September 26, 2007 by djackson.

Jesus told parables, of course. “Parable” is a comfortably King Jamesian word for sermon illustrations or the kind of tales that heavy-headed pulpit paragons scout as being frivolous. A church member once told me that my sermons were emptying our pews because I insisted on telling stories and that I could slap a clot on the hemorrhage if I would only ask myself WWJP - What Would Jesus Preach? I told him that I didn’t have to ask - I already knew:

And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive.”

Then He told them a parable: “Behold the fig tree and all the trees . . . .”

Jesus presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed
in his field.”

He presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed
in his field.”

He spoke another parable to them, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour
until it was all leavened.”

Then I finished him off with, “All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak to them without a parable.” The funny thing is, he key kept amen-ing me at every quotation, completely oblivious to the fact that he didn’t like the way Jesus preached, either.

Anyway, my own lingering bitterness aside, the point is that Jesus’ parables constitute a load-bearing wall in the architecture of his ministry. One congregant symbolically crucified me for my sermon illustrations; Mark 12.12 claims Jesus’ parables contributed directly to his literal crucifixion!

So the question becomes: Who tamed the parables? Why don’t they prickle like a cockle burr in the boxer shorts of our souls and lead us either to change our minds or our hearts or our briefs (all of which comes under the New Testament term “repent”), or to put Christ back on the cross where we obviously feel he belongs?

That is why I want to offer occasional retellings of Jesus “little stories.” Of course they shocked the people of his day, and for a couple of different reasons, which are the same reasons they don’t shock us. First, we miss the punch of the parables because we don’t know the plot in advance. These little soap operas upset everyone in Jesus’ time because they invoked certain expectations and then violated them. N. T. Wright points out that Jesus did not invent the parable. Like Shakespeare, Our Lord swiped his plots and then modified them. For instance, the rabbis had a story about two sons, a hard working honor student and his ADD baby brother. It was a cricket-and-grasshopper kind of thing where the younger son ends up starving in the snow. A modern listener, never having heard the original version, sees only the same old story coming out just as it always did - and always should - and settles into it like a man into an old pair of slippers.

Second, we miss the punch of the parables because we don’t know the cultural context and therefore don’t see the point at which the narrative slides off the rails and begins running amock. In calling his novel That Hideous Strength “a modern fairy-tale for grown-ups,” C. S. Lewis explains that by beginning in a commonplace setting - college life in an obscure English university town - before moving into the realm of mad scientists and devils and visitors from outer space, he follows the method of the traditional fairy-tale:

We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy-tale
opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to
the men who made and first enjoyed the stories.

Everyone in Jesus’ day, for instance, knew that taking a stroll from Jerusalem down to Jericho was a good way to get yourself jumped by local street gangs. The shock wouldn’t have started until the Samaritan showed up. We miss both ends of the skewer: we don’t automatically shiver when Jesus describes the route, and we don’t automatically gag when he introduces the hero.

So we deftly but cluelessly dodge the point of the parables like an idiot-savant torrero who avoids both the bull’s horns without ever knowing he’s been in a corrida. But Jesus tells dangerous stories which should gore our flesh in order to save our souls. So, every now and then, I’d like to try retelling one of ‘em, not because I think I can improve on Jesus’ material, but because perhaps a fresh setting will show the original gem to better effect.

THE PARABLE OF THE CRAZY WELLFARE MOM, from Luke 18.2-8

There once was a judge who landed a gig presiding over secret tribunals for accused terrorists. This black-ops jurist feared neither the Bill of Rights nor the God who supposedly made those rights inalienable. Habeas Corpus was, to him, someone else’s problem, and Miranda was merely the name of his cleaning lady. In the same city lived a welfare widow whose son had been racially profiled and then busted at an airport security checkpoint for having a pair of nail clippers in his pocket and more than three ounces of hand lotion in his carry-on luggage. He disappeared down the dark gullet of Gitmo to writhe in the gastric juices of a ravenous system.

The mother couldn’t afford a lawyer but she went online and discovered the judge’s name and home address and began to appear every day at the iron barricade before his gated community, where she would rattle her aluminum walker against the bars and demand the release of her boy. Soon enough, Amnesty International heard about this and adopted her as a cause celebre. FOX and CNN sent film crews - the media loved the gnarled old woman in the flower-print mumu and Walmart flip-flops. Rumors spread about a possible appearance on Oprah and Bono hinted darkly about the lyrics of his next big hit.

The judge dropped two Alka-Seltzer into his single-malt whiskey and considered. “I don’t fear either house of Congress and the only God I recognize is the domesticated one who works for this administration. Still, this crazy old bat is going to be the biggest public relations fiasco imaginable. If I let this continue, she’ll give the whole operation one big black-eye.” He got on the hotline to the hoosegow. “Kick the kid loose,” he instructed, “preferably late at night and without any advanced notice.”

“Pray like that,” Jesus grinned. “After all, your odds are far better.”

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September 19, 2007 by djackson.

Michael Gates Gill has gone from calling the shots for big bucks to slingin’ shots at Starbucks. He says he definitely prefers the latte to the former. Is his plunge from the pinnacle a fall from grace? No, simply because grace is not something you fall from - it is something you fall into. The geriatric barrista lives a parable which proves that principle.

Gill tells his story in his new book, How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else. He recently spoke about his transformation to Joyce Wadler of the New York Times.

In a former life, he was a six-figure ad exec, the son of a critic for New Yorker magazine who remembers hearing John Updike and Ernest Hemingway hold forth in the living room of his parents’ Bronxville mansion. As a Yalee with a high-dollar gig in advertising Mr. Gates burned his way through two marriages, one job, a start-up company and a gentrified farmhouse in Connecticut. His company fired him, his mistress left him, and he developed a brain tumor while on hiatus from health insurance. As he sat swathed in a dark suit and staring into space at his local Starbucks, the waitress asked if he wanted a job. Well, it offered health care.

Having swapped his power tie for a green apron, Gill discovered a work environment which was extra-terrestrial in terms of the corporate shooting gallery he’d come to know. Employees were “partners” and customers were “guests” and his boss actually referred to a dirty bathroom as “a grout opportunity.” People were nice, and he was happy. He now inhabits bachelor digs in a converted Victorian relic near the train tracks in the same town as his ancestral homestead. He has no third spouse warming up in the bullpen. Starbucks, he explains, “offers an affectionate, nurturing environment so I don’t feel lonely in that sense.”

Gill is not by himself in tracing the success of Starbucks more to culture than coffee. In his new book The Gospel According to Starbucks, Leonard Sweet argues that the church could learn a thing or two from the Seattle java-naut. Coffee, Sweet suggests, is a “conversation drink.” Starbucks has positioned its outlets as “third places” - not work and not home - where such talk can thrive. He points out the social superiority of coffee to other caffeine delivery systems such as soda because “coffee is a hospitality drink, a sign of welcome and openness to sharing.”

When John Steinbeck roamed America in a pickup truck with a converted camper-rig, he noticed the same thing about truckers. “The great get-together symbol,” he writes in Travels With Charley, “is the cup of coffee.” In fact, Steinbeck keeps a stash of java-juice and a hotplate in his primitive Winnebago and many of the stories he tells begin when he invites a stranger to share a mug. At one point a ranch hand confronts the writer. The hired man’s boss has deputized him to chase away trespassers. “Well,” Steinbeck replies, “that sounds as if it means business. If it’s your job to throw me off, you’ve got to throw me off. But I’ve just made a pot of coffee. Do you think your boss would mind if I finished it? Would he mind if I offered you a cup? Then you could kick me off quicker.” The story ends with the hired man helping the novelist find a clump of trees that will hide his rig from sight.

In the end, Michael Gates Gill chose this coffee-conversation-closeness milieu over the fortress mentality of a corner office. He decided he’d rather work for hourly wages within an ethnic kaleidoscope than make serious money in a monochrome corporate meat grinder. He prefers scrubbing toilets for someone who asks nicely to licking the Gucci loafers of people who pay well but don’t ask at all. He seems to feel that sharing beats profit sharing and that community trumps commuting. He describes himself as “a reluctant witness to my own sense of humiliation.”

So we end where we began - with a fall. But what did Michael Gill fall off of, and what did he fall onto? I’ve never liked the phrase “fall from grace” because it inverts the geometry of the gospel. True enough, the apostle Paul coined the term, but modern parlance stands his wording on its head. What Paul told the Galatians was that they had fallen from grace when they bought into the lie of self-service salvation. Galatians 5.4 insists that we cut ourselves off from Christ when we see our faith as a high-wire act where solo performers soar above the amazed mob. Jesus, it appears, hangs out in the net, ready to receive the reluctant witnesses to their own humiliation. Or, to mix the metaphor, he stands behind the counter at Starbucks, ready to receive us as “guests” when we’re kicked out of the country clubs of success, and then to embrace us as “partners” when we find we’re facing eternity with no insurance. And we’ll sit together forever - a miscegenated amalgam of mongrel souls with nothing in common but a cup of coffee - and the cup of mutual sharing in the shed blood of Our Lord.

“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a green apron, He girded Himself. Then He poured coffee into vente cups, and began to wash the disciples’ table and to wipe it with the towel which he carried in his apron.”

Then He’ll call us home to Heaven,
At His table we’ll sit down.
Christ will gird himself and serve us
With sweet lattes all around.

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