February 27, 2008 by djackson.

In his piece “Animal Crackers” composer Eric Whitacre took “The Panther,” “The Cow,” and “The Firefly,” three humorous snatches of doggerel by Ogden Nash, and set them to music. “I’ve always dreamed,” the musician confessed, “of writing a substantial collection of choral works that might enter the standard choral repertoire, something with the depth and passion of Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals and the charm and timelessness of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes. I wrote these instead.”

“I wrote these instead.” That could stand as the title at the head - or the epitaph at the headstone - of many a sermon. In his heart the preacher feels the stir and sting and Sturm und Drang of the word from God within the Word of God. In her head, she hears faint echoes of the Spirit’s soaring arpeggio of truth. He dreams of saying something substantial that might enter the pulpit repertoire, something with the depth and passion of Spurgeon and the charm and timelessness of Lancelot Andrews. Come Sunday she stands before the congregation and confesses, “I wrote this instead.”

“The Preacher,” admits Solomon in the wind-up to his cynical, tell-all autobiography, “sought to find delightful words and to write words of truth correctly.” (Ecclesiastes 12.10) That first verb appears repeatedly in 1 Samuel to describe Saul’s obsessive-compulsive dragnet for the unoffending David, including the time that Jesse’s son likens the manhunt to a satellite search for a single insect in the Australian Outback (1 Samuel 26.20). Those of us who face pulpits on a regular basis begin to understand why Qoheleth slapped that “Vanity of vanities” bumper-sticker on the back of his chariot. The latest edition of Webster’s unabridged contains 315,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary boasts a whopping 171476 words in current use, and 47156 obsolete ones. Flea in a sandstorm indeed! What are my chances, in a given sentence, of hitting on the right one? A needle in a haystack? No, this is the hunt for a needle in a stack of needles! “Words,” Hamlet informs Polonius when asked what he is reading. “Words, words.” The fool things are everywhere!

“Human speech,” lamented Flaubert, “is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.” I wrote this instead.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” I stand in the pulpit and stammer out the equivalent of, “Jesus good! Devil bad!” Spurgeon said, “Can you see Jesus in the dark? Yes. We sometimes see him better in the dark than in the light. If you will go outside in the daytime and look up, you will not be able to see a single star; but if you will get into the bucket of a well, and go down into the darkness, very soon you will behold the stars. To descend may sometimes be the
shortest way to ascend.” I jerk out fragment sentences about Sunday school. John Donne proclaimed, “Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.” If I’m not careful, I drool out pseudo-Joel Osteen drivel about the saccharine goodness of a sickly-sweet Almighty. I wrote this instead.

And yet somehow it happens, Sunday after Sunday to preacher after preacher. Somehow it happens. We hammer away at our cracked tin pulpits as the shaggy congregation growls that it has a good beat but you can’t dance to it. We close our eyes and pluck a verb at random from that 171K-deep heap. With a preemptive prayer for forgiveness we fling it across the empty pews to the hearers huddled at the back and, in Frederick Buechner’s happy phrase, “here and there, now and then,” it becomes the Word of God.

And perhaps, as we leave the pulpit still stunned at the stagnant water now become vintage wine, we hear the Spirit indicate our sermon outline and whisper, “I wrote this instead.”

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February 19, 2008 by djackson.

Claudius: I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet; these words are not mine.

Hamlet: No, nor mine now.

- Hamlet, Act 3/Scene 2

Shakespeare recognized that once a person says something - or writes it down for others to say - one loses ownership. Since scholars believe that many of the Bard’s plays first saw print without his permission (and without him making a farthing off of them), he knew what he was making Hamlet talk about. Of course, Shakespeare himself ultimately swiped the plot of Hamlet from a Danish original, Saxo Grammaticus’ Vita Amlethi. I say “ultimately” because Bill probably kyped the basic plot from Thomas Kyd’s play Ur-Hamlet, which Kyd filtered through a French novel by Francois de Belleforest, who had read Saxo. As Shakespearean scholar William F. Hansen puts it, “most likely, then, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a revision of a dramatic treatment of a retelling of a literary treatment of a Scandinavian legend.”

All of this is on my mind because Hillary Clinton’s campaign claims to have caught Barack Obama with his hand in the rhetorical cookie jar. (Actually, “tongue in the rhetorical cookie jar” would be a more consistent image, but also an unspeakably gross one.) Seems that Obama, responding to Clinton’s charge that the Illinois senator’s candidacy is big on speeches and short on experience, defended his reliance on rhetoric with, well, a stirring bit of rhetoric.

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Obama scoffed during a dinner speach in Milwaukee. “‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words? Just speeches?”

Ripe stuff, but it turns out that he was pretty much recycling a riff run by his pal Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick during his own campaign a couple of years ago. The Clinton camp has long maintained that Obama is merely a political stunt man; now they say he doesn’t even do his own stunts.

I don’t want to get into a whole political thing, but I think the Clintonistas are going down on this one. For openers, Governor Patrick says his buddy is welcome to the bit and that it would have ruined it if Obama had stopped mid-sentence to insert a footnote. But more than that, it is hard to enforce copyright infringement on public discourse, and perhaps even harder to argue that we should. Gary Simpson of Luther Seminary in Saint Paul points out in an article in the current issue of Word & World that this sort of boosting is so common rhetoricians have a technical term for it: “voice merging.” Martin Luther King, Jr. got his “now is the time” theme from E. D. Nixon, the guy who bailed out Rosa Parks. “It is a common practice,” Dr. Simpson asserts, “among ministers who hear others use a phrase, often then to supplement it and finally make it their own, usually without crediting the originator, in order to share it freely with a wider audience.”

So I haven’t been ripping-off Richard Jackson and Calvin Miller and C. S. Lewis and C. H. Spurgeon in the pulpit all these years! I’ve been “voice merging.”

For me, it all comes down to the wise words of that great theologian Waylon Jennings,

Don’t ever cuss that fiddle, boy
Unless you want that fiddle out of tune.
That picker there beside you
He ain’t nothin’ but another side of you.

If we ever get to Heaven boys,
It ain’t because we ain’t done nothin’ wrong.
We’re all in this gig together
So let’s settle down and steal each other’s songs.

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February 15, 2008 by djackson.

If what Jesus says about rejecting his prophets is not sufficiently upsetting, he goes on to explain the basis of this rejection, and why it matters. “How often I wanted to gather your children together . . . .” Our Lord here uses the verb-form of the word he just used as a noun in v.34, “synagogue.” Synagogue comes from two Greek words, a verb meaning “to lead” combined with a preposition meaning “together”. A synagogue, in other words, is the place where people come together to seek God. The Christian equivalent is ecclesia, the verb “to call” with the preposition ex- as in exit, thus a group of people called out from their usual society in order to be God’s community. “Called out from” and “called into” are simply two sides of the same theological coin. In fact, James 2.2 uses the word synagogue (the New American Standard and King James Version both translate it “assembly”) to refer to a local Christian church.

So notice what we have here: “your synagogues” vs. Jesus deep and repeated desire “to gather” his people. In other words, it comes down to a question of who owns Christian assembly, of whose church it is. Jesus contrasts their way of being synagogue with his way, our way of being church with his way. And if we get this wrong, if we make a mistake about the ownership, we get everything wrong. In our church we focus on doing things our way. When Jesus sends his messenger to assert his Lordship, we treat that person like a South Texas road treats a truck’s transmission!

The whole thing reminds me of what I like to call the Parable of the Bolshevik Share Croppers. Jesus had just gotten done telling it earlier this same day – Matthew 21.33-44. Seems that an agri-businessman purchased some land and rented it out to a group of sharecroppers then went back East to lobby Congress for farm subsidies. In his absence the Joad family worked hard and produced a bumper crop but they also started reading Karl Marx and perhaps some Liberation Theology. In any case, when the owner sent his lawyer to collect they refused to pony up. Instead, they declared the farm a commune and launched a sit-in. The demonstration inevitably turned violent: the laborers beat up the lawyer and tossed him out.

The owner tried to work things out – he sent Jane Fonda and Al Sharpton and Jimmy Carter down to negotiate a solution but by this time things had gotten out of hand. CNN buzzed with scenes of cars set ablaze and angry demonstrators flashing clenched fists as they hoisted placards on their shoulders.

The owner, as it happens, had a son who had just graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in social work. He volunteered to go in person. He had a real sympathy for the plight of these brazeros and hoped he could reach a solution that would avoid violence. But by now the thing had taken on a life of its own. Someone on the Revolutionary Council suggested that killing the son would send a strong message against inherited wealth as a keystone of the capitalist system. The next thing they realized they had hung the young man from a street light and torched the corpse. The resulting popular outcry provided sufficient political capital for the President, at the owner’s request, to call up the National Guard. Congress, afraid of being perceived as weak on terror, approved the measure. Absentee landlords everywhere felt renewed security in subletting their land to farm cooperatives.

So Jesus says that a Savior takes necessary steps to remind his people of who owns the church. And don’t fail to notice his motivation, or you’ll miss the whole point and come away with a skewed notion of the character of Christ. Jesus says he wanted to “synagogue” his people, to make a church of us his way “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Hens do that because danger threatens. Augustine in his commentary on the passage talks about scorpions, and how a single sting from one of those bad bugs can kill a chick dead. The mother hen huddles her brood beneath her and then tears the enemy to shreds.

So Jesus tells his nation that thousand-legged danger threatens them with a deadly sting. What might he be talking about? Well, remember the parallel to ancient Israelite history which Jesus makes in v.34 when he invokes the language of 2 Chronicles 36.15 and the story of Jerusalem’s destruction by Babylon. In the first century the Romans were the equivalent of the Babylonian empire. Strong nationalistic elements in Jewish society in Jesus’ day called for rebellion against Rome. That, they said, was the proper way to be Israel, to be the people of God. It cut directly against Jesus’ image of Israel - people who volunteered to lug a Roman soldier’s pack twice as far as the law required. He says that he has offered his nation a clear choice of how to be God’s people, God’s synagogue, and they have gone with the wrong option.

History proves Jesus right, by the way. Within about four decades of the Lord’s resurrection the radicals won out in Jewish life, rebelled against Rome and holed up in the temple. Titus marched his legions down and stormed the city. They decided that as long as the temple stood it would be a lightning rod for rebellion so they pulled it down brick by brick and it has not been rebuilt to this day. Israel’s house was indeed left desolate!

So what does all this have to do with you and me as we try to find Jesus’ way of being church? Quite simply, we face the same choice: whether we will let the radical individualism of our Enlightenment society determine how we shape our churches, or whether we will let radical submission preached by Jesus rule the day. Let me apply this in a single instance.

Remember I said that Jesus’ word for God’s people emphasizes the idea of being “gathered.” I want, he says, to gather all of you under my wings. The idea seems to be that if you want Christ’s protection you will find it only in the company of other believers. This news comes hard for modern American Christians, and perhaps particularly for modern American Baptists. We seem to make a theological virtue out of being uncooperative. Judge Abner McCall, the august former president of Baylor and the Baptist General Convention of Texas once compared leading Texas Baptists to lining 40,000 jackrabbits up and trying to make them all salute in unison! We justify such behavior under a theological rubric called soul-competency or the priesthood of the believer. Ralph Wood of Baylor challenges this notion when he points out that “Luther’s clasic doctrine of the preisthood of all believers . . . has been corrupted into the heretical and essentially Gnostic idea of the priesthood of the solitary beleiver.”

In other words, my “believer priesthood” means that I owe ministry to all of God’s people and especially the gathered people of my own visible, local church. What we usually take it to mean, however, is that I am my own church unto myself and when I do go to the gathered church, it has an obligation to me, not the other way around. The whole idea of ownership gets twisted 180-degrees dead opposite of what Jesus says here. And if we keep trying to be synagogue, to be church, on that basis, ultimately our house is left to us desolate!

Let’s take one example. I read the other day that at the University of California at Berkley they have four separate graduation ceremonies: African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-Amreican and Anglo-American. The anti-racism gurus at Berzerkely, the Mecca of American liberalism, have so enshrined racism that they have to niche-market boutique bachelaureates in order to coddle the radical individualism of our nation’s egocentric ethnicities. I started to laugh at this silliness . . . until I thought of all the Baptist churches that have multiple worship services in an effort to keep order amongst the cultural ghettos of Builders, Boomers, Busters, X-ers, Next-ers and Millenials. I can understand the world having this kind of trouble - after all, they’re nothing but the sold-out sociological pawns of an ever-shifting power play in an ongoing game of intellectual chess. But we, we believers, we Christians, we claim to inhabit the unchanging Kingdom of the Eternal Christ who governs by an entirely different set of laws and yet we seem to do no better.

There’s a scene I have always loved in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet.” Polonius, who is a sort of royal Chairman of Deacons in the court of Denmark, comes to tell the young prince that a group of strolling actors has arrived in the capital. He wants to show how good these guys are by emphasizing that they can perform any kind of play you can think of. They are, he insists, “the best actors in the world,

either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral

I sometimes think of that line when I ponder how our churches proffer pandered praise designed to please the praisers more than the one we say we are praising: The best worship in the world, either for traditional, historical, contemporary, emergent, traditional-historical, contemporary-emergent, traditional-historical-contemporary-emergent. Well, the whole thing is really comical-tragical.

Think about this: I was reading the other day about the physics of stock car racing. Now I’ll admit that I don’t really get NASCAR. They tell me it is the second-most popular spectator sport in America, just behind NFL football and just ahead of tournament poker (yes, poker!). As the grandson of a mechanic and the descendant of a long line of rednecks, I still don’t see the attraction: floor it and steer left - what’s the big deal? But I admit this is my problem because thousands of bellowing, beered-up Southerners can’t all be wrong.

Anyway, this article was talking about the technique of drafting, where one car drives tightly on the rear-end of another. It was pioneered, by the way, in 1960 by Junior Johnson, a former moonshine runner, at the Daytona 500. Junior found out that his inferior Chevrolet could keep up wtih and even surpass the bigger, faster Pontiacs if he tail-gated the faster car and then shot forward at the last second. Junior had never studied physics; he just knew it worked. He won Daytona that year and drafting has been a staple tactic in NASCAR every since. These days pit crews hire Ph.D. scientists to study that kind of areodynamics and they have discovered something fascinating: drafting helps not only the trailing car, but the leading car as well. Drafting reduces wind resistance for the car in back, but it also cuts the turbulence of the air coming off the car in front by channeling it smoothly over the hood of the chase vehicle. The result, the article claimed, is that two drafting cars can, together, travel three to five miles per hour faster than either of them could alone.

That’s a pretty good picture of the real New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of all believers together, a pretty powerful image of all the chicks huddled under the same mother hen! We can resist the centipede sting of secularism, we can outrun the empire-mindset of our modern-day Rome, when our combined momentum drives us hard after Christ. Our whole, it seems, is greater than the sum of our parts.

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February 12, 2008 by djackson.

Have you seen the Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs”? Host Mike Rowe travels America doing one-day stints on some of the nastiest gigs around. My favorite was the guy who harvested the mud used by Big League umpires to rub up balls before a game. The show’s website lists episodes on “Road Kill Cleaner” and “Worm Dung Farmer,” among others.

There are a couple of assignments I’d like even less. The first is caretaker of the NHL’s Stanley Cup. Tradition stipulates that each member of the championship team gets the cup for twenty-four hours during the off-season. The league sends a nursemaid to chaperone this Holy Grail of Hockey so that no harm comes to it. Well, players tend to do things like throw a barbeque, fill the trophy with beer and then pass it around to their teammates. How would you like the assignment of telling a bunch of boozed up professional hockey players to mind their manners around the good silver?

On a similar note, the NFL has a rule that players not involved in the game must stay within a designated area on the sideline in order to prevent any interference - accidental or intentional - with the action on the field. A sideline infraction carries a five-yard tarriff for the first offense and triple that amount for repeat violations. Accordingly, teams employ a “get-back guy” whose duty involves keeping bench warmers behind the chalked boundary. Now there’s a fun career choice: ordering large, angry, adrenaline-soaked, testosterone-amped linebackers not to go where they want to go.

For all that, I can think of a worse job: prophet. One day into the final week before the cross, Jesus reads the collective resume of God’s messengers: killed, crucified, scourged, persecuted. He literally runs the list from A to Z - Abel to Zechariah - and discovers that the Almighty’s mouthpieces require no health plan because they seldom last long enough to need it. The Master roots his rant in Hebrew history, paraphrasing 2 Chronicles 36.15-17, a biblical postmortem on ancient Israel. Interestingly enough, however, he phrases his caveat in the present-tense to speak not of what their ancestors once did but of what they themselves are about to do. Monuments to the murdered, the Lord implies, boast of twenty-twenty hindsight while the present moment’s mistreatment reveals that spiritual myopia still runs in the family.

We who claim to be Israel’s spiritual heirs do well to discern a pattern here. If God’s people have never liked prophets it is unlikely we will suddenly develop a taste for them. For prophets are God’s truth-tellers and, as T. S. Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton,” “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.”

We might protest that we’re no longer redneck enough to serve slaughtered preacher at the church potluck, that the crosses in our sanctuaries are purely ornamental, but Our Lord’s language is uncomfortably inclusive. The Greek verb “scourge” comes from the same root as “chew,” a root which gives us the English word “masticate.” Churches have been known to gnaw up pastors pretty good. The involuntary itinerancy of many ministers testifies to the contemporary potency of Jesus’ words about fleeing from city to city.

There’s one more thing worth noting before we leave verses 34-36 behind. “Behold, I am sending.” Jesus’ grammar verbally italicizes the personal pronoun. As I mentioned, he roughly quotes a scriptural text where YHWH God of Israel deploys successive waves of soldiers to retake contested turf. Now Jesus inserts himself as the subject of the same sentence. He puts himself in the place of power in an unmistakable assertion of his own divinity. Yet the God who speaks of sending prophets also speaks as a prophet who has been sent. The soon-to-be-crucified God joins the ranks of his own faithful servants and offers himself to be savaged in an effort to offer salvation. This subtle linguistic trick provides a powerful punch.

It reminds persecuted prophets that the cross Christ calls them to carry is always second-hand. We bear a used cross whose odometer shows the distance from Pilate’s palace to the Place of the Skull.

It reminds offended saints that we slay the messenger only at the cost of insulting the One who sent the message.

It reminds those outside the faith that Jesus disallows certain approaches to him. While he takes his place among the prophets of God, he won’t stay put. His own language insists that he transcends all categories of the created. If he is not God he is not good. If he is not more than a prophet he is less and other - a blasphemer or a nut-case.

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February 1, 2008 by djackson.

Photographer Luis Draper crystallized the moment back in 1995. As a New York commuter slogged through the subway station at Herald Square, he crossed in front of a mural depicting Michelangelo’s creation scene from the Sistine Chapel. Draper snapped his shutter just as the top-coated, brief-cased toiler trudged into the gap between the outstretched fingers of Adam and the Almighty. (http://www.nytstore.com/ProdDetail.aspx?prodId=16489)

Now it hit me that here was a scene several steps diluted from its origin: God created humanity in a moment of unimaginable beauty; a genius painted it with masterful skill on the ceiling of a great cathedral; someone slapped up a copy on the grimy wall of a public transportation facility; a photographic artist snapped a black-and-white of it; I saw a photo of the photo on crumpled newsprint in the New York Times. It’s a long way from Eden to Corpus Christi, Texas in more senses than just geography and every step seems to be a descent.

Yet whatever moved Draper to aim his F-stop when and where he did, his photo spoke to me as a reminder that each of us lives all of our moments in the holy instant of new creation. When Paul writes in Colossians 1.17 that Christ “is before all things, and in Him all things hold together,” he paints his verb in the vibrant pigment of the Greek perfect tense and thus splashes that primeval past into the present moment. “Christ,” insists Norman L. Geisler, “is not only the One through whom all things came to be, but also the One by whom they continue to exist.” Thus Eugene Peterson renders it, “He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment.”

All of which means that my existence from one keystroke of this blog to the next, yours from the reading of one word to the one following, is no more on autopilot than was Adam’s between lump-of-clay and living being. We with our original ancestor have indeed fallen far from original innocence but have journeyed not one nanosecond from the conscious care of our Creator. Every instant pulsates with holiness in the lightning crack exchange of God’s life-giving power.

So what am I waiting for?

In class discussion this week my students sharply debated the value of time spent in menial - and perhaps meaningless - drudgery. A character in a novel devotes untold hours to illuminating a manuscript of a document he does not understand. Is this wasted days or the opus dei? The conversation crackled with insight and energy until one dedicated pastor of a dying church confessed, “I’ve spent the past several years drawing on a lambskin.” He lived small days of skinny service - slim enough to fit between those two outstretched fingers.

“It is the deep today which all men scorn,” claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson, “the rich poverty which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude which men quite for the tattle of towns. HE lurks, he hides - he who is success, realy, joy and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that everyday is Doomsday.” When, in one of the most famous scenes in all of C. S. Lewis, a character challenged with salvation seeks to put it off until “the first moment I can,” his surgeon-evangelist-tormentor insists, “This moment contains all moments.”

Now granted, this can be a lot to keep in mind when you have to blow your nose or do the dishes or shave your armpits. How is one to electrify such muddy incarnation with some sort of Shekinah of holiness? But you see that’s just the point: God does not require that we sanctify the moment; only that we recognize its inherent sanctity. It isn’t that I can never goof off because every moment counts, but rather that goofing off - if that’s really the calling of this present instant - counts already. A grimy toilet becomes an altar and I kneel before it not only because it’s the only way my brush can reach to back of the bowl but because genuflection is appropriate ergonomics for the work of worship.

God grant us grace to live our lives in the focused power of that photograph. We may be five - or five million - degrees removed from creation’s sixth day but we are not five millionths of a moment from the Creator’s care.

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