus. We are to know not the content of the future, but its author. 

    The Bible both promises more than we can imagine and less that we desire. It is not our needs that bedevil us but our desires. It was because Adam and Eve thought that by listening to the serpent, they could, in effect, gaze up around the bend into their own future lives. In making that choice they were sundered from both their innocence and their relationship with God. Even our best intentions can still mislead us into thinking that God has promised a Crystal ball rather than the deliberate road of discipleship. 

    We prepare plans not to challenge God but to challenge ourselves. We know at some point that our sight will diminish and that we can never see beyond the bend. It is an act of faithful discipleship to beat a path into that unfamiliar future based upon the small amount of information available to us.  What little we see, know, and understand is leveraged not by a wild guess and leap of fate--but trust. Trust in the one who summons us into the unforeseen future following Him, telling His story, making disciples. To do that we need not know the unseeable future or see what lies beyond the next dip or bend. We only need to see Him.

Practices and Principles 3.6.2025

     Having abandoned Ash Wednesday, too many of we protestants have also abandoned the principle of introspective penance. There are many reasons for this. The top of the list is a sense of moral superiority, which seems altogether out of character for disciples of Jesus. We should examine any practice which has the effect of helping us perform a Biblical function, in this case a penitent attitude as expressed, for example in 1 John 1.9-10

“1John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1John 1:10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” (1 John 1:9-10 ESV)

    John expresses and recommends, though the actual term is only fully formalized later, a penitential attitude. For our purpose his is the best example because his words express an elementary principle rather than a specific practice. The principle itself may find a variety of forms of expression, differences in practice which all express the essential principle at stake. 

    The various historic and denominational practices in which the principle is embedded, even those practices which may have dubious Biblical warrant do not invalidate the basic principle—Christian people should be well aware of their own sin, expressing repentance—public and private whenever they can.

    It always interesting, and often surprising to examine broader the Christian community in evaluating the prominence of a practice and its use throughout Christian history. A simple search on the internet asking about Ash Wednesday observances shows not only the expected Roman Catholic observances, but also the traditional liturgical practices of Anglican/Episcopalian congregations, the reformed tradition in its various bodies, and many evangelical non-denominational bodies. Though not a scientific survey it would appear that Ash Wednesday is a fairly wide-spread phenomenon. Whereas in the past there would have been significant chatter among certain religious traditions about not participating in events or actions not specifically mentioned in Scripture (by current name) there seems to be a general agreement (again, I did not do a scientific poll) that the principle of being repentant is valuable and that historic practice, though sometimes innovative, can be valuable. 

    Let me digress a moment to talk about innovation. For a Roman Catholic or an Anglican there is nothing innovative about Ash Wednesday nor the whole Lenten season. These practices are foundational elements of the Church Calendar which evolved over centuries to unify a globally scattered Church prior to modernity. Not to be condescending, but for typical illiterate peasants of the 12th Century the Calendar in general and Ash Wednesday and other holy days in particular, helped orient the devout in time and space, when there was an absence of other reliable demarcations of passing time. Until invention of our modern calendars and the human creation of the mechanical clock most people did not know what the date of the current day even was, much less the time.

    As the modern world exploded out of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the first Scientific revolution everyday people—like you and me were able to nibble the crumbs from the table of the sophisticated. We might own a watch, and keep track of our days in an Almanac, but the big questions of how to regulate our days and hours according to broader, Biblical principles required reference to the external apparatus of the Church year. Not just because that was all we knew but more importantly, that was all we had.

    As Protestantism itself grew, splintered, and evolved it, inherited the luxury of debating the dubious and fixating on the inessential. Ash Wednesday is not the only practice which was abandoned out of a sense of vague Biblical certitude. We argue vociferously about something peripheral, mainly because we can, not because we ought or should.   

    Our brotherhood does not celebrate Ash Wednesday, and for every highfalutin reason, or theological diatribe, or spiritual threat we might articulate in defense of our practice the fact is that Ash Wednesday fell out of favor for those whose denominational evolution culminated in a congregational form of government. In all likelihood, our current practice was derived more from our churchmanship than any Biblical or Theological principle. Ash Wednesday and Lent—whether it was the case or not—appeared to be the sort of thing done out of compulsion and denominational uniformity rather than faith, producing a sense of order our congregations did not otherwise feel or express. In abandoning the practice perhaps, it is inertia that prevails. Yet the practice is subsequent to and dependent upon the principle as articulated in scripture. And that, we have no warrant to abandon. 

    For the congregations we serve, the primary question should be “How can we maintain a penitent attitude, and would we be better served with a practice like Ash Wednesday?” In answering that question, I expect most would say, “What we are doing is just fine.” Is it? Really? Do we actually do anything? Have we thought through the issues of how to inculcate this dependent attitude with respect to our salvation? Isn’t it of increasing importance in an age where the term (Big E) "Evangelical" has become radically detached from the actual Evangel to remind every believer that being a Christian means entering into a relationship with Jesus that transforms every other relationship? Do we adapt practices which remind the communities in which our Churches are embedded that we are “In the world but not of it?” When people look at us, do they still consider us a “Third Race”, neither Jew nor Gentile, subjects not of any Empire of this world but of the Kingdom of God. Ash Wednesday is certainly not the only way to clarify who we are in this fallen world, but by all means there, should be something!

    Our congregation does not have Ash Wednesday observances planned. In my interactions between now and then I will encourage everyone I meet to examine their life in a grateful attitude of penitence. My personal prayer life will, for a few days at least, focus not on the commonplace of common needs requested and blessings pronounced. Instead, I will pray that God’s people look to this season as a time to feel the refreshing, renewing breath of God which comes upon us because of the passion of Jesus. We need quiet times, rooted in Biblical principles, set aside for repentance, regardless of the practices we embrace. But by all means—do something.