My Friend Ted Wrote This
I’m likely to go in twelve different directions today – for those of you who know me, this is not unusual, but I feel like I need to apologize up front to those who aren’t so much a part of the Cult of the Random.
Lent is the season in the church year just prior to Easter, and we Protestants don’t pay much attention to it. I suppose we’re too busy trying to figure out how our lives can be more purpose-driven, or we’re hung up on how the Catholics are wrong about everything, so surely this whole Lent business is for the birds. Besides, most of us just associate it with things like giving up chocolate or TV. But Lent is a season of preparation, a season of the desert, a time set aside in the church calendar to let go of our obsession with saccharine cheeriness long enough to do some reflecting. Historically, the church observed Lent, or something like it, a century or two before they co-opted a pagan holiday to observe Christ’s birth.
The season of Lent has passed, of course, so I’m hopelessly untimely, but I noticed something this Lenten season that I hadn’t before. The Feast of Annunciation, which celebrates Mary’s pregnancy with the Christ child, falls in Lent. In the midst of this season of reflection, of desert, of preparation, we have this image of expectation and hope, mingled with the expectation and hope of the resurrection. The church year folds in on itself like some kind of liturgical wormhole.
In Luke’s telling of Jesus’ story, Mary is greeted by Elizabeth while they are both pregnant, and Elizabeth blesses her. Mary’s response, in Luke’s Gospel, is very poetic:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
And the breath within me has been delighted by God my savior,
That He should look down upon the lowness of His slave.
Why, look! From now on, all races will call me the lucky one,
Because the All-Powerful did great things with me.
His name is holy, and His mercy is for generations and generations toward those who fear Him.
He summoned strength to His arm,
He scattered the proud with the thoughts in their heart;
He pulled dynasties off thrones
And put peasants on high.
He loaded starving people with goods
And sent rich people away emptyhanded.
Israel has claimed its child
As a reminder of mercy,
As He said to our fathers, to Abraham and his seed forever.
Luke’s Mary is awfully literate for an obscure 1st-century Palestinian peasant. This song, similar to Hannah’s song in 1st Samuel, is called the Magnificat, and it has been set to music over two thousand times. That’s more times than Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” has been recorded, and it’s the most recorded pop song of all time – talk about peasants being put on high.
The important thing here is the imagination, the vision, of Mary’s song. The things she says had not actually come to pass, and in many ways they still haven’t. But for Mary, just the knowledge that the Messiah was conceived meant that those things were as good as done. God would be faithful to his covenant, to his character. The mighty would fall and the lowly would be raised up – were being raised up even as the child moved in her womb.
I’m glad we didn’t have a “worship time” tonight. I’m glad we got to hear some good music, and appreciate it for being just that. I think, as a church, we are too focused on music’s role in the assembly. I think it is a distraction. I love music – most of you know that. And I think it has a powerful role to play. I would love to see the church support the arts in a strong and powerful way. I think music and art can help us imagine, and that is definitely important. But we are addicted to the catharsis of worship, and I think it distracts us. In the prophetic tradition God never says, “Hey, sacrifice more goats. I really dig that. More blood. Gotta have more blood.” Generally, he seems to be upset that the really important stuff was being neglected: that injustice was being done, that the poor were not being cared for, that the alien and the widow and the oppressed were not being looked after properly. I don’t think He is saying to us, “Hey, sing more songs, and make sure you get worked up doing it. I love that. Oh, and clap for me – please. Applause for Jesus, what a beautiful sound.”
I appreciate what J had to say in his senior sermon on Tuesday, that we don’t really appreciate what it means for God to be terrible. But I am also more and more coming to see God as much less concerned about whether I sneak off and smoke a cigarette as he is that the migrant workers picking the tobacco can’t support their families or break free from the oppression of poverty. We’re experts in personal morality; it has been the purview of fundamentalists and evangelicals (“kinder, gentler” fundamentalists) for years. I’m afraid we’ve turned a blind eye to systemic injustice; to the sin that permeates our power structures and social systems. That, we are told, is liberal territory, and while I try to live in a world where “liberal” and “conservative” don’t mean anything anymore, there are still some fighting that battle.
There’s a billion-dollar industry in place to convince us that Christian music is important, that we need a soundtrack to our lives and it needs to be written by Michael W. Smith and sung passionately by Jaqui Valasquez. That we need worship songs in our assemblies about how nifty we are that we were smart enough to accept God’s grace. That the role of music in church is to help us get worked up for God. That we need to buy Christian things, that our lives need to be annotated with slogans and decorated with inspirational trinkets. That making fun of secular tunes and turning them into cliché-ridden testimonies is a charitable and cool thing to do.
Don’t get me wrong – there is some good stuff out there. But for every song that says “Let injustice bow to Jesus” it seems like there are twelve that say something like “Hey-O, I receive your mercy.” I try to be careful with anthropomorphisms, but God at least has a forehead and a hand to smack it with.
How about a billion-dollar industry to tell us that the poor are important, that AIDS patients are important, that eliminating the debilitating debt owed by third-world countries in a spirit of Jubilee is important? Better yet, forget the whole industry idea altogether. What about a people preaching that these things are important and leading the way?
I think we need more of Mary’s kind of imagination, of Mary’s kind of hope. This is eschatology, I think, in its best form. I’m not much for rapture theology, though I sometimes pray that God would go ahead and take everyone who expects to be raptured. The idea of that many fundamentalists gone at the same time makes me a little giddy. Okay, that was a cheap shot. But I do want to ponder, as a kind of heuristic device, what it would be like if the entire Contemporary Christian cultural apparatus were to disappear overnight. I want to engage in my own kind of eschatological imagining.
Imagine that suddenly we stopped making Living Epistles T-shirts, that it suddenly dawned on us that “I’m saved and you’re not” is not really the Gospel. And bumper stickers. Imagine every Christian bumper sticker gone, and the aluminum fish with them. Imagine no one wrote books any more with “Purpose Driven” in the title, that church growth suddenly ceased to be a field of study. Imagine that no one was making worship albums with pictures of devout and pious youth on the front cover – you know the look – that no one thought music was going to take them to the throne room. Imagine there were no new church buildings built. Imagine there were no Christian leadership books, no irrefutable laws being handed down from on high, no obsession with being highly effective people, or how many habits those kinds of people have. Imagine no Christian bookstores, no Christian romance novels, no “Armor of God” playsets for kids. Imagine sending food to Nicaragua instead of our leftover VBS materials. Imagine a world where being powerful or beautiful or talented didn’t get you any special favors. Imagine a world where the Christian counterculture is defined by how we love, and not by the success of Christian marketing for Christian products.
Imagine that instead of sappy worship songs designed to give us warm fuzzies about God, Christian artists wrote songs about social justice, about righteousness and peace kissing each other. Imagine that church buildings were being turned into low-rent housing. Imagine that instead of thousands of evangelicals fretting about how to have better church meetings, there were soup kitchens cropping up in every major city like something out of Fight Club. Imagine a strange group of people concerned about the outcast, the downtrodden, the oppressed, to the point that governments had to pay attention. Imagine that we didn’t say a word about ideology, or belief system, but we just invited people to live in a way that honors justice, that teaches us to love God, and neighbor, and even our enemy. Imagine a Christianity that got over its obsession with the speck in Islam’s eye. Imagine studying other cultures and religions not from the standpoint of knowing our enemy, but that we might better love our neighbor. Imagine a Christianity that respected the flag under which we live, but did not bow to it. Imagine a Christianity that inspired people to hold governments accountable for their use of power.
I know I’m crazy. This kind of world, in which dynasties are pulled off thrones and peasants are put on high and starving people are loaded up with goods doesn’t exist.
Or does it?
Lent is the season in the church year just prior to Easter, and we Protestants don’t pay much attention to it. I suppose we’re too busy trying to figure out how our lives can be more purpose-driven, or we’re hung up on how the Catholics are wrong about everything, so surely this whole Lent business is for the birds. Besides, most of us just associate it with things like giving up chocolate or TV. But Lent is a season of preparation, a season of the desert, a time set aside in the church calendar to let go of our obsession with saccharine cheeriness long enough to do some reflecting. Historically, the church observed Lent, or something like it, a century or two before they co-opted a pagan holiday to observe Christ’s birth.
The season of Lent has passed, of course, so I’m hopelessly untimely, but I noticed something this Lenten season that I hadn’t before. The Feast of Annunciation, which celebrates Mary’s pregnancy with the Christ child, falls in Lent. In the midst of this season of reflection, of desert, of preparation, we have this image of expectation and hope, mingled with the expectation and hope of the resurrection. The church year folds in on itself like some kind of liturgical wormhole.
In Luke’s telling of Jesus’ story, Mary is greeted by Elizabeth while they are both pregnant, and Elizabeth blesses her. Mary’s response, in Luke’s Gospel, is very poetic:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
And the breath within me has been delighted by God my savior,
That He should look down upon the lowness of His slave.
Why, look! From now on, all races will call me the lucky one,
Because the All-Powerful did great things with me.
His name is holy, and His mercy is for generations and generations toward those who fear Him.
He summoned strength to His arm,
He scattered the proud with the thoughts in their heart;
He pulled dynasties off thrones
And put peasants on high.
He loaded starving people with goods
And sent rich people away emptyhanded.
Israel has claimed its child
As a reminder of mercy,
As He said to our fathers, to Abraham and his seed forever.
Luke’s Mary is awfully literate for an obscure 1st-century Palestinian peasant. This song, similar to Hannah’s song in 1st Samuel, is called the Magnificat, and it has been set to music over two thousand times. That’s more times than Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” has been recorded, and it’s the most recorded pop song of all time – talk about peasants being put on high.
The important thing here is the imagination, the vision, of Mary’s song. The things she says had not actually come to pass, and in many ways they still haven’t. But for Mary, just the knowledge that the Messiah was conceived meant that those things were as good as done. God would be faithful to his covenant, to his character. The mighty would fall and the lowly would be raised up – were being raised up even as the child moved in her womb.
I’m glad we didn’t have a “worship time” tonight. I’m glad we got to hear some good music, and appreciate it for being just that. I think, as a church, we are too focused on music’s role in the assembly. I think it is a distraction. I love music – most of you know that. And I think it has a powerful role to play. I would love to see the church support the arts in a strong and powerful way. I think music and art can help us imagine, and that is definitely important. But we are addicted to the catharsis of worship, and I think it distracts us. In the prophetic tradition God never says, “Hey, sacrifice more goats. I really dig that. More blood. Gotta have more blood.” Generally, he seems to be upset that the really important stuff was being neglected: that injustice was being done, that the poor were not being cared for, that the alien and the widow and the oppressed were not being looked after properly. I don’t think He is saying to us, “Hey, sing more songs, and make sure you get worked up doing it. I love that. Oh, and clap for me – please. Applause for Jesus, what a beautiful sound.”
I appreciate what J had to say in his senior sermon on Tuesday, that we don’t really appreciate what it means for God to be terrible. But I am also more and more coming to see God as much less concerned about whether I sneak off and smoke a cigarette as he is that the migrant workers picking the tobacco can’t support their families or break free from the oppression of poverty. We’re experts in personal morality; it has been the purview of fundamentalists and evangelicals (“kinder, gentler” fundamentalists) for years. I’m afraid we’ve turned a blind eye to systemic injustice; to the sin that permeates our power structures and social systems. That, we are told, is liberal territory, and while I try to live in a world where “liberal” and “conservative” don’t mean anything anymore, there are still some fighting that battle.
There’s a billion-dollar industry in place to convince us that Christian music is important, that we need a soundtrack to our lives and it needs to be written by Michael W. Smith and sung passionately by Jaqui Valasquez. That we need worship songs in our assemblies about how nifty we are that we were smart enough to accept God’s grace. That the role of music in church is to help us get worked up for God. That we need to buy Christian things, that our lives need to be annotated with slogans and decorated with inspirational trinkets. That making fun of secular tunes and turning them into cliché-ridden testimonies is a charitable and cool thing to do.
Don’t get me wrong – there is some good stuff out there. But for every song that says “Let injustice bow to Jesus” it seems like there are twelve that say something like “Hey-O, I receive your mercy.” I try to be careful with anthropomorphisms, but God at least has a forehead and a hand to smack it with.
How about a billion-dollar industry to tell us that the poor are important, that AIDS patients are important, that eliminating the debilitating debt owed by third-world countries in a spirit of Jubilee is important? Better yet, forget the whole industry idea altogether. What about a people preaching that these things are important and leading the way?
I think we need more of Mary’s kind of imagination, of Mary’s kind of hope. This is eschatology, I think, in its best form. I’m not much for rapture theology, though I sometimes pray that God would go ahead and take everyone who expects to be raptured. The idea of that many fundamentalists gone at the same time makes me a little giddy. Okay, that was a cheap shot. But I do want to ponder, as a kind of heuristic device, what it would be like if the entire Contemporary Christian cultural apparatus were to disappear overnight. I want to engage in my own kind of eschatological imagining.
Imagine that suddenly we stopped making Living Epistles T-shirts, that it suddenly dawned on us that “I’m saved and you’re not” is not really the Gospel. And bumper stickers. Imagine every Christian bumper sticker gone, and the aluminum fish with them. Imagine no one wrote books any more with “Purpose Driven” in the title, that church growth suddenly ceased to be a field of study. Imagine that no one was making worship albums with pictures of devout and pious youth on the front cover – you know the look – that no one thought music was going to take them to the throne room. Imagine there were no new church buildings built. Imagine there were no Christian leadership books, no irrefutable laws being handed down from on high, no obsession with being highly effective people, or how many habits those kinds of people have. Imagine no Christian bookstores, no Christian romance novels, no “Armor of God” playsets for kids. Imagine sending food to Nicaragua instead of our leftover VBS materials. Imagine a world where being powerful or beautiful or talented didn’t get you any special favors. Imagine a world where the Christian counterculture is defined by how we love, and not by the success of Christian marketing for Christian products.
Imagine that instead of sappy worship songs designed to give us warm fuzzies about God, Christian artists wrote songs about social justice, about righteousness and peace kissing each other. Imagine that church buildings were being turned into low-rent housing. Imagine that instead of thousands of evangelicals fretting about how to have better church meetings, there were soup kitchens cropping up in every major city like something out of Fight Club. Imagine a strange group of people concerned about the outcast, the downtrodden, the oppressed, to the point that governments had to pay attention. Imagine that we didn’t say a word about ideology, or belief system, but we just invited people to live in a way that honors justice, that teaches us to love God, and neighbor, and even our enemy. Imagine a Christianity that got over its obsession with the speck in Islam’s eye. Imagine studying other cultures and religions not from the standpoint of knowing our enemy, but that we might better love our neighbor. Imagine a Christianity that respected the flag under which we live, but did not bow to it. Imagine a Christianity that inspired people to hold governments accountable for their use of power.
I know I’m crazy. This kind of world, in which dynasties are pulled off thrones and peasants are put on high and starving people are loaded up with goods doesn’t exist.
Or does it?
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