Volume 3: Issue 3 | May 2020
Explanation of the Third Commandment
"You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain."
-- Exodus 20:7
The third commandment is a little difficult to understand. Murder and theft we readily understand, and they provoke powerful emotions when we suffer them or witness them. But how does one take God's name in vain, and why does God regard it so seriously?
We should notice a similar thought in the Lord's Prayer. The first request we make of God is 'hallowed be your name.' Clearly Jesus knew the importance of God's name. If this is the first prayer we are to offer, it must have a fundamental importance.
Notice that the same thought occurs at the beginning of our catechism. The purpose of life is to glorify and enjoy God forever. Taking God's name in vain is the opposite of glorifying Him.
And notice that an opposing thought is the beginning of humanity's fall under the wrath of God: “for even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but... their foolish heart was darkened (Romans 1:21).”
The Ten Commandments thus follow a definite logic. First of all, let only God be your God – none other exists, none other has saved you. Second, having resolved to worship God, do not veer off the path by erecting an idol and worshiping it. When God sees your idol, he sees not himself but instead a rival for your love and worship. Third, having resolved to worship God, do not cheapen your worship by taking it lightly. If you take worship lightly, you take the God who is worshiped lightly, and your worship becomes an insult. Fourth, do not make your own affairs more important than the worship of God. Six-sevenths of your life is available for your own affairs; the least you can do is to remember and honor God during the one-seventh of your time he has reserved for himself. We should therefore lift God’s name often to praise him in worship. His blessings are many, his acts are perfect, and his love for us endures forever. We are to hallow God’s name daily in personal and family worship and weekly with his church.
However, we should lift God’s name rarely to buttress our own truthfulness. First, because we should always tell the truth, and our yes and no should be trustworthy already. “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil (Matthew 5:37).” Second, because we do not know the future, and so our promises should be few and carefully made. “If you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. But if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin. You shall be careful to do what has passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth (Deuteronomy 23:21-23).” “When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay (Ecclesiastes 5:4-5).” Finally, we must not play games with our vows. Jesus rightly mocked the Pharisees who taught things like swearing by the gold of the Temple was binding, but swearing by the Temple was not (Matthew 23:16-21). When we have to take a vow, we are only to vow in God's name and then seek to fulfill our oath rapidly and not evade or deceive in any way (Deuteronomy 6:13).
Marriage vows are among the most common and most difficult of all vows. Both Moses and Jesus connect vows with divorce. The prophet Malachi wrote, “ And this second thing you do. You cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, ‘Why does he not?’ Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant (Malachi 2:13-14).” Let the married remember the third commandment, especially when they are tempted to break their marriage vows. These vows were taken in God’s presence. We vowed to be faithful in sickness and in health, for better and for worse. Marriage vows are taken “until death do us part.”
Finally, the Third Commandment ends with a warning. People may not respect God's name, or enforce vows made to him, but he will most definitely hold guilty those who break their vows. Even if American state laws countenance “no fault” divorce, God says plainly, “the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”
-- John D. Edgar
Atlantic Presbytery During the Pandemic
We have all continued to gather each Lord’s Day morning for worship, with prayers, song, and Word. Broomall and Elkins Park used the Web-Ex platform, and members have invited folk from other cities to join them. Members of Ridgefield Park have joined Elkins Park. Coldenham-Newburgh used Zoom for its 11:00 a.m. worship. Walton, Providence, Hazleton, and White Lake used Facebook Live Stream, and C-N used it for a 9:30 a.m. meditation. In Cambridge, Noah Bailey recorded his sermon on Saturday evening, and then the congregation listened to it the next day on Sermon Audio, with the Psalms and a worship order emailed to the congregation.
Most pastors continued their existing sermon series: Elkins Park “Bible Stories Everyone Should Know,” Providence “Short Books of the Bible,” White Lake “People Jesus Engaged with After His Resurrection,” Hazleton “Ephesians,” Cambridge “The Book of Acts,” and Walton “Matthew.”
Attendance was the same or higher for every congregation, much higher for those using Facebook Live Stream. Zack Dotson reported up to 1400 clicks on his early morning meditations on Psalm 23, Bill Chellis a high of 600 from Sullivan County, and Daniel Howe a high of 651 contacts in the morning and 384 in the evening. Paul Brace wrote: “It has been an opportunity for ‘community spread’ of our live streams in my neighborhood, especially through my UCC [United Church of Christ] contacts.” White Lake had up to 185 views with 34 making comments: many are people White Lake had earlier connections with. Dave Coon wrote, “This public impact has made us think that we would like to continue live-streaming our service after we are allowed to meet together in person.” I heard the same thought from others using Facebook Live Streaming.
Question: Is there a way to follow up with those who tune in to the Facebook Live Streaming – for example, by soliciting prayer requests? Offering something short to read? Telling them how to donate? Providence is discussing setting up a way to give online.
Midweek prayer meetings continued, either by Web-Ex or Zoom, with much better attendance than usual. Sessions met by conference call, Web-Ex, or Zoom. Several times a week, Alex Tabaka sent meditations on different Psalms of Ascent (120-134) to Broomall members.
In many congregations, elders regularly telephoned members. Broomall divided the congregation into fourths for an elder to call each week. The next week elders called a different fourth. In general, people kept in good contact with one another.
The White Lake food pantry continued with its usual schedule, with some emergency deliveries to folks needing help. The Elkins Park young people did a food drive from their church members and a few others nearby with whom they have contacts and donated the food to a local food bank.
With one exception, congregational finances were not much changed. C-N, however, lost its income from the daycare center that rents their facilities, so their balance dropped sharply after January. There were some job losses in most of our churches, but in general people worked from home or were still going to work. In Hazleton some had overtime work. More than one person got sick, but none so seriously as of the writing of this report that a test came back positive for the Wuhan Covid-19 coronavirus.
I am reminded of the motto of the Reformation Translation Fellowship, adopted in 1949 in a far worse situation than ours: “The Word of God is not bound.” May this crisis turn the minds and hearts of many towards God, and may we as congregations and as a Presbytery know how to reap God’s fields, white to the harvest.
-- Bill Edgar
April 21, 2020
Getting to Know You:
Kevin & Amanda DiBello, Broomall RPC
Where are you each from?
Kevin and Amanda - We both grew up in Delaware County, Pennsylvania close to the Delaware border. Kevin grew up in Chichester and Amanda in Garnet Valley, about ten minutes from each other.
What did you believe about God growing up? What did your family teach you? Did you go to church? Where?
Amanda - I was raised in a believing home where we were very much involved in our local church. My parents taught me the importance of loving God, the value of prayer, and that Jesus came to die on a cross for our sins. I attended Brandywine Valley Baptist Church in Delaware. Growing up in that church was a blessing but I never truly understood or was taught the whole of the Gospel. Our family was very involved in youth group. Looking back it was much more of a social club than edification or education in the faith. In late high school, I wanted to make my faith my own and not something I believed in just because my parents did. After this time, I still wrestled with my faith. I did not come to understand the Gospel and what it required until many years later.
Kevin - I grew up in an unbelieving family and household. I really had no understanding of God, but I would have told you that I believed in a god. In my early to mid teens I guess I could have been considered a postmodern theist who would have said he was against “organized religion.” If I followed anyone, it was probably Bob Dylan. I remember one time as a boy I asked my parents about the Bible. They had told me that it was a book of made up stories. My dad was raised Roman Catholic, and my mom did not have any meaningful exposure to Christianity. She did have a beloved grandmother and aunt who were members at a PCUSA church. We never attended any churches with the exception of maybe an occasional Roman Catholic baptism.
How did things change as you went through high school and beyond?
Amanda - Throughout high school I was very involved in Youth Group at my church. It definitely kept me out of trouble and I am very thankful that the Lord protected me during these years. However, I often went to Youth Group to spend time with my friends and not in a quest to learn about Jesus. I attended several “Missions Trips” where we bonded as a team serving others in various communities/states, but the messages we received were only feelings based and lacking in sustenance. When I went off to college, I did not have a desire to attend church or any Christian campus ministries. Unfortunately, at this time I fell into a “party oriented” life. After spending a year and a half at university, I was very unhappy and decided to come home and commute to a community college. I spent a summer in Haiti tutoring a missionary family with six children ages five to fifteen. During this time I realized how much the Lord provided for me. I began to study the Word of God more, but I don’t think I had access to good resources that would help me to grow in a deeper and richer understanding.
Kevin - In high school at about age sixteen God started working in my life. It began with a girl I met in high school. She told me that in order for her dad to let me date her I would have to be a Christian. I assured her, “I can do that,” and asked what would I have to do to become a Christian. She gave me a few gospel tracts from her church (First Baptist Church of Ogden) and told me that I had to pray, acknowledge that I was a sinner, tell Jesus that I believed in Him and that He died for my sins, read a prayer on the back of this gospel tract, and then I would be saved. I did these things as sincerely as I could. I remember thinking it seemed too easy. Not long after that her family told me that I needed to get baptized, so I reluctantly agreed. Years went by with little to no growth spiritually that I recall. However, the Lord did use these experiences and the people from this Baptist church to protect me and to open my heart to the truth. I am also thankful to have had inherited a high view of scripture from Ogden Baptist church, even though I didn’t read or understand it much. By God’s grace, at around the age of twenty, I began to really thirst and desire to know God. I began to learn and to trust more in Him especially as life became more difficult. I discovered Charles Spurgeon around this time, which was a blessing because I didn’t know that Christians could think like that. By then I had met Amanda. I was digging deeper to find and understand the truth, and I started to serve more frequently at the Baptist church. It was not until Amanda and I were engaged that we together really began to want to know what we believed and why we believed it.
How did you meet? Get together?
Kevin - We met through Christina, who grew up at Amanda’s church. Christina was Amanda’s older sister’s best friend. I met Christina because she worked at a barbershop and cut my hair. During one haircut, Christina had an epiphany: I, and her best friend’s sister Amanda, would be a good match. Praise God! Christina and I were both believers and big fans of music. I told her I was doing open mics with friends in Media, PA. Christina was a talented singer and wanted to join me. I invited her to sing while I played the guitar and added, “Why don’t you bring Amanda along so we can meet?” We didn’t meet then, but did eventually, dated for a year, and then got married.
What led you to God?
Amanda- My family’s church was my home away from home. In high school I wanted to make my faith my own. The Lord blessed me with a strong conscience, and I always thought about pleasing my parents. After college, Kevin and I together began to take our faith more seriously, especially after we were married. We began reading a lot and we came to Reformed convictions.
Kevin- Is this a trick question? God! (See above.)
What led you to visit Broomall Church?
Amanda - While dating and after marrying, we attended a United Methodist church with my family. Kevin never liked the “worship style” and topical (at best) preaching which had little or nothing to do with the Bible. By the power of God’s Spirit, we realized we were spiritually starved and that we NEEDED to hear the Word of God preached and taught. Kevin began searching up local reformed churches. We also prayed that we might find a historically reformed church that was confessional, sang the Psalms (we didn’t even know that exclusive psalmody was a thing yet), practiced church discipline, and that we would hopefully not have to leave in twenty years due to liberalism. We visited Broomall RPCNA and a couple of other churches. We listened to some sermons by Alex Tabaka and read some of Bill Edgar’s articles on the church website before coming to worship. We really loved what we heard and read.
What led you to join Broomall Church?
Kevin and Amanda - The doctrine, preaching, and commitment to historic biblical Christianity brought us in, but I think it is safe to say that the people and community there made us stay. We did not yet understand (and still don’t) so much of the richness of reformed theology and the history of the RPCNA, so it was still a time of much education, for example, coming to convictions on various things like the regulative principle of worship and infant baptism. We had never felt so loved, wanted, and appreciated at a church. We had never been shown such grace and hospitality by anyone, let alone by fellow believers. In all our years at various churches, we had never even been invited over to someone’s house for dinner. On our first visit to Broomall, Bill and Gretchen Edgar invited us over to their house for dinner. On top of that, we knew that the people here cared about our souls and the elders were not afraid to challenge you out of love. We wanted to be with the people who cared about our souls.
How has God helped you in the last few years?
Kevin and Amanda - God by His grace has grown us both significantly, and although we still have much to learn, people to serve, and plenty of sin to mortify, it has been an invaluable and blessed couple of years in the Lord together. God has given us a greater love for others, for His Word, and zeal for the lost. He has also blessed us with such a wonderful family of God. It has been very hard in these ways as well because there is a weight that comes with the high calling of a Christian, but we have seen God’s faithfulness through it all and we are just in awe.
What are you most thankful for at this point in your lives?
Kevin and Amanda - God’s faithfulness, our marriage, Christ’s church, and our family in the Lord!
-- Amanda and Kevin DiBello
Songs of Ascents In Time of Quarantine: Like Mount Zion
"Those who trust in the Lord
Are like Mount Zion,
Which cannot be moved, but abides forever."
-- Psalm 125:1
Security is a primal, driving human desire. Everyone desperately craves it. We want security – assurance – that the things we value and love will endure. This is at least one of the reasons there is so much fear and despair in the shadow of this pandemic. The security we had come to presume would simply always be there is now threatened.
Life, family, job, money, home, relationships – people crave security. We crave it because we know that we do not truly have it. We know from experience that things break down; they pass away, fail, and fade. To quote W.B. Yeats' poem (The Second Coming, 1920) that is sure to make the rounds whenever current events turn even the slightest bit apocalyptic—“Things fall apart...”
Enter the multi-billion dollar insurance industry. We crave true, lasting security, and we know we do not have it. So we pay extraordinary amounts of money for what we believe to be the next best thing, insurance against future disasters. But neither insurers nor those who buy insurance can perfectly foresee the future. Unknown disasters await us.
Right now, around the globe, modern 21st century society is getting a little taste of what people have always known to be true. Nothing in this world is secure. Life can change, and change completely and utterly, overnight. To look for security and stability in the things of this world is to chase after smoke with one’s bare hands.
Therein lies the high drama of Psalm 125, verse 1. God’s Word enters like a thunderbolt into the fading, passing character of this present age—“Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.” Enslaved to sin, we look for security in temporal goods, but are destined to fail. Jesus Christ alone offers that which will never fail and never fade. The inheritance of the saints is “incorruptible [(ἄ)φθαρτον] and undefiled [(ἀ)μίαντον] and does not fade away [(ἀ)μάραντον],” as the Apostle Peter tells us (1 Peter 1:4). In Christ is absolute, unqualified security. It is not to be found anywhere in this present age, for “the world is passing away, and the lust of it,” as the Apostle John tells us, “but he who does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17 NKJV).
The “place” of absolute, unqualified security is in Christ. In Christ and through Christ we have come, not to Jerusalem to which ancient Israelite pilgrims ascended three times yearly, but to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb. 12:22). It is in Christ and through Christ that we have received a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28).
Psalm 125 is a celebration of true security, the security of the LORD. Even if and when “the falcon cannot hear the falconer” (Yeats), the promise of the LORD to His people remains unbroken and unbreakable—“I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deut. 31:6; Heb. 13:5).
Step #1 in time of Quarantine (and in time of Ease): Trust the Lord. Those who trust him are like Mount Zion (Jerusalem) and cannot be moved. In Christ, we have the irrevocable promise of eternal life that cannot be taken away. Trust the Lord!
-- Alex Tabaka
Broomall, 2020
Lucidity or Profundity?
Reprint from the Reformed Presbyterian and Covenanter 1893, February, p. 51.
There is a large class of persons who regard lucidity as shallowness, who confound profundity with obscurity, big words with deep meaning. For the benefit of such the following "free translation" of verses 14-16 of the 139th Psalm is quoted. It occurs on page 20 of "The First Adam and The Last Adam" by William Morris.
"My unevolved essence – the generic and psychic origin of my own existence – was not unobserved by thee, when I was prepared in secret and was embryonically embroidered underneath the surface of the earth. Thou didst superintend my vesicle of evolution, the generic sperm cell, whence my soul is derived and in the purpose of thy creative wisdom, all my constituents – physical, mental, moral, and corporeal – were prospectively designed; what they should be, and what time the process would be complete."
By means of two pages of analysis this 'free translation' is obtained. Some people can understand better the old, and are not ashamed to say so.
Hay and EpiPens: A Proverbs Exposition
by Bill Edgar
Reprint from the Geneva College blog, March 5, 2020
"The people curse him who holds back grain,
but a blessing is on the head of him who sells it."
-- Proverbs 11:26
Family story: my great-great grandfather Coleman, a farmer near Lisbon in upstate New York near the St. Lawrence River, one summer harvested the usual crop of hay during a drought, because his low-lying land was near the river. Even though hay prices were rising rapidly, he sold his crop to his usual customer at the normal price. Several years later, when his first child went off to school, his customer ordered his own sons to protect John Coleman’s son, small for his age, a blessing for both father and son Coleman. (Today’s urban schools, by the way, have nothing in the way of violence on many 19th Century rural schools.)
America’s market-oriented farmers today sell grain on the open market, aiming for the highest price. Timing sales (holding back grain) rarely hurts anyone. If Americans don’t sell grain, then Australia’s farmers will. But in a world without international markets and good transportation, a farmer who withheld grain from sale to take advantage of a poor harvest would make neighbors go hungry, or bankrupt, when the price later rose sharply. The grain was his, of course, and he would be within his rights not to sell it until he chose, but hungry and cash-strapped neighbors would curse him. Greed for a high price would show lack of neighborly love. “But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him (I John 3:17)?”
What is a contemporary equivalent of withholding grain? Life-saving medicines! When Mylan acquired a monopoly on the patent-expired EpiPen, they raised its price six hundred per cent in ten years, increasing profits and executive salaries hugely. It was legal. But it caused real hardships for people who need to carry an EpiPen in case of anaphylaxis caused by an allergic reaction. So people and Congress justifiably cursed Mylan and its soulless executives. Those who defend such corporate behavior in the name of capitalist economics, or market wisdom, reveal their own commitment to ideology rather than to love of neighbor. In contrast, when Jonas Salk, who developed the first successful polio vaccine in 1955, was asked who owned its patent, he answered, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
People who control products necessary for life, like food or medicines, and decline to press their economic advantage to its fullest show the quality of mercy, of which Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy (Matthew 5:7).” Solomon teaches that there will be a blessing on the head of such people, from neighbors no doubt, but also from God. The wise will covet such blessings more than the windfall profit from the providentially granted possession of grain in a time of poor harvest. That windfall profit comes with people cursing the profiteer.
Gender Fluidity... in the Barnyard?
Talking at the Y the other day after a swim, a friend opined that there was no real difference between male and
female. His proof? “With animals you have to look underneath to tell which is which.” Now there was a city boy talking – no personal memory of farm life left in his family!
I said that when I was young, we spent summers on a dairy farm. My brothers and I helped put the cows across the road to a new pasture for the day’s grazing. We would yell at them, run toward them, and herd them toward the crossing. There the farmer’s daughter, Dorothea Millen, would unhook the electric fence, so that the cows could pass through, cross the road, and walk on to new meadow. In late afternoon, we would help bring the cows back across the road. They went on their own to the barn for milking. They didn’t need herding at milking time.
When I was very young, the farmer, Mr. Millen, kept his own bull, along with horses. The bull was tethered to a stake under the apple tree not far from our cabin. He had a ring through his nose, so Mr. Millen could manage him. But charge at the bull to make him run? Never! The bull would charge you. Both the cows and the bull had their horns uncut, but we were afraid only of the bull. There is a reason for an old expression, “Charge like a bull.” There was never a similar expression, “Charge like a cow.”
Not all cows were always docile, of course. They could kick. And I remember one heifer named Rusty who refused to respect the fences, electrified or not. Mr. Millen put a wooden frame around her head to keep her from jumping fences. It didn’t stop her, so the cry would go up, “Rusty’s loose again,” and we had to help chase her down and bring her home. But no one imagined the folly of thinking of her as a bull trapped in a heifer’s body, so that what she needed was to have her udder cut off, some male parts attached, and bull hormones given.
This being a traditional farm, there was also a pigpen and chicken coops. When we were very young, we would go into the chicken coops and look for eggs. (We fed the pigs, but stayed out of the pen. Pigs are dangerous.) Besides the hens, there were roosters. They too could be dangerous, but we were allowed to mingle with them, and feed them corn when we threw corn to the chickens. Every now and then, however, a rooster would get aggressive. There is an old expression, “Strut like a rooster;” no one struts like a hen. One day my younger brother John ran up to the farmhouse with angry tears: a rooster had attacked him, he said. So the farmer went down the hill with him and asked him to point out the offending rooster. Soon caught, the rooster ended up under the apple tree on the wooden block used for cutting off the heads of fowl destined for dinner. Down came the ax, the rooster lost his head, blood spurted from his neck, he ran around a little, and then collapsed.
My mother and we prepared the rooster for supper. First came the scalding water to soften its feathers, which we all helped to pull out. Then she got a knife and cut dinner open, removing the gizzard, liver, and heart, which could be eaten, and discarding the rest of the insides, like the intestines and the lungs. Cut it up and it was ready to cook. My brother found eating his adversary for dinner quite satisfying.
How in the world can queer and gender theorists talk about “gender fluidity” as though it were something real? At least two things are in play. There is an unrecognized Gnostic commitment today that only the soul (mind, personality) matters, and one’s actual body has nothing to do with his/her/its/their/ze/sie/hir “real identity.” But there is also the increasing distance from farm life, where most people lived with domesticated animals through most of history. People today hardly know animals, except for occasional visits to a zoo, Animal Planet on TV, often-neutered pets surgically made unable to reproduce, and the occasional bird or squirrel in the backyard. So people today don’t have the visceral understanding that animals not only come in distinct species, but each species also has precisely two versions of it: male and female.
Christians, too, in our day, easily forget that the Bible emphasizes human commonality with animals. There is the common blessing: “Be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:22, 28) There is the common sexual identity of male and female for each animal. God told Noah to bring the animals into the Ark two by two. “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female.” (Genesis 6:19) God made Man alone in his image and likeness, able to love God, pray to him, and deliberately serve him or disobey. That difference from the animals, however, does not obliterate the reality of Man also being like the animals, with two sexes, male and female, more alike than different because both are human, but still two sexes, male and female.
After I finished this short essay, I was talking to a middle school teacher. His eighth-grade class had been talking about endangered species. He supplied the name of one of them, the white rhinoceros, adding that only two of them remain, both female unfortunately. Up went a hand. “Why don’t they just turn one of the females into a male?” In this Philadelphia school of elite students, there was nodding agreement, not the expected laughter at such an impossible suggestion. How to explain to thirteen-year-olds that, no, you can’t really turn a female rhino into a male rhino? What they have been taught is that gender is fluid, and one can even go back and forth between male and female. And they know nothing from experience about animals to contradict what they had been taught. How sad.
-- Bill Edgar
Thoughtful Questions I've Been Asked During the Past Month
1. What in the world does Ecclesiastes 7:16-18 mean?
"Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them."
-- Ecclesiastes 7:16-18, ESV
Look at the preceding verse: “ In my vain life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing.” (Ecclesiastes 7:15, ESV) The person who strives to be righteous and to be wise often hopes that his righteousness and wisdom will result in long life. But God has no respect for the person who hopes to win long life by his own efforts at being good: those were the Pharisees at their best, and Jesus had little good to say about them. So the Preacher who writes Ecclesiastes has seen the “righteous” man perishing in his righteousness.
Likewise, those who throw God’s law to the wind and live wicked and foolish lives tell themselves that this way of living will be good. But in reality, it will arouse God’s anger just as much as the overly (self)-righteous person does. Nevertheless, the Preacher has seen such people sometimes live long lives as well as die young.
Length of life is in God’s hands, and we cannot attain it by being either righteous or wicked. So how should one live? Go ahead and live, try this with one hand and that with the other, and the one who fears God will in the end not go wrong.
2. Does God punish his children?
“My friend, if you belong to Christ you can be confident that your suffering is not punishment for your sin. Because someone has already been punished for your sin so you won’t have to be.”
-- The Wisdom of God: Seeing Jesus in the Psalms and Wisdom Books by Nancy Guthrie (currently being studied in Broomall RP WMF).
My friend, if you belong to Christ you can be confident that when you sin he will deal with you as a father deals with his son. Every one of my sons can testify to being spanked by their father. It hurt. It was punishment for doing or saying something forbidden. Afterwards, the son remained my son, and my love remained unchanged. In fact, the punishment was an act of love. Just so with God, his Word says. Whatever he does to you, it will be for your good. It will be just. And you will remain God’s son (or daughter) because in Christ you have been adopted as his son, your sins forgiven, and the work of remaking you in Christ’s image begun. But don’t for a moment imagine that suffering in this life never has any connection to a specific sin you may have committed. In fact, the Word tells believers not to despise the “chastening” of the Lord. (See Hebrews 12:5 quoting Proverbs 3:11 KJV) When David presumptuously counted how many soldiers he had, God punished him. (II Samuel 24, I Chronicles 21) When David had Bathsheba’s husband Uriah killed, God punished him by taking the life of his child, even while he forgave David’s sin. (II Samuel 12) So, no, if you belong to Christ you cannot be confident that your suffering has no connection to your sin. Paul sums up God’s dealings with his own straying people as part of his instructions concerning the Lord’s Supper:
"Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” (I Corinthians 11:28-32)
-- Bill Edgar
Hospitality and My Conversion
by Gretchen D. Edgar
Reprint from Midwest Presbyterial, April 2004.
How many of you were born into believing families?
How many of you are from non-believing families?
I come from a family of the old American elite, old Dutch from New Amsterdam and old English from Boston and the Mayflower, all highly educated – a family which had long since rejected Christ and now looked to science and culture for meaning. Both my grandfathers were engineers, one for DuPont, and the other for General Motors. My father did research at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School with his Ph.D. and M.D. degrees from Columbia University in New York. There was music and art, foreign travel, and a Quaker boarding school for me – and no knowledge of God. The only exceptions were my stepmother and her mother, both loyal but somewhat confused Episcopalians.
So when I met John and Bill Edgar in the 1960’s at Swarthmore College – I met John first, but I married Bill – I found their ideas disruptive and disturbing. They were Christians at a college known locally as the Kremlin on the Crum, the creek running through the college grounds. Swarthmore was liberal intellectually, morally, socially, and politically, and very proud. John and Bill were good guys, even if they did not think like most of the Swarthmore world. John would say rude things like, “You are a sinner,” in a very matter of fact way as if to say, “Everyone knows that!” But John also noticed when I had a cold and got me an envelope full of vitamin C tablets from his mother.
Before inviting me to church to worship, John invited me to help him with his job cleaning the church. It was as modest and plain as the Quaker Meeting House I attended for a while as a child. Later, John got me a job in the kitchen at White Lake Camp. He knew I wasn’t a Christian, I knew I wasn’t a Christian, everyone else at Camp knew I wasn’t a Christian, and I knew that they knew – but everyone was kind, friendly, and put me at ease. They were hospitable. John, of course, did tell me in private, since I was also a counselor's helper in a cabin, “Don’t corrupt the kids with your wrong ideas!” And he must have understood that I would respect this requirement, because I did at that point respect Jesus as a moral leader and an excellent example of a righteous man. Of course, I knew nothing about Jesus, I’d only read the Gospels with blind eyes, but I thought that he was a good man – the usual ignorance of unbelievers.
I could go through my ideas about life and meaning quite fluently, and at White Lake that summer of 1967 John’s brother Bill began to answer them thoughtfully. Sam Boyle gave talks about existentialism from a Christian understanding and a Christian critique. I was confronted with intellectual strength that I never imagined could be the case with Christianity. But though that struggle of ideas and thinking was important, I saw something else more important at the Camp. The people at White Lake Camp, the RP’s, you people, were kind.
To be surrounded by kind people was a new experience for me, since I came from a world where accomplishments were most important, character was somewhat important, and kindness hardly at all. Strangely, I felt safe among the Christians there in a way that I’d never felt safe before. The people were hospitable. They’d taken me into their house, the Camp, and while there, they would take care of me. Eleanor Edgar did my wash when she did her sons’, for example.
Mrs. Schafer, the cook from Coldenham, was good to me. She put me in charge of desserts. Then I could offer Bill leftover cake as a conversation starter. Dot Millen of White Lake, on whose land the Edgars' primitive cabin sat, was kind. She kept me at her house before camp started, even though she went out to work every day, and fed me in her kitchen. Eventually, she became one of my most precious friends, my summer mother. One of the junior counselors, a tomboy from Cambridge, got my attention also. When she found out that I was not a Christian, she confronted me privately behind the cabins, in tears at the horror of it. The obvious concern in her tears touched me.
My situation at the camp was a little like the one described by Peter Jenkins, the author of Walk Across America: the people he expected and wanted to be the most help in his travels, he wrote, were not the people who actually helped him. Over and over again, it was Christians who were hospitable. So it was with me. The people I expected to be the most help in my life weren’t, and the people I would not acknowledge as having anything to say to me, Christians, were kind, attentive, inclusive, good. They did not make me feel unwelcome or awkward. I brought plenty of awkwardness to the situation on my own, but it didn’t matter.
I didn’t have a name then for what I experienced at White Lake Camp. Now I do have the name for it. Hospitality, and a hospitality so natural that I think none of them would even have named it that. Many of those who hid Jews during World War II from the Nazis, a profoundly hospitable act, said after the war that they did not think of themselves as doing anything unusual or heroic. They just did what had to be done given who they were and the need that they saw. So it was with the believers that summer; they were being hospitable and didn’t even know it. And they became part of God’s plan for drawing me to himself, just as Christian hospitality was part of God’s way of converting the author of Walk Across America.
From Camp I went back to college where Bill and I studied together in the library and had continual arguments about Christ. At Swarthmore this passed for dating. John introduced me to Christian teaching, but Bill did the listening and rebutting of my ideas. He had an answer for the hope in him. After camp it was quite natural to go to church with Bill. Broomall didn’t have a pastor then, so the preaching was – how shall I put it? – episodic, irregular. I heard Ed Robson, Sam Boyle, Young Sun, and a host of other men whom I now forget. But God doesn’t. I saw people keep the Sabbath, tithe, sing Psalms from the heart, and these mostly old people were just like the people at Camp. They were kind and hospitable. Many Sabbaths I had lunch at Eleanor Edgar’s house. She would have gotten home at about 1:00 a.m. from New York City where she worked as a proofreader for Time magazine, but she had lunch planned for Sunday, usually either waffles or stewed chicken, easy, tasty, fun. And expandable for however many college students came home with her sons.
All these fall months of my junior year, I kept arguing and discussing with Bill the truth of the Christian religion. He kept showing me how I begged questions in my assertions and avoided inconvenient facts, like my sins. It turned out that my various reasons for avoiding Jesus were quite common, not original or brilliant at all: what about people who’ve never heard the Gospel, what about hypocrites in the church, what about evolution, what about good unbelieving people, what about the Crusades, how do you know that Jesus rose from the dead? I’d trot these issues out and Bill would patiently answer them, over and over. I’d go back and try out his answers on my long-suffering roommate Heather, who’d oblige me with my own answers. But over several months, these answers sounded weaker, paler, thinner, and less satisfying. Bill challenged me to write out the philosophy of life which I kept claiming to have. So I did, all on one page, a mishmash, equal parts of Erich Fromm, Kahlil Gibran, and Quaker enlightenment. (Oh, this is embarrassing. I was not nearly so well read as my parents.) Bill and I sat in a dorm lounge – and he held the paper as though it were a piece of toxic waste – and he revealed to me that all I had were airy vapors, taking it apart piece by piece. I went back to my dorm aware that I had nothing, but I wanted to put off dealing with it. Finally, Bill said, “You still have to deal with who Jesus is. Go read one of the Gospels. Mark is the shortest.”
In December my mom, now divorced from her second husband, died in an alcohol related accident, and I knew that she wouldn’t be unhappy or drunk in this life anymore, and that I wouldn’t disappoint her anymore.
Over Christmas break at my Dad’s house, I read the Good News Bible version of Mark. I could see that the people Jesus criticized were a lot like...my Dad. But I didn’t want to admit that he spoke of me too. I was impressed by Jesus, by his authority and his claim to be more than a mere human. The claim that he was a moral teacher proved to be an evasion. He was not who I had made up in my mind. I returned to Swarthmore thinking somewhat more clearly, but preferring to take these things lightly, to know but not do anything about it. One evening in January, Bill got to the point; he’d never been so serious or severe. This was a matter of life or death. Finally, after some silliness and joking, which Bill brushed aside, I bowed before Jesus and Bill helped me to pray. I was a reluctant and uncomfortable convert, in C.S. Lewis’ words, dragged kicking and screaming into the Kingdom of God.
I didn’t see it for a long time, but eventually I understood that I had come Home: this is the faith of some of my ancestors, and as I found out many years later, of an aunt that I never knew. My father kept his knowledge of her Christian faith from me for a very long time. How did God convert me? He’d prepared a place for me at White Lake Camp and at Broomall, a place for me in his church. “For you, O God, have heard my vows. You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.” (Psalm 61:5) God knew that it wouldn’t be Pentecostals, or the Baptists, or Catholics – though there were Catholics nudging me on my way toward White Lake Camp, but that is another story – who would get through to me. It would be Calvinists, Reformed Presbyterians, close indeed to the French Huguenots who were my father’s ancestors before the DeLamaters (DeLamaitre) fled to Holland and then to New Amsterdam.
Now I look back and see better how God made it all fit together. God was there through it all even back when I was a small child wanting a safe place to hide, a child yearning for peace, safety, acceptance, love, and an answer for reproach, a child yearning for truth, for God, for heaven. The people of White Lake Camp and Broomall, by their hospitality, gave me a taste of what everyone wants, a taste of heaven. The Bible, the preaching, and Bill’s patient listening and answering showed me the truth. I was struggling with truth, with Christ, but hospitable Christians cracked open my heart.
I never dreamed in 1967 when I first began attending Broomall that I’d end up there as the pastor’s wife. I testify that the people of that church have continued to be hospitable and kind. For ten years Jean (McKissick) Stewart was one of those people, often in our house and inviting us over to her house.
Our conference today and tomorrow is about hospitality. In the family and the church, hospitality should begin not with strangers, like I once was, but with our own children. We must teach our children well, tell them what we believe and why, and then live before them like we mean it. Every church should first of all make the church and the families in it a safe place for its children. I won’t be saying much more about that topic; it deserves a talk all its own. But I will finish with our children nonetheless. Hospitality begins at home. Your children may ask to invite people over. This is good. Your church should be a safe and welcoming place for your children. It should be home to them, because it will be home for all eternity.
Report on the COVID-19 Presbytery Meeting: March 28, 2020
Readers have no doubt seen many graphs in recent days, most related to the Wuhan, China coronavirus formally dubbed COVID-19. My favorite graph purported to show an exponential increase in technological skill among Reformed Presbyterian pastors. At least in this Presbytery, all the pastors and elders have now demonstrated the ability to join a Zoom meeting, although one A Little Strength editor only managed his audio. Our first-ever remote presbytery meeting was held on Saturday morning, March 28. The moderator was Noah Bailey, the clerk Bruce Martin, and the new unofficial post of host was held by ruling elder Tom Fisher.
Student Hunter Jackson was the center of attention. He defended his historical paper on The Reform of the Medieval Clergy's Primary Work in the Pastoral Theology of John Calvin. His examination was unanimously sustained and he was licensed to preach. An application from the Elkins Park congregation to the Home Mission Board for assistance with Mr. Jackson's summer internship at Elkins Park congregation near Philadelphia was endorsed and passed on.
The Atlantic Presbytery continues to urge the wider Synod to enact a number of good governance proposals. A revision and expansion of an earlier paper urging transparency in board and seminary employee salaries was approved and forwarded to Synod.
The Presbytery called for its congregations to fast and pray on April 2, seeking relief from God's judgment through the COVID-19 pandemic. This day of fasting coincided with other calls throughout the wider denomination. Pastor Daniel Howe was not able to attend the meeting due to having this disease at the time. We rejoice that he has since recovered.
This meeting was likely Gabriel Wingfield's last as a member of the Presbytery, as he has accepted a call to become the pastor of the Oswego congregation in the St. Lawrence Presbytery. He and his family hope to move there in early summer.
While the online meeting certainly saved on travel time and expense, it should be noted how many items could not be addressed adequately and so were omitted. Other than written reports, the Presbytery did not hear from the three congregations without settled pastors: Coldenham-Newburgh, Ridgefield Park, and Walton. Nor did we hear about Walton's church planting effort in Oneonta NY. Nor did we formally approve a budget, though the budget is remarkably stable from year-to-year and can likely remain on autopilot for some time. The times and locations for our next two meetings were not set, nor was a congregational visit arranged. So, while 21 st century technology has its advantages, the most important technical skill your pastors have remains the ability to drive a car.
-- John D. Edgar
When the Bombs Fell: Cyprus, 1941
by Willium Wilbur Weir
Reprint from the Covenanter Witness, March 25, 1942, pp. 228-230
For two minutes we have been listening to the sound of approaching bombers. We cannot see them for the trees about the trenches where we have taken shelter. Suddenly the man behind me says, “There it comes.” We flatten out in the bottom of the trench, faces down. What kind of animals are we? Surely not human beings! But here we are and the sound of the falling bombs brings us face to face with death. Five seconds of such suspense easily becomes an hour. Death is coming. But where? To whom? The uncertainty sends the heart beat soaring. Surely God can help! As I pray, my thoughts go to the dear ones in the mountain home I left but yesterday. Then a prayer for the lad on the sea
somewhere on his homeward voyage. But the bombs are striking. Is it like rolls of wire falling? Is it glass breaking? Six or eight are counted. Where did they fall?
We get up and look at one another. Thank God, we’re alive. The roar of the bombers dies in the distance. Yonder a black cloud rises above the houses. It is in the direction of our school. Some bomb must have fallen in open fields,
perhaps our school football field. We start from the trenches but an A.R.P. Warden passing by tells the crowd to keep to the trenches. [A.R.P. Warden = Air Raid Precautions Warden – ed.] The fire engine – the only one in this city of
12,000 – passes by with its volunteer brigade. Army trucks keep up an almost continual noise. The A.R.P. Warden returns and reports that a house has been hit. We wait for further news. Why haven’t we moved all the school equipment before today? Only this morning when the siren blew we were holding a meeting of the school staff to decide on the location of the school for the coming year. Some still favor remaining in Larnaca.
But here comes the warden again; he says some have been injured, a house has been hit, a woman killed. He mentions a name. Is it possible? I came with her son in a motor-car from Nicosia yesterday. He would send his father back to the hills and he would stay in the shop. His mother would not leave as long as one of them remained in the city. Others of the family had evacuated.
Can I not go to investigate? There is the warden. My duty is to keep off the streets until the “all-clear” sounds. We stand and talk. These are not up-to-date trenches – about five feet deep, no covering, no seats. A mixed population run into them when the siren sounds. Here is a man, from the government offices, who is eager to talk.
“When this war is over, nations must work out a new way of living together,” he says.
“Man seems too weak,” I reply, “to work for his own best interests. Individuals show this very definitely and the nations even more. The gambler is an example; he does today what he will probably regret tomorrow. The nearsightedness of man is an old story. Nations act today in a way that means certain war tomorrow; they seem helpless to save themselves.”
“Children in school,” he says, (he knows that I am a teacher) “should be taught to put the interest of others above themselves.”
“That’s a question of respect to God first. A person must be lifted above himself by a change of heart; that’s the real cure for selfishness. That is why I work in a mission school; there I am encouraged to help young people where
they most need it.”
“Yes, there is the case of my brother. He persuaded me to guarantee him for three hundred pounds. I paid the money finally, but he lost his job in the government. You know, to be safe from these bombs, a person ought to build
himself a huge iron cage.”
“No,” a government official beside us replies, “he ought to go to the church or mosque and pray.”
“The church or mosque may be right here,” I suggest.
The “all clear” sounds. We rush out and the greater part of the crowd starts towards the bombed area.
Thank God! There stands the little bungalow we call home! There are the school buildings, untouched. I push on and overtake the husband and the son of the woman who was killed. The son knows that his mother is dead, but the father does not; yet he must suspect. I offer a word of comfort and walk on with them until we are told by the military police that we may not approach the bombed house for there are unexploded bombs in the area. I go and telephone the Chief of police for permission for the father and son to go. The appeal is refused. We go towards the hospital for we learn that the corpse has been taken already. Yonder in the sky appear five planes in V formation. Though no siren has sounded, we instinctively crouch to the ground. Noting the direction the planes are taking we do not flatten out, but begin to rise – except the man whose wife has been killed, whose home has been destroyed. He lies there flat in the dust by the roadside till we call him to get up. A happy man yesterday, he is an object of pity today. Only a few days ago he, with some of his family, was in our home in the mountains. I have taught five of his children – watched them grow to manhood and womanhood. For years I have seen him each Lord’s Day pass our house with members of his family on their way to church in the mission chapel.
Arriving at the hospital we find a nurse who leads us – a group of five or six by this time – to a room behind the hospital where we offer what little consolation we can as the husband and the son view the corpse marred by bomb splinters. The nurse urges that the funeral be held as soon as possible. Someone has gone already to telegraph to the pastor away in the mountains to come at once. I run over to our house and get a couple of sheets for the nurse.
It is now two in the afternoon and we hurry away to get a bit of lunch. I have been invited to a home only two hundred yards from the bombed house. They show me their kitchen where every loose particle of dust and soot has been shaken to the floor by the force of the bombs.
At three o’clock when a daughter of the deceased arrives with her husband, we go together to the home where the father and brother are staying. At four I go to telephone (to Lefkara) to learn if the pastor has left (for Larnaca) and if the funeral can be held this evening. By 5:30 the call gets through. The pastor has started. We decide that the funeral must be tomorrow.
At supper, in a restaurant, I meet a lawyer friend who tells me of the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill somewhere on the Atlantic. The result? “Beautiful words!” He reminds me of what he told me more than a year ago, that America now has the opportunity and the responsibility for world leadership on a higher level than that yet known. But she will not use it, he thinks, for the forces of selfishness are at work there also. Why do Roosevelt and Churchill state that those nations now enslaved will have the opportunity to choose their leaders? Why, he wants to know, do they not say that all people will have the opportunity to choose their leaders? I am reminded of the cry and the hope of small groups – nationalities – in the Near East during the first world war, how they felt their day had come when President Wilson and others put forth theories of freedom.
Back to the home where the bereaved ones are staying, for a word before bedtime. A friend arrives and announces that the pastor could not get permission to drive at night; he will come tomorrow morning.
It is Friday. Yesterday the bombing, today the funeral. Other funerals may follow, for there are several wounded in the hospital. I slept some last night, but must confess that sleeping in this area is a bit different now. I would slowly drop off, then come back to life with a start.
After working in the office until almost ten, I go to the mission chapel where a group have already gathered for the funeral. The pastor arrives but must first go to the house. Across the street is another funeral, from the Anglican
Church. The little sister of one of our students died yesterday. The funeral procession is just leaving the church – hardly a procession, only three cars in all. I borrow a bicycle and follow them to the cemetery. Glad I came for no friends have come with the father, mother and little one, except the military padre in charge. Some curious people living near the cemetery follow the group in. I take the white strip of cloth from the hands of the father and help lower the coffin into the grave. The padre closes the service, each casts in his handful of earth, I have a word with the family, meet the padre and hurry away to the other funeral.
Quite a number gather in the mission chapel to pay their respects to the first air raid victim in the history of the city. After the benediction is pronounced at the cemetery, the crowd waits, and as the gravediggers are busy with their shovels, one of the old hymns is started by a Christian mother who sang those hymns years ago in Turkey. Three hymns are sung and the grave-diggers are through. Another mound has been added to the dreary looking cemetery. Friends offer their formal words of comfort to the relatives of the deceased, we get into the carriages and drive to the home of a friend where the family has been taken it. We sit for a while, then file out as we again offer what comfort we can. But these people are not without comfort within themselves. They have a deep Christian faith; and that faith has been tested before. They seem to belong to Cyprus but are refugees here. They fled from Turkey some years ago. They
know what it is to become victim of political quarrels. They can “take it.”
The next day I leave for the village where the school is to be located for the coming year. For five days I look for houses, interview owners, try to reason with those who see their opportunity to profiteer, draw up contracts, plan for the accommodation of classes, and masters with their families, a boarding department of from sixty to eighty students – it is all speculation for who knows what the condition will be by September?
I leave the village early Thursday morning for the thought of breakfast in Larnaca after five days in the village “hotel” is comforting. By nine o’clock I am enjoying a good breakfast in the “Grand” hotel by the Larnaca seaside. Suddenly the siren sounds. People are running past toward the trenches. I join the crowd. The trench is about twenty yards from the water’s edge, and under a tall palm tree. What is that? We listen. Bombs falling in the distance. I count ten of them. A few minutes pass and we hear a plane. Down in the trenches we lie, more like rats than men. The plane passes over us. No bombs. But there it is turning around. The warden passes and warns the curious ones to keep low in the trenches. The plane passes again…and again. The “all clear” is heard. We come out of the trenches to begin where we left off.
A friend is leaving for Nicosia – (I have) a chance to ride. Some problems, in connection with the renting of buildings for the school, must be presented to the government. Back to Larnaca in the early afternoon, and on the following day away to the mountain village of Prodromos where the family are safe and happy. I arrive at about five-thirty in the evening right in the midst of a birthday party. It’s the birthday of the twins from Abyssinia. They are “our children” this summer. There is the little fellow from Turkey also; and number four is from the Sudan. Number five is our very own, and number six is somewhere on the sea. Others have been invited, and what a happy crowd! Who would suspect there was a war on? This is something different: it is home; it is rest and comfort.
It is my turn to take the Sabbath service in the forest under the pine trees. Only tomorrow, Saturday, to prepare, and I am tired, dead tired. But a theme has been running through my mind. Getting back to these mountains has led me to
think of the mountain top experiences of the Bible. That is the one and only theme to use. I am strengthened for the service, for a mountain top has never meant so much before – new meanings appear in those verses.
Back to the plains on Wednesday, for the evacuation problems are not yet solved. Nicosia is the first stop, and while an employee in the post office is asking about the school with a view to sending his son, the siren sounds. Half an hour in the trenches – this time covered trenches, and a friend has brought a chair. Never mind. I shall spend only three days away from home on this trip – back up on Saturday. What a relief it will be!
About an hour later while rounding a corner I meet Argos. He is always alert for openings for gospel messages, and today is no exception. Why shouldn’t I stay over the weekend and conduct a service, in the Larnaca chapel for soldiers
and others who may drop in? One of the soldiers has asked for a service; Argos wants to remain in Nicosia. I promise to write him my reply the following day; for some minutes my conscience is not at ease. The memory of those services
we held in the school before the attack was made on Syria is a challenge. Those services were appreciated; and some of those lads never came back. Suppose I refuse this invitation; who knows what cause there may be for regret? The answer is clear, and when I meet Argos on the street later I tell him that he may go ahead and advertise the service.
At Larnaca that evening we load a truck and are off the next morning to the hill village of Lefkara, the new home of our school. Back in Larnaca Saturday evening and on the Sabbath day the service – a good group present and we
have God’s blessing.
Back to the home in the mountains on Tuesday. Some soldiers have gathered in for the evening. They are chaps who love the Lord, and we gather around the piano for a song before evening prayers, and the kiddies run off to bed, as the soldiers take their leave and walk the mile back to the village. The one whose turn it is to take the Sabbath service in the forest is absent, so I ask a couple of the soldiers to speak. They give their testimony – a “straight from the shoulder” talk, a challenge to the large group of young people present. Another song at home in the evening and we say good-bye to a few of them whom we shall perhaps never see again. But there is the memory.
Notes by Bill Edgar:
1. The events described began on August 14, 1941, before the United States was in the war, and the Germans were driving across North Africa towards British-owned Egypt. The bombers were Italian, almost certainly from Libya. (See Weir, “A Christian Looks at Death,” Covenanter Witness, 11/20/1974, p. 7) Cyprus was a British colony with two major military bases, one right next to Larnaca.
2. The author, William Wilbur Weir, was born near Winchester, Kansas. He attended Geneva College, taught for a year in the American Academy in Larnaca, Cyprus, founded by Walter McCarroll, later pastor of Second New York RP Church. Weir attended Princeton Seminary 1920-22 in New Jersey, and Philadelphia Presbytery licensed him to preach. Later, he earned a Master’s and an Ed. D. from Columbia University in NYC. He spent his career in Cyprus as the headmaster of the American Academy in Larnaca.
3. The “lad on the sea” whom Weir mentions in the first paragraph is his son Richard, a long-time elder of the RPC in the Bronx, which later moved to Ridgefield Park, NJ. His trip back to the States is its own exciting story. He joined the Merchant Marines during WWII.
4. Argos, whom Weir mentions, is Argos Zodhiates, a Greek Cypriot whose family had moved to Egypt. Argos attended the Academy, and after further education became pastor of the Greek congregation in Cyprus. After World War II, he went to a Protestant church of about 2,000 in Katerini, Greece, until the Greek government finally expelled him. He ended his career as the pastor of a Greek church in Newton, Massachusetts. He and Bill Cornell, pastor of our church in Cambridge in the later 1970s, were good friends.
5. During WWII, the Academy operated for two years in the mountain village of Lefkara. Moving there was a monumental logistics challenge, and operating the school successfully was a great success.
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Authors in this issue
Kevin & Amanda DiBello are members of Broomall RPC. Kevin is a new deacon.
Bill Edgar is a retired pastor of Broomall RPC (Philadelphia).
Gretchen D. Edgar is Bill's wife, the mother of five children, the grandmother of 14, and accomplished hostess of many waffles and real Latourette maple syrup Lord's Day meals.
John D. Edgar is the pastor of Elkins Park RPC (Philadelphia).
Alex Tabaka is the pastor of Broomall RPC (Philadelphia).
William Wilbur Weir was the longtime headmaster of the American Academy in Larnaca, Cyprus.