November 30, 2007 by djackson.

In a departure from my usual run of ambient cogitation, I want to insert a commercial. Actually, it is two commercials, one for each of a couple of projects I’m privileged to be a part of. My ads won’t be anywhere as near as good as the beer commercials on NFL football, but I’ll give it my best shot.

FIRST, I am honored to have been invited to contribute an essay to a new book, Out of the Ooze. Some years ago Tony Celleli, at that time the minister of spiritual formation at Second Baptist Church of Corpus Christi, where I was pastor, directed my attention to a website for the emerging church conversation. I discovered that it was an exhilirating, alarming, refreshing place where one could air out new ideas in safety. From time to time, I posted articles on various topics. Recently, Spencer Burke, founder of TheOoze (http://www.theooze.com/main.cfm), decided to publish a compilation of essays by various contributors including one by the undersigned. The resulting volume, published by NavPress, is entitled Out of the Ooze: Unlikely Love Letters to the Church from Beyond the Pew . If you’d like to check out the book, you can do so on Amazon.com. If you are interested in the emerging conversation, this might be a book worth reading. (Note: I don’t make a dime off it so I’m not pimping for royalties here.)

NEXT, a talented group of people behind the “Celebrating Grace Hymnal Project” allowed me to participate in a courageous effort to create a new hymnal. I say “courageous” because, of course, hymns are supposed to be dead which makes hymnals a form of coffin. These folks, however, feel that the church’s tradition of worship is very much alive and want to produce a volume which expresses that vibrance. Before anyone panics (and those of you who know me personally - and have heard me sing - might be on the verge!), they didn’t let me near the actual notes and chords and treble clefs and things. I am on what is gently denominated the “Extra Musical Committee.” That’s not “extra” as in “more or better than usual” but as in “something besides.” Our team has written or collected liturgies, responsive readings, prayers and other forms of congregational worship opportunities. If you’d like to know more about “Celebrating Grace,” the website is http://www.celebrating-grace.com/. Notice that they have a place for comments and suggestions so if you have strong opinions about music and worship, here’s your chance to get ‘em heard.

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November 30, 2007 by djackson.

And He spoke many things to them in parables, saying, “Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among F295 the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.” - Matthew 13.3-9

Jesus decided he would just tell a bunch of stories that day. “Get this: a spammer went forth to spam; and as he spammed, some of his emails hit filters which dumped them directly to the trash where the server eventually deleted them unread. Others hit the inboxes of Ritalin Rangers who got all fired up; but before they could click the link to take them to the website, they saw another message from a bank in Nigeria offering to transfer $47,500,000.00 into their accounts and that was all she wrote. Others went to multitasking stress-junkies who barely glanced at the thing on their iPhones before the need to deal with eighteen voice-mails and a raft of text-messages, check their stock portfolios, get satellite directions to their next meeting and chug a grandoramalama-mochacocabaroqua-leonardo-de-cappucino from the nearest Starbucks caused them to hit the “delete” button without even realizing it.

“And others went to people who immediately recognized a product they needed at a price they could pay. They not only made an online purchase themselves, but passed the email to several of their friends whom they knew would be interested. This worked out to an ROI of between a hundred percent and thirty with a mean of sixty.

Ya feelin’ me?”

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November 28, 2007 by djackson.

Natalie Angier, in an article for the New York Times, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/science/27angi.html?pagewanted=print) describes her angst when, at Jewish weddings, everyone has to dance the hora, a Fiddler-on-the-Roof sort of interpretive movement set to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” She doesn’t like to do this, because she doesn’t do it well.

Or didn’t do it well; now she does. She went to a symposium at the University of Michigan where she heard a paper read by a neurobiologist and emerged as a born-again hoofer. Top that, Benny Hinn!

I feel Ms. Angier’s former pain. My older son and I once appeared in a production of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The director set it on a college campus in the ’50’s and the curtain call consisted of cast members doing the Stroll from the backdrop to the footlights. My ragged lurch, since it was the last thing I did each night, wiped out any good moments I’d had on stage. Night after night friends who came to the show could talk about nothing but how ridiculous - and uncomfortable - I looked. It’s not an athletic thing; I was a two-sport letterman in high school and played college football on a scholarship. It’s a Baptist thing. Garrison Keillor expresses it well:

The beat goes on but I can’t dance to it anymore. Of course, I never could dance at all, having grown up in a fundamentalist home, which you can tell by the way I move. We believed that any rhythmic physical movement would awaken our carnal desires, as surely as aspirin dissolves in a bottle of Coke, so we kids had to sit in study hall when they taught dancing in phys ed, couldn’t go to the dances, not even square ones, couldn’t even join marching band. I wanted to dance. Wanted girls to know that what I lacked in aptitude I made up for in sheer avid interest. Couldn’t dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus. Those Sanctified Brethren are good people but they do leave a mark on a boy, and even today, when I sweep into a room holding a glass of Puillly-Fuisse, people see me sweep and say, “I didn’t know you were a Baptist.” I wasn’t. We considered Baptists loose.

Turns out, though, that dancing and faith - indeed, faith and the arts in general - have far more in common than we ham-footed fundamentalists ever suspected . . . and we’re a people who are good at suspicion.

See, the seminar Ms. Angier attended was about the evolutionary value of art. Prevailing scientific wisdom holds that graffiti and Beethoven’s fifth symphony and bobbleheads and Marvel Comics and Da Vinci’s Last Supper and all the rest of it are nothing more than a Darwinian bow-wave thrown off by the majestic prow of humanity’s supersized brain. We’re so smart that we get bored and start coloring on the walls. But emergent scientists like Ellen Dissanayake of the University of Washington in Seattle want to vote this one off the island because there’s no way an entire species would devote so much time to something entirely extra-curricular.

Another mainstream theory holds that humans use art the way a peacock uses its technicolor tailfeathers: to get chicks. Ms. Dissanayake rejects this one, too, and has a theory to explain why but I can bust this myth based on my own observation: who ever saw the first-chair violin in the high school orchestra awash in cheerleaders?

Ms. Dissanayake’s take on art is that humanity uses it to build the community necessary for surival. For most cultures (western individualism being the exception) art exists in communal forms: quilting bees, harvest dances, maybe even those cards everybody holds up at football games to spell out “Go Team!” or whatever. Through this kind of “artifying” (and no, I’m not quoting President Bush; the term is Ms. Dissanayake’s coinage) Ms. Angier claims that:

People can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world.

Indeed, of her own experience of learning to dance the hora with grace and confidence, she writes, “I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother.”

Which is where Baptists - and Christians in general - come in. Don’t these claims for art and dance sound like what we should be able to say about worship? The creation of community so that “more numerous are the children of the desolate than of the one who has a husband” (Galatians 4.27); the fusing of resources to “let the weak say, I am strong” (Joel 3.10), the creation of a new society that can turn the world upside down (Acts 17.6) - isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when God’s people gather to praise him? Worship should whirl broken souls into the choreography of devotion that we “restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4.6) and make them want to phone home.

So why don’t we dance? Sure, Salome danced before Herod and gave John the Baptist the mother of all headaches. But David jigged before the Lord with such abandon that his Dance of the Seven Skivvies scandalized his blue-blooded wife. Yes, yes, David eventually got bucked off the bull in the great Hormonal Rodeo, but that had to do with a bath, not a ballet. Should we ban bathing? And not only dancing, but the arts in general: why so many Philistines among the children of Israel?

But there’s no denying we don’t dance well, and I think the issue is more tempermental than theological. Dances are uncertain things that rely on timing and intuition and some form of telepathy between participants. We prefer to march: a regimented movement with predictable outlines and little room for personal innovation. Marches have their points, no denying: they provide safety and routine and wide moral margins. But they seldom make an estranged daughter want to pick up the phone and call her mom, or a pack of prodigal sons and daughters want to kneel down around the Bible and cry out to their Father.

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November 20, 2007 by djackson.

Mr. Whipple is dead. Actually Dick Wilson, the actor who portrayed an anal-retentive toilet paper merchant in five hundred television commercials over two decades, is dead.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you have to understand, I’m gettin’ up there. A student asked me the other day if they had wedding gift registries “back when you got married.” I told her yes - they were hand-illuminated by Celtic monks and nailed to the door of the local church. A few days later she flashed her engagement rock at me and asked if we had those back when I got married. I told her no; the carbon hadn’t been compressed to diamond back before the earth’s crust cooled. The point here is that Mr. Whipple haunted the television of my childhood - a fussy Malvolio of a grocery store clerk who jacked up his blood pressure in an endless campaign to prevent froth-headed soccer moms from fondling the tissue. The airwaves in those days were a wasteland where housewives only got desperate over ring-around-the-collar and why their husbands never asked for a second cup of coffee at home.

Anyway this guy died and after a nine-decade run on the world’s stage will be remembered only for the tag line, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin!” They’ll probably cut it on his tombstone, which will doubtless be shaped like a big roll of three-ply. I hate to think what they used to cushion his head in the coffin! Now, he had other gigs - Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, The Bob Newhart Show. (Note to my younger readers: think Charmed, Prison Break, and The Bill Engvall Show.) He’s “Mr. Whipple” for all eternity, or at least for as long as American pop culture lasts, which won’t be for eternity but will certainly feel like it.

It got me to pondering the whole business of obituaries and legacies and what we leave behind when we leave everything behind and shuffle off this mortal coil. Robert Browning has a great poem called “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church.” The dear old bish, on the verge of pegging out, gathers his crew of illegitimate sons and gives instructions for the lavish (and costly) sarcophagus he wants constructed in the nave of his cathedral. You get the impression that the boys are thinking of something more along the lines of a shallow ditch in Potter’s Field and all that money put to better use in the local taverns and brothels. All the leverage their dad has left is a threat not to pray for them in the afterlife and they don’t seem too impressed by the amount of stroke he’s likely to have with the Almighty.

You give up a lot of control, being dead. They can dress you any way they want, play whatever music they feel like at the funeral, nuke you to cinders - you can’t stop ‘em. Worse still, other people get to pick what you’ll be remembered for. Shakespeare’s Richard II, in one of his mopier moments, advises his pals,

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth

Well, he can talk about his epitaph all he wants, but his version will indeed be about as permanent as tear-trails on the driving dust. His enemy, Henry Bolingbroke, will spin matters for the press once his henchmen whack the deposed monarch.

Just the other day I saw an add in the Baptist Standard for a seminar on writing your own obituary. “Does your family know about your merit badge or that school recognition that happened so many years ago?” A few lines later, “Learn how to write your own obituary, providing all the helpful information your family and friends would love to know about after you’ve passed away.” But I want a seminar that tells me how not to have a life so pathetic that a Boy Scout medal is the loudest horn I can blow. Helping people remember the life I have won’t cut it; having a memorable life will.

Premature obituaries have inspired some people. In 1897 a rumor got about that Mark Twain had snuffed it. He quipped in the New York Journal, “The report of my death is an exaggeration.” An exaggeration, but not an outright lie; Twain, ever the wordmaster, knew the difference as he shaded his epigram in subtle tones of mortality. Then there was Alfred Nobel, who invented both dynamite and Gelignite. When word got out, mistakenly, that he had croaked, a French paper sneered, “Le marchand de la mort est mort,” “The merchant of death is dead.” They went on to say some nasty things about how he’d made a pile of money on stuff used to blow people up. Well, the French - still, Nobel took it to heart, decided he wanted to be remembered for something else and founded the famous prize which did indeed rehab his rep.

So it seems we have about three options. First, there is the “Mr. Whipple Plan” whereby our dorkiest deeds defy our demise, living undead like reputation-vampires. Call it the Marc Antony factor:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones

Second, we can go “Seminar Style,” handling our own PR like a FEMA official at a rigged press conference. Finally, there’s the “Nobel Gambit” - grease enough people to make sure only our good stuff pops up on the first page of a Google search.

But about the time I was pondering all of this the New Testment lectionary reading for the day included Revelation 20.12:

And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.

So it seems that Someone else gets the last word - Someone who’s been keeping disturbingly careful notes, Someone not at all inclined to put a positive spin on my career as a slick actor, an ecclesiastical adventurer, or a mad bomber. Maybe the seminar we need is not one on writing our own obituary, but on un-writing it! Perhaps the real point is not (per Browning’s bishop) that someone etch my indelible epitaph on ageless marble in the presence of God, but that someone hit “delete” and wipe my hard-drive before I face that august Presence.

Mercifully, the lectionary extended the day’s assignment to verse 15:

And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

No merit badges there, no happy faces on my homework. When the very Marianas Trench begins to barf back the dearly departed, when the underworld does a one-eighty and converts life’s ultimate basement into an attic, when the unblinking scrutiny of perfect righteousness makes a Sixty Minutes expose look like a puff-piece - when this starts to happen the last thing I need is to be remembered. What I need is to be forgotten, completely effaced by a no-fault Witness Protection Program and reinvented under the assumed name of the only One whose record can legitimately stand the treatment.

As C. S. Lewis phrases it, “Die before you die. There is no chance after.” To paraphrase the dying thief, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom - but remember me as yourself.”

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November 14, 2007 by djackson.

“Reformation of mores.” I encountered the phrase recently in connection with the novitiate in Maryknoll, a Catholic missionary order. A former postulant explained that the novice year aimed at “reformation of mores.” The writer defined this as “renouncing encumbrances of the old life and practicing the new.”

Reformation, well, no surprises there. But mores? The more is the polite cousin of the taboo. Taboo dates to pre-European culture in the Polynesian islands and refers to what simply is not done - the biggies, the absolute no-no’s. “Reformation of taboos” makes sense. I can understand a spiritual re-education camp where electric shock and punishment push-ups break the bad boy behaviors of overt sin. I can see the rack and thumb-screw for bootlegging dirty magazines into the scriptorium or getting tanked up on the sacramental wine. But who would bother to mess with mores, country club sensibilities that have to do with which fork to use for the salad course and wearing white after Labor Day? Why would those mad monks spend twelve months micromanaging an initiate’s quirks, foibles and pecadillos?

“Though this be madness,” as Shakespeare’s Polonius observed, “yet there is method in’t.”

Taboos don’t take a year to rework. These big slabs of moral beef present a ready target for reformation. God could pretty much dispatch taboos in ten punishing punches. “Thou shalt not” is the body-blow that brings knockout power to a target too big to miss. Idols, murder, stealing, lying - simple to detect with clearly etched boundaries between guilt and innocence.

Much Evangelical preaching operates at the level of taboo. We preachers like to stand in the pulpit and pound the heavy bag. Such proclamation jolts the speaker with a rush of moral clarity and scaffolds the hearer with reinforced satisfaction. I know I’m telling you the right thing, and you know you’re not doing the wrong thing. That great libertarian William F. Buckley writes, “I don’t like rules, but they can be liberating. If the sign says, ‘Smoking Permitted Aft of These Seats,’ then it is only a matter of ascertaining which way is aft before lighting up; and nobody has a legitimate case against you.”

Of course, taboos migrate, but they move at such a glacial pace that we easily keep track. “Don’t smoke or drink” said the churchianity of my youth. “Don’t get an abortion or be homosexual” is the message that currently dominates our billboard pulpits. The old may fade as the new waxes but always with a comfortable period of overlap. Taboo evolves from Neanderthal to Cro Magnon across the chronology of an ecclesiastical ice age and we have no trouble keeping up.

Yes, it is easy to keep our lit cigarettes on the windy side of taboo. The Pharisees in Jesus’ day practiced taboo spirituality. They so savored these moral checkpoints that they festooned the original Ten Uppercuts with numerous jabs. “Remember the Sabbath day” spawned tadpole taboos about flicking fleas and when a licit stroll became a forbidden journey. They stationed pickets and skirmishers on the outskirts of the main batallion in order to make certain no sin invaded the sanctuary of their religion. But if your cigarettes remain aft, the smoke tends to drift forward and send second-hand spiritual carcinogens into the lungs of the innocent.

That may be why Jesus chose to spend so much of his sermonizing on mores. “You have heard that it was said to them of old . . . .But I say unto you.”

Taboo blockaded you from sticking an icepick in someone’s earhole; mores, however, invited character assasination by spiking a third party’s ear with an ice-cold stab of gossip. If taboo restricted murder, Jesus retrained mores to include anger.

Taboo anathematized adultery, but left the eye as a sexual organ free from any legal chastity belt. No prohibition restricted a prescription for visual Viagra that violated the personhood of a woman and reduced her to three-D porn. Jesus worked in the realm of mores and told us to restrain our retinas.

Taboo chained us to the lex talionis and limited the going rate of revenge by the extent of the original offense. Biological (and financial) parity did not aim to encourage mercy but merely to limit vengeance to justice. Jesus called for a remade more which would replace the amputation index for a cheek-for-fist rate of exchange.

Which gets us back to the monastery.

Mores are largely a matter of social conditioning. We conform to them without thinking about them. Once made aware of them, we cannot imagine violating an established one or creating an absent one. As a Texan, I would no more put beans in my chili than some Back Bay Boston esthete would drink red wine with sole. As a Baptist, I never give a second thought (because that would require a first one) to popping the top on a cold brew at the end of a hard day. Conversely, I have a hard time realizing I’m sinning as I sink a shank of sharp-honed gossip into the fleshy part of another’s reputation. I grew up with that behavior. I’ve heard some of the finest Christians I know engage in it. If taboo is the moral heavy-bag in whose wide sides we sink our savage fists, mores are the speedbag whose ball-bearing spin demands nimbleness if we are to strike it twice in the same spot.

The only answer is, indeed, “the reformation of mores.” We must sink ourselves in a new society where these bad habits stand out by being exceptional. Before I became an academic, I never cared about footnote form; preachers have a knightly nonchalance about such matters. Now I can spot a misplaced publication date at a single glance. My new priorities arise not so much from moral improvement as immersion in a different community. Christ calls us to enter a different kingdom, one present though not yet fully born, where mores morph and mold us into a metamorphosis of new life. Which means a couple of important things about the local church.

It means, first of all, that church ceases to be the weekend lounge of the spiritually competent and becomes the bootcamp of the still-civilian soldiers in Christ’s new army. I don’t come to the church as a free agent who chooses to add his value to the franchize. I don’t come as a consumer who samples the wares on offer and purchases only so long as he can’t get the same goods elsewhere at a lower price. I come as a recruit who has seen something desireable in the seasoned soldiers and wants to undergo the training. I submit myself to this community and ask them to reconstruct me as a citizen in the Kingdom of Heaven. And I expect to fail big and often and to receive saving discipline until my mores begin to reform.

It means secondly that I cease to see church as a mechanism for getting what I want out of secular society and start to see it as a way to stop wanting those things. I realize that my “best life now” contorts itself to mores which, as spiritual invertebrates, squish nicely between the big blocks of Christian taboos. I ask the church instead for a spine-stiffening dose of the uncompromised teaching of Christ which, by ending my osteoporosis, forces me to realize that I don’t even negotiate the taboos as well as I once thought. My hands and eyes start to offend me because they don’t fit the new mold, so I re-invoke the lex talionis but turn it inward and hack off my own offending appendages.

“Reformation of mores.” The little jobs are always harder, aren’t they? And more important.

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