October 12, 2009 by djackson.

Are you a practicing Christian?

You don’t hear that question a lot these days, though I can remember when it was fairly common. D. L. Moody once buttonholed a prospect who, when questioned about his faith, replied, “I’m a Baptist, but have not worked at it in a good while.” Perhaps “worked it out,” per Philippians 2.12, would have been better phrasing, but the man was onto something. Christian faith, in other words, should produce some sort of activity. That’s the subject of James’ whole rant in James 2.14-26.

We don’t talk a lot about being “practicing Christians,” but the term “Christian practices” does seem to be all the rage. Dorothy C. Bass defines the term as “patterns of cooperative human activity in and through which life together takes shape over time in response to and in the light of God as known in Jesus Christ.” She refers, in the same place, to “the ordinary, concrete activities of actual people - and also the knowledge of God that shapes, infuses, and arises from these activities.”

It’s that last phrase that deserves closer attention. Sally Brown of Princeton Seminary, in an article in the October ‘09 issue of Theology Today, invites us to explore what she terms “the text-practice interface.” Her idea seems to be that while we do things because the Bible tells us to, we also understand what the Bible by watching what we do about it. She offers the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who absorbed the worship services and social activism of African American churches during his trip to the states, then read his Bible in Germany in a way radically different from many of his fellow German theologians under the Third Reich. “No Christian community’s practices,” Brown boldly asserts, “are solely derived from its authorizing texts, nor does any community in actual point of fact employ only the Bible to adjudicate disputes about the appropriate conduct of the community’s practices.”

As Dr. Carey Newman, director of Baylor Press and my former seminary roommate, likes to put it, “Obedience is a fully hermeneutical act.” Or, as Mark Marquez, worship leader at Bay Area Fellowship Church once told some of my students, “If you want to understand God, pick up a broom.”

So I’m curious: What are your “Christian practices,” whether personal or communal? How has your reading of Scripture shaped them? How have they shaped your reading of Scripture? At the porous border of text and activity we do well to examine whom we’re letting into the Promised Land.

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October 9, 2009 by djackson.

I have, of late, like Shakespeare’s Benedick, had “some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me” or, to be more precise, broken over my head. Because they were bald jokes. Now, it isn’t (I don’t think) that I am thin-skinned or can’t bear to be teased. (Although I do wonder: we’re not allowed - and rightly so - to tease fat people; and they can diet. Why is it acceptable to abuse people for a genetic condition that no amount of exercise or eating yogurt and oatmeal and Elmer’s glue can cure?) No, I think what bothers me is the complete lack of wit, thought, or cleverness in these jibes. It seems that the mere mention of a receding hairline is, by definition, funny. It’s not the heat; it’s the stupidity.

It reminds me of a scene from Rostand’s classic play, “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Cyrano, the reader may recall, has a honker of truly Jimmy Durante proportions, a brobdingnagian proboscis suitable for battering down city gates. And he’s a trifle sensitive about it but he is also a poet and playwright, “a fellow of infinite jest.” When a would-be comedian offers the observation that, “Your nose . . . is very big,” Cyrano trouble deciding what’s worse - the insult to his pride or to his craft. In the end, he goes with the latter:

Ah no! young blade! That was a trifle short!
You might have said at least a hundred things
By varying the tone

To remedy the omission, he offers a few insults of his own. It occurred to me, that if I have to hear jokes about my hairline, at least I they shouldn’t be hair-brained. So, ala Cyrano, with due apologies to Rostand, I offer the following menu to those who have the compulsion to make bald jokes, but not the wit.

Aggressive: ‘Sir, if I had such a head
I’d amputate it!’ Friendly: ‘Well, it’s true -
That you must save a fortune on shampoo;
Unfortunately, you can’t change your hairdo!’
Descriptive: ”Tis a rock!. . .a globe!. . .a dome!
—A mound, forsooth! It is a cupola!’
Curious: ‘How serves that oval cranium?
A pot to hold your prize geranium?’
Gracious: ‘You love the little birds, I think?
I see you’ve managed with this shiny map
To find the little things a place to crap!’
Truculent: ‘When you smoke your pipe. . .I dread
That the tobacco-smoke beclouds your head—
Would not the neighbors, as the fumes rise higher,
Cry terror-struck: “The moon is all afire”?’
Considerate: ‘When driving do take care
You do not cause a wreck with such a glare!’
Tender: ‘Pray get a small umbrella made,
Lest its bright shining blots out all the shade!’
Pedantic: ‘That beast Aristophanes
Names Hippocamelelephantoles
Must have possessed just such a solid lump
Of flesh and bone, above his forehead’s bump!’
Trendy: ‘The latest fashion, friend, that dome?
Like rappers’ bling-bling? ‘Tis a flashy chrome!’
Emphatic: ‘No wind, O majestic brow,
Can give THEE cold!—save when hurricanes howl!’
Dramatic: ‘When you blush, what a sunset!’
Admiring: ‘An add for Rogaine certainly!’
Lyric: ‘Is this an orb, a monarch you?’
Simple: ‘When is the monument on view?’
Rustic: ‘A forehead? Dang! Don’t that beat all!
‘Tis a dwarf pumpkin, or a basketball!’
Military: ‘A powerful redoubt!’
Practical: ‘Put it in a lottery!
Assuredly ‘twould be the biggest prize!’
Or. . .parodying Pyramus’ sighs. . .
‘Behold the head that mars the harmony
Of its master’s phiz! blushing its treachery!’

And so I leave you with Cyrano’s own peroration:

—Such, my dear sir, is what you might have said,
Had you of wit or letters the least jot:
But, O most lamentable man!—of wit
You never had an atom, and of letters
You have three letters only!—they spell Ass!

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