P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

Welcome to the Voice of Prophecy as we pause in our regular weekend schedule to quietly remember an important event which happened Fourty years ago yesterday. For most of you listening, this is the 22nd of November, which takes us back three and a half decades ago to a city named Dallas, Texas and the assassination of the President of the United States. I’m your host today, Pastor Lonnie Melashenko, the speaker of our daily radio broadcast heard on many of these same stations. Usually you hear Pastor Morris Venden here during this half hour of Bible study time, but Pastor Venden was away from California this week as we came into the studios and so we are simply going to slide a few programs back a week so that we could pay some attention to this milestone as it occurred.

If you were with us at all this past week you know that we were able with the Spirit’s guiding to find so many spiritual truths that tie to an event like this one, a national tragedy and perhaps some of you tuning in today would like to receive those five messages. Well, we’d be honored to mail you that entire Monday through Friday package of five radio programs on cassette. The regular cost for that cassette is just $10.00 and you can mail your request to us at the Voice of Prophecy, Box 53055, Los Angeles, California 90053. Again, that's Box 53055, Los Angeles, California 90053. In Canada, write instead to Box 2127, Oshua, Ontario L1H7V4. Or you can call our toll-free request line located at 1-800-872-0055. Again, that’s 1-800-872-0055. Remember, you’ll receive all five radio messages in last week’s anniversary series Lessons from the Texas School Book Depository.

If you’re still searching for that pen or pencil, I’ll be sure to repeat this information at the close. Now for a few moments let’s travel back to another November 22 and the lessons waiting for us there.

He was admitted to the emergency room at twelve thirty eight in the afternoon. They wrote down in the log white male. Every patient has a number and his was 24740. His driver’s license indicated that his height was six feet zero inches. His hair code was a four, which means brown. Eye code, six stood for gray. Date of birth, 5/29/17, which meant that this new patient was forty-six years old and of course, there was a box on the hospital form, which read chief complaint. The medical clerk in careful handwriting wrote down GSW, which was short for gunshot wound and then under the space for name was written down, Kennedy, John F. Well, friend that was thirty-five years ago today if you’re hearing this on the 22nd of November 1998. Three and a half decades ago as we think back, the United States of America underwent one of its darkest Fridays. A president was murdered in Dallas, Texas. For the next three days time almost stood still. Many of us remember vividly where we were when we heard the news. We recall in all the painful details what we saw on television. The flight home on Air Force One carried our new president, the body of our dead president and the widow, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy.

Then there was the rotunda service, the mass at St. Matthew’s, the graveside ceremony at Arlington, for three days there were no commercials on television, no breaks, no interruptions, nothing but this death, this tragic extended moment. We spent last week on our daily Voice of Prophecy broadcast considering some of the spiritual lessons that can come out of this memory, this anniversary from the year 1963. What can the people of God learn from tragedy, from the heartaches of our journey here on earth, from the abrupt unexpected turns in the road of life? Do broken hearts ever heal? Does God have a hand in the detour of life? What does it mean when my spouse or loved one is struck down?

The Sunday after the shooting in Dallas, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy were struggling over a million details, as well as trying to cope with their own personal grief, but they also needed some words to say at the Arlington service. What words of the Bible should they share with the world leaders who would attend, but it was Jackie who suddenly suggested, “How about Ecclesiastes?” So the family members looked it up and of course we remember they read these words, “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to love and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace.” Well, that seemed exactly right especially the part about a time to die. Somehow those ancient words gave the Kennedy brothers comfort on that rainy Sunday afternoon.

In a sense, all of us remembering here in 2003 can perhaps learn a lesson too. There is a time for rejoicing, the Bible tells us and a time for fun, a time for laughter, parades through town, presidential motorcades and banquets, but then there is a time for sober reflection as we stand at the graveside of a friend. What do we think about then? What thoughts of eternity ought to be in our minds at that moment? All through the eight hundred ninety one pages of this monumental book The Death of a President, author William Manchester tells us about people who either did or did not grasp the sober truth of Ecclesiastes chapter three. There were those who comprehended and accepted and grappled with the spiritual enormity of what was happening there in Dallas on Friday November 22, 1963. Then, there were those who didn’t, those who laughed or giggled. It was a time to mourn and what a tragedy, what a waste it is when a person misses the significance, the eternity of the crucial landmarks of a person’s life.

There in Parkland Memorial Hospital on that Friday there was nothing but grief and tears or you would like to think that’s the case. Henry Gonzales, U.S. Congressman from Texas, was in deep shock as he wandered the hallways. He saw Jackie Kennedy who looked so destroyed, so fragile. Then down the hallway he spotted a young nurse standing next to a youthful male patient. There arms were around each other and for a moment Henry thought they were comforting one another, then he saw a smirk on her face and heard them laughing together. They were joking with each other, playfully teasing with the body of their dead president literally down the hall and Henry Gonzales in both anger and sorrow called out to them, “Show a little respect, can’t you?” And the two kids looked up startled, “Us? What did we do wrong?” With a casual shrug they moved down the hallway so they couldn’t hear the humor, their laughs.

In researching this important book, Mr. Manchester tells us that the biggest college football game in the country, the oldest rivalry, the Harvard-Yale game had been immediately called off when the two schools heard the news. A president was dead and it simply was not appropriate just one day later to have that kind of fun with cheerleaders and pom poms and rah rah rah and all the rest. Any reasonable person who read Ecclesiastes chapter three or had any kind of built in instinct for what is right and appropriate would know that but did you know that this very evening, Friday night, right there in the city of Dallas, just about every high school proceeded with it’s Friday night games? That very evening they went ahead and flipped on the stadium lights and sold popcorn and played their games just blocks away from Elm Street where there was still blood on the concrete outside the Texas School Depository.

I think we could paraphrase this piece of scripture and remind ourselves, there is a time for games and there is a time to cancel games. You know friend, I have been in the work of the Lord for a long time. Melashenkos have been preaching out of the old family Bible starting from before 1963. I can tell you that and there have been times in my own life when I heard that still small voice saying to me, Lonnie, this is a time to cancel a game. This is a time to forego parties and potluck dinners and that anticipated round of golf because there is something sober, something vital, and something not to be missed over here instead. In our churches, there are times to turn down the music and just listen instead, not to the preacher but to the quiet promptings of that member of the godhead we call the Holy Spirit. Maybe you remember clear back at the book of Exodus chapter three where the Lord has a sober moment, a confrontation with Moses and it wasn’t a time for games or jokes, in fact God said to his servant, “Draw not nigh hither, put off they shoes form off they feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

Now, we might sing that in church and you might have sung it yourself today or yesterday. “We are standing on Holy Ground.” How often on an important November 22 or anytime the Lord stands before us do we in our hearts take off the shoes of our distractions, our jogging trips to the pleasure palaces of life to stop to say, “Lord, for thy servant heareth.” Manchester uncovers a strange little tidbit from clear across the country. In a Nevada theater, a daytime matinee of some film the lights suddenly came on and the manager of the theater came on and told the patrons that we have just learned that the president of the United States, the vice-president, the governor of Texas and a secret service man have been murdered, which as we all know wasn’t entirely accurate, but you know how rumors always work. Now get this, he then told the people sitting there, “We now continue with our matinee feature.” They turned the lights out again, the screen flickered with the action as the story started up again. You know something? Not one person in the theater moved. No one got up, no one left, no one shrugged, no one rushed to a pay phone, they just sat there in the darkness and kept on watching some movie because they paid a buck fifty to get in.

Their president was dead but they had a movie to watch and King Solomon who, here in these Ecclesiastes, comments how so much in life is meaningless would certainly have said to them, “Foolish movie-goers, where are your priorities? Here on the screen with this fictional made up Hollywood concocted story, your president is dead.” Maybe for these few moments on this thirty-fifth anniversary we can learn from the many instead of the few because all around the globe on that Friday November 22 for the weekend that followed, most people were wise enough to stop and to think and to pray. As U.S. Air Force One carried the body of John F. Kennedy came into Andrews Air Force Base at 6:05 p.m. that evening. People on the plane were surprised to find that there was something like three thousand people. There was a fence separating them from the tarmac but nobody tried to climb over, nobody shouted, nobody whispered, nobody made jokes. It was a cold wet night and these three thousand people like a huge church congregation simply stood there to show their respect. To show unity in suffering.

On any other flight Manchester writes, they would have caught John Kennedy’s eye but now before his splendid plane appeared, the more august greeters would have been aware of them and they would have been murmuring excitedly among themselves and agile youths would have been leaping high for the first glimpse of the presidential seal. Tonight they were utterly quiet. Here a shoe shuffled, there an eyeglass glinted, and a cigarette glowed shrinking to its doom. Over at Bethesda Hospital there the autopsy was performed; suddenly there was a huge, quiet, reverent crowd there too. No one wanted autographs, no one wanted to party or take advantage of the situation by selling hastily concocted souvenirs. No, they simply wanted to show respect. Not knowing how to express themselves, Manchester writes, “They just stood, some all night.” It was 3:56 in the morning, Saturday morning now when the ambulance carrying Kennedy’s body slowly began to drive through the wet empty streets of Washington DC taking the president home to the White House, but Bobby Kennedy looking out through the window saw workmen wearing blue jeans, standing at attention as their president passed by. In all night filling stations, attendants who made a couple of bucks an hour working that graveyard shift stopped what they were doing and stood at attention, facing the slow moving ambulance with their caps over their hearts.

An ex-politician named Richard Nixon ironically had spent Thursday night, the twenty-first, in the city of Dallas. John F. Kennedy of course had beaten Nixon in the 1960 race and now the former vice-president was in private practice making a living representing Pepsi-Cola. He flew out of Dallas the next morning and missed the horror of the assassination. He was in a taxi in downtown Manhattan when news of the shooting swept around the world. A cabby had to tell him the sad news and what did Richard Nixon do? He and the Kennedys were political enemies, and later years were to reveal more facets of that rivalry but did he give a quiet pump of the fist, did he inwardly celebrate? No, this man, this career politician who had lost an agonizingly close election to Kennedy sat down to write a note of condolence.

Manchester let us in on the content and I am quoting, “He wrote of his and his wife’s thoughts and prayers for Mrs. Kennedy and mentioned the role of fate in making the two men political enemies. Somehow the letter conveyed the spirit of what Nixon himself might have called Americanism. It was civil and it was touchingly gentle. So many people seemed to sense rightly the spirit of Ecclesiastes chapter three; there is a time to celebrate and a time to comfort, a time to beat back your enemies and a time to embrace them. André Gromeko who was one of the toughest hard-line reds and in Manchester’s words cried openly as he left the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after paying his respects. An African man in the deepest part of that continent thousands and thousands of miles away from the streets of Dallas walked ten miles through the bush to register his feelings. “I have lost a friend and I am so sorry.” Very, very early Saturday morning as that ambulance was preparing to bring the body of Kennedy back from Bethesda Naval Hospital to the White House, someone realized that there wasn’t a military honor guard to receive that body. Somehow it didn’t seem right that the commander in chief should arrive without that escort.

Well, someone called the marines garrisoned at Eighth and I streets there in the capital. This was three thirty in the morning but seventeen minutes later, they were there, every man immaculately attired in their dress blues. They had gotten ready, each of them on the bus. All of those marines, it must be remembered, have painful realization of just where it was that Lee Harvey Oswald had learned to fire a rifle. Their officer, 1st Lieutenant William Lee gave them instructions on how to proceed and just what to do when the hearses arrived. Then they started down the long driveway that led from the White House out to the front gate. Sargeant Shriver, brother in law of the president and head of the Peace Corp looked out into the darkness and watched the marines heading to their grim task. He could hear their boots thumping on the concrete and all of a sudden the footsteps stopped. Men were just halfway to the gate but they had stopped. Shriver could hear some very low voices but had no idea why the marines had come to a halt. “What’s going on?” one staffer wondered. “Why did they stop?” Someone behind them said, “They are bowing their heads. Yes, there is a time to march, a time to wear your dress blues and a time to take the battlefield and there is a time to pray.

Friends, these are all just memories now. You probably remember many of them yourself if you lived through this particular November three and a half decades ago. So many people lined up to get into the rotunda to pay respect. They weren’t boisterous in line, no jokes, no silliness, just a few quiet guitars and people singing hymns. It was a church congregation really, with two hundred thousand people there. Many of them would never get inside, the police had told them it was a case of simple math and eighty five thousand of them would never see the casket. It didn’t matter; they stayed because there is a time to mourn.

When it was time for the funeral, cars were lined up on New York Avenue bumper to bumper more and more of them until the traffic was lined up all the way to Baltimore some thirty miles away but no one honked, no one was angry and maybe you remember the two most photographed scenes. Little John John after the funeral as the coffin went by and his mom leaned over and said, “John, you can salute daddy now. Say good-bye to him.” Cardinal Cushing saw that little face, this small boy with the short pants and the red shoes doing a perfectly military salute to his father and he almost collapsed right there. Eight months later he could hardly talk about it. “I almost died,” he confessed, remembering. The other picture was of Caroline kneeling with her mother in the rotunda next to the casket, reached out and took her mother’s hand as if to comfort her. All the joint chiefs of staff were standing there. Hardened military professionals and every one of them had wet faces streaming with tears. Ah, there is a time to laugh, and a time to shed tears.

Friend, the challenge for us on this November 23, 2003 is to sense these opportunities for spiritual awakening and vulnerability. When the still small voice of God speaks to us, will we be making so much noise that we don’t hear it? Will we be partying when we should be praying? That Sunday, the entire NFL schedule was played, teams did take the field and reluctantly play out their contests and I suppose there were some people in the stands but not one person watched on television. There was no football on television that day because people were looking elsewhere as they should be. They were putting aside political differences, as they properly should. The leading Republicans in congress, Charlie Halligan and Everett Dirksen who hosted the popular Charlie and Ev show on TV were among the first to put aside partisanship and say to Lyndon Johnson in his most challenging hour, “We’ll work together for our country. God bless you Mr. President.”

Memories are good if they soften up our hearts and peel away our spiritual defenses. On Monday evening after the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery was over and all the foreign dignitaries had left, Bobby Kennedy came up to his sister-in-law again. “Well,” he said quietly, “Shall we go visit our friend” And they returned to the grassy hill and the eternal flame for their final prayers and I’m sure they remembered with a stab of agony how earlier that afternoon the marine band had slowly played that great stirring song the Navy Hymn. They played it at funeral cadence; eighty beats per minute and the soberness filled the watching world. Its lyrics had always been intended for navy sailors and captains of PT boats, “Oh hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.” But in recent years a line had been added, “In the air, on land and sea, oh God protect the men who fly through lonely waves beneath the sky.”

Maybe we hear those notes here in 2003 and think instead, of the movie soundtrack and the great ship going down into the Atlantic and many people dying. Hopefully the importance of being ready at all times, right with God at all times, willing to sacrifice your life at any moment so that someone else could get into the lifeboat instead but certainly for all of us, this song speaks of a God who loves his children through every tragedy and that we ought to be quiet enough to both whisper a prayer and to hear out father’s response.

Amen, that was the Navy Hymn, or Eternal Father from the CD Celebrated Sounds of the Christian Edition, which we are proud to say, includes our studio engineer Armando Cordero as one of its members and Calvin Knipschild, director. I’d like to remind you again that today was obviously a radio special for us, a program interruption. Next week Pastor Venden will be back with us to share the second part of a wonderful two-part message Love, Marriage and Roles. In the meantime, we have an opportunity to share with you the five daily messages that led up to today’s anniversary program, Lessons from the Texas Schoolbook Depository aired last week on our entire network of daily stations and for a donation of just $10.00 you can receive all five cassettes messages.

Now, here’s our address. Voice of Prophecy, Box 53055, Los Angeles, California 90053. Again, that's Box 53055, Los Angeles, California 90053. In Canada, write us at Box 2127, Oshua, Ontario L1H7V4. You can also call toll-free to request this five-part anniversary series and make a gift with a credit card. Here’s that number 1-800-872-0055. That's 1-800-872-0055. By the way, I hope many of you will stop in and visit all of us on our website which you’ll find at www.vop.com and you can request this tape series and share a prayer request, sample our Discover Bible School lessons or just say hello. We’d love to have you visit.

We’ve spent today looking back, but now as we close, perhaps we should look ahead. What would God have you do in the moments that are left to you this year and beyond? What would heaven call you to do when opportunities for spiritual growth or kindness or for the sharing of a cup of cold water come your way? Would you be distracted looking elsewhere untouched or would you be ready to respond? There in St. Matthew’s cathedral during that Monday service of John Kennedy Bishop Philip Hannon read a part of Kennedy’s inaugural address. Part of it you surely remember but maybe not what should be the punchline for us today. “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. With a good conscience only our sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth and lead the land we love asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

Now, may the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.