Anglican Radio

I happened to be in the way of driving a bit yesterday and I didn't plan well, so I had nothing to listen to in the car apart from the usual stack of CDs that live in the glove compartment. These include Charpentier's Christmas Mass (my favorite, I love it, but it wasn't long enough), Tacitus' history of Rome (fascinating in a way that sends you into a slow stupor), Robert Earl Keen, and something foul for young children. So, after exhausting all those one more time, I was left to the radio. As far as I can make out, the radio is divided into three categories: stupid secular music, NPR, and Christian Broadcasting.

I think we can safely leave the stupid secular music to one side. Here and there are songs that keep you awake on the road but in between that are loud young people talking about sex in such a way that you begin to think maybe you should have gone for the religious life after all. Every now and then there will be a car commercial.

That leads necessarily to NPR. NPR sits there all over the dial, smugly, mocking and taunting the ordinary political conservative who also, tragically, believes in God. On the one hand, there are the soothing news voices, the air of respectability, and the seemingly interesting topics that we all care about. On the other hand, at least whenever I turn it on, it really is all homosexuality all the time mingled artfully with passive aggressive political digs. Maybe I would feel less crestfallen if I hadn't first missed the Writer's Almanac and then Performance Today. When it finally came to a long discussion about the importance of twitter hashtags in bringing pressure to bear on Islamic (not that they used that word) fascism (nor that one), I had a temper tantrum and spun the dial.

That leaves us with Chrisitan Broadcasting. This should be easy because it's Christian and it's on the radio and here I am, a Christian, listening to the radio. What could be more obvious? The obvious depends entirely on when you happen to turn it on. Every now and then, by grace and not by our own deserving, when you click it on, you might hear a good sermon by someone you know to be a good preacher. If this happens it will be in the last five minutes of the sermon and as it winds down you will be filled with the dreaded knowledge that that as the only sermon of the day and regular programming will now resume. Let me just say, before saying anything about regular programming, that I love listening to a good sermon. I just love it. There are so many good preachers out there who do the hard work of study and preach with care and precision and having them all on the radio is such a blessing. Would that all Christian radio was just the sermon and we didn't have to mention what goes on for most of the rest of the daylight airwaves hours.

Regular Programing can be divided into two categories: Music and The End Times with an occasional variation of themes to include How To Be a Christian Man and Proverbs 31. I'm not interested in the End Times right now because there's nothing I can do about it. I really am ready for Jesus to come back. I don't have secret unconfessed sin, I really will be happy to see him face to face, and I am more than able to supply my own guilt trip when necessary. As for being a Man of God, well, not being one to experience any measure of gender confusion, and possessing the belief that if the boys need help figuring out who they are as men of God that Matt and the men's bible study will help them, I am pretty quick to spin the dial. So also with Proverbs 31. I've read it, I know what it says, I'm just going to keep living rebelliously with my own sin of not spinning wool and flax right now. Maybe later we can all revisit this subject, but don't get your hopes up.

That leaves Christian Music. This encompasses the same tantalizing taunting of NPR. As a Christian, I love to think about Jesus and I love to hear scripture, and, however classless I may be, I love a good melody. As I neared my destination yesterday there was a providential moment of someone with not a bad voice bellowing 'It is Well With My Soul'. That's so helpful, I thought, why can't they just play this over and over. It is a real help to hear a good hymn or a well read passage of scripture in moments of stress. As soon as the song drew to its ending note, however, some other person began wailing and then I had a vision, in the back of my mind's eye, of so many enthusiastic young Christians trying to write music. Trying very very very hard. Sweating it out over rhymes like 'door and implore', 'rest and blest', 'Jes-us and us', 'pride and confide', 'obey and may'. Trying, and yet, well. Most of the time I just can't bear it.

That leaves the final option for the radio, turning it off and driving in silence, listening to the rain beat and sweep down. Someday, after I've done a lot of other things, I want to make a station of Anglican Radio Broadcasting. Solid expositional preaching, soothing voiced conservative political analysis, sacred choral and organ music that corresponds to the week's propers, sung morning and evening prayer, and a whole hour of Getty hymns, just to show we're not stuffy. But that won't happen until Jesus comes back, so maybe I should go face down the End Times after all.