We Were Like Men Who Dreamed

Wesley: God is Love

2012-01-22T13:21:00.000-05:00

"It is not written, 'God is justice,' or 'God is truth': (although he is just and true in all his ways) But it is written, 'God is love,' love in the abstract, without bounds; and 'there is no end of his goodness.' His love extends even to those who neither love nor fear him. He is good, even to the evil and the unthankful; yea, without exception or limitation, to all the children of men. For 'the Lord is loving' (or good) 'to every man, and his mercy is over all his works.'"

~John Wesley

Hooker: God is good.

2012-01-05T19:02:00.001-05:00

"That and nothing else is done by God, which to leave undone were not so good."

"No good is infinite but only God; therefore He our felicity and bliss. Moreover, desire tendeth unto union with that it desireth. If then in him we be blessed, it is by force of participation and conjunction with Him. Again, it is not the possession of any good thing can make them happy which have it, unless they enjoy the thing wherewith they are possessed. Then are we happy therefore when fully we enjoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our souls are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God."

~Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

My Favorite Movies of 2011

2012-01-04T01:09:00.000-05:00

9) Puss in Boots

This Shrek spin-off is another strong showing from Dreamworks Animation who, until last year’s How to Train Your Dragon, was churning out a lot of well made but more or less stupid movies. Puss hearkens back to the playful energy of Shrek 2, the fairy tale mash-ups of Shrek (which the sequel had little of at the narrative level), and the classical swashbuckling excitement of The Mask of Zorro. It’s loads of silly fun, and funny to boot. And did I mention it has kitties? Lots and lots of cuddly, mischievous cats and cat accessories and cat jokes? I have an alternate title suggestion: I Can Haz Fairy Tail Adventurz.

8) Captain America

It's what's on the inside that counts.

Like Iron Man in 2008, Captain America exudes stylishly muscular energy. It’s part snappy 30’s period piece, a la director Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer with a bigger budget, and it apes Raiders of the Lost Ark—successfully. A sinister German general (Hugo Weaving) has taken the fuhrer’s supposed obsession with the occult to it’s logical conclusion: he is building an invincible army by way of an ancient mystical artifact. Something more than the average soldier is needed to stop him. For Steve Rogers, a scrawny idealist played by a CG-altered Chris Evans, all he can dream of is serving his country. He is spied out by a government scientist who understands that it is the values—not the strength—that makes the man, and the scrawny boy is transformed by science into a beefed-up hero. The rest of the film is exciting and great and of course good wins, but I think that this movie was noteworthy (and stands out among the Marvel canon) for taking the best of classical American ideals about self-sacrifice and personal nobility and embodying them so un-ironically in the person of Steve Rogers. I don’t consider Captain America propaganda, but it made even this skeptic feel a little patriotic.

7) The Muppets

The lovers, the dreamers...

A passion project of the lovable man-child Jason Segel, The Muppets is a warm, snarky nostagia trip through the days when children’s films weren’t dominated by pop-abusing CG rodents. Segel and his muppet brother search out Kermit once they learn Muppet Studios is to be demolished, meaning of course that everyone has to get back together to sing songs, tell jokes and be flummoxed with each other so it doesn’t get torn down. But the journey is the destination here, and the songs are wondrously joyous and winking, sparkling with the witty verve of Kiwi folk-comedy lyricist Brett Mckenzie of Flight of the Conchords. It brings heart back into the stale contemporary mix of prat falls and meta humor, affirming friendship, loyalty and family even among the most ragtag of misfits.

6) Source Code

Sisyphus much?

If you can imagine Groundhog Day and The Matrix having a love-child, that begins to get at what Source Code is like. Jake Gyllenhal plays an army veteran recruited without consent to relive the last eight minutes of another man’s life, which was ended by a train bombing that killed him and hundreds of others. Each iteration of the events is exactly the same except for how Gyllenhal’s character chooses to influence them, using his past experiences of that same eight minutes to his advantage in order to ferret out clues about the bomb and bomber. Unlike The Matrix, it wears its sci-fi conceits lightly, focusing on the brisk action of the investigation and Gyllenhal’s interest in the friend of his surrogate body played by Michelle Monaghan. It’s a smart, fun movie.

5) Attack the Block

"This is MY house. I have to defend it!"

Attack comes from one of the minds (Joe Cornish) closely involved with the Britain-born genre mash-ups Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Here the setting isn’t suburban (Shaun) or country (Fuzz), but the block—i.e., the London projects. It’s a wickedly sly turn on E.T.—rather than strike up a friendship with a strange creature, these kids just kill the first alien when it gets aggressive, inciting the wrath of its cohorts and setting up the rest of the film. On the block, aliens don’t bear the Spielbergian hope of Close Encounters, but the Spielbergian splatter of Jaws and Jurassic Park. It's an exciting but grim movie. Writer/Director Cornish labors to root the proceedings in an almost anthropological sense of place and dialogue—my friend and I didn’t always understand what these poor kids from the block were saying—yet finds nobility and strength in these scrappy survivors for whom an alien invasion is just another setback in an already too cruel world.

4) Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2

Only a true heir of Godric Gryffindor could have received it.

Either the Harry Potter series took six films (and director Yates 2) before it found its cinematic vocabulary (Prisoner of Azkaban notwithstanding), or Rowling wrote Deathly Hallows in a more classically cinematic-epic style. I don’t think any of the Harry Potter films are Great, capital G, before Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1—a chilling, harrowing and lonely film carrying the emotional freight of its several predecessors. In Part 2, All the dark undercurrents of the series explode in a fantastic cataclysm of good and evil. The villains are primal and terrifying, the heroes desperate and noble. It’s visually fantastic and a satisfying conclusion to the series in terms of emotional closure with the beloved characters.

3) Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Animation auteur Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) has worked a marvelous kind of magic with the fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise. Its pure escapist fluff, but it’s the crème brulee of fluff. While the Bourne series had a stark, verite vibe (which the Bond revivals attempted to reproduce), Bird lets none of the post-9/11 spy seriousness weigh down the flat out awesomeness of the action. The plot is, as always disposable, but the set pieces are engrossing, multilayered, kinetic, yet never confusing. This was the most fun I had at the movies this year.

2) Midnight in Paris

Le sigh.

Owen Wilson stars as yet another stand-in for writer-director Woody Allen’s trademark persona of nervous hand-wringing, vulnerability and literary intellect. He’s a hack Hollywood script-writer vacationing in Paris with his bracing fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her in-laws. He's also attempting to write a novel.* Needing escape from the blunt pragmatism of his co-travelers (who also include the trademark Allen foil: a pontificating pseudo-intellectual who doubles as an apparent romantic competitor) he starts taking midnight walks in the city of love where he is magically transported to the golden era of his imagination: 1920’s Paris and the Lost Generation. He rubs elbows with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Dali—and falls for a sweet but wounded French girl played by the beautiful Marion Cotillard. The movie critiques Wilson’s romanticist escapism, but ultimately celebrates romantic adventure: deep feeling and authenticity empowering one to take responsibility and face life, as Hemingway would have it, with grace and courage.

1) Certified Copy

Certified Copy depicts a vulnerable woman (Juliette Binoche) eager to love a cerebral and reserved academic (William Shimell) lecturing in the small Italian town where she runs an antiques shop. He preaches post-values aesthetics like an artless Oscar Wilde, and has written a book about collapsing the distance between original art and copies. But his heady hedonism seems untenable to Binoche’s single mom, and as their conflict increases over the course of one day in Italy (as their conversation spills from Italian into French into English and back to Italian over and over again), it becomes unclear whether they’re in a tentative courtship or a struggling marriage. The film takes on a moebius strip like quality, and the viewer’s perspective determines the meaning of their relationship. It sounds like a ponderous mess, but on screen the performances are fully, wonderfully human.

Special Mention
Hugo
Filmmaking legend Martin Scorsese’s first “family” film, Hugo is a dazzling picture nostalgic for the same time and place Owen Wilson pined for in Midnight in Paris. It has the all the chilling misery of a Dickensian fable, but the cathartic levity is missing. You’ll see no other film like it from the last year, and few as technically amazing. However, whereas the best family films have big-hearted uplift, Scorsese identifies overmuch with the lonely orphan of the streets. The film’s focus on the movie magic of George Melies is a pale comfort to the boy’s palpable losses.

Most visually spectacular
Tintin
Spielberg and Weta Digital have outdone their motion capture forebears (moreso Zemeckis than Cameron) and created a living, breathing world that has merged human and cartoon while somehow skipping the uncanny valley altogether. Yet I didn’t love the film because, though it was spectacular and entertaining, the whole show felt thin. Perhaps in working so hard to digitally simulate the appearance of human characters, the filmmakers forgot to actually write human characters.

Best Acting
Certified Copy
Juliette Binoche steals the show with a nuanced and vulnerable character without seeming to be acting at all. Her co-star, Shimell, who shares almost all of his screen time with her, achieves the difficult task of crafting an equally enfleshed character alongside her. Without their performances the film would be a cute, Tarantino-wannabe narrative game.

Best Music
Midnight in Paris
Classical, winsome and romantic.

Most Obtuse (and overrated?)
Tree of Life
This is the film on everyone’s top ten this year (along, mostly, with Certified Copy), but I’m not of the opinion that filmwatching means I have to labor diligently to piece together what a film is about. Tree of Life has some strong performances from Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. The vignettes showing mid-century life in the Texan suburbs are fascinating and deftly realized. And I’ll concede the film’s beauty and ambition—it showed me some things I’d never quite seen in a movie before (contemplative dinosaurs, for a start). Ultimately, though, the film was lost on me. There’s something to be said for the narratival directness of a movie like War Horse, which isn’t a great film but is certainly a good one. But hey, sometimes it’s go big or go home.

Most wanted (to see)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Drive
Cave of Forgotten Dreams

*The novel he's working on is about a man running an antique shop like the one Juliette Binoche is in Certified Copy. And Hugo is wistful for early 1900s Paris just like Marion Cotillard's character in Midnight in Paris. I guess Paris was hot at the producers' pitch meetings a year or two ago.

Bible ≠ Jesus

2011-12-17T13:47:00.000-05:00

"In Jesus alone do the divine and human appear in complete hypostatic union. Jesus is therefore the Word of God absolutely. The Bible is the Word of God relatively. Yet the only vehicle possessed by the church for knowing the Incarnate Word is the written Word of the Bible. Church and Bible are found to be in a continuous and never-ending dialogue whose purpose is to discover the character of the Word of God with ever more faithfulness."

~ Charles Price in F.H. Borsch, ed., The Bible's Authority in Today's Church (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1993), 71.

Nimble, Futile Wit

2011-12-12T14:18:00.000-05:00

"What good was it for me that my nimble wit could run through those studies and disentangle all those knotty volumes, without help from a human teacher, since all the while I was erring so hatefully and with such sacrilege as far as the right substance of pious faith was concerned? And what kind of burden was it for thy little ones to have a far slower wit, since they did not use it to depart from thee, and since they remained in the nest of thy Church to become safely fledged and to nourish the wings of love by the food of a sound faith."

~St. Augustine, Confessions, IV:31

Advent Reflections II: Exile & Promise in Isaiah

2011-12-11T11:41:00.001-05:00

Obviously a full treatment of exile & promise throughout the whole book of Isaiah could fill several volumes. I have been looking at chapters 40-44 today (which could also serve as material for much more than a blog post) and thinking about them as an Advent text.

This morning was the first time I've turned on Handel's Messiah this year. The oratorio begins with Yahweh calling his prophet to declare comfort to his people. This is as good a thematic distillation of Advent as any--God's chosen people in pain, waiting for his promised comfort to come to fruition. Handel made a canny choice in his prologue, apparently grasping the primal appeal of the Messiah--comfort. It recalls Christ's promise of rest for the weary, of the Father's pledge to wipe every tear from our eyes. This comfort is best understood not as an explanation for the existence evil, but rather a concrete response to it. The over-arching theme of Scripture shouts, "God has acted for us!" This was my inspiration for opening my bible to Isaiah 40 today.

As I was reading through the following chapters, it struck me how knowing just a little context about the material illuminated a clear narrative unity. I have most often heard different selections from these chapters preached or expounded as though they were a jumble of disparate oracles to be applied in ways separate from each other. Rather, they fit together to address Israel's exile to Babylon, the idolatry that led her there and the respite Yahweh desired to bring to his people. Once I picked up on this in the first chapter, I was fascinated and kept reading.

God's prophetic purpose here seems to be to encourage his people in exile to continue their devotion to him despite their history of idolatry and their enslavement to the pagan Babylonians. Like the apocalypses of Daniel and Revelation, Isaiah wants to turn the tables on the evil empire: it is not Babylon, her idols and her "king of kings" that are in charge. Yahweh is in charge. The LORD is king.

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? ...It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing" (40:21-22).

God is in charge and Israel, though they have been judged and exiled, remains his people. "'I have chosen you and not cast you off'; do not fear, for I am with you" (41:9-10). In theology we call this "election" or "predestination" (I prefer the former); I think it is better to forget the controversial baggage of these terms and grasp them with warm-hearted enthusiasm as the bounteous kindness of God, who called forth a people for himself not because they were special but because he would make them special. It is thereby that we can understand how God can exile Israel yet remain faithful to her, how the whole story of the Old Testament proclaims the grace of the God who was faithful to an unfaithful people. We tell ourselves this story not to say we are better than the Jews, but because we should know that we are no better than them (cf. Rom. 11:17-24).

Israel, as a sort of test-case for humanity at large, showed through its unfaithfulness that the human race was unable to answer and resolve the problem of evil and the tragedy of our alienation from God. God's response comes in 41:25 and following--a divinely-called deliverer, a "servant". Cyrus of Persia (45:1) would in the nearer future physically deliver back to her homeland between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, yet they would remain dominated by foreign and pagan powers (read your Apocrypha, children) and finally Christ would come to enact the return from exile which no one expected: "This is the king of the Jews" (Mk. 15:26).

Yahweh makes it clear, however, that Israel's purpose extends beyond serving as "Exhibit A" in his case against humanity. "You are my witnesses," he declares, "and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (43:10). Israel not only proved humanity's sinister frailty, but also learned the strength of God's steadfast love: "I, I am Yahweh, and besides me there is no savior" (43:11). Israel's long and winding road formed a people who preserved a key theological insight for recognizing God in the flesh: only God can save. Their past, namely the deliverance from Egypt (43:16-17), points to the future:

"I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert" (43:18-19).

The first glimmer of hope.

Here is the comfort of Israel: God has saved, God will save. "O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me" (44:21). So the people of God, despite their dire situation in Babylon, will not benefit from idols, from man-made contrivances masquerading as saviors. They need not believe they are abandoned to the cruelty of Babylon. "Return to me," he pleads, "for I have redeemed you" (44:22). God, for Israel. By extension, God for the world.

The Advent season is a time for us to remember that while Christ has effectively brought an end to exile through his death and resurrection the world yet remains full of sin, suffering and the evil powers that foster them. In the face of loss, economic hardship, sickness or whatever might trouble us, it will always be tempting to believe that "Babylon" is in charge. When contemporary society frames Christianity as bigoted or irrelevant or nonsensical, it is tempting to believe that the idols of money, sex and power are what really count. Advent is a time to remember that affirming the lordship of Christ does not mean escaping from the very real problems which surround us.

I am reminded again of Simeon and Anna at the beginning of Luke, two faithful Israelites who lived long lives only to be introduced to the infant Savior in their twilight years. They are models for the people of God living among powerful idolaters (in their day the Romans and their Herodian puppet kings). We too stand between God's past and God's future, remembering the vindication of the resurrection yet groaning in anguish until his glorious return.

Try and hear these oft-cited words with me as Anna and Simeon would have heard them: as people standing in the painful middle between God's promises and their fulfillment.

"Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
‘My way is hidden from the Yahweh,
and my right is disregarded by my God’?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Yahweh is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint" (40:27-31).

Initial Advent Reflections

2011-11-27T10:25:00.001-05:00

I pulled out my bible at the airport yesterday, and turned to the beginning of Luke. I figured it was a good place to start, what with Advent about to begin and everything. Of the gospels, Luke seems to me to have the strongest sense of exile and its coming end, especially because of the Magnificat and the story of Simeon and Anna.

Upon meeting the infant Jesus, Simeon says to the Lord:

"Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation... a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to you people Israel" (Luke 2:29-30, 32).

It's the poignant exultation of a faithful Israelite which expresses both the weariness and relief of a people who had been living for centuries with the central hope of their religious-ethnic identity in shambles. It was like if there had been several centuries between the middle and end of Avatar. The word for this in biblical parlance is "barrenness." It specifically refers to pregnancy and the inability of a woman to conceive, and its use has been a part of Israel's history since its beginning in Abraham. Everything in God's redemptive action can be summarized in that story, where the word of the Lord came to a barren couple with the promise of a child.

When God's people found themselves in the prolonged, dire barrenness of exile, God didn't answer them with fanfare and a quick fix, but rather with furtive promises on the edge of their corporate consciousness. The end to his centuries-long silence comes to Zechariah in Luke chapter one, promising the coming herald John the Baptist who would "make ready a people prepared for the Lord" (Lk 1:17). Such a situation rewards the careful contemplation of Mary, rather than the casual inattentiveness of nominal religion. It is because of her silent pondering of the words and events she witnesses that she is able to burst into the rich and theologically-reflective song of the Magnificat:

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant... His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation... He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty... according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever" (Lk 1:46-55).

It's a magnificent summary of God's redemptive history with Israel made present tense and realized in the person of Jesus. Mary serves as our exemplary model in these early chapters, standing alongside Simeon and Anna as properly comprehending and responding to the arrival of Christ.

For those of us for whom salvation seems far off, or hidden, or even non-existent, these stories from the beginning of Luke call us to quiet ourselves and listen. Because even in our hour of darkest need, we see that God may very well not come to us in the way we would like him to, but on his own terms. In a way that asks us to be faithful long-term, like Simeon and Anna, even when God's answer feels like it will never come. I have my own struggles with hopelessness, despair and frank impatience with God's timing; these stories encourage me to seek the hope of Christ even when I can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not about insisting to oneself "One day all my problems will be solved and my hopes fulfilled!", but, rather, that there is a way of being faithful in times of exile, there is a living God waiting for us on the edges of our awareness--waiting for us to pull away from despair and towards the groaning expectation of those who put their trust in him.

"Sing, O barren one who did not bear; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate woman will be more than the children of her that is married, says the Lord. Enlarge the site of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left, and your descendants will possess the nations and will settle the desolate towns. Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed; do not be discouraged, for you will not suffer disgrace; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the disgrace of you widowhood you will remember no more. For you Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like the wife of a man's youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer" (Isaiah 54:1-8).

St. Antony the Baller

2011-11-26T17:54:00.001-05:00

"Either cleanse these men by your logic-chopping or by any other skill or magic you wish, and calling on your idols, or otherwise, if you can't, lay down your quarrel with us and witness the power of Christ's cross."

~ St. Antony of the Desert

"Life's A Happy Song"

2011-11-25T16:24:00.001-05:00

Rather than review the new Muppet movie, I'm just going to share this video of Kermit singing with Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords [which I can't embed! :( ].

The movie not only seems poised to revitalize the Muppet franchise, but it is bringing back an old stand-by: the Muppet characters casually riffing with popular comedians. The mischievous interplay of the crew with Jason Segel during his SNL monologue earlier this week is another sterling example, as well as Kermit's back-and-forth with Seth Myers on Weekend Update.

I don't know whether the Muppets have ever been clinically prescribed for depression (unless you count A Muppet Christmas Carol) but certainly these bits, the movie itself and (newly-discovered for me) "The Rainbow Connection", have gone a long way to warm this cynic's heart.

I recently confirmed to a friend that yes, if she bought into a movie's bullshit then it meant the film's producer had done their job well. I don't know all that went in to making this movie, but if I could talk to Jason Segel, I'd have to thank him profusely. Because the movie doesn't peddle bullshit (my emotionally-charged epithet for false or cheap hope, at least when I'm talking about movies or story-telling in general), but the observation that people can build family through love. It's something I suck at, frankly--my immediately family is a mess and I've always struggled with feeling alienated from whatever social group I happen to be a part of.

I'm probably going to number into a large crowd of late-twenty-somethings and early-thirty-somethings who didn't exactly grow up with the Muppets but will have a fervent response to the movie anyway. So what if I wasn't weaned on "The Rainbow Connection"? It still has the power to speak.

Forgive & Forget It Jesus, It's Chinatown: Christian Reflections on a Few Good Crime Movies

2011-11-16T00:55:00.001-05:00

“There is no one who is righteous, not even one.”
~ Romans 3:10

“And again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.”
~ Ecclesiastes 9:11

Movies about crime allow us an opportunity to become temporary voyeurs of a world we know or assume exists somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks. Most of us would never venture there willingly, but this illicit subculture is ripe with human drama and can offer insights about ourselves and our society.

Crime films are legion and often recognized as the best the medium has to offer--The Godfather, and so on. The subject material autmatically supplies two essential elements of an entertaining movie: conflict and spectacle. Many movies about crime of both high and low caliber coast by on this fact alone. But as I was thinking about how I love a lot of movies about crime, I decided the most interesting ones were not simply about crime fighting (police procedurals, most comic book movies) but also about the criminals themselves. Because taking the criminal perspective offers an opportunity to understand the criminal in all of us, one restrained by social conditioning, fear of the law and hopefully transformed or being transformed by the grace of God.

I scribbled down some crime movies I know and love that fit this description. I didn’t want to have to watch anything new in order to make some good recommendations and offer some thoughts, so there may be omissions that reflect this (like The French Connection, Scarface or A Clockwork Orange). I’ve also omitted some that are over-exposed, so I won’t be writing about The Godfather or Pulp Fiction--God knows there’s enough people on the internet already doing that.

I don’t know whether I need this caveat or not, but if you don’t like blood and profanity in your movie selections—well, stick to the ones that were filmed before Woodstock. This blog entry includes some YouTube clips--I've indicated where I think someone might be offended.

9) The Departed

“When I was your age they would say we could become cops or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this--when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?"

Martin Scorsese is one of several directors on this list who made a career of filming the minds and lives of on-screen reprobates. The Departed came in 2006 as a late career return to form for the director, painting the town (and the walls) red with a cracker-jack screenplay about opposite undercovers in the Boston mob and state police. I think what you can get a sense from in this film is both the capacity for those seeking good to resort to the wrong means and the ability of those seeking bad to masquerade as good guys. It paints the pursuit of justice into a morally murky, testosterone-charged corner. Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon both do fantastic jobs depicting men who have lost or are losing their moral center, and all of these boiling identity conflicts seem to literally explode out of their heads by the film's end.

The following video contains brief strong language, a racial epithet and a glimpse of strong violence. The boy Jack Nicholson's character takes under his wing grows up to be Matt Damon--the scene sets up his induction into the criminal underworld. Notice that his gateway to crime is groceries, comic books and a father figure.

8) In Bruges

In Bruges is a witty and elegiac comedy about hit-men sightseeing in “the most well-preserved” town of medieval Europe (Bruges, Belgium). Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson achieve an odd couple rapport in a screenplay that tries to find what dignity a couple of murderers might have. If that dignity remains disconnected from an authentic sense of socio-moral location for these two men, the actors work hard to sell the vulnerability. Farrell’s neophyte gunman is seeking a kind of absolution or reprieve from a tragic hit-gone-wrong, Gleeson comes alongside him with something resembling fatherly compassion and ultimately selflessness. Ralph Fiennes figures in as their livewire boss and wrench in the gears. The resulting and banter and gunfire plays out in stark relief to the somber historical setting and is rendered melancholic by a spare and haunting melodies of the score.

7) Jackie Brown

Adapted from a book by crime-wit writer extraordinaire Elmore Leonard, this hip caper centers on So-Cal flight attendant Jackie Brown as she becomes caught between cops, criminals and a bail bondsman over a bag full of money. Quentin Tarantino cast 70’s icon Pam Grier in the title role and gives her a mo-town soundtrack to underline themes of economic desperation and feminine empowerment. She plays both sides off each other in a series of crosses and double-crosses in order to do something for herself in a world that’s given her nothing. The budding /potential romance between her and the bondsman (the charmingly weathered Robert Forster) adds an element of wistful sweetness amid all the thuggish posturing. Strong supporting performances from Robert DeNiro, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton round out the cast.

6) Fargo

Sarcastically “based on a true story,” Fargo takes a simple tale of blackmail and sublimely twists it into a violent absurdity. A scheming weasel of a Minnesota car salesman attempts to squeeze money out of his cantankerous but wealthy father-in-law by having his wife kidnapped. The aftermath takes one turn down Murphy’s Law lane after the next, until most of the principal characters are dead or in handcuffs. Said salesman (William H. Macy) squirms his way through the film in a staggering display of wimpy depravity. The silent hulking introvert who acts as one of the two kidnappers unravels all the carefully laid plans via violent outbursts which erupt unexplained from his ineffable depths. And the highly-praised Frances McDormand stars as a sweet and pregnant cop who seems smarter than everyone else in the movie, and providing the film’s bleak universe with both a brain and a heart.

In the following clip, you can see the seeds of discontent take root as the car salesman's foolish first scheme unravels right in his face.

5) No Country for Old Men

The film's opening narration:

Also from Fargo’s directing duo of brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country is a kind of successor to that film—without the brain and heart. To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, “If there’s a bright center to the universe, this is the film that’s farthest from.” It’s bleakness is accentuated by the casualness with which it transpires couple with the characters’ weary resignation to it. The plot is almost inconsequential—bag of money, wanted by more than one person. However the filmmaker’s find in Cormac McCarthy’s source material another ineffable killer in the creature of Anton Chigurh, a relentless hitman in a bowl cut and armed with a cattle-dispatching tool powered by compressed air. It resonates thematically as crime film especially in its depiction of law enforcement’s confusion and impotence in the face of indifferent and careless evil.

The film's utter hopelessness for mankind to solve its darkest problems forces the question of Christian hope. Where do we place our hope? Who do we trust for our security? The resurrection of Christ calls us to look at a world as bleak as the one of this film and still live and act as beacons of love and selflessness within it.

4) Chinatown

“Forget it Jake—it’s Chinatown.”

The above quote has become a shorthand for the cruel and indifferent mess of the world. It also serves as a shorthand for the movie itself, a meandering noir whose gumshoe protagonist (Jack Nicholson) is lost in a web of murder, a women, powerful men and something to do with water rights in 1930’s Los Angeles. Filmmaker Roman Polanski is a Holocaust survivor and a probably disturbed man with a notorious and high-profile criminal history. In Chinatown he uses noir tropes of elusive truth and capricious conspiracies to flesh out a dark world that exists right on the sunny L.A. streets. The infamous revelation at the center of the film seems arbitrary, and exists almost solely to push home the perverse cruelty of the universe. But as someone with a deeply personal connection to one of the greatest criminal acts of the modern world, the wounded cynicism of this film may have something to say about the toxic circumstances which engender misanthropy and criminal rebellion against society’s norms.

3) Psycho

Hitchcock believed in playing the audience like a musical instrument, keeping a tight rein on their suspense and investment with the events on-screen. If not quite his masterpiece, the stabby thriller Psycho is a virtual study in the manipulation of audience expectation when it radically shifts gears after the “shower scene” it made famous. The film begins with a crime—again a missing bundle of money—which brings an otherwise innocuous woman ought into the countryside where the ominous Bates Hotel and its caretaker(s) wait to receiver her. Rather than play out as a sin-and-consequences morality play, Psycho works mostly as a mystery about evil lurking in unexpected places. Whether a chummy hotel clerk or pretty office receptionist, the criminal mind and behavior is right beneath the surface. One of the many ways Psycho was timely was its release in a year (1960) pitched right as America’s postwar conformity was ready to explode and unravel as the country’s crimes (like racism) began to pierce the repressive Eisenhower-era façade.

Creepy.

2) Heat

What Heat asks of its leading male characters is whether they can live the lives their compelled to have and still function as human beings. Both Al Pacino’s manic cop and De Niro’s laconic bank thief are loners, incapable of maintaining extracurricular relationships due to their work commitments. Pacino holds onto the angst engendered by dead hookers, child-abusing junkies and other tragedies entailed by his job because it “keeps him sharp; on the edge; where [he’s] gotta be.” De Niro’s commitment is to have nothing in his life he can’t walk out on in thirty seconds—otherwise he’s dead. The crime and pursuit essence of the film is slick, smart and excellently choreographed. It takes on an epic scope by the sheer number of sharply-drawn characters caught in a web which boils down to one man’s pursuit of the heist and another’s pursuit of the law.

1) Goodfellas

“Ever since I could remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

This actually based-on-a-true-story movie is great for so many reasons. Through and through, director Martin Scorsese infuses the whole film with the texture and verve of a raucous Italian family at mealtime. The speech patterns, the cars, the machismo, all the little ethnic idiosyncracies—the film gets them all so right. Moreover, in Henry Hill we’re given an entry into the mafia world we can identify with—and a lifestyle aspiration. Because Goodfellas illustrates the seduction and pull of a lifestyle that offers everything, anything you can think of; it’s the American Dream in a heartbeat. Nowhere is this more lucidly and vividly displayed than the famous Copcabana tracking shot (I can't find a good embeddable version. Follow this link if you're curious).

It’s at once a technically marvelous, unbroken camera pan through an elegantly choreographed scene and a window into how life in the mob made the world Henry’s oyster. His smitten date can only wonder, “Where do you work?”—it’s uttered with the kind of rapt disbelief usually reserved for high-powered men quick to rattle of their achievements, accolade and prestige. The allure makes the criminal life relatable, demonstrates to us how our often hidden and internal desires for such things could pull us down the same path.

"Everything was for the taking... And now it's all over."

This past year the majority of the ministry work I did was in the local jail. I learned there that I couldn’t afford the pretense that I was a better human being than the men I worked with. I think another reason crime movies are appealing is that they can show what it’s like to act out in seductive, self-serving and ultimately destructive ways. It’s fun to see people run off with the cash, the car, the women, the respect, and so on, but it’s telling that so few crime movies allow their characters redemption without some kind of cost.

Ex-mafioso Hill ended up straight-jacketed by the Witness Protection Program to save his own skin. But he also eventually lost his marriage and his government cooperation by getting slapped with drug charges not too many years later. I find crime movies fascinating because they allow a window into either a take-everything-you-want life I’ll never have or the dark mess of the criminal life or both—because they show human beings letting go of the repressed release valve that keeps so many of our self-destructive tendencies. Sometimes a criminal with nothing left to lose seems more honest, more real about who they really are. He or she can offer us not a window but a mirror, making us ask our usually self-righteous selves—what’s the difference? Acknowledging our own utter helplessness in the morality department empowers us not only to seek the saving power of Christ all the more intensely, but also to see the helpless, broken and cruel in the world around us as desired by God to be recipients of his grace.

God-Loved Ghosts in Broken Machines

2011-11-14T17:12:00.001-05:00

This is the homily I gave last Tuesday morning during morning prayer at Trinity. It's based on the psalm for that day, Psalm 78.

Memory. We take it for granted, but all of our perceptions and judgments are shaped by it. It’s where, in one sense, our view of the world comes from. Our minds are host to so many memories we can’t count—weddings and funerals, friendships gained and lost, sought goals that did or didn’t pan out. Probably most of these memories revolve around our connections to other people—the things we did with them, or to them, or vice versa. For better or for worse. But as Christians, we have another category of memory—that of our testimony, our past experiences of being tangibly connected to God. Our psalm for today shows how testimony can overcome living from the cumulative memories of a broken world.

Some ancient songwriter composed Psalm 78 long ago in order to remind Israel of her testimony. “Give ear,” he says, “incline your ear,” pay attention to the things “that our ancestors have told us.” What did the ancestors tell? First and foremost, that Yahweh set it up that Israel would be the people to put their hope in him and keep his commandments. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—these ancestors had a testimony from God setting them apart from their own ancestors, “a stubborn and rebellious generation.” Secondly, they told us through their actions that being the people of God is often, to quote Leonard Cohen, “a cold and broken ‘Hallelujah’.” Because the psalm goes on to recount the people of God’s history of vacillation between faithfulness and rebellion, between “Israel” and “Jacob”. The Psalmist is reminding the worshiper that to be Israel means to bend God’s way and not another, to be, in fact “Israel”—and to leave the wilfullness of “Jacob” behind.

The worshiper is reminded that Israel “forgot what [God] had done, and the miracles that he had shown them.” We’re also reminded of the God whom they encountered—not the bitter, fickle and angry God of some imaginations, nor the stoic dispenser of justice common to others. This God comes across as passionate, involved with and invested in the people he has marked for himself. His anger flares up at their disobedience, but steadfast love comes quickly on its heels, providing water and food. He’s a triune omnipotent groud-of-all-being person on a mission for the redemption of humanity, and in his millenia-long to and fro with Israel he demonstrates both his worthiness of character and humanity’s absolute need to be redeemed from above.

Psalm 78 bracingly reminds us of our shortcomings—Israel demonstrated the human capacity for open rebellion in the face of God’s kindness. The poet protests, “How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert!” We’re a fickle species, human beings. Being human can sometimes be like being a machine where some of the most important parts are missing, or a cake missing its best ingredients like sugar or chocolate. God knows that about us—he knew it about Israel, no doubt. To the point of killing some. But despite that, he remains invested in us. Our sinful actions anger him, but he has compassion because he knows our frailty, he knows how we have been compromised by the stain of sin and the poisonous memories bequeathed to us by our lives. It is knowing and trusting in this God which empowers us to transcend the bondage of common fare human living.

That we can see all these things in this Psalm belies the songwriter’s own frustration and love for the sometimes faithful of Israel. He’s rubbing our noses in the past, begging the worshiper to remember the God who saves and act accordingly. And, ultimately, his hope is for a God-sent king to shepherd us in this charge. David serves as the template, the preliminary sketch of the solution this messy situation demands—an unruly people brought under a righteous but deeply invested God demands God’s direct leadership. We are like Isaiah’s sheep, each turning to our own way, but God has instituted Jesus, son of David, to sort us out.

This all suggests that what we’re in desperate need of is an active remembering of God and his works coupled with the example and leadership of Christ. This is not in any way to lean towards a so-called “works righteousness,” but rather to wrestle with the real and dirty problem of being a human being and also a possession and follower of Jesus Christ. Because we all have our demons, so to speak, whether anger, pride, lust, gluttony or fill in the blank. I don’t have to name your sin, or mine, to be confident that it exists and that on some days it exists boldly. It’s why the confession is part of daily worship.

Let us be reminded, then. We must face the fact that our sin angers God, but we can be comforted to know he has compassion nonetheless. Whether this means prayer, or repentance, or bible reading, or journaling, or all of the above and more, we always need to be reminded of the powerful God who doesn’t always seem close and essential to our day to day lives.

The Basis of Everything That is Important To Me

2011-10-20T18:10:00.000-04:00

The following is a selection is from a brief essay by my systematics professor on the influence that the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury had on the twentieth-century German theologian Karl Barth. It essentially outlines exactly what reading the Bible means to me and is like for me, and by extension describes the process by which I have any knowledge of God at all. I am learning that theology can be deeply edifying.

"Although Anselm begins with God's remoteness... he does not stop there. The theologian pores over Scripture in the hope that God will reveal his very Self through the Scriptural medium. That this may occur is not, in the first instance, due to any inherent power of the biblical words. The Scriptures, like any other created reality, cannot reveal god. If God does reveal his very Self it will be an act of grace. Therefore Anselm begins with prayer. Anselm prays because he knows that he cannot know God unless God takes form within the written word. 'What is at stake here is not just the right way to seek God, but in addition God's presence, on which the whole grace of Christian knowledge primarily depends, the encounter with him which can never be brought about by all our searching for God however thorough it may be, although it is only to the man who seeks God with a pure heart that this encounter comes.'* When God reveals himself he does so by taking form within the written Word. This is an event; it happens from time to time. In the moment of speaking, God reveals the Word as Scripture. As the theologian hears this Word, he grasps the underlying intelligibility of Scripture and formulates it in theological statements. The statements themselves are comprehensible only when they are also illumined by God as revelatory words. This happens as God the Word binds himself to the biblical work, similar to God the Word having bound himself to the human nature of Christ. By the communicatio idiomatum, the divine Word was comprehensible as human words. Similarly, the divine nature, God the Word, becomes comprehensible as the words of Scripture. In this way real knowledge of God occurs, a knowledge which is known by the categories of the understanding grasping the intelligibility of the biblical words. This knowledge depends, in the final analysis, on God's grace. Without grace, Scripture is silent. The knowledge of God and the faith to believe it 'does not come about without something new encountering us and happening to us from the outside... The seed to be received is the 'Word of God' that is preached and heard; and that it comes to us and that we have the rectitudo volendi to receive it, is grace.'** In short, Anselm proposed a doctrine of revelation which depended upon God's act, an event in which God took form within the spatial and temporal existence of the believer to reveal his very Self speaking as the biblical words."

~Robert Sanders, "Barth's Encounter with Kant: Liberalism, Its Rejection, and Anselm"

I wonder if it's really true, as Barth says, that God only reveals himself to those with a pure heart. It seems to me that God is in the redemptive business of revealing himself to those with wicked hearts and thereby purifying them. I know that he reached out to me when I was thinking and acting any other way but pure--and that he continues to reach out to me even as I continue to need purifying.

*Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides quarens intellectum, trans. Louise Smith (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 38.
**Ibid., 171.

Theology as Therapy

2011-10-20T00:29:00.000-04:00

I'm kind of a neurotic person. I try not to let it show; I probably fail. When I'm at my most neurotic I isolate myself because I don't want people to see me that way--twitchy, clammy, socially mal-adapted. I guess that most people who know me know me as a person of faith, but I'm a skeptic first. I am a person of my mind and sometimes its prisoner.

Maybe I can't avoid sounding obnoxious if I describe myself as intelligent, but it's a designation and reality that has been normal for me since I can remember. It's one I think that most of my close friends would agree upon. My mind works fast and intuitively; I enjoy making connections and interpretations, and I'm constantly stitching together the big picture from all the disparate parts. I'm quick to resist other people's interpretations and explanations--unless they jive with my pre-existing framework--a tendency that does not play well with a good many ways of thinking religiously.

I am in some ways a reluctant Christian, faith thrust upon me by Christ-centered spiritual experiences which I can give no account for other than by responding obediently. And though my mind and body kick and scream as my spirit points them heavenward, I routinely return to Peter's exclamation, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).

In college, I lived in two worlds which tended to remain unhelpfully separate: secular history and religion classrooms on one hand; biblicist worship meetings and small groups on the other. I'm grateful for both, but over most of the past decade those two strands of thought have met in a chaotic mess on the battlefield of my mind. In the classroom I imbibed more and more the dismal story that is human history (a long tale of Darwinian cruelty, imo) and tortured myself with questions about the socially constructed nature of thought and reality. In Christian community, worship and bible study I could take refuge from these mental torments, but I could not possess intellectually satisfying resolutions--only escape through faithful affirmation that Jesus stands above and will one day save me from the mess.

For many years my main exposure to formal theology came through biblicist Calvinists whose aggressive certainty and investment in the particularity of their various doctrines only seemed to confirm my charismatic-fundamentalist suspicions that most of theology was a distraction from "mere Christianity." This dovetailed nicely with the post-modern suspicion of reason I gained through various classes and conversations in college, leading me to a place where my mind and spirit seemed like they were forever doomed to be reluctant companions.

Recently, some assigned readings in theology have seemed breaths of fresh air to this sordid chaos--it only took two full years of seminary for them to come along.* "To pronounce the name of Jesus Christ means to acknowledge that we are cared for," writes Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics in Outline, "that we are not lost... We do not exist in any kind of gloomy uncertainty; we exist through the God who was gracious to us before we existed at all... God has so acted for our good, does and will so act, that there exists salvation for every lost condition." The phrase "gloomy uncertainty" grabbed my attention as it so aptly described the mental and emotional anguish I am sometimes beset by. It shook me out of my complacency with such quagmire: I realized that I accepted as normative a mental state which does not make sense for someone who believes they belong to and have been rescued by the god of Israel. And I have long accepted it without ever thinking it absurd, but rather felt arrested by the frustration it brings. His insistence on "salvation for every lost condition" reminded me that I needed to look to Jesus and fight against the chaos.

Barth treats Jesus phenomenologically--his reasoning accepts the historical and contemporary reality of Christ a priori, and he refuses to distance his thought from the person of Jesus through abstraction. This way of thinking is especially appropriate for someone whose adult faith began with a spiritual event which they have had to come to terms with rather than conversion through evangelism, community or some other means.

The other theologian whose words have been soothing salve to my chaotic cerebrum is Richard Hooker. I wish I had read Hooker my first year at seminary, as his Thomist view of law, creational order and wisdom may have settled much of the law-grace perplexity I experienced. "The being of God," he writes in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, "is a kind of law to his working; for that perfection which God is, giveth perfection to that he doth." In other words, God's actions are consistent with his nature--"his most glorious and most abundant virtue." Divine law is not an arbitrary set of commands, nor a merely a redemptive roadblock whereby we are condemned so that we can recognize we need God's mercy. Law has to do with a sacred pattern reflective of God's nature, loving and keeping it the essence of wise human living.

This essentially Thomist perspective establishes a way forward for Christian discipleship and radically undermines common Platonic perversions of Christian thought which see spirit and matter as radically opposed to one another. C.S. Lewis described Hooker's worldview as one "drenched... with deity"--not pantheism, but rather an insistence that ultimately all creation is of and from God, despite the brokenness and sin which come from the fall. A.M. Allchin writes that

"Above all things [Hooker] is concerned to hold together the glory of God and the true dignity of man. This means that in his controversial writings he finds himself defending the demands of a Calvinism which was already setting the sovereignty of God over against the freedom of man, thinking to exalt God at the expense of his creation. This was never Hooker’s way. He sees God’s wisdom and power shining out in and through all things, in the richness and diversity of the world which God has made, and above all in man whom he has created in his image and likeness."**

I find it to be intellectually healing to read these Christian thinkers talking about God in a way that doesn't require logical and moral gymnastics in order to readily recognize Him as "good," "beautiful," and "merciful." These are affirmations of a recognizably good person at the center of what can sometimes seem like a veil of nice-sounding God talk that may or may not pan out. I can be told a hundred times that God is my Father and he loves me and shrug it off. It's as if by reading these different theological bits I've had someone go beyond telling me I have a loving heavenly Father: they've actually begun to show me what he looks like. And God seems less and less like a dream my intense and skeptical mind keeps wanting to wake up from.

*I should note that some readings from Augustine and Aquinas last year on the subject of God and goodness were also helpful, though I think I was too emotionally strained at the time to receive from them all that I could have.

**A.M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in the Anglican Tradition, 7.

Holy Cross Day

2011-09-14T07:48:00.002-04:00

"Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world to himself: Mercifully grant that we, who glory in the mystery of our redemption, may have grace to take up our cross and follow him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen."
~Collect for Holy Cross Day, BCP p.244

"It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit of evil spirits. As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do? Was he to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifferences to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created men at all. It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself."
~St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, I.6

"And he said to all, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?'"
~Luke 9:23-25

"Chasing God and the Moon"

2011-08-13T08:09:00.000-04:00

"This... is about me pursuing God and running after His heart wherever He leads me, and that is something that I hope to be doing for the rest of my life. It’s not something I can check off a list whenever I get off the plane. It’s a pursuit that goes beyond my location or circumstances... God can be found wherever we are at any time; we don’t have to go all the way around the world to find Him. I actually think that I have spent far too much of my life 'waiting for the moment' rather than fully giving myself to the chase. And I think those moments that I wait for end [up] being a disappointment if I haven’t been engaged in the journey and the process of getting there, and if I choose not to remain engaged once the moment has passed.

Right now our plane is literally chasing the moon, and we seem to be catching up. We flew right through our daylight hours and we’re about to cross over into night again. For now, I am chasing God and the moon right into India, and I pray that I will not at any moment find myself waiting to Live."

~ S.D. Zielstorff

"No Complacency"

2011-08-11T07:36:00.001-04:00

"In the two fundamental duties of pleasing God and loving one another there must be no complacency."

~ John Stott, Evangelical Truth (IVP, 2003), 32.

What You Should Ask For

2011-08-07T13:53:00.000-04:00

"Do not ask for what some tell you that you should ask for, but for that which you feel the need of, that which the Holy Spirit has made you to hunger and to thirst for, you ask for that."

~ C.H. Spurgeon, from his sermon "Pray, Always Pray"

Billy Graham on Compassion, Suffering & Happiness

2011-08-02T17:34:00.000-04:00

"Abraham Lincoln once said, characteristically, 'I am sorry for the man who can't feel the whip when it is laid on the other man's back.'

Much of the world is callous and indifferent toward mankind's poverty and distress. This is due largely to the fact that for many people there has never been a rebirth. The love of God has never been shed abroad in their hearts.

Many people speak of the social gospel as though it were separate and apart from the redemptive gospel. The truth is: There is only one gospel. Divine love, like a reflected sunbeam, shines down before it radiates out. Unless our hearts are conditioned by the Holy Spirit to receive and reflect the warmth of God's compassion, we cannot love our fellow-men as we ought.

Jesus wept tears of compassion at the graveside of a friend. He mourned over Jerusalem because as a city it had lost its appreciation of the things of the spirit. His great heart was sensitive to the needs of others.

To emphasize the importance of people's love for each other, He revised an old commandment to make it read: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart... and thy neighbor as thyself' (Luke 10:27).

St. Francis of Assisi had discovered the secret of happiness when he prayed:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life!'"

~Billy Graham, The Secret of Happiness (BGEA, 2002), 35.

The Obscene & Inspiring Billy Graham Library

2011-08-01T17:35:00.001-04:00

My family and I visited the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, NC today. Upon arriving at the front gate, we are not charged to park or visit, but are greeted warmly and asked if it is our first time. The parking pass we're given doubles as a evangelistic tract. We pull into the lot and see the main building: a large barn-shaped structure with an enormous cross-shaped window on its front with entry doors at its foot. There is also a mock-grain silo.

The interior of the main hall is nostalgically synthetic. Perfectly trim "rustic" wood lines the walls and ceiling, vintage Sears & Roebuck signs are hung, and there is a fake barn to the right with--I kid you not--an animatronic cow which begins the library tour. Beyond the front desk are a small cafeteria and a book/trinket store, rounding out the theme park vibe. It's Graham by way of Disney.

Bessie, said cow, begins the tour with tales of Graham's early life on the farm near Charlotte, milking at the crack of dawn and eventually practicing sermons while he does his chores. The barn set has nice detail touches (further evoking Disney) like a fore-fronted, gently slumbering cat with subtle movements and a dimly-lit barn constructed with forced-perspective to create the illusion that it extends further than it does. The other "cows"'s rear ends and twitching tales are visible, growing smaller as they recede into the background. I told my groaning mom and sister that it would be more realistic if they had included animatronic defecation and the synthetic yet pungent replication of its odor.

We are ushered along to the first of several seating areas with screens detailing moments and highlights from Graham's life. These are interesting enough, but retain the kitschy quality of the Biff Tannen museum from Back to the Future II. I feared, at first, that the experience would not transcend the carefully-mannered elements of the production, but it eventually won me over through faithfulness to its raison d'etre: Graham's articulate and impassioned proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The man's preaching covers a multitude of aesthetic sins. The desperation of his soul for others to come to Christ is present in each word, each turn of phrase bursting with urgency for the redemption of humanity.

We were ushered through other exhibits and scenes: a mock-revival tent, a mock-radio station, a mock-main street with storefront and (the highlight) a mock-Berlin Wall and guard station replete with rubble, graffiti, barbed wire, and a search light. This room interwove details about the persecution of Christianity behind the iron curtain and Graham's evangelistic exploits in Eastern Europe and Russia during those years. All of these extensively utilized visual media and scenery to tell the story of Graham as a global evangelist, collectively taking on a Gump-ish quality by showing how one man carried his personality and pursuits through so many late twentieth century highlights. They also point to Graham as a man of God who harnessed the power of communications and transportation technology to become the most widely heard evangelist in world history.

It was in the next room after the Berlin Wall that I broke down. A 2005 letter to Graham from the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Australia described his Graham-led conversion experience in detail. He added that it was rare for him to ask a church in his diocese whether any in the room had been converted at the 1959 Sydney crusade and not at least see a few hands. This one particular letter momentarily stood in for Graham's global impact, implying that all over the world pockets of the faithful live indebted to the life and ministry of Billy Graham. I was deeply touched by the concern for and success with bringing the gospel to the nations, and had to sit down and cry it out.

I usually don't respond when people talk about their heroes of the faith from church history or contemporary life, but Billy Graham always commands my attention. His life and manner inspire me and reach me--probably in no small part due to his accessibility through visual media. I left the tour feeling encouraged in my faith and strengthened with desire to pursue God and his calling for my life. The synthesis of decades worth of sermons and interviews revealed a man who lived with a passionate dedication to the gospel--with integrity--consistently demonstrating a focus on Jesus and moral confidence whether he preached to a crowd or was being interviewed by Woody Allen. The transformed life of the man outdid the oppressive corniness of the library's presentation about him. (Apparently Graham himself was embarrassed after visiting the library for the first time; he wished it wasn't so exclusively focused on himself)

In an interview towards the end of the tour, given quite recently it would seem, Graham conceded that his one regret was that he didn't spend more time in prayer, meditation and study. He said he would have done the same number of evangelistic rallies, but many fewer non-evangelistic speaking engagements. This thought made an impression upon me. I was also struck by Graham's eschatological optimism: whereas many other Evangelicals think of transforming society and hoping for Christ's return as opposites, Graham remains optimistic that Christ's pending return does not mean things have to keep getting worse until he does. And that's good news I can believe in.

The Spiritual Relevance of Theological Training, Part 2

2011-07-24T08:51:00.000-04:00

In my previous post I considered the relevance of theological training to the spiritual life. If the call of Christ is to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves, why study theology? I granted it a certain but limited value--my attempt to commend it to those who think it doesn't matter and to relativize it to those who think it matters too much. These posts also represent my attempt to work through these issues myself. I wanted to find out what I thought and should think about these things, and so I set about writing my thoughts down this way. Writing is my means for organizing and processing my thoughts, and this blog has only ever been a glimpse into my thoughts and thought process, never a display of polished writing. This post is part two of my miniature investigation into the relevance of theological training; here I turn my sights from the spiritual life of the individual to the communal responsibility of the Christian leader (by which I mean anyone officially active in the oversight of or ministry to a Christian community, ordained or otherwise).

From a leadership perspective, theological education in biblical studies, systematics and church history has one primary and invaluable function: protecting and articulating the apostolic faith and understanding how it interacts with unbelieving host cultures. This function does not constitute the core of basic Christian discipleship, but it must serve discipleship’s ends by creating and protecting a safe and stable environment where basic discipleship can occur. Without this telos, academic theology and its by-products are, spiritually, a collective waste of time. Basic discipleship, on the other hand, without intellectual and ecclesiological structure tends towards petty cultism, schism, anti-intellectualism and historical rootlessness. The former will lose Christ in the halls of the ivory tower, the latter will become socially irrelevant as it sinks further and further down the rabbit hole of Christ-culture and mind-body dualism.

Academic theological training will not provide many things to the Christian leader. Integrity, diligence, public-speaking, pastoral skills, administration, and so on—these must all be gained elsewhere (not to mention the "basic discipleship" I have been speaking of--a life built on the foundation of love for God and love for neighbor). However there remain some essential skills which come with academic training and should not be underestimated:

1) Critical thinking! Christians known for pursuing personal relationships with God are not known for their logical consistency and general intelligence. This is a shame. Rather than shunning secular universities and institutions as godless enemies, Christians should be fully engaged with secularism, armed with robust faith, flexible minds and fearless confidence that God can and will redeem human society through the salt and light of the church. This will require creative ways of integrating the mind of faith and the mind of science, and a re-evaluation of old battle-lines drawn through issues such as evolution, post-modernism and politics.

Furthermore, Christians need to read things that challenge their minds, stretch their worldviews, and undermine their presuppositions. A vital, orthodox faith in Christ is no reason not to be well-read.

2) Exegesis! Christian leaders need to know how to read, interpret and apply the Bible consistently and holistically. Evangelicalism has far too many topical, eisegetical and emotionalistic sermons. Sermons should be Christocentric and reflect the import of a Scriptural text, rather than constructed from random Bible verses to make a point apart from text and context. Consistent exposure to exegetical preaching is not only good stewardship of God's word, it also fosters a church body which respects God's word and interprets it carefully.

3) Systematics/Biblical Theology! Christian leaders should have a basic grasp of the bible and know how to synthesize its content in response to practical concerns and questions. Whether someone wants to know how a Christian should manage their finances or why there is suffering in the world, Christian leaders should be able to respond with holistically biblical wisdom. It wouldn’t hurt them to also have some fundamental grasp of the history of theology either (nor philosophy, if they’re so inclined).

And finally—this is not a skill, per se, but still relevant—Christian leaders oughht to grasp at least enough of church history* that they understand their role and denomination as one niche in a globe-spanning and millenia-long redemptive mission orchestrated by the God of the universe. Good church history instructs us in humility, empathy and, not least, the exemplary lives of the saints who have lived for Christ throughout. Woe to those who conceive of it as a mere chronological succession of theological ideas.

Presumably, all these skills would be added to people who live by the Jesus Creed. Because without the core of basic, Jesus-oriented discipleship, all these professional skills are but dried grass blown away by the wind. Also, these considerations have been made in the ideal; the exigencies of Christian mission will always contend for the same time and money that might be spent on theological training. It is up to church and seminary leaders to determine the balance; please God, let them continue to hear you and always find ways to integrate mission and training.

I conclude with a plea for prayer. I assume that those who read my blog have at least some passing interest in my life as a seminarian, so please petition the Lord that I would be able to embrace first the Jesus Creed and also the discipline of training and theological formation. My hope and desire is to be an integrated leader—fully devoted to “basic Christian discipleship,” successfully trained in the intellectual disciplines relevant to mission of Christ and the community of his church.

*For this task I recommend Mark Noll's Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. It is not a long book, especially considering it spans two thousand years of church history, and it is just enough information to begin to hint at the shape of the story of the people of God since Pentecost.

The Spiritual Relevance of Theological Training, Part 1

2011-07-23T11:11:00.000-04:00

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” ~ Jesus (Matthew 22:37-39)

Two posts ago I related some of my struggles with seminary, especially related to the emphasis on professional training for ministry. Some recent back and forth with a friend has stoked some further thoughts about seminary, specifically my attempt to gauge the relative spiritual importance of academic theological training. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to consider biblical studies, systematics and church history, as my basic questions have to do with the spiritual relevance of the academic disciplines. In my opinion, the spiritual relevance of an applied disipline such as pastoral theology, leadership or practice is self-evident, provided that the pastor ministers in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit. This is not to say that that field does not need re-evaluation and reform in certain ways. Additionally, the relevance of liturgical instruction goes unquestioned provided that both instructor and student have an integrated grasp of liturgy and the imperative to love God with one’s whole being.

I see two Christian perspectives from which to evaluate academic theological training. The first and most important concerns basic Christian discipleship and formation, the second Christian leadership and pastoral responsibility. Either way, I believe its relevance can be considered through one lens: the commands to love God and to love our neighbors.

Scott McKnight calls Matthew 22:37-39 “The Jesus Creed.” These commandments, construed Christocentrically, constitute the distilled essence of Christian praxis. Anything which does not accord or strive to accord with these imperatives cannot be justly called “Christian behavior.” These calls to love underscore the whole ethical thrust of the New Testament and outline what it means to follow Jesus. Throughout this essay I will refer to living by these commands as “basic discipleship.” How then does theological education fit the Jesus Creed? I will attempt to answer this question by going through the “creed” line by line.

Theological training can and should cause its students to love God more deeply from the heart by more intimately acquainting them with the grand redemptive narrative of the Bible and, in particular, the redeeming work of the cross and the powerful victory of the resurrection. The seminarian must come to more clearly understand the God who prefers mercy to judgment, and so be filled with love. However, it is unclear, and perhaps improbable that the relentless specificity of academic theology is necessary for or essential to this task, except insofar as these basic ideas need articulation and defense over and against those who would appropriate the Bible to tell a different story. For those called to the apologetic task, this is no small order.

As for loving God from the soul, the psychological and emotional healing required for this are unlikely to be gained through academic pursuits. Moreover, the spiritual disciplines required to sustain soul care—meditation on Scripture, prayer, rest, community, celebration—neither require academic precision nor certification. Professional Christian counseling, however, should require academic training in both Christianity and counseling, although these disciplines will affect those receiving counsel only indirectly.

The imperative to love God with all one’s mind will often be cited as the Jesus mandate for theology and its professional training. I would argue that, while this is not an invalid application of the Jesus Creed, left alone it is a woefully narrow construal of the call to love God with our minds. For not only do we need care for logical consistency in our God talk, but also a consistent habit of turning our thoughts towards God. As Paul writes, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (Romans 12:2). Theological sophistication and precision can never replace this; affirming orthodoxy will not, by itself, effect the mental transformation that God desires for us. Only the spiritual habits of Scripture meditation, prayer and corporate liturgical worship will do the trick.

Love of neighbor will be partly addressed when I consider the relevance of theological training to Christian leadership. Theological knowledge will be used to love others mostly through Christians' attempts to satisfy others' theological problems and conundrums. Basic questions like "Why suffering?" and "Doesn't the Jesus love and the Old Testament God hate?" can only be addressed by someone with at least rudimentary theological training, even if it's only congregation-based catechesis. Helping people in a particular cultural and intellectual setting become intellectually receptive to God and the gospel is of no small value. Even so, intellectual concerns are relativized by the hierarchy of needs, especially when the majority of the world waiting to hear the good news are poor and hungry.

All considered, I find theological training to be of limited value in the life of the lay disciple. Non-academic catechesis might go a very long way in shaping thoughts for God by training disciples in basic doctrine. It does stand to reason, however, that loving God with our minds means being lifelong learners: as much as our station, vocation and capacity allow, Christians should be growing in intellectual knowledge of God. For some that will mean academic theological training; for the vast majority it will not. However, considering the relevance of theological training vis-à-vis Christian leadership in my next post will, I think, reveal considerably more benefits to basic Christian discipleship, albeit in a somewhat indirect way.

Only A Single Mom Could Have Written This Fantasy Epic

2011-07-20T00:44:00.003-04:00

"Where your treasures is, there your heart will be also."
~ Matthew 6:21

"The last enemy to be destroyed is death."
~ I Corinthians 15:26

Spoilers.

I had the strangest experience watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2 this evening. I was filled with a deep appreciation and love for my mom, who has loved and sacrificed and prayed my sister and I through the past two decades. Strange, not because it's inappropriate to feel this way towards my mom, but rather because through all those years she has also been a vocal opponent of all forms of fantasy fiction. To her it is all too tolerant of the occult, grievous to the Holy Spirit and a dangerous gateway for sparking interest in the demonic and the mystical. As a schoolteacher, Harry Potter and his tales have been especially worrisome, given their massive popularity with students and teachers alike. Strange then that a Harry Potter film would so powerfully and forcefully remind me of her Christocentric motherhood.

During this evening's movie-going experience, I was struck by how much J.K. Rowling's experience as a single mother had shaped the series' conclusion. Obviously, that Rowling would make Lily Potter's motherly love the mythological foundation of the most powerful magic in Harry Potter's wizarding world betrays her sympathies. It is the recurring theme of the series, and Deathly Hallows is its swooning thematic crescendo. Several of the leading adult ladies of the series vividly illustrate such love in the epic's climactic moments.

First off, Professor MacGonagall's face-off with Snape in order to protect Harry seemed to me a capstone to her quiet and dutiful stewardship of him over the years. She fought as surrogate-mother, as one of the many who have stepped in to fill the family void left by the murder of Potter's parents. Her fierce determination to protect Harry and all of the other students revealed this usually reserved and proper school-marm as the lioness she has always been.

Concordantly, Narcissa Malfoy's role in the series seems to have been to show that, even in the most despicable of families, a mother's love will trump all else. After Harry returns from King's Cross, she reveals that her devotion to Draco goes far beyond whatever she gives to Voldemort. If Potter will confirm Draco's life, she will not betray Harry's resurrection. It is Draco's life and well-being that matter, not the dark lord's. Her pact with Snape in The Half-Blood Prince also underscored and highlighted this concern.

Bellatrix Lestrange, on the other hand, is the anti-Lily and the anti-Narcissa. Her devotion to Voldemort is absolute, her emotional compass as intelligible as the Joker's. She has no family, no discernible friends, and no relational inter-connections to establish her as a psycho-social being. Bellatrix embodies the nihilistic consequences of Voldy's will-of-death, a dehumanized freak and a picture of what might have become of a humanity enslaved to an immortal demon. Helena Bonham Carter tweaks the character performance to 11, and, while never boring, I think she mistakes cartoonishly outlandish evil for dehumanized amorality.

As far as cinematic high points go, Molly Weasley's face-off with Lestrange far outstrips Voldemort's demise--the audience cheered for "Not my daughter, you bitch!" and Neville killing Nagini in roughly equal amounts, but not nearly so much for the final defeat of the dark lord. When she defends Ginny and defeats Bellatrix, Molly both embodies and makes bad-ass the same motherly love evinced by Lily so many years before. Her defeat of Lestrange is Lily's first vindication: motherly love defeating evil without the sacrifice of martyrdom.

Lastly, even the somewhat-derided "19 Years Later" series coda demonstrates a mother's touch. Rowling has said that this epilogue was written at the same time as The Philosopher's Stone, meaning she always had a kind of boring normalcy in mind as the fruit of all their labors. A man (or a rabid fan or sequel-hungry studio head) would have come up with something like Harry's life being filled with a series of ongoing adventures and derring-do. A single mother understands, however, that to have life and a functioning family that you love is all the reward one needs.

In Harry's epic tale, it's motherly love that serves as protection against the abyss. And experiencing its conclusion in full sight and sound this evening reminded me just how much I owe to my mom for serving the same purpose. I have walked away from the charismatic fundamentalism of my past for myriad reasons I won't describe here. But I am forever indebted to my mom, charismatic and fundamentalist if anyone else is, and for the prayers she prayed and the tears she shed to shield me from the will of death which sought to destroy me. It almost did; I was almost lost to radical unbelief and nihilistic amorality forever but she never stopped praying. She never stopped fighting for me or my sister.

I know that, ultimately, it is God's faithfulness which holds me secure and has kept me for his purposes all these years. But I am no less convinced that my mom has been an integral part of his means for doing so. God has chosen to partner with and work through human beings on this earth--essential to his very purpose in creating us was to grant us dominion over creation. So thanks mom; thanks for wielding the mythic power of God's love, the deep magic from before world began which is rooted in the sacrifice of love. And thank you, Jesus, for laying your life down for us, for making a way out of sin and death and into an abundant and eternal way of life. You deserve all the honor, all the glory and all the praise.

And Jesus, thank you for Joanne Rowling. Thank you for allowing this woman to glimpse your love and refract it through the dark glass of fiction in such a moving and powerful way. Please continue to reveal yourself to her and all who love the story she has told, because it's always been your story, the only one we want to hear again and again, where love wins, evil passes away, and all the things that were wrong are made right again. Lord Jesus, let these tales stir our hearts and imaginations, spur us to live lives not for ourselves but for others, and provoke us all until we continually seek to fill our beings with you, the man who lived.

If you enjoyed this, I recommend "Harry, the Hallows, Love, and Life" by my friend RebbieJaye who knits and blogs @ osbornfiber.com.

Seminarian Identity Flux

2011-07-16T00:45:00.002-04:00

It's easy to lose sight of what matters. I have been preoccupied much of this year with anxieties and fears having to do with success and competence in ministry. There's something to the internal logic of seminary and its culture that pushes this emphasis; the incessant process of evaluation almost demands it. Theological training is a crucible, and from what I understand it is not unusual for those receiving it to find their faith tested even as they are being trained to shape the faith of others. So I do not here make a fundamental criticism of seminary, but I must contend that it is in and of itself a very different kind of thing than normal Christian discipleship and formation.

Part of my test, part of what seminary means to me, is coming to understand the Christian leader that I will never be. I will never be a driven, self-organizing, energetic community-creator continually spawning new ministries. I have to say this to myself because I perceive that ideal to be prevalent in contemporary Christianity and close to what people are looking for in a church planter--a vocation currently receiving much attention in my denomination and school. It is cognitively dissonant (and, therefore, emotionally distressing) to me to train to serve God's kingdom with mannered, workman-like competence as the guiding principle.

But I recognize my own baggage at play in resisting such a curriculum. I know that I need this training, but the fierce core of my soul will ever resist the notion that professionalism will suffice. This serves as a convenient excuse to disregard professionalism's qualities--neatness, timeliness, diligence, consistency, etc.--as the phony trappings of a bourgeois clericalism. I must find the third way betwixt fleeing such responsibilities and embracing them as the essence of churchmanship. It's my internal struggle between the feisty legacy of the Jesus movement and the slow-to-change ecclesiology of Anglicanism. Moreover, it's my nasty, cheap-trick fight between my sloth and the gospel demand that I roll up my sleeves and do some work.

I am deeply grateful for a friend who recently, through no intention of her own, reminded me of what matters. She has often had this function in my life, and has accomplished it most recently by preparing to move to India in order to be Christ among orphans there. It is the rarest kind of friend who through simply living their life in Christ recalls for you what most deeply moves and energizes your faith and being. For me this is loving God purely and from the heart, and actively bringing his love to "the least of these." If only every day at seminary were a lesson in this truth, saintliness might spread like wildfire.

Recognizing this alone does not accomplish the hard work of growing in love for God and love for others. However, prioritizing these objectives may very well be my ticket to negotiating a proper balance between my personal spirituality and public professional responsibilities. If I can consistently treat the latter as irrevocably important but always relative to Christ's prime directive ("Love the Lord your God with all your heart... Love your neighbor as yourself") then perhaps I can find a way to healthily channel my charismatic passion through Anglican ecclesiological structure. If not, then I will at least have grown in the core of what it means to be like Jesus and will not have wasted my heart trying to live by the dictums of professional competence.

I've got to level with the world of theological education: In my heart I never wanted to be an exegete or a scholar, nor a simulacrum of Tim Keller exuding white collar competence and theological sophistication from the pulpit. I just wanted to love Jesus and love people, and be in a community where that could be lived out in faithfulness to the word but apart from flaky, anti-intellectual fundamentalism. Gaining Anglicanism has been a welcome and fruitful gain in that process, but integrating my core passions while yet struggling through the cycle of sin and forgiveness has made for a bumpy road.

I need prayer. Prayer that the Lord will help me to live simply and from the heart. I want to be able to possess the integrity of love while not disregarding the obligation of professionalism. I want freedom from sins which so readily ensnare my body, heart and mind. I want to live in to the hope and purpose that God has for my life.

More Thoughts on God & Movies

2011-06-10T02:27:00.000-04:00

After I finished my most recent blog entry about the pros and cons of escapist entertainment, I was bothered by an unresolved point. In that entry I posited with some pomp that "Good art is part of the beauty of the goodness of creation, part of that God-given self-reflection bestowed upon homo sapiens." It's not that I disagree with myself, but that I felt I had not done justice to what I most love about film: instinctive absorption into a fabricated experience. This category, contra "part of the beauty of the goodness of creation," leaves room for such variety as to allow the darkness of a bloody Scorsese montage scored by Clapton as well as the effulgence of a gourmand rat fulfilling his creative potential and passion. Both sequences unfold masterfully, choreographed and cut into nimble storytelling segments of high visual panache.

Ratatouille - Fixing the Soup

Goodfellas - Jimmy's Gang gets whacked (not for the sensitive of conscience/disposition)

Yet as one driven to not only refine an aesthetic sense for film but also to engage it with Christian theological reflection, I cannot merely embrace it for its own sake, a la Oscar Wilde. That a film can be deeply dark yet aesthetically compelling therefore presses the question of whether or not art can be fundamentally construed by Christians as a good part of creation--or whether media that does not communicate some variance on Christian hope must be judged as categorically "not art." The question I therefore place to my "good art" proposition is this: "What place does the depiction of darkness have in an authentically Christian depiction of beauty and goodness?"

The classical answer to this question has been handled to great box office success by the twentieth century mythological synthesizers who have adapted the Christian metanarrative into archetypal conflicts of good versus evil. Whether or not the intentionally set out to tell the Christian story, their work nevertheless betrays heavy borrowing from it. George Lucas and the various adapters of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling have thrilled audiences and stuffed their pockets via powerful re-tellings of the Christus Victor myth.* At their best, they inspire our hearts to hope by stirring our longing for eternal mercy of final justice. At their worst, they reduce the gospel to thrill-oriented storytelling, cheap catharsis of an intractable evil.** Quoth Luther, "On earth is not his equal." For this reason and others I detested the flimsily Dickensian Slumdog Millionaire, which applied Hollywood hope to two-thirds world poverty.

Where, then, is the place for art (film, no less) as a kind of truth-telling that doesn't succumb to the worst excesses of the fantasy epic genre? A strong counter example would be No Country for Old Men--it is utterly devoid of Christian hope or some cipher for it--but the film does tell part of the true story. It undercuts all boasting of human effort as an answer to the problem of evil; analagous to events in other Coen films (including Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and Fargo), one individual's choice to act nihilistically undermines all attempts at order. Such films*** probe the disturbing realities the great epics avoid entirely: what if we knew of no way to conquer the radical evil of the Emperor, of Sauron, of Voldemort? The twentieth century's great legacy of death on an unprecedented scale looms large over all contemporary attempts to relay genuine, powerful hope through mere storytelling.

Miller's Crossing - "Ethics"

N.T. Wright has proposed one possible way forward. His 2006 sermon "Apocalyptic and Beauty of God" takes the three separate questions of how Christians should think about apocalypse, art and the now-and-not-yet nature of the glory of God and integrates them into an elegant Christian aesthetic. In sum, as the apocalypse is an unveiling of the victorious Christ within the physical world (rather than an elimination of that world by him), as art should not exist to be frivolously pretty but to communicate the deep reality of the gospel, and as we can see that the earth both lacks and contains the glory of God, Christian art must be about the task of creatively communicating the good news that although we know chaos existentially the glory of God is revealed and will be revealed until "the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." (Habakkuk 2:14).

Art happens as Christian revelation when it authentically represents the suffering and hopelessness common to the human experience and then depicts the glory of God or its metaphor amid that darkness. Unfortunately, the state of Christian film is dire and lacking competent examples of even purely sentimental film-making. Our subculture thirsts for the intellectual rejuvenation of latter day poets, not just in film but in all of the arts.

Two secular, Mexican filmmakers released 2006 films which approximated Wright's aesthetic. They both ultimately tip the scale in the direction of darkness and chaos, but both Pan's Labyrinth and Children of Men depict beauty and hope surviving in the midst of chaos. Joss Whedon's Firefly paints a vivid yet stark universe where the makeshift family of the flagship's crew becomes the hold against void and the personification of its meaninglessness, the Reavers. Jonathan Demme's 2008 family drama Rachel Getting Married wrings moments of poignant forgiveness and intimacy from the deeply fractured family web it works so hard to construct. Even Toy Story 3 required a hellish face-to-face with mortality at a garbage dump before allowing peace and happiness for its protagonists. I'm not sure how well all of these make my (or Wright's) point; perhaps it's because filmmakers (more to the point, studios) don't think in this direction.

Serenity - "The First Rule of Flying"

I wrote last year that, to me, "Movies at their most thrilling and important fabricate vital, visceral experiences which involve the viewer vicariously and, sometimes, voyeuristically." Need Christians even demand or expect movies to tell a recognizably Christian story? Is that the best part of going to the movies? The fact that a film can be good even if it is only about a guy driving a car fast and dangerous to get a random package from one side of town to another begs the question. It suggests that while the medium has the potential for expressing the best and greatest ideas and images we can conceive, it can survive and even flourish as pure pulp nonsense.

Coming back to my point about X-men: First Class, if it had been the visually dynamic experience Avatar was, I wouldn't have been lamenting the art house flick I wasn't seeing but rather quite happy to be caught up in the moment. Sometimes, a movie is just a movie, but that doesn't preclude basic standards for quality. In a smaller, yet still prolific class stands the secular art movie, which may actually provoke your brain to grasp for meaning. Smaller still is the number of provocative, artistically-accomplished movies which register as genuinely Christian. But a boy can dream, can continue to hope that the power of film at its best will not forever be disconnected from the power of the gospel.

*As C.S. Lewis has said, a true myth.
**And, as the years have gone by, not so cheap.
***The Coens are simply the purest and most accomplished example, especially in their commitment to laconic agnosticism.

X-Men & The Summer Movie I Really Want to See

2011-06-08T10:05:00.004-04:00

I saw X-Men: First Class last night. It's an engaging blockbuster with an ensemble cast not afraid to take time away from the "boom" moments in order to develop characters. Apparently, the Cuban Missile Crisis was masterminded by a rogue mutant intent on edging out homo sapiens ftw, and of course it's up to X and crew (including Magneto!) to deal with it. The action is creative and visceral, and they even managed to squeeze in the least throwaway training montage of action film history. And if that's not enough to commend the film, take note of Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto; between this and his short bit in Inglourious Basterds he is becoming one of my new favorite people to see in a movie.

Now that I've done my part to talk up this well-made summer flick, I'm going to renege somewhat. I suppose this is part of not being thirteen anymore, but there were parts of the film where I was bored. I'd say the action, though as effective as one might hope, had about a 50/50 grab on my adrenaline. As a movie nerd/idealist/critic/whatever, my hopes for any film are that I will be absorbed by the audio-visual experience, and that doesn't mean that the "boom" moments have to be overwhelming. Those moments can be used to their full effect (I'm looking at you, James Cameron) but mostly these days they just induce CGI ennui.

I found myself longing for a film of more significance last night. Wishing that Midnight in Paris or The Tree of Life were showing in Pittsburgh. A film that exceeded mere commercial success and accomplished something aesthetically. This may sound kind of old hat--the movie guy saying summer movies are dumb, let's watch something else; but I don't think X-men was dumb, just not what I wanted from the movies last night. I fondly recall seeing Pan's Labyrinth for the first time at the Tallahassee art theater, bowled over by its weirdness, coiled with tension as it built to its climax, pensive and silent for several minutes after it was over. My friend and I sat there as the credits rolled, motionless and quiet. That's the kind of movie I want to see this summer.

I try to be careful with my words when I describe the significance of a film. As a servant of and thinker for the kingdom of God, my cosmic and existential map precludes ever taking a film too seriously. In Ratatouille, one of my favorites and a vivid celebration of the creative process, the rat protagonist insists to his cynical father "I know I'm supposed to hate humans, but there's something about them. They don't just survive, they discover, they create." Good art is part of the beauty of the goodness of creation, part of that God-given self-reflection bestowed upon homo sapiens. I understand that most people don't experience that through film the way that I do. I understand the relative harmlessness of an isolated 2+ hours of blockbuster escapism. But, please, whatever you do, have the itch--the itch for something other, something more than escapism and successful commercialization of intellectual property. Because ultimately that need, that desire will point you beyond yourself, beyond others, beyond mere five-sense knowledge. That's the realm of the holy, the reality of God, and he wants you to want him.

Summer Update

2011-06-05T16:12:00.001-04:00

This concludes my longest hiatus from blogging since I began two Augusts ago. I hesitate to admit to much, except to say that the past semester was both emotionally and spiritually difficult and I had not the head-space for organizing thoughts and crafting words for the curious.

It is now June and beautiful in Western Pennsylvania--the power of the White Witch faded some time ago; Aslan has come, and all that. I struggled through the end of my semester, accomplishing by God's mercy a virtual miracle of academic work to complete and submit all that I did within the last 2-3 weeks of the semester. I had some time off after that to recoup and have been enjoying fellowship, books, video games, movies.

I've picked up a part time job as a bookkeeper for Rock the World, a youth missions organization in Ambridge. I have no experience in the field, except that my two Tallahassee-based bureaucratic jobs both gave me crash courses in adapting quickly to new data systems. I'm looking forward to my time there, both for the organization's service to the kingdom and my general liking of the staff and for the experience I'm going to get with understanding fundraising and spending in a non-profit ministry context. I will also be putting in some more chaplain hours at the jail this summer, at least through the end of this month, if not also beyond. Between the two activities I'm only burning about 25 hours a week, so I'm able to stay active without the drain of full work week.

I'm not going to take any summer classes. I decided amidst my end-of-semester chaos that I would take a break from school and enjoy the meatier bits of life. Ministry at the jail and at church. The knowledge and love of God. The company of friends. The consumption of literature and the playing of music. My friend and roommate Scott has given me free reign with his guitar, and I have been playing more this past week than I have in a good while.

I also hope/intend to return to the gym after a 3-4 month hiatus. It's hard to go back when you've been away, especially when your regular partner goes at 5:30 in the morning three days a week. It's just so early, and, as a single and socializing twenty-something it doesn't quite fit the shape of my life.

As for home, who knows whether I'll return. There are certainly some friends I want to see; some few are even moving to other continents within the year. But travel is expensive and my car is unreliable. Yet the Lord is good, and he holds the web of our intersecting lives in his hands.

Mark's Jesus and the Mystery of the Holy

2011-03-05T19:16:00.000-05:00

"But Mark's point is different. The disciples are not given the gift to know, and what they have been given is in the singular, mysterion, not a secret but a mystery. This may be well the key word in Mark's narrative. One can scarcely miss the associations it suggests with the mysterium tremendum ac fascinosum. Jesus himself is the singular 'mystery of the kingdom,' and he is so as the Holy One. He is recognized fully only by God and other spiritual forces. He radiates an intense and fearful power. It is a power, furthermore, that at once attracts and repels, so that some are drawn to him and some reject him. Most of all, the mysterion resists understanding. It cannot be deciphered, controlled, or reduced to a formula. The mystery of the holy, even when revealed, remains beyond reach.

[Johnson goes on to describe Mark's portrayal of the disciples as both specially called to share in the ministry of Jesus and relentlessly ignorant of what his messiaship entails]

These literary observations suggest something of Mark's religious purpose in shaping the story of Jesus and the disciples in this fashion. Mark's readers would naturally, as we still do, identify themselves with the disciples. Mark therefore uses the relationship to teach his readers. The message is mainly one of warning against smugness and self-assurance. He seems to be saying, 'If you think you are an insider, you may not be; if you think you understand the mystery of the kingdom and even control it, watch out; it remains alive and fearful beyond your comprehension. If you think discipleship consists in power because of the presence of God, beware; you are called to follow the one who suffered and died. Your discipleship is defined by his messiahship, that is, in terms of obedience and service.'"

~Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, 3rd. ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 153.

Orthodoxy - Oppressive Tradition or Protective Framework?

2011-03-01T19:21:00.000-05:00

The following is copied from a Facebook comment I made on a friend's post about Rob Bell's new book on hell, Love Wins. It is a distillation of many of the things I have been thinking about while finishing up my course work for a winter intensive on the history of Anglicanism, and I put so much effort and thought into constructing it I decided it was worthy of a blog post. It is aggressive, intentionally so, probably because I have spent so much time thinking about Church history these past three days. I'm painting with a broad brush, so if any of the experts out there want to correct me, I'm game.

"Okay. Deep Breath.

Orthodoxy and tradition are the reason you even have a bible to read. It's the 'religion of men' that has handed down the word of God from generation to generation, preserving the apostolic witness to Christ. The bible didn't just drop out of the sky whole-cloth--that's what Muslims believe about the Quran, not what Christians know about the historical development of the Bible. This isn't an attack on biblical Christianity, but an insistence that holy truth cannot solely be discerned via one's personal devotions and 'common sense' reading of the bible. When we approach God and his word, we do so as part of a long tradition of God's faithful departed and in fellowship with his living followers.

The history of heresy has taught the theologically astute how to smell a rat. I've been enthralled before to Bell's tightrope walk between orthodoxy (that just means 'What the Church has always believed,' btw--born of a virgin, crucified, risen, coming again, fully man-god, etc) and welcome his fresh and culturally astute perspective. But part of the project of remaining relevant to culture and the existential situation of the common man is repeatedly calling the relevant back to the apostolic witness. Paul Tillich said it was first our job to answer culture's questions and we got liberalized, de-spiritualized Christianity which might as well be Unitarian. Karl Barth, on the other hand, insisted that God gets to ask the questions first, not man, and helped preserve historic Christian truth within our highly pluralistic culture and contributed greatly to the development of Vatican II.

So if those of us with theological training twitch when we hear someone suggesting that, contra what Christians what have always believed, they have it figured out, it's only because we recognize that the long tradition of the faithful has been hard at work preserving the apostolic witness to Christ. Just so you could have an English translation of the bible with which to decide whether Rob Bell is right."

My Unprofessional Oscar Picks

2011-02-24T12:45:00.002-05:00

Original Screenplay - The King's Speech

Adapted Screenplay - True Grit

Visual Effects - Inception

Sound* - Inception

Original Song - Tangled, "I See The Light"

Music* - Inception

Documentary - Exit Through the Gift Shop

Directing - David Fincher, The Social Network

Costumes - True Grit

Cinematography - True Grit

Animated Film** - How to Train Your Dragon

Supporting Actress - ??

Actress*** - Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit (write-in)

Supporting Actor - Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech

Actor - Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

Picture - The Social Network

From my early picks one might conclude I favored True Grit as best of the year, but ultimately The Social Network held together as the movie which excelled as more than the sum of its parts while tapping into something essential about the digital revolution of social interaction. Even with its apparent fabrications. If Exit Through the Gift Shop could be nominated for the lead category, I would pick it over all of them.

*Both categories, 'cause I don't understand the difference. Inception won the year as host to the most spectacular sights and sounds available in theaters. It's score at first seemed ominous, then laughable, then perfect--after somebody slowed down that Edith Piaf song and put it up on YouTube to show how the score tied into the film's web of interlacing dreams.

**Yes, Toy Story 3 was a strong three-quel and yes, I generally love Pixar. But I thought Dragon excelled as a smart, exciting and gently heartwarming film. Pixar knows how to be touching, and TS3 was no exception--strangely enough, however, after last year's heart-wrenching Up I was ready for a more uneven combination of style and substance.

***As usual, the lead actress nominations go to indie/art films with strong female leads but I haven't seen any of them. I've written in Steinfeld because she was the true lead performance of True Grit, not the superb Bridges, and the studio campaigned for the Supporting Actress award because there was no chance she would win vis-a-vis Hollywood heavy's like Natalie Portman, Annette Bening & Nicole Kidman.

Addition - BTW, I still would like to see The Fighter, Winter's Bone & 127 Hours.

Cartograms

2011-02-08T14:05:00.000-05:00

You can click these to enlarge them.

A contemporary world population cartogram:

A contemporary world GDP cartogram:

No comment.

God, Darwin & Poverty

2011-02-07T09:47:00.017-05:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Monday morning, 2/7/2011, during chapel at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA. It is based on the office reading from Isaiah 58:1-12.

Some Christians spend a lot of energy debunking Darwin. It’s not surprising—the debate between the theory of evolution and the biblical account of creation often plays out as a struggle between competing origin stories both making tacit claims to the ultimate source of human knowledge. It makes ripe fodder for the apologists, the New Atheists, the Veritas Forum; for those looking for to draw clear boundary lines in the Culture War. This morning I suggest, however, that we lay aside Darwin’s black box, the language of God, questions of inerrancy and genre, and whether we might one day find the frog whose DNA will allow me the pet velociraptor I’ve always wanted. This morning I want to suggest that Evangelicals ought to admit that Darwin got it right. At least on the issue of competition.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Human history is not a happy story. It’s not a list of great men’s exploits, as some would have it, but rather an ancient and all-encompassing narrative of people behaving badly. Pessimistic? Maybe. But I think the biblical witness to original sin suggests otherwise. “There is no one who does good,” quoth the psalmist. And, if you remember your Romans Road to Salvation from Sunday School, you know that Paul once declared, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one.”

Darwin’s postulation of the “survival of the fittest” accords with this little theo-historical construction. The strong prosper, the weak suffer, and every man does what is right in his own eyes. It’s a dog eat dog world, as they say. Darwin made his observations based on the world as he found it. That majestic circle of life where Simba eats us and we have the privelege of eating the grass growing on his grave. That enlightened post-industrial society where the boss is comfortable and the worker chokes down coal dust. The world where, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “Life in a state of nature is poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Darwin was right. And in the pyramid scheme of human ecology, the majority of humans who have ever lived or are currently living have been poor.

Our reading this morning from the prophet Isaiah issues a clarion call to the people of God: “Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet! Announce to my people their rebellion, to the house of Jacob their sins.” And what was their sin? Mistreating the poor. Not only the “poor in spirit,” but the materially poor—the worker, the hungry, the afflicted. God calls special attention to this problem, giving Isaiah the added charge not to hold back on this point. So forgive me this morning if I don’t mince words.

“You only seem to be a nation who does what is right,” God says to Israel. They’re praying—even fasting—yet things aren’t going well. God seems distant. Their prayers are not being answered. “Look,” God says, “you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress al your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.” It’s tantamount to saying, “If you’re not loving and serving the poor, I’m not listening to you.”

Why is it that the evangelical church has been bleeding numbers, as people such as Bishop Todd Hunter have reported? We might suggest any number of reasons. Hostile culture. Bad economy. There’s a war on. And so on. But the timely reason for us this morning is the need for a socially and economically uncomfortable stewardship for the weak and marginalized.

God says that the fast he has chosen is to loose the bonds of injustice, to break yokes, feed the hungry, “to bring the homeless into your house,” to clothe the naked (If we start bringing the homeless into our homes, I promise, we will be uncomfortable). God is in effect saying, “You want to honor me with your piety? Serve the poor!” We can no longer delude ourselves into thinking that we’ll dedicate our ministries to proclaiming “evangelical truth” while we leave the so-called “social gospel” up to the liberals. We ought not to leave the serving of tables to others whilst we dedicate ourselves to the word and prayer. We must bring all together in a holistic expression of right thought and right action. A gospel of word and deed.

James asks, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” God’s heart beats for poor of the earth, and when Christians ignore their fundamental calling to love and serve the weak we cause him anguish. When Christians love those from whom they can gain no gold or glory from in return, we bring him delight. God practically gushes at the thought of it: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom will be like the noonday.” It’s virtually the key to his heart, it would seem. God loves the vast mass of humanity, and most of them are poor.

In conclusion, let us consider verse 12 of Isaiah 58: “Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt: you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” This suggests to me that the people who both “delight to draw near to God” and “offer food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted” will be key architects for the city of God. They will build and shape kingdom communities that sanctify the name of the one God as well as thrive as extended spiritual families able to serve as the basis for a spiritually vital Christian society. They will by their word and deed, by their love and grace, by their healing and holiness proclaim that “survival of the fittest” has died, long live the king of glory, Jesus Christ.

Let us follow him, proclaiming his truth and emulating his socially transgressive love. Amen.

"34,000 children died today."

"Be ye transfigured"

2011-02-04T13:24:00.001-05:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Friday morning, 2/4/2011, at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. It is based on the lectionary gospel reading from Mark 9:1-13.

In our gospel reading this morning, we’re exposed to an unusual and unique moment in the life of Christ. Jesus’s closest disciples—-Peter, James and John—-witness a startling revelation of the glory of God in the physical person of Jesus. It’s called the transfiguration and is a surprising and shocking moment in the gospel story, especially in the book of Mark. Over and over again Mark’s gospel sees Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons yet strongly commanding others not to tell anyone who he is. As if his true identity is hidden—-a secret, an unknown.

Because as far as anyone could tell, he was a powerful miracle worker, but not necessarily more than that. Undeniable miracles would have been impressive and unusual to the people of Jesus’s day, no doubt, but it would not have occurred to them to call him a god. Let alone a cosmic judge or eternal king of glory. Jesus managed to confuse even his closest followers on this point.

Simon Peter figured it out, saying, “You’re the Messiah—the divinely appointed king who has come to set things right.” He must have been excited. Life in his world was hard, cruel, confusing. Painful. How excited he must have been when the holy revelation struck him—-“This man is the Messiah—-the king who was promised. Yes! Hallelujah!”

But Jesus yet confounded him. The Son of Man had to suffer, he said. Be rejected by Israel—the people of God. “This can’t be, Lord!” Peter cried in protest. But, shockingly, his protest turned out to be the words of Satan, in direct opposition to the will of God. Indeed, the whole gospel of Mark is a headlong rush to the cross. A few short chapters filled with healings and brisk teachings and then the Son of God is hanging and bleeding on the Roman cross.

So as our story begins today, and Jesus is leading Peter, James and John up a high mountain, it is actually a moment of confusion for his close followers. The ones who thought they knew him well might have been questioning themselves, questioning Jesus. Because the problem of a dead Messiah struck right at the heart of their deepest hopes and fears.

Jessu reassures them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” That might have sounded to them something like me saying to you all in the room this morning: “Some of you here will live to see a day when humans live in peace and prosperity with one another. When suffering, poverty and sickness have ended. When human beings have been freed from sin and stopped treating each other terribly. When no one has to worry about where their next meal will come from, or where they will sleep on a cold night.”

But Jesus brought a different message. He didn’t proclaim an immediate end to human suffering, but of the soon beginning of a time when humans might be restored to their true potential. And—WHAM—he let the disciples have it with a disply of divine glory. Jesus is shining with an intensely bright light. Moses and Elijah show up. It shocks the disciples senseless. Mark even notes that Peter began talking about building tents because he’s simply confused as to what to say. Then the voice of God himself declares, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

This startling event is called the transfiguration of Jesus. It was when Jesus gave a select three men a sneak peek at the resurrection, at what lay in store for him and for all of humanity. They beheld a transformed human being, filled with they glory of God. After seeing Jesus shine with blinding white light, surely Peter, James and John could lay any doubt to rest. Surely this man was the Son of God.

But as they’re coming down the mountain afterwards, Jesus returns to that pesky prediction that he will suffer and die. “He is to go through many sufferings and he is to be treated with contempt.” The man filled with the glory of God is the one rejected and killed by the people of God.

Jesus came not only as a conqueror, but also as a sufferer. He demonstrated through his death and resurrection that he can bring life from death, health from sickness, freedom and peace from demonic bondage. He went right into the middle of humanity’s mess and caught the business end of a nail for his efforts. Jesus’s transfiguration would help its witnesses hold onto hope through that dark hour. It reminds us that, though he died in shame, he purchased the right of every person to be filled with the glory of God.

God said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Each one of us here has the potential to be filled with God’s glory. To have the life of God flowing in our lives, even in the midst of pain and suffering. So I exhort you all now as I exhort myself: Jesus is God’s Son, listen to him! Pay attention to his actions, his words, his love for the hurting and the lost. That is what it looks like to be filled with God’s glory. That’s what it looks like to be truly human. Jesus shows us what God’s original intention for human beings was. Being saved by Christ is more than the hope of initiation into paradise. Jesus is calling all of us to join him in living heavenly lives on this often dark and messy earth. He is God’s Son, the Beloved; listen to him!

Voyage of the Dawn Treader, reviewed.

2010-12-29T23:59:00.002-05:00

My girlfriend is going to have some words for me. Mostly kind ones I'm sure. But if she slipped in a knowing "I told you so" I'd have no right to hold it against her. Just the other day I upset her by panning the latest Narnia film sight unseen. The first one disappointed, I said. The second one reportedly murdered the book, I said. This one apparently added some mystical macguffin to spruce up the adventure with a chase, I said. Humbug, I said. And so she gave me the third degree about how they were decent movies and can't you just go along with the big budget adventure movie and darnit Mike you haven't even seen the thing. The conversation was long distance, but I imagined her face at the time to be scrunched in a cute twist of pouty insistence.

I went with my mom this evening to see Voyage of the Dawn Treader, begrudgingly but not wanting to stay in the house any longer. I came out of the theater pestering my mom because she didn't seem to enjoy it quite as much as I did. VotDT is no triumphant success of thrilling movie excitement, but it is an excellent kids' movie and fun enough to win over a skeptic.

If you don't already know, VotDT recounts a sea-faring adventure involving three British schoolchildren magically whisked away from wartime Britain into a parallel universe filled with mythical creatures and gallantry and adventure. It's adapted from one of a series of seven books by the wildly popular mid-century evangelical writer C.S. Lewis, a Cambridge professor of medieval literature turned lay theologian. The Chronicles of Narnia, as these seven books are known collectively, detail the adventures of English schoolchildren mostly from the same family and decade who live full lives in this alternate universe before returning to the same age in the "real" world. The disjunction in the passage of time might these days cause one to wonder whether someone wasn't trying to convince Leonardo DiCaprio he was a magical king. But enough of that.

Edmund & Lucy have spent decades in Narnia previously and are thrilled when the seascape in their bedroom begins to gush saltwater and hurtle them back into adventure. Their boorish young cousin Eustace, however, is not. The film wrings some laughs from the brat's fussy adjustment to a life of excitement and danger, some pathos from his growing up through the experience.

VotDT does mostly well by their story as known from the book, fleshing details here and there, twisting bits of one adventure and another together. But the book VotDT already suffered from having too episodic a structure, so I actually found (to my surprise) that the plot alterations served both the movie and the spirit of the text. Fancy that! Seen in the right cinematic light, the Dawn Treader's various adventurous episodes start pushing towards the delirious "why not?" fun I remember from moments like Up's dogfighting dogs and King Kong's thrice tyrannosaurus-laden throwdown. Well, it's not that exciting, but the point is I had fun when I didn't expect to.

The acting is serviceable, though Edgar Wright's Reepicheep is fantastic and Georgie Henley still rocks as Lucy, even if she's not the same intensely adorable waif of five years ago. Liam Neeson (or the sound engineer digitally modifying his voice) sounds better as Aslan, and the character is used to better effect. Personally, I would have liked Eustace's deliverance scene* to have been put together differently, but what's on screen works and they managed to retain the meaning. The FX are also serviceable, but nothing so refined as what has been put to work in most blockbusters the past several years. It doesn't look bad, but it also doesn't look good next to something like Pirates of the Caribbean or Harry Potter--it takes little imagination to think that the franchise's loss of Disney backing had something to do with this. But, in the end, it all holds together.

So Rachel, you were right. The movie doesn't suck. It's pretty good, actually. And I think most of the people who bother enough to casually skim my writings would enjoy it, though probably not for top dollar.

*Not to be mistaken with Eustace's Deliverance scene, although several creatures do refer to him as a pig.

He Is Able

2010-12-29T00:10:00.000-05:00

From the office readings for the first Sunday after Christmas, year one.

"Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham. Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested."

~ Hebrews 2:14-18

The Love that Moves the Sun

2010-12-16T11:18:00.000-05:00

Just so was I on seeing this new vision
I wanted to see how our image fuses
Into the circle and finds its place in it,

Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —
Except that then my mind was struck by lightning
Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

~conclusion to Dante's Paradiso

God Loves Naked People

2010-12-16T09:00:00.001-05:00

The following is a transcript of my wedding sermon written as my final Homiletics assignment. The psalm referred to here is Psalm 139. I used the names Paul and Thekla as my fictional married couple--props to you if you get my church history joke.

God loves naked people. God created us naked. We’re not born with suit and tie (or skirt and heels), right? Most of us remember from Sunday school that Adam and Eve went about those primordial years au naturale, blissfully unconcerned about it. Adam never looked at Eve in those days to say, “Eden feel a bit drafty today?” Rather, Genesis tells us that “the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.”[1] Our creational account is packed with so many firsts and prototypes, and one of them is the first marriage. We see in the unfallen Adam and Eve an effortless vulnerability and self-exposure, doubtless a powerful context for incredibly deep interpersonal knowledge. For the kind of fellowship God intended humans to have, even as he said, “It is not good that the man should be alone.”[2] Imagine what friendship and romance would be like without selfishness, without distrust, without lies and violations. That’s the holy peace, the blessing God desires for all the families of the earth.

Of course we know that it didn’t stay that way. Our lives are deeply complicated by the problem of sin and human failure; our relationships so often broken and hurting. We long for peace and deep sharing with others, but we’re our own worst enemies. And just as sin originally drove Adam and Eve to cover their nether-regions, the brokenness, pain and transgressions in our lives cause us to cover ourselves. I am not, this afternoon, advocating public nudity or anything so crass. I am merely pointing out what most of us at least intuitively know—we just don’t share our deepest selves, our figurative nether regions, with everyone. Sometimes with anyone. We’re afraid to be fully known, because in our nakedness we are ashamed.

In our psalm today, the composer says to God, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made… My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”[3] That’s some intense x-ray vision. Sort of like a cosmic full-body scanner like they have at airport security. As uncomfortable as those contraptions make us, the God of heaven and earth sees way more than the TSA.

But the psalmist isn’t boycotting this divine invasion of privacy! He sings, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is so high that I cannot attain it.” And rather than squirm uncomfortably at the thought of exposure, he invites God’s penetrating gaze: “Search me, O God, and know my heart… See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” This should surprise us because it’s not normal human behavior to want our wickedness exposed. We hide. We run for cover. Just as the first husband and wife did all those millenia ago. But the psalmist understands God in a way Adam and Eve didn’t grasp, or were deceived into doubting. If God knows everything, why not let him deal with you? And if God is good, holy, just, merciful and omnipotent, who wouldn’t want his involvement?

So what does this have to do with marriage? Believe it or not, marriage involves nudity. Shocking, I know. The way our secularized culture treats marriage, however, dilutes the point I’m about to make. Through pre-marital sex, people expose themselves physically to one another without the concordant psychological, emotional and spiritual exposure that a lifelong commitment to another person entails. Its sinful precisely because it divorces body from mind, separates our beings in ways never meant to happen. Sexual “liberation” is sexual slavery. My point here now is that Christian marriage in a very sober sense means a lifelong commitment to someone before seeing them naked, figuratively and literally. Marital faithfulness means not running away when you begin to encounter the depths of the person you love—when they begin to encounter yours. It’s an intentionally intrusive set up—listen to this Paul and Thekla—designed by God to refine and sanctify you. It will not always be fun, but, with the Lord’s help, it will ultimately be good.

The liturgy we hear today tells us that marriage “signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people.”[4] The marriage covenant speaks of a higher covenant, a commitment made by God to humans without the stipulation that they take off their clothes. In other words, God doesn’t commit to us based liking what he sees when he looks at our true selves. If he did, we’d never make the cut.

Paul and Thekla marry today knowing some things about each other. They know that they both enjoy backpacking in the mountains. They know that they both enjoy old movies and good wine. They know that they both love serving and loving others as part of God’s people. And we, as their community at Church of the Resurrection, can attest to the good things they share as well. We have witnessed their love and commitment grow and mature this last year, and it is because of this that we have gathered together with them today.

However, just as we witnesses do not share in the closest and most personal parts of Paul and Thekla’s romance, so also Paul and Thekla have yet to share the deepest and most intimate parts of their selves. Marriage will mean exposure, both figuratively and literally, for our dear friends. I am here to declare today to you, Paul, and to you, Thekla that the dark corners of your souls will be unearthed by your life together. Places of darkness, pain, fear and sadness will inevitably surface. Not because either of you are particularly bad human beings, but precisely because you are normal human beings. Even Christians cannot escape this fate, as being new creations in Christ is a lifelong process of sanctification and not a one-stop, instantaneous transformation. Marriage will be a crucial part of your pilgrimage toward heaven, a process of love and refinement lasting decades.

So don’t be surprised when you find yourselves in your first fight! It’s going to happen! One day you’re going to look at the other person and say, “Surely this isn’t the beautiful creature or the godly adonis that I married!” Watch yourself when those thoughts and feelings come to the fore. Because those are the moments that a strong marriage is made of; because it’s how you respond when your loved ones fail you that determines the strength of your closest relationships.

Let’s turn our thoughts back to God for a moment. Unlike the way Thekla can know Paul or vice versa, God knows our best and brightest attributes as well as our deepest depravities as a matter of fact. So when God makes an offer of commitment and love to you—and he has—it’s demonstrably more astounding than the one you made or may one day make on your wedding day. More astounding than what Paul and Thekla are about to do today. Though we know they are doing a beautiful thing. That’s the marvel and the offense of the gospel, the loving and faithful commitment of God to people who by no means merit such a gift.

How is it that then Christ is the bridegroom, and we are the bride? Women take to this analogy naturally, but men tend to struggle with it. It seems flowery and girly. But when the Bible speaks this way about Christ and the church, we need not picture an iconic and kissy romantic embrace a la The Princess Bride or somesuch. Though it is a profound encouragement that, when asked what he had to live for, Jesus did not mutter “to blave.” True love, he says! For the joy set before him, he endured the cross. And yes, when he returns, he will shame the metaphorical Prince Humperdinck of this world.

But we can think of Christ as the true bridegroom today because we know that he knows us deeply and intimately, yet he has chosen us. That is the gospel. Christ sees us naked, yet he offers redemption to us. God loves naked people. And so I charge you both today—you Paul, and you Thekla—“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”[5] Go thou, and do likewise. Amen.

[1] Genesis 2:25.
[2] Genesis 2:18.
[3] Psalm 139.
[4] BCP, 423.
[5] I Corinthians 13:4-8

2010: 8 Good Movies

2010-12-13T16:03:00.001-05:00

2010 was not a good year for movies. I could probably only name one or two films released this year that I regretted missing (Winter's Bone, Let Me In... and that's it).* We had a weak summer for blockbusters--Iron Man 2 was flat, Robin Hood needlessly historicized and overblown (from what I understand), The Sorcerer's Apprentice tepid (also word of mouth). At the end of the summer, one critic had actually proclaimed 2010 the worst year ever for movies. I'm not informed enough to agree or disagree with him, except to say that I usually enjoy a wealth of movies each year and in 2010 I'm unable to put together a round list of 10 favorites.** So here are the eight fun/favorite movies, ranging in quality from "not a waste of your time or money" to "surprisingly good."

8) Unstoppable

This movie is hammily acted, visually overwrought and light on meaning. It's also a "white-knuckle thrill ride" that will have you on the edge of your seat the whole time. Despite its B-movie elements spun from real-life events, I really enjoyed it. A true popcorn movie. Although, unfortunately, this SNL parody is not inaccurate.

7) Tangled

Tangled manages to be a non-irritating, mostly exciting Disney princess movie about Rapunzel, her magical hair and leaving the confines of an over-protective childhood for the world of men. The love interest is given more characterization here, and feels less like an arbitrary stand-in for romantic wish fulfillment (i.e. Prince Charming). Plus, there is a surprisingly dark psychology at work in the film as the heroine must become self-aware of her reclusiveness and own up to her own life rather than being enslaved by the adult expectations of her childhood.

6) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pt. 1

A road trip movie into dark woods, dark histories, and dark corners of the soul. Some have complained that it drags, but I was sufficiently invested in the characters to care deeply for the risks and sacrifices they make. I was riveted the whole time. I remembered enough of the book to know when danger was coming, but not always to whom and with what consequence. The movie does have murder, torture and mutilation (mostly off-screen), so I'd say definitely not for kids.

5) How to Train Your Dragon

Perhaps the most exciting and entertaining kids' movie since The Incredibles. It's a rousing and funny adventure involving vikings, dragons and self-actualization. What's not to love?

4) Inception

An exciting and brainy action movie that falls all the way down the rabbit hole. Recent interviews with director Chris Nolan and freeze-frame comparisons from the Blu-Ray now mitigate this take, but I was fairly sure after watching it that the film offered no objective frame of reference. But when the visuals and ideas are flying this fast, one can be forgiven for trying to get a grasp on its reality and just giving in to the fun.

My review of Inception from this summer.

3) Toy Story 3

A fantastic threequel. The film has energy, wit, visual creativity in spades and heart--all hallmarks of the Pixar brand. It's also surprisingly dark--think toys being forced to face the stark dread of existential annihilation. Ingmar Bergman with a rainbow palette, if that makes sense to anyone but me. And it's refreshingly poignant in a way that doesn't feel contrived within the Toy Story universe but also avoids asking you to care too much about possessed action figures.

2) The Social Network

Mike Radcliffe likes this. With enough rapid-fire dialogue to tire Bogart's tongue, a splash of chilled-heart cynicism and the color scheme of an autumnal sweater-wearing English Lit major whose favorite movies are Dead Poets Society and Rushmore, TSN is a dark American fable of careerist techno-prowess and Harvard campus social climbing. The "real" Mark Zuckerberg has derided it as tabloid journalism because it basically says he invented Facebook to get girls (and Jesse Eisenberg brilliantly portrays him as unlikeable dweeb). Everyone knows he's BSing because the site never would have made it off the ground if it weren't for its streamlining of digital connections between oppositely-sexed coeds. Just before the film's release he donated a zillion dollars to a failing New Jersey school system, a PR move that seems just as fake as the Facebook avatars composed of "Likes" and snapshots which his program facilitated and wrings billions of dollars of profit from.

1) Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

SPvtW captures the outsized feeling of personal romantic drama by scrawling the main character's inner world across the screen via the overblown visual signatures of video games and comic books. Michael Cera plays an even more restrained version of himself as Scott Pilgrim, a 22-yr old Canadian layabout and bassist who is caught between the too-young fangirl he's dating (a bubbly sprite of a teenager named "Knives Chau") and the mysterious and alluring girl of his dreams (a dyed-hair, alluring cool girl named "Ramona Flowers"). Pilgrim has to fight Flowers's emotional baggage one-by-one, Dragonball Z-style, in order to be with her and eventually has to own up to his own mistakes and fight as a matter of self-actualization and self-respect rather than trying to earn the respect of the women around him. I'll be the first to admit that romantic twenty-somethings weaned on Super Mario Bros./Duckhunt like myself are the target audience here and those not submerged in our rareified geek culture may not care. But for those of our digitally infused cerebra, SPvtW will have us selecting "Play Again" many times over.

*By contrast, in 2009 I loved Avatar, A Serious Man, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Up and maybe some others I can't remember right now.

**Sadly, the Coen brothers' True Grit doesn't come out until the 22nd. I will be talking someone in Jacksonville into seeing it.

Shouting Through Pain

2010-12-03T15:36:00.000-05:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Friday morning, 12/3/2010, at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. The lectionary readings were as follows: Psalms 16, 17 & 22; Isaiah 3:8-15; I Thessalonians 4:1-12; Luke 20:27-40.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cried these words on the cross right before he died. They are the pained cry of a man who has known great suffering. But even on the cross, Jesus had scripture in mind. He understood that his death has meaning, that even at his most forsaken, the Father is working to bring redemption to mankind.

Psalm 22 begins with that same cry we hear on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God, why? Why did you let this happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? The psalmist felt that question. Jesus felt that question. “I cry by day,” he says, “but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.” This is no brief spell of depression. The psalmist is in major crisis—otherwise, his song would not have been appropriate for history’s greatest crisis, the cross of Jesus Christ.

We see the tension between suffering and faith right away, because the psalmist turns around and says, “Yet you are holy… In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them…” He’s remembering the stories he’s heard, the scripture preached to him, the faith he received from those who came before him. We do and we ought to do the same when hard times are upon us. As the great Christian author C.S. Lewis once said, “God shouts through our pain.”

But then the psalmist takes another right turn. He complains, “But I am a worm, and not human.” “Surely these stories, these truths don’t apply to me!” he seems to be thinking. We wonder the same. How can mere words measure up against the reality of starvation or betrayal or the unforgiving bitter cold of a Pittsburgh winter? It’s all fine and well to talk about what God did with those people back then—a long time ago and far, far away—but what about where I live? What about the boundary line between my life and death? What about my pain? We’re aching for God to answer us.

“But,” he says, turning again, “it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.” He remembers. He says, this God wasn’t just around in these old stories. He’s creator God. He saw me through my youth. Now I face hardship, suffering, death—but I remember when God got me through.

I’m going to tell you a story about God getting a family through tough times. Years ago, a young couple in their thirties had one child, a four year old boy. One day the mom walked into the room only to find her one and only son writhing on the floor, his muscles spasming and body contorted in the frightening throes of a full on seizure. He’s rushed to the doctor. The parents are waiting, terrified of what the news might be. The word comes in: your son has a bacterial brain disease, and he’s in a coma. “My God,” they must have thought, “why have you forsaken us?” How could this have happened to our son? How could you take him from us?

Imagine them, sitting up late at night by the hospital bed, worried and grieved to the point of nausea. Then the doctor, a Christian, comes into to talk to them. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but there’s nothing more I can do for your son. We’ve exhausted what medicine has to offer him.” End of story—except, he quickly adds, “But there is one thing I can do—pray.” And they pray fervently in the name of Jesus for the health of this child, and then the doctor leaves. My mom fell asleep by the bed that night, not knowing whether she would ever see her son alive again. The next morning I woke up, healed, unaware anything had gone wrong.

God got me through. I praise him and thank him because if it weren’t for the resurrection power of Jesus, I wouldn’t be standing before you this morning. My parents knew the sharp pang of fear and terror that their son would probably die, knew what forsaken felt like. But God turned it around. The psalmist knew what forsaken felt like, yet he concludes his song proclaiming, “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.” And Jesus knew what forsaken felt like, yet God raised him from the dead on the third day.

My good news for you today is that you may know what forsaken feels like, but we worship the true God who raises men from the dead. You may know what the long and hard journey feels like, but Jesus is walking that road with you. You may know that place of pain and bitterness, of isolation and danger, but Jesus knew that place, too. He’s all we’ve got--all any of us have.

Have mercy on us, Lord! We need you! We’re nothing without you! We can’t make it down this road on our own! We’re tired—help! Lord Jesus, have mercy on your people. Protect us from all our adversaries, spiritual or physical, and keep us safe in this life and the next. Fill us with hope and joy, with the light of life, with the peace the passes all understanding, because we’re utterly dependent on you and we’ve nowhere else to go. Thank you, Jesus, for the breath you give us, for the death you died, for the salvation you bring. Amen.

The Foundation for True Enlightenment

2010-12-02T21:56:00.000-05:00

1) There is a God.
2) You are not him.

Excerpt from Amsterdam

2010-11-28T14:52:00.000-05:00

"When at last he directed his attention out the window, a familiar misanthropy had settled on him and he saw in the built landscape sliding by nothing but ugliness and pointless activity.

In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was--square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after miles, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened into a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning."

from Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), 68-69.

Holiday (Verbal) Snapshots

2010-11-25T08:59:00.004-05:00

11/23/2010

I endured an annoying 3 hr delay for what should have been an easy-peasy direct flight from Pittsburgh to Charlotte. We took off from PGH after we were originally slated to arrive at CLT. Some things I noticed:

-A solitary girl--mid-twenties?--keeping her small, chic airport store tidy while Christmas music plays overhead. I am struck by the contrast between the sacred-filial nature of the music and the corporate materialism and isolation of the setting.

-The plane breaks over the clouds, a vast white-gray cotton ball expanse lit from below with patches of orange suburban light. The moon shines high, small and bright above the cloudscape and Orion reaches for it in an eternal, sisyphean freeze-frame.

-The ground far below is black and inscrutable. The Gods-eye view shows thousands of light-points, intersecting curving roads and silhouetted tree tops--all that man has wrought upon the darkened geography. Each light represents--one person? One family? Five families? I think about how God must see us bustling about on this rock, taking note of each of our lives. I'm wondering--what do I amount to in this hill of beans? What will I amount to? Who will notice?

11/24/2010

I'm glad to be home with mom and sister. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. We spend a pleasant drive together from Charlotte to Jacksonville. Katie (sister) and I sing songs together, though I hold off on the Disney princess ballads she wants me to back her up on.

11/25/2010

A morning walk in the dark—-my first time up before dawn on Thanksgiving in my living memory.

You know you have some form of homesickness when the pungent salt-sulphur aroma of the intracoastal marshes makes you feel like you’ve returned. My uncle's neighborhood is all tall, twisted, moss-covered oaks like the ones around the house and neighborhood I grew up in. I recognize fauna sounds I never realized were unique to home. Chirps and twitters in the branches above; I heard them a long time ago.

It's still dark. The moon, a bright waning gibbous, hangs high and small above—the sky is clear but the ground is wet and water drips from the trees. A pre-dawn mist hangs low and close, and white light from the sparsely placed street lamps pokes Spielbergian rays through leaf-lattices and I wonder can I go anywhere without something reminding me of a movie.

Christ the King Sunday

2010-11-21T22:00:00.003-05:00

The following is a transcript of my sermon preached Sunday evening, 11/21/2010, at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. The lectionary readings were as follows: Psalm 46; Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:34-43.

Jesus is Lord. Hallelujah. Today is Christ the King Sunday, the end of the church calendar year. We’re about to begin advent, or the four weeks leading up to Christmas, which is meant to be a time of repentance and preparation for the coming of the king. That’s what Christmas is about, that’s the beginning of Jesus’s role in history—the incarnation, the virgin birth, there in the stable with the animals in the night. Advent and Christmas will begin the church calendar again. It’s our commemoration of the first coming of Christ. It follows then that on Christ the King Sunday, the end of the church calendar, we should be thinking about his second coming.

We’re at Shepherd’s Heart Fellowship tonight. It’s a great name for a church because it sums up what Jesus was about. And it says that we here want to, with God’s grace, follow in his footsteps. The bible often uses the word “shepherd” to talk about the leaders of God’s people. Moses was a shepherd. David was a shepherd. Jesus was and is the good shepherd. In our passage from Jeremiah tonight, however, God has some strong words for the “shepherds” of Israel of that time. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” he says. “It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.” That’s a scary thing to hear from the Lord. Sometimes those meant to serve God’s people end up hurting them the most. They don’t love them with the love of Christ and so have the opposite effect of their job description. Those of us who serve and lead in churches ought to tremble at this thought, because we know that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are jealous for their children and will judge those who bring harm to them.

However, in Jeremiah, just after this judgment, however, God promises to them that he will send a good shepherd—a righteous, wise and just king who will save God’s people. It’s Jesus. The pastor of pastors. The king of kings. He is our hope, though all other men may fail us. Church leaders, political leaders, business leaders—but at the end of the day they’re only dust in the wind, withering grass in the field. But the word of the Lord endures forever. Jesus is Lord and he shall reign forever and ever. He's coming back to the earth with justice and love. That’s why we celebrate Christ the King Sunday.

That’s what the people of Jerusalem wanted, when they crucified him. They were looking for a king who could save them, deliver them from the Roman oppressors and restore God’s kingdom to its former glory. But they were blind to the Messiah standing right before them. Their spirits had become crushed and twisted by oppression and hopelessness, and in demanding a king they destroyed the only one they could have. We read in Luke today how the jeering culprits called for him to save himself—three times we see this. Jesus hangs on the cross, beaten, bloodied and pierced, gasping for air and the Jewish leaders say, “If he is the Messiah, let him save himself!” The Roman soldiers, who have just finished driving the nails into him and the others say, “If he is the King of the Jews, let him save himself!” And a criminal crucified and hanging next to him says, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” Save yourself, save yourself, save yourself! That’s what a king does, right? He’s strong and he rules by might.

We know this plea, though. "Save yourself" is the plea of anyone who has seen the darkness in the world and cried out for a king. All of us who have said "Why did this happen in my childhood?" "Why did that happen to that guy over there?" "Why was that girl sexually abused?" "Why is that man in Asia or this woman in Africa starving to death?" Why, why, why? The injustice and darkness in the world makes us cry out for an answer. It's why were longing for a good and strong king to coming along and sort the mess out.

But our king relinquished his authority and died on the cross that day. And it was written over his head, ironically, “The King of the Jews.”

But one man did recognize him that day. The other criminal did not demand that Jesus leave the cross. He rebuked the first criminal, saying, “Don’t you realize we’re up here because we deserve it, but this man has done nothing wrong? Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” That second criminal did not demand that Jesus meet his expectation for what a king should be, but he demonstrated trust that Jesus was king, that he had a kingdom which he could take the criminal to and that he would be successful in reigning there. Many of us already know Jesus’s reply: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Jesus accepted a criminally convicted, dying, shamed man who with his last breaths acknowledged the lordship of the true Messiah. It was like unstrapping a man from the electric chair and sending him on vacation to Hawaii. Because Jesus is a merciful lord, because he accepts all who humbly recognize his authority. "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." That’s why we celebrate Christ the King Sunday.

And we know how the story ends. Jesus didn’t stay dead. He was murdered gruesomely and unjustly but the grave couldn’t hold him. God through the Spirit raised Jesus from the dead three days later and demonstrated that this man really was “King of the Jews.” A man who doesn’t have to save himself because God Almighty vindicates him with surprising strength and power. That’s our king. That’s our savior. That’s the Jesus we worship. Jesus the Messiah has been raised from the dead and is therefore Lord of the whole world. Hallellujah. He’s Christ the King, and he loves you more than you know.

That’s the good news, right? The king God has given us is the good shepherd he promised way back when to Jeremiah. We could have a tyrant, or a selfish monarch, or a timid democratic-republican politician. But because God is merciful, we have Christ the King. Jesus the Messiah. The ruler who is both loving and strong. The lion who lays down with the lamb. And what a lion he is.

Remember our Colossians reading.

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross."

We have these two amazing pictures of Jesus today. On the one hand we have the Jesus of ancient Jerusalem, stained with dirt, no place to lay his head, followed by friend and foe everywhere he went and weak and bleeding and dying on the Roman cross. On the other we have the resurrected Lord Christ, revealed as fully God and fully man, the creator of all things and the one who will one day restore all things to the way Father, Son and Holy Spirit always intended them to be—beautiful, whole and full of joy.

We know something very important because of this. The king who rules the world and our lives is also the man who suffered a murder most foul. The gospel is no fairy tale. It is good news about a real event of power and love in the midst of the darkness and evil in this world.

I’m saying this because, by myself, I have nothing to offer you today. I’m just a white kid from suburban Florida—what do I know? I don’t know your lives. I don’t know your pain. And if I did, what could I do? Can one person fix another? I am weak and useless. I have my words and my presence—but what are these in the face of homelessness? In the face of addiction? When people have been abused and abandoned? I can promise you nothing of my own, no good thing I can give you. I’m sorry, but I’m just not that great. I’m not that exciting. Thank God Almighty it doesn’t depend on me.

I can’t give you anything today, but I can point you to Jesus. Ten years ago I was seventeen, and I had walked away from the Lord. I decided I didn’t need this Christian stuff, I didn’t need God to get on with my life--in short I wanted nothing to do with it. But God rescued me from my sin and doubt. For weeks on end I woke up night after night with no reason that I could tell--every night at 3 o’clock in the morning. I told no one. After this had happened many times, a man prophesied to me that God was calling home prodigal sons and that I had been waking up at three in the morning but didn’t know why. God spoke to me through that man, convicted and convinced me he was real, rescued me from my despair.

I don’t know your pain. But he does. I don’t know your story. But he does. I don’t know what’s going on in your life tonight. But God does. I can’t talk to you about walking through great suffering, but I can tell you about the Jesus who spoke to me and delivered me from doubt and unbelief and despair all those years ago. I haven’t been through everything in this world, but Jesus has been there. He lived in a small village of a poor country occupied by an evil superpower. He walked among the sick and the sinful. He worked alongside the ordinary people of his day, working with his hands to eke out a living in first century Palestine. And one day, he walked into the desert, driven there by the Holy Spirit, and came out a man on fire for the purposes of God. And he proclaimed and he healed and he delivered and he spent his life in love on behalf of God’s people. A truly good shepherd, laying down his life, leaving the ninety-nine to go after the one. He became obedient to death on a cross and made it so that we neither have to be judged for our sin nor remain enslaved by it. “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.” That’s why we celebrate Christ the King Sunday.

Remember the thief on the cross. Jesus accepted him into the kingdom solely because he acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah, the Lord. The thief didn’t say to Jesus, “Save us, and I’ll believe!” but rather he believed, and trusted Jesus to save him. The thief accepted Jesus on his own terms, dying there next to him on a cross. So as we celebrate Christ the King, we must remember that Jesus is not the kind of king we’re used to. Celebrating the King of kings and Lord of lords means accepting Jesus as the crucified king, as the one who appears weak, as the one who loves the hurting and the broken and not just the rich and the powerful.

Our king may not lead be leading tanks and helicopters into battle, or making billions on the stock market, or be the most popular man in politics. Strangely enough, to some he might even be the most shamed man in politics. But Jesus loves his people strongly and selflessly. Jesus knows our weakness and he doesn’t try to hide his own. Powerful men are always busy trying to hide their shortcomings, trying to make people forget the times they didn’t succeed. Look at my resume! Look at my accolades! Look what I’ve accomplished! But Jesus said, “When the Son of Man is lifted up, he will draw all men to himself.” Jesus wants us to look at the cross, wants us to look at the broken, humble, dying man there and learn an important lesson. It’s written above his head: “The King of the Jews.” The true shepherd of the people of God, the man with the power, the king and ruler of the earth is the one who has suffered along with every man, woman and child who ever knew the sting of injustice, abuse and pain. Faith is believing that today we read about the same man in Luke 23 that we did in Colossians 1: the man who died on the cross is also the God-man who is coming back to sort out this mess! He’s coming back to bring freedom and healing to the world and to judge and destroy the wicked! That’s why we celebrate Christ the King Sunday.

It is my heart’s desire and prayer for you that you would know Christ the King. Moreover, the King himself wants you to know him. If you already belong to him, he wants you to be near him, he wants you to trust him, he wants to bring healing and deliverance in your life. Jesus has walked the hard paths of this world, he has suffered the abuses and injustices which men heap upon each other, and God has raised him from the dead in order to bring us salvation. That's why we celebrate Christ the King Sunday. Amen.

Evil, Prayer & the Return of the King

2010-11-18T15:50:00.000-05:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Thursday, November 18th during Homiletics class at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA. The homily is based on the office readings for Friday of Proper 28, year two: Psalms 102 & 107; Malachi 3:1-12; James 5:7-12; Luke 18:1-8.

This life is like living in Gondor under Denethor. Do you know the story? In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, the great kingdom of men, Gondor, has been without a king for ages. A long line of stewards—provisional administrators—has kept the land in working order in the intervening years. Yet the threat of evil has always lurked just across Pelennor fields and now it threatens to wipe out known human civilization. The steward Denethor has been unwilling and unable to rally other kingdoms to the front line defense and so will stand alone. Denethor and his armies are losing a war of attrition and will surely not survive the onslaught of Mordor’s troops massing behind the black gate.

But then the true king returns. The one king, Aragorn, destined to lead the men of Middle Earth in victorious battle against Sauron and his armies and restore peace. He oversees the defeat of radical evil and the restoration of the good kingdom. The stewards, at best, wielded a provisional authority, a holdover in the absence of true kingship. Aragorn, however, wielded an apocalyptic authority bequeathed to him by prophecy and lineage. For lack of more refined Tolkien-esque language, I’ll call it God-given authority. Anointed authority. Messianic authority.

Our world exists under the reign of provisional rulers, stewards of authority with neither the power nor the inclination to bring messianic peace. They cannot and will not “beat their swords into plow-shares and spears into pruning hooks.”[1] So we live with the unsettling and intractable pains of an ungoverned world. Injustices go unavenged. Suffering goes un-soothed. Tears remain un-wiped. The dead remain in their graves. Our readings for today speak to such a world, for they presuppose it when they discuss God’s arrival on the earth—the true return of the king.

Here’s what they say. God promises in the third chapter of Malachi that he “will be swift to bear witness against” the many evildoers in this world, such as “the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me.” [2] In Luke 18 Jesus makes a tacit indictment of temporal rulers as wicked judges who neither fear God nor care about other people. And the book of James opens with instruction on how to deal with the many and inevitable trials of this life; its fifth chapter with words spoken against the rich who “condemned and murdered the righteous one.” [3]

Yet they hope for an end to this dreadful situation. In Malachi God is coming to judge evil. James promises us that the one we wait for is merciful and compassionate. And in Luke the good God answers the plaintive cries of his people. These passages promise us the advent of apocalyptic authority, when the true king will come on the stage and laugh derisively at the Denethors of the world and dash the nations into pieces like pottery. [4] They are charged with the eschatological hope that the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our lord of his Christ and he shall reign for ever and ever! [5] These authors speak of no fairy tale delusion meant to ignore the suffering and struggle of the present. These men faced it head on, in the Lord, grappling with the messy existential crisis of “Why is this world so messed up? Why are these pagan tyrants ruling the world? Why do so few people acknowledge Jesus as lord and Christ? Why, why, why?” They were there, they lived in it and through it and they were dying in the arena for it.

This is why James has to say in chapter 5 verses 7 and 11, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord… Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” Hardly the words of a romantic! Basically we’re warned, “Remember Job’s life? Don’t expect it to be any better than that and you won’t lose your faith.” It sounds dark, but remember that Job’s story ended with a lesson: God is God and you are not. Jesus himself embraced a modified version of this when he said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” [6]

So we who live in this quagmire of provisional authorities must learn the lesson of Job and of Gethsemane or risk rejecting the king who will one day return and sort out this horrifying mess. That lesson? Your life is forfeit and the best thing to do with it is to spend it utterly unto the promise, purpose and command of the creator god and his Messiah, Jesus. This potentially sounds entirely dreadful. However, in Luke 18, Jesus tells “a parable about [our] need to pray always and not to lose heart.” [7] In it we learn that the god to whom we are indebted is not a capricious perpetrator of chaos but rather one who hears and answers the prayers of his people who cry out to him day and night.

Jesus concludes this parable, asking, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” [8] Not all of us here will face the darkest existential terrors this world offers its inhabitants. However, as disciples of Jesus, we cannot expect a fate any better than our master’s. The Jesus pattern—the prototypically Christian one—is constant and continual reliance on Father God through prayer in the midst of an evil world. Did Yahweh forsake Israel forever to Pharaoh’s oppression? No! He heard their cry and sent Moses to deliver them. A deep prayer life exists as a groaning pang in the midst of a suffering world, calling out to the one true king.

As Christians we don’t fully know the “why” of the problem of evil. Even polite discussions of the subject tend to reveal deep theological and philosophical fault lines between denominations and ecclesiological bodies. But we do know the “what then.” Through faith in the good and strong God followed and embodied by our Lord Jesus Christ, and through a life committed to reliance upon him through prayer and devotion we become living testimonies to the reality of a king other than Caesar, a lord other than the banal forces of money, sex and power which dominate the globe. Let us turn to him today and everyday, rest our hearts in his presence and turn our prayers and actions toward his purposes. Amen.

[1] Isaiah 2:4
[2] Malachi 3:5
[3] James 5:6
[4] Psalm 2
[5] Revelation 11:15
[6] Luke 22:42
[7] Luke 18:1
[8] Luke 18:8

Priest vs. Vampire

2010-11-16T22:09:00.004-05:00

This the priest vs. vampire comic I mentioned on Facebook a few weeks ago. It's not great, but I'm happy with it. The idea behind it is a rethinking of vampire lore through the lens of biblical/sacramental theology and then posing a priest as a vampire hunter who can only defeat them via sacraments (no stakes, etc.). If there were to more than this one (who knows?) I would try to end the first several with a sacraments joke or something similar. You know, seminary humor.

Scott Bowles and I collaborated on the original concept as well as brainstormed different possible plots for the strip. I did the drawing, inking and digital editing (using my cheap printer to scan and Microsoft paint to edit--nothing but the best for this project).

Click on the image below to see the whole comic.

J.I. Packer & the Evangelical Mind

2010-11-15T22:48:00.000-05:00

"In particular, it is important to insist that obscurantism in all its forms is wholly out of keeping with true Evangelicalism. The Evangelical is not afraid of facts, for he knows that all facts are God's facts; nor is he afraid of thinking, for he knows that all truth is God's truth, and right reason cannot endanger sound faith. He is called to love God with all his mind; and part of what this means is that, when confronted by those who, on professedly rational grounds, take exception to historic Christianity, he must set himself not merely to deplore or denounce them, but to out-think them. It is not his business to argue men into faith, for that cannot be done; but it is his business to demonstrate the intellectual adequacy of the biblical faith and the comparative inadequacy of its rivals, and to show the invalidity of the criticisms that are brought against it. This he seeks to do, not from any motive of intellectual self-justification, but for the glory of God and of His gospel. A confident intellectualism expressive of robust faith in God, whose Word is truth, is part of the historic evangelical tradition. If present-day Evangelicals fall short of this, they are false to their own principles and heritage."

~J.I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1958), 34.

Equipping the Called

2010-11-14T13:18:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you feel like going to church--other Sundays seem best spent in bed under warm blankets without the messy intrusions of worship and fellowship, though many of them are yet spent in church. Moreover, there are times you don't feel like leading (or preaching in) church or chapel or morning prayer, because you're tired or weak or timid or fill in the blank. Leading Sunday morning worship at the Beaver County Jail this morning was somewhere in-between the two for me, and I take no credit for somehow transcending the plain I-don't-want-to-do-this-today mentality.

I was hanging out late with friends last night, first in one location and then at home, and when we decided to call it a night we moaned and gnashed our teeth because only then did we realize it was two in the morning. I kicked myself (fig.) because I knew I had to be at the jail at 8:30--Idiot! You put off bed again! At that point Sunday morning seemed best a time for blankets and shut-eye and all of those lovely things, not clothes and driving and inmates and worship officiating. I resigned myself to the bed and I can't swear one or the other whether I pleaded with God for mercy in the morning.

Yet mercy came. I awoke early and with a start--first because I was sleeping light and/or God is gracious and second because I still haven't changed my alarm clock since "fall back" and I had the terrible sensation of Oh no oh no oh no, I slept through the church service I was supposed to lead. But then I realized--to my great relief--that I hadn't, and rolled over and waited for the alarm.

It went off, I got up and got dressed and drove to the jail, praying halfheartedly for the morning with pleas of "Lord, have mercy" but still wrestling with clinging strands of sleepiness. I'm over the initial fear of speaking in front of groups, at least at the jail, Shepherd's Heart and in homiletics class. So I need grace in the area of trembling before God as I go to represent him to his people, because this morning I was more or less going to get the job done. That's a confession, of sorts, I guess. Point being, I wasn't nervous about going into lead, but I did feel the nagging absence of spiritual gravitas as I headed into the situation. Lord, have mercy, I prayed.

Dudley was waiting for me when we got there--he was the preacher for the morning--and we went in and got the chairs set up and waited for the guards to bring the inmates down. They arrived from all the various housing units in a group and we greeted them and shook their hands as they came in to sit down. An inmate named Thomas regularly handles the music for us, so we let him pick out the CDs and songs to begin the morning with. In that moment I had a flash of inspiration to begin with a prayer, even though it wasn't in our prepared liturgy or regular practice from what I could tell from Dudley's actions (he's a regular on Sunday mornings, I usually work at the jail during the week).

I stood before those men and I was totally in the moment. I felt the full weight of my role as their worship leader and said a prayer that came from beyond me. I didn't have it in my heart or on my mind and surprised myself with the passion and conviction and holy words I brought to that moment. I became conscious of the fact that God was giving me the words to say and demonstrating his love for these men by sidestepping my lack of preparation and giving them gospel truth. The rest of the service I was fully present, whether in song, or in liturgy or in praying one-on-one with inmates at the end. God showed up and made church happen this morning--I am so thankful its success didn't depend on me.

15 Albums I Love

2010-11-13T19:16:00.001-05:00

I'm no music critic, but I know what I like. I ferreted out these choices by running through my most played songs on iTunes, but I didn't always choose the albums whose songs got the most number of plays.

1) Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan

Sometimes I think I should have come of age in the sixties, but I'm thankful for the cynical and/or prophetic distance that kept me from becoming a true believer in postwar, anti-establishment romantic idealism. Still, my heart is very much with the man (lowercase m) here, whether it's the pain of lost love ("North Country Girl") or raging protest against the military-industrial complex ("Masters of War"). I only hope that my writing could one day give voice to others' protest against this world but also direct them toward the good news which ultimately provides the basis for a better one.

2) The White Album - The Beatles

I didn't like this at first, as I had just been introduced to the Beatles with the relative thematic unity of Sgt. Pepper's but esp. Abbey Road. However, The White Album has remained that most consistently engaging and entertaining of their corpus (so far). Even if the songs are a scattershot collection, they mix tastefully just as Huck Finn described good food doing in the opening bit of his eponymous adventure.

3) Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

Scott Bowles once pointed out how even this album's busiest parts remain smooth and soothing. The whole thing has an unforced air, Davis's horn lilting jauntily over the ensemble's engaging rhythms.

4) Pan's Labyrinth - Javier Navarette

One of my favorite movies and, by all accounts, favorite scores, Javier Navarette built the score around the bedtime lullaby sung to the young heroine as a frail comfort within a world of terror. That motif, usually played on a rich and lonely cello, is haunting, beautiful and mythical all at once.

5) Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

Harmonized pastoral laments and ballads accompanied by an Appalachian ensemble of strings and drums.

6) How the West Was Won - Led Zeppelin

A thrilling, 3-disc live album recorded in Los Angeles in these rock Olympians' heyday, HtW3 shows the band stretching their sound both in terms of live-wire intensity and extensive riffing not common to studio produced tracks. The album opener is an aggressive performance of "Immigrant Song"--the highlight a 25 minute "Whole Lotta Love" doubling as a history of rock and roll. Way hardcore!

7) Thriller - Michael Jackson

At least he deserved the title "King of Pop," if not the right to demand to be called it. Except for "The Girl is Mine" (the dreadful collaboration between Jackson & McCartney) the tracks are infectious and engaging. Mama-say mama-sah ma-ma-coo-sah!

8) St. Elsewhere - Gnarls Barkley (Cee-Lo Green / DJ Danger Mouse)

Hands down, Cee-Lo has an amazing voice. It's powerful, rich, soulful, piercing and full. Combined with Danger Mouse's skilled genre mash-up approach to music (Google "Gray Album"), the two produced a fantastic pop album.

9) Spirited Away - Joe Hisaishi

Joe Hisaishi is Miyazaki's go to composer, and he has an old fashioned sensibility recalling both classical Hollywood as well as Baroque waltzes. He retains a distinct eastern flavor, however, and his sounds here evoke the excitement, playfulness, terror and mystery of the world the heroine finds herself in.

10) Ratatouille - Michael Giacchino

Giacchino has composed the most memorable scores from the last decade, beginning with his big picture debut in The Incredibles, whose brilliant horns-heavy score was catchy and retro and plain awesome. In Ratatouille he combines playful Parisian melodies with rousing orchestral crescendos to highlight both the joys and dramas of artistic fluorishing. I love love love this score. (See also Lost, Star Trek, Up)

11) Grace - Jeff Buckley

A fantastic and moody rock album that shifts wildly from contemplative whispers to Zeppelin-esque jams. It is most remembered for his transcendent cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," but the ethereal" Dream Brother" and love-drunk "Lilac Wine" will stick with you as well. What could have been a long and fruitful art-rock career was cut short by the artist's untimely death by accidental drowning in 1997.

12) The Doors - The Doors

Energetic, loose and passionate. Morrison sells the whole package with his unhinged vocals, jumping off from a mostly restrained musical background ("Back Door Man" would more or less sound like piddling on the organ without his zeal).

13) Dying Star - Jason Upton

This is the only Christian album I've included on this list, as it's not usually specific worship albums that I love but rather the holy God they point me to. However, Upton's Dying Star has stayed with me for years because of its multi-track metanarrative spanning the journey of faith from disillusionment to calling to running to rest to glory.

14) Crash - Dave Matthews Band

I'm not the unabashed fan I once was, but DMB served as my introduction to secular music after being raised on a Christian-only diet for the first 21 years of my life. Crash is their best album--tight, energetic, bawdy and spiritual. My coming of age with music began with them, and my favorite genres can all be found in their mix-up of rock, blues, jazz, folk and world sounds.

15) Viva la Vida - Coldplay

A grand departure from the somewhat bland but highly listen-able ethereal soft rock of X&Y, VLV mixes metaphors and emotions, apparently saying something about God & politics but mostly ending up really fun. "Yes" has some of the dark longing of "I Want You" (Abbey Road) but is counterpointed by the sweet breeziness of "Strawberry Swing." The title track has energy and inventiveness, even if they might have cribbed a major riff from Joe Satriani.

--

Additionally, I just downloaded Cee-Lo's new album, The Ladykiller, and it's fantastic.

The Holy Spirit

2010-11-13T14:08:00.000-05:00

"Theologians have constantly debated about the starting point of theology: Should we start with God and move from him to man and the problems of human life? Or should we start from the other end, with man and his experience, and from there ascend to God? Indeed the two options have been set against each other as 'theology from above' vs. 'theology from below.' But if we take seriously the fact that God in his Holy Spirit dwells with us, working in us and influencing us, it should be easy to discover even in the midst of our own experiences the reality of that God who as our Lord and Master stands above us with all his authority and power. And if it is really God whom we encounter in our experiences, the 'theology from below' which begins with our needs and desire, our troubles and concerns, will suddenly turn in to a 'theology from above' because in all those things it is he who encounters us, the One who is greater than ourselves and our little world. It ought to be possible to know him as One who in our world--his creation--is strange to us, and accordingly learn to hope for the future consummation of his work."

~Eduard Schweizer, The Holy Spirit (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), 8.

The Lord is My Shelter

2010-11-12T00:31:00.000-05:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Friday, November 12th during morning prayer at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. The office readings for Friday were as follows: Psalms 88, 91, 92; Joel 2:28-3:8; James 1:16-27; Luke 16:1-9. The homily is based on Psalm 91.

Our Psalm today, Psalm 91, is a famous psalm, known for its promise of God’s protection from harm. Many people have memorized it, recited it, and have been comforted by the reassurance it provides. Men and women in the dire straits of poverty, sickness, war and disaster have been strengthened and encouraged by its images. It paints an awesome picture: God delivers, covers, sends angels, protects and rescues. It is a powerful litany of salvation.

Salvation, we find here, depends on how we relate to God. Only God can save, and we must turn to him in order to know this for ourselves. “You who live in the shelter of the Most High,” begins the psalm, “who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’” So it’s those who live in God’s shelter who know the powerful salvation of God. In ancient times God made a home for himself, the temple, and those who worshiped there and were part of his covenant people received the benefits of his saving power. They knew victory over their enemies, prosperity and the beauty of holy worship.

Jesus came as the living embodiment of God, and replaced the temple as God’s shelter. “The word became flesh and dwelled among us.” Jesus came, and what happened at the cross? The veil of the temple was torn right down the middle. The barrier between men and the holy of holies—God’s shelter—was removed when Jesus died as the final perfect sacrifice for sin. With arms wide open, he invites all who will call on his name to possess the salvation of God. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved… For ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’”

Do you live in the shelter of the Most High? Do you know what it means to stand in the presence of God? If you know Jesus, you do. We who confess Jesus as Lord and believe in the power of his resurrection hope and wait for the glorious day when God will judge evil men and rescue his people from the struggles and suffering of this life. We who live in the shelter of the Most High have a promise from God: “He will deliver you… he will cover you… he will command his angels concerning you…”

Yes, we’re waiting for the last day, but today we can believe that God will seek our best for us. It’s not yet fulfilled, but already God is willing and able to watch over and protect us. Sufferings and testings will and do come. Jesus said, “In this world you will have tribulation…” The gospel does not pretend suffering and pain do not exist, but it’s good news precisely because it proclaims salvation from those things! Therefore we’ve got gospel all over the place in Psalm 91, the effects of God’s good and powerful reign extended to his people. Jesus said, “In this world you will have tribulation,” but then he adds, “but be of good cheer—I have overcome the world!”

I am not suggesting that the Christian life is a cake walk. I am not under any delusions that when we follow Christ it’s all sunshine and happy days. But I have seen the Lord move in my life and in the lives of others and I have to say, “You will not fear the terror of the night, or the arrow that flies by day.” You will not fear the dark things and people lurking around corners on cold winter nights. You will not fear the weapons carried by thugs and criminals roaming the streets. Because God himself is your fortress! He is your shield and your deliverer! And if he is for you, who can be against you?

I knew, in my teenage years, the terror of uncertainty and doubt. I didn’t believe in God and had no hope in my life. And the Lord spoke to me and pulled me out of the miry pit. He rescued me and gave me the conviction that I need not fear. And he wants to do the same for you. He’s longing to show favor and grace to you.

Who lives in the shelter of the Most High? Who abides in the shadow of the Almighty? The ones who acknowledge and call on Jesus as Lord. That’s not just a one time thing. Not that you become Christian again, but that part of salvation is calling on the name of our Lord over and over again. Jesus! Jesus, save us! The darkness is great, and we are weak! Call on the Lord Jesus and know what it means to say, “The Lord is my fortress.” Call on the Lord Jesus, and he will satisfy you with long life and show you his salvation. Amen.

Summary/Reflection: Bp. Todd Hunter & Congregations for the Sake of Others

2010-11-06T13:06:00.007-04:00

“I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.” ~ Philemon 9

Bishop Hunter’s big success at yesterday’s afternoon lecture at St. Steven’s Church in Sewickley was an act of informed synthesis. Ostensibly, we were there to hear about “Church Planting for the Sake of Others,” but the talk in no way developed that idea as a concise thesis. Don’t misunderstand, Bishop Hunter did address issues of mission and even offer some new ways to think about it, but he delivered information to us scattershot, a shotgun spread of issues ranging from how we tell the Christian story to engaging in an informed way with our culture. Nebulously, however, a coherent big picture for the future of Anglican ecclesiology and mission eventually came into view.

He began with a splash of cold water: evangelical Christianity is on the decline. According to sociologists of religion, he says, we’re bleeding numbers. He chalked this up to the fading currency of dogmatic truth in the post-Christian West, which I’m sure is insightful, but I was wondering about when these sociologists were taking these numbers. If in the aughts (00’s), his interpretation might have overlooked the problem of George W. Bush, who did no small amount of damage to evangelicalism’s reputation.^ He also refused to criticize some “Moral Majority” leaders like Robertson and Falwell—I appreciated his respect for them as people trying to uphold righteousness in a failing culture, but thought he remained too shy of acknowledging great public sins like their 700 Club conversation on September 12, 2001 blaming 9/11 on lesbians and the ACLU.*

The bishop described a familiar cultural situation: most Americans don’t consider Christianity to be our default religion, but rather one of many religious options. Pluralism and tolerance rule public discourse on God. He brought up the New Atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins, etc.) and told us how they’ve changed the tone of atheism from mere dismissal of religion to an outright denunciation of it as morally bankrupt and necessarily damaging. He countered this with statistics about historically steady church attendance and atheism’s lack of popular appeal.

What’s the zeitgeist then? Is it surprising to say that a mushy, post-confidence pluralism prevails, neither outright denying nor outright affirming the existence and/or relevance of God to human life? I’m not sure he spelled it out just this way, but it represents the sum total of his statements on the subject and is, I think, perceptive and relevant. Think of last year’s blockbuster Avatar and the way it’s pantheist-buddhist mystical interconnectedness and call for us to love and defend the weak and the different enriched its otherwise Dances With Wolves in Space plot. I loved the movie, but recognized it as an epic drama of the Obama age: “We’re sorry about Iraq; everything’s connected; there’s something that gives us hope; we’ll use the best technology to show you.”

So what? Bishop Hunter contended that we must recognize this situation as de facto and respond appropriately. “There’s no way into mission apart from reality,” he said. And mission “only happens by understanding and facing reality.” Paul’s Areopagus speech in Acts 17 serves as the model—we make a bridge from their reality (“unknown god”) to ours (“the God who made the world and everything in it”). We don’t preach the gospel by relativizing our story: “It was the particularity of Jehovah that liberated human beings.” Our hardest job, as he puts it, is “lovingly contending” for the uniqueness of Christ. It’s anathema to our culture, yet we can’t shout them into agreement with us. There has to be another way.

“How do we,” he asked, “take the particularity of Jehovah and be his people in this time and place?” In his view, we can neither rely on the strength of dollars or implicit social capital** and must rethink church and mission in terms of loving our neighbor as ourself.*** And that’s where the idea of “Congregations for the Sake of Others” creeps in, as it commends Christians to love people into Christ rather than seeing them as numbers to be secured as the spoils of evangelistic combat. Rather than think of church as one hour a week on Sunday, let’s think of it as all week long, where ambassadors for Christ are living gospel lives among the lost and then bringing them into community and worship on the basis of love.

He commended, almost apologizing for fear of offending Anglican tradition, an instrumentalist view of the church suggesting that Sunday worship is not an end in itself. I guess that’s a sacramental theology debate to be had another day. But he insisted that nothing ought to get in the way of gospel proclamation and gospel living, and that traditions which do need to be reconsidered in light of this imperative. He mediated, however, saying that “Worship was never meant to be in opposition to mission.” There are ways, he said hopefully, of bringing together a robust and historical sacramental theology with an urgent and nimble evangelical mission. He did emphasize that we need a leadership culture that celebrates risk and can deal with failure, the opposite of which is a “paralyzing conservatism.”

Bishop Hunter proposed many things that I, with a strong background in free church evangelicalism, have long been familiar with. In essence, that we need to recapture a biblically Christ-like model of being and doing Church because resting on an institutional legacy does not foster the God-dependence essential to incarnational ministry. His best advice: “Find a reckless abandon to the person and work of the Holy Spirit.” Sounds like the bread and butter of my childhood charismatic evangelicalism—-no surprise since Hunter spent many years with Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard Church. His great success yesterday was not in presenting something new, but rather in presenting something ancient: the apostolic witness of Christ’s life and Paul’s commands (esp. Romans 12:1-2) as the ultimate models for church life. Hunter practices what he preaches, as his talk took the particularity of YHWH known in the life and times of Christ and the early church and demonstrated how it speaks to our contemporary American cultural landscape.

*Such jeremiads have tempting parallels in scripture, but they betray a total ignorance of America’s toxic foreign policy towards Muslim countries since World War I.

**Here "social capital" implies a broad cultural assumption that the church and/or bible hold recognizable moral authority.

***For a non-professional historical take on this idea, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997). For a biblical take on this idea, see the bible, especially Matthew 22:37-40.

^Addition, 11/13/2010: I should add to this the problematic fallout from 9/11 in general and the cultural polarization which made evangelicalism seem a Christian doppelganger of violent Islamic fundamentalism.

Philemon: The Power of Love

2010-11-04T16:16:00.000-04:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Thursday, November 4th during Homiletics class at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA. The homily is based on the whole book of Philemon. The jokes are intentionally corny--please don't think I consider this homily to double as an outstanding work of comedy.

All you need is love. Love is all you need. You don’t need money, fame, credit cards to ride this train. It’s not just a second class emotion. Love hopes you don’t mind that it put down in words how wonderful life is now you’re in the world. It’s enough to make kings from vagabonds. Can you feel the love—this afternoon? Because love doesn’t want to close it’s eyes, doesn’t want to miss a thing. So pay attention, O Theophilus—my fellow God-lovers—because I’m going to talk about the love tucked away in Philemon, that little discussed book squeezed between the pastoral epistles and Hebrews. Philemon is a book that’s usually far from my mind when I think about instruction on love in the New Testament. But baby, Philemon’s got the love we need, and, maybe, more than enough.

Philemon is a short letter, twenty five verses, written from Paul to the leader of a Colossian house church named Philemon along with a handful of others associated with him. The occasion for the letter is a runaway slave named Onesimus, who has sought asylum through association with the imprisoned Paul and has been converted to Christianity in the process. Paul had that effect on people, it seems. The book of Philemon grants us a rare insight into Paul handling a pastoral situation, a complex one where gospel values and social values are tangled and competing. In the end, we’re given a stunning example of how the gospel works in real life and what it looks like when people live under the authority of the selfless servant king rather than the tyranny of the psycho-socio-economic-political web we call “the world.”

Philemon begins with a standard Pauline introduction, “Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, etc., etc.” and immediately segues into lavish praise of the main recipient. Paul is thanking God for Philemon, his faith, his love, his reputation for spiritually refreshing others. So, Paul reasons, Philemon ought to be willing to extend this same spirited generosity to Onesimus, Philemon’s runaway slave. Nevermind that running away was punishable by flogging or worse. Nevermind the social normality of treating slaves as property—that nagging question, “What will the slave-holding neighbors think?” Nevermind that Onesimus not only ran away, but also, uh, crossed the Red Sea laden with more than shirt and sandals, if you get my drift. He took the money and ran.

But now Onesimus has converted and repented of his theft. Reconciliation is appropriate, even necessary to make a true gospel witness of this situation. What must Philemon have been thinking? Something like, “Headlines read, ‘Master and thieving-runaway slave reunite peacefully!’” The shame! Yet Paul refrains from commanding Philemon. “I would rather,” he says, “appeal to you on the basis of love.” This basis of love shows itself in several ways.

First, I have already mentioned Paul’s gushing praise of Philemon. He clearly respects the man and hopes that he will do the right thing. His refrain from command him to obey only further highlights that trust. Near the end of his petition he pleads with Philemon to do for him what he has done for others: “Let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.” A declaration more than demonstrating Paul’s love and trust for Philemon.

Secondly, Paul clearly loves Onesimus and says as much. He calls the slave “my child” and “my own heart,” emphasizing how useful he is to Paul and how much he wants him to be on the church planting team. He vows to take upon himself whatever debts or crimes Onesimus owes Philemon. He loves him by praise and by purpose—the whole letter is a testament to Paul’s loving concern for the runaway slave.

Finally, the undercurrent of Christ’s love runs through the entirety of this brief correspondence. The letter presumes the power of the gospel as a direct shaping force on each of these lives, and Paul reminds everyone of this by modeling Christ throug his actions. Having been a criminal and slave under the power of the law and without recourse, Paul knows the love and freedom of Christ through the good news of his life, death and resurrection. Now he intercedes on behalf of a criminal and slave without recourse in order that Philemon “might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” And, even though Paul hopes Philemon will respond redemptively, he secures his commitment to Onesimus with what might seem as a threat to Philemon: “Prepare a guest room for me. I’m coming.”

When was the last time you loved people so well that others were inspired to love more? I’m preaching to myself here, too. Our ministry, our lives ought to be marked by sacrificial love inspiring sacrificial love. We’ve been loved by Jesus and so we love him and then others and then they love Jesus and then others. It’s meant to be a glorious and holy cycle of redemption. And when we live this way, we see another small piece of God’s kingdom come to earth. We see another part of this world not dominated by sin and manipulation but rather by the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord. And that’s the power of love. Amen.

I, Scandal

2010-10-30T02:10:00.001-04:00

I've been thinking about my penultimate post, "Rock." I came across the quote I shared while working on a word study for a seminary class on the Greek word skavndalon, usually rendered "stumbling block." The quote struck me because it opened up this story about Peter and Jesus in a fresh way and clarified how much I, like Peter, am offended by the cruciform nature of Jesus's mission.

In the story, found in Matthew 16, Peter swings wildly from being right on ("You are the Messiah") to being wrong wrong wrong ("This must never happen to you"). I have been swooning these past few years, ever since N.T. Wright switched me on to it, over the glory of the resurrection and the excitement of Christian eschatological hope. It seemed the cure to what ailed me--namely the deep-seated unsettling I experienced as a history major learning about the cruelty and rampant injustice of humanity's past, present and future. Not that the immediate nastiness of evil has been removed by this hope, but that we have the promise of a good king coming to settle the accounts. Eschatological passages like Psalm 2 have become simultaneously chilling and thrilling, since the future they imply is both scary (the implication of God wreaking havoc on the kings of the earth seems frighteningly violent and chaotic) and wonderful (the kings of the earth are, by and large, power-hungry, greedy, murdering bastards--explicitly or implicitly). Sorry, classical liberalism, I just don't buy your metanarrative.*

Yet, for all my trembling adoration of the coming king, I have suspected myself of not fully tangling with the cross. It's convenient to exult in the righteous warrior (which I do not intend to cease doing) and easy to forget the suffering servant. Any good Christology must embrace both, however discordant they might feel, and recognize they are inextricably and causally linked.** Jesus has established the archetypal pattern for being fully human, for realizing the full potential of God's original charge that man might "have dominion" over the earth. And that pattern is marked first and foremost by the cross: self-sacrificing love for others as part and parcel of an unflagging commitment to God's purposes for humanity.

Like Peter, I find myself scandalized by this notion. It's all well and good to state it as a concise bit of biblical theology as I just have, but quite another thing to wrestle with its full existential implications. As the rogue once said, "Good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living--well that's another." And, honestly, I'd rather my cosmic judge conform to the classical, Greco-Roman hero ideal. Aragorn trotting that horse passionately before the black gate. Luke nailing the rat-sized exhaust port. McFly with the left hook to Tannen. Mr. Incredible flinging the car into Syndro's plane. That satisfying comeuppance of evil which often caps off the hero's journey of training and self-actualization.

We do get that with Jesus. He's coming back to tear down the kingdoms of this world and finalize his own. But between now and then, he's calling his people to fulfill their creational mandate to be image-bearers, and he's calling them through the cross. This is where I live: enraptured by the dream of eschatological glory and filled with dread at the cruciform path which leads there. With Peter I exclaim, "You are the messiah!" only to quickly remonstrate "This must never happen to you." What I'm really saying, what I'm really pleading is "This must never happen to me." I am a skavndalon to the purposes of God in my life, and I want to want to change.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me--a sinner. Grant me your grace, strength and perseverance to tread the path you've laid out for me, to trust that you will vindicate me in the end if I will only follow you with all trust. Deliver me from fear and timidity; make me the man you've always intended--enable me to realize my potential to bear your image and, through you and the power of the Holy Spirit, be a blessing to this world.

*That we can hope for political power to uphold justice and prevent chaos, to solve the basic problem of global human society. But I voted for Obama and don't regret it, so chew on that.
**Philippians 2:5-11; Revelation 5:12.

The Swift Justice of Jesus

2010-10-29T00:17:00.000-04:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Friday, October 29th during morning prayer at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. The homily is based on a reading from Matthew 13:24-30.

I wish that I could tell you all this morning that I can explain all the suffering in the world. I wish that I could offer you an immediate solution, some sort of good versus evil strategy that would rid our world of evil. You’d like to hear that, too, I bet, if it didn’t sound so much like a fairy tale. Like a comic book fantasy where the superhero cleans up the mess and everyone goes home happy. I can’t offer that kind of a story this morning, because the gospel of Jesus Christ is more than a story with a happy ending. The kingdom of heaven is more than a nice idea—it’s lived out in the midst of the messiness and even downright nastiness of human life.

In our reading this morning, Jesus tells a parable about God’s kingdom. A man plants wheat seeds in a field, but then an enemy comes along at night to plant weeds in the same field. When the plants finally grow, the wheat and the weeds are growing right alongside each other, competing for nutrients from the soil and water and sunlight from the sky. The man’s servants report this to him, asking whether they should root out the weeds for the wheat’s sake. He instructs them to let both the wheat and the weeds grow alongside each other until the harvest, until all the plants will be collected and sorted—wheat will go to his barn and weeds will be burned by fire.

What’s going on here? How do we understand this story Jesus tells us? We’re lucky, because just a few verses after our reading Jesus explains what he meant. The one planting the wheat is the Son of Man—Jesus—and the field he’s planting in represents the whole world. The wheat seeds, he says, are the children of the kingdom. That tells us first that the kingdom of heaven is about Jesus growing good in the world by placing his followers in it.

The enemy, no surprise, is the devil, and the weeds he plants represent his followers. Not just devil worshipers either—you don’t have to seem like a follower of satan in order to be one. Remember the old saying that the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people that he doesn’t exist. If the devil is responsible for planting the weeds, then we know that evil and evil people are not God’s will. They weren’t planned or put there by Jesus.

The servants question the fieldowner, “Where did these weeds come from?” I think this question is common to every person who has believed in a good God. We look at this world we live in and wonder—where did all this evil come from? Why are people so terrible to one another? It bothers us, it affects our lives. Where did these murderers come from? Where did these racists come from? Where did these greedy people come from? Where did these hateful and abusive people come from? The devil has been planting them in the world since man left the garden of Eden.

Like the servants, our first response is “Get rid of the weeds! Get them out of here!” We want justice to be swift, ruthless and clean. We want to wipe out our enemies in war, to eliminate our villains in the electric chair. But Jesus, like the fieldowner, restrains us, because in attacking our enemies we end up attacking ourselves. “In gathering the weeds,” reads the parable, “you would uproot the wheat along with them.” We cannot be God’s good for the world and also serve as judge, jury and executioner of the evil. Rather than a decisive victory today, we’re waiting for the harvest, that day when wheat and weeds are both gathered up and the good go into Jesus’s home and the bad are burned in the fire.

Jesus promises in verses 41-43 of chapter thirteen that

"The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!"

Listen, everyone. Jesus is coming back, and he’s coming back as a good king with swift justice. He’s sending his angels to take out every oppressor, every murderer and rapist, every greedy person, every man or woman whose words or actions have turned people away from God. This is good news. And it is good news for we who believe and trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, because his mercy protects us from the judgment we deserve.

If this message makes you uncomfortable this morning, maybe it’s because the swift justice of Jesus Christ doesn’t sound like good news to you. All of us here have reason to fear God’s judgment except for the mercy and grace of Jesus. Maybe you’re here this morning and you fear the swift justice of God because you know you don’t have the protection offered you by Christ. I say to you today, repent! Believe the good news that Jesus has been raised from the dead and is coming back as a good king to rid the world of evil. Confess your sins to him, put your trust in him and he will forgive you. If you want to make him your Lord and Savior today, please say the following prayer with me:

Lord Jesus, I believe that you died on the cross and were resurrected by God after three days. I believe that you are the Lord of the world and the only one who can save me from sin and suffering. I confess to you that I have led a sinful life and have hurt myself and others, I ask you to forgive me my sins and receive me as your child. Have mercy, Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

"Rock"

2010-10-24T11:52:00.013-04:00

"But he turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."
~Matthew 16:23

"Because the way of Jesus to the cross became a σκάνδαλον* to Peter, he himself became σκάνδαλον to Jesus, i.e., a personified temptation to turn aside from God's will."

~Kittel, Gerhard, Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-1976), 348.

*Gk., a stone that trips someone or springs a trap to ensnare them

15 Directors Meme

2010-10-13T22:19:00.000-04:00

I'm posting this after seeing it on FlixChatter, a blog I linked to from IMDb. The idea is to list 15 directors who have shaped the way you watch movies (obviously a practice of film nerds like myself). To quote directly from FlixChatter: "These are auteurs whose work I admire, even if I don’t necessarily go and see every single one of their films. Some of their work [has] defined my taste in movies and some are those that I could watch over and over again." I've decided to limit myself to directors whose work I can explicitly identify as formative to me as a film watcher. They're listed here in alphabetical order, by last name. The movies listed in parentheses are concrete examples of their formative influence (not just "favorites"). I follow up the list with a brief commentary on a few of my choices.

1) Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Punch Drunk Love)
2) Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille)
3) James Cameron (Terminator 2, Avatar)
4) Joel & Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men)
5) Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth)
6) Peter & Bobby Farrelly (Dumb & Dumber, There's Something About Mary)
7) Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, Vertigo)
8) Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey)
9) Michael Mann (Heat)
10) John McTiernan (The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard)
11) Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)
12) Martin Scorsese (The Departed, Gangs of New York)
13) Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien)
14) Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park, Jaws)
15) Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds)

"Look at all the blood..." young Joseph Mazzello intoned with reverent awe, staring at the empty Hawaiian field later to be filled in with a digital hulking Tyrannosaur tearing at its prey. At 9 years old, in my movie theater seat, I was that kid, seeing the digital creation he only pretended to see, no less awed by the life force spilling from the predator's mouth. I saw the film at precisely the right moment for it to impress a movie-watching framework upon my mind that has lingered nearly twenty years: movies at their most thrilling and important fabricate vital, visceral experiences which involve the viewer vicariously and, sometimes, voyeuristically.*

Many of the films on this list fit this description, and it has a noticeable lack of cerebral, ennui-ish fare (French New Wave, Terence Malick, etc.). Some films end up standing in for other things, like the fact that No Country for Old Men preceded my interest in noir and hard boiled stories and so ended up more of a direct influence than Chinatown or The Big Sleep even though both of those earlier films are genre forebears of the later one. Other films, like Pulp Fiction, get weeded out because their influence had so permeated pop culture by the time that I saw them that they seemed fresh more in historical perspective than in their contemporary cultural landscape.

I left off two directors I really like, Steven Soderbergh and Edgar Wright, simply due to the derivative nature of their films. They may be masters of the derivative (I love The Limey) but the work doesn't register as innovative enough to be called influential, unless you consider creative derivativity** to be the post-modern meta distillation of Pulp Fiction's inevitable legacy. Where Tarantino transcends his own trajectory, however, comes especially with the poignancy of Kill Bill, Vol. 2's ending but even more so with the deconstructionist take on war and vengeance that was Inglourious Basterds (whose line "Frankly, watchin' Donny beat Nazis to death is is the closest we ever get to goin' to the movies" fits neatly with my aforementioned framework). Wes Anderson might also fit this category, though he has enough eccentricity to find his own directorial voice on a regular basis.

And lastly, I've included some movies here unlikely to be considered "great films" by anyone, yet I consider their influence unquestionable. They say comedy is murder, and it's due in no small part to the fact that what makes people laugh is so darned inconsistent across demographic groups. That said, the Farrelly brothers have made some gut-bustingly hilarious movies which I suspect divide people sharply*** into those who love their movies, those who regard them as infantile and boorish, and those who regard them as masterpieces of infantile-boorish absurdity. Of course I'm in the latter camp, albeit with caveats if you press me on the subject. Additionally, John McTiernan has never been called an auteur (that I know of) but many of his films have a direct, analog, blood-and-guts urgency missing from so many contemporary, synthetic action spectacles.****

*Take that, V for Vendetta.
**I made this word up, I think. It's a derivative of derivative and creativity. Isn't that so meta?
***Just like Jesus! :D
****Film critic David Edelstein has described his boredom with epic digital conflicts as "CGI ennui."

Good Soil

2010-10-12T09:07:00.001-04:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Friday, October 12th during morning prayer at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. The office readings for Friday were as follows: Psalms 137, 144, 104; Micah 3:9-4:5; Acts 24:24-25:12; Luke 8:1-15. The homily is based on the reading from Luke.

Today’s gospel reading makes it easy on us. Jesus tells a parable, he explains why he tells the parable, then he explains what the parable means. There’s something interesting going on here, because he seems to mean his words to be easy to grasp. He’s talking to farmers and people of the land about sowing seeds—he’s speaking right at the level they’re at. But then he explains that actually he’s given this parable that those hearing wouldn’t understand, that he didn’t want them to comprehend his message and therefore respond. Now that’s what I call a paradox. One plus one does not equal two here, it seems.

We might look at this passage and say, “Jesus, what’s going on here? You don’t want people to understand you? What’s the deal?” Right? Because, certainly sometimes we have enough problems hearing and understanding him, so how should we think about this? I think the answer is right here in the parable itself.

Now, Jesus obviously explains his meaning to his disciples. He makes a distinction—there were those guys over there that I hid my meaning from (and I meant to) but I’m going to tell you guys here close to me what I’m really talking about. In this parable, he says, the seed being scattered is the word of God. So the man scattering seed is like someone out among the people with God’s message. God’s word that there is a new king, he can free you from your sins and you don’t have to be dominated by the oppression in this life any more. Jesus, right? And ironically, of course, those people who hear but don’t understand this message have it delivered to them by the ultimate embodiment of God’s word—Jesus. The ultimate seed to be planted in our lives.

And there are all these different kinds of situations and responses to the word we see here. They’re familiar, right? Sometimes the word gets trampled on and devoured—sounds almost like crucifixion. There are people who will look at the gospel and step all over it, who think it’s just a worthless fairy tale and has no power for anyone. They do not know Jesus, the gospel-bearer, and they are blind to the power of the word of God. Sadly, they cannot be set free. Sometimes the word reaches a heart so hardened or hateful or hopeless that it won’t take root and grow in that person’s life. Some of us just can’t even stand the thought of there being truth and beauty in the world—and, surely, some of just don’t even want to repent. Then sometimes the word gets choked out by weeds already present in the soil, like those many things in our lives that compete with God’s word for our worship and love. It’s no surprise to us that money, people and other concerns strangle the word of God in some lives.

But then, there’s good soil. Oh, in the good soil that wonderful message that Jesus reigns and forgives and frees us bears fruit and shines to the glory of God. “These are the ones,” Jesus says, “who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.” It wasn’t just that Jesus’s words spoke to them in familiar language about planting seeds, but also that his words had to be received with a holy posture of heart before God. The cynics, the hopeless, the idol worshipers—they can’t receive the word, they can’t even hear it. It’s honesty and goodness that enable us to understand God’s message to us, that enable us to understand Jesus.

So, how can we become good soil? Notice that Jesus made sure his word found good soil; he took his disciples off to the side and explained to them what was going on. They were the ones given the gift of understanding his teaching, of comprehending the gospel of God. But beloved, these men would not have been “good soil” without the closeness of Jesus. Without God working upon their hearts and minds, they would not have left their families and jobs to follow Jesus around. And they wouldn’t have gained the honest and good hearts that enabled them to hear what Jesus had to say to them.

Here’s another paradox—another “one plus one does not equal two.” God wants all of us to hear and respond positively to his word. But we’re broken creatures, stained by the fall and incapable of hearing on our own. Our hearts by nature aren’t honest and good, but deceitful above all things. We need the kind, powerful touch of God in our lives in order to hear his good word to us. We need to respond to his call, leave behind the things that hinder us and put ourselves in a place to be changed. The disciples stayed around Jesus constantly, slowly learning his ways and being delivered from their sin. Let us also draw near to Jesus, plead with him to change us and free us from sin, and hope to understand and live in the light of the gospel, for the glory of God.

Jesus Casts Out Demons

2010-09-26T20:25:00.001-04:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Friday, September 24th during morning prayer at Shepherd's Heart Fellowship in Pittsburgh, PA. The office readings for Friday were as follows: Psalms 88, 91, 92; Esther 8:1-8, 15-17; Acts 19:21-41; Luke 4:31-37. The homily is based on the reading from Luke.

I have never had a hard time believing in the cross. It never seemed implausible to me that the people of Jesus’s day would want to kill him. Nothing is surprising about it. It’s the way of the world, right? The cross is the natural, logical result of a righteous man confronting a wicked world.

The cross is not the surprising part of the gospel. No, the surprise comes with the resurrection. It’s resurrection, vindication, victory, peace that surprises us. Because the authority Jesus had meant that sin and death could be done away with without more sin and death.What’s surprising to us is a life transformed—a man or woman freed from their addictions, from the sins that make their life miserable.

We’re familiar with the pain of life. In some sense, then, it’s not the demons in this story that surprise us. The other people in the synagogue aren’t surprised by them. It’s not the existence and presence of dark forces that make the news. It’s that someone has authority over them.

Because what does life teach us? It teaches us that, more often than not, the evil in the world can only be fought with more evil. You’ve got to fight fire with fire. I’ve spent some time as a pastor up at the jail in Beaver County. The men I’ve met there grew up in evil circumstances—drugs, violence, abandonment, whatever you can think of—and the choices that landed them in prison reflect that.

But their prison time doesn’t have authority over the evil in their life, it just cages them. They’re not free, and, sadly, many of them are not, so to speak, “better” when they leave. I would argue that this isn’t due to a shortcoming on the prison’s part, but due to the fact that there is evil in this world we are powerless against. So it’s not surprising that rehabilitation is so rare.

The surprising moment in our gospel reading this morning occurs when Jesus casts out the demon. It’s part of the announcement of the kingdom—the new way of doing things Jesus brings to us.

So what, then, ought we to think of the demons in our own lives? Even we who confess Jesus as Lord wrestle with untamed darkness in our lives. Not that I’m saying any of us are possessed, but rather that we live in a spiritual world. Our modern society trains us to imagine that there’s nothing more to existence than what we can see. But the bible paints a different picture. We see in the scriptures a world where evil spirits cry out in church and we are warned that some of us have entertained angels though unaware.

We can’t then, think that our struggle with sin is merely a fight against our bodies and minds. There are demonic forces who are happy to suggest and cajole and push and prod us in all the place we are naturally weak.

The Christian author C.S. Lewis once said that there are two main lies humans believe about demons. One is that they do not exist—maybe you’ve heard the saying, “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people he doesn’t exist.” The second lie is that we ought to take a great interest in demons. People who buy this second lie put their faith in astrology, divination, witchcraft and so on.

Where does that leave us, then? All our thought about the darkness and the demons in this has to begin and end with the authority of Jesus. He has been raised from the dead. He is king. And he is coming back.

Jesus has the power to deliver us from our sin. To transform us so that we are not forever enslaved to our bodies and minds. We must run to him, turn to him, get on our knees before him. We’ve got to throw ourselves on his mercy—and I proclaim this morning that we can and must be confident he will be merciful. Because only Jesus, friends, has authority over the evil in this world. Only Jesus has been murdered though righteous and vindicated by the resurrection. Only Jesus can save us, only Jesus can deliver us, only Jesus can take our filthy rags and make clean and beautiful clothes from them.

Let us turn our hearts to Jesus today, receive the Father’s mercy, and be transformed by the power of the Spirit. Let us pray.

A Heaping Plate of Life

2010-09-20T14:20:00.001-04:00

It's the beginning of the semester and I'm full sprint out of the gate, you might say. Second year at seminary, and I'm feeling secure about many things that felt insecure last year. Primarily the question "What am I even doing here?" feels a great deal more settled, because of the friendships I've made at school, because of the church relationships I've built and am building in the diocese, because of the various ministry engagements I've had this summer and will continue to have this year.

I've only recently completed my clinical hours at my summer internship at the Beaver County Jail. What an experience it has been. I found myself running from the responsibility the first part of the summer, maybe afraid that I would realize I wasn't up to the task of full-schedule pastoral ministry. It came to the point, however, where I had to decide whether my trepidation outweighed my desire to complete the internship successfully and I had to say to myself, "Do whatever it takes." That in itself was formational moment.

I began leading morning prayer with a group of inmates in the "toughest" of the housing units, including one man facing murder charges. Their response to my availability and persistence became both blessing and motivation, and I was able to grow into the notion of other men identifying me and relating to me as a pastor. I had to push through those days I didn't want to be there, to get out of bed and go represent Christ to these incarcerated men. I think I learned, in a way I hadn't fully before, how to "just do it" whether my internal psycho-emotional-spiritual composition was conducive to the task. I will continuing spending several hours a week at the jail as part of my mentored ministry class for school, but it will be a significant reduction from the number of days I was present there during July and August.

In addition the life at the jail, my other major development has been at the parish level. This past year I have been attending Church of the Ascension and have loved participating in their worship services and receiving the benefits of their Christian education program (I attended confirmation classes there and was confirmed this past May). It's a great church, and I hope to stay involved in the prayer ministry there as much as I can. But the combination of spending time with the "down and out" at the jail and several spiritual direction meetings with the rector of a homeless church in Pittsburgh lead me to wonder whether a charismatic church for the poor wouldn't be a better fit for my home parish as well as my potential ordination discernment process. So, as of the past month, Shepherd's Heart Fellowship has become my home church.

My friend Justin and I will be serving there on Friday mornings, taking turns officiating morning prayer and delivering homilies (he is serving for his mentored ministry), and attending/serving on Sunday evenings (yesterday we helped set the altar and administer the Eucharist as chalice bearers). My service there is my way of really serving the body that will more than likely sponsor me for ordination, which I am glad to do. And beyond that, I am excited to be spending my energies on ministry commitments to the poor--both the homeless and the incarcerated--because I really get life from doing it and I believe God has called me to it.

The other place I know God has called me to, prayer, prompted my volunteering to be the Middler class representative for Trinity Healing Fellowship, the campus group that organizes prayer teams for Wednesday morning Eucharist as well as a monthly healing service. I am excited to continue praying for people in this way, and I hope to, as much as I can, continue serving in prayer with the teams at Church of the Ascension, at Shepherd's Heart, and attend the House of His Presence Friday prayer meetings at Shepherd's Heart as often as my sanity and gas tank allow.

Academically, this will be a language heavy semester, as half of my classes are deal with either grammar or exegesis in the biblical languages. My other class (besides Mentored Ministry) is homiletics, a subject I am eager to learn more of since I so enjoy writing and delivering sermons as many of my friends acquainted with my tendency to pontificate could have told me.

That's my heaping plate, then: Pastoring the poor, prayer, doing language work and preaching. Maybe this adds some context to the homily I gave last week: Lord, help me not forget Jesus in all of this!!

Mythopoeia

2010-09-20T13:49:00.001-04:00

"The language of modernity has emphasized the factual, and in doing so, theological imagination has greatly suffered. Indeed, modernity's language can be understood as anti-mythopoeic because modernity disconnects itself from ancient and patristic thought. In the quest for knowledge, truth has come to be defined as something that has been proven to be factual. Contrarily, the ancients used imagination and story to convey truth and meaning. The Church Fathers, with their many interpretive lenses of Holy Scripture, used theological imagination to express biblical truth, for their language oftentimes stirs the entire makeup of the reader: mind, soul and spirit. Modernity's loss of theological imagination, therefore, is an attempt to present facts that appease the cognitive dimension of the mind rather than the holistic makeup of the human being. In recapturing the essence of mythopoeia, theological imagination can once again emerge, conveying truth and meaning to the complete ontological makeup of humanity."

~Scott Seely, "Aslan's Song: The Mythopoeic Dimensions of the Narnian Creation Account" (Ambridge, PA: Trinity School for Ministry, 2010), 5.

You Always Have the Poor With You

2010-09-13T01:32:00.001-04:00

The following is a transcript of my homily preached Monday, September 13th in chapel at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA. The office readings for Monday were as follows: Psalms 56, 57, 58; Job 40:1-24; John 11:55-12:8. The sermon refers to the reading from John.

“You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”[1]

This verse has become, in some circles, an excuse to brush off the poor—to brush off attempts to point out the social radicalism essential to gospel announcement that was and is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why bother with the homeless? The disadvantaged? Those people on the other side of the tracks? Jesus said they’ll always be with us, shouldn’t we just focus on getting people saved?

We, as seminarians, may or may not hold this view. We ought, though, as bible students to already know of God’s preference for the poor which runs straight through the heart of scripture and the gospel. The announcement of a king who lives among and serves the very outcasts of society. A message of grace that has little room for CV’s, resumes and other catalogues of human achievement. Even at Trinity, as some of your own poets have said, C equals Mdiv.

We, as kingdom servants in training, will always have the poor with us. We will be called, no doubt, to many different offices, peoples and locations, but everywhere we go we will encounter the poverty and barrenness of this world. Some will be called to the materially poor directly, others indirectly. All of us, though, will somehow be affected by their plight. As Paul reported of the church leaders in Jerusalem, “They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.”[2]

In another sense, however, the poor is anyone and everyone. All of us fated to live and die in this cursed world and suffer the consequences. Our future gospel ministries will take us face to face with the spiritually, emotionally, relationally and psychologically poor. A question will then press upon us: in the midst of serving the poor, will we forget Jesus? Like this homily’s content so far, will Jesus be lost in the fray of worrying about the broken?

“You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”[1]

But how can this be relevant to us? Jesus promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”[3] I’m afraid I must venture to something somewhat mystical to answer—my apologies to any intuitive thinkers in the room. There is a kind of being present with Christ which goes beyond acknowledging the fact of his omnipresence, an ineffable experience of spiritual immediacy familiar to charismatics and contemplatives alike. I think of it when I read Christ’s words about abiding in him, or when the psalmist obtusely commends me to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”[4] Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “Let those who are versed in the mystery revel in it; let all others burn with desire rather to attain to this experience than merely learn about it.”[5]

But, how can pouring oil on the feet of a man about to die be relevant to us? I take the oil to represent resources—the text emphasizes its costliness—and being present with Christ in this way requires our most coveted asset: time. It takes minutes, hours and days to be alone, quiet and prayerful before God. To comprehend the word not only as narrative, theology and instruction, but also as the word of God which the Holy Spirit illumines in our hearts, “like fire… and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces.”[6] Practices like lectio divina help us encounter the Bible as a living text, and we hear not only the textual reconstruction of ancient kerygma but also the living God speaking to us today.

Spiritual disciplines such as these are not so-called “works of the law” by which we accrue merit before God. But, rather, these are practices experientially verified by a long history of church testimony. As Richard Foster has written, “The path does not produce the change; it only places us where the change can occur.”[7] We earn no new status before God, but the healing presence of Christ restores and redeems our selves to become the divinely fashioned images we were always intended to be. As Paul has written, “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”[8]

How then is Judas’s protest relevant to us? Because we will commit our resources to serving those in need and forget cultivating a life of spiritual immediacy with Christ. Because we will commit our resources to being trained to serve those in need above a life of intimacy with Christ. When our minds, hearts and bodies are cluttered with chaos and sin, we experience a temporal distancing from God where there is less love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. I should point out that these are the final measure of Christ’s closeness, not gently electrifying experiences of the transcendent (however rapturous they may be).

And if nothing I have said here was compelling or convincing to you, set aside time for divine solitude just for the sheer glory of God. To honor our creator and redeemer. Because the answer to the question “How do I love God with all my heart?” is not “By loving my neighbor as myself.” Because just as Paul says the worship of creation dehumanizes us in Romans one, the worship of, contemplation of, praise of, supplication to and tangible experience of the creator re-humanizes us. As the apostle says, “All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”[9]

concluding prayer:
“I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."[10]

[1] John 12:8.
[2] Galatians 2:10.
[3] Matthew 28:20.
[4] Psalm 34:8.
[5] Quoted in Thomas Dubay, Fire Within (Ignatius, 1989), 212.
[6] Jeremiah 23:29.
[7] Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline (1998), 8.
[8] Ephesians 2:10.
[9] 2 Corinthians 3:18.
[10] Ephesians 3:16-19.

The Flaming Hammer

2010-08-22T00:05:00.000-04:00

The following is a transcript of my sermon preached Sunday, August 22nd at St. George's Anglican in Waynesburg, PA. The readings for this week were as follows: Psalm 46; Isaiah 28:14-22; Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-29; Luke 13:22-30. The sermon primarily refers to the reading from Hebrews.

I don’t know if you noticed just now, but our New Testament reading this morning was missing some verses. No, nobody made a mistake. The lectionary—our list of weekly scripture readings found in the prayer book—leaves out Hebrews 12:20-21, as it often does with supposedly unpleasant content. What was left out? Let me read it to you. It says that the hearers at Sinai begged “that not another word be spoken to them. (For they could not endure the order that was given, ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.’ Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’)”[1]

Our dean and president at Trinity School for Ministry, the Very Rev. Dr. Justyn Terry, has said before that often the scriptures left out of the lectionary are the very ones we ought to preach on. This morning I tell you, I accept his challenge. This morning I will preach the full word of God, however unpleasant it may be.

Israel begged for God’s intense, fiery word to stop. Who among us does not know the difficulty of hearing the full word of God? The gospel, as good news will do, fills us with hope. We rejoice in the glory of God’s mercy and grace extended to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet the cross ought to also to cause us holy fear, as we have been told by Jesus himself that “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”[2] The cross both announces the grace of God as well as the sacrificial lifestyle he calls everyone to live.

Last week I spoke the word of God to you. I told the story of Babylon’s invasion of Israel and the dark consequences which followed. It was a dire time in Israel’s history. A time of violence, immorality and uncertainty. I pointed out that our own day suffers many similar problems. I argued that, as in Jeremiah’s day, many voices in our culture claim to have the answers and solutions while those who speak God’s word are deemed dangerous or irrelevant. I concluded that we ought to judge all these voices based on what we know about God through the Bible, through that long and full history of Israel culminated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But did we hear the full word of God? I’m asking myself here; did I even proclaim it?

Let me ask you—who did you identify with in that story? I’m guessing no one here saw themselves as Babylon, the future army of destruction. That would be like rooting for an evil Terminator or a dictator. Maybe some of you saw yourself like Israel—God’s chosen, but compromised by sin, unsure of the word of the Lord in a chaotic time. But my guess is—and I say this because I was no different—that most of us identified with Jeremiah. The one who got it right. The good guy. We like heroes and we want to be heroes—we’re encouraged by their tales of perseverance and righteousness, and rightly so. We ought to aspire to a noble life. However, as we dream of nobility, we must not forget the darkness of our human nature. We don’t like to admit to our own villainy and probably need God’s word to admit it to ourselves.

I will not argue today any differently than I did last week—as Christians, we face a God-less culture which might be happy to eradicate the apostolic witness from public life altogether. But when we point our finger at this sinful culture, are there not three fingers pointing back at us? We who instruct others not to sin, do not we also do some of the very things we criticize? As much as we do so, we ignore part of God’s instruction that our lives ought to reflect our message, and therefore should heed the words we read today in Hebrews: “See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven!”[3] Those of us quick to identify the sins of others ought to also examine ourselves.

One of us might say, but Lord, have I not done well enough? Is it not enough to attend church, avoid terrible things like drugs and illicit sex, to do my best to “get by”? So long as I’m not like “those people over there”?

To illustrate my point, I have two stories to tell.

A couple of years ago I lived in Tallahassee, FL with my friend Scott. We were both out of college, both Christians and both working at a job we had because they were willing to give us money if we showed up and, well, confound it if we didn’t have this persistent need to eat regular meals and sleep under a roof behind a locked door. Scott knew a man through mutual friends whose name, like mine, was Mike. Mike did not have his life together. He lived out of his van and was a recovering alcoholic who lapsed every now and then. He had intermittent work with stone-cutting and placing for personalized driveways and patios, but was often short on cash because he would hold out for better paying jobs and feel insulted by low-paying grunt work. He asked Scott if he could live with us and, with my reluctant permission, Scott said yes.

So Mike lived with us for a couple of months. Working intermittently. Taking up large chunks of my free time with his energetic ramblings. Staying off of alcohol. I allowed and tolerated his residency because I regarded it to be my Christian duty, but I was a reluctant host and probably not always a kind one. Shortly after Mike moved out, he lapsed back into his addiction, and stumbled drunk into a house on his street late one night. The young coed he terrified called the police, who arrested him for breaking and entering. When I heard this, I turned my nose up and decided that he deserved what he got. I never visited him in prison.

I remembered these events recently, with sorrow, because of my current chaplaincy internship at the Beaver County Jail. There I’ve met Marcus, whose name I’ve changed to protect what little privacy he has left, a man I pray with on a regular basis and who is also a killer. Marcus, formerly a Muslim, found Christ while reading the Gospels alone in his cell. He became irritated and unamused by the macho posturing of his fellow inmates, and has come to know the peace of God through the grace and forgiveness of Jesus. Marcus regularly demonstrates an authentic, humble faith and an intelligent curiosity to understand as much about God and the Bible as he can. We are even currently reading a spiritual book together.

Every day I meet with him, I have to be willing to extend Marcus the same grace he has come to accept, or I would not be able to minister to him. I realized quickly from ministering to inmates that I could have no hope of being effective if for a second I considered myself to be better than them. I must remember both that, as the apostle Paul says, “There is no one who is righteous, not even one,”[4] as well as that, as the ancient preacher says in Ecclesiastes, “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all.”[5] We are all sinners, and given the right circumstances, we may have been capable of both history’s worst atrocities as well as the pettiest of its crimes.

With Scott and I’s friend Mike, however, I had no such kindness. I put in the hours at my meaningless job and resented him for not having the backbone to do the same. When he ended up in prison, I was tired of his excuses, of his problems, of his story. I thought, “He deserved it; I’m done with him.” Lord Jesus, please forgive me this cold-hearted act of pride.

I ask you then, as I’m asking myself, how will you love your neighbor? If we identify and act as orthodox church-goers, do we also keep Christ’s command to love our neighbor by extending gracious kindness to those who don’t deserve it? Or are we content to label them—drunk, addict, sexually immoral, bum, thug? Or gay, liberal, Muslim, socialist? Or homophobe, fundamentalist, fascist, bigot? The church, the right, the left—all of them have labels and names meant to say “I am not like you.” Even “preacher” can become an epithet of derision or separation, assigning something like self-righteousness or self-promotion to one who proclaims the word—or maybe indicating detachment from so-called ordinary life. I am here to tell you, however, that though a preacher may be a, quote, “man of God,” he is still a man.

Paul’s accusation ought to gnaw at the edges of our conscience. No one is righteous. No one does the right thing. If this is so, how can any group or individual claim superiority to another? This is certainly a word we don’t want to hear. It’s natural to us to jostle for position, competing and comparing ourselves to one another. We take comfort in the notion that we’re not all that bad, not “the bad guys.” But in so doing we ignore Paul’s devastating critique of humanity. Again I quote Hebrews to you: “See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking… how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven!”[6]

Let’s return again to our readings from last week. God proclaimed through Jeremiah, “Is not my word like fire, like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”[7] Jeremiah’s words undermined the whole nation of Israel, called their religious, political and economic life into question. Had they faithfully responded, God would have broken their public life in pieces in order to reconstruct it in his image. Since they were faithless, he tore the whole thing down and made them start over.

Therefore I ask, what are we doing in church? Isn’t our worship service flush with the word of God, that burning, rock-breaking hammer? Are we not coming, as it says today in Hebrews,

"to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumberable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel?"[8]

Like the Moses trembling at Mt. Sinai, we can never take God’s word for granted. We come to church, together, in the presence of Almighty God, and hear his words. They not only expose our society for its sinfulness, but ourselves as well. All of the ways we fall short of the glory of God.

As Anglicans, we affirm that God is powerfully present in the sacraments. Not only, beloved of God, ought we to faithfully remember and observe God’s story and word, but we also ought to be cognizant of the living God present here with us this morning! He is a God nearby, and not a God far off. As we prepare to receive the eucharist, let us examine ourselves. Do you need to repent of failing to love your neighbor? Is there a hard word God has been prodding your conscience with, one you would rather ignore or forget? In the presence of God, Jesus, the angels, the firstborn, we must repent of our wicked ways and receive the forgiveness of Christ.

We are about to encounter the living God in the body and blood of Jesus, so hear these words: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”[9]

[1] Hebrews 12:19b-21. This section must be modified based on whether the reading is actually modified by the bulletin and/or the reader.
[2] Luke 9:23.
[3] Hebrews 12:25.
[4] Romans 3:10.
[5] Ecclesiastes 9:11.
[6] Hebrews 12:25.
[7] Jeremiah 23:29.
[8] Hebrews 12:22-24.
[9] Hebrews 12:28-29.

My First Jeremiad

2010-08-16T09:07:00.001-04:00

The following is a transcript of my first sermon, which I preached yesterday, August 15th, at St. George's Anglican in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. Numbers in brackets refer to footnotes at the bottom, asterisks to comments I excised in the editing process because of excess erudition. The readings for this week were as follows: Psalm 82; Jeremiah 23:23-29; Hebrews 12:1-14; Luke 12:49-56. This sermon is built around the Old Testament reading.

Where is God? Can anyone here tell me? Or show me? We might simply say, “everywhere,” right? As Christians we believe that God is omnipresent: he is “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen” (that’s from the creed) and he is “before all things, and in him all things hold together”[1] (that’s from Paul). In our Old Testament reading this morning, God put it this way through the prophet Jeremiah: “Am I a God near by, says Yahweh, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says Yahweh. Do I not fill heaven and earth?”[2] He is in all places at all times, and we can go nowhere where he cannot find us.

We know this is true, as doctrine. But, on a daily basis, how aware are we of God? Do we not often imagine him to be “a God far off”? I will speak for myself and admit that in my weakness I do not always believe and act as though God is present with me, as though he is acquainted with all my ways.[3] When we believe God to be absent, we sin with even less restraint. Those are not the moments in my life that I am proud of, or that I would be very happy to share with a group of strangers on a Sunday morning. Yet I made those decisions, I suppressed what I knew to be true about God, and so did you. All of us here today have at one point or another acted on the tacit assumption that God is not watching.

Please permit me, then, to tell a story about an ancient group of people who did the same. Israel, though the very ones chosen by God to bear his promises to the world, famously failed to live up to their high calling. In Israel’s long and winding road of a history, we find both grace and judgment at work in hundreds of messy stories involving ordinary people interacting with an extraordinary God. Grace because God chose them and stayed faithful to them regardless of their faithlessness, judgment because God did not forever tolerate their disobedience.

In the year five-hundred eighty-six, before Christ, an army of Babylon attacked Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s temple and carted off millions of Hebrews to be slaves in another land. It has been called “The Babylonian Captivity” and “The Exile,” and it was one of the most devastating moments in Jewish history. God’s chosen people lost the land God had promised to their forefathers and given to them through the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. God’s chosen people lost the building where Yahweh himself dwelled—Solomon’s temple, the holy of holies, heaven on earth.

Israel assumed Yahweh to be “a God far off” in the starkest way: by worshiping the fertility god Baal. Honoring and sacrificing to another god implies Yahweh is not who he says he is, that his covenants cannot be trusted, that his faithfulness amounts to nil. So God sent Babylon, called God’s army[4] by the prophet Joel, and they destroyed the keystone markers of Israel’s identity: land and temple. They were left with only confusion and despair. They suffered the sharp end of God’s ancient promise to them from the book of Deuteronomy: “If your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.”[5]

In the year six-hundred twenty-seven, before Christ, some forty years before the invasion, nothing could have been further from Israel’s mind. The people of God lived in the land which God had given them, and all was right with the world. But then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. “Jeremiah!” God says (I’m paraphrasing). “You’re a prophet!” Jeremiah says back, “But I’m only a boy.” “Don’t say that! You’ll speak my words to nations, and they’ll succeed or fail because of them.” Not so bad, right? Jeremiah was certainly handed a big task, and he was inexperienced. But he had God’s reassurance: “I am with you to deliver you.”[6] The turn of the screw, however, comes with the content of Jeremiah’s first assignment. God’s message to Israel? “Out of the north disaster shall break out on all the inhabitants of the land.”[7] What a task that was. First day on the job and already preaching doom and gloom. I can’t imagine (pause).

We can imagine, however, that bringing a message of destruction to a confident kingdom* would not have been easy. From Jeremiah’s story, we see that it wasn’t. His family opposed his work. He enraged the religious leaders and ended up beaten, imprisoned and alone. Even rival prophets went about contradicting his message: “How long?” Jeremiah asks in today’s reading, “Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies, and prophesy the deceit of their own heart?”[8] They recounted dreams and captivated Israel’s imagination with “a God far off,” leading the nation to accept a way of life marked by the absence of God.

It was Jeremiah’s job to call Israel to repentance, to recognize that, in fact, God was not far off but very near. Many of his oracles come as bittersweet supplication, such as God’s plea for his “faithless children” to return in chapter three—he says “I won’t be angry with you! Return to me, for I am merciful.” We see that the God who judges with armies is the God who loves and pleads with his chosen people to return to the sole worship of him. This was God’s message to faithless Israel, and they refused to hear it.

But how could they know? Why believe a naysaying loner when there are plenty of other prophets who say every thing will be alright? God asserts, “Is not my word like fire… like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”[9] It certainly proved to be so. Jeremiah prophesied it and God’s word eventually came to pass, with Babylon’s invasion breaking Israel in pieces. But this became clear to Israel only too late. At the time Jeremiah’s words may have only seemed a crude power-play, playing the proverbial God card in order to legitimize his message. I believe, however, that another message from Jeremiah helps clarify the choice they made as well as the choices we are making today.

Jeremiah, chapter six, verse sixteen: “Thus says Yahweh: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”[10] Beginning with story of Abraham, through the life of Jacob, the trials of Joseph, the exodus of Moses, and so on, ancient Israel had an even more ancient path laid out in example for them. The people God chose for his purposes always had the measuring rod of covenant, promise and command by which they could judge their lives. They could look to the stories of those who had gone before in order to know who God was, what he was like and what he had to do with their lives. Had they remembered Jacob, they would have known that God is not only near, but close enough to wrestle with. Had they remembered Moses, they would have known both of God’s love for Israel in the Exodus and his anger with them in decades of wandering in the Sinai wilderness.

The false prophets enticed the people, saying, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed!”[11] Something new, unusual, mystical. A feel-good spirituality affirming both the supernatural and the uncomplicated goodness of human life. Baal was a fertility god represented by a cow or calf, itself an ancient symbol of domestic security and stability. Our God certainly loves and blesses safe and happy homes—his original promise to Abraham was to bless all the families of the earth![12] But Baal-worship meant something of an attempt at short-circuiting God’s good intention, seeking prosperous homesteads without reference or devotion to the one true God. Jeremiah’s oracle retorts, “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.”[13] The test of a prophet? Of a spiritual message? Agreement with the story of God so far, a faithful representation and reiteration of God’s relationship with and purpose for humanity. All spiritual messages must sink or swim by this standard.

We may not live in ancient Israel, constantly feeling the hot breath of pagan empires ready to storm through our little strip of land near the Mediterranean Sea. But we do live in a time and place, however, where time-tested securities and inherited values no longer seem as certain as they once were. Our nation is at war in two countries, swinging wildly between political extremes, deeply in debt and struggling to pick up the pieces of a massive economic failure. The confidence and resilience of post-War America have dissipated. Rather than cheer our sure footing as a world leader, we now wonder and doubt whether the king’s men can put Humpty Dumpty back together.

Our national religious life is similarly in tatters. Whereas fifty years ago mainline churches constituted the primary shapers of American religion, today a melting pot of spiritualities and philosophies attempts to eliminate religion from public life altogether. Whether saint or sinner, probably most Americans would have at one time recognized Christianity as basic American religion. As Johnny Cash once sung, “And there's nothing short a' dying / That's half as lonesome as the sound / Of the sleeping city sidewalk / And Sunday morning coming down.”[14] Even rogues and rebels like Cash knew they should be in church, even if they kept away. Today, however, the gospel seems to many as merely one truth claim among many. Our culture suffers a plurality of spiritual options, each seemingly as good as the other. As President Obama has said, we are no longer a Christian nation.

Here, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, today, August the fifteenth of two-thousand ten, a question presses upon us: “Who ought we to listen to?” How do we tell the Jeremiahs from the false prophets? Like ancient Israel, America, nay, the world stands at a crossroads and God calls us to look to those ancient paths. ** In some sense each day for each individual is a crossroads, a new moment in which we must choose whether we will live as though the Father is “a God near by” or as though he is “a God far off.”

I know from experience that knowing the “God near by” does not happen by a sheer act of will. We cannot force ourselves to live every moment conscious of our Lord any more than we can think about every breath we take, or every time we blink. What then shall we do? We must commit ourselves to constant exposure to the bible’s big story, recalling each and every day the faithfulness of God to his people and the moral and ethical standards he calls them to live by. Through scripture, through prayer, through liturgy and eucharist, we remind ourselves of the nearness of God, we learn how intimately he is involved in our everyday lives.

Let us remember this week those ancient paths tread by God’s people, lives lived in the real world with all its problems, but nevertheless living testimonies to our Father in heaven, and our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

* - orig. "a secure and content ethnic theocracy"
** - orig. "I am not here advocating some aggressive theocratic political agenda, but rather echoing the Bible’s ancient call to 'all people everywhere to repent.'[15]"

[1] Colossians 1:17.
[2] Jeremiah 23:23-24.
[3] Psalm 139:3.
[4] Joel 2:11.
[5] Deuteronomy 30:17-18.
[6] Jeremiah 1:8.
[7] Jeremiah 1:14.
[8] Jeremiah 23:26.
[9] Jeremiah 23:29.
[10] Jeremiah 6:16.
[11] Jeremiah 23:25.
[12] Genesis 12:3.
[13] Jeremiah 23:28.
[14] Johnny Cash, “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”
[15] Acts 17:30.

C.S. Lewis on Old Books

2010-07-23T16:55:00.001-04:00

"Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why--the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed 'at' some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ('mere Christianity' as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones."

~C.S. Lewis, from the introduction to St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1977), 4.

Inception, reviewed.

2010-07-18T02:32:00.034-04:00

Inception, like many action movies, layers one kinetic combat set piece on top of the last. Instead of coming one after the other, however, they come one within the other. A collapsing city within a snow fortress assault within a zero-gravity hotel hallway brawl within a gunfire-peppered street chase in the rain within an otherwise calm flight from Sydney to Los Angeles (thankfully not Oceanic Flight 815). Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team use an unspecified technology to infiltrate "shared dreams" within which they are able to infiltrate dreams within dreams. The bulk of the film spells their attempt to use this ability in order to plant an idea in a tycoon's brain (Cillian Murphy) as an act of corporate espionage on a competitor's (Ken Watanabe) dollar. That's the gist.

Technically, the first hour is pure exposition, setting the stage for the intricate brain heist to follow. Like The Matrix, the world and its rules are introduced along with the characters and their respective skill sets and motivations before the big bangs can go off. Cobb used to work for dream-walking academic Miles (Michael Caine) before he was forced to flee the country and use his dream powers for money to try and get back to the children from whom he is now estranged. He connects with young Ariadne (Ellen Page) an "architect" student of Caine's skilled at constructing dream worlds that can be used to entrap unsuspecting dreamers.

One of director Christopher Nolan's acknowledged influences is Michael Mann, whose concrete sense of place is evident here. The action scenes have a pragmatic, rather than stylized, feel, as well as the concussively tangible crunch of cement, steel and glass lacking from so many synthetic cinematic conflicts. Thrilling and tense, the Russian doll action structure showcases a fantastic editing feat where the events in each layer of consciousness (within each of which time moves exponentially faster) have a kind of doppler/ripple effect on all the successive layers. So when the van in the street chase goes into freefall, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) must defend his sleeping comrades on the next layer down in zero gravity. The result is exciting and new, as if Dave and HAL9000 had a shootout and fistfight aboard the Discovery. Confused? Don't feel bad, the architect--ahem, director--Nolan has constructed an elaborate but self-consistent artifice meant to incept bewildering thrills in the audience's mind.

But Nolan is too interested in murky psychological rabbit holes to leave it at that (hah). Cobb's former wife keeps violently interrupting his subconscious and jeopardizing his missions, perhaps begging the question of whether dream worlds overlap with one another. Nolan thankfully avoids ending with a cliche it's-all-in-his-mind twist and instead wrings a tantalizingly ambiguous conclusion from his interlocking action scenes. It stays with you and is sure to prove fanboy fodder for many message board arguments to come. Never before has the question of how long a top can spin been of such consequence.

Cinephiles be warned, however, don't go to Inception expecting a masterpiece. It's an exercise in cleverness, and an exciting one at that. But it lacks the existential and emotional heft of its cinematic cousins, whether Heat's languid cynicism, The Matrix's trippy liminality or even Memento's sympathy for an afflicted man trying to keep himself together. Like any action movie, the actors are stock figures in a calculated entertainment. But with Nolan as the ringmaster, the sights and sounds crackle and pop spectacularly while the plot twists and twists and twists. It's a thinking man's shootout, one that sticks in your mind after the dream is over.

10 Unlikely Favorites

2010-06-10T14:44:00.007-04:00

In the spirit of Ebert's Overlooked DVD column, here are ten movies I love that you might not have seen or heard of, or that simply deserve a second viewing. They're not in any kind of order.

1) The Limey (1999), Steven Soderbergh

Ocean's 11 director Soderbergh infused this revenge genre piece with style and poignancy. By casting two aging sixties icons--Terrence Stamp and Peter Fonda--and lacing the soundtrack with the songs of their times, he connects their wistfulness for their own past to something broader in American consciousness. The Who's The Seeker plays like a theme song to the film, suggesting something more existential about Stamp's quest to avenge his daughter's death, and sounding pretty cool when Soderbergh has Stamp walk in slow motion to its cadences Reservoir Dogs-style.

2) Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Frank Oz

Scoundrels spins two con-men's bet into a farce of dueling, manic wits. Steve Martin puts on perhaps his best uptight-unhinged performance (it's up there with Planes, Trains and Automobiles), and Michael Caine provides the unctuous-outrageous counterpoint. It wrings many laughs from these men's absurd commitment to their cons, which includes a great moment where Martin--pretending to be a crippled navy veteran--drags himself across a beach in a staged attempted suicide. Dirty and rotten, indeed.

3) Collateral (2004), Michael Mann

Boistered by a dark, off-type bad guy performance by Tom Cruise, Mann's Collateral may be the best of the semi-Hitchcockian thrillers of the last decade. Jamie Foxx, pre-Ray, shines as the Jimmy Stewart everyman who finds himself trapped by a dark and morally twisting conundrum: drive a hit man from hit to hit in your cab for good money, or you'll be shot. Mann applies the gritty, on-the-street feel he developed in his epic crime melodrama Heat and yields a neo-noirish, ultimately small film about an average man who has to rise to the occasion of unusually critical circumstances.

4) Porco Rosso (1992), Hayao Miyazaki

This seems to be the Miyazaki no one has seen or heard of, but it ranks near the top of his filmography above less satisfying pieces like Castle in the Sky and Howl's Moving Castle. It follows a lost generation type World War I flying ace who has turned to bounty hunting to cash in on his unrivaled aeronautic prowess. Michael Keaton provides a great world-weary, rugged man spin to the character in the English dub, who is an idealist who has more or less given up on a happy life and settled into success and isolation--the internal component of the curse he carries which made him into an anthropomorphized pig. The movie lyrically combines quietly observed stillness and frenetic aerial excitement, and Porco has to come to terms with himself and the women he won't allow to love him.

5) Zodiac (2007), David Fincher

Rather than the aestheticized ritual murders of se7en or the aestheticized ritual brawls of Fight Club, Fincher here aestheticizes the police procedural. Fact by fact from the real-life case of San Francisco's 1970's serial killer, he lays out the story of the murders and the men who tried to apprehend their perpetrator. It's full of mood, eerie cinematography and strong performances from Downey Jr., Gyllenhal and the rest of the cast. It shows a quest for justice that has none of the satisfaction of a typical revenge thriller (note the pointed references to Dirty Harry) and that proves a long self-destructive process for those who stick with it. For a film about a serial killer, there is hardly any gore although the two or three murder scenes do manage to jangle the nerves.

6) Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Joel Coen

What if a divorce attorney pursued a scheming man-eater of a divorcee? This premise drives the Coens' imperfect but often hilarious genre riff on old school screwball comedies. Granted, Clooney and Zeta-Jones do not zip in their scenes together, but strong supporting performances from Cedric the Entertainer, Billy Bob Thornton and Geoffrey Rush crackle with comic absurdity. Also, Clooney's banter with his right hand man provides some quotable fast-talking comic bits. It's uneven, but when the effeminate Eurotrash Heinz, the baron, Kraus-von-Espy comes on stage--well, it's worth the price of admission.

7) The Color of Money (1986), Martin Scorsese

Possibly the best movie about pool hustling you could hope for. I remember being disappointed with Rounders, the Ed Norton/Matt Damon movie about card sharks, and I think Color supersedes its successor by playing to its actors strengths and having a whiz-bang visual stylist like Marty behind the camera. Paul Newman, reprising his role from The Hustler (1961), plays an old pro tired of the sport and rich from selling booze. He takes young hotshot Tom Cruise under his wing; the movie wisely takes the annoying edge off Cruise's trademark intensity by making it a liability needing to be trained rather than simply unleashed. He is a stallion that needs to be broken, Newman his grizzled ranch-hand. The performances are believable, un-pretentious; the drama stays meaningful by ultimately having to do with Newman's choices at the end of his career rather than a simple help-the-hotshot-to-win father-son narrative.

8) The Life Aquatic (with Steve Zissou) (2004), Wes Anderson

Anderson's films combine storybook artificiality with melancholy to affect wistfulness for lost childhoods and unrealized dreams. If you dig this shtick you'll tend to like his work, otherwise you probably "don't get it." Aquatic's narrative may be the most self-consciously artificial of Anderson's creations, but it has it both ways by being about a man whose real life and on screen life have bled together so that he lives vicariously through his celebrity self-image. Bill Murray has enough big-hearted melancholy--as bastardly as it may make him in this film--to carry the story; Owen Wilson comes in as the (maybe) son-figure who becomes instrumental in Zissou's grasp of his inner child and eventual coming-to-terms with his "real" self. All this is set against the backdrop of a cartoonish oceanic expedition with twee fluorishes like acoustic David Bowie covers sung in Portuguese in character by Seu Jorge. To me, the Sigur Ros scored climax still rings transcendent, though those without a taste for the films sad childishness probably won't find it emotionally resonant.

9) The Hunt for Red October (1989), John McTiernan

In some ways this is the perfect film. A world on the brink of nuclear disaster. A rogue Russian captain commanding a first-strike capable silent submarine. A gutsy and snarky CIA analyst played by Alec Baldwin. It's eminently watchable genre material, a political-military thriller with Sean Connery's brogue standing in for the otherwise Russian-twinged English among his crew. It's corny-good, Saturday afternoon fare, one of the movies I watched in awe as a child that still entertains today. I'm always up for the threat of nuclear holocaust (in movies) and am ready for an Ocotober/Strangelove double-feature.

10) In Bruges (2008), Martin McDonagh

Two Irish hit men sight see in Bruges, "the most well-preserved medieval city in Europe." This black comic thriller contrasts the centuries old serenity of the setting with the violent lifestyles of its visitors. Brendan Gleeson plays an older gunman responsible for Colin Farrell's newbie who has been sent away from London after botching his first assignment. Gleeson enjoys the sights with serenity of having accepted his life, while Farrell is all nervous guilt and manic energy and can't stand the boredom of the town. Ralph Fiennes comes in, third act, as boss and bad guy, announcing the climax over the fourth wall, "This is the shootout." He plays his gangster alpha male with unhinged intensity that will have you laughing in disbelief. The film is ironic, clever, violent and very, very profane. It's an acquired taste, but, like good whiskey, it's oh-so-good going down once you've dealt with the unpleasant sensation you get at first.