March 29, 2007 by djackson.

HP Sauce is English ketchup.  An American corporation owns the label and makes the condiment in Holland.  The MG typifies British sports cars.  China now owns the name and makes the vehicles. 

The initials in the label of the UK’s famous brown sauce stand for “Houses of Pariliament,” an architectural icon whose image appears on the label.  The Brits prefer it by a seventy-one percent margin over other toppings.  The stuff dates back to the late 1800’s and a Nottingham grocer who concocted the recipe.  Heinz bought the name and formula for four hundred and forty million pounds, closed the plant in Aston, England, and outsourced the whole deal to Europe.  The label looks the same, but the contents now have no connection to the sceptered isle of kings.  Heinz says the move is purely a matter of economics.

The MG embodied the fighting spirit of the British during World War II but the company had not been doing well of late.  China had a yen to make the little roadsters; well, three and a half billion yen, to be exact - the amount they invested in a new manufacturing plant, along with the fifty three million pounds it took to purchase the brand name.  The communist giant can crank out cars far more cheaply than its English competition.

One wonders what meaning labels retain when origins shift.  The same money that buys a name in order to invoke a heritage often denies the inner essence.

The Christian name has been bought and sold throughout its history.  The new owners frequently make decisions based on market share rather than doctrinal fidelity.  Constantine’s edicts of toleration trademarked the title in ways that boosted its market share.  Some Christians felt that Rome had purchased the cross at the cost of tax breaks for clergy and real estate options on pagan temples.  The product proffered on Sundays still carried the original label but seemed to contain a cheaper product made in a very different kingdom than the one Jesus preached.

At the other end of history, American evangelicalism must confront the intricacies of truth in advertising.  Politicians and publishers, singers, painters, clothing manufacturers and the folks who make those little “Testamints” have all paid their portion to capitalize on the label.  We have to wonder, however, who now controls the assembly lines where modern Christianity is manufactured. 

As Jesus prepared to take the message of salvation to a world which misunderstood the meaning of Messiah, he trekked into the desert.  In a three-round bout of single combat he steadily rejected the devil’s lucrative offer of a buy-out.  Satan offered a high investment-to-return ratio:  one publicity stunt from the temple’s top, one quick genuflection to acknowledge a new CEO, and Jesus owns the world without the mess and risk of the cross.  The Lord famously refused.  He would set up production of eternal life in a radically different kingdom and hire only hands who professed single citizenship to that alternate reality. 

When the desert fathers felt that their church had kept the brand-name but voided the truth of the faith, they stalked off to the Egyptian wilderness of the Thebaid.  They rejected assmebly-line religion which honored efficiency at the cost of intensity.  In caves and huts they set up mom-and-pop shops (well, really “amma-and-abba” shops) which handcrafted the image of Christ on one heart at a time.  It was inefficient.  It was unprofitable.  It was nuts.  And it saved Christianity.

And so during Lent the church goes to the desert, to the lonely places abandoned by empire.  Interestingly, this may be the one Christian observance that the secular world has no interest in owning.  No chubby gift-giver or flop-eared rodent arises as the cultural ikon of this season of self-denial.  The odd restaurant ups its offering of fish, perhaps, but that’s about it.  During the forty day pilgrimage of Lent the church revisits her native land, where she remembers that the hood ornament does not define the heart of the product, and that it does little good to put Zion’s temple on the label if we outsource the cooking to the kingdom of this world.

Jesus never authorized the sale of salvation.  Judas got what he could for it but offed himself in the face of a certain indictment for fraud.  Simon the Samaritan attempted a hostile takeover but received only a big-time board room rebuke from Peter.  Next time you pick up a product with a cross on the label - whether you find it in a Christian bookstore, a seminary logo, or a church steeple - stop long enough to read the fine print and discover where it was produced:  Wall Street or the Via Dolorosa, at the top of an industial pyramid, or on top of a skull-shaped hill?

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March 24, 2007 by djackson.

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation” narrates the personal apocalyptic of Ruby Turpin, a smug Christian farm wife who’s redemption begins with her attempted murder in a doctor’s waiting room.  God’s unlikely messenger literally beats Ruby over the head with a book (a symbolic Bible) and then goes for her victim’s throat.  It’s an enacted parable worthy of the greatest - and craziest - of the ancient Hebrew prophets:  Isaiah streaking through Jerusalem for three years (Isa 20.2-4), Jeremiah smashing a Ming vase on the town’s toxic waste dump (Jer 19.1-15), or Ezekiel playing with toy soldiers (Ez 4.1-3).  Frustration frequently drives prophetic preachment beyond syntax to action, beyond verbage to viscera.  Ruby gets the message through her head.  The Lord opens her eyes by blackening one of them.

But the God-bitten seer in the story commands our attention.  O’Conner makes her visionary physically repulsive.  This story uses the word “ugly” seventeen times, and seven of them describe this teenage oracle.  Acne has pulped her skin until we read that it is “blue” and “seared” and “purple.”  She is fat and unfashionable.  And her name is Mary Grace.

The daughter of one of O’Conner’s friends asked why the author made Mary Grace so ugly.  “Because,” replied the mother, “Flannery loves her.”  Upon hearing of this catechism the author replied, “Very perceptive.”  The explanation intrigues, but does not appear to explain.  How did love drive a writer, omnipotent within the world of her story, to curse her God-bearer with a repulsive face, a clumsy body, and mute rage which finds escape only in the blazing blue of her maniac’s eyes?  A writer of O’Conner’s undoubted skill could have made her Mary as beautiful as any sacchrine saint from the brush of a Renaissance master.

Perhaps that is just the point:  we insist on the virgin’s attractiveness to hide from ourselves the cost of carrying Christ.  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” and we imagine the mother of Jesus demure in adolescent beauty.  Baptists reject the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but embrace an even less-biblical dogma of the Immaculate Complexion.  It never occurs to us that the womb which spoke the Word into the world may have paid the price in every other part of the body and mind which broke at the foot of the cross.   O’Conner gives us a Mary so full of grace that she must pound it into the heads of those who are too self-satisfied to know they need it.  She reveals a God-ravaged virgin, a Madonna unmade by the intensity of the Shekinah. 

Lent is a good time to think about our culture’s addiction to comfort.  It is also a good time to ponder our penchant for beauty.  In his book Oh Shepherd, Where Art Thou? Calvin Miller portrays a plastic-perfect preacher and remarks on the documented relationship between looks and leadership.  “Church growth pastors,” he observes, “are by and large ‘good looking.’”  As are underwear models, sports commentators, and TV news anchors.  Somehow, we believe, collagen-pouted lips produce a more acceptable sermon.  Like apples of botox in settings of silicone is a word spoken by classic bone structure. 

The Bible, however, tends to indicate that close encounters with the Almighty do lasting damage to skin-deep charms.  Even Job revividus finds fragments of ash clinging to the deep shadows under his eyes.  Jacob limps for life after the angel of God supplexes him off the top ring-rope.  Tradition describes Paul as short and bald, and his face no doubt spasmed and ticked from the divine cruise control which corkscrewed into his groin.  Isaiah 52.14 says that the exertions of Golgotha left the Suffering Servant ravaged.  “A ruined face,” runs The Message, “disfigured past recognition.”

The desire for a pretty Christ springs from the yearning to be pretty Christians who primp and pout at the makeup mirror of a pretty Christianity.  Frank Miller, in his mighty novel A Canticle For Leibowitz, describes a Catholic abbot contemplating the statue of a secular antichrist set up outside a center for euthanizing the unfit. 

He recognized it as one of the composite human images derived from mass psychological testing in which subjects were given sketches and photographs of unknown people and asked such questions as: ‘Which would you most like to meet?’ and ‘Which do you think would make the best parent?’

In the end the tonsured old relic ponders the sissified pseudo-savior and decides that

He could with effort imagine the statue saying: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ but could not imagine it saying: ‘Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones,’ or flogging the money-changers out of the Temple.

Lent comes to us in blue-faced, blazing-eyed ugliness, in the Saguaro-spined and prickly particularity of a God who hates sin.  The anteroom to Easter is the seeming dead-end of a tomb not designed to handle through-traffic.  We make small sacrifices as a reminder that Christ cares nothing for cosmetics and comfort, and will willingly burn our souls to cinders to make us instruments of salvation.  The feet of those who bring the gospel may be beautiful; their faces often frighten both owner and observer.  Maybe we would be more willing to beat and choke with the inarticulate cry of salvation if we had already given up on being loved for our good looks.

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March 13, 2007 by djackson.

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and will hand Him over to the Gentiles.  They will mock Him and spit on Him, and scourge Him and kill Him, and three days later He will rise again.” - Mark 10.33-34

It was that last part that was the kicker.  A prediction of rejection and execution did not require divinity.  If you’re an off-the-rez rabbi headed for Jerusalem, you can pretty much predict an assassination attempt.  History bristles with accounts of martyrs who saw it coming. 

A fortnight before Booth’s bullet blasted point-blank into the brain that birthed the Gettysburgh Address, Abraham Lincoln recounted to his wife a weirdly prescient dream of his own death.  He hunted through the White House seeking the source of muffled weeping until finally, in the East Room, he discovered a catafalque with a shrouded corpse.  “Who is dead in the White House?” he demanded of a blue-coated member of the honor guard.  “The president,” came the soldier’s report.  “He was killed by an assassin.”  Well, if you’re a president whose popularity rating is so low that half the country seceeded rather than submit to your leadership, you take that sort of thing as part of the job description.

The very day that Oswald’s slug shattered John F. Kennedy’s skull in Dealy Plaza, the president described to his wife how easily an attacker could accomplish the task.  The morning newspaper had carried a full-page add labeling Kennedy as a traitor to America.  A pro-civil rights president in Texas in the early Sixties didn’t have to be a prophet to predict that someone would try to off him; he had to be historically tone-deaf not to expect it.

The night before James Earl Ray gunned him down on his hotel balcony, Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech at the Mason Temple church, soared beyond oratory to oracle as he acknowledged,

Like anybody, I wiould like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.  And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

Dr. King had received death threats throughout his public ministry.  The timing is remarkable, but the realization is not.

Jesus could have foreseen Gethsemane - the cough of wind-guttered torches, the nervous reek of sweating legionnaires, the jaundiced whites of Judas’ shifty eyes, the flat slap of sandals on stone as the disciples fled into the darkness - by the same means that Lincoln envisioned a state funeral for a fallen chief executive.  Our Lord might have sketched a floor plan of Golgotha based on nothing more than personal past observation and the ability to read Jewish and Roman politics like a pundit predicting stock market trends. 

But that last part is the kicker:  “and three days later He will rise again.” 

N. T. Wright puts an interesting spin on the pay load of Jesus’ prophecy.  This “‘awareness of vocation’ is,” he argues,

by no means the same thing as Jesus having the sort of “supernatural” awareness of himself, of Israel’s god (sic), and of the relation between the two of them, such as is often envisaged by those who, concerned to maintain a ‘high’ christology, place it within an eighteenth-century context of implicit Deism where one can maintain Jesus’ “divinity” only by holding some form of docetism.  Jesus did not, in other words, “know that he was God” in the same way that one knows one is male or female, hungry or thirsty, or that one ate an orange an hour ago.  His “knowledge” was of a more risky, but perhaps more significant, sort:  like knowing one is loved.  One cannot “prove” it except by living it. 

Jesus had read Scripture deeply and discovered the figure of the Suffering Servant who would die for the sins of his people.  The Father would vindicate this hero before all by raising him from the dead.  Jesus understood himself to be this chosen one.  He entered that identity time and again as he asserted the Father’s prerogatives over creation, Sabbath, and sin.  He had succeeded each time.  In embracing Calvary he did not act apart from evidence but he did act beyond it.  He boldly went where no man - not even the Son of Man - had gone before, and he did it, in the final analysis, without guarantees.  His faith was the assurance of the thing that everyone hoped for, the conviction of the thing no one had ever seen.

History fails to provide parallels because this was a historical one-off, but one experience at least points us in the right direction.  When Rosa Parks kept her seat on a Montgomery bus, she acted without guarantees.  On that December day in 1955, the forty year-old African American woman had no particular reason to hope that her fate would differ from that of other activists whose civil disobedience had resulted only in punishment.  As Parker Palmer observes,

Obviously, Rosa Parks overcame her own doubts and decided to act.  But she did so with no guarantees that her training would pay off, that nonviolent strategies would work, that her colleagues would share the risk with her, or that she would spark a national movement. . . .Had Rosa Parks sat there calculating the odds of making history, she might well have moved to the back of the bus.  The decision she made was rooted in the only sure place we have, no matter how shaky we feel:  the deep inwardness of an integrity that tells us we must do this thing.

To the cops who came to arrest her, Ms. Parks politely replied, “You may do that.”  She had come to see, as Palmer phrases it, that “no punishment anyone lays on you could possibly be worse than the punishment you lay on yourself by conspiring in your own diminishment.”

Two millennia ago a sleepless, sweat-soaked, blood-perspiring carpenter-cum-Christ heard the jingle of Roman panoply across a darkened olive grove.  He had no scientific certainty, no litmus paper-perfect data, that his death would be anything other than one more assembly line butchery in Rome’s slaughterhouse of self-proclaimed saviors.  Had he knelt there calculating the odds of changing eternity, he might well have moved to the back of the garden.  His decision to step forward was rooted in the only sure place that full humanity can ever have: the deep inwardness the Holy Spirit who told him that he must do this thing. 

When they said they’d come to arrest him, he courteously gave them permission (though he stipulated that his disciples be struck from the arrest warrant).  “I am he” was the Aramaic equivalent of “You may do that.”  From the moment they cuffed him and stuffed him, to the moment he died with a set prayer from a sampler as his last words, he moved in a faith as naked as the body which housed it.  And for the same reason!  The death squad chose not to sever his seamless robe but put the whole thing in the pot for a winner-take-all role of the dice.  The Master decided to toss his entire being into a high-stakes gamble that he was who he knew himself to be.  If he rolled snake-eyes and stayed dead, he was one more chump with a single round in the chamber of a pistol on the balcony at Monte Carlo.

If this seems like heresy, rest assured: it is simply orthodox Chalcedonian Christianity.  That ancient formulation, drafted to do down a quartet of pernicious heresies about the person of Christ, declares that he is “acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”  Full incarnation requires the need for faith, a faith unconfused with divine foreknowledge.

Lent is a time to ponder our need to act without guarantees, to follow the specific call of Christ on our own lives in this very moment.  It is a time for sitting - or even kneeling - when the world commands us to stand.  It is a time for gambling when we cannot read the already-written gospel like a conman placing bets on a contest concluded an hour beforehand.  It is a time for remembering that Jesus wasn’t cheating when he trusted himself to the Father, and that when he calls us to obey in the darkness, he does not do so as one who has known only light.

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