The Mandible Press

Skin and Bones and Words

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/018  Tinder Loving Care...and the Bible.

We approach the bible as though it’s Tinder.  We want to swipe and swipe, never slowing until something catches our eye.  That is all it takes.  We are woefully comfortable with consuming the portions of the bible that have no resonance beyond the retinas.  One finds verses that satisfy his or her spiritually mastabutory urges.  These verses parrot our own desires--for everything to be okay, to be absolved of responsibility, for a pristine and safe future despite our behavioral recklessness.  Oh and if the verses are easy? Even better. “Oh that verse is hot!” “Oh that verse looks like the verse next door!” “Bae” (Okay, confession, I don’t know what ‘bae’ means) Sometimes this approach to scripture leads to a real relationship.  They call women who marry men from Tinder “Tinderellas” which is clever.  Sometimes this approach to the bible ends in a faithful, productive, dynamic life of commitment to Jesus.  Mostly it just ends in reposting verses in a cool font against the background of mist-covered mountains.   Unfortunately seeing verses on facebook or twitter doesn’t typically result in vibrant spirituality.  This is because the point of reading the bible isn’t actually reading the bible but living with the bible.  You don’t swipe the bible, you get an apartment and a plant and a dog with it.  You fight with it about your budget and your parents and your plan to become a street magician instead of finishing grad school.  You roll your eyes at it when it’s old fashioned and it sighs when you are self-absorbed.  You call it disgusting and it mumbles that you’re short-sighted.  It presents terrifyingly gorgeous vistas of what the world might be and reminds you of the simple heroism of keeping your word.  It shocks you with simple beauty and you marvel it with passion.  Living with the bible results in confusion and anger and occasionally doubt; but it also fills life with longing and hope and vitality.  The bible is an unfolding chronicle of what it means to experience reality honestly and yet recognize that there is a force of love and sustenance both within and beyond our empiricism.  The bible will tell you every night that the world is exactly as you’ve experienced it; but within that experience is a loving and powerful creator.   And then you’ll argue about who has to get out of the covers and turn the hallway light off.  

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History

In 48 B.C.E Julius Caesar crossed a threshold.  Not the Rubicon.  The Rubicon was a creek compared to the leap Caesar made politically.  Julius Caesar had bribed and threatened and postured so effectively he was able to put his name forward in consular elections while maintaining control of a massive armed force.  One can imagine why this would be viewed…unfavorably.  Caesar had made himself beloved among the low-earning and lower educated classes of the Roman republic.  Though he came from a family of means and opportunity he regularly cast (or caste?) himself as a “man of the people”.  Fifteen years prior Caesar had been elected pontifex maximus.  There is nothing in Caesar’s history prior to this appointment that makes one believe he was particularly religious; though his political savvy correctly indicated that the appearance of a particular spiritual stance would be advantageous.  

Caesar had been born into an upper class and had accrued wealth while leading legions in Asia, Gaul and Britain.  Yet his passion projects, favors and personal loans sapped him of the wealth that should have sustained even the most lavish of lifestyles.  He regularly lamented his financial woes whilst touting his various successes.  His “poverty” engendered him to the hoi polloi in Rome.  Somehow a nobly born, wealthy general with free-flowing funds became “just like us”.  This political slight of hand met with success largely because of disdain directed at the “elites” of Roman society and politics.  The general and consul Pompey was Rome’s hero—until the general public deemed him too connected to the senate and their apparent oligarchal aims.  

Caesar offered his daughter in marriage to Pompey as a sign of goodwill (can you imagine a time in which women were just handed over like that?) and the two men served as prongs of a triumvirate which controlled Roman policy home and abroad for years.  There was, however, always a fly in ointment.

Cicero.

Cicero was a senator six years older than Caesar.  As Caesar spent years winning the loyalty of legionaries on the republic’s frontiers Cicero drug its beating heart (most times kicking and screaming) more firmly into its ideals.  Cicero was not a populist.  Cicero would have been considered a federalist had he been a contemporary of Ben Franklin.  Cicero believed that governance was best done by the experienced and capable elite.  Though not born to the same measure of means Caesar enjoyed Cicero projected a more austere persona of social supremacy.  No one would imagine “having a beer” with Cicero.  He was an irritating insider.  

Caesar had Pompey’s hand and his daughter had Pompey’s…other parts but Cicero had his ear.  Pompey had marched an army into Rome to suppress the civil war that a previous general had inspired (shoutout Sulla! You crazy murderous bastard!) but through Cicero’s influence had disbanded his army and recommitted himself (to a degree, you can take the player out the game but…) to the idea of a true republic.  Eventually the triumvirate crumbled.  Pompey was left in Rome, Caesar was kicking ass in Gaul (think kinda France, kinda Germany, and eventually the UK) and their partner was dead in Parthia (think…somewhere else).  Caesar’s daughter, Pompey’s wife, died.  The uneasy peace betwixt Caesar and Pompey disintegrated.  

Cicero realized he faced a real Sophie’s cho-cho.  He had opposed Caesar at every turn and at his every appointment, yet his commitment to the republic made an alliance with the currently weaponizing Pompey distasteful.  Cicero opted for political pragmatism.  He made speeches on behalf of Pompey, he attempted to rally the masses to the Pompey’s cause which he thinly veiled in the language of republic rhetoric.  He was presumably compensated for his speeches, they were presumably videoed and then reported upon, one of the seven hills of Rome was presumably named “Wall Street” err…hill.  

Political punditry would have prematurely predicted a victory for the Pompeian/Ciceroan faction.  The senate was in their corner, Pompey’s war-chest was full and all logic seemed to foretell their success.  Caesar deployed Mark Antony to Rome and ensured his election as Praetor, or people’s representative.  Antony had a flirtatious relationship with the truth, a real “will they won’t they” thing.  However he had an ironclad grasp on women.  He would just grab them… Antony became Caesar’s mouthpiece, willing to say whatever necessary to enflame the masses.  Caesar triumphed in Gaul.  He then asked for a “triumph” into the eternal city.  He refused to disband his army.  Cicero tried to explain the danger inherent in Caesar’s movements and ascendency to the Roman people through impeccably worded pamphlets and striking oration during debates.  Caesar and Mark Antony responded with effective, if not markedly, different approaches.  

Caesar crossed the Rubicon.  Pompey fled.  The senate, swayed by Cicero, abandoned Rome with Pompey.  They were expunged from the republic they attempted to lead.  

Historical inquiry typically focuses on what happens next.  Caesar was lucky and deliberate.  Pompey failed to meet his former friend and father-in-law’s decisiveness on the battlefield.  Eventually Pompey’s defeat becomes a rout and he flees to the shores of Egypt.  Once there he was beheaded.  Cicero killed himself. Caesar’s supremacy inspired anger and not a small amount of nationalistic nostalgia.  And, as we all know, nostalgia gets a little stabby.  

Caesar’s only political policy was ambition.  Once the fever dream of total control was attained there was a predictable rebellion.  Caesar is murdered on the senate floor by a coalition of opponents and former supporters.  But like glitter in the carpet some things can’t be cleaned up.  Antony and Caesar’s heir Octavius join forces with a third pointless character to defeat Caesar’s assassins.  The republic in form and function has bled out.  Caesar wasn’t the cause of it’s death, but he was the apex of a system that made certain the wound could not be staunched.  Caesar was Sulla’s ideological progeny; a combination of political acumen and ruthlessness which drew circles of acceptable expressions of nationalism in the form of nooses and then kicked out the chairs.  Caesar’s opponents were not merely those who argued his policies (anemic as they were) but those who believed in the process of governance which existed.  Caesar was a bloody champion of those tired of the “status quo” (latin. congruency. literature.).  With the government and it’s functionality dismantled the republic quickly became the empire.  Octavius Augustus cleared the field and assumed control of that empire and managed everything from the armed forces (which he increased drastically) and child producing intercourse in families.  Augustus ruled Rome with an even and steady hand.  His successors would not.  Therein lies the danger with emperors, some are assholes.

Cicero had no choice but to acquiesce, right? The devil you know is certainly better than the one you don’t.  However he had a moment, maybe a year in which he could have filled the chasm which Julius Caesar gleefully plunged into.  He could have denounced Pompey’s militarization and thrown his lot in with the people.  It would have been a half-court shot…blindfolded…while on fire.  Cicero truly believed the people wanted to governed through representatives who would attempt to do the most good for the widest portions of the populace.  Utilitarianism, as it turns out, is no match for an avatar with sword and breastplate, money and microphone.  

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/017

From the book of Habakkuk (The publisher-added superscript says “The Lord’s Response” as in the Lord’s response to Habakkuk’s prayer which occurs immediately before the following)

“Look!...”

I used to remember something about the Hebrew word translated to English as “Look!”  It had something to do with the exclamation point.  It’s buried somewhere in my mental harddrive.  It’s tangled in the electro-magnetic wiring that should immediately call it to attention.  I used to remember this thing about this word and it would be cleverly employed here and my veracity would be established and this would feel less like pandering and more like the exchange of a service.  In the economy of attention this would become “fair” because my knowing that thing about a word validates your time spent examining my observations.  I used to know this thing. And you would be impressed because Hebrew is hard to read.  There are no vowels.  Vowels are held somewhere in the dark alleys of the language and you have to follow street-smart dots of ill-repute to where the vowel sounds huddle around trashcan fires.  Hebrew is hard to read.  I had to name its letters based on their shape.  One was “the little house”, another was “the gate”.  I would mutter things like “well that little house doesn’t have dots so it doesn’t make the same sound...”   I am exciting at parties.    Hebrew is hard because you read it from right to left which is basically giving your brain the finger  Hebrew is hard...but its worth it. It’s worthwhile if you’re going to stand up and talk or sit down and write about famous people who knew Hebrew (Jesus for example).  So when I search for the thing I knew about the Hebrew word translated in English as “Look!” and I cannot bring it from the back of the cave, hanging like a bat, into the light I am more discouraged than I should be.   I have phantom limbs.  When your life hits an M Night Shyamalan twist the first bit of grief expended is over the past.  Friends become “existing contacts”.  Places you worked become “Most recent job here”.  Typically we engage in a tumbling bit of irrationality fueled by anger, angst and sadness.  We careen down a hillside watching what has been fly beside us.  Finally we hit the bottom.  If I was a smart person at the bottom I would have calmly assessed the situation, expressed gratitude for not breaking any limbs and taken the next few steps one at a time.  Unfortunately I’m an idiot.  I immediately began the second and more dangerous descent when life completely implodes.   I began pining for a future that would never be.   If being expunged from our own past is rolling down a hill; attending the wake for a future than can never be is willfully drowning.   What is that thing about “Look!”?  I know it, I remember it and it mattered somewhere up the hill.  Does it matter now?  Will it matter again?  I doubt it.  It was good too.  Something that would have made you tilt your head a little and think “wow, that seems incredibly ancillary but somehow extremely pertinent” (your thoughts are rife with syllables apparently).  It would have struck you like someone coming by and helping you with a crossword clue you’re stuck on or running through a category in Jeopardy.  It would have been as though you were at a party (who goes to parties anymore?) and someone told you about a band they love and you find them on Spotify and it turns out they’re great; or at the same party wondering aloud who directed that movie you love but you’re also confused by and another person telling you “That was Terrance Malick” and of course that person would know because they are into stuff you love but also confuses you.  This thing about “Look!” would have made you feel like that.  In the wrong hands it would feel like smoke and mirrors but deftly applied it may unlock deeper meaning or offer you a point of accessibility to an ancient text hitherto unknown.  It would have been cool.  You would have thought I was cool and smart and your respect for me would have grown just a little because I could convince you that I was the type of person who knew that sort of stuff and I wouldn’t have to wrestle through showing you the messy complexity of who I am when I’m tired or lonely or bored.  I’m the guy who knew the thing about the word translated into English as “Look!”.   I actively miss that.  Like a phantom limb.  A stillborn future.   At this point I should research the word.  Even when you jettison your “before” life you keep pieces of nostalgia.  Most, in my case, are books.  Some are intensely specific paperbacks, others are gargantuan hardbacks that stand sentinel at the bottom of our family’s bookshelf.  If I pulled a few out I could solve the riddle I’ve written for myself (because let’s be honest gentle reader, you don’t give two tin craps about the word).  Its hard to plop the books down on the table though, it’s too familiar and too foreign all at once.  If I open them and remember what it was like to do this regularly then I can’t avoid how I feel or what I miss.  I would have to clear my head and accept that the penance is over and whatever has been pissed away is gone and good riddance.  I would have to stop being distant and disengaged.  I would have to quit trying to stiff-arm reality.  I would have to accept the things I cannot change without the urging of a sponsor.  It is so much easier and more convenient to drown in personal lament for what was and won’t be.  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Look!” 

When a prophet puts the word in God’s mouth, or perceives God using it (we’ll talk more about that later) the command is to notice what is happening in reality that gives weight to the obvious. In Habakkuk’s case the perception is that evil leadership prospers unchecked.  Habakkuk understands God to be urging he and his community to notice that a leveler is coming.  

Is there weight in what we may be missing wishing for something that won’t be?  Are there divine, profound, healthy and sustaining echoes and explosions I have ignored because I’ve been drowning in a dead future?  All the things I wish you would have felt about me in an alternate future revolve around me.  They are finite and shallow. There is a moment in them but nothing more; bones with no marrow.  But if I would “Look!”, if you would look would you see anything you didn’t expect?  I wonder what vitality we would find in the life into which we’ve stumbled if we came up for air.

As one of my favorite authors Frederick Buechner says “Here is the world. Beautiful and Terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” 

Or, 

As one of my favorite authors, Chance the Rapper says (well, yelps) “I woke up this morning. I woke up this morning! I gotta smile when I say that shit iiiiiiiiii woke up this morning!” 

We will talk about what is recorded and categorized as God’s response to Habakkuk’s prayer before the end of the week.  For now, I’m just trying to look. 

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/016

Habakkuk pt. 2: the Habakkuking 

Not long ago my six year old hatched a plan.  It was a simple plan (remember that band?!).  It revolved around the extradition of a friend from that friend’s house and the transport of said friend to our house.  Limited moving pieces, neigh on zero correspondence save for the requisite text--elegant in its efficiency.  Serving as an accomplice my only role was to coordinate the transfer.  Unfortunately circumstances, as they do, had the crap extenuated out of them.  The friend couldn’t come.  Tyrannical schedules had been long put in place to govern the weekend in question.  The plan imploded.  Judah, the six year old, is a sensitive kid.  This failed rendezvous collapsed his soul.  

Through tears: “But it isn’t right!” 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Habakkuk, as we noted in part one, was a prophet.  Therefore he was either a performance artist, a mystic, a government employee or a combination of the three.  One might imagine prophets (as we have characterized them) peering into the future for insights that might aid twenty-first century members of a religion they can’t imagine in a land they would not have believed existed in choosing a leader in a government model they couldn’t fathom.  However prophets in Habakkuk’s cultural neighborhood didn’t look into crystal balls as much as they simply looked out their windows.  

The manner of their report having done so determined their identity: either propagandist or prophet. 

As best we can tell Habakkuk wrote somewhere around 600 BCE (Before Christian Era) in the nation state of Judah.  Judah was an entity careening towards its nadir.  For the previous 150 years the royal authorities in Judah had used any and all measures to stay the seemingly inevitable--defeat, occupation and deportation.  When Judah was united to her northern neighbor Israel/Samaria under the leadership of famous kings David and Solomon (think, roughly 1000-900ish BCE) her borders were largely secure, her economy was robust and her military was feared.  The zenith of Judean power followed a relative power-vacuum in the region.  Between 1400 and 100 BCE few “superpowers” or aggressive empires presented themselves in the area.  Therefore the Israel/Samaria & Judah state(s) had time to develop as a force to be reckoned with.  However after the reign of Solomon the states became formally divided.  In the following years the old enemies some of you may remember from felt-boards (the Hittites, Jebusites, Canaanites, Stalactites, Stalagmites, Stick-tites, Overbites, Excitebikes etc) had given way to legitimate empires such as Assyria.  In 701 BCE Assyria laid siege to Jerusalem, the capitol city of Judah and a place famous for how relaxed and totally chill everything has been... Nearly a decade earlier an Assyrian force had conquered Israel/Samaria and Judah seemed to be the next colonial domino to fall.  Except it, well, didn’t.  The Assyrian army had been ballin’ out for years but Jerusalem stymied them.   (EVERYTHING IN ME WANTS TO NERD SO HARD ABOUT MILITARY ADVANCES HALTING AT SEEMINGLY RANDOM MOMENTS>>>>MUST>>>>NOT>>>>GO>>>>THERE) 

Theories abound as to why the Assyrian army left Jerusalem unassailed.  Armies had an unfortunate (if you’re in the army) tendency to spread diseases.  Holler at me typhus! Perhaps such an epidemic crippled the Assyrian army.  Historians also suggest that there was political unrest in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital which forced the invading army homeward.  Whatever the reason for abandoning Jerusalem the reality was astonishing: one day the people Judah were faced with the prospect of starvation and subjugation and the next they simply were not. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

People of faith experience an occupational hazard when interpreting reality.  Their belief in something beyond what they observe forces them to view reality through the lens of that belief.  Therefore we end up with “I know this is hard, but everything happens for a reason. #trustgod” facebook posts.  The Assyrians bail and people of a particular worldview in which nothing is attributed to chance are offered the opportunity to ascribe the sudden change to the will and work of God.  Jerusalem is preferred and protected by God the royal prophets say.  God will never let Jerusalem fall the royal prophets say.  Jerusalem is the chosen city of chosen people the royal prophets say.  God loves us more than he loves everyone else the royal prophets say. 

Typically the following truth should be revealed like a slamming door at the end of an essay, but I simply can’t wait:  If you ever hear anyone say that any deity loves their group/tribe/party/family/person more than any other you are not listening to a prophet but a propagandist

The stillborn siege of 701 BCE permitted a certain ecstatic arrogance within the Judean government.  All reports of danger were met with the same very practical prophetic response: “peace!”  Consider that cultural climate when you hear Habakkuk’s prayer. 

How long, Lord, must I call for help,    but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!”    but you do not save?  Why do you make me look at injustice?    Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me;    there is strife, and conflict abounds.  Therefore the law is paralyzed,    and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous,    so that justice is perverted.

Before we dive into the content of this prayer let’s note a couple things.  1. There is a rhythm to this thing.  Remember we said that Habakkuk drops a mixtape so it should be no surprise that  he has bars on bars.  He’s thought about this.  He’s prepared it.  This isn’t a response to a bad day or a foul mood.  Habakkuk is carefully taking note of his world and is responding in this manner because he is so certain of his conclusions.   2. Habakkuk sees no inconsistency with believing in a very powerful deity and simultaneously calling that deity out.  Faith occasionally renders its adherents cowardly.  Habakkuk is no coward.  He is also not wavering in his faith.

Habakkuk is not somewhere “out there”.  He isn’t in Assyria or Babylon or ISIS or the trailer park or an inner-city school or the Democratic national convention or a Trump rally.  He is “in”.  Particularly he is in Jerusalem.  His critique comes from within his tribe; from within the “chosen” place of chosen people.  He’s not suggesting that things are so bad “out there” but thank goodness we’re the good guys!  Everyone around him is yelling “Peace!” and he shouts “Violence”.  Read his song again. 

Violence//Injustice//Wrongdoing//Strife//Conflict//Perverted

Peace? 

Nope.

Not if people are cheated.  Not if someone’s humanity is reduced. Not if systems enable oppression and abuse.  

Michael Render is a very successful artist.  His art is hip-hop music which he performs under the moniker Killer Mike (which is cool, try it, be Killer Mark or something for a day.  You’ll feel so much more legit).  Render’s eloquence doesn’t falter off the track either.  He is a profoundly apt and engaging voice on social and political issues.  After the grand jury refused to prosecute any officer involved in the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO Mr. Render suspended his live show to comment (NSFW).  Regardless of your opinion on the matter you can probably identify with Killer Mike’s exasperation and pain...

...this is not right. 

If there is a God and that God is good and not capricious or disengaged shouldn’t God make things as they should be?  The Hebrew word for things as they should be is shalom.  Shalom is translated often as peace but it’s a bigger word than that.  It’s goodness made manifest.  Habakkuk sees poverty and oppression and people being taken advantage of and evil leadership turning a profit and wonders if the one who taught them the word shalom has lost his voice.  

Habakkuk doesn’t begin with a disclaimer or apologize for his outrage.  What the hell God?  Shalom? 

And then he waits. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If you speak American (no, I don’t mean English, I mean cultural American) or Christian Radio you know that we have certain things bubbling up rapturously inside us.  Either praise or hormones (though the two are barely distinguishable in their given formats).  We HAVE to sing praise.  We HAVE to dance with her/him.  

Very rarely do we have “What the hell God?” ready to volcano out of our hearts according to American culture or Christian radio.   But you have, haven’t you?  You are a living breathing human being and shit has happened to you or because of you and you have wanted answers or changes.  You have walked out of hospitals or office buildings or your front door and wondered just wear the shalom might be because it sure isn’t with you.  Everyone else is #blessed and you are drowning.  

If that is where you are have the courage to ask why and when and how long.  Believe that God is only God if you can ask the hard questions.  Don’t buy into the idea that you need to be sure “everything is okay” or that you “shouldn’t complain” in order to be a person of faith.  Prophets write challenging songs to God.  Propagandists write anemic songs about a filtered version of God.  

Have you ever wondered “What the hell God?”

Yeah?

You’re a prophet.

And you stand in a long line of prophets.  And you share the soul DNA of countless prophets who have come before and have come alongside you.  You don’t feast on your hurt alone but with brothers and sisters and the occasional odd uncle who listens to your hurt and does not say “don’t worry, everything happens for a reason” but something infinitely more worthwhile--“I know how you feel.”  There is a Jewish means of interpreting reality which suggests that if God is creator and sustainer of all life it naturally follows that God is to be found in all life.  So perhaps the struggle and hurt and pain and full-throated anger directed toward the face of God is actually a means by which we draw closer to the divine.  

Things are not right. 

It’s okay to say it. 

[mandiblepress]

/015

We are going to talk about Habakkuk.  Wait, no don’t leave!  We are going to talk about Habakkuk because I asked folks on to swipe right on the biblical book they would like to get to know.  Somehow Habakkuk was an early choice. The quick rundown--Habakkuk is a book of the bible which appears in the Old Testament.  Most folks suggest it was written somewhere around 620-605 BCE (before the Christian era).  Before twitter basically. 

So we will talk Habakkuk.

But first we have to talk Miss Cleo.

Miss Cleo, for those of you in a coma during the 90’s, was a paragon of psychic prowess.  Miss Cleo would give you a free tarot card reading.  She’d tell you who fathered your child.  All you had to do was CALL MISS CLEO.  She made all the money.  Miss Cleo was successful because white Americans like their prophets to fit a certain type.   In the past that was the roving gypsy; turban crowned and hunched over a crystal ball.  Miss Cleo presented a newer, more exotic version of the prophet.  Here was a creole/Jamaican African-American woman undoubtedly pulled from some centuries old hotel in New Orleans so of course she can see the future!   Only she couldn’t. Turns out Miss Cleo was a fraud.  She could not predict your future or access the unknowable through oversize playing cards.  She wasn’t even Jamaican!

Did you watch the video of Miss Cleo?  Absurd right?  Why would anyone ever…

Well would you?  If you knew no one would know and it would be free.  Would you call her?  You can’t now, she isn’t taking calls, but would you?  Why?  Do you really want to know?

In churches folks talk about “prophets” or “prophecy” occasionally.  There are sections of the bible categorized as such, which Habakkuk is a part.  In my experience people on stage usually teach from said sections like they’re flipping tarot cards working to discover the future.  “Okay it reads here that a beast from the north will rise--THAT HAS TO BE CANADA OMG STRENGTHEN MILITARY PRESENCE IN THE UPPER REACHES OF NORTH DAKOTA!”  What if that isn’t the point?  What if the goal of prophetic literature or even prophetic experience isn’t a glimpse inside the crystal ball but a clearer vision of what you can see through the window?  

Thus--Habakkuk.

We will pursue our study of Habakkuk in a very simple way: I will put the text we are covering in front of you and then we will workshop and discuss it.  By discuss I mean I will type and you will read, that is the transactional nature of what we are doing here.  I will use the New International Version which matters to like 3 people so everyone else just shrug and say “okay” audibly no matter your setting.  I won’t be including chapter and verse numbers because nothing we read in life includes such weird stuff.  A huge amount 1 of prophetic literature 7 is poetic in form and 2 nothing 11 ruins a good poem like 3 a number in the middle of 5 a great line.  I will however put the text in italics to differentiate.

HERE. WE. GO.

The prophecy that Habakkuk the prophet received.

That will do it for today.

Habakkuk is a prophet, which means one of three things: 

1. Habakkuk is a royal advisor/cabinet member.  The office of prophet was established in nearly every ancient government and has continued until today.  Presidents have “spiritual advisors” but you could call them prophets.  The ancient Roman republic and empire had Augurs (not to be confused with Aurors who fight Dark Wizards for the Ministry of Magic) and the monarchies of England and France employed Christian monks with specific responsibilities related to supernatural perception during the period of the Hundred Years War. In some biblical books the main character has to say “Hey listen I’m no prophet…” (Shouts to Amos) in an official capacity.  Prophets were expected to narrow the gap between obvious information and transcendent information.  Imagine you are an official prophet, you have an office, you have a key card that gets you in the building, you have a pocket reference guide regarding sheep intestines so when you slaughter one in the temple you can understand the will of the gods based on the shapes said intestines make on the floor, and you have a steady paycheck.  Now imagine your boss, the king, is about to make a decision.  Maybe he wants to increase taxation.  Maybe he wants to reform governance in a frontier colony.  Maybe he wants to build a giant statue of himself and let his citizenry know that if they don’t regard it as the nexus of all life and meaning he will impale them on stakes in front of their family--you know, king stuff.  There’s a memo on your desk: Is this policy/law/project approved by whatever deity you worship? What if you know it’s not?  What if everything you believe about the world and humanity and the God you believe in threatens to crack your sternum from the inside because you know this is not the way in which God would want creation to move forward?  Do you speak truth to power?   Maybe.   You probably say “Dude that statue sounds great.  Checked with our god this morning, he said go for it.  Said the ivory inserts will really make your eyes pop.” The official prophets who dissented received less than noble treatment.  Tradition tells us they were fed to animals, pulled apart whilst still alive and decapitated.   One last thing about official prophets, they typically would wear tunics made of camel’s hair.  That doesn’t matter at all...until it matters…

2. Habakkuk is a professional activist/performance artist.  Banksy is the world’s most famous street artist.  His work is typically breathtakingly beautiful and grating.  Banksy rouses the rabble.  When you cruise through google images of his art you are at once impressed and a little ashamed.  He subtly takes on items as simple as restrictions on graffiti and enormous as economic explotation.  Banksy doesn’t just make you look in the direction of his art--he asks you to see it.  That’s a bit cliche, and also true.  For example:   

Did you look at this picture or did you see it?  Did it make you ask questions about your world?  Did it make you nervous or sad or worried that you may be complicit in the heart of its message?  Banksy is a prophet.

eL Seed is an artist who creates enormous murals in unlikely places.  Though he does so with the cooperation of local leadership (unlike Banksy) his goal is the same--he wants observers to see things different because of his work.  eL Seed created a multi-building mural in a district of Cairo that could only fully be seen from a nearby mountain.  Why that district? It is where Cairo dumps its garbage.  The mural is actually calligraphy which spells out a quote in Arabic from the third century, “If one wants to see the light of the sun he must wipe his eyes.”  The inhabitants were called “people of the garbage” by other residents of Cairo.  They refuse to see themselves that way.  eL Seed is a prophet.

Some biblical prophets were not commissioned by the crown.  They were activists and poets and essayists and musicians.  One was a performance artist named Ezekiel.  Ezekiel would build huge models of Jerusalem out of mud depicting sieges and attacks.  He would make enormous pots of stew and cook over cow feces for effect.  At one point he cuts the backside out of his tunic like ancient onsie pajamas with the trap door to demonstrate embarrassment that is at hand for the nation’s leadership.  Ezekiel didn’t want you to simply look--he wanted you to see.

3. Habakkuk is a mystic.  If the image of a hermit in a cave just came to your mind (“Well NOW it did!”) please push it to the side.  A mystic is someone who has a transcendent experience and now has to rectify the world they inhabit with that experience.  In the bible these experiences are often called “visions” and happen to a very select group of people extremely infrequently.  However one might wonder if all humans don’t have such experiences on a regular basis.  Do you remember the first time you saw the person you were attracted to naked? Yeah, good luck understanding the world you thought you knew after that experience.  Or what about when you held your first child?  Or when you got to college and realized there were other people who thought and felt and struggled like you?  There are darker visions too--when your grandmother died, when he left even though he said he’d never leave, when the person you’re attracted to sees YOU naked for the first time.   We took our three kids to Colorado recently.  They had never seen mountains.  They knew that they would see mountains eventually on this trip.  We hadn’t reached the great desolation that is Western Kansas yet when our youngest (Beckham, 4 years old) yelled “MOUNTAIN!!” while pointing out his window--at a hill.  We explained his mistake to him, “You dummy, that’s not a mountain!” (just kidding).  Hours later we were west of Colorado Springs on state highway 24 staring at the beautifully imposing Rockies.  Beckham looked out his window and then up--“Mountains.” In whatever form there is a thing that happens and after it has happened to you or around you there is a distinct feeling that nothing will be the same.  Now we have to live with the world as we thought we knew it and this profound feeling that there is simply more.  Has the world changed? Have we changed?  Does it matter?  

Habakkuk fits into one or more of those categories.  He could be a royally appointed prophet who has a mystic experience and now wants to make socially aware statements via art or performance.  We know that Habakkuk is a musician because later in the book we are told one of his prayers is shigionoth, a musical term that no one really understands so I’m going to say it refers to a mixtape.  Habakkuk drops a mixtape.  

Habakkuk is a prophet.  He is an incredibly engaging and compelling prophet for reasons we will understand in the coming weeks.  Habakkuk is honest and human and probing and angry and desperate.  Habakkuk engages in true prophecy--he looks at the world around him and wonders why.  That is prophecy.  Telling the future is no great trick.  Staticians do it every day (shouts SMA) and Miss Cleo had the most technologically advanced nation in the world semi-confused that she could uncover great mysteries through her tarot cards and an affected Jamaican accent.  Prophecy that matters is putting your faith into honest conversation with the world around you and wondering why.

You are a prophet.

[mandiblepress]

/014

Paul, a church planter/pastor/activist is arrested for roughly the 759th time.  Dude stays causing trouble.  Occasionally he would respond to he trouble by saying “Gee, well, I have to speak the truth so I guess this had to happen.”  In other instances he was a little more Chuck D throwing verbal bricks and daring someone to pull a badge.  Once Paul incited a riot that may have been 20,000 people strong.  The rioters were pissed because Paul dared suggest that Jesus should replace a goddess named Artemis as the object of their worship and faith.  In the rioters defense Artemis was typically depicted with countless breasts…so….

People who study the bible and right books about the parts they study are considerably split regarding Paul’s qualities and…nuances.  Some think Paul is a linear theological savant.  Others think he’s a sexist trying to draw Christianity as a religion in his image.  Some think Paul’s goal was to make a machine out of a movement and others are convinced he didn’t know what he was getting into at all.  However no scholars debate one item—Paul’s importance.  Paul, or the literary “Paul” created by a community with a certain religio-social agenda (biblical studies get very inside baseball very quickly) formed early Christianity.  

The story of THIS arrest takes place in the book of Acts.  It is nearly the final scene in Acts.  Acts is either an ancient Michael Bay script (GRAB SOME SNAKES, MASS HYSTERIA, EARTHQUAKES) or a sweeping Terrance Malick “experience” (long monologues about metaphysics, characters you think are important but can’t understand, gorgeous vistas taken from a ship’s prow).  Either way it’s intriguing.  Regardless of your opinion concerning Jesus, God or Christianity Acts is a page-turner.  When reading the bible that’s incredibly important.  Because some portions are the worst.

This is from the first book in the bible, Genesis:

This is the account of Shem’s family line.

Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father[d] of Arphaxad. 11 And after he became the father of Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters.

12 When Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he became the father of Shelah. 13 And after he became the father of Shelah, Arphaxad lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters.[e]

14 When Shelah had lived 30 years, he became the father of Eber. 15 And after he became the father of Eber, Shelah lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters.

16 When Eber had lived 34 years, he became the father of Peleg. 17 And after he became the father of Peleg, Eber lived 430 years and had other sons and daughters.

18 When Peleg had lived 30 years, he became the father of Reu. 19 And after he became the father of Reu, Peleg lived 209 years and had other sons and daughters.

20 When Reu had lived 32 years, he became…OH MY GOD SCOOP MY EYES OUT THIS IS SO BORING.  

Some of the bible is intensely boring.  You can admit it.  Jesus isn’t going to hate you (I mean, you reposted that thing on Facebook in which a painting of white Jesus challenged you to share it so you’re good) and your grandma who drug you to vacation bible school isn’t going to find out you think so.  Some of the bible is horrifyingly boring.  That’s what makes the book of Acts so fun!  Sure there are long speeches but at the end people die or they have to make daring escapes.  

Paul is arrested near the end of Acts and refuses to take a plea deal over and over so there is only one option—his case will be tried in Rome, under the legal auspices of Caesar himself.  

This sounds incredibly exciting.  People of faith have always seemed to want to be in front of the public consciousness.  We (SURPRISE!) even try to live vicariously through famous folks who acknowledge their faith.  I remember buying the Puff Daddy and the Family album No Way Out.  Puffy starts the whole album by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.  12 year old me firmly believed: Holy Crap. Puff Daddy is a Christian, we have so much in common.  Sociologically the desire to see someone like you in a position of notoriety or power is not uncommon at all.  However when people of faith get involved things can get a bit weird.  I grew up attending church super bowl parties.  During halftime every youth pastor in the United States was apparently contractually obligated to play a “sports heroes devotional” video.  I missed so many halftime shows over the years listening to Drew Brees tell me how Jesus helps him throw a twenty yard out.  The only halftime show we did get to see, due to some DVD player malfunction, was the famous “Janet Jackson’s Gratuitous Nipple Accessory Debut: featuring Janet Jackson’s boob and Justin Timberlake” show.  This was not congruent with NBA star A.C. Green’s message about celibacy until marriage.  Christians seem to take every opportunity to say “Hey look! There’s one of us!” or to be the person who ascends to some place of power so they can say “I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about your Lord and Savior…”

It should be incredibly exciting…

Paul is making himself famous, the most powerful person on earth is going to know his name and hear about his faith.  However when you read Acts 22-26 its really hard not to yawn.  It should be exciting, but it’s not.  Apparently notoriety and power aren’t surefire plot points.

In the previous several months and in the coming months there is a good chance you’ve heard a few different people try to convince you that they are “Christian”.  If you are a person of faith they want you to say “that could be one of us—in the greatest position of power”.  It’s an alluring idea.  Think about what a person guided by faith might be capable of given such incredible resources.  There is a problem inherent to that formula.  What you imagine a “person of faith” to be and what I imagine a person of faith to be could be quite different.  For example, I think president Jimmy Carter provided an incredible example of faith in action from a position of power.  My grandparents (who bear the strongest possible behavioral resemblance to Jesus) hang up the mass printed Christmas cards sent by the Bush family because it demonstrates, to them, a sentiment consistent with the Bush faithful ethos. Differing opinions in the realms of faith and politics (which is a silly thing to say because really there is only one “realm”, it’s called life) is nothing new, but it illustrates a significant truth—ready?

Faith, in fame or power, is destined to disappoint.

Unfortunately one of two things typically derail the semi-smug “They are one of us!” arousal: scandal or boredom.  

We know what scandal looks and feels like.  Boredom creeps up on us.  Things aren’t as revolutionary as we thought they’d be.  Negotiation is more common than conversion.  Our powerful avatars may be ostensibly interested in an eternal kingdom but they are keenly aware the next election cycle is four years away.  We want the powerful “Christian” to adjust the axis in such a way that we feel it because we are worried in our simple, normal, fame-less lives we cannot.  

We, as it turns out, are dummies.

We are dummies because God grooves in the daily shit.

I’m not suggesting you should avoid politics.  Please, vote.  Vote your conscious and argue your points and support your candidate and articulate your concerns and stay informed.  Listen to NPR, visit politico.com watch (gulp) Fox News.  But when the conventions and debates and elections are over remember—you don’t need that person to exert the force of faith on the world.  We simply need to commit to quiet faith beside our friends.  Share some of your stuff, try to encourage your neighbors, don’t be a racist, take time to slow down and be thankful even when things are falling apart, remind the people in your life that you love them, try not to whisper “fuck you” under your breath so much.  Take the risk of believing that a force beyond yourself wants to hear from you and is constantly lovingly inclined toward you.  

In November Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be elected president.  They have both told us they are people of faith.  One thing is certain, after the election things will get boring.  Your life isn’t.  

[mandiblepress]

/013

I have a friend who has his pilot’s license and a small plane.  I wish I had a small plane and could fly it.  I would live in aviators.  I would buy a $400 leather bomber jacket and make my wife call me “Ace” during romantic times (in which she’d wear the jacket and...okay that’s off topic).   I have another friend with a motorcycle.  I wish I had a motorcycle and the instantaneous critique of you sheep who choose to drive your “cars” with “four wheels”.  Get out on the open road man!  Once you slam the visor down on that helmet and climb on that vintage Indian Scout you’ve effectively shut out the corporate roar.  You’re a lone wolf with rocket fuel pumping through your veins.  I would buy a $400 leather moto jacket with an asymmetrical zipper and make my wife call me “Chief” during roma...... I have a friend who’s built something he loves from literally nothing (this is a metaphorical act of building, if you don’t get that you’re going to be wildly confused).  He is a sought after expert in his field.  He teaches and trains and is widely respected.  I bet he wears a leather jacket too and I bet it costs around $400 dollars.  It used to be easy to recognize that we weren’t like celebrities.  In the nineties I knew I wasn’t Mark Paul Gosselaar (ne Zack Morris).  And it didn’t take long for me to realize I would not in fact be a professional athlete.  By “didn’t take long” I’d say it was the first time I played any organized sport...ever.  I was slow, short and my head was too big for my body.  I was the opposite of a prodigy.  What would that be?  Ah yes, a disappointment.  Something weird has happened to our society in the last fifteen years or so.  Our day dreams have drifted a little closer to corporeality.  Do you want to be fit?  Watch these videos on youtube.  Do you want to be erotic? Watch these videos on youtube.  Do you want to be a famous musician? Upload your videos to youtube.  Do you want to be a celebrity?  Tweet at them! Now you’re cool too! Do you wish you were someone else?  Use this filter, say something deprecating and watch the “but you’re so pretty!” comments roll in.   In a very strange way it is as though the moon got closer but the tides don’t change.   It is easier than ever to be disengaged.  The moon is closer, but the tides don’t change.  It is easier than ever to be aloof and wistful.  The moon is closer, but the tides don’t change.  It is easier than ever to lose your life wishing you had another one. 

This isn’t a “carpe diem” rant.  Some days are not all that seizable because they suck.  Or they’re boring.  Or your kids keep fighting for no reason and you’re secretly glad when one hits the other because they totally had it coming.  Or your boss is particularly convinced that “it” is “your” fault.  Don’t seize those days.  Light them on fire just to dance on their ashes. 

I wish for “different” a lot.  Thus my obsession with things I don’t have and the jackets that accompany them.  The lust isn’t for the things as much as being something different.   One of the great gifts of Jesus is convincing people that they don’t need cool leather jackets.  Fishermen can be fishermen and that’s okay.  You can be awkward and that’s okay.  You can be a nerdy accountant and that’s okay.  You can have a thousand bad choices on the back of your life’s baseball card and that’s okay.  In fact you can be making bad choices the moment Jesus enters the scene and that’s okay.  At one point in which Jesus is doing Jesus stuff: healing, curing, being rad, being the Oprah of instantaneous life-change and one thinks to oneself, “Those are the people Jesus helps, people with obvious flaws they could not control so Jesus gives them a better life.” 

Yet, in another scene from a Jesus biography Jesus simply says “Hey, if you have a weight on your shoulders or soul, I want to help you with that.”  Have you ever wanted so much it’s heavy?   Like you’re pulling the moon closer in hopes it changes the tides?  The good news is that you are enough.  The beauty of being a follower of Jesus, as messy and weird and confusing and god-awful I and you may be at it, is that you simply have to be.  That’s it.  But I still think I’d look dynamite in a cool leather jacket. 

[mandiblepress]

//012

On June 5th I will stand up and talk about God and faith and Jesus and death and netflix and zombies; all of which may sound weird to you.  It is weird to me now.  That sentiment hollows me out because it used to be normal.  A couple years ago I would have done this after having filled up two white boards and finding just the right images and borrowing a Casio keyboard for the two seconds I was going to use it because it just worked.   But now it’s an anomaly of a weekend.  To be clear it’s an anomaly because of me and on my own account.  So please, no Che Guevara silkscreens of my face.  This week friends of mine are gathered to talk about what it will take to be a church in the coming year.  They will sing and plan and attend business meetings (the antithesis of “church”) and drink beer on porches and laugh uproariously (the very essence of “church”).  I miss them. Again, I miss them because of me.   At any rate they will be there and because they are there I am in a different city speaking to strangers.  I am lapping at this opportunity like a feral dog.  I’m all slobber and dehydration--two competing images that make perfect sense to me.   I have this chance because two friends trust and love me.  Or they had no other favors they could call in.  I will choose to believe the former because I have to.   This weekend I’m talking about confronting dead places in life with somber realism but the type of hope that should land you in a sanitarium.  The idea is that you have to look the deadly mistakes, committed by and to you, in the face to have any hope of pulling a full life out of their ruins.  Hopefully people will laugh and think and breathe deeply and leave having heard good news.  Maybe they won’t.  I will try very hard because I love the risk and because my friends trust me and I’d probably tear out my intestines if any of the friends who stuck with me in the past 18 months asked me to.  I will tell jokes and drag metaphors to their very extent and pause dramatically and make weird hand motions and probably offend 32% of the audience because I’m a junkie and this is my fix and if you catch me in the traphouse I can’t be blamed for what you see.  I will beg these strangers to go into their places of death and dare resurrection to happen.  What I won’t tell them is that is precisely what I’m doing this weekend.  I brought my family along so I wouldn’t collapse into a blubbering mess at any point.  I am strolling into my cemetery this weekend to see if what I hope for is true or if I’m full of shit.  

I get to do the one vocational task I’ve ever felt made again this weekend.  And then I will hold up some bread and some juice and tell people it’s actually the mysterious marriage of divinity and humanity. 

And I’ll believe it myself.  

Grace and peace. 

[mandiblepress]

/011

“I had an epiphany.”  “Okay.”  “Would you like to hear what the epiphany was?” “Um. Sure.”  “You’re not enthused about it.  Never mind.” “Just tell me your epiphany.”  “No, it’s okay.  It wasn’t that great.  It was just about God and the progression of religion and stuff.”  “Sounds...” “Okay so here it is:...” 

I had that conversation with my wife on date night.  Because I am smooth and sexy and have always excelled at turning her on with provocative and suggestive conversation.  Nothing says “I can’t wait until we get home you need to pull over on this country road” more than a monologue regarding a philosophy of religion.  

According to psychologists most “epiphanies” or grand revelations happen in the shower for a reason.  There is some combination of the solitude, repetitive sounds and temperature that place you in an epiphany-ready state.  I could link you to articles supporting that claim but we both know you’re not here for hard science!  I’m not sure where my epiphany (one of many by the way, I have epiphanies on epiphanies on epiphanies son) happened but it wasn’t in the shower.  I may have been driving.  Or daydreaming.  Or reading. Who cares really. 

My wife and I had been talking about how we “fit” into faith communities or even faith conversations in our current context.  Couples or friends only talk about such things if they feel as though they aren’t fitting in.  Square pegs don’t chat with other square pegs about how well things are going sliding into square holes.  We feel a bit as though we’ve been playing racquetball for the past five or six years and suddenly we’ve been placed in a situation in where everyone plays tennis.  

Thus: epiphany. 

On this drive or daydream or out at my woodshop (hahahahahhahaha) I was trying to formulate what I really think the bible is.  That definition is keeping me off the tennis courts.  Literarily the bible is an anthology.  Supernaturally the bible is God’s communique with mankind previous, current and future.  Cultically the bible is the normative guidelines for behavior and inclusion into “the group”.  Cheesily the bible is: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, God’s handbook for life, Your Roadmap, Life’s Instruction Manual.  Can you think of any more? 

Most typically the bible is considered to be “God’s Word.” Which means.....what exactly? Unfortunately I’ve probably held a physical bible in my physical hand and refereed to it as such in front of people before.  How much does it  help someone who is trying to make sense of their life in the context of the transcendent by saying “hey this thing in my hand with paper that tears literally if you blow on it is the ‘word’ of the indescribable, omnipotent, everpresent and creative God of the universe”?  

I’m not sure I think the bible is that. 

The bible, to me--please note that disclaimer, is an memoir of unfolding understanding regarding God and how God relates to and interacts with creation.  A memoir because it’s written by people in the context of reflection.  Unfolding because it is progressive.  Understanding because it is communicated from a human perspective that is seeking knowledge using experience, evidence and intuition to arrive at certain conclusions.  Before you start labeling me or placing me in a “camp” (and only those of you who are firmly encamped yourself will do this--the rest of you didn’t know there were camps or don’t care and now you just want to go camping) I should tell you I believe in inspiration by God’s Spirit in some very guttural and subtle way and I believe the bible is intensely honest of not a perfect description page for page of God or God’s behavior.  

A cursory reading of the bible’s first few books casts God in a role eerily similar to other Near Eastern deities.  God is immediate.  His presence and actions are easily perceived and impact creation instantaneously.  God is also immediate in the sense that he acts within a relative small geographical framework.  There aren’t any verses in Leviticus in which God has to take a break because he’s got stuff going on in New Guinea.  Immediacy is a good thing.  However immediacy carries with it the burden of tyranny in many scenes from scripture.  In another ancient document from a reasonably similar context there is a deity named Molech who defeats a vicious female deity to achieve superiority over the cosmos.  He then orders creation as he sees fit.  Certain people are expendable and bound for sacrifice.  Violence is normative and females can be subjected.  Molech sounds very similar to melek, a semetic word for “king”.  In that historical setting Kings are like Gods and Gods are like Kings.  When you read in the bible that God orders mass genocide and kills people for touching certain objects doesn’t it feel a bit tyrannical?  If we read tweets describing things like that we call them war crimes, or crimes against humanity.  Is this who God is? 

Bloody swords and plagues and anger and revulsion? 

Or is this the best effort of humans trying to grapple with understanding the biggest answers to the biggest questions.  

There is a rabbinic tradition which says that the biggest questions are always posed in the wrong way.  Humans tend to ask why and what.  Job is a character in the bible who has a book named after him.  It’s a really horrible story actually.  Job’s life goes to shit.  Thoroughly. That’s the story.  The whole thing.  Job maintains faith in God’s presence and even benevolence though there is evidence to the contrary.  Job asks God the big questions.  Why did this (or all bad things) happen?  What did I do wrong? What should I do now? Why didn’t you protect/rescue/reward me? 

The king’s throne sways a bit under humanity’s questions. 

God answers by describing Godself.  

Rabbis say that when you ask God questions God really answers by saying “Who’s asking?”  

Once the idea of tyrannical deity who resembles and behaves very much like an earthly king  no longer suffices religions usually drift toward ethereal ideas or theories.  The king who uses force becomes more akin to The Force.  A prince who had his own epiphany becomes the source and constant act of having epiphanies.  Philosopher Rudolph Otto (rapper name, I called it) said that the idea of God is the Mysterium Tremendum (the terrible mystery) that exists in every culture.  That is how religion should progress: from immediate king-like deity, to rules and structure, to ideals and theories to disengaged model of behavior and consciousness.  It’s really the arc that we should read through the bible.  That tyrannical king is an anemic explanation for any of life’s big questions so eventually humans in a given group jettison that perception.  Next we move on to rules and restrictions to establish group norms.  These smell like the old king but seem to be more within our own control.  Autonomy feels good after chains.  However these collapse under a different weight--relationships.  We meet people shaped by different rules and restrictions and find, usually to our shock and discomfort that we like them.  They love and speak and dance and pray in ways different from us but, dammit, we like them.  This again forces us to evaluate our orientating beliefs and usually remove them even more from the concrete and tangible portions of our daily lives.  Therefore we become convinced that whatever the “king” was and whatever the rules were supposed to direct us toward must be more simple and more pliable.  Do good. Be kind. Everything happens for a reason.  

Those sort of platitudes are smoke.  

That is the progression we should see in the bible as the understanding of God evolves.  You can certainly observe the tyrannical king-figure account.  However, there are these nagging whispers that this may  not be predictable at all.  

God makes females in God’s image. 

God refuses to accept a human sacrifice. 

God reminds “his people” that he actually has “more people”. 

God imagines (wistfully even!) a day in which people can talk to their neighbor without holding their breath.  

Amidst all the noise of crashing swords and the wailing wounded and the chaos of the earth opening to swallow people whole there are these subtle whispers that this story--this ongoing memoir is something completely different. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel (NOT a good rapper name) says that the story of the bible is God in search of man. 

Christians, for centuries have called the phenomenon of God becoming man the Incarnation.  

And that is where the train jumps off the predictable tracks. 

Tyrannical religion, rules and cliches can’t tolerate a God that puts skin on. Certainly one that puts skin on and then fully embraces human existence. 

The bible should drift into ethereal platitudes, but instead there is afterbirth and circumcision. 

If God is a tyrannical Near Eastern king he doesn’t care about you beyond what tribute you can supply him with.  

If God is a set of rules you can satisfy then God doesn’t care about you beyond how proficient you are at fitting in.  

And if God is a cliche then you shouldn’t care about God. 

But, according to the bible, God becomes a human.  God learns to walk and spits up and struggles with hormones and battles anxiety and depression and makes and unmakes friendships.  All of the bible, sputtering and clumsy as it may be, drives to this point.  This is real.  God has blood and expanding lungs and dirt under his nails. 

This of course means that God inhabits human experience with a different level of association than controlling it.  God as man is subject to creation as well as occasionally superseding it.  God cares about you because God knows, in his bones, what it is to be you. 

That is where the bible goes.  That is the evolution.  And that is better than a ruler or rules or cliches.  Because with is always better.  With is the queen of prepositions.  This means that God is with you when you weep bitterly or when you laugh until you have to excuse yourself.  God is better than an idea or a force or something you can say without thinking. 

God who puts skin on is better than where religion typically ends up. If God is your tyrant right now I hope you entertain the idea that there is something better.  If God is your rules keeping you in and others out I hope you imagine there might be something better.  If God is a wisp of a cliche to you please believe there is something better. 

Because reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting isn’t as good as the first time your baby lays on your chest. 

Because porn isn’t as good as sex. 

Because “liking” someone’s picture isn’t as good as hugging them. 

Because looking at a recipe on pinterest isn’t as good as eating your grandma’s food. 

Because staring at google maps isn’t as good as a road trip. 

I don’t think the bible is perfect.  I think it contains errors and misrepresentations of who God is.  However I do think it is an honest and human product rife with the interjections of God’s own Spirit.  Maybe I’m completely wrong.  Maybe I should be more convinced by arguments such as “The bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!”  

Or maybe I’ll just keep playing racquetball and see who joins the game. 

[mandiblepress]

//010

I read the twenty-third psalm in a Salvation Army multi-purpose building once.   That’s the weirdest place in which I’ve ever read the twenty-third psalm.   I was standing between two folding tables.  Old folding tables.  The type that come standard with a warning from someone to “watch your fingers” when you set them up and take them down.  These tables had it easy that Saturday afternoon.  Each held only a few photos in cheap frames.  They could have been stock photos for all I knew.  In that Salvation Army multi-purpose building I was aware of a scant collection of pertinent information: someone had died, their relatives had somehow received my number, I needed to kill whoever gave that number out, I would be doing a funeral service of...some kind, and I would read the twenty-third psalm. 

Why don’t we call it Psalm 23?  It’s separated itself in cultural consciousness so much that we announce it differently.  Even if you don’t speak bible fluently there’s a good chance you know a smattering of P23.   “The Lord is my shepherd...something something...leads me....something...some guy named Rod comforts me...something about water...green pastures.....”  My paternal grandma didn’t attend church.  Even so, she made me promise that the twenty-third psalm would be read at her funeral.  

Have you ever heard it outside of a funeral?   When I hear it I instinctively think, “shit, who died?”  I wait for the horrible recording of some octogenarian warbling “I cooomme to the garrrrr-den aaaa loonnnnnnnne (wheezing breath) whiiile the dew (wheezing breath) is still on the roooo...ooooooses...”   I have a difficult time really hearing P23 because it smells like something died. 

There were no dead bodies in the Salvation Army multi-purpose building.  In fact no one was really sure where the deceased actually was.  Some son receieved a call from some facility somewhere with the news.  “Hell” he told me out by his van between drags, “seemed like I should get people together and do...somethin’”.  A few hours before the (service? thing? extended smoke break?) funeral he and I hammered out the particulars.  They were as follows: his dead father was an abusive alcoholic whose greatest passion in life was illegal street racing. 

So, you know, good funeral stuff. 

I went to a coffee shop to avoid the urge to drink bourbon and to plan the message.  I was on a roll.   “Name” “Eulogy” (which had been written on a piece of yellow legal pad and handed to me at the nerve center, or, van. “Read 23rd Psalm”

But why would I read that?  How could it possibly apply to this man who lived with the very opposite of comfort and brought nothing but strife to his family?  “The Lord is my Shepherd, I have what I need.  He makes me lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside quiet waters and refreshes my soul.”  As I sat silently reciting those lines in the coffee shop I knew what should happen if I read them in the multi-purpose room.  

Someone should call bullshit. 

That poem did not belong to the dead guy.   Not because he was “bad” or because he was abusive or a drunk.  I believe grace has incredibly elasticity and it stretches to places we don’t like to imagine.   But that psalm isn’t for the dead.  Some poetry is perfect for a wake or funeral or hugging the hospice nurse.  Not that poem.  I’ve had it wrong my entire life.  I’ve been humming it as a dirge.  

It’s not. 

It’s a lullaby. 

I found it’s true melody in the Salvation Army multi-purpose building and I told the folks on folding chairs as much. I couldn’t imagine their conflicting emotions that day.  So I read them some poetry.  Hurt and confusion and anger and wistfulness aren’t erased by poetry--but hearing that someone loves you enough to walk with you through a valley of “deepest shadows, even deathly shadows” gives you a tune to hum at night between tears, or drinks, or your gritted teeth. 

I confess I’ve lost the melody of late.  My friend (good friend, the kind you get maybe one shot at so don’t crap the bed if you have those friends) asked me to think and write about the twenty-third psalm and I was instantly angry.  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want? Really?  Because I feel as though that’s all I have been doing for months.  Still waters?  My ass.  I’m drowning. 

Anyone with me? 

I want to be wherever the poet is.  Lounging Walt Whitman style in some field somewhere.   But this isn’t a “someday” poem.  It’s not a destination poem. It’s the answer to “are we there yet?”  It’s the answer to “shouldn’t I be there (wherever your “there”) by now?”  

I didn’t stop wanting or hurting or wishing because I read this psalm over and over.  But I remembered the valley of deep shadows and deadly memories.  I remembered love and kindness that literally kept me alive. 

Do you remember that?  In your valley?  Or when you walked with someone else through theirs?  

I remember.  I could almost hear it.  It was on the other edge of the nighttime.  It was the light left on in the hallway.  Someone was humming the tune to this poem and it didn’t sound like a procession toward black cars.  It sounded like my sons’ laugh and the way the light shines through my daughter’s hair and my wife’s touch and loud bars and a Hemingway sentence and the horns on an Otis Redding song.  

This is a poem for life. 

[mandiblepress]

//009

Recently I took my children fishing.  I have one kid, the middle one (it always is right?) who loves to fish.  He really enjoys process and procedure so the standard acts of casting/reeling/wildly flapping moss from the lure/repeat appeal to him at a deeply instinctive level.  My daughter, Gracie, is committed to fishing until she starts imagining native Americans living wherever we’re fishing and starts telling me about the injustices they suffered.  Sidebar: Gracie will probably end up being one of those “MEAT IS MURDER!!!!!!” people.  Our youngest, Beckham, just wants to mess shit up.  He throws rocks and always stands juuuuuuuust close enough to the water to constantly worry you so you have no hope of enjoying yourself.  

We went fishing at “the Creek”.  If you speak rural fluently I don’t have to explain “the Creek” to you.  Your extended family or a friend’s family took you to the Creek (Once I took friends from Lexington, KY and Portland, OR to an event at “the Creek” and every element perplexed them.  I think they both got legionnaires disease immunizations immediately upon returning home).  I used to go to this creek with my grandfather.  We’d fish and hunt for arrowheads and make rock-bridges to cross and swing on vines and bellow like Tarzan.  Once the creek flooded and there were countless sunfish (you could call them perch but that would be a bit like calling a mall Santa “Tony” even when he’s in costume) stranded in the long grass of the pasture.  We scooped them up in buckets and transported them to ponds.  We saved their lives...until larger fish ate them after we relocated them.  

I am old enough to know what the Creek really is.  It’s a group of muddy shallows connected by fitfully running water.  It’s tiny and might be at this point 37% manure.  I’ve pounded fenceposts into it’s silty bottoms and could step across it’s breadth in most places.  It is insignificance made aquatic.  

But I know it’s not.  Because of my grandpa and my cousins and now my kids. *And because once I tried to make out super hard with my then-girlfriend/now wife at the Creek and got shut down because of grasshoppers and mosquitos and stuff--looking back a good choice on her part.   The Creek is silly and small and so completely country that it shouldn’t matter, and yet it matters a great deal. 

As we left the creek we followed a decades old path winding up from the valley to the top of the hill.  You can follow this path/road past abandoned cars that are as much moss as machine and a low-slung rock wall all the way to the gate.  Or you can stop.  We stopped.  I had to show them where I proposed to their mom.  It was Christmas Eve, 2003, and I covered the inside of a stone building with candles and hand written letters and anxiety and asked their mom to marry me.  I described it all in detail to my children.  Gracie waited for me to finish and said “So you asked mom to marry you in a barn?”

...

It is really just a shed.  It holds junk now.  It doesn’t matter.  It is insignificance in limestone.  But it’s not that at all.  Obviously. 

This is typically the part in which you’re invited to think of some place or item like that in your life, something mundane but imbibed with such meaning because of it’s history or it’s origin.  I don’t want you to do that at all. 

Because you are that thing.  You are a place God comes to to remember how much he loves and cares and to smile for no reason.  However muddy or meaningless or messed-up you believe yourself to be I believe the Spirit of God (however you want to think about “God”) stays close to you so that God can celebrate.  Ancient poets used to say this is like “deep calling out to deep”.  

I had a friend recently tell me about a time in which they felt absolutely certain they were forgiven.  The specifics are not important--the outcome is.  They knew and experienced something that altered their self-understanding.  Normally we think that God does this for our sake.  God forgives us because we can’t be in relationship with anything divine until we are clean or “better”.  But what if God does this for God’s sake?  What if God always sees the rescue of the perch and the wax dripping down the uneven stones and won’t see the cowshit and the garbage in the corner?  

If you’re a bible-ish person you could cruise over to Hosea chapter 11 and read about God trying to distance himself from a people-group that consistently distances themselves from God.  The most poignant line in the poem is “How could I give you up...”  

You will never be insignificance with flesh to God.  You are the Creek.  

[mandiblepress]

//008

We carried laundry-baskets full of fireworks. 

I grew up in a microscopic town in southeast Kansas.  The type of town in which hearing “I can’t park that close to the building because of my dogs” is not unusual or illogical.  I had cousins, however, who grew up in Lawrence Kansas.  Lawrence is a college town.  It is cultured and educated and progressive.  In Lawrence naked-lady mudflaps would be ironic.  My great aunt and uncle (and a great-great aunt who I never really figured out...or saw come to think of it...or heard speak...) lived on a picturesque property which abutted a busy street at its most faraway point.  Their property contained the crown jewel of all visiting kid fantasies: a P to the double-O to the L.  And it had a diving board and slide.  No hoses to be seen.  That’s right--in ground bitches. 

An enterprising group of firework salespeople approach my pool-owning family about establishing an annual fireworks’ tent near the busy street.  My great aunt and uncle agreed to the placement on one condition; their family would be allowed to obtain fireworks free of charge.  Now, one must imagine these salespeople thinking to themselves, “How much inventory can a docile family of five really take?  I mean, one of them is a ghost great-aunt and ghosts can’t use fireworks!”  Both parties readily agreed. 

And somewhere to the south a phone rang, a stray dog howled and pick-up trucks poured forth exhaust. 

We descended upon that poor firework stand like conquistadors.  

July 3rd and 4th my immediate family, my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents invaded Lawrence, the pool and the pretty property.  Plastic bags became obsolete once the sulfur lust was in us so we started walking laundry baskets and boxes down to the stand so as to better transport our treasures.  For two days we blew up everything that had a fuse in addition to stocking a dragon’s-hoard of nightworks in a storage building elsewhere in the yard.  This ruined my expectations for all future Fourth of July celebrations, but forethought isn’t in view while you spring across a field, guided by the bouncing light of the flashlight you’re carrying, back to the treasure-chest to grab the next flaming neon projection of youth.  

Remembering those sprints, beside my cousins with our punks in our hands, I can’t help but think of how preposterous it all was.   Free fireworks.   Family everywhere. Abject danger and near certainty of injury.   The constant cycle of hope//expectation//explosion//exhale//approval.  

As a parent I can finally appreciate the fear involved as well.  We children had no idea the damage we were capable of.  Yet all wounds were minor and the spectacle was phenomenal.  

And this, friends, is the church. 

Embarrassing family invited to luxury they could never imagine and told to do more than merely observe but to participate.  Make a mess.  Involve other people.  Be terrified.  Grin like buffoons.  Check on everyone.  Follow what light you have.  Send up your bright defiance against the night.  Pick up the mess.  Ignore your differences for the sake of the party.  Trust that if you share there will still be enough for you. Cheer for each other.  Slow down long enough to see the beauty of it all.  Notice the way it shines on each other.  Move.  Faster.  Now be still.  Run.  Gasp.  Yell.  Laugh.  Now laugh again.  Pick up another one.  Watch in sparkle.  Watch it shine.  Listen when the old folks tell you to be careful.  Don’t be too careful.  

This is the church. 

[mandiblepress]

//007

“He never visited the front...”

Douglas Haig was the field commander of the British armed forces along the Western front during World War 1.  Haig was deliberate, steadfast and the owner of an obstinate certainty that the greatest armed conflict the world had ever seen would conclude in mere months.  

It lasted four years. 

Haig bore the benefit of a home country completely inebriated by nationalism and imperial honor.  Britain sent wave after wave of young men into military service and to the front.  Haig obliged this tidal swell of pride by sending literal boatloads of men to their death.  Haig regularly commented to family members and politicians that evidence of his success was to be found on the roles of battle casualties from his own army.  Haig opted to stay far from the front in a lovely estate in France while fighting raged to the east of his position.  

Nearly all of Haig’s proteges adopted their mentor’s “distant observational” style.  However one ventured to the front in a military vehicle one day after the Somme offensive in which over 50,000 British soldiers were cut down like weeds by German machine gun fire (later German gunners wrote in their diaries that they wept for their enemies as they unloaded their weapons on line after line of Brits marching to their doom).  Haig’s clerk could not believe the carnage on in and among the trenches.  He vomited repeatedly, cried uncontrollably and collapsed into the mud.  

He was sent back to England to sit behind a desk in the war department offices lest his hysterics become contagious among the rest of Haig’s personal attendants.  

For four years Douglas Haig never visited the front.  He never saw missing limbs or weeping wounds or shellshocked men cowering in the dirt.  

*********************************

“I wish we’d bring back that line about the harrowing of hell in the apostles’ creed...”

There are things you imagine you’ll hear after you deliver a sermon or talk or lesson, and then there’s that. 

If you talk in front of people for a living you become accustomed to the disheartening reality that folks normally do not plant their consciousness on your deepest or most researched points.  They remember jokes or how anxious you looked or the goddamn powerpoint slides never working.  If they talk to you after, when you feel like someone getting off a boat for the first time in hours, it is usually about something unrelated to what you were REALLY trying to say.  Which makes a theological comment about a two-thousand year old creed surprising and a bit refreshing in the moment. 

The “harrowing of hell”, for those of you who talk like normal people, is a item of belief born from a couple sentences within New Testament scripture. The most explicit being 1 Peter 3:19-20 which reads:

 “ After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—  to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water...”

The “he” in question (as it usually is--#predictable) is Jesus.  The writer is suggesting that sometime after his death and resurrection(?) Jesus made his way to the abode of the dead and preached to the folks who made fun of Noah for building a giant boat when rain was just a word that rhymed with pain in paleolithic R&B songs.  Catholic brothers and sisters also learn in their journey of faith that Ephesians 4:9, which says “he (yup, you guessed it) descended to the depths of the earth” alludes to Jesus’ visit to hell after his death.  

Regardless of your views on hell, Jesus’ death and resurrection and eternal human destiny we could all probably agree that this is pretty weird.  Skeptics and fundamentalists alike can hold hands and skip away from this idea chanting “...da fuq?” together with giant vacant grins on their faces because this is just weird.  However we have learned over the course of a couple millenia that Christians are nothing if not really great at making mountains out of obscure sentence fragments written by people we’ve never met.  Therefore this has fallen, like so many perplexing items, into the junk drawer of argument and counter argument.  Go ahead and google the “harrowing of hell”.  Enjoy the clickhole you’re about to fall into.  Farewell theological Chilean miner.  See you next never! 

I used to love arguing about his sort of thing and even this thing in particular.  What did it mean!? Why was it included in the text!? What did it reveal about the three(ish) days Jesus spent while, um, dead!?  Why did the “Gospel of Nicodemus” also feature the harrowing of hell?  What the hell is a harrowing? 

I still enjoy talking about these things.  I think it’s fun to have historical, sociological and textual conversations.  But I think I’ve read the texts and their emphasis wrongly for years.  I had those questions and I looked for their answers because it was my job and I snorted being right like it was premium blow. 

I had really been looking in the wrong place. 

And for the wrong thing. 

Because if Jesus went to hell (however and for whatever and in whatever capacity)...

...he would find me there. 

Have you been through “the worst”?  Are you in “the worst”?  Have you been a villain?  I have no idea what the answers to those theological and textual questions might be but I have found an answer nonetheless.  Jesus has been to the worst.  Most are probably familiar with Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir of his time in a concentration camp.  The scene most regularly quoted by preachers and sophomore philosophy students includes his recounting of watching a young boy being hung.  A fellow observer asks the most honest and human question imaginable: “Where is God?”, another responds by saying “He’s there, on the gallows.”  Abraham Joshua Heschel says that all of Jewish philosophy is built on the idea that God is in search of man.  Apparently that means all humanity in all circumstances.  

If you are in hell please do not worry about whether or not certain lines from certain declarations of “right doctrine” are included or not.  Please know that Jesus is there with you.  You are worth braving the worst.  Jesus has been to the front.  He has wept in the trenches.  He has feared for his life and your life and will do anything to remind you that you are not alone and the dark fears the light because it cannot overcome it.  Jesus does not sit comfortably waiting for us to pull ourselves out of the trench to either offer ourselves to inevitable self-destruction or independent self-redemption.  He would find you anywhere simply for the sake of being with you.  Your mess, your violence, your failure and hate and perversion and anger are not enough to keep him away.  

Believing this is childish.  Of course kids don’t fight over creeds. 

[mandiblepress]

//006

Jim Gaffigan had a bit in a stand-up special years ago in which he admitted to an inability to tell his son what an antenna really was.  The boy suggests it’s a silver stick, Gaffigan corrects him, and once his son asks the predictable follow up question Jim realizes he has no idea how an antenna works.  He plasters a smile on his face and says, “It’s a stick buddy! You nailed it!”

Trying to talk about advent or the incarnation is very much like that.  We move from the mystery of the universe’s creator and animator becoming a refugee couple’s baby to things we can touch and tear and manage annually like wrapping paper and strands of lights and overeating (when did we decide that the best way to honor the incarnation was by eating copious amounts of meats and sugars?  “Well, it’s what the baby Jesus, born and raised at or below sustenance level, would have wanted.” *Shoves peanut-butter ball in mouth).  

I certainly don’t want to present myself as another angsty Christian pissing and moaning over commercialization.  I love buying my wife and kids gifts.  I love buying a tree decorating it.  I also hate refugee crisis and world hunger and the absence of clean drinking water and try to contribute to the alleviation of said travesties.  I think you can be both.  I hope. 

What I’d like to do instead is present two very different metaphors for advent.  You will read far better and more poetic descriptions this season.  And perhaps none is as succinctly ideal as the repurposing of Isaiah’s poetry employed by Jesus’ biographers. 

Those living in the shadow of darkness have seen a great light.  

Could we risk two more metaphors?  

First, something with dirt under its nails: 

Advent is akin to watching sycamore leaves drift down like dirt colored parachutes. Knowing that it is ordained by nature doesn't make it any less beautiful as it arrives or sublime as it happens.  All nature whispers and sways, reminding us that things cease whilst others begin.  So we stop and notice our breaths like clouds and the leaves like parachutes and the end of old things while new things come to be--soft as leaves on the breeze and bright as the northern lights.

Now, something with popcorn butter on its fingertips: 

There is a holiday movie that might perfectly identifies God’s perspective and motivation surrounding the incarnation.  Of course one’s mind grips Christmas Vacation like a tractor-beam.  Specifically the scene in which cousin Eddie (played with now obvious aplomb by Randy Quaid) is directing his RV’s sewage into a street drain.  He remarks to Clark, the protagonist viewing the amateur sanitation from inside his warm house, that the “shitter” is indeed “full”.  Clark remarks to his wife that he’s watching an “asshole”.  Later he’ll eat Christmas dinner with that asshole.  And that’s the incarnation.  I am, you may be, at our best prepared and polished for Christmas.  Bearing our gifts to the manger and humming our carols.  We might also be assholes who are full of shit.  The incarnation is the door with the wreath swinging open so that we see our place is already set.  

[mandiblepress]

//005

Advent 1 

“Adeste fideles læti triumphantes..”

Technically the Sunday after thanksgiving marks the beginning of the advent season.  Advent being the season in which churches prepare to observe and celebrate Christmas.  Depending on fluency speaking “church” you have born witness to traditions formal and folksy during this season.   I say “technically” because the Sunday following Thanksgiving is always an odd hinge.  Nearly everyone is tired and consumed with self-loathing for all they ate. People are planning cyber Monday shopping or sharing Black Friday stories like they are comparing notes on storming Omaha beach.  This coming Sunday is the first honest-to-goodness Sunday in the advent season.  There is a good chance, however, that many churches used the past Sunday as an opportunity to launch Christmas music. 

The italicized lyric above is from a well-known Christmas hymn.  I represented it in latin to grant it a deeper sense of timelessness and to make it seem cool.  Of course that may not be foolproof logic, just ask everyone who has Chinese symbols tattooed on their body if something’s vagueness makes it hip.  The lyric translates thusly “O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant...”  It’s a fun Christmas song.  It can be done slow and pensively or full of horns and good cheer.  It’s not quite the celestial chunk of molly that “Angels We Have Heard on High” can be, but it’s not the grasping longing of “O Come O Come Emmanuel” (interestingly, written by Justin Vernon).  “O Come all ye Faithful” is a fun song.  An invitation to those of us who have been tearing construction paper rings from chains in eager anticipation of something interrupting our normalcy. 

I remember singing songs like this at Christmas Eve services in the church my family was a part of during my childhood.  When you’re eight or nine, dwelling in the nuerological space between belief in a man benevolently entering your house during a winter’s night and the audacious belief in a creator inhabiting an infant’s body after a miraculous pregnancy, Christmas Eve church services are a bit of a glimpse through the looking glass.  Everyone appears to be quite satisfied with life.  Everyone has brought their own candle.  You will get to say the word “ass” during a Christmas song and your mom cannot get angry with you.  Eventually in this service you will get to light your candle and then you’ll be able to play with the dripping wax during the final song and prayer.  To recap--you get to curse and light a fire at church.  Christmas Eve FOREVER! 

Toward the end of the service everyone would leave their seats and make a circle around the sanctuary’s perimeter.  Candles and faces alit.  Everyone seemed so happy.  Of course they would be invited by the song--these are the faithful.  These are the well prepared and celebratory.  These are they that will receive an apple and an orange on the way out of the church building because nothing says happy holidays like sticky fingers on the drive home.  I realize my memories have become tinged with a sepia tone, but I swear I can almost see Mr. Rockwell’s brushstrokes on those bygone Christmas Eve services.  Here are the faithful, come as requested. 

But what about those of us who have been less than faithful?  I have vacillated between fickle and farcical in my pursuit of gospel truth and incarnate infants.  Am I still called to make the trip to Bethlehem?  I have no gifts, only baggage--is it still a pilgrimage for me?  What of those among us that cannot seem to summon any sense of joy or triumph, but instead come angry and sullen?  Do we still fit in the candlelit circle gripping tightly our excuses or deceptions or doubt?  Moreover, do we still have a place at the nativity?  The shepherds are there, bedecked in their humble nobility and simple faith.  The magi, replete with appropriate gifts and again--faith.  Mary, pondering and pensive, full of the most absurd and tender faith the world had or will see.  Joseph, a man so practical as to coordinate a quiet divorce, sits there with his faith in the prescriptive power of dreams.  But is there room for us, our absence of or lack of adherence to faith written all over our faces.  I imagine that if were a taller lad of eight I would have seen more creases around more faces in those circles at Christmas Eve.  Maybe I would have noticed the way the shadows played on the crows’ feet of a man who knew no bonus would cheer his emptiness this year.  Maybe I would have seen the pursed lips of a mother wondering how she will manage to last the night, let alone another year.  Maybe I would have noticed the couple whose eyes held more questions than faithfulness.   Is there room for us there in Bethlehem where the triumphant have gathered? 

In a biblical text that is both miles away and somehow only a fingerprint from the story of the baby in the manger is a simple request.  Or maybe a command.  Most likely an invitation.  An early follower of Jesus has an incredible experience in which they dream/experience/trip out and bear witness to amazing thing.  The dream/real/trip concludes with an image of a wedding party.  In some wild symbolic way the wedding represents the merging of what is material and immaterial, somehow serving as a simile for God’s attachment to and love for humanity.   “The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.” 

Is there room for us at the miracle of God-in-flesh?  Apparently the only requirement is need.  My moments of joy and triumph have not been plentiful.  Can you identify?  Well maybe, amongst the shepherds and magi and angles and holy parents there is a little room.  As if backlit by a small candles I think I can make out another shadow slowly making it’s way toward the manger.  It limps and halts.  It keeps its head down and shuffles slowly forward.  Looks quite a bit like my shadow, or yours. 

[mandiblepress]

//004

A Dispatch from a Lesser Shore

She kept her head low so as to avoid the glare of the sun.

Of course there was no sun. Not in this room. There are only four lights. Each holding three fluorescent tubes. If you imagined the tubes arranged differently they could be bars on windows. But of course there are no windows here. Students joke that the entire building was modeled on a prison. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the students have yet to recognize that all large buildings are built basically the same way. Though to be fair to students any building in which one has to perform the dark arts of calculus is as good as a prison. The room was all painted cinder blocks and isolation. There was a slender window in the door. A porthole just large enough to remind a student that they were trapped while the rest of the world swam by. Between the bars and the blocks and the view she couldn’t be blamed for keeping her head slung low. Weeks ago she had dared to look at the non-sun in the room. We had talked about her time in various foster families and group homes. She had skipped like a smooth stone from one house to another. She had refused permanent placement with anyone but her mother. A family had tried to adopt her once, they had adopted her sister in fact, but she was resolute. She would have her mother or none. Her hair would fall around, under and amidst her glasses; she’d attempt to pull it out unsuccessfully with her hand and tell me “if I can’t have my family I don’t want any family at all.” *** That sunny day I remember being surprised by her teeth. I always suspect that their teeth will give them away. Clothing and fashion are fickle signposts, but teeth are honest. Their teeth should look like plastic toys left outside through a summer. Faded and dirtied at once. But her teeth were clean and straight. More luck than attention I surmised. *** The mother she was tethered to might lose the right to be considered this girl’s parent. What biology and the mystery of the universe had decreed a court could denounce. The mother had to demonstrate her capacity to maintain employment and stable residency. She had just started school learning to manicure nails and was living with a couple in the middle of a divorce. As is so often the case the stone didn’t start skipping across the face of the foster care system with the girl in the room in the school. The mom in the nail school was once just a scared girl in a room herself. Ironically it was a room that probably felt like a cell. Instead of fluorescent tubes it contained pliable rubber tubes. The kind of tubes that you should find when rooting around for something under the sink. Instead they connected to needles that hid beneath her own mother’s skin. This is where the first rock skipped. In this room with these tubes a woman died. She had cancer. Cancer is a first stone. The girl in that room was only 13. Months later she would have a miscarriage. Three years later she would give birth to the girl in the room with the fluorescent sun. *** The long winter of foster care is usually 16 months. One year and the opening salvo of another. The time it takes to advance from cautiously riding a bike to careening from a curb. The time it takes for teenagers to fall in love, get bored, break up and fall in love again. The time it takes to grow a convincing mustache.

The girl in the room hadn’t logged 16 months yet. She had recently observed her grey first anniversary. Ten residences in twelve months. That included the family that wanted to put her in their pictures. It also included time in a detention center, a hospital and a group home. At some point the stone stops skipping. Gravity and friction and decreasing velocity conspire against the impossibility of progress and it sinks. “Have you ever thought about suicide?” She asked me on the sunny day. The part of me that remembered protocol started typing an email to principals and counselors. I had to admit what I had suspected about the surplus of rubber bracelets crowding her wrists and elbows. The part of me that had sunk, that had been to the therapist’s office and made speeches to people I loved and hurt and lied to and been furious with didn’t want to type anything to anyone and simply wanted to be fifteen and admit to having been in a room like this room and confronted the worst and most dangerous parts of myself and wished they weren’t there. I wanted to admit that there had been days in which my worst parts were so entangled with my noble parts that there could be no surgical removal; just one drastic elimination. I just wanted to say “yes.” *** The sunny day ended with the unveiling of my betrayal. The girl was paraded to different offices before finding herself, finally, back in the room. She didn’t speak again that day. She practiced a limited script during the latest visit. She told me what parts of the human body I reminded her of and when she would be leaving. The stone skips again. She had committed to monkish silence after an initial verbal assault. But it is the adolescent prerogative to adjust course. She told me her grandfather had been in prison for decades. For rape. Of his children. Her father continued the trend. There is an endless supply of fossil fuel which could be cultivated by psychologists, sociologists, social workers, politicians and judicial types in what she had told me in that staccato delivery which only took about thirty seconds. Of course the reverb of such revelations is disorienting. What do you do with a person who has so resigned themselves to their future because of their past? What do you do when that person is fourteen? ***

In another life, across another sea, I would have prayed with this girl. Maybe she would have started crying and her sterile acceptance of fate would have revealed itself to be hope and fear wearing grown-up clothes. Maybe she would have listened without hearing and I would have wasted my breath.  Would I have believed what I said?  It is divine prerogative to adjust course so perhaps revelation would have dawned or supernatural resolve would have been bestowed.  Most likely not.  We probably would have sat in silence after I said “Amen” and listened to the stones skip. 

In this room we just talked about an English project revolving around The Lord of the Flies. We spread a piece of black paper, roughly torn from one of those giant rolls, on the floor and glued magazine pictures and phrases to it. Eventually it looked like a post-modern ransom note. She found a column-header from a political magazine proclaiming in Times New Roman “The Dangers of Democracy.” She had solved the mystery. She knew what the book was about, not merely what it was.

I have no idea what will happen to this girl. Of course this isn’t true, I have a very informed and field-tested idea what will happen to her. But I hate that idea. I will pretend it isn’t there like a child rolling over in bed to ignore the monster that waits in the closet. I will lie to myself and say “I have no idea what will happen to this girl.” In my ignorance sometimes I can convince myself that there is light being bent and impeded by a better future. I squint and see shadows. But there is no sun in this room.

[mandiblepress]

//003

Once there was a man who suffered an existential and very real crisis.  This is what happens when you shake the dust of your driveway from your sandals knowing you’ll never stir it up again.  As one might assume in a story of leaving he does a large bit of going, heading from place to place.  In one such place, though he is unknown and deceitful, that place’s ruler forgives a misdeed and sends aids him in his travel.  After his beloved dies in another place the inhabitants therein offer to facilitate her burial at their own expense, though the going man is unknown and seems to be propelled by conflict.  The traveler is known in famous literature as God’s friend. 

I cannot imagine what it feels like to be a refugee.  I cannot imagine what it feels like to send your children away in hopes that their chances of survival anywhere other than the home you know will increase.   I have no experience with the legitimate fear of death. 

I also cannot fathom the responsibility in leading a country or county or even city.  If all my children are dressed by 7:30 am on a weekday morning I reach for the confetti cannon.  Sometimes I forget to lock the door, I have no business critiquing people who determine how wide to swing the gates on national borders. 

The staggering amount of things I cannot comprehend notwithstanding, I am also far from naive.  I know the country I live in has regularly accepted those in need of refuge reluctantly or at its own benefit.  In fifth grade my class was assigned a project in which we would each research national landmarks.  I was assigned Ellis Island.  I’d probably be much more fun at social functions had I been assigned Yosemite.  I know that the privileged class of American citizen (of which I am a part) itself moved from opportunism (don’t call the pilgrims refugees please, it makes for powerful memes and atrocious history) to oligarchy at a breakneck pace on the backs and blood of Native Americans and African slaves and a globe’s worth of immigrants.  I also know that the ambition of the United States has created as many huddled masses as it has received. 

I have also never accepted a homeless person into my home.  Yet I have also never made the absurd connection between a national stance on admitting refugees from a drastic and brutal civil war to housing a homeless person.  However I certainly see the point--I should not stamp my foot and malign my democratically elected representatives if I could not deign to demonstrate a bit of hospitality myself.  

The refugee story we are probably most familiar with happened somewhere in the neighborhood of 1300 BCE.  A group of former slaves or poverty-entrenched low-caste manual laborers were sent forth from Egypt.  Archeology may not readily support the image of MILLIONS of people marching from Egypt to the Jordan valley but there are historical records of a roaming people-group crashing its way through that area around that time period.  A period that coincided with a general power-vacuum in the land that would become famously known as Canaan.  Some folks believed the story of that grand relocation was recorded as or immediately after it happened.  Others (*raises hand) believe the record was made later, after the decedents of those travelers had been forcefully relocated again.  So either as the refugees are carving out their new homes or as they imagine going “home” someday once again they remember and record the story of their departures and arrivals.  That story also contains the expectations their God has on them in this new home.  One expectation is that they would ideologically and functionally make concessions for the orphan, widow and alien, because they know how it feels to be far from home, away from heart and hearth.  

God, according to this story of travel, tells people to actively identify with the refugee. 

****

The distance from Jesus’ toes to the ground could not have been great.  Roman crosses were designed to be seen not to be towering.  Yet, that distance represented an immense amount of geography.  The earliest followers of Jesus believed in some mysterious way that in the hours of his execution Jesus inhabited humanity’s distance from divine intention.  Somehow Jesus animated our every shameful withdrawal, evasive lie, confessing speech, text of blame and angry rebuttal.   Suspended above the ground Jesus was without refuge.  The expectation remains the same--identify with the refugee.   Jesus knows what it is to be cursed and crooked.  Jesus knows what it is to be a drastic disappointment.  Jesus knows what it is to be confused and coerced.  Jesus knows this because you and I know how these things feel.  And we have brothers and sisters that know how these things feel, who are without home or hope or help.  The expectation is the same--identify with those refugees.  May they come by boat or in bars, by train or text; be they strangers or spouses.  I am at times lost and very much found.  I vacillate between being right where I belong and thoroughly adrift and Jesus promises to be like me at every point on the compass.  Because God goes with the ones who are walking a long road they do not know.