What does it mean to be a martyr?

The Greek word "martyria" - which meant "witness" - appears throughout the books and letters that became the New Testament.

Believers witnessed both in word and deed. Then came persecution. By the time the drama of the early church reached the Book of Revelation of St. John, with its image of the Whore of Babylon "drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus," the word "martyr" had changed forever.

"I'm not even sure we can understand what 'martyr' used to mean," said Fred Norris of the Emmanuel School of Religion in Elizabethton, Tenn. He is the former president of the North American Patristics Society for scholars who study the early church fathers. "Sacrifice doesn't mean much in this culture. ... So we use 'martyr' in a way that's quite silly. We say, 'Oh, she's acting like a martyr,' and we don't even mean it as a compliment."

There was more being a martyr than dying a tragic death and the word certainly didn't imply that someone had a death wish. The key, said Norris, was that the believer refused, in the face of terror and torture, to deny the faith. Thus, a martyr's death was a public witness.

Today, the word "martyr" is highly relevant in Uganda, China, Iran, Indonesia, Sudan and elsewhere. And last week in Littleton, Colo., the story of 17-year-old Cassie Bernall inspired many young believers to embrace the true meaning of the word.

In the days since the massacre, her story has spread worldwide through news reports and the Internet. The details may vary, but no one challenges the heart of the story. Classmates, other Christians and four members of her own West Bowles Community Church youth group witnessed her death in the Columbine High School library.

As the killers in the black trench coats approached, Cassie clutched her Bible and dove under a table. After playing cruel jokes on other victims, one gunman asked Cassie, "Do you believe in God?" She paused. Some witnesses said the smoking gun already was aimed at her.

"Yes, I believe in God," she said. The gunman laughed and said, "Why?" Then he killed her. Other witnesses told Time that Cassie, who a few years earlier considered suicide and bathed in the occult, also said: "There is a God and you need to follow along God's path." Then the killer said, "There is no God," and pulled the trigger.

Cassie's story is especially poignant because of this face- to-face confrontation, her public affirmation of faith and its immediate consequences, said Norris. This resembles the legal trials of martyrs who faced Roman judges. In this case, the believer was tried and executed by a peer who represented, in some bizarre way, a youth culture steeped in violence and death.

At least one other student, 18-year-old Valeen Schnurr, faced this life-or-death question. She also answered "yes," and was shot. She suffered nine bullet and shrapnel wounds - but lived. Others escaped the killing zone with their own physical, emotional and spiritual wounds.

"The early church had a different word for someone who was wounded or tortured and refused to renounce the faith," noted Norris. "This people were called 'confessors' and their wounds served as a witness to their faith. This gave them a special authority and they also served as an inspiration to others."

Only the spiritually blind have missed the symbolism in Cassie's death, as Vice President Al Gore, evangelist Franklin Graham and many news reports have focused on her final words. Preaching from a rough outline scribbled on four note cards, her youth pastor told the 2,000-plus gathered at her funeral that she was a witness before her death, in her death and, now, in the lives she has touched. In a video taped days before her death, Cassie simply said her goal was to be "a good example to non- believers and also to Christians.''

"What the church has talked about for 2,000 years, what every church in this world has talked about on a daily basis, Cassie, you did it," said the Rev. Dave McPherson. In the end, he told the crowd: "The ball is in your court, now. What impact will her martyred life have on you?"

A call to focus on the flocks

A few years after Roe vs. Wade, one of America's most passionate preachers publicly attacked the impact of legalized abortion on the powerless.

His National Right to Life News article ended with these words: "What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of person, and what kind of society, will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?"

The Rev. Jesse Jackson used to ask those kinds of questions, before he bonded with the Democratic establishment.

Now, two former Moral Majority leaders are bluntly asking ministers on the Religious Right if they will be able to avoid yielding to similar pressures to conform after an unholy union with the Republicans.

"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," argues columnist Cal Thomas, who writes for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. "When a preacher or any other person who claims to speak for God, and who already holds sway over sometimes large numbers of people, is seduced by power, he can become destructive, not only to himself and to those he is charged to lead, but to the cause and the objectives of the One he is supposed to be serving."

In their book "Blinded By Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?", Thomas and the Rev. Ed Dobson of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., stress that they have not abandoned any of the moral and religious convictions that once landed them jobs as top aides to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Va. Both say that moral conservatives must continue to be heard in both political parties, in mass media, in education and in a wide range of organizations that try to affect public-policy debates.

Nevertheless, both are convinced it's time for those who lead religious ministries and institutions to get out of politics and back to changing hearts, minds and souls. It is time, they insist, for shepherds to focus on their flocks.

God needs people who are called to work in politics to work in politics, said Dobson, during a visit to Washington, D.C., to hook up with Thomas for a "60 Minutes" interview. God needs spiritual leaders to help people through their churches and parachurch ministries. The danger zone, he said, is when ministers start devoting their time, gifts and resources to trying to vote in the Kingdom of God.

"Churches were created for ministry and it's wrong to try to use them for other goals," said Dobson, whose 6,000-member evangelical church is active in many morally conservative social causes, but shuns political efforts.

It's easy to understand the temptation, he said, because he felt it himself during the years when he often stood in for Falwell at political forums and on news shows.

"There is an illusion of access and influence and power when you are talking about the great issues of politics," said Dobson. "It makes you feel important. But what you are doing is trying to find a short cut to changing the culture. It won't work."

Church history could be repeating itself.

A few decades ago, many mainline Protestant church leaders became obsessed with progressive social causes during the era when the parents of the 1950s and '60s were struggling to raise the Baby Boomers. Mainline ministers briefly basked in the spotlight, while scores of their people took their spiritual questions elsewhere. Today, Bill Clinton's White House haunts many conservative pastors the way Vietnam haunted clergy on the left. Meanwhile, the Baby Boomers need help raising another massive generation of children.

The bottom line: Is the goal of the Religious Right to be as assimilated into the Republican Party as the National Council of Churches has been into the Democratic Party?

"One reason the National Council and World Council of Churches no longer have the moral power and authority they once enjoyed is that they married government to God," according to Thomas. "In the process, their moral power evaporated and they became, as the Religious Right has become, just another special- interest group to be appeased by politicians."

Odds & sods '99: God, Van Halen & beyond

The Epistle of James warns that it's crucial for gossips to mind their tongues.

"If we put bits into the mouths of horses ... we guide their whole bodies. Look at the ships also; ...they are guided by a very small rudder," notes the third chapter. "So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!"

Now let us turn to the third chapter of Van Halen.

"Rudder of ship, which sets the course," sings Gary Cherone, the rock superband's new vocalist and lyricist. "Does not the bit, bridle the horse? Great is the forest, set by a small flame. Like a tongue on fire, no one can tame."

Here's why I bring this up. Every year, I mark this column's anniversary - this is No. 11 - by sifting through 12 months of odds and ends (mostly odds). All the biblical allusions in "Van Halen 3" got me to thinking about the Gospel Music Association's struggles this year to determine what songs would be eligible for Dove Awards. At least 13 entries - notably Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me" and Michael W. Smith's "Love Me Good" - were ruled to be lacking in clearly Christian lyrical content.

So why didn't Van Halen get a Dove? What could be better than rockers singing words out of the New Testament? The "special thanks" notes inside the disc even included a nod to super-Calvinist theologian R.C. Sproul.

Here's some more samples from my "On Religion" files.

* The Ship of Fools web site offered a letter from a Toronto church where the pastor had to print two funeral leaflets in one day. He used his software's search-and-replace function to turn a service for a parishioner named Mary into one for a parishioner named Edna. All was well, until worshippers hit the creed, which now said that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost and "born of the Virgin Edna."

* A Christianity Online editor shared how his 3-year-old recited the Lord's Prayer solo at bedtime. She ended with: "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail. Amen."

* After my "Titanic" columns, a California friend sent me a prospectus for "Titanic II." It's set in heaven and Rose is in counseling, because lover Jack is mad that he only knew her for three days and her husband wants to know why a 60-year marriage meant so little to her. Meanwhile, people who didn't get in lifeboats are upset with those who did. Folks who spent their lives looking for the jewel are furious. Everybody has to spend eternity listening to "My Heart Will Go On."

* The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas created an appropriate Lenten gift for traffic-stricken drivers - a black, purple and white bumper sticker of the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

* Last summer I was eating breakfast in the cafeteria underneath the U.S. Supreme Court. I popped open my cranberry juice and found this under the lid: "Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere – Gilbert Keith Chesterton." Yes, and what about law?

* Who says the religious left doesn't believe in absolutes? "A vote against impeachment is not a vote for Bill Clinton," said legal scholar Alan Dershowitz. "It's a vote against bigotry. It's a vote against fundamentalism. ... It's a vote against the right-to-life movement. It's a vote against the radical right. This is truly the first battle in a great culture war. And if this president is impeached, it will be a great victory for the forces of evil – evil – genuine evil."

* During an outdoor memorial concert for the Princess of Wales, David Hasselhoff of "Baywatch" prayed for her to stop the rain. It stopped. Meanwhile, National Review notes that the stone inside the shrine for Diana reads: "Whoever is in distress can call on me."

* Many have heard the one about the Zen master who asked a hot-dog vendor to "make me one with everything." One reader noted that, after handing over a $20 bill, the Zen master waited and waited and then asked: "Where's my change?" The vendor replied: "Change must come from within."

Preparing for Pascha in Serbia

In the fall of 1992, Serbian Patriarch Pavle came to Washington, D.C., to explain why he had led protests in Belgrade against Slobodan Milosevic's neo-Communist regime and why the Serbian Orthodox Church's Holy Synod was calling for a new government.

His National Press Club address drew a handful of reporters and none from major media.

This past fall, Bishop Artemije of Kosovo came to Washington, D.C., and warned that the prospects for peace were bleak as long as Milosevic held power. He urged U.S. officials to seek negotiations between Serbs who oppose Milosevic and Albanians who favor non-violence. After all, both Christianity and Islam teach the faithful to live in peace.

"We are especially concerned that the past United States policy ... to rely on Milosevic as a guarantor of peace is immoral and counterproductive," Artemije told the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. "We appeal to all Americans to understand that the conflict in Kosovo is not between the Serbian and Albanian people, but between a secessionist extremism on one side and an oppressive and unrepresentative regime on the other."

The bishop's visit passed with barely a notice.

Today, Milosevic's opponents in Serbia are hiding in bomb shelters or hiding from secret police in the final days before Pascha (Easter in the West) on the ancient calendar used in Orthodox Christianity.

"It's especially tragic that the world hasn't been able to hear the voice of the Serbian church through all of this," said Father Alexander Webster of the Orthodox Church in America, a historian who also is a chaplain in the U.S. Army National Guard. He is the author of "The Price of Prophecy," which details both Orthodoxy's triumphs and failures in the Communist era.

"It seems like everyone, from the White House on down, has been rushing to demonize the Serbs without asking if everyone in Serbia deserves that label. The reality is more complex than that."

While some Serbian bishops have blessed past military efforts, the church has consistently condemned Milosevic and all violence against civilians – Albanian, Croat or Serbian. The church also has opposed economic embargoes that hurt Serbian civilians and "efforts to cut Kosovo out of Yugoslavia through military force," said Webster.

The roots of this crisis are astonishingly complex, ancient and bloody. In 1204, Western crusaders sacked Constantinople, massacring Eastern Christians and Muslims. In 1389, Serbian armies fought – virtually to the death – while losing the Battle of Kosovo, but managed to stop the Ottoman Empire from reaching into Europe. The Kosovo Plain became holy ground.

Leap ahead to World War II, when Nazi Germany tried to use Albanian Muslims and Catholic Croats to crush the Serbs. Then Communists - such as Milosevic - took over. In the mid-1990s, the United States all but encouraged Croat efforts to purge Serbs from Krajina, where they had lived for 500 years. The West has been silent as Turkey expelled waves of Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Since morphing from Communist to nationalist, Milosevic has skillfully used Serbia's array of fears, hatreds and resentments to justify terror in Kosovo and elsewhere by his paramilitary and police units. The Serbian strongman knows that Kosovo contains 1,300 churches and monasteries, many of them irreplaceable historic sites.

Retired New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal, who once won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Eastern Europe, put it this way: "I do not get emotional about the history of Kosovo. I am not a Serb. Serbs do. ... Serbs are as likely to give up Kosovo willingly because the Albanians want it as Israelis are to give up Jerusalem because the Arabs want it."

Meanwhile, the Serbian bishops have released yet another statement reminding both sides that the "way of non-violence and cooperation is the only way blessed by God in agreement with human and divine moral law and experience." They also added the following prayer to worship services in Holy Week and Pascha.

"For all those who commit injustice against their neighbors, whether by causing sorrow to orphans or spilling innocent blood or by returning hatred for hatred, that God will grant them repentance, enlighten their minds and hearts and illumine their souls with the light of love even towards their enemies, let us pray to the Lord.

"Lord have mercy."