August 30, 2006 by djackson.

“Girls Gone Wild” is simply “Gone” as far as Corpus Christi is concerned.  For the second time this year, the video Sodom of sexual exploitation was due to roll into town, ply young women with alcohol and gain ownership of images of their bodies.  This footage would then be splattered like a drunkard’s vomit all over video and the internet for the gratification of what are loosely called “men.”  Last time, the brains behind this travesty (or rather, those with their brains in their behinds) said they cancelled for financial reasons.  This time, the local saloon keeper who had made his parking lot available for the tour bus said he refused to stamp the hands of these eternal adolescents because of phone calls and petitions which came from…local high school and college students!  The scuttlebutt on the Evangelical circuit is that it was the Home Schoolers who torched the touch-hole on this shot across the bow.  So what do we learn from this?

 We learn that exploitation and liberation are not the same thing.  Women are free to use their bodies to entice men, but then they aren’t free to use them for much else.

We learn that there is some decency left among the youth of America, or at least of Corpus Christi.

 We learn that you might as well go ahead and squeak.  Who knows?  You might get some grease, and at any rate you’ll let people know the friction is heating up.

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August 29, 2006 by djackson.

My pastor, Grover Pinson at Windsor Park Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, came out with a really good thougth last Sunday.  Preaching from Revelation 21, he referred to the “New Jerusalem smell” of our ultimate home, like the “new car smell.”  The latter, by the way, turns out to be a Chernobyl mushroom cloud of toxic gasses (http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2005-09-26-new-car-smell_x.htm), but the aroma of the New Jerusalem will waft peace and spiritual health to the redeemed for all eternity.  What I liked about Grover’s concept was that the “New Jerusalem smell” never fades.  I’ve owned one off-the-lot new car in my life, and the aroma quickly gives way to the everyday mustard gas of sweat, vintage sack lunches, aftershave and exhaust.  My last two churches constructed new buildings during my tenure, and I know the “new building” smell; it has a shelf life of about two months.  But Heaven?  Well, when we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sniff God’s grace than when we first begun.

 The sermon made me think of Robert Frost’s poignant lament that, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

When Lancelot first rides toward Camelot in the new rays of an early dawn, he has a condom stashed in the hip pocket of his plate armor.  Though Frodo has destroyed the one ring, Aragorn already knows his line will eventually fade.  But the streets of gold will stay, and the New Jerusalem smell will never diminish.  Which brings up another idea.  During the evening service, my pastor, with a courage which far exceeds anything I ever approached in my quarter-century of pastoral ministry, invites the audiience to do a cook-down on the morning’s message.  I mentioned how taken I was with Grover’s emphasis on the new world which is coming, and lamented that the fascination of most Evangelicals seems to be with what happens to the old world as it is going, as witnessed by the popularity of the “Left Behind Series.”  “Yeah,” interjected a college student sitting behind me.  “We should have a ‘Sent Ahead’ series.”

 Nah.  I don’t think it would sell.

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August 28, 2006 by djackson.

This blog takes its title from the final line of Henrik Ibsen’s play, “A Doll’s House.”  Torvald Helmer, a banker and classic Victorian pater familias, asks the question.  The final, solar-plexus-punch reality of the play is that he has no clue as to the actual answer…or, if he does, has realized it far too late.

I felt a little like that recently as I perused a magazine on church growth.  It isn’t a bad magazine, and is associated with a writer and thinker for whom I have considerable respect.  The particular article consisted of a barbershop quartet of “emergent church” wallahs pooling their vast perspicacity on the subject of how to reach the unsaved.  One participant, whose book I have read with some admiration, made the following statement:

“THE MAIN THING WE NEED TO CONSIDER IS - HOW EFFECTIVE IS CHURCH IN OUR EMERGING CULTURE.”

Really?  Is that “the main thing”?  Is relevance to the culture “the most wonderful thing of all”?  Because if you extend that line of logic, you end up with something like this:  if effectiveness relative to culture is “the main thing,” then in fact culture is the main thing, which means we are worshiping the culture.

Now, the question probably has to be asked at some point, and is probably even important.  Saul altered his driver’s license to read Paul, probably because the Gentiles to whom he preached found it easier to pronounce.  But I would contend that “the main thing” we have to consider is how effective church is in God’s kingdom.  Michal thought David’s dance of the seven skivvies was inappropriate; his worship was not effective in the emerging culture of his own marriage.  His majesty appealed to a higher standard:  “It was before the Lord,” 2 Samuel 6.21.  He then followed that up with a highly seeker-unsensitive slogan which translates idiomatically from the Hebrew, “You aint’ seen nothing yet!”

I understand (What do I know?  I’m a lifelong Baptist.) that the Episcopalians once went through great searchings of heart over whether the priest should face the congregation instead of the host as he stood at the altar.  I’m not a sacramentalist, but once buy transubstantiation and the theology makes sense:  why look at the people when you’re dealing with God?  Maybe, if there’s time for it amidst all that emerging, our churches would do well to wonder which way they’re facing. 

So is “effectiveness” the “main thing we need to consider”?  Is is “the most wonderful thing of all”?  I remember an essay by Riverside Church pastor Ernest Campbell.  It was entitled “What a Friend We Have in Yahweh,” and the gist of his argument was that we should downplay the name “Jesus” because “The term ‘God’ can be unifying.  The name ‘Jesus’ has proved to be divisive.”  Hmmm.  “Has proved to be”?  Well, it always was, wasn’t it?  In fact, he told us as much with a lot of loose rhetoric about slashing swords that made hash of family reunions.  When he preached in the synagogue at Capernaum to a crowd still digesting the pervious day’s potluck of loaves and fishes, “effectiveness” was hardly the main thing he considered:  his sermon cut the congregation from 5K to a pitiful dozen, and one of them would eventually pimp him out to the bad guys. 

The curtain line in “Doll’s House” comes after Torvald’s wife, Nora, has finally had enough of him and walked out.  She tells him she has ceased to believe her husband capable of changing so profoundly “that our life together would be a real wedlock.”  Two stage directions frame his final statement:  “A hope flashes across his mind,” and “The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.”  I think seeker-sensitivity often becomes the last-ditch seduction of the bride of Christ when she ceases to believe in wonderful things happening but does not insist on a real wedlock.  If we keep that up, any hope that flashes across our minds will be met with the sound of two doors shutting:  the doors of our churches below, and the gates of Heaven above.  In between those sounds, in the precious time we have, we need to think seriously about what truly is the most wonderful thing of all.

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August 25, 2006 by djackson.

Pluto is no longer a planet.  Despite being round, having three moons, and circling the sun, the tiny sphere fails to meet the new definition concocted by the International Astronomical Union.  (I didn’t know astronomers had a union.  If they go on strike, does Saturn disappear or something?)  Anyway, this bunch of pocket protector Paladins have considerably upped the tarrif on who gets into the club.  Now, in addition to orbiting the sun and being round, an object must “clear the neighborhood around its orbit.”  While batting .660 against that standard, Pluto’s elliptical orbit can’t keep Neptune out of its hood, resulting in a demotion.  Now they can’t think what to call the thing.  Someone has suggested “dwarf planet,” but that will offend the Vertically Challenged Community.  Perhaps the PC would be “little planet.”  The scientists, being scientists, suggested “small solar system bodies,” which has absolutely no snap to it.  My favorite so far is “planette.”

All of this is causing quite an uproar.  NASA thinks demoting Pluto is a Goofy, Mickey Mouse thing to do.  Teachers worry that their textbooks have gone instantly out of date.  (Execpt here in Texas, where high school science books predate the newly-non-planet’s discovery in 1930).  And at least Pluto is a has-been.  Under the new guidelines such celestial objects as Ceres and Xena become never-was’s. 

Indeed, you could say the controversy is world-wide.  Well, as wide as this world, anyway.  On Pluto itself, the news doesn’t seem to have had much impact.  Instead, the little fellow just keeps humming along out there, blissfully oblivious to its ranking in the lastest NCAA poll.  See, Pluto orbits the Sun, not the Earth.  Her relationship to the center of her universe hasn’t changed.  Earth, and earthlings, are not the focal point around which she turns.  In fact, she probably just looks right by us, too blinded by the blazing light of her heavenly benchmark even to notice all our terrestial uproar.  Our position in her sky, like our opinion of her status, keeps changing.  The sun, by contrast, stands still.

“The heavens declare the glory of God,” says Psalm 119.1.  We could all learn a lot from Pluto.  If we keep our gaze fixed on  the Sun of Righteousness, risen with healing in his wings, we won’t be quite so concerned with our read-out in the latest opinion polls.  Solomon rightly despaired of life “under the sun,” a fact which should remnid us to set our sights a little bit higher.  My title, my popularity, my stroke may change from one day to the next, but I won’t worry if I’m circling the same Savior today whom I circled the day before.

Near the end of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan the Lion confronts the wicked queen about the status of Edmund, a traitor whom the former has chosen to forgive and the latter still seeks to condemn.  When the White Witch mentions a traitor, “Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund.  But Edmund had got past thinking about hmiself.  He just went on looking at Aslan.”  Later, as Lion and Queen argue, “Edmund was on the other side of Aslan, looking all the time at Aslan’s face.  He felt a choking feeling and wondered if he ought to say something; but a moment later he felt that he was not expected to do anything except to wait, and do what he was told.”

That’s the answer to all our angst about accomplishment and success and stacking up with the big boys:  keep looking at Aslan.  If we can achieve an unbroken concentration on Christ, we won’t worry about the latest headlines.  Even if our role is a small one, and we find ourselves isolated in frigid, starless darkness, silently spinning around six million empty miles from the middle of things, we will do our obscure work in perfect peace, not because of who (or what) we are, but because of where we’re focused.  “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” - Isaiah 26.3.

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