You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'christology' tag.
I don’t know the story behind this song by The Velvet Underground, but then, oddly, I do, and so do you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the famous line “”In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning”. True One lays awake…wondering not about Jesus or God so much as about the life one has, doesn’t have, wishes to have, or has destroyed.
This is where the “dark night of the soul” of mystics like St John of the Cross and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux differ, for they ended in mystical union with the Divine.
Most of us just wish to reach morning.
A friend of mine was detoxing from heroin and had agonizing nights. To make matters worse, his friends and family had written him off as hopeless and his ex-girlfriend, who he still loved, lived in the next room and as he was writhing in pain (with the words of John Lennon’s Cold Turkey churning in his brain over and over and reverberating through his body), she was having loud sex with some guy she had never met over the phone.
[Um...note that "Jesus" is playing bass...ahhh life]
Inconsolable and unable to form any thought that did not lead back into a hopeless loop he remembered that a pastor had suggested that he simply say the name of Jesus over and over again in his head when he was sleepless and in pain. The man had suggested that the name of Jesus was one both to focus on (whether one believed or not) simply because it was inherently and utterly GOOD. (There was other advice, like find a rehab facility and get some support, but this is all my friend remembered as he shook violently in bed hearing the ecstatic screams from the next room).
He told me later that this “Jesus thing worked” for him. He was not interested in Church (said he wasn’t “good enough”) but he said “It’s the one name that isn’t messed up…it’s pure and makes me feel safe.”
I use to be an insomniac…mostly born from worry, anxiety and no small amount of legitimate fears and questions. I thanked him for the insight, which he felt was odd.
“But you are a Christian” he said “I would think that a given.”
“No, it really isn’t. And as horrendous as your story is I have had a lot of sleepless nights where that would have come in handy.”
“Well what do you think about?” he asked.
“Mostly girls…”
After we stopped laughing he said “doesn’t work does it?”
“It works a little, but certainly not when they are in the next room..you know…”
He slumped back and took a long drag of his cigarette and was quiet. “I do ask a lot of questions though,” I said “. “I mean, it’s quiet, I think God is a good listener, though God probably gets real tired of the whining…”
“What do you ask?”
“Mostly what the Eff I am doing here? Is this all there is (working for an ad agency trying to get people to buy stuff they don’t need).
“I thought you Christians had all the answers” he said leaning back smugly.
“Do I look like I have all the answers?”
He laughed. “But I like that old ‘Jesus’ song Lou Reed did with the Velvet Underground.” I said. “It’s a sweet heart-filled simple song where he just asks Jesus to help him find his ‘proper place’. I don’t have the answers, but I think that’s a core question for me.”
We parted with a hug and for the rest of the day I couldn’t get it the “Jesus” song out of my head..but I didn’t mind. It’s not like that stupid
“Free Credit Report” song that makes me want to shoot my TV or hunt Canadians.
My only beef with the song is the slight self-flagellation of “cuz I’ve fallen out of grace”. You cannot fall out of grace. By it’s very nature is holds and protects and secures. You’d have an easier time of falling off the Salt flats in Utah.
But I love the song, and the question. Now that the grace of Jesus has found me, can I find my “proper place”?
Mac over Seattle, circa 1999.
The Incarnation grounds us in the love of God. “God with us.” The Cross is the core of that love and Paul says it is central to everything Gospel. If you reinterpret, sidestep or attempt to co-opt the Crucified God your theology, no matter how well-intentioned, is worthless and void.
Mine too.
As Bono sings “Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall….but You go on.”
So in some ways we are right to fixate on the cross. If you are on a sinking ship and there is one lifeboat left to get to safety that is pretty much the only important thing. What you do after, how you will rebuild, if you will marry, have kids etc…is all dependent on being rescued.
But here is the part we are not so very good at. I am not. In fact I am a disaster. It’s like I understood on that lifeboat what the real questions of life are and now that I am on dry land I have no idea how to translate any of it.
So it is with the empty tomb. What do we do with such expanse? He is not here. But He is here…Now.
That’s a little open-ended, no?
As I flew in 1999 into Seattle en route to Redmond I was pondering Jacques Ellul’s notion of the “City” as “man’s replacement for God” (The Meaning of the City) it was doubly ironic as I was arriving over a city that connections millions, if not billions, of replacement parts of the whole artifice, and was doing so as the head of a major Internet Gaming Portal (“re-creation” for the rest of the time when we are not replacing God in earnest).
This is what we do with our freedom. And we wonder why we feel more empty than a tomb.
Maybe, just maybe, it is because we have no idea what to do with the open-ended freedom of Easter. An empty tomb, a Living Lord who wants us today with Him, and a yawning existence with millions of competing voices. We shrink back at its immensity and seek diversion, not as they did in Pascal’s time as a clear-faced alternative to the seriousness of Truth, but rather now like hiding in the bomb shelters of London.
If Good Friday and Easter morning can begin to deal with our paralyzing fear of death, it is on Easter afternoon we realize we have another great fear: the fear of life.
And what is His answer today? To make it all “alright”?
No.
He never lied as people do. He said then as He says today. He says simply “I will be with you”.
And if you want to hear Him you must do a simple thing. Listen quietly because the world screams, but God whispers.
Stretch Limo Hummer H2. Happiness and Safety.
Well at least it is not as many as Luthers (95? or was it 57? Oh no..that’s a Chevy).
It’s been on my desk., I shd file, but I feel it is important. So I’m bouncing off Brueggy-baby’s 19 points in rapid Christocentric fashion. If you wanna get a copy of the main deal Google it. It’s from an address in 2004 at All Souls Church in Decatur, GA.
1. Everybody lives by a script.
The larger script is hinted at in the “Curse” in Genesis 3 when the whole thing goes awry. Then much of the OT is a living historical setting of the stage for fruition in the final acts.
2. We get scripted.
Our birth is followed by being scripted by a near blinding number of scripts with subtexts, both conscious and unconscious. Most psychological confusion results form competing scripting. Our own choices in scripting are not always apparent. The Word offers us an alternate text from which to see our script in general. The Holy Spirit is at work in scripting a living congruence with these alternate texts. Our resistance to them (and the larger resistance in the Church and even larger World resistance) is the insistence on having an authoratative script (note the word) who establish personal meaning and direction. By nature, we all become mutli-textual as the scripts we live by and embody war against one another.
Most opt out of the tension by what Pascal called “diversion”, which can be just about anything, but is often relegated to human relationships (drama in the scripting) or to silencing the text through drugs, alcohol, sex, television or shopping.
The Author of all true texting and scripting is God. The example of how to read your script comes from Jesus when He says that He only does what the Father does and that if you have “seen Me you have seen the Father.”
3. The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializesus all, liberal and conservative.
That about sums it, athough he has left out the scripting that often replaces the therapeutic, which is spiritual scripting.
4. The script enacts through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and happy.
Witness the current scripts for the upcoming presidential election. All find their basic texts in the above. The alternate text does not promise either safety or happiness in the manner that the other scripts do. It’s script it too grand and not applicable to immediate scripting the ways these immediate promises of safety and happiness do. The larger script offers (via faith) immediate contact with the Giver of Life and the living embodiment of it in Christ Himself.
Despite wealth and science, we are neither happy nor safe. Nor are these the deepest longings our beings wish to be scripted.
5. That script has failed.
“Military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy”. The case is before us. The script continues to ail us and cost lives. It, in fact, makes us less happy and less safe.
The incarnation is a direct threat to all such scripting, It says that love and sacrifice are more powerful and real and lead to real meaning and connection with Him Who is our resurrection hope. In Him we are finally safe (resurrection) and joyful in Him despite outward circumstances, trapping or scripting. Poorer folk have always known this, which is why they seem more happy than the Wall Street mogul (and why people in Denmark are more happy).
The suffering of the poor (in no matter what ways) makes them more like God as revealed in Christ. The script of consumer militarism would create the illusion we are all Caesers of one kind or another. That this attempt is a somewhat meaningless sidelight is seen in the rendering unto Caeser a tribute from the mouth of a fish.
6. The Health of our society depends upon disengagement from the script of consumer militarism.
A better word is “detachment”. We must still live here but are not required to accept the scripted fiction. This is why idetifying with the platforms of any political party are immediately a capitulation. We are free to reject any fictive aspect of any cultural script and understand them to be tmeporary at best. They may be a “helpful fiction” at certain points but are but grass like ourselves (but the Word of God abides forever).
I disagree that a society, any society can be “healthy”. To be sure, any society that is detached from it’s own life-lies or aware of them may be “health-ier” that a utopia, a dictatorship of a hyper-nationalistic/consumer script.
(More soon)
Sweetness
There was also a sweetness and playfulness at moments at the Old Simpson. Doc skewering Rich or me, the pranks…some serious learning, and lastly the man we kind of all looked to: Doc.
The only commemorative thing I have ever purchased was a paver stone at the Valley Springs Presbyterian Church in Roseville. It was my last footprint in that whole (for me) somewhat loathsome valley, just as Doc left his footprint inside me from that one year at Simpson. A man of refined taste, humor, grace and intelligence, he was a fine mentor.
As I have been Jedi master to as many as ten serious “patowans” (seven of which are in ministry or ordained), Rich and I were Doc’s renegade patowans. He had others. Dale S. was president of the student body and a boy scout…true, a Canadian boy scout, but we were converts from across the tracks. Raw, uncultured and devoid of religion. Doc took a quiet joy in our exploits, even as he tried to impart the beauties of art and literature in Western culture and managed to pass on his love for Kierkegaard on to me.
Over coffees, he endured my constant, and not yet gracious, railings against church institutions, including the one that he was vice president of.
The New Simpson would be more free and joyful and not be about fundraising or building expansions. Someone like Doc would be at the helm…a quiet, thoughtful, even reserved man of wisdom and depth. Those there would have the mirth that Lewis speaks of—a laughter that is deeper because those involved have taken each other and their callings seriously first.
That’s the dream and my view. On the other hand, it might just have been something I ate.
Recent Comments