It's a Musical
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are in Luke chapters 1 and 2 today.
As this is a history podcast, it is fitting that we look back at a historical document and consider how people in that day looked back on history. This is a little piece of historiography, if you will. I think we’re going to start with the Magnificat, which is Luke 1:46-55.
“Children, don’t do this at home.” Actually we would like you to do this at home, and this is kind of the point of this. We’re looking at songs and poems, and we all know that poems are not really literal and they’re all about your emotions, right? Except when God writes them and then all bets are off as to what’s going on here. What does he say?
The first thing I think I probably said last time, because I always do, is the doctrine of organic inspiration. God prepares his servants to be the sort of people who have had the experience, who have the knowledge, who have the background, the intelligence, the creativity, to write the kind of words he needs written for particular circumstances. The Holy Spirit superintends this so that although it is the word of man, it is also the word of God.
When we look at Mary and I say, “Wow, she was a Bible scholar,” I’m not downplaying inspiration. I’m simply acknowledging the kind of inspiration that the Bible teaches us from beginning to end. Very rarely does God overpower human consciousness to such a degree that people are simply spitting out words programmed into them. Automatic writing in occult circles works that way, where the person comes away not even knowing what he said. There is little or nothing in scripture like that.
So as we look at Mary and at her words, we see a young woman – 16, 17, 18? We don’t know exactly how old she was, but a young woman who has studied the scriptures a good deal. She’s obviously very familiar with Hannah’s song in the book of 1 Samuel, chapter 2 I believe it is, but also with the psalms and the prophets, and she’s been pulling all this together.
Not only is she a profound Bible student, far outdistancing most of the rabbis of her time, she’s also a poetess. This is poetry. We call it a song and the church has always regarded it as such, because in the ancient world the two tended to be interchangeable. The Iliad and The Odyssey, for instance, were first of all chanted or sung. I say chanted and I’m going to hope that people know what chanting is, because I’m not going to do any. Either of you into chanting? No? No one wants to chant with me?
I’ve been to Roman Catholic masses when they were doing that. I guess I did a little bit of some of it in choir. It was somewhat of an African chant though, so it’s different, but it’s that repetitive single note that you get.
“Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain.” I did some chanting because the psalter that my church in Anderson used had a couple of those and the pastor liked to use them. As you say, it’s more about holding particular notes, a very simple note structure that’s repeated, and you innovate and squeeze the words to make it work. The only other thing that we have in our culture is rap. I’m not rapping.
Anyway, this is why, as I understand it, these have been regarded not simply as poems but as psalms, as things that were sung, or designed to be sung at the very least.
Going into this I think I’ll just read the Magnificat and then we can talk a little bit about both what it says and what it doesn’t say.
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
Compare this or contrast this to something that might come out of a gnostic form of worship. Ladies, I’m going to let you jump in and talk about this for a little while. Is this what you would expect from your local Mystic Church of the Firstborn down the street?
Maybe the first two verses. “My soul is magnifying the Lord. My spirit is rejoicing.” I could see those first two being more focused on the internal maybe, but then when she starts going to her lowly estate in this world –
No, funny enough. And she as a woman is going to be called blessed for actually physically carrying and bearing a child is very non-Gnostic. We need our anti-Gnostic bell to ring.
What struck me about the song is the military language, which does not at first glance seem to go with the birth of a child. Why is this victory over enemies? Why is this scattering the proud?
Or the idea of him coming with his arm, which in the scripture is the arm of the Lord, a metaphor for his power, for his strength, for rising up to act. Again it’s very physical. It’s even attributing to God an arm that he’s going to be working with in this world.
It was interesting in looking at the songs here in Luke, as well as Hannah’s song, that almost all of them mention enemies, again that idea of military, of black and white, the clear contrast of good vs evil, but it’s the Lord’s enemies obviously and not ones that we would decide should be enemies. He takes care of people in their physical estate of hunger, of poverty. In all of these things he’s helping the people, but it’s through the lowly estate of Mary that he is making all this possible.
And a real physical baby, which I think is key to all of this. I appreciate where you started, that Gnostics are not going to talk about giving birth to a real child. You mentioned carrying the child. There’s a lot about Jesus being born, that sudden epiphany as God reveals himself, but there’s not a whole lot about, “And Mary was pregnant for nine months and it hurt and she labored and it hurt and she gave birth and it hurt and there was blood and there was placenta.”
“Ooo don’t!” as the Gnostics cover their children’s ears. “We don’t want to hear about that. It was sweet and otherworldly!”
We see historical consequences to the birth of this child, this real flesh and blood child. Would one of you please comment on verse 55?
I was hoping we’d address this specific verse, “As He spake to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed forever.” This is the seed that’s coming. This is the fulfillment of a promise that was made in history to a person, and this has been an entire people having come from this person, descendants of Abraham, who have been waiting all this time for this promised seed. They’re real people. Abraham was a real person. This baby is a real person, and this is the fulfillment of the promise.
It’s hearkening us back all the way to Genesis in that promise of the woman’s seed forward, which Satan has been trying throughout history to get rid of in event after event after event after event. Mary is now stopping and saying, “God has prevented all of that and he’s going to continue to do so even more clearly now through this child,” because these are real people the Lord has brought through history.
What do you do with “and his seed forever”? What does that tell you in terms of the things you’ve already said?
There have been many temporary salvations in Israel’s history. There was the exodus, there was King David winning many many victories, there was bringing them back from Babylon, but there’s something different about this time and it’s that it’s forever. This is not going to be reversed. This is final.
Again, anybody who’s listening is amply familiar with my tirade against Bible people, Bible times, Bible lands, Bible stories. One of the points we’ve made in the last couple podcasts is how badly both the world and the church sort of excise Jesus from history at this point. “Bible times are coming to an end or they’re being sucked up into heaven,” thus the reference to upper story religion – a fit place for a Gnostic bell – something outside our reality. Is that what Mary is saying, that Bible times and Bible stories are all coming to an end? Real life will go on but spiritual life will continue forever on another level? Is that what we’re supposed to understand?
No, not at all. “As He spake to our fathers” – in the same way. That’s what that phrase means.
[ringing sound] Oh, there’s been a gnostic bell chucked down the stairs at me. Hold on, I’ll be right back.
The idea of the seed going on forever is that we are part of that seed here in this world, that he saves us body and soul, in life and in death, that we belong to Jesus Christ. So as Paul says in Romans, we are Abraham’s seed now, that it was a physical seed and it continues to be one. Even though we’re not born by regular flesh and blood means into the Kingdom of God, we are still real people that he’s saving in this world and not just in the world to come. We’re not just waiting for heaven, but the blessedness, the things that she describes, are here and now even if it’s not the fullness. It’s the beginning.
Not that’s worth holding up the other songs that we have to discuss. We have such limited time.
Moving on then, Zechariah is next. He has a very long song. Zechariah has been made dumb because he refused to believe Gabriel, and now when his family and friends are asking him “What should we call the child?” he writes out, “His name is John.”
First, they’re shocked. “What? No. You don’t know anybody named that.” But God opens his mouth and fills him with the Spirit and he says this:
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,
And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;
As he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began:
That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us;
To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant;
That he would grant unto us, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear,
And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways;
To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,
Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,
To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
In light of what you said about Mary’s song, what similarities or common themes or approaches do you see here? Or what other things would you add?
I would jump straight to verse 77 and just say that mind is blown. I feel like our minds should be blown by this verse, “To give knowledge of salvation unto His people by the remission of their sins.” Salvation throughout the rest of Zechariah’s song and through much of scripture is a military term. He talks about enemies, being saved from enemies, rescued – that’s the sense of the word – and now it’s salvation by the remission of sins. What? These are not two different scales anymore.
Who are our enemies? I believe it’s the Heidelberg Catechism that says the world, our own flesh, and the devil.
To oppress us or attack us without ceasing. There was an old comic strip, probably older than you might remember, called Pogo.
It was set in the southern swamps. Pogo was an anthropomorphic opossum, and there’s a rather famous series of panels that I’m not wholly familiar with but I know the final one, because everyone knows the final one. Pogo and his friends are looking for some enemy that has invaded the swamp and they keep hearing sounds and noises, and they keep going, and eventually they figure out they’re running around in circles, and they finally run into each other.
There’s a line in Peanuts too where Snoopy says something like, “Never suggest the problem might possibly be with them,” as Charlie Brown and Linus wander off, having had their little fight.
We don’t want to think that the problem is us. We want to point fingers at everybody else. This is what Adam and Eve did in paradise.
Our teachers in school have been teaching through Saul’s reign, and he is very much a second Adam in a new garden, and every time he screws up – “But the people made me! The people you gave to be with me! I listened to the people. I obeyed the voice of the people. I wanted to do the right thing but these people, you know…” Of course, Aaron did the same thing at the base of Sinai with the golden calf. “The people!” rather than saying, “My greatest enemy is my own sin.”
Sin is not something that is separate from me, it is me. It is me making choices in terms of what I want, my own wickedness, selfishness, and desire to play God, to judge other people by my own standards, and then to run away the moment things go wrong and people start pointing figures. This is the nature of sin and it’s an offense to God.
This is where we talk both about the pollution of sin and the guilt of sin. I have to always teach my students, “Guilt is not a feeling.” It’s been funny sometimes to read, “And guilt is not a feeling, but it’s when you feel like you’ve done something wrong.”
Modern psychology has turned guilt into merely subjective feelings, our own internal evaluation of our actions and of the world around us, but for scripture guilt is an objective legal reality. God has a law and we’ve violated it and we deserve punishment. There’s something else the church doesn’t want to talk about.
I was talking to a young lady recently who was saying about a church, so many good things, “And they acknowledge sin and they want to talk about the love of God, which is great, but there seems to be this disconnect of, ‘Well, sin is bad because it’s bad for you,’ not the idea that God might actually get angry with you.”
Then there’s the whole progressive movement of the church that says, “God doesn’t need to be angry with anybody. God doesn’t need to punish sin. He’s loving. He can just overlook justice….”
It’s so funny that they want God to overlook justice, when their chief concern is with “social justice.”
It’s been so interesting in recent weeks to watch the things that they are promoting for their own causes, but do not apply it to their enemies. “We are going to be the most merciful and the least severe, except on the people we don’t like. Then we’re going to be horribly severe on them and completely unmerciful, because they don’t deserve it.” It’s been interesting to watch.
There’s always going to be extreme hypocrisy in any person, but particularly in any movement that is denying the true character of God, because that’s the only place you get true consistency.
That is profound. Everybody listen to what she just said. Say that again, Rachel.
I will try. You will always get hypocrisy in any idea, system, movement, or religion that is not founded in the character of the one true God, because he is the only one that is actually consistent.
But getting us back to our song, I was noting the similarities with Mary, that he also is talking about how this is in fulfillment of the prophecies going before, it’s in fulfillment of God’s covenant, of his oath, but it’s with a slightly different emphasis here, looking at the house of David. Some of the things remind me of the temple in terms of speaking of holiness and righteousness, that the Lord is fulfilling his law in Christ so that we can be righteous before him.
And live out holiness before him and, again, all the days of our life, not our death, not in heaven but here in this world. That’s what it means to be saved, that we being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him. We live our lives in the presence of God.
We’re to live it in holiness – that’s our relationship to God, especially from the inside out – and righteousness, our relationship to those around us in terms of God’s law, and it’s to be all of our lives. This is why we’re being saved. We’re not being saved so that we can feel whole, or have a best divine friend, or have a wonderful spiritual experience, or know the meaning of life.
Many of these things may work themselves out in the process, but it’s not the focus of this song. God wants servants who live by his standards out of a heart that doesn’t fear man, but that fears him, with the recognition that we are always in the face of God. We’re always living and moving within God himself. It’s not that religion is up there someplace and we’re down here, and maybe one day the two will meet. No, we’re constantly Christians. We are always living life in the power of God’s Spirit, under the blood of Christ, within God’s providence, under his favor, smile, blessing, and chastening hand. This is going to be the history of the nature of the church forward.
Again, God is not withdrawing his kingdom into another world, he’s not withdrawing his people out of this world. This is going to be a present power and reality. Like Mary, Zechariah sees that it’s going to work tremendous changes that will be visible – social changes, political changes – but that’s not the heart. The heart is, as you say, forgiveness of sins.
To kind of piggyback on what you said, any movement that does not recognize that our fundamental problem is that we’ve sinned against God is going to try to fix us on other terms, and it will be frightening in the end. They’ll say all the nice sweet things up front, but in the end it will be 1984, it will be Brave New World, because they have to control everything to make everything right and happy.
Because as sinners we destroy everything in ourselves, because that’s what sin does.
Thus the need of a savior, and thus the child who will go before and prepare the way to introduce the light of the gospel.
This phrase is borrowed from Isaiah, “The light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our way in the way of peace.” First of all, peace between God and man. We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we’ve received the atonement. Having that peace, we then can begin to work at peace with one another within the church, and even to peace to those without. Paul tells us to live peaceably with all men as much as is within our power.
That brings us to the third song, which is the one everybody knows and actually has memorized in some version of scripture, the angel’s song. It doesn’t actually say the angels sing it. Presumably they did.
By the way, a side note. There are so many things that we take for granted because they show up on greeting cards, like there are angels all around the manger scene. The wise men are there too, by the way. There may be a little drummer boy tucked in there someplace. I like the little drummer boy, but he wasn’t actually there.
The angels are always shown in the sky. Until they leave we are not told that they’re in the sky. We’re told at the end they go away into heaven. It doesn’t say they’re hovering in the sky in the meantime, and nowhere in the past has that ever happened. The angel generally just walks up to you and says, “Hi, fear not.” They may have been in the sky, but the angel comes upon them, which can simply mean they walked up and said, “Hi shepherds, got something to tell you,” but he’s an angel so the “fear not” thing.
The angel announces with words that are very familiar to us. “Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings,” the gospel, “of great joy which shall be to all peoples, for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord.”
The angel is borrowing phrases from Isaiah and from the prophets to pull it all together. “This is not a new promise. This is the old promise. It’s all coming together here now on your watch. You need to know about this.”
Once again we need to pay attention to the ways that 2,000 years of history have changed the sense of these words. The good news, the gospel, that’s a military victory. It’s not a way of thinking. It’s not a truth to be preached on some religious level. This is a military victory and these 2,000 years of history are going to refine it for us.
Euangelion – good message, but the message, as you say, was generally that sent from a military commander who has successfully conquered his foes to tell people back home, “Hey, we won. The battle’s over. I’m coming home with spoil. Get ready to celebrate.”
You notice here and in the previous two songs, the victory is taken for granted. Jesus hasn’t even been born yet. I guess he’s born at this point, but he’s a baby. He hasn’t gone to the cross. He hasn’t faced Satan. He hasn’t done the miracles. He hasn’t revealed the Father. He’s just a little baby, but all three of these songs act as if, “We’re done now.”
There’s something similar in Revelation 12, where the radiant woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon with the stars in her hair, is travailing with child and she brings forth a child who’s to rule all nations with a rod of iron. We’re told “and the child was caught up to the throne of God and he’s going to rule all nations with the rod of iron.”
The whole life of Christ is bypassed. It’s referenced later on in the chapter as the reason for the victory, but at that point John’s version of the Christmas story in Revelation goes from the birth to the ascension, because once he’s here it’s over. The enemy has no chance here. Satan cannot stop him.
The dragon is there trying to devour him. He’s been working on this for 4,000 years, but it slips right through his fingers. The grave cannot hold him. Herod cannot kill him. He ascends to heaven and takes up his reign and immediately Satan is cast from heaven. These songs seem to echo that, that the good news is already here.
But when God gives us a promise, when God materializes the surety on the earth in front of us, it’s signed, sealed, and delivered. It’s done. We’ve won. Now we just stand back and watch it unfold, and that’s sort of what the angels are saying.
Then the angel adds, “This shall be a sign unto you. You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” The lying in the manger is the strange thing. I’m not sure about the swaddling clothes, although they find an echo in Jesus’ burial scene, because swaddling clothes were simply strips of linen cloth that you wound around the baby to make him nice and snug and tight so he doesn’t flail. You ladies both know about snuggling babies better than I do. It’s been a long time for me, but it’s very similar to what Joseph and Nicodemus did for Jesus.
So here we have a Joseph and a Mary swaddling Jesus at the beginning, and in the burial accounts we have Joseph with a number of Marys standing there watching, as they swaddle the body then. Again there’s a “from here to here” – not such a big deal, 33-1/2 years and yet it’s absolutely sure.
At this point, “Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.’”
I think the first obvious thing is that they did not say it in Latin. The western church, speaking Latin as it did, turned it into “Gloria in excelsis deo,” which is fine, but we don’t speak Latin and they didn’t speak Latin. Gloria means glory – glory to God.
It sounds prettier when you sing in Latin because English is a more Germanic language with our hard consonants and funky vowels.
It’s very short, and people have picked up on “peace on earth” or “peace on earth, goodwill toward men.” I think if it were possible to do a Google search on all of the movies and TV ads and greeting cards where this phrase has ever been borrowed, and they are legion, I think you would find that “Glory to God” often gets dropped and we pick up with the other and then try to reinterpret it on our terms, but it starts where it starts. It stars with “Glory to God.” This is all for the glory of God. This is not primarily about us.
Yes, God loves us. Yes, God gave his son for us, and yet the chief end of God is to glorify himself and enjoy himself forever. That we are pulled into that is both a mark of God’s incredible grace and his incredible wisdom. If we try to concentrate on our little inner group, our family, our clique or whatever, and then reach out and try to pull someone else in, it often gets awkward and we often screw things up because we can’t balance it like that, but God can. God’s made us in his image so that when he is glorifying himself most, his people ought to be enjoying themselves the best, to kind of borrow some ideas from John Piper.
“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace.” First of all, again the peace between God and man, but beyond that when that peace takes over it breeds peace among men, and the prophets are full of this.
Jesus said, “I came not to bring peace but a sword.” Yes, I know this, because initially when the gospel comes into our lives it transforms us and changes us and makes us not like the world. Then the world hates us because we’re not playing by its book. So yes, the initial impact of the gospel is not peace. It is separation. Jesus said, “I’ve come to set a man against the member of his own household – mother against daughter, father against son and all that,” but when the gospel has run its full course and all those people come to Christ, then peace begins to ensue.
We want the peace right up front. We want the solutions – the political solutions, the military solutions, the scientific solutions – that give us peace here and now, and God is at best a second thought, even for Christians oftentimes. We want peace in our hearts. We want peace in our minds. That’s great and God has promised it eventually to his children, but right now he may be calling you to suffer. He may be calling you to persecution and tribulation, and there’s nothing inconsistent there.
Someone once coined the phrase “preppy post-millennialism.” I think I know what they meant by that. I think they meant the kind of prophetic optimism where everything is just going to get better and better, and the gospel is going to change the world, the kingdom of God is going to come in all external fullness, and I won’t have to suffer or give up anything or go anyplace strange or step out of my comfort zone. God is just going to do it all and it’s going to be wonderful. Tribulation? What?
It makes me think of the adage that if your eschatology is based upon your circumstances, it’s probably wrong, in the sense that if you’re post-millennial because you think everything is going great and you can clearly see the kingdom is growing and you’re having a great life, so it must be that’s the right way to look at it. Or the world is falling apart, everything is going terrible, it must be almost the end! Both are wrong.
I teach in a school where most of the kids come from churches that are frankly pre-millennial. The kids don’t know that. They don’t even know what that means, and they oftentimes don’t even know that there are eschatological options.
I had one dear sweet girl come up to me and she’s new to the school, very quiet and meek and has hardly said a word to me, but she brought her Bible up, opened to Revelation 13 and she said, “I was talking to my mother and friend and we were just looking at this where the Beast is wounded in his head. Do you think that refers to when Donald Trump was shot in the head?”
I tried to let her down as sweetly and gently as I could, because that’s all she knows. That’s obviously the kind of Bible interpretation or kind of hermeneutic that she’s been raised in, and no doubt her mother has been raised in. “Look at the newspapers. What spectacular thing do you see that touches you now? It must be in the Bible, right? Because we’re that important.”
I didn’t go quite that far with her. I tried to be nice and just basically say, “We’ll get to Revelation eventually at the end of the course, and by then it may make more sense and you’ll understand how the Bible uses these images.” Ronald Reagan was shot in the head too, and he actually had names that had 6 letters each – Ronald Wilson Reagan – so it’s 666 and people thought he was the anti-Christ for a little while, but he wasn’t.
We pick up our eschatology the way some people catch the measles, just by the people we hang out with and the environment we were raised in. And yes, by looking at the headlines, good or bad, or looking at our own bank book, our own personal experience, our own family – here’s one. Covid, which was a disaster for everybody else, was one of the greatest times in my life because I was trapped at home, with my family. It was so great. We all got along. We enjoyed each other. We complained about the outer world but it was a very precious time for me.
So sometimes you’ve got to get over your own perspective of things and realize that God in bringing peace to earth – here’s this baby. When you say peace on earth – baby born in a manger in a stable, in a barn is not the first thing that’s going to come to your mind. Neither are troops sent in to murder said baby, and getting others instead. This is peace? Well, it’s how God arranged it.
Look to the cross. Was that peace for Jesus? Ultimately yes, but still he went through hell literally on the cross. So we shouldn’t impose our ideas of what peace means, or how God achieves it, but we do know that God values it because he announces it as a good thing.
Then “good will toward men.” There are translations based on corrupt manuscripts that render this “peace to men of goodwill.” I’m sorry, there are no men of goodwill. There aren’t. People are not naturally goodwill-minded. “Let me help you because I am so loving and kind, I just go around helping people.”
I’ve seen that rendered “Peace towards men with whom he is well-pleased.” Is that trying to read the same thing in a different way?
Yeah, it’s at best splitting the difference. Goodwill toward men – this is God’s goodwill. God is exercising a goodwill toward his people in the person of Jesus. It says “to men,” it does not say “to man.” There’s an important difference there. Jesus is not going to save everybody, and not everyone is going to know God’s peace, but God does exercise a goodwill toward the world in general. God loved the world in such a way that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. That’s this promise.
It is not a guarantee that God has set his saving love on every single individual, but rather that God has put forward the only way whereby peace is possible, and he does it because he means humanity in general. And there are eschatological implications there, too. Calvinists, in trying to deflect Arminianism, have done weird things to John 3:16.
I read Arthur Pink’s book, The Sovereignty of God, which is a good book, but when he got to his section on John 3:16 he defined ‘world’ as ‘the world of the elect,’ which he seemed to think was very small. That is so contrary to the flow of the passage and to what’s going on there and what Jesus is saying. It just shows you that sometimes you need to step back and not let your theology, however correct it may be, interpret a passage that has nothing to do with what your theology is actually talking about.
The promise is not a universalism that everyone will be saved, but it is a promise to the world that God plans to win the world back, and that in the end not only will the planet and the universe be renovated, but it will be full of a great multitude which no man can number, of all nations, peoples, and tongues, not a small remnant, but a great army who know God’s peace. So there’s that.
We have one more song, and we’re probably running out of time, I’m guessing.
Then maybe we pick it up with the nunc dimittis next time. So that brings us to recommendations.
By the way, in passing before we do that, Rachel, the one you recommended last time, would you again tell us the name and author of the book?
It’s called Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion by Allie Beth Stuckey.
Having that recommendation from you, and it being my wife’s birthday, something I had forgotten about until almost the day of, I set about to say, “Okay, I have no time to order it on Amazon. What are the chances that any local bookstore would carry it?” Well, zero actually, naturally.
So having failed at Barnes & Noble, I went to Hobby Lobby to grab her some colored pens and some other things, and standing there on the way out I just happened to look down at their book section, and lo and behold there it was! So she got it for her birthday and she’s enjoying it, and it turned out that she had wanted to read it, so thank you for that recommendation. Even we listen to one another’s recommendation sometimes. What have you got, ladies?
I have a song recommendation. We didn’t get a chance to dig into the Trinity Hymnal today, as we had planned – hopefully next time. This one, I don’t know if it will stand up to our scrutiny, but it’s a beautiful song called “Canticle of the Turning.” It’s sung to the tune of “Star of County Down,” in some hymnals “O Sing a Song of Bethlehem,” and it’s a paraphrase of the Magnificat and it’s just very fun.
I got to perform this song with a couple of friends in college, one of whom was Catholic and another of whom was I think not yet Catholic. I think she was on her way. They were just shocked that I would participate in singing about Mary or something, but it’s not about Mary. I think it’s a very beautiful paraphrase of scripture. Again “The Canticle of the Turning” is the name of the song.
Recommendation: Canticle of the TurningIn light of that, and before Rachel maybe steals it from me, I’m going to recommend Christmas caroling. Yes, it’s not that time of year just yet, but it is still one of the best ways to preach the gospel to people without terribly offending them.
Our school has been doing this on and off for years now, and as we go down the streets of Old Roseville there are people who actually are waiting for us. They’re not necessarily Christians, but it’s part of the nostalgic environment. Whether or not they hear the words and process them I don’t know, that’s in God’s hands, but we generally have tried to hand out cards with Bible verses on them and they know that there are people out there who do this.
We’ve had government workers in one office say, “Could you go sing to our friends in this other office, because they never hear anybody and it would be so great.”
“No, we don’t go there, sorry. We’d love to but we don’t have transportation, actually.”
We always end up in City Hall in Roseville and this is amazing. First of all, it is a city institution. It’s political. It’s governmental, and they have always welcomed us. And not only have they always welcomed us, but the first few times we did it the ladies in the offices up there would stand and video us and they would put it up on their own site. So we have the City of Roseville playing our kids singing gospel songs, and they being all thrilled about it.
We’ve also gone to the post office, which used to be a federal institution a lifetime ago, back in the days of Miracle on 34th Street, but still it has some federal ties and regulations. I remember one time going to the local post office, and we always ask because we don’t want to make anybody angry or cause trouble, and there was a gentleman there who I took to be Muslim. We thought, “Oh, is this going to work?” and he was like, “Oh yeah, of course, come on in!”
We’ve had people give us brownies, and we had an ice cream truck stop and just give the kids little ice creams. It can be a wonderful experience. It just takes a little prep in getting people motivated. You too can do this at home with your school or your homeschool group or church. Look for opportunities. The door is still open. People still remember this and many still include it within their cultural memories. You at least get a chance to say something.
When the City of Roseville’s own website is proclaiming the gospel, I think that’s a win on a number of levels. We’ve established a principle that we can’t do this, but this is still a freedom we have in this country and it’s not violating any laws. So anyway, Christmas caroling – go do it.
The recommendation I had been planning is completely not Christmas. Is that okay?
And it could be controversial and potentially offend people, but I’m going to go with it anyway.
I know, right? So adding to my recommendation last week, which I mentioned in Toxic Empathy she gave more details about abortion than I’d ever heard, I forgot to mention she also gives details about the so-called sex transformation surgeries that I’d never heard, that was very eye-opening.
But this one is another, and it will actually help you have a biblical perspective, which is a podcast by Elisha Childers, who I often recommend. She’s interviewing a woman named Katy Faust, who wrote a book called Them Before Us, and it’s about having child-centered policies. Basically she’s claiming that all the stuff we do with children in politics and government tends to be adult-centric, all about our wants and our needs.
One of the key things she talks about is the realities of what happens in order to facilitate IVF, and how this is a very parent-centered process that disregards the children that are being created and treats them as commodities in many different ways. It was again a lot of things I had never heard, never knew, and I think a lot of people don’t know those things, so I would recommend at least listening to the podcast.
There are points where I don’t agree with them because they start into natural law, that there are things we can observe from the world and we don’t need scripture, so I don’t appreciate everything she has to say, but I do think her assessment of our culture’s obsession with adults having whatever they want, having children however they want, whatever kind of life they want is on-point, particularly in the field of IVF and surrogacy and all this. There are things I again just never knew.
I remember learning a little bit about snowflake adoption, which is the purchase of embryos that you then adopt, carry to term, and deliver, but it’s a purchase because they are considered property rather than children, which is just crazy.
The process that they go through in order to even just fertilize the eggs, where they’re forcing your body to produce large numbers of eggs and then they’re fertilizing 10-15 of them, and then they’re looking at them and taking the ones they think are most genetically profitable and useful to potentially implant. So essentially they create 15 people and hope that one will survive, and purposely disregard others as medical waste or freeze them. It’s kind of scary what they do in that process.
Brave New World. Remember, Christmas starts with the murder of children, which is something we’ll get to next time.
Well, on that cheery note teasing next time, we will see you then. Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, Dear Listener, please visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
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