July 30, 2007 by djackson.

Our local paper carries a column called, “A day like today” which lists historical events that took place on the publication date.  I’ve developed the habit of glancing over it each morning.  As I scanned the roster on July 26 the following item caught my attention:  “In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.” 

Of course, like everyone, I immediately thought of the first page of Katzuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day.  It reads simply, “Prologue - July 1956.”

The novel consists of a kind of diary or travelogue kept by Stevens, longtime butler of Darlington Hall, a manor house which has for centuries belonged to one of England’s aristocratic families.  The subtle irony of this opening entry lies in the aging servant’s cluelessness as to the importance of the date.  Nasser’s powerplay amounted to an affront to the United Kingdom, a gauntlet flung down at the feet of John Bull.  In the end, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, his country fatigued and impoverished by the Second World War, failed to assert English dominance.  Some historians see July 1956 as the second date cut on the tombstone of the British empire.  In other words, the story begins on the day that Stevens’ world, the world for which he has lived, the world of lords and ladies and butlers and footmen and grand country houses, ceases to exist.  The protagonist splashes through his own saga like a clueless ichthyosaurus who manages not to notice that the Jurassic has ended, the Cretacious is on the rise and the plesiosaurs are taking over.

The whole thing got me to wondering about my own opacity.  Through what epoch-making events do I walk unscathed, my denial ensuring my demise? 

Sixteenth century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel painted a canvas entitled “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  The picture shows a ploughman driving his team on a cliff above a busy harbor.  In the middle-distance a herdsman gazes absent-mindedly skyward as ships ply the waters behind him.  If you look carefully, you can just see a pair of legs which thrash above the waves in the lower right-hand corner.  The son of Daedalus has just paid the price of soaring pride, has lost the glorious gamble of a grab at godhood, has embodied the hope and the hopelessness of being human . . . and nobody much noticed. 

Another Bruegel, “The Numbering at Bethlehem,” portrays a busy European town at midwinter.  Children play various games, laborers frame a house, and a crowd gathers outside the local tavern which has been commandeered by the IRS.  Amidst all of this bustle a man with a saw on his shoulder leads a mantled woman on a donkey through the mob.  The incarnation arrives in the hometown of David and nobody seems aware.  “Just think!” quips George Bernanos, “The Word was made Flesh - and not a journalist in the world wrote it up!”

This train of thought raises several unsettling questions for me.

To what extent do I execute the graceful steps of a dance now devoid of meaning, moving with dignified expertise through the drawing rooms of a genteel churchmanship which no longer conveys the gospel to a world that emerged while I wasn’t looking?  Did the “colonies” of Christianity in the global south suddenly assert their independence through a vigorous and indigenous faith while the hereditary lords of Christendom lounged in the leather upholstered categories of a theology we mistook for God himself?

Have I developed such a fixation for ploughing my furrow that I failed to see the magnificently tragic fall of my fellow human being?  As a shepherd who longs to be faithful, have I focused on the 99% perfect flock before me so exculsively that I failed to hear the shriek as one sky-crazed wanderer plummeted to his death?  Doubtless he is lost, perhaps he is guilty - but perhaps he deserves my respect for getting so magnificently off-course, and doubtless he deserves my love simply for being beloved of God.

Would I recognize, in my busy religiosity, a woman big with the potential presence of Christ?  Would I see in the hard hands of a carpenter the ministry of conducting the incarnation into my midst?  In his science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz author Walter Miller, Jr. has a scholar describe a passing peasant to a Catholic clergyman.  “Illiterate, superstitious, murderous.  He diseases his children.  For a few coins he would kill them.  He will sell them, anyway, when they are old enough to be useful.  Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization.  What do you see?”  And without denying a single item in the previous indictment the minister replies, “The image of Christ.  What did you expect me to see?”  But if I don’t see the image of Christ in everyone, I can’t expect to see it in the one who perhaps bears it with particular power - because that one will look like all the others. 

On a day like today an empire fell.  On a day like today a failed god dared the sun and died.  On a day like today Christ came to town on the back of a donkey and the inside of a teenage girl.  What is God about in a life like mine, on a day like today?

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July 24, 2007 by djackson.

So there’s this rumor going around that you can clean your computer keyboard in the dishwasher.  There’s also this rumor going around that you’d better.

Seems Clorox did a study which concluded that the abc pad on your word processor has more germs than the office commode.  Telephones topped out the list of icky workplace equipment but not by much.  Tuscon has the cleanest computers and New York the dirtiest.  Anyway, it suddenly seems I’m spending my days up to the digits in finger lickin’ good fungus and I’m afraid to scratch my nose although bathroom breaks have become less stressful. 

As word of this cyber-sickness spread, someone launched the notion that the average computer keyboard is dishwasher safe.  I first heard about it on National Public Radio back in June.  Nell Boyce tossed her old HP model in on the “normal wash” setting and hoped for the best.  As she waited, she interviewed computer makers and geeks and received mixed results on the idea.  Manufacturers shun the notion and recommend antibacterial spray and those little cans of compressed air.  One outfit, Seal Shield, makes a keyboard that is not only dishwasher safe but works at the bottom of a swimming pool, though anyone who surfs the net beneath the surface has clearly gone off the deep end.

I thought I’d give it a try, but someone should have warned me that this absolutely does not work for laptops.

Actually, that last part is a lie - I don’t have a laptop and anyway I didn’t try it.  I did have a laptop but one night when I brought my dog in from the rain he shook himself dry and spattered water all over it and the keyboard died on the spot.  If a mere Presbyterian sprinkling KO’ed the thing, I somehow have to believe a baptism by full immersion would prove fatal as well. 

But what I really wonder is whether all this cleanliness is really necessary.  Or at all next to Godliness.

I say this, not because germs are unimportant, but because they are unavoidable.  After all, our bodies come equipped with an amazing system for waging war with infection.  At some point we must decide either to retreat to hermetically sealed bubbles or to slurp from the common communion cup of contagious humanity and learn to live with it, and with each other and with ourselves.

And I think this has important theological implications. 

The religionistas of Jesus’ day were fanatics for cleanliness.  They far preferred a fresh-scrubbed, though short-circuited, religious keyboard to a faith made funky in the effort to communicate.  Like surgeons with sterilized hands held aloft they moved through the crowds of commoners insisting that no one mar their immaculate holiness.  Now, clean hands are a good thing in a surgeon, but these soul physicians somehow forgot that all that scrubbing served only as a prelude to plunging their spotless mits wrist-deep in the pulsing life of a diseased patient.  We disinfect to keep from infecting, not as insurance against being infected. 

When they snarked at the Savior for not sudsing up with sufficient care he pointed to the irony of having dishpan hands and a bedpan heart.  (Mk 7.1-23)  Jesus’ fingers flew over the keyboard of common humanity, over surfaces made sticky with the clinging flesh of lepers and the STD’s of hookers and the unstaunched blood of menstrual women.  He played with clay cobbled from his own spit and drew in the dirt and dandled street urchins on his lap.  It wasn’t that Our Lord loved filth, but that he realized we can only tap out the message “God loves you” by touching the contaminated surfaces of sin-slimed hearts.

In his novel The Diary of a Country Priest George Bernanos creates a crusty old character called the Cure de Torcy.  This gruff priest acts as mentor to the callow protagonist.  At one point the old man invites his pupil to consider how the church should think about cleanliness.  Seminarians, he complains,

read stacks of books, but never have the nouse to understand what it means when we say the Church is the Bride of Christ . . . . I’ll tell you:  it’s a sturdy wench who’s not afraid of work, but knows the way of things, that everything has to be done over and over again, until the end . . . . for all the efforts of Holy Church this poor world won’t turn into a shining altar for Corpus Christi day.

The Cure goes on to describe the former cleaning woman at his cathedral.  She scoured the building to within an inch of its life until every surface shown.  This worked just fine until Sunday came and people showed up.  “If I’d let her have her way,” the priest claims, “I’d have turned everyone out so the Lord might keep His feet dry.”  In the end all her mopping only upped the humidity until the floors mildewed and her lungs wheezed with pneumonia.  The Cure concludes,

The mistake she made wasn’t to fight dirt, sure enough, but to try and do away with it altogether.  As if that were possible!  A parish is bound to be dirty . . . . Which all goes to prove, my boy, that the Church must needs be a sound housewife - sound and sensible . . . . A real housewife knows her home isn’t a shrine.  Those are just poet’s dreams.

So let us remember not to short-circuit someone’s salvation by soaking our souls in an unhealthy religious steam bath.  Let us be unafraid to have a faith interface that connects with corruption, to be those physicans who are indeed sent to the sick.  The keys to the kingdom come as we dare to touch the keyboard of contagious suffering in order to spell out the gospel of Christ to those he came to make clean.

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July 16, 2007 by djackson.

The daughter of a good friend spent some time in Germany recently.  Late one night in Salzburg a drunk staggered onto her bus.  The driver promptly eight-sixed the booze-hound but like the persistent widow in Jesus’ parable the man refused rejection.  Each time the driver turned to resume his seat, the wino would sneak back on board.  The exasperated conductor finally ejected the offender with extreme prejudice.  The inebriate’s backpack crashed to the sidewalk and spilled its contents across the pavement.  The victim gave vent to an earthy Saxon oath, the pneumatic doors hissed shut, and the bus disappeared in a fog of diesel smoke.

That little drama put me in mind of Jim Collins best-seller, Good to Great.  Collins undertook to discover why some companies become twenty-game winners in the big leagues while others muck about the minors, never rising higher than some AAA farm club.  His research leads to a metaphor:  your business is a bus with you at the wheel. 

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there.  No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.  They said, in essence, “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus.  But I know this much:  If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

There you have it!  No drunks on the bus.  They smell.  They puke and urinate.  They sing off-key drinking songs and they pull the cord each time the vehicle passes a liquor store.  We’re making up this journey as we go, we’re trying to get to somewhere great, and we have no time for the ramblings of the chemically altered.  Bacchus and his backpack can literally hit the bricks.  We have better things to do.  Leave the snivelling lush and his pathetic belongings to diminish in the distance as we hammer down for the unknown glories of an unspecified Shangri La.

Calvin Miller posits a different image in his book The Empowered Leader:  he tells his readers to take the train.  He quotes his mother, who once told him as they watched freight cars thunder down the tracks, “Engineers only pull levers; the journey is up to the rails.”  Miller expands,

Great Christian leaders ride the rails of divine obedience.  They are responsible for levers.  They are responsible for the distance.  But they are not responsible for the direction.  Direction is God’s compass, given to those who lead.

“God is sovereign,” Miller asserts in the same passage, “and all of history is but the train for which God laid the rails in eternity past.” 

Such a view makes the conductor - not less important, but important in a different way.  No longer responsible for the destination, she can pay attention to the passengers.  Knowing the train runs on the right rails, she can be less concerned about bouncing the wrong people.  Drunks can share the destiny because they can’t derail the journey.

Jesus was not a Jim Collins kind of guy. 

Jesus rode the rails of the Calvary Express like Casey Jones pushing the 382 to a date with destiny on the southbound Cannonball route.  He said over and over, in various ways, that he simply followed the twin tracks of prophetic Scripture and his Father’s call.  He insisted that despite all appearances his train offered non-stop service straight through death to the throne of Heaven.  What looked like a crash at Calvary was in fact a break-through, and the empty tomb was a roundhouse where God reversed the direction of all human destiny. 

The bus-drivers of Jesus’ day disliked his approach.  They specifically objected to the passenger list.  Jesus loaded his carriages with half-pickled prostitutes and pocket-picking IRS agents.  The dining car echoed to the bellowed ballads of rowdy parties.  Al Quada jihadists and Roman GI’s found themselves sharing a seat.  Demoniacs with no self-control jostled religious officials who were all about control (and all about self), women busted into this man’s world with loosened hair and lavish offerings, and Jesus let the children blow the steam whistle.  And the Lord never once said anyone was the wrong sort.  People could always decide to get off, and sadly many did, but nobody went with the imprint of the Master’s sandle on the seat of his toga.  To the tipsy reject on the side of the track, weeping over the violated contents of his pathetic backpack, Jesus said, “Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece.” 

All that was a bit much for a bunch of sphincter-clinching theologians whose white-knuckled hands clutched the wheel at precisely ten and two.  They had to steer the switch-backs of imperial politics and negotiate the hairpin curves of an unpredictable populace.  They had no room for a would-be Messiah made drunk with delusions of grace.  They gunned him down in a drive-by and dumped the corpse in a convenient cave.  They roared into their self-directed future and never saw the cliff until their tires spun on empty air above the unavoidable abyss.

I think our calling as the church is to get the right people onto the train - and to remember that the right people are anybody who wants on board.  I think of that Teutonic tippler swearing impotent oaths to the Salzburg sky and it reminds me of a line from Dorothy Parker’s short story “Big Blonde.”  The central character spends her energies on the imposed duty of being happy because the shallow and selfish riders on her bus will brook no sorrow.  In her final abandonment, in her own drunken ejection to the unforgiving pavement, Parker writes that “she saw a long parade of weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things.”  The bus fare has finally become more than her bankrupt soul can afford. 

To people like that, to all the alcoholics abandoned on mean streets and the big blondes whose sorrow no one wants to share, Jesus the conductor cries, “Come to me all ye that labor and are heavy laden - all weary horses and shivering beggars and all beaten, driven, stumbling things - and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and low of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

All aboard!

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July 9, 2007 by djackson.

Everything in this post comes from a sermon called “A Tale of Two Pillars” by Burt Burleson.  He preached it at DaySpring Baptist Church in Waco, Texas on April 22, 2007.  You can read it at http://www.ourdayspring.org/documents/sermons/2007.04.22_A_Tale_Of_Two_Pillars.pdf.  The lectionary readings for that day included John 21, where Jesus invites Peter for a stroll along a seaside path, and Acts 9 where Jesus kicks sand in Paul’s face along the Damascus Road.  Pastor Burleson used the juxtaposition to talk about the very different characters of the two men God used to lead his church in the earliest days of her life.

The two weren’t very much alike - Paul with his patrician background, always wanting to talk about how his family came over on the antediluvian Mayflower, how he could trace his roots right back to the mud puddle from which God molded Adam, pointing to his diploma from Jerusalem Seminary with Gamaliel’s signature at the bottom; Peter, with his calloused working-class paws and Galilean accent anticipating Melville with the boast that a fishing boat was his Harvard and Yale.  Paul, who read the great Greek poets; Peter, whose language was as salty as his trade and who probably knew little poetry beyond some limericks that you couldn’t repeat in the synagogue.  They’d never have been friends - well, they’d never have met - under any other circumstances than the coming of the Kingdom.

But even once they found themselves in agreement - fundamental agreement about the central truth of both their lives; once they became Christians, they went about living out their mutual faith in ways that were almost mutually exclusive.  The differences between them were basic personal construction.  Even when they did the same thing, they would do it in radically different ways.

Pastor Burleson imagines Paul as the archetypal straight-A nerd.  “You know the type…just obnoxiously squeaky clean.  Made his bed before he was ever asked.  Never got in trouble down at the synagogue.”  Peter on the other hand could be obnoxious but never squeaky-clean.  He’s the kid who always argued that there was no point to making the bed since you were only going to sleep on it again. 

If they’d both played baseball, Paul would have been the scientist, keeping notes on every hitter he faced, mixing up his pitches and careful to stay ahead of the count.  Peter would have been the big left-hander with the lazy motion who has nothing but a fastball and brings heat regardless of the score or who’s on base.  He wouldn’t be above throwing the spitter or at least scuffing the horsehide with a hidden fishhook.  Paul, who would never dream of juicing the pill, would react with such pale chagrin to these tactics that you’d want to slap him.  If you caught Peter in the very act he’d respond wtih such a disarming grin and nonchalant shrug that you’d laugh in spite of yourself.

If they’d both coached football, Paul would think like Woody Hays and Darrel Royal - keep it between the tackles, three yards and a cloud of dust, three things can happen when you pass and two of them are bad.  Peter would run the triple-reverse tackle-eligible flea-flicker on third and short from his own six.

Put it this way:  in John’s account of the post-resurrection encounter with Christ, Peter starts off naked in his bass boat.  Paul probably didn’t get naked in the shower.

What they both did was ministry, but it worked the same way.  They agreed on the big theological issue of the day:  gentiles could be Christians without being kosher.  This put them both in a tiny minority when the convention met in Jerusalem that year to propose revisions to the Nazarene Faith and Message.  You’d think that kind of pressure would meld their respective lumps of coal into an indivisible diamond.  But the thing was, they’d come to their shared position by their usual mutually exclusive methods.

It took Paul three years in the desert with an interlinear copy of the Septaugint and his Hebrew/Greek lexicon to determine that God had intended all along to extend salvation to those outside Israel.  He had a solid theological platform from which to download the various features and functions of an inclusive Christianity.  He had a Power Point presentation on pork and slides on circumcision and a full-color chart complete with an end-times cookbook featuring recipes for rabbit and shrimp.

Peter decided it was okay to crack a cold one with non-Baptists when, on the blue edge of a diabetic coma he thought he saw a bedsheet full of brewskis and heard the Eternal Barman holler “Last call!”  What took Paul three years of prayer and fasting, Peter accomplished in a half-hour because supper was late.

The genius of Dr. Burleson’s sermon lies in the observation that for both men these strengths inevitably slopped over into weaknesses. 

With Peter, openness quickly became impulsivity; “easy-come” translated readily into “easy-go.”  From promising to die to being quick to deny, from slashing off ears to saving his rear, from busting into the empty tomb without waiting to rushing out without understanding, Peter’s personality was so nimble he could be downright schizophrenic.  So when the brass from Jerusalem came to inspect the emergent work at Antioch, Peter went from laissez faire to legalist so fast he had to Heimlich himself to keep from choking on a scrap of undigested exegesis.

Paul, by contrast, took so long to reach a conclusion that by the time he did it had calcified.  True, he bore up where Peter had buckled.  The strength of his convictions arose from the slow process by which he had reached his conclusions.  But when it came to grace of another kind, his fixed and formulated framework tended to fossilize into inflexibility.  John Mark bailed on the first missionary expedition then asked for a second chance.  Peter would have let the whole thing go with no more penalty than a couple of noogies but Paul just couldn’t get past it.

The point here is not that each man was flawed, but that God used them both and thus saved the church from being at the mercy of either’s individual weakness or - more frightening still - either’s individual strength. 

Pastor Burleson concludes his sermon with reference to a famous ikon that shows Peter giving Paul a hug.  He speculates that this might represent one of those playground detentes of which parents are so fond:  “Okay now, Peter and Paul…put your arms around each other…Come on.”  I went online and checked the image.  Sure enough, there the two are, their bulbous ikonic bobble-heads bumping against one another in an awkward embrace.  They may be embracing; they may be looking for an opening.  I was a high school wrestler and this looks to me an awful lot like what is known in the sport as “tying up”. 

But the whole idea made me think of another famous photo of more recent vintage.  On April 22, 1947, during Jackie Robinson’s rookie season in the Big Show and America’s rookie season in desegregation, his Brooklyn Dodgers played Philadelphia.  The Phillies, perhaps in an effort to rattle a dangerous opponent, harrassed Robinson each time he came to bat, bellowing racial slurs that would probably have been banned at a Klan rally.  Their white uniforms might have been so many bedsheets.  Leading the charge was their manager, Ben Chapman.  Later, league commissioner Happy Chandler insisted that the two meet for a PR photo-op in an effort to control the damage.  The resulting image, which Robinson rightly described as a travesty, seems to show two men laughing amiably as they hold a Louisville Slugger between them.  A closer look hints that Chandler, with both fists wrapped around the handle, seems intent on laming Robinson over the head with it and that Robinson grips the barrel only to prevent anything of the sort from taking place.

And this thought drew me to a final image.  Along with the make-nice-for-the-camera image of Peter and Paul, I found another ikon in which the two saints stand side-by-side holding between them a sort of cardboard cutout of an eastern Bassilica. http://www.catholicposters.com/shop/product.php?prodId=1129&cat=32+ The idea, as I understand it, is that between them they are holding up the church.  But look at their faces.  They’re turned sort of three-quarters from one another.  Peter looks askance at Paul, who gazes awkwardly down, avoiding direct eye-contact.  Peter holds a few loose pages of parchment, probably the rough-draft of his first epistle.  Paul clutches a jeweled, gilt-edged copy of his collected works.  It doesn’t have a zippered cover but looks as if it should, and you can bet there are no three-month-old copies of church bulletins sticking out between the pages.  Significantly, Paul grips the church with his right hand while Peter remains the ultimate southpaw.  They look an awful lot like Robinson and Chapman!

One has to wonder who put ‘em up to this.  Probably Barnabas, Aramaic for “Mr. Encouragement.” His nickname recalls the “Happy” handle born by the hapless head of MLB who tried to slap a smiley face over a big-league boo-boo because, when you get right down to it, that’s about the only option he had.  Paul later found himself in similar shape when he heard that two head honchos in the Philippian congregation had gotten sideways with one another.  “Get Euodia and Syntyche together,” he orders the poor pastor caught between these two high-powered cogs.  “They’re upsetting everybody.  Tell ‘em to make nice for crying out loud.”  And everybody did, because sometimes that’s all you can do.

This is where Pastor Burleson leaves us with his sermon.  “It could happen!!  It can happen!!  It does…all the time in and through the Church.  Someone’s impulsivity meets up with grace and it becomes the gift it was meant to be.  Someone’s neurotic compulsivity gets forgiven enough that that person becomes a blessing to the Church.  Or, at the very least, what once drove us crazy becomes an occasion to practice all we’ve preached.”

There is a wonderful petition in the Book of Common Prayer which goes like this:

 O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love
our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth:
deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in
your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What I like best about this prayer is that it insists that I include myself along with the other.  It is a good prayer to pray for our enemies - maybe even a better one to pray for my friends, and best of all for my brothers and sisters in Christ.  It is a good way to remember that even if I cling to Christ’s church only out of sheer self-defense, I owe a debt of gratitude to the one who motivates me to cling.

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July 2, 2007 by djackson.

“I love how God tells us on so many issues, ‘Here’s the formula.’” - Blog of a Megachurch Pastor

I sort of stumbled across that quote recently and it caught my attention.  It caught my attention because I had recently been dipping into Donald Miller’s book Searching for God Knows What.  He frames the book around his experience at a Christian writer’s conference which instructed nascent Max Lucados in the art of the faith-based best-seller.  The leader’s technique essentially involved finding three- or four-step plans for conquering whatever issue ails the reader.

At the time, Miller says he was pondering a novel with the working title Sister Democracy, Show Some Leg! about a curvaceous Carmelite who topples Third World dictators through a deadly combination of Scripture and sex appeal.  He didn’t think he could reformat this yarn to fit the paradigm.

This experience sets Miller mulling the whole formula issue.  “It seems,” he observes, summarizing pretty much the entire contemporary Evangelical hermeneutic (to say nothing of Western systematic theology in general) “when God put the Bible together, He hid a lot of the ancient wisdom so, basically, you have to read into things and even kind of make up things to get a formula out of it.”  Later, he returns to this theme:

Sometimes I feel as though the church has a kind of pity for Scripture, always having to come behind it and explain everything and put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of illiterate hillbillies.  I don’t think they were illiterate hillbillies, and I think the methodology God used to explain His truth is quite superior.

(Sidebar:  Actually, some scholars speculate that the hillbilly label fits Amos, the sheep-dipping, pod-pinching prophet who hocked his double-wide to finance a trip up north to preach judgment to the city slickers.  His whole prophetic career may have amounted to little more than an eighth century BC Grapes of Wrath odyssey with Amos playing the role of Jim Casey. Others debate this and see him as a gentleman farmer, sort of like Mifflin Kennedy or Captain Richard King, cattle barons who ran the biggest outfits in South Texas back in the days of the long trail drives.  But at any rate the only real formula found in the book of Amos is for getting yourself kicked out of church, so Miller’s point holds good.)

And what, in Miller’s opinion, is God’s superior methodology?  He puts the question another way:  what if you had to explain the gospel to someone “and you no longer believed the gospel could be presented accurately using a step-by-step guide with all the beauty of blender instructions?”  He answers:

And I suppose what you would have to do would be to tell a bunch of stories.  You could explain the basics in propositional speak, but to get to the heart of the thing you would have to tell a bunch of stories.  After all, this is what God does in Scripture.

That hit home with me a couple of days later as I was reading a book on Kierkegaard and came across a great cartoon.  (Yes, my Soren Kierkegaard book has cartoons; Proto-Existentialism for Dummies is about all the philosophy I’m up to.)  The sketch showed Jesus standing before a typical first-century seeker.  “What’s heaven like?” the man asks.  “Crops,” Jesus responds.  Then the following exchange ensues:  Guy:  “No, really.”  Jesus:  “Bread.”  Guy:  “No, really.”  Jesus:  “Hidden treasure.”  Guy:  “No, really.”  Jesus:  “Fish.”  Guy:  “Forget it.”

Now, that’s a pretty good summary of the parable sequence in Matthew 13 and you can imagine the frustration of hearers who wanted to do something with Jesus’ words instead of having Jesus’ words do something to them.  Clearly, somebody had to invent the three point sermon and the self-help book to rescue the Lord from his own arcane style.  The Son of God didn’t really say, “Here’s the formula.”  He said, “Here’s a half-hungover farmer who can’t sling seed straight and here’s an eco-terrorist trying to taint the food supply with loco weed and here’s a mutant mustard plant and here’s a microorganism in your food and here’s Cap’n Flint’s ill-gotten gains squirreled away on Treasure Island and here’s the pearl that destroyed Steinbeck’s protagonist Kino and here’s a bunch of guys dodging stingrays while casting for bait fish out in the Cayo del Oso.”  And then he asked the disciples, “Got all that?” and they said, “You bet” and you just know they were lying.

“It seems,” Miller ventures, “if there was a formula fix to life, Jesus would have told us what it was.”

So maybe the right way to read the Bible is not to figure it out but to work it in; not to master it but to be mastered by it; not to conquer it like Captain Ahab jonesing over the corpse of the White Whale but, like Jonah, to be swallowed up by it until, amidst the saltwater and seaweed and half-digested giant squid tentacles we come to understand that salvation lies, not in finding a formula for sailing the ship in a God-brewed storm but in jumping overboard to meet the God we’ve been dodging.  Formulas essentially aim to shore up the shelter I’ve slapped together to keep from needing grace.  God’s Word, by contrast, is the wind that levels our lean-to’s and trashes our trellises and drives us from our high hill of holiness and back into relationship with people whose theology is so bad they’d dress a goat in burlap to get on God’s good side.

So got it?  REJECT the Formulas, RECOGNIZE the Narrative, RETURN to Relationships.  I mean. . .darn!  Here, just look at this olive tree for a minute.

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