It was 1984 and I was 11 years old. My family attended a small Pentecostal Church in one of the poorest parts of Houston. There was a trailer parked to one side of us, and the church playground included a concrete sewage culvert that I used to crawl through. My father was the youth pastor there and a member of the board. In the South, if your father is in ministry it means you attend church Sunday morning, evening, and on Wednesdays. This was our normal routine for years…until the Great Satellite Revival came.

I remember when the enormous satellite dish appeared. Where once stood our playground’s single slide, was a parabolic monstrosity of wire mesh and servos. Although the children of the church despised the new dish, the adults were enthralled with the new technology. “Just think of all the new avenues of evangelism”, we were told. I wasn’t very spiritual at the time, all I could think about was my missing slide.

It wasn’t long before the new dish had an opportunity to prove its worth. Somewhere, I don’t remember the exact location, there was a ‘revival’ going on. We pointed the dish to the correct part of the heavens and revival came down to us at the speed of light. I had never seen anything like it. It was exciting: people were yelling, dancing, and talking about miracles of healing. I really wanted to see a healing, and I paid rapt attention to the screen. Of course, I had seen people get healed on TV before. Remember the episode of Little House on the Prairie where lightning strikes Mr Ingal’s makeshift altar? This, however, was going to be a real healing. So I paid attention and kept watching. The preacher said that it was not God’s will for anyone to be sick…that if we had faith only the size of a mustard seed, then we would be healed. If you didn’t get healed that particular night, you just needed to keep coming back until your healing came through.

Sick people began to come to the services. Presumably, the word was getting out to our relatives and neighbors that real revival was happening through the ‘Satellite Revival’…it now had an official name. I remember seeing one man roll up to the front of the church in a wheelchair to receive his healing. When he didn’t get up out of his chair with new legs, I’ll admit I was a little confused. Then I remembered ‘our part’ in the healing equation…he just needed a fresh injection of faith. Maybe if he came to the next service he would be healed then.

The next night came around, and the man in the wheelchair didn’t return. His loss, I remember thinking. I went home that night and rummaged through my mother’s spice drawer. I found what I was looking for and opened the little jar. Little mustard seeds poured into my hand. “They’re so small”, I remember thinking. I wonder if that man in the wheelchair knows how small they are? Maybe if he tried just a little harder?

As the revival spread to other subscribers the Revival began having services every night except Sundays. Letters came in from everywhere telling of healings, exorcisms, and deliverances. Our dish was one of many thousands, we were told. The nations of the world were now being evangelized because of our generous support. Support or not, it had been a few weeks now, and there hadn’t been any obvious physical healings on the air. Lots of people came up to the preacher’s microphone and told how they were healed of backaches, pain in the (insert body part here), diabetes, and all manner of afflictions. I just wished they could catch one on TV! That would make our displaced slide worth the price of admission.

The problem with broadcasting to so many countries is that it takes lots of cash. After 5 weeks of nightly services, apparently there was a big cable bill to be paid. The preacher started asking for faith partners; that if we planted our seed money God would surely extend this revival to the end of all days. It would start a fire that would engulf the entire earth. To an 11 year old boy, nothing is more exciting than apocalyptic language…fire, comets, explosions of celestial proportions…who am I to stand in the way of the end of all days? It sounded like the ultimate fourth of July party, so we gave. The Satellite Preachers were very cooperative about this: they even inserted special intermissions into the broadcast so that we could collect faith offerings without missing any of the praise reports.

The best part of offering time was the ticker that went along the bottom of the screen. If you gave directly to the partner hotline, you could have your name and the amount you gave roll right across the TV for everyone to see. Thousands were being given for God’s kingdom! If someone gave a particularly large amount, it was celebrated by blowing on the Shofar. I remember seeing Christ Assembly’s name roll across there one night. Hooray for us! But then I saw the amount we gave. I remember feeling ashamed that we managed to give so little. Couldn’t we do more? Maybe that’s why the man in the wheelchair wasn’t healed? I felt even more ashamed…what if it’s our fault? We never did offer enough money to be an official ‘Faith Partner’, and I resented it.
As it turns out, there weren’t enough faith partners out there to keep the revival going. The pleas for a ‘gift of faith’ from the preacher started to take up more time than the sermons. People started staying home. I was confused…I still hadn’t seen a healing. If God can heal people, why can’t he make money appear out of thin air to keep the healing ministry He’s using on TV? The preacher explained that it was probably our fault; that someone ‘out there’ was blocking the blessing due to their lack of faith. Even before the preacher said it, I had already figured out that the guilty party should repent and show their repentance by sending in a check. We were being disobedient by not being a faith partner. People in Romania were going to suffer because of what we hadn’t done. “I’m sorry God”, I remember thinking. “When I grow up and get a job, I’ll give what’s necessary to send revival everywhere”.

The Satellite Revival finally ended. Thousands had been healed, the lame walked, and the broken hearted had been bound up. I was proud of our dish now. Who needed a slide anyway. Every time we brought a visitor to church I took them to the playground and explained to them how it communicated with something up in the sky.

I posted this originally over at Challies.com. No one addressed my post directly, so I thought I would rescue it from apathy induced oblivion and bring it to my blog where it could be ignored here as well. The context: a couple of Reformed guys wrote a book about why they were very thankful that they were not sinners like that postmodern guy over there (I paraphrase). In their book they critique the emergent church’s renewed interest in art. Here is my response…

“Is it because churches aren’t displaying art on their walls? Neither are insurance companies, but nobody is up in arms about that.”This phrase may be the crux of misunderstanding between the Emerg* world and the *Reformed world (insert prefixes and suffixes as your heart desires). No one is ‘up in arms’ about the lack of art on corporate walls because they are a place where empiricism, pragmatism, the scientific method, and logic reign supreme. That is the domain of business…where transactions take place. ‘You’ve done this for me, so I’ll do this for you’.

On the other hand, should a church resemble a business? I hope I’m not being too presumptuous in saying that most people would agree that it isn’t. Church on the other hand is the place where we meet together to celebrate the beauty of what Christ has done for us, to become aware of the depravity of our fallen nature, and to receive the grace God has offered. Art (at least pre-modern art), helps us do these things. The stations of the cross remind us of Jesus last hours. The pageantry of the Tenebrea confronts us with the horror and finality of death. Architecture, stained glass, paintings, sculpture, all can contribute to a greater awareness of the good news of the Kingdom, and why we so desperately need it.

The ‘crux’ is this: Emerg* and *Reformed people need each other as a corrective for each of their respective excesses. The business-like, transactional, systematized theology of the Reformed needs an injection of beauty and metaphor that the emergents appreciate. Conversely, the Emergents could very much benefit from the appreciation of orthodoxy, church history, and leadership that the Reformed world has in (over)abundance.”

A few counterpoints of my own:

• At one point in Challie’s post, he relates a comment from his father in-law who poses the question, ‘Why do Christians give latitude to artists that they wouldn’t give to anyone who works a simple trade?’. I have known several churches where the attending tradesmen are regularly commissioned to do the skilled work around the church. Landscapers, electrician’s, plumbers, mechanics…all enjoy some amount of patronage or donate their time to the church. I have known very few (2 to be exact) who either bought art or accepted donations from resident artists. From my own experience, considerably more value latitude is given to skilled tradesmen than to artists.

• In the father’s quote above substitute the word ‘pastor’ for the word ‘artist’ and then see who ‘gets up in arms’. If we’re chuckling about other people’s sacred cows, lets be fair and tip them all over (its a southern thing). One of my favorite bloggers, Brant Hansen, has quite a few things to say about evangelicalism’s obsession with the role of the pastor. My own view is that the role of the pastor is important. If one of their duties is to preach the good news then the artist can help them immensely. Symbols are powerful things, and art synthesizes the symbolic with the natural. It brings together two sides of God that the Modernist world view has eternally separated: Transcendence and Immanence. A powerful sermon can come from a canvas as well as a lectionary.

• If we cut out what we would consider art from the bible we would have to at least omit:
• big chunks of the Psalms (poetry)
• Song of Songs (poetry)
• The Magnificant (song)
• Probably the book of Job (prose)
• The parables of Jesus? (prose)
• Illuminated manuscripts (the Book of Kells)

So to answer my question, ‘Is Art Worthless?’, art is an integral part of who we are as human beings. To suppress that part as having little or no worth is yet another form of dualism. Art is not easily categorized or systematized, but it is part of our nature to imagine and express just as it is in our creator’s nature to imagine and express.

I keep having this strange dream, over and over…

I’m sitting at my keyboard, or reading my journal, or thinking about a conversation I had.  I’m reading something I’ve written or said in the past, and think to myself…what a load of crap!…or I can’t believe how arrogant that sounded…or I could have been much kinder there…

That’s when I realize, this isn’t a dream…I really am:

1. A Jerk
2. Unkind
3. Rebellious
4. Selfish
5. Immature
6. All of the Above

There are points in my life that I look back at and cringe internally at what I’ve done…things that I’ll be forever embarrassed over, even if no one knows what was going on at the time.  Generally, they are the things I’ve said that can’t be taken back…communication is irrevocable.  Once something has been said, it can’t be unsaid…the tongue truly is a firebrand.  Once something is burnt to ashes, it can’t be unburned, and somehow ashes don’t fit together like broken pieces of pottery…even then the cracks always show.  The best thing that can be done at that point is to make ammends, and try to change so that I am less prone to the same foolish mistake.

The desire to stop this recurring cycle drove me down a particular path….study.  Our post-enlightenment, scientific era has taught us that ‘Everything can be understood’…even my human nature.  I thought that if I couldn’t be mature, at least I could sound like I knew what I was talking about.  The problem is, knowledge and humility are definately NOT two sides of the same coin.  The more I discover about history, theology, logic, literature, ect…the more it makes me want to jump into the middle of conversations that will let me display my new-found knowledge.  Is this the end that I’ve been searching for?

In the end, I feel like I’m building my own private tower of Babel.  Something to demonstrate my own greateness; my own ability to overcome limitations.  I want to be the self-actualized, empowered, sanctified-be-my-own-force-of-will human being that most of Cable TV and half of the Barnes and Nobel says I can be.

Why is it so hard to give up on a self-improvement program for a heart that, according to an old testament prophet, is ‘desperately wicked’?  Perhaps its because, like the people at Babel, I ‘know’ that if I just ‘build the tower a little higher’ I can overcome the gravity that ties me to this earth. 

There’s a quote that encapsulates this struggle: “Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.” –Robert Farrar Capon

Here’s the rub…Jesus did not come to save me from myself.  He came to save me from the effects of sin and the seperation from God.  I don’t get any guarantees that I’ll be a nice person afterward…that in this life, I’ll become a kinder, more thoughtful version of myself.  The only guarantee that I get is that I can be saved despite the fact that I’m still an asshole.  This makes God’s grace even more precious and unfathomable to me…love for the unloveable and the unlovely….and a wrecking ball for my tower.  Besides, who needs a tower when I’ve got a home. 

Sometime, during my middle-teen years, I made a few very close friends. We did practically everything together. Located on the Gulf Coast, we veiwed ourselves as our community’s resident Zen Philosophers… the sole island of Reason amongst a land of cultural Philistines. This view was neither true nor humble, but I blame it on the niavete’ of youth and remember not to be so snobby now that I’m older.

Growing up in Eastern Texas has some advantages. The nights are imbued with a warmth that has a certain permanence. No matter how dark the skies are, the breeze carries with it the memory of the noon day sun. The midnight winds off the Gulf of Mexico can sometimes clear away the flying insects, and suddenly the atmosphere around you reaches its own version of perfect clarity. Stillness and peace try to make you forget that we are, after all, creatures that see more clearly in the light of day.

It was on nights like these when my friends and I would go down to a deserted field and fly kites. They were kites of the ordinary sort (Gayla from what I remember): Baby Bats, Super Bats, and Sky Spies. You could pick one up from our corner store for $1.49.  Once they were airborne, however, they meta morphed into something else entirely.

None of my friends were christians, and my ‘christianity’ was a collage of do’s/don’ts, southern revivalism, and endless altar calls. Jesus had never quite made it off of the Sunday school flannel-graph and into my soul. To tell you the truth, I was far worse off than my friends who didn’t know Him at all.  Two of my friends were atheists, one was an agnostic, and  another subscribed to his own invented religion he called ‘Steve-ism’.  Whatever our spiritual leanings, we all had one thing in common…we felt like cosmic orphans.  We were the Fatherless castaways that somehow had fallen overboard on our voyage Home.  As the ship of our childhood security sailed out of sight, we bobbed up and down in an ocean that neither cared for us or wanted us…and no one threw us a life-line.

The beginning of my long swim home began that night as we stood under the Texas sky and put our kites in the air.  I let out a little line, and the kite took its station among a backdrop of stars.  Like a sentry on guard, it paced back and forth against the horizon, occasionally rising and dropping with the wind.  However, I held the kite close to the ground out of fear that I might lose sight of it in the darkness. 

My friends already had their kites in the air, and they were letting them soar higher and higher.  Although i didn’t want to lose control of my kite, I suddenly felt like I might be missing out on something…so I started letting out the line.  Gradually, my kite got smaller and dimmer as the twine unwrapped from my spool.  A small ball of anxiety grew in my stomach as I would alternately lose sight and then find my kite’s position again.  The anxiety built and reached a climax as my kite finally crossed the threshhold of perception and was swallowed whole by the night. 

Then….peace.

The next thing I remember was turning to my friend Steve and seeing serenity and hope on a face that had never been there before…as if the knots of cynicism and despair were being untied by the slender fingers of compassion.  My reverie was broken by a sudden tug on my kite string.  Although I couldn’t see it, my kite was there; made real by the gentle, constant, reassuring pull at the line. If I strained to hear, I could make out the distant noises of its sails fluttering in the wind. 

This is where the peace came from…from knowing without seeing, from having an invisible companion in the midst of black night, from feeling the pull of something that is transcendant yet close. 

Finally we reeled in our kites.  They became ordinary in our hands once again and we prepared to leave.  In hushed tones, we spoke about what had just happened.  Everyone had felt it…everyone knew.  We realized that even though we are creatures of the daylight, sometimes seeing can be a hinderance to understanding.  We suddenly understood that while we may yet be orphans, outcasts, and castaways, Someone had thrown us a line…and was gently, inexorably pulling us home.

Peace be with you…

Recently, I was reading an article posted over at iMonk, ‘Read it again, and don’t skip the hard parts‘.  Its an essay that discusses the the Gospel of Mark and contrasts iMonk’s view of the Gospels with what is currently passing as the Evangelical view.  Its a great essay, and one that I recommend highly.  Coincidentally, I was listening to NPR this morning on my drive to work, and the topic of discussion happened to be gun control. 

I’m a gun owner (born and raised in Texas), so usually a discussion over adding restricitons to gun ownersip will hold my attention.  However, this morning, I found myself drifting.  I started thinking about the Constitution, Bill of rights, lawyers, NRA, historians and theologians…and how they are all related.  I’ll admit this was before my first cup of coffee, so let me try to connect the dots for you…

 The Founding Fathers (which is a loaded term right out the outset) had a somewhat heated debate between two camps of Federalists and anti-Federalists for about a decade.  One of the results of this ongoing debate was the Bill of Rights.  Thanks to the Bill of Rights we have guarantees of Freedom of speech, due process, freedom of assembly, and so on…Everyone loves the Bill of Rights, right?  That’s not strictly true, though.  Take a look at the second line item of the Bill….”The Right to bear arms and… organize a state militia.” 

This is the ‘hard part’ of the Bill of Rights….A part that people of our time and sensibilities have difficulty swallowing.  Some people would go as far as to say that this amendment is immoral….

Enter Stage Left: The Lawyers and Historians 

We bring in the hired guns to think the hard thoughts for us.  Most people will have some position on gun control.  Moreover, whatever your position happens to be, there is a historian and lawyer lined up and ready to support you with arguments that you make your own.  Read this article from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms#Definition

What does this have to do with theology?  Some of you, I’m sure, can already see where I’m going with this.  If you are familiar with bible studies, denominations, theology, and (dare I say) the christian blogosphere. you can see reflections of our old semantic remedies in the wiki article. 

If you don’t like the right to bear arms, you can explain it away as idiom, context, or numerous other rhetorical devices.  What if you like the second amendment?  You can point to the text and say, “there it is in black and white”…”How about following what it says?”

Just so that I’m clear, let me say that this post is not about gun control, nor is it about proper theology…its about Human Nature.  The fact is, there are very difficult passages in the bible. There are aspects of our modernist/postmodernist culture that are completely repulsed by passages about homosex, genocide, hell, complimentarianism, slavery, predestination, armageddon, hell, ect…What happens when we run head-on into something that challenges us, our theology, or our culture?  Do we duck and cover under Calvin and Arminius?  Do we run to Amazon to buy the latest book by NT Wright/Piper/McClaren? Worse yet, do we just try and ignore what the bible has to say TO our cultural context, and let our cultural bias act as our interpreter?  I’m not saying that those who have gone before us have nothing to say to us.  I’m not saying that context, culture, and idiom are irrelevant.  What I’d like to consider is that before going to great thinkers for canned answers or trying to force-fit scripture into the flavor-of-the-month cultural cause, we should wrestle with these questions ourselves. 

Human nature nags us to take the path of least resistance; even when that is not necessarliy the best or most rewarding path.  Leaving the hard questions to everyone else is human nature.  In Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s series there was a space ship that used a special stealth field.  It was called the ‘Some Else’s Problem’ field.  It worked on the principle that everyone saw that spaceship as ’someone else’s problem.  This resulted in a gigantic space cruiser being virtually invisible.  Thats what we’ve got here.  Culturally speaking, we’ve got gigantic space cruisers floating around in the bible, and most christians just skip over them like a long list of ‘begats’.

In conclusion, the lawyers don’t really care what you think about gun control.  They’re out to make a name for themselves by winning cases.  The case could be made that bloggers, denominations, and authors  are under similar pressures to win as many as possible to their specific ideaolgy.  There is a tension that we are called to live in.  Its the tension between truth, faith, and convictions.  For instance, my convictions are that women should be allowed to teach in church, the truth is that that Paul said some things in his letters that point the other way, my faith tells me that at some point my convictions and the truth will be reconciled and I will be given the grace to live with the result….and having the Grace of God is even better than being supplied the truth.  Peace everyone…