radioreb’s blog

Audio: If you could sing like anyone, living or dead, who would you choose to sound like?  Share a song of theirs.
Submitted by aa.

2-01 Walking On The Moon

U2honolulu

I'm a fan of bootlegs.  Despite their somewhat illegal nature, I am an addict of the live concert experience.  All those people singing the same songs I sing, all part of the same atmosphere, all paying outrageous prices for seats so far away that the bands look like ants with instruments (What did we do before Mega Screen?).  I most recently got my hands on a U2 boot that was from a show in Honolulu in '06.  On that particular ticket were The Kings of Leon and Pearl Jam.  Not bad warm up acts, but anything is possible when you're U2.  I remember going to see Heart in the 80's and the band Honeymoon Suite opened.  Despite their unknownness and lack of hits (although "New Girl Now" would chart), they were better than the headliner.  The same can be said about a lot of shows, can't it?  We are surprised by the gifts of the unknown while the star almost always delivers exactly what one could expect.  

While considering the line up of this show, I was caught up in the rock concert's similarity to church.  From the U2 "sermon" to the Pearl Jam "worship" to the Kings of Leon "passing of the peace", Sunday morning looks like an event where we come to hear the star, sing the songs and have plenty of time on the front end to be late.  Who's heard of the Kings of Leon?  I don't remember who opened for the Replacements when we used to go see them, but I think that's because we were late (and intoxicated).  

Much has been written, preached, spoken, and painted about the strange predominance of the sermon and star likeness of preachers.  As Bono said, "You don't become a rock star unless you've got something missing somehwere, that is obvious to me.  If you were of sound mind you could feel normal without 70,000 people a night screaming their love for you."   Even more energy has been spent examining the need for community among followers of Jesus.  AND then, even more comment has been made in regards to worship, it's role, the function of liturgy and order, and response.  

After listening to this supremely superior bootleg I felt something strange.  The very same sensation I experience after a rock concert, I experience at the end of a typical worship service.  At the end of the show, I want somehow to breathe in the presence of the music, the lingering rhythm, the after effects of sound.  I want to swim in those lyrical seas and lay in the melodic pastures.  During worship, the audience sits captive to the liturgy waiting for the star, sermon, to take the stage.  Everything is geared in that direction.  I was a worship pastor once, but couldn't reconcile worship as the opening act.  Many times the sermon meandered and could never touch the honesty and simplicity of "Amazing Grace."  Many times I was carrying the baggage of the week or the preacher didn't have a grip on the material and so it felt as though the Spirit was left waiting in the wings.  I have a hard time not thinking of worship and liturgy as a kind of spell used to evoke the Word of God, much like opening acts evoke excitement for the star.  After 45+ minutes of late arrivals, bathroom breaks, refills, side bar conversations, the star is a welcome relief, even if the openers were better.  

Thomas Long wrote,  "We go to scripture then, not to glean a set of facts about God or the faith that can then be announced whenever and wherever, but to encounter a Presence, to hear God's voice speaking to us ever anew, calling us in the midst of the situations in which we find ourselves to be God's people."  
The Witness of Preaching, p 45.

The Word is a rock concert.  It is the experience.  It doesn't need an opener.  It doesn't spring forth because a worship leader sings "He Knows My Name" enough times.  It beckons us.  

It leads us into the post performance, into the space between where the music stops and the response begins.  

It is there that we can tell the difference between master and servant, pauper and pop star, God and idol.  The experience of the Word is an act of transformation.  "The word of God we encounter in the scripture does not attack idolatry in general; it dethrones our idols, severs the bonds of our old and crippling loyalties [55]."  

What would it look like if worship led with the Word?  If idols were smashed before we worshiped them.  What if the whole of worship was a response to the offensive idol smashing Word?  This would be a tough and terrible transition for many.  We'd have to be on time (a challenge for my family in particular).  As it is, church runs like a rock show, or movie, or theatre:  Lots of stuff you can miss early on like the Kings of Leon, movie trailers, eight extra minutes of curtain, praise songs and announcements.  Only Television has the brass to require that the viewer be there on time, BUT...there's TiVo.  

Perhaps we should wait for the bootleg, skip the experience and go straight for the podcast.  Keep our idols right where we likes 'em.

Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.  But if He knows I am going to do so and so, how can I be free to do otherwise?  Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the same time line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot.  Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them.  But supposee God is outside and above the time line.  In that case, what we call 'tomorrow' is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call 'today'.  All the days are 'Now' for Him.  He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not.  He does not 'foresee' you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him.  You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing.  Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way - because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you.  In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already 'Now' for Him.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

There is no greater proof in the world of our spiritual danger than the reluctance which most people always have and all people sometimes have to pray; so weary of their length, so glad when they are done, so clever to excuse and neglect their opportunity.  Yet, prayer is nothing but desiring God to give us the greatest and best things we can have and that can make us happy.  It is a work so easy, so honorable, and to so great a purpose that (except in the incarnation of His Son) God has never given us greater argument of his willingness to accept it, of His goodness and our gracelessness, of His infinite condescension and our folly, then by rewarding so easy a duty with such great blessing.

from The Divine Hours, Vol II, quoted from Jeremy Taylor

Distressing as it is, the President has declared himself martial witness to truth and right cause as AP states:

WASHINGTON - President Bush, on a collision course with Congress over Iraq, said Friday "I'm the decision-maker" about sending more troops to the war. He challenged skeptical lawmakers not to prematurely condemn his buildup.

"I've picked the plan that I think is most likely to succeed," Bush said in an Oval Office meeting with senior military advisers.

Just a couple of things:  one, this is not a Republican/Democrat thing...this is about right and wrong.  Two, we are the decision makers.  If the mid term elections said anything, it's not that we want all the red/blue state maps redecorated, but that we as a nation do not want the fearful incompetence of this present administration to decide anything.  It's a Republic, something that the Republican in Chief has long forgotten, if he ever knew at all. 

Three, there is no such concept as the premature condemnation of the President's plan.  As noted Jan 22, in the New Yorker Magazine:

This was the advice given by McGeorge Bundy* to Lyndon Johnson in a memo dated February 7, 1965 [yes, you read that correctly], concerning an escalation plan for Vietnam that Bundy thought might have as little as 25% chance of success:

Even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.  At a minimum, it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own."

The President's plan has been condemned for the last 42 years.  In my book, the sudden resurgence of criticism doesn't quite qualify as "premature."

So what do we do?  I have to think about it, but I have some ideas...coming up next!

addendum:  HR at emergingsideways tipped me towards zefrank's show re: this.  Check it out. 

* this is a flagrant criticism of a blue government official...conspiracy diluted.

One of my most recent Fuller Sem courses is an introduction to the people and culture of Islam.  Every other other Saturday, we gather for the whole day and make a seminary outing of it.  Of course, it's kind of preposterous to consider it a true introduction since there are only Christians in the room, however, I'm learning much I did not know about this truly remarkable history, faith and tradition. 

To begin the class, the professor put up a comic strip which showed a rugged mujuhadin holding (what else) a bomb.  Underneath was the caption, "The only good Muslim..."  Sadly, when the Westerner finishes that sentence, we fail to draw the merciful and grace filled conclusion that Jesus would lead us to think and feel.  And why?  Why have the few (the less than 1%) been allowed to shape public perception?  Because that's the way it works.  Don't you have to join the Republican party after becoming Christian? 

The instructor then put the second half of the cartoon up which showed a very attractive and diverse group of people above which read, "...The majority of them."  When I can I'll post the cartoon because I think it serves us in the West to stop and think about how we think about "our enemy" in the East. 

To sum it up, I have learned that our perception and policies are simply grotesquely "naive."  Of course, I'm not qualified enough to fairly critique the obscene responses of our administration and military complex.  It goes without saying that I'm no politician.  I don't have the time to sit around and write chain emails of emotionally manipulative (and completely fabricated) statistics, incontextual quotes, and the magnification of a severely minority opinion.  Well, I guess if I have time to blog...

But I am a bit more fluent as a beginner theologian.  I believe that our Scripture and doctrine makes it clear that there is only "us."  There is no "them."  It is the world that God so loved that he gave his only Son.   It is every nation that will bow before the throne of God.   Not a church, not a neighborhood, not a particular race nor dialect, but all people reconciled to one another and to God in a reconciled creation. 

I don't know where this posting is headed, but I do know that we have alot of backtracking to do.  We have a ton of room to be reconcilers, a ton of room to walk with humility, a ton of room to repent and own the actions of others as our own.  I know we have alot to learn in order to move forward.  I know that I have much more to write as I flesh out my perspective.  

I just got turned on to the Spoken Groove.  If you've never flobglobbed, then my zinoinkend, you've never schtipped a rithenfundren!  Check out this video and dine on his lyrical feast.  Genius, damnit!  Genius I tell you.  Douglas Adams would be proud!

spoken groove was-a-boom-boom (i think)

A prominent world leader suggested that today, as we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. we ought to do something nice for someone...help someone in need.  Ironically, this same world leader has muted the cries of a defiant country in crisis and a mourning generation of parents in our land and theirs.  Oh, if MLK, Jr. was merely challenging America and indeed the world to "do something nice."

What is life but a platform where we air our thoughts and feelings?  Quite a bit (to say the least), but it's hard to do a whole lot more on a blog.  It has been difficult not writing; not having that typepad identity, regardless how appropriate.  Needless to say, two more lapsed quarters in seminary, umpteen books, and a world that keeps moving towards globalism and uniformity and I still have the desire for a place to air my stuff.

So suffer a while with me if you will.  I'm going to try voxing here on the free version typepad.  It's cute.  I'll give it that, but cute might be all I need.  Functionality can come later.  I just need a net to catch some thought-filled butterflies that flutter around in my head. 

While on typepad, I struggled with two things:  what to say and what you would think if I said it.  I'm getting over that right now.  I've stayed away from politics in the past because they are such hot issues, but my faith thrives in the heat.  Not in the red/blue schism, but the right/wrong split.  Like Isaiah standing before an all powerful Ahaz, the gospel breathes life into all aspects of living.  Life is not political.  Politics are simply a part of living and if we've learned at all from Jim Wallis, it's that our walk with Christ must transcend dual party politic and encumber itself with Kingdom perspective. 

So, prophetically and vindictively (I'm still a sinful cuss):  When this particular President took office, knowing his performance as governor in a single state, I said...more like proclaimed...This is a President who will "Go Down in History" period.  What we suffered in the Lone Star State, we have suffered together as a nation and no amount of chain forwarded email from beyond the grave will convince me otherwise.

Bushhistory