November 27, 2006 by djackson.

Not long ago, I posted in this space a review of the movie “Facing the Giants,” then withdrew it upon advice of counsel.  It was a little harsh, even for me.  I mean, I said it was the dumbest movie since “E.T.”, even including “Gigli.”  But this would also cover “Glitter” and any film with Kevin Costner and on more mature consideration doubt I can make that case.

If you haven’t heard, the movie was produced by the good folks at the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.  The pastor, Michael Gatt, led the congregation to found “Sherwood Pictures” as a part of his conviction that SBC can “reach the world from Albany, Georgia.”  And I’m sure it can.  But not this way.

The plot concerns the fortunes and misfortunes of the Shiloh Academy Eagles and their coach Grant Taylor.  Coach Taylor has posted six straight losing seasons and watched his team drop the first three contests of his seventh campaign.  His house stinks, his car dies, his wife isn’t pregnant, and the booster club wants his head sharing space with John the Baptist’s.  After an all-night chalk-talk with the Almighty he assembles his team and tells them that from here on in its praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-pigskin.  Predictably the Eagles run the table straight into the state championship game, he roots the dead rat out of his drywall, a pleased parent gives him a new truck, his DNA finally does a victory dance in the estrogen endzone, and he gets a raise instead of a pink-slip.

All right, its corny.  But so were all sixty-seven sequels of “The Mighty Ducks.”  And all right, between the clumsy acting and heavy-handed preaching it feels like a Frankenstein pastiche of “Walker Texas Ranger” and “The 700 Club.”  And yes, the characters are such cardboard cut-outs of sermon points that one expects the players’ jersies to have Roman numerals or alliterating letters instead of regular digits.  But for all that it isn’t a lot worse than propaganda pieces like “Runaway Jury” or the current flick about Robert Kennedy.

So why did this movie upset and - it took me a while to realize this - embarrass me so badly?  That mystery deepens when I consider that, for the most part, I agree with the film’s message.  Okay, not the trust-the-Lord-and-win thing.  I played high school football, and I loved Jesus, and we went out every Friday night and got our heads kicked in.  Still, the movie seeks to share the gospel in which I stand and by which I am saved.  So what’s my problem?

And I think I may have figured it out.  It is precisely because I buy the movie’s premise that I would rather not see it on the silver screen.  At one point a teacher at the school informs the coach that one of his players has “accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior.”  Mulling over that line, I realized that I reacted against having something so intimate trotted out by a bad actor as propaganda in a movie theater.  C. S. Lewis once wrote something similar about family affection.  “To produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move.  It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.”  The intimate truths of the Christian faith, and the homely language in which we Baptists (being a people close to the soil as we are) have clothed them do very well indeed in their place - in the pulpit or the prayer closet or quiet conversation between close friends.  But splatter them in technicolor at the local metroplex and they seem suddenly pitiful.  Perhaps one reason God protected the sacred space of ancient Israel was not just that it was too glorious for his people to behold, but also too intimate for the gentiles to appreciate. 

Which is why I think that, as a piece of evangelism, this movie is a bust.  Conservative Christians can use it to groove their stroke, deepening the synaptic patterns of belief they hold dear.  Unbelievers, I’m convinced, will notice the ham-fisted symbolism (care to guess the name of the scrawny kicker sent in at the last second to boot the winning field goal against the “Giants”?) and wooden dialogue and go away with another reason to sneer at the saints.  They’ll say the movie wasn’t any good; the truth will be in some ways the opposite:  they weren’t able to appreciate the good in it.

When reviews of C. S. Lewis’ space novels first appeared, he was delighted to find that very few critics even noticed the underlying Christian symbolism.  He figured that pop culture evangelism was more of a black-ops kind of thing than a charge up San Juan hill.  Maybe the makers of “Facing the Giants” could benefit from pondering that notion.

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November 14, 2006 by djackson.

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November 13, 2006 by djackson.

“The beyond is not what is infinitely remote, but what is nearest at hand.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I’ve declared myself the Ben Gunn of Ward Island.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I live on an island.  My island, as I’ve taken to referring to it.  Yes, I share it with my wife and son, two coworkers, a brace of Baptist Student Ministries interns and a few thousand college students, but if you take the nature trail along the south edge at just the right time of day, you feel as alone as Ben Gunn.

You may remember Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, a hapless buccaneer so harmless that even his ghost can’t frighten his former colleagues.  They maroon him on an uncharted spit where he spends three years in absolute solitude yearning for cheese and Christian companionship.  But he knocks about the place until he knows it well, and discovers riches into the bargain.  Like the man in Jesus’ parable, Ben Gunn sells all he has to buy a treasure hid in a field, though he doesn’t consent to the bargain and makes the sacrifice before he discovers the pay-off.

So I’ve been spending as much time as possible rambling around the less-inhabited parts of my island, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that it could take me the rest of my life to master the small slice of sea and marsh that lies along its edge. When I set out most mornings the sea is grey and the grass deep green.  By the time I head back the sea has gone from gun-metal to bright blue and the grass has blossomed gold, and to ask which color they “really” are makes as much sense as asking if a T-bone steak is “really” a cow placidly crunching cud in the pasture or a sizzling brown slab soaking your baked potato with juice or the tender-tough texture against your tongue or the burst of flavor at the first bite. 

The other morning I spotted a vine whose heart-shaped leaves had draped themselves over a host stand of bushes and blossomed into tiny white flowers, the center stained purple.  Tennyson’s lines sprang to mind:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

1 Kings 4.33 says that King Solomon “spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,” and at that moment I was hard-pressed to decide which end of that spectrum paid greater tribute to his wisdom.  Henry David Thoreau boasted that he ahd “traveled a good deal in Concord.”  Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz once told his students that he’d spent the summer traveling, and had made it halfway across his backyard. 

With what unassailable inscrutability did that flower rebuff me!  I say it was a white flower with a purple center growing from a green leaf, but fifteen minutes previous it had been no color at all because the sun lay below the horizon.  Was the tint in the flower or in the light or in my retina awaiting an opportunity to exit?  I suddenly realized that I don’t know anything . . . except for what I’m told, and “what I’m told” is only another term for revelation.  The atheist says I’m a fool for believing in God only because the  Bible tells me about him.  I say the atheist is a fool for believing in San Diego for the same reason.  And if he counters that he’s seen San Diego for himself, I point to a tiny wild flower and laugh myself sick.

So I’ve reached two conclusions.  The first is that ecotourism is for suckers.  What do I need with jetlag and dysentery in order to ponder an Amazonian rainforest when I can occupy myself for years battling my bafflement at the battlements of a beefsteak vine?  The second is that Ben Gunn might have been a decent sailor, but he was a bad theologian.  Pirate’s treasure pales in comparison to the riches he failed to find on his island.

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November 10, 2006 by djackson.

I beseech you, brethren, (ye know the house of Stephanas, that it is the firstfruits of Achaia, and that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints,) -1 Corinthians 16.16

When the Dallas Cowboys finally put it all together and whipped Carolina 35-14, coach Bill Parcells waxed poetic.  “I’d take all the crap I took in this business twice a day for about two years to feel just like I did tonight once.”  Well, poetic for a football coach, anyway.  One week later, of course, it was Terrell Owens’ endzone nap and the blocked field goal that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  Twice a day?  For two years? 

Actually, I think Parcells meant it.  Because I spent most of my life in a similar profession.  One where you take crap.  One where it seems that anybody with brains enough to find his seat thinks he knows your job better than you do.  And one where one day - Sunday, in fact - was consistently enough to send you back into the Monday-to-Saturday meat grinder.  Gary Long, a doctoral running buddy and one of my co-enablers the last three years I was in the pastorate, once said that he attended meetings for a living in order to support his preaching habit. 

in 1 Corinthians 16.15, Paul speaks of those who “have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints.”  All right, I know that’s the King James, and that the English language has shifted in the last four centuries or so.  I realize that Paul’s mental picture was not the heroine-addled hophead, a metaphor for one who mainlines ministry, his arms bruised by commentary-tracks, his fingers itching to feel the pages of a lexicon, standing shivering in the shadows of the local Baptist church hoping to score a preaching gig, or at least a Sunday School lesson.  Paul does not deliberately depict the preacher who lives for the feel of the fix and is free from jitters only when he stands in the pulpit to proclaim words that could very well get him fired.  I know that the Greek verb really invokes the image of a soldier standing a post.  I know, and yet . . . .

I think the KJV gets closer here than, say, The Message, “they’ve put themselves out.”  The Authorized Version certainly beats the NIV (well, it would almost have to, wouldn’t it?), “they have devoted themselves.”  “Addicted” is better because the syntax implies that their headaches are self-inflicted, they have done this to “themselves.”  And “addicted” is better because, very probably, Paul provides this shout-out for the household of Stephanas because these poor pastors were taking it in the jockstrap from their contentious Corinthian congregation.  Only an addict consistently assigns himself the worst jobs in order to pay for the eventual and isolated rush.  Only an addict continues to present an attractive target by mounting a raised platform in front of a hostile crowd.

In his heartbreaking and hillarious book The Philippian Fragment, Calvin Miller has his Second Century pastor Brother Eusebius visit the Monastery of St. Thaddeus, whose monks tear their tongues out as a pre-nup on their vows of silence.  Not surprisingly, twenty-two of the thirty tongueless tonsures is an ex-pastor.  When Eusebius confesses a secret longing to join their ranks, Brother Cicero grabs a scrap of parchment and scrawls, “NO! NO! NO! KEEP TONGUE!”  Cicero recalls with tears the times when God seemed to speak through his now empty mouth.  Preaching, Brother Eusebius concludes, “must not quail before those who would seek to silence that speech of integrity that has something to say and has to say something . . . that sound that must trumpet a warning because it has seen the distant chasm and knows the pitfalls that the adversary has dug in the path of humankind.”

So here’s to all my former coleagues who have stayed in the game.  I myself got out, went over the wall, joined the ranks of the civilians, and I am your inferior and servant and fervent admirer.  May God intensify the jonesing of your magnificent addiction.  Keep shoveling crap.  Sunday’s coming.

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November 6, 2006 by djackson.

 You have fallen from grace. – Galatians 5.4 

Ted Haggard is big news now. A few days ago, a male prostitute from Denver went public with claims that the megachurch pastor and political player had paid for gay sex amped up by a methamphetamine cocktail.  Mike Jones offered scanty evidence for his and Haggard stood pat with a flat denial, but, as I told my son at the time, I tended to believe the charges were true.  The whole thing fit a sadly familiar pattern:  deny what you can, admit what you absolutely must then retrench behind fresh denials.  Like the German army falling back from Normandy, you know it’s probably all over, but you give ground by inches because there’s nothing to retreat to except a concrete bunker below Berlin.  Sadly, my instincts proved correct.  As Calvin Miller’s Pastor Eusebius says, “I don’t have the gift of prophecy, but sometimes I can spot trends.”

Pastor Haggard’s sin does not disgust me; it frightens me.  John Donne was right when he wrote in his “Meditation XVII” that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”  Only he was more right than he allowed for.  Any pastor’s sin diminishes me, because I am involved in the ministry.  Any Evangelical’s sin diminishes me, because I am involved with Evangelicals.  Any Christian’s sin diminishes me, because I am involved with Christianity.  Mostly, “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned,” so any man’s sin diminishes me, because I am involved in sin. 

We’d rather not be diminished.  The National Association of Evangelicals has cut Pastor Haggard loose.  The White House says he was never all that welcome anyway.  His church fired him as one leader praised “the godliness . . . the integrity and authority” of the governing board.  The pastor is under quarantine lest sin prove contagious.  But like Poe’s Prince Prospero we seal ourselves off only to discover that the Red Death has penetrated the lavish party of our secure sanctuaries.

Associated Press reporter Colleen Slevin describes Haggard as “disgraced”.  I beg to differ.

Dis-grace would be the condition of lacking grace.  A week or so ago, Ted Haggard walked a tightrope of righteousness, a straighter and narrower way, I think, than Jesus ever envisioned.  Thousands of eyes tracked his movements as he inched his way along a moral line as taught as a banjo string.  One small slip, he knew, would send him spiraling into an unforgiving abyss, turn his audience into his jury, and transmogrify fame into infamy.

That was dis-grace. Pastor Haggard has fallen, but do not make the major theological error of labeling this a “fall from grace.”  True, the apostle Paul warned the Galatians that it could be done.  But look carefully at the context.  The Galatians had bought into a tightrope spirituality, a works-based belief that one could keep his balance on the cliff-edge of perfection by various bodily and behavioral amputations.  Such people, Paul says, “are severed from Christ.”  Falling from grace, ironically enough, essentially consists of believing that one can fall from grace.

One cannot fall from grace.  One can only fall ON grace.

“The opposite of sin,” writes Philip Yancey, “is grace, not virtue.”  Pastor Haggard was living a hell of unconfessed sin.  He went for the quick-fix of virtue and found it unobtainable.  He is no longer hiding in sin; he is no longer pretending to virtue; he is left with nothing but grace.  He has fallen on, into, onto - grace.  His elevated position on the tightrope left him no leisure to look down, and even if he had he was too far above the floor and too blinded by the arc lights to see that way down below Christ had woven a net of grace and stretched it plenty wide. 

So welcome, Pastor.  Welcome down here among the rest of us:  the drop-outs and the screw-ups, the melt-downs the cast-offs and the cave-ins.  Robert Frost said that home is that place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.  Grace is that place where, when by your very nature you have to go there, God by his very nature has to take you in.  And if God loves each of us - and the terrible truth certainly seems to be that he does - we’ll all take the tumble . . . and all find ourselves gathered in the unfailing net of grace.

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