At Carnegie Hall, gospel singer Wintley Phipps delivers an amazing rendition of Amazing Grace. In his explanation of the song he says,

“A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano. Probably the most famous on this slave scale was written by John Newton, who used to be the captain of a slave ship, and many believe he heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant. And it has a haunting, haunting plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage. And we feel it. We feel it. It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.”

I love that kind of insight.  Mr. Phipps then delivers a stirring performance bringing the audience to its feet.

Enjoy.

From Reuters:

Among Catholic-Protestant splits on display during Pope Benedict’s visit to Germany is a disagreement over whether Martin Luther, the 16th century reformer who launched the split in western Christianity, has now been rehabilitated.

Pope Leo X cast Luther out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1521 with a vociferous decree branding him “the slave of a depraved mind” and calling his followers a “pernicious and heretical sect.” But his present-day successor, Benedict, spoke so positively of Luther’s deep faith during a visit to the monk’s old monastery in Erfurt on Friday that Germany’s top Protestant bishop announced Luther had effectively been rehabilitated.

“Luther has experienced a de facto rehabilitation today through this appreciation of his work,” Bishop Nikolaus Schneider, head of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), announced to journalists on Friday after talks with Benedict. “We heard this very clearly from the mouth of the pope,” he said. “What follows now formally is another question … but that’s not so important for me.”

Vatican spokesman Rev Federico Lombardi begged to differ on Saturday. “To say that would be exaggerated,” he told journalists in Freiburg, the last stop on the pope’s four-day tour of his homeland.

Read it all.

Nathan Finn offer this for your consideration:

Every semester, I teach a couple of church history survey courses at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The first course, Church History: Patristic and Medieval, more or less covers the period from the end of the first century AD to the dawn of the sixteenth century. One of the topics I address is the crusades. Many students are very interested in the crusades. They hope that understanding the religious wars between Christians and Muslims will help us better navigate our own contemporary context, particularly the War on Terror and growing emphasis on evangelical missionary work in unevangelized Muslim nations.

Unfortunately, the crusades are white hot landmines on the battlefield of political correctness. Many on the cultural Left use the crusades as an argument for secularism, or at least the muffling of (conservative) religious voices in the public square. They strongly imply that America in particular and Western Culture in general are to blame for most of the ills around us. Some even insinuate that we deserve the scorn of Islamic terrorists, though to be clear, the Left believes that the terrorists take their scorn too far in resorting to violence. Not surprisingly, many leftwing Christians make similar arguments. Just read the reports of any national gathering of the mainline denomination of your choice over the past eight or ten years.

Read the rest.

From Phil Cooke:

In filmmaker Ken Burns’ remarkable series on the Civil War, historian Shelby Foote describes General Ulysses S. Grant as having “4am Courage.” He was describing how cool Grant was under fire, and even if awakened at four in the morning with a battlefield emergency, he wouldn’t be startled. He’d keep a cool head and make strong decisions. That kind of calm comes from FOCUS. Focus allows you to push out all the different and often conflicting opinions, voices, and hysterics that everyone around you is hearing, and concentrate on the single most important task of the moment.

When sudden bad news happens, are you shocked, startled, or freaked out? Or are you able to focus, look straight at the challenge, and make a good decision?

The truth is, “4 am courage” is something we need 24 hours of the day…

Check out these great photos from Triggerpit:

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is one of the oldest continuously operating churches in the world. The structure is built over the cave that tradition marks as the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth, and thus it is considered sacred by Christians.

The structure is actually a combination of two churches, with a crypt beneath—the Grotto of the Nativity—where Jesus was born.

See the rest.

I am delighted to invite you to join me in Israel for Lent in 2012.

One of the most profound and moving experiences of my life was my visit to the Holy Land in 2005.  Imagine walking the streets of Bethsaida, visiting the home of Peter, standing on the steps at Caesarea that Paul walked down as he set sail for Rome, walking through the wilderness of En-gedi, praying in Gethsemane, climbing Temple Mount and visiting the empty tomb.  Words could barely describe what I felt.  I would love for you to join me, and my friend Wayne Skaff, for this amazing experience of visiting the land of the Bible.

As a part of our trip, I will be leading us in a Scripture lesson each day, connecting the Bible stories the holy sites we will visit. We will be in the hands of an experienced tour leader as this is Wayne’s 32nd trip to Israel.  Below is an overview of the trip and our itinerary.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Here’s the itinerary:

Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Leave for Tel Aviv

Wednesday, 14 March
Arrive in Tel Aviv.  Rest at our hotel on the Mediterranean.

Thursday, 15 March
Caesarea (Mediterranean home of Herod, Roman hippodrome, “Pontius Pilate stone”, site of Paul’s port of landing after his second and third missionary journeys as well as his trial before Felix, Festus and Agrippa), Mt. Carmel, Megiddo, Nazareth and Cana.

Friday, 16 March
Golan Heights, Caesarea Philippi, Dan

Saturday, 17 March
Galilee – Capernaum (Synagogue and Peter’s home), Site of the Sermon on the Mount, Seashore where Jesus called His disciples to be “fishers of men.”

Sunday, 18 March
Jordan River valley to Jericho, Mt. Olives and Garden of Gethsemane

Monday, 19 March
Jerusalem (Temple Mount and Old City) and Bethlehem (Church of the Nativity, Shepherd’s Field)

Tuesday, 20 March
Jerusalem – Caiaphas’ house, City of David, prayer time at Western Wall (“Wailing Wall”), walk the Via Delarosa, Mt. Zion, Upper Room.

Wednesday, 21 March
Jerusalem – Israeli Museum to view the Dead Sea Scrolls and other treasures, visit Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum), Holy Communion at the Garden Tomb.

Thursday, 22 March
Qumran, Masada and the Dead Sea

Friday, 23 March
Some will depart for the USA.  Others will continue on to Petra

Optional Extra – Trip to Petra, Jordan
Friday 23 March
Eliat

Saturday, 24 March
Petra, Jordan

Sunday, 25 March
Depart for the USA

For more information (including costs and to sign up) contact Nancy Sapakoff (NSapakoff@WeAreStAndrews.com).

Next year, Jerusalem!

Major Dick Winters died last week in central Pennsylvania following a battle with Parkinsons Disease.  Major Winters, the focus of Stephen Ambrose’s book, and HBO miniseries, “Band of Brothers,” was a WWII hero – although he decried the usage of that term with regard to his actions.

From a distance, I found him fascinating and I wonder about a country which produced such men.

Winters, writing in his book, “Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters”, begins Chapter 1 with these words:

I am still haunted by the names and faces of young men, young airborne troopers who never had the opportunity to return home after the war and begin their lives anew. Like most veterans who have shared the hardship of combat, I live with flashbacks–distant memories of an attack on a battery of German artillery on D-Day, an assault on Carentan, a bayonet attack on a dike in Holland, the cold of Bastogne[...] If you had a man who was killed, you looked at him and hoped that he had found peace in death. I’m not sure whether they were fortunate or unfortunate to get out of the war so early. So many men died so that others could live. No one understands why. 
To find a quiet peace is the dream of every soldier. For some it takes longer than others. In my own experience I have discovered that it is far easier to find quiet than to find peace. True peace must come from within oneself. As my wartime buddies join their fallen comrades at an alarming rate, distant memories resurface. The hard times fade and the flashbacks go back to friendly times, to buddies with whom I shared a unique bond, to men who are my brothers in every sense of the word. I live with these men every day.

Major Winters describes Easy Company’s assault on Brecourt Manor on D-Day:

Read the AP story.

h/t: Jessie Robinson

On any list of great English theologians, the name of Richard Hooker would appear at or near the top. His masterpiece is The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Its philosophical base is Aristotelian, with a strong emphasis on natural law eternally planted by God in creation. On this foundation, all positive laws of Church and State are developed from Scriptural revelation, ancient tradition, reason, and experience.

The occasion of his writing was the demand of English Puritans for a reformation of Church government. Calvin had established in Geneva a system whereby each congregation was ruled by a commission comprising two thirds laymen elected annually by the congregation and one third clergy serving for life. The English Puritans held that no church not so governed could claim to be Christian.

Hooker replies to this assertion, but in the process he raises and considers fundamental questions about the authority and legitimacy of government (religious and secular), about the nature of law, and about various kinds of law, including the laws of physics as well as the laws of England. In the course of his book he sets forth the Anglican view of the Church, and the Anglican approach to the discovery of religious truth, and explains how this differs from the position of the Puritans, on the one hand, and the adherents of the Pope, on the other. He is very heavy reading, but well worth it. (He says, on the first page of Chapter I: “Those unto whom we shall seem tedious are in no wise injuried by us, seeing that it lies in their own hands to spare themselves the labor they are unwilling to endure.” This translates into modern English as: “If you can’t take the intellectual heat, get out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand a book that makes you think, go read the comics.”) The effect of the book has been considerable. Hooker greatly influenced John Locke, and (both directly and through Locke), American political philosophy in the late 1700′s. Although Hooker is unsparing in his censure of what he believes to be the errors of Rome, his contemporary, Pope Clement VIII (died 1605), said of the book: “It has in it such seeds of eternity that it will abide until the last fire shall consume all learning.”

Many regard his sermon, “A Learned discourse of Justification,” as his best short work.  In an earlier sermon, Hooker had expressed the hope of seeing in Heaven many who had been Romanists on earth. A Puritan preacher took him to task for this, saying that since the Romanists did not believe the doctrine of Justification by Faith, they could not be justified. Hooker replied at length in this sermon, in which (1) he sets forth the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, and agrees with his opponent that the official theology of Rome is defective on this point; (2) he defends his assertion that those who do not rightly understand the means that God has provided for our salvation may nonetheless be saved by it, in which connection he says: “God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.” His sermon is often bound with the Laws, and is also available in the paperback volume Faith and Works (ed. Philip Edgecumbe Hughes, Morehouse-Barlow, Wilton CN 06897, ISBN 0-8192-1315-2) [Note: this book is out of print but should be available used]