I have stalled in a few spots on the work at hand but I am still composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I certainly won't manage to finish all 24 in less than a few years but I do believe I should be able to get to the halfway point before this year is out. It took Rekhin five years to compose his set so I won't be surprised if it takes me five years to complete mine. It took roughly ten years to finish the four duo sonatas in the cycle for guitar and woodwinds and those are considerably larger works.
Yet it also bears repeating that fugues are among the most complex musical works to write and the guitar is an exceptionally unforgiving instrument for contrapuntal music. Chris Kachian is correct to observe that sustained three-voice counterpoint is impossible on the guitar (composers who are not guitarists should go pick up his Composer's desktop guide to the guitar) There is no trouble, however, with sustained two-part textures that convey the effect of multiple textures.
This two parts in place of three or more brings with it other challenges.Even in works like Bach's fugues for violin stripping everything down to a single line punctuated by chords means you have not sacrificed the implication of thematic development throughout your piece. But I don't feel like getting into all the details of that now.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
the sound of Internet Monk
I've been lurking (as I have for years) on the Bht and Bill's comments about the sound of Michael's voice are funny. The backpedaling about saying that Michael read much smarter than he sounded and Bill having to explain that he's not from the American South is funny. :)
I am not from the Southern United States. I was born and raised on the "left coast" in the Northwest nearly all of my life. But half of my family is of Okie stock (they came over during the Depression period, if memory serves) and another part of my family has roots in Arkansas. So while a significant chunk of my family is as not-Southern as possible (Northwestern American Indian) a decent chunk of my family has roots from the southern regions of the United States. All that is to say that I knew Michael was in Kentucky and I've heard enough music from the South and enough voices from the South that all of that felt, if not natural, unsurprising.
It was that he had nice things to say about the band Rush that completely mystified me. For years I imagined that Geddy Lee was somehow living proof that the tradition of producing castrati had somehow not died!
I am not from the Southern United States. I was born and raised on the "left coast" in the Northwest nearly all of my life. But half of my family is of Okie stock (they came over during the Depression period, if memory serves) and another part of my family has roots in Arkansas. So while a significant chunk of my family is as not-Southern as possible (Northwestern American Indian) a decent chunk of my family has roots from the southern regions of the United States. All that is to say that I knew Michael was in Kentucky and I've heard enough music from the South and enough voices from the South that all of that felt, if not natural, unsurprising.
It was that he had nice things to say about the band Rush that completely mystified me. For years I imagined that Geddy Lee was somehow living proof that the tradition of producing castrati had somehow not died!
Link: Fearsome Tycoon on the passing of Michael Spencer
I said that I couldn't add anything meaningful beyond what other people have said and it's true (it's certainly true for the time being at any rate). As an example, here's a link to something Fearsome Tycoon wrote recently on the passing of Michael Spencer.
http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-on-passing-of-michael.html
Michael's own words seem appropriate:
"If Christianity is not a dying word to dying men, it is not the message of the Bible that gives hope now."
I think about death almost every day. Statistically I'm half-way there for life expectancy. Even in my twenties I considered often the possibility of death. It's easy to die at the hands of someone driving a car. I don't think about death in the way that some would advise you to think about death,in the sense of living life in such a way that at the day of your death you imagine that all these people will be sad that you are gone. Living your life forward toward some imagined legacy for yourself is not exactly what I mean. That is the opposite of what I mean because those sorts of legacy-living Christians have fooled themselves into thinking that Koholeth is wrong.
Or they may persuade themselves that on the day of their death they will stand before God and think that they have built a legacy that God can be proud of. He won't be because it's silly to take credit for the work that God has done through you. Again, these sorts of legacy Christians have fooled themselves into thinking Koholeth was just kidding around when he said that when you die your legacy is forgotten and there is no memory of godly or wise men in the generation to come. We imagine to ourselves that Koholeth is wrong but the truth is borne out in the millions of people whose names we cannot even recognize or conceive of who were living lives with such legacies in mind. If you don't believe me I'll get to examples of the sorts of legacies we REALLY remember and discuss in our time.
As Fearsome puts it, death still wins. We live in an era in which notoriety comes more from being notoriously wicked and cruel than notoriously kind and just. On the basis of Godwin's law alone more people are likely to know about Hitler or Stalin than about some saint who helped the downtrodden or innovated something positive for society. We can go find out about who helped bring the atomic bomb into the world but who were the people who developed the first viable plastics? Canyou name them?
But did Walter Semon ever imagine that his invention would be used to adorn Kate Beckinsale in vampire movies? Heh, dollars to doughnuts he probably never thought of that application. Of course my point is you have to go look this stuff up. The names of people who have made positive and taken-for-granted contributions to society are entirely forgotten while the names of tyrants and armchair philosophers and demagogues who are, in the grand scheme of things, mostly useless remain legends. We remember novelists and entertainers who deigned to tell us how to live our lives ranging from Mark Twain to Huxley to Orwell to Rand to Dostoevsky to Dickens.
Even Christians who talk about legacy can end up talking about the legacy of Marxism or Stalinism or Freudian thought or Darwinism. A lot of Christians talk more about the negative legacies of men they don't admire than about the legacy of Christ. Perhaps that is because though we pay lip service to the legacy of the living Christ which has not yet been formed in us we find it more glamorous and politically compelling to talk about the legacies of people whose ideologies we oppose. A lot of Christian blogging can be about the legacies we want death to remove than about the legacy of the One who has conqured death itself. But this legacy is what makes our prospective legacies count for nothing. Paul sacrificed an unblemished legacy as trash for the sake of Christ. We have the legacy of Paul's writings because he forsook every other legacy he had been working toward his whole life up to that moment of meeting Christ in favor of considering Christ his legacy. The more I reflect upon the cross of Christ the more I believe we fool ourselves into thinking we understand the mystery of it. Our understanding of the scandal of the cross is to put it at the level of a scandal involving Tiger Woods, ostensibly offensive but easily forgotten while we go work on our legacies. The scandal of the cross is the scandal of Christ's death revealing what our legacies are apart from trusting that His legacy alone is sufficient to give life.
I find it no coincidence that it has been from pastors who have daily actually faced death that the most useful warnings have come. Michael's words about death and Matt Chandler's words about how serving Christ will involve staring failure and death in the face to be more compelling than a lot of sermons I have heard in the last ten years. These are men whose legacies will survive because Christ lives and not because God has somehow told them in any other way that they will have a legacy.
Consider those to whom Yahweh promised a lasting legacy,Abram and David. Those legacies were fulfilled in Christ. Consider every other part of the legacies of these men and you will see how miserable, brutish, and sin-riddled those legacies of Abraham and David are. Their descendents went into slavery, exile, idolatry, banishment, war, and suffering. But when we come to Christ, the second Adam, the legacy is fulfilled. Our faith is that Christ Himself is the fulfillment of whatever legacies God may (or may not have) promised to us and our ancestors and our descendents.
But we don't really believe that, do we? Why else would we work toward legacies in which our names are even remembered? This is not simply an allure for people in the arts but also in preaching. And why not? Who among the arts would object to having a literary and pastoral legacy on the order of John Donne? I admit that I find the idea appealing even though I have no desire to be a pastor and am at best only able to say that I am a competent and rather boring poet. But consider Donne's passion for moments and we'll see that his passion was not directed at his legacy as such. In Christ those who are remembered are remembered for considering Christ more worth remembering than their own names. If we remember their names we are blessed with the opportunity to live out the Psalmist's advice to make the godly men and women of the land our heroes to emulate regardless of the era in which we live.
Yet we don't even know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews yet that author's words speak across millenia to challenge us to perservere in the faith. We have scholars debating about who Koholeth even was and yet Koholeth's words have been preserved for us in the scriptures. A name like Obadiah is common enough that we have trouble saying who he was.
I am glad to have read Internet Monk for these last eight years. His work has been a blessing and an encouragement to me. As I have said before I owe my being at the church I am at to Michael linking to a great sermon on Psalm 41. It can be popular to cite John the Baptist's words, "He must become greater and greater while I must become less and less." Do we really remember where that trajectory of less and less ended? It ended in execution because a power-hungry king felt he couldn't break a silly promise he made to a dancing girl. This is the trajectory of a man who sent disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one we have been waiting for or should we seek another?" Even a man as great in the faith as John struggled at the end of his life with a panoply of doubt and discouragement in the face of both death and uncertainty that the one he baptised was the one who was promised.
It is fitting that the pastors who have faced death and the one who has been taken by death are the ones whose sermons and writings stick with me now because they in that have shared supremely in the death of Christ and will at the end of all things share in that life.
http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-on-passing-of-michael.html
Michael's own words seem appropriate:
"If Christianity is not a dying word to dying men, it is not the message of the Bible that gives hope now."
I think about death almost every day. Statistically I'm half-way there for life expectancy. Even in my twenties I considered often the possibility of death. It's easy to die at the hands of someone driving a car. I don't think about death in the way that some would advise you to think about death,in the sense of living life in such a way that at the day of your death you imagine that all these people will be sad that you are gone. Living your life forward toward some imagined legacy for yourself is not exactly what I mean. That is the opposite of what I mean because those sorts of legacy-living Christians have fooled themselves into thinking that Koholeth is wrong.
Or they may persuade themselves that on the day of their death they will stand before God and think that they have built a legacy that God can be proud of. He won't be because it's silly to take credit for the work that God has done through you. Again, these sorts of legacy Christians have fooled themselves into thinking Koholeth was just kidding around when he said that when you die your legacy is forgotten and there is no memory of godly or wise men in the generation to come. We imagine to ourselves that Koholeth is wrong but the truth is borne out in the millions of people whose names we cannot even recognize or conceive of who were living lives with such legacies in mind. If you don't believe me I'll get to examples of the sorts of legacies we REALLY remember and discuss in our time.
As Fearsome puts it, death still wins. We live in an era in which notoriety comes more from being notoriously wicked and cruel than notoriously kind and just. On the basis of Godwin's law alone more people are likely to know about Hitler or Stalin than about some saint who helped the downtrodden or innovated something positive for society. We can go find out about who helped bring the atomic bomb into the world but who were the people who developed the first viable plastics? Canyou name them?
But did Walter Semon ever imagine that his invention would be used to adorn Kate Beckinsale in vampire movies? Heh, dollars to doughnuts he probably never thought of that application. Of course my point is you have to go look this stuff up. The names of people who have made positive and taken-for-granted contributions to society are entirely forgotten while the names of tyrants and armchair philosophers and demagogues who are, in the grand scheme of things, mostly useless remain legends. We remember novelists and entertainers who deigned to tell us how to live our lives ranging from Mark Twain to Huxley to Orwell to Rand to Dostoevsky to Dickens.
Even Christians who talk about legacy can end up talking about the legacy of Marxism or Stalinism or Freudian thought or Darwinism. A lot of Christians talk more about the negative legacies of men they don't admire than about the legacy of Christ. Perhaps that is because though we pay lip service to the legacy of the living Christ which has not yet been formed in us we find it more glamorous and politically compelling to talk about the legacies of people whose ideologies we oppose. A lot of Christian blogging can be about the legacies we want death to remove than about the legacy of the One who has conqured death itself. But this legacy is what makes our prospective legacies count for nothing. Paul sacrificed an unblemished legacy as trash for the sake of Christ. We have the legacy of Paul's writings because he forsook every other legacy he had been working toward his whole life up to that moment of meeting Christ in favor of considering Christ his legacy. The more I reflect upon the cross of Christ the more I believe we fool ourselves into thinking we understand the mystery of it. Our understanding of the scandal of the cross is to put it at the level of a scandal involving Tiger Woods, ostensibly offensive but easily forgotten while we go work on our legacies. The scandal of the cross is the scandal of Christ's death revealing what our legacies are apart from trusting that His legacy alone is sufficient to give life.
I find it no coincidence that it has been from pastors who have daily actually faced death that the most useful warnings have come. Michael's words about death and Matt Chandler's words about how serving Christ will involve staring failure and death in the face to be more compelling than a lot of sermons I have heard in the last ten years. These are men whose legacies will survive because Christ lives and not because God has somehow told them in any other way that they will have a legacy.
Consider those to whom Yahweh promised a lasting legacy,Abram and David. Those legacies were fulfilled in Christ. Consider every other part of the legacies of these men and you will see how miserable, brutish, and sin-riddled those legacies of Abraham and David are. Their descendents went into slavery, exile, idolatry, banishment, war, and suffering. But when we come to Christ, the second Adam, the legacy is fulfilled. Our faith is that Christ Himself is the fulfillment of whatever legacies God may (or may not have) promised to us and our ancestors and our descendents.
But we don't really believe that, do we? Why else would we work toward legacies in which our names are even remembered? This is not simply an allure for people in the arts but also in preaching. And why not? Who among the arts would object to having a literary and pastoral legacy on the order of John Donne? I admit that I find the idea appealing even though I have no desire to be a pastor and am at best only able to say that I am a competent and rather boring poet. But consider Donne's passion for moments and we'll see that his passion was not directed at his legacy as such. In Christ those who are remembered are remembered for considering Christ more worth remembering than their own names. If we remember their names we are blessed with the opportunity to live out the Psalmist's advice to make the godly men and women of the land our heroes to emulate regardless of the era in which we live.
Yet we don't even know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews yet that author's words speak across millenia to challenge us to perservere in the faith. We have scholars debating about who Koholeth even was and yet Koholeth's words have been preserved for us in the scriptures. A name like Obadiah is common enough that we have trouble saying who he was.
I am glad to have read Internet Monk for these last eight years. His work has been a blessing and an encouragement to me. As I have said before I owe my being at the church I am at to Michael linking to a great sermon on Psalm 41. It can be popular to cite John the Baptist's words, "He must become greater and greater while I must become less and less." Do we really remember where that trajectory of less and less ended? It ended in execution because a power-hungry king felt he couldn't break a silly promise he made to a dancing girl. This is the trajectory of a man who sent disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one we have been waiting for or should we seek another?" Even a man as great in the faith as John struggled at the end of his life with a panoply of doubt and discouragement in the face of both death and uncertainty that the one he baptised was the one who was promised.
It is fitting that the pastors who have faced death and the one who has been taken by death are the ones whose sermons and writings stick with me now because they in that have shared supremely in the death of Christ and will at the end of all things share in that life.
Link: No Voices Inside My Head (Bill MacKinnon)
http://www.internetmonk.com/articles/V/voicehead.html
Out of consideration of iMonk's passing this week I wanted to link to one of the more memorable, enjoyable, and useful entries in his blog by a friend of his. Bill's comments and jokes ring especially true for me because I have a Pentecostal background and because I have been around a few people who claim to have gotten IM's from the Almighty about any number of things without explaining how they just know they heard these things or got these emails.
Even preachers who say we should not expect these sorts of missives to be normative can still manage to talk as though those things are normative ... for them. The most honest comment I ever heard about hearing from God and reading the scriptures came from an AG youth pastor who told me that, for real ninety percent of the time he read the scriptures and didn't feel like he was getting anything out of it. He was studying to make sure he knew what the Lord said through the scriptures. On the other hand, that ten percent of the time where the Lord used scripture to potently speak to his circumstances would get larger the more time he spent studying the scriptures and, in any case, even that ten percent is something to be grateful for as a gift from the Lord.
It is ironic that in my life an Assemblies of God youth pastor did the most important work in demystifying the process of studying the scriptures to appreciate that in most of your life God won't seem to be talking to you at all and that even in your private study of scripture you shouldn't expect to read the Bible and have some pointed personal message for YOU that day. The older I get the more I realize I was blessed to have an exceptional, unusual Assemblies of God youth pastor as a mentor in my teens. He was one of the first people to tell me that God generally never speaks to you through voices inside your head and that it is good to be grateful for the relatively few times when Scripture, if you will "comes alive". It is alive even if it doesn't seem to be alive "for you".
Out of consideration of iMonk's passing this week I wanted to link to one of the more memorable, enjoyable, and useful entries in his blog by a friend of his. Bill's comments and jokes ring especially true for me because I have a Pentecostal background and because I have been around a few people who claim to have gotten IM's from the Almighty about any number of things without explaining how they just know they heard these things or got these emails.
Even preachers who say we should not expect these sorts of missives to be normative can still manage to talk as though those things are normative ... for them. The most honest comment I ever heard about hearing from God and reading the scriptures came from an AG youth pastor who told me that, for real ninety percent of the time he read the scriptures and didn't feel like he was getting anything out of it. He was studying to make sure he knew what the Lord said through the scriptures. On the other hand, that ten percent of the time where the Lord used scripture to potently speak to his circumstances would get larger the more time he spent studying the scriptures and, in any case, even that ten percent is something to be grateful for as a gift from the Lord.
It is ironic that in my life an Assemblies of God youth pastor did the most important work in demystifying the process of studying the scriptures to appreciate that in most of your life God won't seem to be talking to you at all and that even in your private study of scripture you shouldn't expect to read the Bible and have some pointed personal message for YOU that day. The older I get the more I realize I was blessed to have an exceptional, unusual Assemblies of God youth pastor as a mentor in my teens. He was one of the first people to tell me that God generally never speaks to you through voices inside your head and that it is good to be grateful for the relatively few times when Scripture, if you will "comes alive". It is alive even if it doesn't seem to be alive "for you".
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
A champion among stupid theological statements: God won't give you anything you can't handle
Over the years I have heard any number of theological aphorisms that on closer inspection turn out to be false. The whole book of Ecclesiastes is best read as a reflection on the limits of the best wisdom human experience has to offer. Rather than see it as the book of some guy who cynically disobeyed God and whose judgment can't be trusted we should remember that every word of the scriptures is inspired and consider that if one of the authors of scriputres throws up his hands in exasperation at the limits of even the best wisdom we should be wary of simplifying what is complex and remember that that which is crooked cannot be made straight.
Yet we always want to simplify and straighten. Among stupid simplifying and straightening statements in theology none seems more perncious to me now than the axiom "God won't give you anything you can't handle." Now if by that statement someone just means to say "there is no temptation but is common to man", okay. But if the idea is that God won't give you a mission you can't accomplish, well, then that's grossly mistaken.
Not one of the saints in scripture met the end of their lives saying "mission accomplished". Moses died outside the promised land with the knowledge that an entire generation of God's people would die in the wilderness due to their faithlessness. Joshua did not really complete the conquest of Canaan. None of the judges managed to secure more than a temporary reprieve on injustice and war. The kings were generally mitigated disasters. Even Elijah, arguably greatest among the OT prophets, failed to accomplish two things God explicitly and directly commanded him to do (annoint Hazael king of Aram and annoint Jehu king of Israel). Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac and then stopped. God promised Abraham that his descendents would be enslaved in a foreign land for centuries and THAT came to pass long after Abraham was dead.
The pioneers of our faith are failures through and through. Luther did not manage to reform the western church. It splintered. The Puritans failed to reform the church of England and pioneered Presbyterianism. Our best attempts with what we are sure are the most God-given reasons end in failure. There are those who would say this is a sign that God is not really on our side because you can't argue with success and failure is the most compelling argument for God's disfavor. The kingdom divided because of wicked kings but did that mean that Israel stopped being God's chosen people? Did that nullify the promises God made to Abraham or David? By no means!
Yet we are people who like to believe that when it really matters our failures are the surest proof of God's disapproval. We still have a kind of spirituality where we pay lip service to the idea of considering God before men but still believe that we can manage to hold our heads high in front of others because if God is really on our side no one can stop us. We don't really rejoice when we feel we are persecuted for the sake of Christ. Our idea of persecution is that unbelievers think Christians are jerks who believe God approves of them by giving them awesome parking spots going to the mall or that their favorite athletics team won the series. We think of persecution as the neighbors speaking poorly of our church for eating up local real estate and seeming bent on altering the fiscal and political landscape through subculture-wide breeding programs. We consider this persecution? While Michael Spenser was alive I believe he rightly called this sort of thing out as a particularly obnoxious form of self-pity.
Now if God actually only ever gives you no more than you can handle then some saints have aptly joked that it would be nice if God thought less of what they could handle! Let us consider the greatest pioneer of the Christian faith, faith in the power of the coming Christ. Let us consider the one who is often rightly called the first Christian. Why is Mary most blessed among women? For being constantly under the suspicion of being a lying adulteress whose bastard son was executed because he was yet another rab-burrough Palestinian anti-Roman terrorist in waiting? Jesus was our pioneer in death and failure even though He has the words of life. I can say that it's always a temptation to want a resurrection without crucifixion but it is also a huge temptation to still see crucifixion as a sign of failure.
If we tell someone like Mary "God won't give you anything that you can't handle" what do we mean by that? What can we mean by it? If we tell Christians that God won't send you on an impossible mission we don't understand the Lord or ourselves. The Lord saw that after generations upon generations the mission was impossible. In fact Yahweh tells Moses in the most potent terms possible that Israel was GOING TO FAIL! The mission was going to be a complete disaster. The team was going to give up, sell out, and go home. God called Abraham out of the realm of Babylon and he willingly went but after centuries of recalcitrance Israel was sent by war and exile back into the very land of Babylon out of which the great ancestor of the faith had been called. What Israel as a whole did with Yahweh and His appointed prophets, priests, and kings Jesus' own disciples did to Him at Gethsemane. Christ Himself knows what it is like to face unanswered prayers and to be sent on a mission that ends in death. Christ embraced a failure greater than any we fear so as to give us the gift of a victory we cannot obtain, a victory that is beyond what we are really capable of fully imagining.
Yet why, after all of this testimony in the scriptures and the lives of the saints do we persist in supposing that God does, in fact, somehow have this rule that He won't give us anything we can't handle? Do we not remember that the Lord is the first inventor of impossible missions? God tells Noah to build a boat when it had not rained. God comes to Abram and says that through his descendents a great nation will be made. Abram rightly says that that is impossible because he is an old man and his wife is barren. Moses is sent to be the human agent of rescue for a people whom God will spend a generation crushing in the wilderness for their unbelief and disobedience, their unwillingness to trust in His goodness. God comes to the ancestor of our faith with an impossible mission and yet we delude ourselves and each other into thinking that God won't give us anything beyond what we can handle?
Yet we always want to simplify and straighten. Among stupid simplifying and straightening statements in theology none seems more perncious to me now than the axiom "God won't give you anything you can't handle." Now if by that statement someone just means to say "there is no temptation but is common to man", okay. But if the idea is that God won't give you a mission you can't accomplish, well, then that's grossly mistaken.
Not one of the saints in scripture met the end of their lives saying "mission accomplished". Moses died outside the promised land with the knowledge that an entire generation of God's people would die in the wilderness due to their faithlessness. Joshua did not really complete the conquest of Canaan. None of the judges managed to secure more than a temporary reprieve on injustice and war. The kings were generally mitigated disasters. Even Elijah, arguably greatest among the OT prophets, failed to accomplish two things God explicitly and directly commanded him to do (annoint Hazael king of Aram and annoint Jehu king of Israel). Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac and then stopped. God promised Abraham that his descendents would be enslaved in a foreign land for centuries and THAT came to pass long after Abraham was dead.
The pioneers of our faith are failures through and through. Luther did not manage to reform the western church. It splintered. The Puritans failed to reform the church of England and pioneered Presbyterianism. Our best attempts with what we are sure are the most God-given reasons end in failure. There are those who would say this is a sign that God is not really on our side because you can't argue with success and failure is the most compelling argument for God's disfavor. The kingdom divided because of wicked kings but did that mean that Israel stopped being God's chosen people? Did that nullify the promises God made to Abraham or David? By no means!
Yet we are people who like to believe that when it really matters our failures are the surest proof of God's disapproval. We still have a kind of spirituality where we pay lip service to the idea of considering God before men but still believe that we can manage to hold our heads high in front of others because if God is really on our side no one can stop us. We don't really rejoice when we feel we are persecuted for the sake of Christ. Our idea of persecution is that unbelievers think Christians are jerks who believe God approves of them by giving them awesome parking spots going to the mall or that their favorite athletics team won the series. We think of persecution as the neighbors speaking poorly of our church for eating up local real estate and seeming bent on altering the fiscal and political landscape through subculture-wide breeding programs. We consider this persecution? While Michael Spenser was alive I believe he rightly called this sort of thing out as a particularly obnoxious form of self-pity.
Now if God actually only ever gives you no more than you can handle then some saints have aptly joked that it would be nice if God thought less of what they could handle! Let us consider the greatest pioneer of the Christian faith, faith in the power of the coming Christ. Let us consider the one who is often rightly called the first Christian. Why is Mary most blessed among women? For being constantly under the suspicion of being a lying adulteress whose bastard son was executed because he was yet another rab-burrough Palestinian anti-Roman terrorist in waiting? Jesus was our pioneer in death and failure even though He has the words of life. I can say that it's always a temptation to want a resurrection without crucifixion but it is also a huge temptation to still see crucifixion as a sign of failure.
If we tell someone like Mary "God won't give you anything that you can't handle" what do we mean by that? What can we mean by it? If we tell Christians that God won't send you on an impossible mission we don't understand the Lord or ourselves. The Lord saw that after generations upon generations the mission was impossible. In fact Yahweh tells Moses in the most potent terms possible that Israel was GOING TO FAIL! The mission was going to be a complete disaster. The team was going to give up, sell out, and go home. God called Abraham out of the realm of Babylon and he willingly went but after centuries of recalcitrance Israel was sent by war and exile back into the very land of Babylon out of which the great ancestor of the faith had been called. What Israel as a whole did with Yahweh and His appointed prophets, priests, and kings Jesus' own disciples did to Him at Gethsemane. Christ Himself knows what it is like to face unanswered prayers and to be sent on a mission that ends in death. Christ embraced a failure greater than any we fear so as to give us the gift of a victory we cannot obtain, a victory that is beyond what we are really capable of fully imagining.
Yet why, after all of this testimony in the scriptures and the lives of the saints do we persist in supposing that God does, in fact, somehow have this rule that He won't give us anything we can't handle? Do we not remember that the Lord is the first inventor of impossible missions? God tells Noah to build a boat when it had not rained. God comes to Abram and says that through his descendents a great nation will be made. Abram rightly says that that is impossible because he is an old man and his wife is barren. Moses is sent to be the human agent of rescue for a people whom God will spend a generation crushing in the wilderness for their unbelief and disobedience, their unwillingness to trust in His goodness. God comes to the ancestor of our faith with an impossible mission and yet we delude ourselves and each other into thinking that God won't give us anything beyond what we can handle?
A small parable about the history of prophetic literature
http://xkcd.com/723/
Of course that's not literally what it is about but the observations are applicable to anyone with a thorough knowledge of prophetic literature and how people have responded to it in its time.
Of course that's not literally what it is about but the observations are applicable to anyone with a thorough knowledge of prophetic literature and how people have responded to it in its time.
Transfiguration and failures
This is not quite an Easter reflection but it is a sort of Easter reflection. The resurrection of Christ is the ultimate demonstration that Yahweh uses what is considered of no account to bring to no account those things and people that are considered great in this age. God was pleased to use those things that are nothing to bring to nothing those things that are. This is not merely true of Christ Himself, it is also true even of those who were with Him at the transfiguration.
Consider the life of Moses. As Matt Chandler so ably expounded in a sermon, Moses' ministry ended in abject failure. He saw God declare that an entire generation of His chosen people would die in the wilderness because of their disobedience. Yes, Moses received the stone tablets and the law and it was that law that revealed not only how fully God's people had failed to be God's people but the law itself came full of the promise of inevitable failure. I do not think that evangelicals in America in particular appreciate how fully and inevitably the Mosaic law comes with the predction of failure not onloy for Israel in some abstracted historical sense but also as a warning to us, as Paul takes some pains to explain.
Moses was God's appointed man, a chosen one, a man annointed with the task of leading Israel out of Egypt. Moses, through God's power, did that ... sort of ... but not really. They merely went out of Egypt through God's divine power but they died in the wilderness under God's wrath. Yet Israel's failure was not credited to Moses. Moses failed on his own terms, in anger striking the rock when he merely needed to speak to it. Now a pastor could explain that since the rock that is Christ had been struck once before there was no need to strike the rock a second time.
I would propose that a less allegorical reading that still gets to this weakness is that Moses had been so accustomed to being the conduit of God's laws and God's words to Israel he presumed upon both the content and necessity of his mediation and did not realize that his responsibility was a gift to be considered a gift. If you will, we could describe it as a privilege rather than a right. He had the responsibility to lead them out of Egypt but Israel's entrance into the promised land, clearly, was a privilege that could be revoked. Moses died a failure who saw from far off what he could not enter into. Yet by faith Moses trusted in the goodness of God and in God's promises. Moses knew that the Lord spoke the truth in predicting the failure of Israel to keep covenant and the need for covenant renewal.
So if Moses' ministry ended in failure what about Elijah, considered the greatest among the prophets for raising the dead and destroying kingdoms? Elijah fled as soon as Jezebel declared that he would die. He was restored to his ministry by the Lord and went forth in power ... yet two things God specifically commanded Elijah to do Elijah did not, in fact, ever do. Annointing Hazael as king of Aram Elijah left undon and that task was accomplished by Elisha. The annointing of Jehu as king was handed off by Elisha to another, which means Elijah's failure to annoint Jehu is literally twice removed since not even his prophetic protege accomplished the task on his behalf in obedience to God's command.
We must appreciate here that if the law-giver failed in his administration of the law because of the hardness of the people; and if the prophets served the role of challenging the people to recognize their failure to uphold the law; that just as the law itself is unable to give life then just as terribly the prophet is unable to convince people to follow the laws they are already not following. In Christian preaching and teaching we can persuade ourselves that even if people do not desire to follow the laws of God that if you just scream at them prophetically enough that they will be induced to become obedient because they feel bad about being failures. Now this failure is very real and that is why we need Christ as our mediator and the Lord as our sustainer ... but we should be reminded that Elijah as well as Moses ended his life a failure, as one who explicitly had NOT done the things that God had explicitly commanded of him.
And then there were the kings, those predicted by both the laws and the prophet. Moses revealed on God's behalf that one day there would be a time and a place for a king. We know from the entire line of Samuel through Kings and Chronicles that these kings were perhaps the greatest failures. If the law failed to convict and quicken life in its hearers; and if the prophets failed to challenge God's people to be obedient to the law; then the kings went seveeral steps furhter and actively encouraged the people through boththeir precepts and actions to run AWAY from Yahweh. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized because when we speak of these things we are talking about the Lord's chosen people.
We are not told what Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah about at the mountain during the Transfiguration. We know that after this moment Jesus began to speak more plainly about the necessity of His death and of the coming resurrection. At the risk of speculating based on what the scriptures reveal as the failures of both Moses and Elijah I imagine that Jesus, as God the Son, had an opportunity to explain to Moses and Elijah (who had been taken up in a fiery chariot and had not tasted death) that where they had failed He would now succeed. He would succeed in accomplishing the aim of the Law that Israel and its human mediator in law-giving could not do. He would succeed in challenging God's people to consider the scope of that law from the heart as even the greatest of prophets, Elijah, had failed to do. Furthermore, Jesus as the Christ would accomplish as king the defeat of enemies that waylaid every previous king in Israel, the enemies of sin and death.
Yet to obtain this victory would entail embracing a failure greater than any failure known by Moses the law-giver or Elijah the prophet. Jesus would embrace death on a cross on charges of blasphemy and anti-Roman terrorism. Jesus would be summarily executed for being, in our contemporary terms, some Palestinian sectarian religious terrorist who was presented as a threat to the liberties of contemporary Western society and enlightenment. He was seen as yet another upstart Palestinian attemping to foment a revolution that would revive the glory days of a long-lost pathetic rabble of a bygone Middle Eastern petty empire.
Ever since swine had been offered in sacrifice to Zeus on the altar from the days of Antiochus there had been an abomination that desolates and signs of it everywhere. The failures of God's people were not only present but these failures could be seen as signs of God's continuing lack of favor. Israel was still languishing in a mixture of failure and violent attempts to obtain success.
Christ announced the acceptable year of the Lord but with it came an announcement that Israel had failed and failed at every level. The cursed fig tree, the unharvested harvest, the Gentiles who would one day be part of the harvest, Jesus announced all these things and announced that there was greater faith outside the chosen people than within it. Jesus also declared that those most eager to get "back to the Bible" were the worst offenders. It can be easy to domesticate this criticism as that of the "religous" in Jesus' day without seeing the implications of it for our own time. Jesus would have a stern rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" Christianity. Jesus would also have a rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" manhood and womanhood. I am not particularly an egalitarian, mind you, but when Jesus said to Martha that Mary had chosen the better part and it would not be denied her that involved letting Mary ignore that societal limitations of what was expected of her as a woman in that age.
Consider the mother of the Lord, Mary. She went her whole life being considered by at least some to have been a liar and a fornicator at best. She went through life a nobody and constantly under the suspicion of being an adulteress, a liar, and a freak. She could have, in our most pious reconstructions, known that Jesus was going to die but since the annunciation would have happened while she was still a teenaged girl possibly as young as twelve it is not likely that she had a category for the kind of warrior her son would grow up to be. She saw her son dying on the cross and the gospels attest that in some cases Jesus' family thought He was beside himself, possibly not even in His right mind.
The good news of Jesus' life and death as the Christ is arguably the most horrific experience any mother could ever have. So in every respect she is our forerunner in the faith, witnessing firsthand the ways in which Jesus was seen as stricken by God. Mary saw her son so transfigured by crucifixion as to seem not even human. By this time she must have lost her husband as well, because it was John to whom Christ entrusted the care of His mother. Mary was then like Naomi but did not take for herself the name Mara because of the bitterness of losing both her husband and her son, the loss of the son being quite literally more excruciating for her because she was losing her son to a cross.
Jesus' adversaries said, "We are not born out of wedlock. We know who our father is." Jesus was seen as a bastard by his religous opponents in every possible sense of that term, from its most literal to its most figurative interpretation. Christ embraced a level of shame and degradation and failure that we spend our entire lives running from, avoiding, convincging ourselves we have not attained or cannot possibly attain.
The Transfiguration functions as both fulfillment and tacit rebuke. In it we get a glimpse of the Christ we hope Him to be and see that He communes with the greats of the past both in giving laws and in speaking with prophetic power. Yet these greats are still ultimately failures and this is a sobering lesson I must continually revisit and learn anew each step of my life. As Matt Chandler put it, lots of people go into ministry wanting the victorious stuff of deposing kings and raising the dead and putting armies to flight, not hiding in caves or wearing animal skins and being derilect. We want the glory now and not to see that to have it said of us that the world was not worthy of us also really means that we were not considered worthy of the world. We do not believe, really, that God has truly chosen to use those things that are nothing to make nothing those things that are.
The Transfiguration makes the scandal of Jesus' death on the Cross all the more unbearable and His apparent failure all the more complete. It is the Transfiguration we hope for without the path to the Cross. We do not see that even in the Transfiguration the path of the Cross is still there in the failures of those men who were permitted to speak with Christ on the mountain. Moses failed and Elijah failed and Christ was about to go forward to a failure even more scandalous and horrifying than the failures of either Moses or Elijah. They failed as prophets who were recognized as truly serving the Lord, Christ would fail to be recognized even as a prophet and would be killed as a blasphemer and a bastard. Moses and Elijah were never considered guilty of the emblematic failures of the people they spoke to, Christ was considered stricken by God and possessed by devils. Moses and Elijah proclaimed the Lord's warning and desires to the people, Jesus was executed as a man leading the people astray from the mission given to them by Yahweh.
It is so perilously easy to want the path of Transfiguration without realizing that it leads straightaway into Golgotha. The path of Transfiguration is what people invoke, whether they know it or not, when they parrot "If my people ... " as a way to revive the fortunes of America little knowing the import of the scriptures they happily distort for the sake of the same national glory Jesus' adversaries sought to preserve in their own time. Paradoxically to surpass the failures of Moses and Elijah Christ had to embrace failure and defeat more scandalous than either those failures had ever known. Yet it was through this miserable, horrific failure Christ purchased on our behalf both peace and victory.
Though the misery is real it is still better to be counted among the losers with Jesus than the winners of earth.
Consider the life of Moses. As Matt Chandler so ably expounded in a sermon, Moses' ministry ended in abject failure. He saw God declare that an entire generation of His chosen people would die in the wilderness because of their disobedience. Yes, Moses received the stone tablets and the law and it was that law that revealed not only how fully God's people had failed to be God's people but the law itself came full of the promise of inevitable failure. I do not think that evangelicals in America in particular appreciate how fully and inevitably the Mosaic law comes with the predction of failure not onloy for Israel in some abstracted historical sense but also as a warning to us, as Paul takes some pains to explain.
Moses was God's appointed man, a chosen one, a man annointed with the task of leading Israel out of Egypt. Moses, through God's power, did that ... sort of ... but not really. They merely went out of Egypt through God's divine power but they died in the wilderness under God's wrath. Yet Israel's failure was not credited to Moses. Moses failed on his own terms, in anger striking the rock when he merely needed to speak to it. Now a pastor could explain that since the rock that is Christ had been struck once before there was no need to strike the rock a second time.
I would propose that a less allegorical reading that still gets to this weakness is that Moses had been so accustomed to being the conduit of God's laws and God's words to Israel he presumed upon both the content and necessity of his mediation and did not realize that his responsibility was a gift to be considered a gift. If you will, we could describe it as a privilege rather than a right. He had the responsibility to lead them out of Egypt but Israel's entrance into the promised land, clearly, was a privilege that could be revoked. Moses died a failure who saw from far off what he could not enter into. Yet by faith Moses trusted in the goodness of God and in God's promises. Moses knew that the Lord spoke the truth in predicting the failure of Israel to keep covenant and the need for covenant renewal.
So if Moses' ministry ended in failure what about Elijah, considered the greatest among the prophets for raising the dead and destroying kingdoms? Elijah fled as soon as Jezebel declared that he would die. He was restored to his ministry by the Lord and went forth in power ... yet two things God specifically commanded Elijah to do Elijah did not, in fact, ever do. Annointing Hazael as king of Aram Elijah left undon and that task was accomplished by Elisha. The annointing of Jehu as king was handed off by Elisha to another, which means Elijah's failure to annoint Jehu is literally twice removed since not even his prophetic protege accomplished the task on his behalf in obedience to God's command.
We must appreciate here that if the law-giver failed in his administration of the law because of the hardness of the people; and if the prophets served the role of challenging the people to recognize their failure to uphold the law; that just as the law itself is unable to give life then just as terribly the prophet is unable to convince people to follow the laws they are already not following. In Christian preaching and teaching we can persuade ourselves that even if people do not desire to follow the laws of God that if you just scream at them prophetically enough that they will be induced to become obedient because they feel bad about being failures. Now this failure is very real and that is why we need Christ as our mediator and the Lord as our sustainer ... but we should be reminded that Elijah as well as Moses ended his life a failure, as one who explicitly had NOT done the things that God had explicitly commanded of him.
And then there were the kings, those predicted by both the laws and the prophet. Moses revealed on God's behalf that one day there would be a time and a place for a king. We know from the entire line of Samuel through Kings and Chronicles that these kings were perhaps the greatest failures. If the law failed to convict and quicken life in its hearers; and if the prophets failed to challenge God's people to be obedient to the law; then the kings went seveeral steps furhter and actively encouraged the people through boththeir precepts and actions to run AWAY from Yahweh. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized because when we speak of these things we are talking about the Lord's chosen people.
We are not told what Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah about at the mountain during the Transfiguration. We know that after this moment Jesus began to speak more plainly about the necessity of His death and of the coming resurrection. At the risk of speculating based on what the scriptures reveal as the failures of both Moses and Elijah I imagine that Jesus, as God the Son, had an opportunity to explain to Moses and Elijah (who had been taken up in a fiery chariot and had not tasted death) that where they had failed He would now succeed. He would succeed in accomplishing the aim of the Law that Israel and its human mediator in law-giving could not do. He would succeed in challenging God's people to consider the scope of that law from the heart as even the greatest of prophets, Elijah, had failed to do. Furthermore, Jesus as the Christ would accomplish as king the defeat of enemies that waylaid every previous king in Israel, the enemies of sin and death.
Yet to obtain this victory would entail embracing a failure greater than any failure known by Moses the law-giver or Elijah the prophet. Jesus would embrace death on a cross on charges of blasphemy and anti-Roman terrorism. Jesus would be summarily executed for being, in our contemporary terms, some Palestinian sectarian religious terrorist who was presented as a threat to the liberties of contemporary Western society and enlightenment. He was seen as yet another upstart Palestinian attemping to foment a revolution that would revive the glory days of a long-lost pathetic rabble of a bygone Middle Eastern petty empire.
Ever since swine had been offered in sacrifice to Zeus on the altar from the days of Antiochus there had been an abomination that desolates and signs of it everywhere. The failures of God's people were not only present but these failures could be seen as signs of God's continuing lack of favor. Israel was still languishing in a mixture of failure and violent attempts to obtain success.
Christ announced the acceptable year of the Lord but with it came an announcement that Israel had failed and failed at every level. The cursed fig tree, the unharvested harvest, the Gentiles who would one day be part of the harvest, Jesus announced all these things and announced that there was greater faith outside the chosen people than within it. Jesus also declared that those most eager to get "back to the Bible" were the worst offenders. It can be easy to domesticate this criticism as that of the "religous" in Jesus' day without seeing the implications of it for our own time. Jesus would have a stern rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" Christianity. Jesus would also have a rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" manhood and womanhood. I am not particularly an egalitarian, mind you, but when Jesus said to Martha that Mary had chosen the better part and it would not be denied her that involved letting Mary ignore that societal limitations of what was expected of her as a woman in that age.
Consider the mother of the Lord, Mary. She went her whole life being considered by at least some to have been a liar and a fornicator at best. She went through life a nobody and constantly under the suspicion of being an adulteress, a liar, and a freak. She could have, in our most pious reconstructions, known that Jesus was going to die but since the annunciation would have happened while she was still a teenaged girl possibly as young as twelve it is not likely that she had a category for the kind of warrior her son would grow up to be. She saw her son dying on the cross and the gospels attest that in some cases Jesus' family thought He was beside himself, possibly not even in His right mind.
The good news of Jesus' life and death as the Christ is arguably the most horrific experience any mother could ever have. So in every respect she is our forerunner in the faith, witnessing firsthand the ways in which Jesus was seen as stricken by God. Mary saw her son so transfigured by crucifixion as to seem not even human. By this time she must have lost her husband as well, because it was John to whom Christ entrusted the care of His mother. Mary was then like Naomi but did not take for herself the name Mara because of the bitterness of losing both her husband and her son, the loss of the son being quite literally more excruciating for her because she was losing her son to a cross.
Jesus' adversaries said, "We are not born out of wedlock. We know who our father is." Jesus was seen as a bastard by his religous opponents in every possible sense of that term, from its most literal to its most figurative interpretation. Christ embraced a level of shame and degradation and failure that we spend our entire lives running from, avoiding, convincging ourselves we have not attained or cannot possibly attain.
The Transfiguration functions as both fulfillment and tacit rebuke. In it we get a glimpse of the Christ we hope Him to be and see that He communes with the greats of the past both in giving laws and in speaking with prophetic power. Yet these greats are still ultimately failures and this is a sobering lesson I must continually revisit and learn anew each step of my life. As Matt Chandler put it, lots of people go into ministry wanting the victorious stuff of deposing kings and raising the dead and putting armies to flight, not hiding in caves or wearing animal skins and being derilect. We want the glory now and not to see that to have it said of us that the world was not worthy of us also really means that we were not considered worthy of the world. We do not believe, really, that God has truly chosen to use those things that are nothing to make nothing those things that are.
The Transfiguration makes the scandal of Jesus' death on the Cross all the more unbearable and His apparent failure all the more complete. It is the Transfiguration we hope for without the path to the Cross. We do not see that even in the Transfiguration the path of the Cross is still there in the failures of those men who were permitted to speak with Christ on the mountain. Moses failed and Elijah failed and Christ was about to go forward to a failure even more scandalous and horrifying than the failures of either Moses or Elijah. They failed as prophets who were recognized as truly serving the Lord, Christ would fail to be recognized even as a prophet and would be killed as a blasphemer and a bastard. Moses and Elijah were never considered guilty of the emblematic failures of the people they spoke to, Christ was considered stricken by God and possessed by devils. Moses and Elijah proclaimed the Lord's warning and desires to the people, Jesus was executed as a man leading the people astray from the mission given to them by Yahweh.
It is so perilously easy to want the path of Transfiguration without realizing that it leads straightaway into Golgotha. The path of Transfiguration is what people invoke, whether they know it or not, when they parrot "If my people ... " as a way to revive the fortunes of America little knowing the import of the scriptures they happily distort for the sake of the same national glory Jesus' adversaries sought to preserve in their own time. Paradoxically to surpass the failures of Moses and Elijah Christ had to embrace failure and defeat more scandalous than either those failures had ever known. Yet it was through this miserable, horrific failure Christ purchased on our behalf both peace and victory.
Though the misery is real it is still better to be counted among the losers with Jesus than the winners of earth.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Michael Spencer (aka Internet Monk) has died
I can't really add anything that has not been said effectively by others. I'll miss his writing.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Link: Inhabitateo Dei: Your Hopes Must Be Dashed--reprise of the temptation of Christ in Luke
http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2009/04/05/your-hope-must-be-dashed-a-palm-sunday-sermon/
Earlier I wrote about the temptation of Christ in the gospel of Luke. The proximate cause for that post was learning that Mark Driscoll had taught from that passage and the broader cause was that I have read a lot and thought a lot about the passage over the years. Ergo Garrett, Jeffrey Burton Russell, et al in the earlier post.
Being a Dostoevsky fan I can't help but consider things like The Grand Inquisitor and perhaps Halden considered Dostoevsky's masterpiece of confrontational philosophy while drafting his reflection on Palm Sunday. He describes (I think rightly) Palm Sunday as the end of Lent and the culmination of a new form of temptation of the sort that Satan visited upon Jesus in the wilderness. In Luke's gospel the ultimate temptation is to invoke the scriptures themselves, even a passage in the Psalms that was used as a go-to prayer against demonic attack, and to use that scripture to tempt Jesus to put God to the test. It is precisely this that Jesus now confronts in the face of a throng of people who welcome Him with shouts of "Hosanna". I don't need to rehearse that this word means "save us!" The temptation Christ faced was a temptation He overcame. He did not choose to be the kind of King His people wanted Him to be and for that they crucified Him.
It is not coincidental to say that at this time many American Christians whip out the passage that says "If my people who are called by my name will heed my voice and turn to me then I will hear them and heal their land." No one bothers to look at what actually happened in that narrative--Israel did NOT listen and they did NOT turn and they went into destruction and exile as the Lord predicted centuries before in the book of Deutoronomy. God knows the hearts of people and anticipated the failure of those in that time. Quote the passage in the context of Chronicles as a literary whole and it becomes impossible to cite the passage as an optimistic admonition that if you just vote in the right political party God will favor your country again.
Since other Christians have forced the matter I'll just force it in another way, both Judah and Samaria ultimately fell. If we want to insist on allegorizing this in absurdly American terms Samaria represents the Democratic party and they apostasized early and greatly. Judea represents the Republicans and while at the end Reagan mightily went forth on behalf of the cause and salvaged America from the liberals the party ultimately also betrayed true principles and term limits meant the Josiah figure (Reagan) did not rule or reform for long before the Republican party ultimately failed just like the Democrat party to secure and preserve the richness of the republic (e.g. the Torah). I can reverse the allegory to have it apply to Democrats, too, but that would involve digressing into the misdirection of JFK's administration and the analogy would fall apart even more quickly than it would for the elephant. I hope by now you figured out that I'm employing more than a little sarcasm here.
So, why, then, should American Christians who are conservative imagine that things in our age would be any different? Why should the trajectory of "God's country" be different in the United States than it was for Israel? This is granting the generous concession that the comparison is apt and that the United States was actually founded on "Christian principles". I always thought Francis Schaeffer's argument that principles influenced by Christian thought is not the same as "Christian nation".
Now conflating God and country is one of the perennial problems of every pagan empire and it was even a problem in Israel. It is, in essence, a problem with the human condition. Even without gods this human capacity remains and would not be remedied even if religion itself were somehow magically obliterated from the human race. Taking a passage severely out of context and acting as though the United States of America is the temple built by Solomon and Israel is the chosen people is not surprising to me ... but it is still profoundly disappointing. American Christians have had a knack of deluding themselves into thinking the Bible has to be about them for centuries. Now I don't tend to get questions about how America plays into Bible prophecy but I still settle for Psalm 2.
I am not really particularly liberal in my politics or my religion ... but I find the ignorant abuse of scripture to rally about political causes offensive coming from both conservatives and liberals alike. "If my people ... " who will sacrifice their children, kill the innocent, levy heavy burdens on the people, and justify it through exceptionalism continue to do so then they will fail. If people value profit and industry over people for generations then when they have given away their industrial base and jobs to foreigners why, precisely, should they complain that foreigners have the jobs that their masters of inidustry gave away decades ago? How far can you complain "They are taking are jobs?" when you and your allies have given them away for years to improve the profit margin? There are progressives and leftists who are opposed to internationalism because they want Americans to have jobs instead of having them shipped overseas.
There are otherwise stalwart conservatives who believe it is wrong to take a punitive approach to immigration. As Pat Robertson once said, conservatives have erred about immigration because they do not realize that Christians are to be kind toward them ... of course Robertson has mistakenly imagined that the United States in some sense at all a "Christian" nation or was one. A friend of mine put it this way, no one seems to be complaining about all the WHITE illegal immigrants living in the United States, working jobs, starting businesses, and the like. If the immigrant is willing to work as hard for a third less money and the home-grown American doesn't want to work for the pay grade the American employer is offering then who is going to get the job?
Ergo, immigrants are taking away American jobs at least in part because Americans don't want to work for what they believe to be too little pay while employers are not willing to pay more to Americans because of the impact it will have on their bottom line. Employers who do not want to bother jumping through the legal hoops required to employ someone can be described as sticking it to the man but the interpretation of these actions may simply be to complain that Mexicans or other illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs and living off of American social welfare programs. I in my broadly pessimistic disposition do not see a reason to be optimistic that this or that will get better. I suppose I share Miyazaki's generally gloomy outlook on the race as a whole while being willing to have some optimism at a local level.
Since my hope (though I often struggle here) is in Christ it is foolish to put hope in politicians winning this or that election. Just as God ordained slavery for Israel some Christians might just as well be told that God ordained Obama for such a time as this. Christians of a particularly conservative bent may see it as punishment on America for choosing evil. America chose evil a long, long time ago. The truth is that every nation is part of the swarming sea that opposes the reign of the Lord in the Apocalypse. Some thirty years ago American Christians were anticipating that Russia was the place of the antichrist, or perhaps the European Union. Others anticipated that Syria would be where the antichrist comes from. Now, of course, some American Christians are imagining that Obama could be the one or is at least as bad. The number of the beast in any number of ways spells out Nero. There have been countless antichrists, just as there will be countless more.
These concerns are not new. The old days were not without these concerns. As far back as Cicero guys were complaining about how the old days were better and the youth today are dissolute and without direction. Yet Koholeth wrote millenia ago that it is not your place to ask, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it is stupid to ask that question. Yet that is precisely what I see a lot of Christians doing, asking where the good old days were. I in my mixture of skepticism about the future and glum assessment of the past is that the past was not really all that good and the future isn't really all that good either unless we're talking about the return of Christ. It is easy at a generational level to excuse in ourselves what we now condemn in others. Perhaps it is God's providential sense of humor not only to turn us into our parents but to ensure that our children at some broad level mirror our own folly back to us.
When Christ came and said "My kingdom is not of this world" He demonstrated that throughout His life and ministry. Welcomed as a savior on Palm Sunday within a week the mob sought His death. Christ did not come to be the kind of military, political, or economic savior we wanted Him to be. He did not come to bring peace but to bring a sword and, paradoxically, entered Jerusalem on a donkey, a king coming in peace. It is the nature of the peace He purchased on our behalf that we continue to find offensive and continue to find grounds enough to forsake Him. Our capacity to forsake Christ and the temptation to forsake Him is a subject so large it will merit another post and seeing as Halden wrote a sermon that has gotten me thinking about that, another post there is.
Earlier I wrote about the temptation of Christ in the gospel of Luke. The proximate cause for that post was learning that Mark Driscoll had taught from that passage and the broader cause was that I have read a lot and thought a lot about the passage over the years. Ergo Garrett, Jeffrey Burton Russell, et al in the earlier post.
Being a Dostoevsky fan I can't help but consider things like The Grand Inquisitor and perhaps Halden considered Dostoevsky's masterpiece of confrontational philosophy while drafting his reflection on Palm Sunday. He describes (I think rightly) Palm Sunday as the end of Lent and the culmination of a new form of temptation of the sort that Satan visited upon Jesus in the wilderness. In Luke's gospel the ultimate temptation is to invoke the scriptures themselves, even a passage in the Psalms that was used as a go-to prayer against demonic attack, and to use that scripture to tempt Jesus to put God to the test. It is precisely this that Jesus now confronts in the face of a throng of people who welcome Him with shouts of "Hosanna". I don't need to rehearse that this word means "save us!" The temptation Christ faced was a temptation He overcame. He did not choose to be the kind of King His people wanted Him to be and for that they crucified Him.
It is not coincidental to say that at this time many American Christians whip out the passage that says "If my people who are called by my name will heed my voice and turn to me then I will hear them and heal their land." No one bothers to look at what actually happened in that narrative--Israel did NOT listen and they did NOT turn and they went into destruction and exile as the Lord predicted centuries before in the book of Deutoronomy. God knows the hearts of people and anticipated the failure of those in that time. Quote the passage in the context of Chronicles as a literary whole and it becomes impossible to cite the passage as an optimistic admonition that if you just vote in the right political party God will favor your country again.
Since other Christians have forced the matter I'll just force it in another way, both Judah and Samaria ultimately fell. If we want to insist on allegorizing this in absurdly American terms Samaria represents the Democratic party and they apostasized early and greatly. Judea represents the Republicans and while at the end Reagan mightily went forth on behalf of the cause and salvaged America from the liberals the party ultimately also betrayed true principles and term limits meant the Josiah figure (Reagan) did not rule or reform for long before the Republican party ultimately failed just like the Democrat party to secure and preserve the richness of the republic (e.g. the Torah). I can reverse the allegory to have it apply to Democrats, too, but that would involve digressing into the misdirection of JFK's administration and the analogy would fall apart even more quickly than it would for the elephant. I hope by now you figured out that I'm employing more than a little sarcasm here.
So, why, then, should American Christians who are conservative imagine that things in our age would be any different? Why should the trajectory of "God's country" be different in the United States than it was for Israel? This is granting the generous concession that the comparison is apt and that the United States was actually founded on "Christian principles". I always thought Francis Schaeffer's argument that principles influenced by Christian thought is not the same as "Christian nation".
Now conflating God and country is one of the perennial problems of every pagan empire and it was even a problem in Israel. It is, in essence, a problem with the human condition. Even without gods this human capacity remains and would not be remedied even if religion itself were somehow magically obliterated from the human race. Taking a passage severely out of context and acting as though the United States of America is the temple built by Solomon and Israel is the chosen people is not surprising to me ... but it is still profoundly disappointing. American Christians have had a knack of deluding themselves into thinking the Bible has to be about them for centuries. Now I don't tend to get questions about how America plays into Bible prophecy but I still settle for Psalm 2.
I am not really particularly liberal in my politics or my religion ... but I find the ignorant abuse of scripture to rally about political causes offensive coming from both conservatives and liberals alike. "If my people ... " who will sacrifice their children, kill the innocent, levy heavy burdens on the people, and justify it through exceptionalism continue to do so then they will fail. If people value profit and industry over people for generations then when they have given away their industrial base and jobs to foreigners why, precisely, should they complain that foreigners have the jobs that their masters of inidustry gave away decades ago? How far can you complain "They are taking are jobs?" when you and your allies have given them away for years to improve the profit margin? There are progressives and leftists who are opposed to internationalism because they want Americans to have jobs instead of having them shipped overseas.
There are otherwise stalwart conservatives who believe it is wrong to take a punitive approach to immigration. As Pat Robertson once said, conservatives have erred about immigration because they do not realize that Christians are to be kind toward them ... of course Robertson has mistakenly imagined that the United States in some sense at all a "Christian" nation or was one. A friend of mine put it this way, no one seems to be complaining about all the WHITE illegal immigrants living in the United States, working jobs, starting businesses, and the like. If the immigrant is willing to work as hard for a third less money and the home-grown American doesn't want to work for the pay grade the American employer is offering then who is going to get the job?
Ergo, immigrants are taking away American jobs at least in part because Americans don't want to work for what they believe to be too little pay while employers are not willing to pay more to Americans because of the impact it will have on their bottom line. Employers who do not want to bother jumping through the legal hoops required to employ someone can be described as sticking it to the man but the interpretation of these actions may simply be to complain that Mexicans or other illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs and living off of American social welfare programs. I in my broadly pessimistic disposition do not see a reason to be optimistic that this or that will get better. I suppose I share Miyazaki's generally gloomy outlook on the race as a whole while being willing to have some optimism at a local level.
Since my hope (though I often struggle here) is in Christ it is foolish to put hope in politicians winning this or that election. Just as God ordained slavery for Israel some Christians might just as well be told that God ordained Obama for such a time as this. Christians of a particularly conservative bent may see it as punishment on America for choosing evil. America chose evil a long, long time ago. The truth is that every nation is part of the swarming sea that opposes the reign of the Lord in the Apocalypse. Some thirty years ago American Christians were anticipating that Russia was the place of the antichrist, or perhaps the European Union. Others anticipated that Syria would be where the antichrist comes from. Now, of course, some American Christians are imagining that Obama could be the one or is at least as bad. The number of the beast in any number of ways spells out Nero. There have been countless antichrists, just as there will be countless more.
These concerns are not new. The old days were not without these concerns. As far back as Cicero guys were complaining about how the old days were better and the youth today are dissolute and without direction. Yet Koholeth wrote millenia ago that it is not your place to ask, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it is stupid to ask that question. Yet that is precisely what I see a lot of Christians doing, asking where the good old days were. I in my mixture of skepticism about the future and glum assessment of the past is that the past was not really all that good and the future isn't really all that good either unless we're talking about the return of Christ. It is easy at a generational level to excuse in ourselves what we now condemn in others. Perhaps it is God's providential sense of humor not only to turn us into our parents but to ensure that our children at some broad level mirror our own folly back to us.
When Christ came and said "My kingdom is not of this world" He demonstrated that throughout His life and ministry. Welcomed as a savior on Palm Sunday within a week the mob sought His death. Christ did not come to be the kind of military, political, or economic savior we wanted Him to be. He did not come to bring peace but to bring a sword and, paradoxically, entered Jerusalem on a donkey, a king coming in peace. It is the nature of the peace He purchased on our behalf that we continue to find offensive and continue to find grounds enough to forsake Him. Our capacity to forsake Christ and the temptation to forsake Him is a subject so large it will merit another post and seeing as Halden wrote a sermon that has gotten me thinking about that, another post there is.
Link: Inhabitatio Dei--Judas, Jeremiah--a Holy Saturday homily
http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2007/04/07/judas-jeremiah-a-holy-saturday-homily/
For some reason I never bothered to note that Halden Doerge of Inhabitatio Dei blogging is in Portland, Oregon. I, er, happen to be Oregonian by birth and upbringing and came to the Emerald City to study. This homily I read recently is something I find encouraging and so I am linking to it, in classic WenatcheeTheHatchet fashion, literally years after it was posted.
What sticks with me is the observation that Judas, upon realizing his guilt in betraying Christ to death, goes to the very religious authorities to whom he betrayed Jesus. Their response is to refuse him any possibility of absolution. We may surmise that Jesus' enemies who arranged for the crucifixion did not, in fact, even remotely care that Jesus was innocent. They were taking matters into their own hands because they had cause to believe Jesus was a blasphemer and very probably a bastard who claimed to be able to do what God alone could do. And, on top of all these things, Jesus was being welcomed as a king; had spoken against the Temple predicting its total destruction; and was becoming popular enough that Rome was in danger of beginning to take some action. All these, for the Temple authorities, would have made Jesus anything but an innocent man.
Yet Judas, we are told, knew the magnitude of his sin. He may have known it incompletely in as much as he merely knew he was guilty of shedding innocent blood. He may have known that he consigned to death a man whom he may even at one point have considered the Christ, God's appointed man to defeat the power of evil in that age. When he realized his guilt he went to the very authorities to whom he had betrayed the Lord. Their answer was "See to it yourself." Judas was trapped in a double bind of his own making.
We generally see Judas as the betrayer, as the bad seed from the start. Yet Jesus was abandoned by all of His disciples at the hour of death. Judas betrayed his master and quickly came to regret it. We are told that he repented. He felt remorse. He turned, however, to religious authorities who neither absolved him of the death he was complicit in nor approved of his being party to the death. The religious leaders and his pangs of conscience put him in an inescapable double bind. He was needed so that the enemies of Christ could obtain what they wanted by finding a pretext to have Jesus put to death, and yet he would not be considered any kind of hero or ally, merely a tool. He became a tool to his own sin and to those who found his sins useful for obtaining their ends.
Yet in the end it seems to be Judas' despair of any hope in the face of his own regret and rejection by those whose money he sought that impels him to end his life. The other disciples were, theologically speaking, no less guilty of nailing Christ to the cross through their own sins. What was it, then, that made Judas so particularly doomed? Was it because Judas did not recognize that Jesus was the Christ? No, this does not seem to be the case or he would have abandoned Jesus with the others and would not have remained when Peter said "To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life?" We are told that Satan entered Judas. We are not told that Satan entered Judas at the START of Jesus' ministry but near its end.
Was Judas' particular flaw unbelief? Even the other disciples did not believe until after the resurrection and even Thomas doubted. Did Judas lack hope? So did the other disciples. What did Judas do or think in the wake of the death of Christ that made him different? In his lack of hope he forcefully accomplished for himself what he realized he was guilty of according to the law--he took his own life. I don't have more to blog about at the time so I'm just going to unceremoniously end.
For some reason I never bothered to note that Halden Doerge of Inhabitatio Dei blogging is in Portland, Oregon. I, er, happen to be Oregonian by birth and upbringing and came to the Emerald City to study. This homily I read recently is something I find encouraging and so I am linking to it, in classic WenatcheeTheHatchet fashion, literally years after it was posted.
What sticks with me is the observation that Judas, upon realizing his guilt in betraying Christ to death, goes to the very religious authorities to whom he betrayed Jesus. Their response is to refuse him any possibility of absolution. We may surmise that Jesus' enemies who arranged for the crucifixion did not, in fact, even remotely care that Jesus was innocent. They were taking matters into their own hands because they had cause to believe Jesus was a blasphemer and very probably a bastard who claimed to be able to do what God alone could do. And, on top of all these things, Jesus was being welcomed as a king; had spoken against the Temple predicting its total destruction; and was becoming popular enough that Rome was in danger of beginning to take some action. All these, for the Temple authorities, would have made Jesus anything but an innocent man.
Yet Judas, we are told, knew the magnitude of his sin. He may have known it incompletely in as much as he merely knew he was guilty of shedding innocent blood. He may have known that he consigned to death a man whom he may even at one point have considered the Christ, God's appointed man to defeat the power of evil in that age. When he realized his guilt he went to the very authorities to whom he had betrayed the Lord. Their answer was "See to it yourself." Judas was trapped in a double bind of his own making.
We generally see Judas as the betrayer, as the bad seed from the start. Yet Jesus was abandoned by all of His disciples at the hour of death. Judas betrayed his master and quickly came to regret it. We are told that he repented. He felt remorse. He turned, however, to religious authorities who neither absolved him of the death he was complicit in nor approved of his being party to the death. The religious leaders and his pangs of conscience put him in an inescapable double bind. He was needed so that the enemies of Christ could obtain what they wanted by finding a pretext to have Jesus put to death, and yet he would not be considered any kind of hero or ally, merely a tool. He became a tool to his own sin and to those who found his sins useful for obtaining their ends.
Yet in the end it seems to be Judas' despair of any hope in the face of his own regret and rejection by those whose money he sought that impels him to end his life. The other disciples were, theologically speaking, no less guilty of nailing Christ to the cross through their own sins. What was it, then, that made Judas so particularly doomed? Was it because Judas did not recognize that Jesus was the Christ? No, this does not seem to be the case or he would have abandoned Jesus with the others and would not have remained when Peter said "To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life?" We are told that Satan entered Judas. We are not told that Satan entered Judas at the START of Jesus' ministry but near its end.
Was Judas' particular flaw unbelief? Even the other disciples did not believe until after the resurrection and even Thomas doubted. Did Judas lack hope? So did the other disciples. What did Judas do or think in the wake of the death of Christ that made him different? In his lack of hope he forcefully accomplished for himself what he realized he was guilty of according to the law--he took his own life. I don't have more to blog about at the time so I'm just going to unceremoniously end.
Jonah and the Assyrians
The church I attend recently wrapped up a series on Jonah that is quite good. A few years ago I heard a friend of mine preach through Jonah and he also did quite a good job. A cursory review of the circumstances the book describes are in order and hearing Jonah preached at one church and then another has reminded me that God's kindness is offensive because He so often shows it to those whom many of God's most ardent supporters (in their own minds, at least) can be livid when God chooses to show mercy on the utterly merciless.
That the Assyrians were a very martial and combative culture is not particularly lost on those who investigate them. That God chose to relent of destroying the city after Jonah preached "Yet forty days and the city will be overthrown" is beyond dispute. That Jonah was exceedingly angry and furious that God chose to show mercy on the Assyrians is something Jonah makes plain. He was angry enough to wish for death after the death of a plant ... while waiting to see more than a hundreed thousand die under the wrath of God.
What God reveals in Jonah is that He may choose to send us to pronounce judgment on those who are accurately considered terrible sinners. We may object to even warning them of the Lord's wrath to come, flee from His presence, and then eventually realize that we must go back. Jonah asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the storm rather than ask the sailors to return him to his land to make the trip to Ninevah. Jonah chose death rather than obedience to the Lord ... and yet the Lord showed mercy to him.
Out of that mercy Jonah goes and speaks to the city of Ninevah and pronounces judgment on them. Then the city repents and Jonah is furious that God relents of the destruction promised. Jonah waits. A plant grows up and withers overnight and Jonah is more upset about and more grateful for the plant that he did not work for then for the city that God has spared. Jonah is who we are. We are the sort of people not merely tempted but who actually do consider ourselves the measure of justice and mercy. We say to ourselves "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." We can fool ourselves into thinking that those we "pity" are those whom we pity when we detest them, perhaps even for good reasons. Yet God calls Jonah to speak to a city full of people whose soldiers have destroyed his homeland. God sent them in judgment on Israel's wickedness and yet, paradoxically, they warrant warning. And when warned by Jonah they repent, and this is what infuriates Jonah--that he knew beforehand in his own country that Yahweh would have pity on them.
Who do we not pity that deserves our real compassion, not merely the "pity" we use as a mask to hide ourselves from the depth of our hatred? The first form of pity pours out life to those who need it and may not seem to have earned it. The second is the mask we wear to hide ourselves from the loathing we have at having our hopes or desires thwarted. Jonah hoped for the ultimate destruction of the Assyrian empire.
There may be several levels at which Jonah was furious. First, he could easily look like a false prophet in as much as he had pronounced a judgment that was averted. Judgment EVENTUALLY came as predicted by another prophet, but Jonah's warning was not to be the one that brought about destruction. Second, Jonah saw that God chose to mercifully spare the least deserving nation he could think of, a nation that had ravaged Israel. Third, Jonah saw himself and his people as the good guys and the Assyrians as the bad guys.
It is this third reason that I wish to consider at some small length, because while Jonah would be right to be angry at the cruelty of the Assyrians he was more angry at God for His mercy toward them, it seems, than toward the Assyrians themselves. Here is the part where, true to small group discussion form, I can ask "Who are the Assyrians that you don't want God to show mercy to?" I know that for a LOT of people I have known in the last five years those "Assyrians" would constitute Mars Hill. See, long-time readers of the blog won't have to search too long to see that I have had a profoundly ambivalent perspective on the church and people who have via anonymous comments wanted me to be more on "their" side have not gotten this.
Well, one of the last sermons I heard at Mars Hill was during the Jonah series back in 2008 and it has been illuminating to realize that the church I'm now attending has just gone through Jonah. I'm not interested in ignoring the providential potential in this for myself. It was actually a sermon a friend of mine preached from Jonah that helped me realize that instead of staying where I was at the time that I actually really did need to start moving forward into the next phase of life. I very much appreciate my friend for preaching that sermon and appreciate that there is a new place for me to be for the time being. The future is as always uncertain and often looks gloomy but the Lord leads us through gloomy and uncertain times as well as positive ones. The Lord ordered Jonah to go speak to Ninevah and sometimes the great unexpected turn of events is that God grants blessing and even victory to those you consider your enemy, those you consider unfit for the mercy of God. And in case I miss an opportunity to make this observation again, I did write the sonnet "On Election" in response to how many American Christians view this with respect to politics.
Jonah's anger was that God averted wrath and extended mercy precisely because of Jonah's obedience in proclaiming the warning of God. Jonah's sermon was one of doom, certain doom, and yet God used it to catalyze an act of repentence that averted the very doom Jonah so confidently declared. Jonah said, "Did I not say this when I was still in my own country!? You are a God who is slow to anger and merciful." Our greatest resentments are often at those who continue in sin for years or decades and whom, it seems, God providentially lets off the hook. Not only does God "let" them carry on in sin but they then turn away from those things they did to the Lord and we feel like fools. Jonah hoped for a destruction that did not come. First he fled God's presence, then he insisted on being cast into the sea but even there he did not die. Finally when Jonah realized that God would not even allow him death and that he had to go pursue obedience Jonah relented ... a little ... before reverting to his old anger.
What this means is that Jesus was not kidding when he said to bless those who curse you and to pray for those who persecute you. Jonah shows us how that DOESN'T look so that we can better see how it WOULD look when Christ comes to a world that ultimately rejects Him. Jonah arguably had a more compelling case to want the Assyrians dead than many of us will have about the people we want dead. Jonah's reasons were not even, by our measure of ethics, even remotely bad reasons. Yet the mercy and love that Yahweh extends can be scandalous, even obscene.
In fact that mercy is so obscene Jonah asked God to kill him. There are acts of mercy the Lord offers to people we hate or have been hurt by that are so offensive we would rather not be alive. It is to this fury of Jonah that the Lord asks, "Do you do well to be angry?" Do you do well to go outside of the city all by yourself and hide in a shelter you didn't even make that God providentially gave you for a time and from there wait for the Lord to destroy people because you have felt wronged? Jonah was a prophet who wanted collective guilt to be true for the enemy and not for his own people. Even though we say that collective guilt at all is barbaric this is something we cling to whether we hate Democrats or Republicans or Christians or atheists or Jews or blacks or whites or whomever we choose to resent collectively.
Jonah is a reminder that this kind of resentment is not new and it will never go away. What God does in the midst of this is show a degree of kindness that we find obscene. Jonah is at slightly greater length an examination of what Jesus spoke of through the parable of the Samaritan. Only Jesus went further by demonstrating that the apostate, the heretic, the traitor, the destroyer of all things good and holy was the one who showed greater kindness than those who would have been considered the heroes of righteous.
We constantly want God to give us and our people victories in obvious ways and through obvious means and then become offended when God continues to use those things that are nothing to put to shame those things that are. We, like Jonah, benefit from recognizing that the Lord who can show boundless mercy to us can also show that boundless mercy to people we don't think deserve that mercy. If we question the legitimacy of that mercy for others how can we say that we merit it? We don't and if it is a gift given to us do we question God's wisdom and kindness in giving it to others? We often do. I know I must remind myself regularly that this is a struggle for me and I recognize it is a struggle everyone will have in life.
Whatever your Jonah moment may be, do not wait outside the city of Ninevah for a destruction you want the Lord to enact on your behalf because you feel morally outraged. Proverbs warns that you shouldn't even be happy when your enemy falls or the Lord will take note of your resentment and turn around and bless your enemy. You shouldn't be too eager for your enemy to fail to begin with. Jonah had not learned that and apparently did not learn that for some time. God used him anyway and if God can use such a bitter, combative, and disobedient prophet whose message of brute destruction became a catalyst for the Lord's mercy then this is instructive.
That the Assyrians were a very martial and combative culture is not particularly lost on those who investigate them. That God chose to relent of destroying the city after Jonah preached "Yet forty days and the city will be overthrown" is beyond dispute. That Jonah was exceedingly angry and furious that God chose to show mercy on the Assyrians is something Jonah makes plain. He was angry enough to wish for death after the death of a plant ... while waiting to see more than a hundreed thousand die under the wrath of God.
What God reveals in Jonah is that He may choose to send us to pronounce judgment on those who are accurately considered terrible sinners. We may object to even warning them of the Lord's wrath to come, flee from His presence, and then eventually realize that we must go back. Jonah asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the storm rather than ask the sailors to return him to his land to make the trip to Ninevah. Jonah chose death rather than obedience to the Lord ... and yet the Lord showed mercy to him.
Out of that mercy Jonah goes and speaks to the city of Ninevah and pronounces judgment on them. Then the city repents and Jonah is furious that God relents of the destruction promised. Jonah waits. A plant grows up and withers overnight and Jonah is more upset about and more grateful for the plant that he did not work for then for the city that God has spared. Jonah is who we are. We are the sort of people not merely tempted but who actually do consider ourselves the measure of justice and mercy. We say to ourselves "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." We can fool ourselves into thinking that those we "pity" are those whom we pity when we detest them, perhaps even for good reasons. Yet God calls Jonah to speak to a city full of people whose soldiers have destroyed his homeland. God sent them in judgment on Israel's wickedness and yet, paradoxically, they warrant warning. And when warned by Jonah they repent, and this is what infuriates Jonah--that he knew beforehand in his own country that Yahweh would have pity on them.
Who do we not pity that deserves our real compassion, not merely the "pity" we use as a mask to hide ourselves from the depth of our hatred? The first form of pity pours out life to those who need it and may not seem to have earned it. The second is the mask we wear to hide ourselves from the loathing we have at having our hopes or desires thwarted. Jonah hoped for the ultimate destruction of the Assyrian empire.
There may be several levels at which Jonah was furious. First, he could easily look like a false prophet in as much as he had pronounced a judgment that was averted. Judgment EVENTUALLY came as predicted by another prophet, but Jonah's warning was not to be the one that brought about destruction. Second, Jonah saw that God chose to mercifully spare the least deserving nation he could think of, a nation that had ravaged Israel. Third, Jonah saw himself and his people as the good guys and the Assyrians as the bad guys.
It is this third reason that I wish to consider at some small length, because while Jonah would be right to be angry at the cruelty of the Assyrians he was more angry at God for His mercy toward them, it seems, than toward the Assyrians themselves. Here is the part where, true to small group discussion form, I can ask "Who are the Assyrians that you don't want God to show mercy to?" I know that for a LOT of people I have known in the last five years those "Assyrians" would constitute Mars Hill. See, long-time readers of the blog won't have to search too long to see that I have had a profoundly ambivalent perspective on the church and people who have via anonymous comments wanted me to be more on "their" side have not gotten this.
Well, one of the last sermons I heard at Mars Hill was during the Jonah series back in 2008 and it has been illuminating to realize that the church I'm now attending has just gone through Jonah. I'm not interested in ignoring the providential potential in this for myself. It was actually a sermon a friend of mine preached from Jonah that helped me realize that instead of staying where I was at the time that I actually really did need to start moving forward into the next phase of life. I very much appreciate my friend for preaching that sermon and appreciate that there is a new place for me to be for the time being. The future is as always uncertain and often looks gloomy but the Lord leads us through gloomy and uncertain times as well as positive ones. The Lord ordered Jonah to go speak to Ninevah and sometimes the great unexpected turn of events is that God grants blessing and even victory to those you consider your enemy, those you consider unfit for the mercy of God. And in case I miss an opportunity to make this observation again, I did write the sonnet "On Election" in response to how many American Christians view this with respect to politics.
Jonah's anger was that God averted wrath and extended mercy precisely because of Jonah's obedience in proclaiming the warning of God. Jonah's sermon was one of doom, certain doom, and yet God used it to catalyze an act of repentence that averted the very doom Jonah so confidently declared. Jonah said, "Did I not say this when I was still in my own country!? You are a God who is slow to anger and merciful." Our greatest resentments are often at those who continue in sin for years or decades and whom, it seems, God providentially lets off the hook. Not only does God "let" them carry on in sin but they then turn away from those things they did to the Lord and we feel like fools. Jonah hoped for a destruction that did not come. First he fled God's presence, then he insisted on being cast into the sea but even there he did not die. Finally when Jonah realized that God would not even allow him death and that he had to go pursue obedience Jonah relented ... a little ... before reverting to his old anger.
What this means is that Jesus was not kidding when he said to bless those who curse you and to pray for those who persecute you. Jonah shows us how that DOESN'T look so that we can better see how it WOULD look when Christ comes to a world that ultimately rejects Him. Jonah arguably had a more compelling case to want the Assyrians dead than many of us will have about the people we want dead. Jonah's reasons were not even, by our measure of ethics, even remotely bad reasons. Yet the mercy and love that Yahweh extends can be scandalous, even obscene.
In fact that mercy is so obscene Jonah asked God to kill him. There are acts of mercy the Lord offers to people we hate or have been hurt by that are so offensive we would rather not be alive. It is to this fury of Jonah that the Lord asks, "Do you do well to be angry?" Do you do well to go outside of the city all by yourself and hide in a shelter you didn't even make that God providentially gave you for a time and from there wait for the Lord to destroy people because you have felt wronged? Jonah was a prophet who wanted collective guilt to be true for the enemy and not for his own people. Even though we say that collective guilt at all is barbaric this is something we cling to whether we hate Democrats or Republicans or Christians or atheists or Jews or blacks or whites or whomever we choose to resent collectively.
Jonah is a reminder that this kind of resentment is not new and it will never go away. What God does in the midst of this is show a degree of kindness that we find obscene. Jonah is at slightly greater length an examination of what Jesus spoke of through the parable of the Samaritan. Only Jesus went further by demonstrating that the apostate, the heretic, the traitor, the destroyer of all things good and holy was the one who showed greater kindness than those who would have been considered the heroes of righteous.
We constantly want God to give us and our people victories in obvious ways and through obvious means and then become offended when God continues to use those things that are nothing to put to shame those things that are. We, like Jonah, benefit from recognizing that the Lord who can show boundless mercy to us can also show that boundless mercy to people we don't think deserve that mercy. If we question the legitimacy of that mercy for others how can we say that we merit it? We don't and if it is a gift given to us do we question God's wisdom and kindness in giving it to others? We often do. I know I must remind myself regularly that this is a struggle for me and I recognize it is a struggle everyone will have in life.
Whatever your Jonah moment may be, do not wait outside the city of Ninevah for a destruction you want the Lord to enact on your behalf because you feel morally outraged. Proverbs warns that you shouldn't even be happy when your enemy falls or the Lord will take note of your resentment and turn around and bless your enemy. You shouldn't be too eager for your enemy to fail to begin with. Jonah had not learned that and apparently did not learn that for some time. God used him anyway and if God can use such a bitter, combative, and disobedient prophet whose message of brute destruction became a catalyst for the Lord's mercy then this is instructive.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
John Piper is taking a sabbatical
I confess to not being the hugest fan of John Piper. I don't dislike him and I even own a few of his books but his popularity at Mars Hill baffled me. I took it as a sign of what I had surmised as far back as 2002, that Mars Hill is basically Reformed Baptist but is loathe to identify as such. Well, if there are pastors on staff who are actually Arminian then I could say that they are a nascent addition to the broad denominational umbrella of "Baptist".
That was cool for a time but I have found over time that since my sympathies are more Presbyterian it was helpful to move in that direction (if Piper's popularity eludes me I totally get why people at Mars have enjoyed Tim Keller's teaching).
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have had some pretty serious concerns about Mars Hill over the years but I stay in touch with my friends and family there and have even networked so as to get a capable musician in touch with a campus pastor. Last I heard (with my own ears) said musician is doing fine work at the campus and the pastor's sermon was excellent. I just needed some time to figure out that there is a no direction for me to travel. Moving in that new direction hardly means that I don't keep connections to the past. That may well be my strength and weakness, I am not the sort of person who likes to burn bridges where others burn bridges as soon as they find it useful and appealing.
I hope, since Driscoll has cited Piper as an example, that he will follow Piper's example at some point. Luke is mapped out enough that at some point Mark should consider an actual sabbatical. This seems to be the thing he has not really done. A month, I suppose, but eight months? Never. Mark seems to define himself by his work and it is going to remain a persistent idol he will struggle with. David struggled all his life with not being a particularly good husband or parent. Driscoll may struggle all his life with defining himself by his work and his being a family man. I have struggled my whole life with fear so I can at least credit Mark with not being afraid, though that can often be precisely what leads to problems. He's not afraid to make all sorts of stupid statements from the pulpit ... then again I believe every strength is generally also its own corresponding weakness.
I wish Piper well during his sabbatical.
That was cool for a time but I have found over time that since my sympathies are more Presbyterian it was helpful to move in that direction (if Piper's popularity eludes me I totally get why people at Mars have enjoyed Tim Keller's teaching).
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have had some pretty serious concerns about Mars Hill over the years but I stay in touch with my friends and family there and have even networked so as to get a capable musician in touch with a campus pastor. Last I heard (with my own ears) said musician is doing fine work at the campus and the pastor's sermon was excellent. I just needed some time to figure out that there is a no direction for me to travel. Moving in that new direction hardly means that I don't keep connections to the past. That may well be my strength and weakness, I am not the sort of person who likes to burn bridges where others burn bridges as soon as they find it useful and appealing.
I hope, since Driscoll has cited Piper as an example, that he will follow Piper's example at some point. Luke is mapped out enough that at some point Mark should consider an actual sabbatical. This seems to be the thing he has not really done. A month, I suppose, but eight months? Never. Mark seems to define himself by his work and it is going to remain a persistent idol he will struggle with. David struggled all his life with not being a particularly good husband or parent. Driscoll may struggle all his life with defining himself by his work and his being a family man. I have struggled my whole life with fear so I can at least credit Mark with not being afraid, though that can often be precisely what leads to problems. He's not afraid to make all sorts of stupid statements from the pulpit ... then again I believe every strength is generally also its own corresponding weakness.
I wish Piper well during his sabbatical.
in which I admit to not liking the Eagles
They aren't the worst band out there but for reasons I don't feel like getting into I have been exposed to a hefty dose of the Eagles in the last week and I have become more aware of a line from the Dude in The Big Lebowski. I don't need to quote the line if you have seen the film and understand the sentiment Jeff Bridges' character expresses about the Eagles. I am, at any rate, not in a situation to be ordered to get out of a cab for expressing the sentiment.
Decades ago (really) Musician published a great skewering of Don Henley's lyrics by pointing out that the man had such a way with poetry, such a way with turning a lyrical phrase that you would have thought that those phrases had ALWAYS EXISTED IN THE LANGUAGE. True that!
I remember hearing the song "Take it Easy" and the whole premise of the song just seemed absurd in a way that could only, perhaps, happen in the 1970s. This song was co-written with Jackson Browne? Seven women on his mind and looking to be saved by the "love" of an eighth one?
The Eagles' songs are not exactly terrible but they represent a banality of musical and artistic direction that is respectably self-contained but just doesn't hold up in many details. "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" stands out as one of the great howlers of Eagles' lyrics. Why, yes, they grabbed the steely knives because plastic cutlery just wouldn't get through the pot roast. The Eagles' creative output in songs like Hotel California or Life in the Fast Lane particularly constitute what in television we would call the "very special" episode of a comedy. That would be the scenario where the comedy proposes grandiose pretentions to being "serious" without a particularly compelling basis for it. Think Alex P Keaton going on in soliloquoys about death for this one.
It's not that comedies cannot touch upon serious issues or that drams can't be broadly comedic. I hardly ever watch TV but to pick two shows that I think broadly balance comedy and drama House and Scrubs come to mind. These are the only two shows about doctors I have seen that I can actually enjoy because the characters are not just plausible in their "good" traits they are even MORE plausible in their pettiness and their varying inexplicable weakness. Dorian's capacity for empathy is equalled by his absurd self-regard and narcissism. House has a similar capacity for craven self-regard without the oft-extended capacity to empathize with people. If the show starts off mixing drama and comedy that mixture is more readily retained.
In music I have mentioned earlier (much earlier) in this blog that a musician like Elton John can plausibly transition from pop songs to Broadway because of common connections. Billy Joel didn't make the transition from rock/pop to classical so effectively because he hadn't really stayed connected to it. I can't speak to Elvis Costello's attempts to get into classical music but in many cases that addition of classical to pop is often as ineffective as the transition from classical to pop.
I consider it unlikely that people who read this blog with any consistency are necessarily Eagles fans but they have stuck around for the long haul. My not liking them doesn't mean I can't respect their longevity. There are people who actually enjoy M.A.S.H. for some reason and people still flock to see Wagner performances even though I have found both his music and his person to be loathsome. But so it goes. For all I know after I'm dead and buried there will still be someone who hears those lines "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" as some sort of profound utterance.
Decades ago (really) Musician published a great skewering of Don Henley's lyrics by pointing out that the man had such a way with poetry, such a way with turning a lyrical phrase that you would have thought that those phrases had ALWAYS EXISTED IN THE LANGUAGE. True that!
I remember hearing the song "Take it Easy" and the whole premise of the song just seemed absurd in a way that could only, perhaps, happen in the 1970s. This song was co-written with Jackson Browne? Seven women on his mind and looking to be saved by the "love" of an eighth one?
The Eagles' songs are not exactly terrible but they represent a banality of musical and artistic direction that is respectably self-contained but just doesn't hold up in many details. "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" stands out as one of the great howlers of Eagles' lyrics. Why, yes, they grabbed the steely knives because plastic cutlery just wouldn't get through the pot roast. The Eagles' creative output in songs like Hotel California or Life in the Fast Lane particularly constitute what in television we would call the "very special" episode of a comedy. That would be the scenario where the comedy proposes grandiose pretentions to being "serious" without a particularly compelling basis for it. Think Alex P Keaton going on in soliloquoys about death for this one.
It's not that comedies cannot touch upon serious issues or that drams can't be broadly comedic. I hardly ever watch TV but to pick two shows that I think broadly balance comedy and drama House and Scrubs come to mind. These are the only two shows about doctors I have seen that I can actually enjoy because the characters are not just plausible in their "good" traits they are even MORE plausible in their pettiness and their varying inexplicable weakness. Dorian's capacity for empathy is equalled by his absurd self-regard and narcissism. House has a similar capacity for craven self-regard without the oft-extended capacity to empathize with people. If the show starts off mixing drama and comedy that mixture is more readily retained.
In music I have mentioned earlier (much earlier) in this blog that a musician like Elton John can plausibly transition from pop songs to Broadway because of common connections. Billy Joel didn't make the transition from rock/pop to classical so effectively because he hadn't really stayed connected to it. I can't speak to Elvis Costello's attempts to get into classical music but in many cases that addition of classical to pop is often as ineffective as the transition from classical to pop.
I consider it unlikely that people who read this blog with any consistency are necessarily Eagles fans but they have stuck around for the long haul. My not liking them doesn't mean I can't respect their longevity. There are people who actually enjoy M.A.S.H. for some reason and people still flock to see Wagner performances even though I have found both his music and his person to be loathsome. But so it goes. For all I know after I'm dead and buried there will still be someone who hears those lines "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" as some sort of profound utterance.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Classical guitarists seeing other six-stringers as the enemy of real music
I last week finished a prelude and fugue in F minor for solo guitar. It is hardly a long piece, about three and a half minutes, just the right length to be a pop song on the radio. Of course it won't be. Nevertheless I am happy that I finished the 9th of a projected 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. If I am fortunate I may even find people to perform and publish them and can join Igor Rekhin in being a footnote in the history of guitar repertoire for being the second person to compose a set of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar.
I have been considering the attitude those of us who play classical guitar have toward those who play guitar but not the classical kind. It really is frequently a stupid and condescending attitude! The most prominent and flamboyant offender in this mentality would probably have to be Segovia who, in response to some kind words by George Harrison said of the Beatles that even as illegitimate children he could not accept them musically despite them being nice boys and all. Fortunately the Beatles did not have to worry about, as it were, Segovia being a deadbeat dad who refused to pay child support! I'll be first to admit I only really ever liked the album Revolver but the Beatles did a respectable job writing pop songs. I prefer Dylan by far but that's another matter entirely.
It is a relief to know that there are plenty of classical guitarists who don't automatically look with disdain on popular styles of music. We should recall that the gap between popular and "art" styles of music has never been so great or onerous as it has been since the dawn of the 20th century. When famous composers of "classical" music have included musicians who played in street bands ranging from Haydn to Villa-Lobos we ought to know better than to create some silly dichotomy between "high" and "low".
Nevertheless this impulse to distinguish between the two poles permeates humanity. People who prefer high liturgy can often see other churches that have a lower liturgy as not even having liturgy. Conversely people who prefer low liturgy will often convince themselves that they don't HAVE liturgy in their church when they patently do! If you have sacraments of communion or baptism in your services the, congratulations, you've got yourself some liturgy. Do you have public prayers? Reading from scripture? Teaching? Then, yep, you've got liturgy. It might be minimalist or even barely recognizable as liturgy but you've got it.
By the same measure, pop music may not have a lot of complexity in terms of content or form but it's got content and form and is still music. I was noticing over on a discussion forum I'm part of for classical guitarists how people have lamented cliches in pop music lyrics about romantic love. Hey, I resent them, too, but if you've ever actually READ lyrics to songs by John Dowland you'd probably find yourself saying that the people who write songs for Britney Spears are pretty much in the same level. No offense meant to John Downland fans but there's more intellectual substance to lyrics by Rush and I don't even LIKE that band! Respect? Yes. Enjoy? Not really ... except for YYZ. I have to grant them that's a fun instrumental.
Many works for classical guitar are beautiful but many of them can still come across as the sorts of show pieces that show up on rock and pop albums to demonstrate that the pop maestro "could" do the classical thing but prefers to rock out. Billy Joel spent years overcompensating for "the tyranny of the lyric" and about all he proved to me is that if he wanted to get into classical music it would have helped to have been active in that stuff from the start of his career. Old rock and pop stars turn to other styles of music when their careers start to flag. Joel turned to piano music and classical stuff. McCartney wrote an oratoria.
Elton John did musicals and Disney soundtracks. At the risk of indulging in a terrible stereotype Broadway and Disney are gay enough that John has undoubtedly had the smartest alternative to a simple rock career. No disrespect meant, its a move that makes the most sense because it actually fits. It was a natural extension of his artistic temperament. Of the cross-over artists only Elton John has crossed over into an idiom that makes sense and doesn't suggest he's overcompensating for a failure in his original domain of popularity. At the other end of this trying-too-hard witness Phil Colllin's so-called acting career.
This could all still be used to prove Matanya Ophee's axiom that even in the world of popular music everyone else does crossover work IN ADDITION to their established career while classical guitarists are tempted to do it INSTEAD. All of the repertoire tends to be lollipop repertoire anyway so in some ways (in my crankiest moments) I don't see that there's much difference. Serious guitar repertoire is to serious chamber music everywhere else what "pop" music is to "serious" rock--yes, we can say it's technically in the same domain in terms of musical vocabulary but no one within those spheres of creation want to be considered in the same category. If classical guitarists who are snobby about pop music had any notion of how they are looked down as being similarly bereft of musical substance we might be more humble about how "important" the things we do and play really are.
Of ocurse I say all this as a hobbyist and an amateur. Perhaps professionals have the luxury of being snobby because they make a living at it.
I have been considering the attitude those of us who play classical guitar have toward those who play guitar but not the classical kind. It really is frequently a stupid and condescending attitude! The most prominent and flamboyant offender in this mentality would probably have to be Segovia who, in response to some kind words by George Harrison said of the Beatles that even as illegitimate children he could not accept them musically despite them being nice boys and all. Fortunately the Beatles did not have to worry about, as it were, Segovia being a deadbeat dad who refused to pay child support! I'll be first to admit I only really ever liked the album Revolver but the Beatles did a respectable job writing pop songs. I prefer Dylan by far but that's another matter entirely.
It is a relief to know that there are plenty of classical guitarists who don't automatically look with disdain on popular styles of music. We should recall that the gap between popular and "art" styles of music has never been so great or onerous as it has been since the dawn of the 20th century. When famous composers of "classical" music have included musicians who played in street bands ranging from Haydn to Villa-Lobos we ought to know better than to create some silly dichotomy between "high" and "low".
Nevertheless this impulse to distinguish between the two poles permeates humanity. People who prefer high liturgy can often see other churches that have a lower liturgy as not even having liturgy. Conversely people who prefer low liturgy will often convince themselves that they don't HAVE liturgy in their church when they patently do! If you have sacraments of communion or baptism in your services the, congratulations, you've got yourself some liturgy. Do you have public prayers? Reading from scripture? Teaching? Then, yep, you've got liturgy. It might be minimalist or even barely recognizable as liturgy but you've got it.
By the same measure, pop music may not have a lot of complexity in terms of content or form but it's got content and form and is still music. I was noticing over on a discussion forum I'm part of for classical guitarists how people have lamented cliches in pop music lyrics about romantic love. Hey, I resent them, too, but if you've ever actually READ lyrics to songs by John Dowland you'd probably find yourself saying that the people who write songs for Britney Spears are pretty much in the same level. No offense meant to John Downland fans but there's more intellectual substance to lyrics by Rush and I don't even LIKE that band! Respect? Yes. Enjoy? Not really ... except for YYZ. I have to grant them that's a fun instrumental.
Many works for classical guitar are beautiful but many of them can still come across as the sorts of show pieces that show up on rock and pop albums to demonstrate that the pop maestro "could" do the classical thing but prefers to rock out. Billy Joel spent years overcompensating for "the tyranny of the lyric" and about all he proved to me is that if he wanted to get into classical music it would have helped to have been active in that stuff from the start of his career. Old rock and pop stars turn to other styles of music when their careers start to flag. Joel turned to piano music and classical stuff. McCartney wrote an oratoria.
Elton John did musicals and Disney soundtracks. At the risk of indulging in a terrible stereotype Broadway and Disney are gay enough that John has undoubtedly had the smartest alternative to a simple rock career. No disrespect meant, its a move that makes the most sense because it actually fits. It was a natural extension of his artistic temperament. Of the cross-over artists only Elton John has crossed over into an idiom that makes sense and doesn't suggest he's overcompensating for a failure in his original domain of popularity. At the other end of this trying-too-hard witness Phil Colllin's so-called acting career.
This could all still be used to prove Matanya Ophee's axiom that even in the world of popular music everyone else does crossover work IN ADDITION to their established career while classical guitarists are tempted to do it INSTEAD. All of the repertoire tends to be lollipop repertoire anyway so in some ways (in my crankiest moments) I don't see that there's much difference. Serious guitar repertoire is to serious chamber music everywhere else what "pop" music is to "serious" rock--yes, we can say it's technically in the same domain in terms of musical vocabulary but no one within those spheres of creation want to be considered in the same category. If classical guitarists who are snobby about pop music had any notion of how they are looked down as being similarly bereft of musical substance we might be more humble about how "important" the things we do and play really are.
Of ocurse I say all this as a hobbyist and an amateur. Perhaps professionals have the luxury of being snobby because they make a living at it.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
And can it be that Benny Hinn
Should, now, against Joel Osteen speak
That all Joel's words are not but sin
and his doctrine of demons reek?
Long Hinn within Orlando played
And said the Trinity was nine
"This is your day" his program said
A best life now no less divine.
Amazing balls, how can it be
That Hinn scolds Osteen's heresy?
Should, now, against Joel Osteen speak
That all Joel's words are not but sin
and his doctrine of demons reek?
Long Hinn within Orlando played
And said the Trinity was nine
"This is your day" his program said
A best life now no less divine.
Amazing balls, how can it be
That Hinn scolds Osteen's heresy?
Monday, March 15, 2010
Remembering an incident from high school
The incident was that I got some piece of paper that told me (as best I can barely remember it) that I was something like in the top 1 percent of high school students in the United States for academic achievement. My first reaction (in light of my observation that I felt like I had been basically coasting my way through what would turn out to be somewhere around a 3.7 GPA) was "Really? This generation is doomed!" If yours truly was in the upper echelons what hope did my generation have? You could infer from this that I have always had that sunny disposition that appears in these blog entries.
Yet I have been tempered since that time by more than a few readings of Ecclesiastes. The past was not really all that good and it is foolish to ask where the good old days have gone that were better than these. The only thing I'm less optimistic about than the future is to look back fondly on the past. The past was not, really, all that great. If the future is so bright I have to wear shades then that future is the explosion of crisis.
I don't feel particularly bad for what may be considered the decline of Western civilization because I'm no longer convinced that the alternatives are better or that the decline is actually preventable. We are ourselves the decline of western civilization we see in others. Even those who would consider themselves the solution are merely another manifestation of the problem. Hope that things will improve here and now is a luxury for fools. No, I haven't read any Lovecraft and have better things to do with my time. As I was writing earlier, the incident from high school comes to mind as a memory of how I have long had this positive disposition.
Yet I have been tempered since that time by more than a few readings of Ecclesiastes. The past was not really all that good and it is foolish to ask where the good old days have gone that were better than these. The only thing I'm less optimistic about than the future is to look back fondly on the past. The past was not, really, all that great. If the future is so bright I have to wear shades then that future is the explosion of crisis.
I don't feel particularly bad for what may be considered the decline of Western civilization because I'm no longer convinced that the alternatives are better or that the decline is actually preventable. We are ourselves the decline of western civilization we see in others. Even those who would consider themselves the solution are merely another manifestation of the problem. Hope that things will improve here and now is a luxury for fools. No, I haven't read any Lovecraft and have better things to do with my time. As I was writing earlier, the incident from high school comes to mind as a memory of how I have long had this positive disposition.
Internet Monk and cancer
This is, for those who are familiar with his work, not exactly new news. He has cancer and the news is that he has maybe a few months to live.
This year has already been a year in which I have become acutely aware of death and failure (which are not things I was particularly unaware of before, just in case anyone was wondering). I have been trying and failing in my job hunt for nearly half a year now. I discovered that an old high school associate has come down with cancer. Another person I was acquainted with just after my college days was murdered by her stalker. So I am more than a little acquainted with the reality that even in the midst of life we face death.
I know iMonk is going to die, possibly even before the year is out. I trust the Lord has him in His hands. I have no problem praying the Lord would be gracious enough to heal him of this sickness even as I myself have had family praying for me for decades to be healed of a physical condition that has never actually improved and at one point got catastrophically worse. That Christ Himself prayed in the garden a prayer that was given a resounding 'no' that sent Him to the Cross means I do not have to feel bad praying that the Father would intervene even in a case that is utterly hopeless. As the three young men said, "We are confident that God will deliver us yet even if He does not we will not bow down before that idol." There are reasons that the Gospel is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, even those Gentiles and Jews who, as it were, are within the Christian faith.
What I have most appreciated about Michael's blogging is that he has found ways to articulate what it looks like to be the professing Christian who, nevertheless, when confronted with who Christ is finds His actual teaching to be foolishness or a stumbling block. I have respected him for being able to criticize even those teachers and preachers he respects.
I've never met the man. We've traded emails a handful of times over the years and he is at least acquainted with some people I know, but I have benefited a great deal from his writing over the years. Thanks to a link he posted I found a church in Seattle I have been attending after a significant crisis in my life about where exactly I would fellowship. A friend had advised me around that general period to not leave merely out of dissatisfaction but that if the Lord opens up a positive direction forward (as He did for a friend of mine) that that was a great reason to move into a new direction. Thanks to a link from iMonk, that positive new direction materialized when I heard a sermon that helped me better understand one of the psalms and to have a clear sense of a place where scripture was taught in a way that reached me in areas where I am weak. I have iMonk to thank for that, even though we've never met and at best are merely strangers who have traded a handful of emails.
At some point we all struggle with whether or not the Lord is good, if we are Christians. It is not merely inevitable it is a necessary part of the journey of faith. If we never doubt whether or not God is for us and have no pangs of conscious then how certain can we really be the Lord is actually for us, He who died for our sins out of love? Michael wrote clearly and succinctly about those sorts of struggles, and also wrote clearly and succinctly about how in many ways American evangelicals invite resentment and distrust because we are the Pharisees that we claim to not be like. We are the Sadducees who have traded in the eruptive power of Yahweh for a settled society that gives us what we want and the stability and prosperity we lean on as a gift of God given to those who are wise and prudent. This quality in us is so pernicious we can embrace it fully while being certain we are NOT exemplifying it. We are, like Peter, apt to say "though all others desert you, Lord, I will not forsake you." Michael has done a good job of writing about what it is like to be Peter and to discover that you are not as faithful to the Lord as you imagined you would be.
When Christ comes to you having gone to the cross you have the opportunity to run from Christ or to run to Him. What I have always appreciated about Michael's writing is that he lays out that stark set of options and has always urged people to run to Christ and not from Him. It can be easy to find yourself effectively saying "No" to Christ because of the sinners He keeps company with. This is especially true for those who have been hurt by churches, who would sooner live their lives in a bar picking up people than to set foot in a church after the things they have been hurt by.
It could have been an opportunity for Michael to say something like, "you cannot have God as your father unless you call the Church your mother". He has not, by and large, said that. The mother of God's people is so far from perfection that many of the debates about the Bride more or less center on which limb is less gangrenous than the other! God's bride (Israel) is depicted as a cheating whore who goes so far as to PAY others so that she can commit adultery. That is a bad and pathetic prostitute indeed who has to pay her customers to use her. That is who the Bride of Christ is, ourselves who are being redeemed by Christ from that impulse, from that embrace of death as life.
Michael has, I believe, done an effective job of reminding those of us who are Christians that we badly need the savior we often present as not having so badly been needed. He has been effective in arguing that in many cases we in the Church present ourselves as the mediator of Christ whle little realizing how badly we need Christ to mediate for us, not the other way around. We have often been the very obstacles to Christ that have been stumbling blocks to those who would otherwise come to Him and yet we feel ourselves to be persecuted because of an often listless and lacklustre faith. For all these things I have appreciated Michael's persistence even when he wrote things I didn't agree with or just found a bit dull. I kept returning and keep returning to his blog because his passion for Christ is indisputable.
This year has already been a year in which I have become acutely aware of death and failure (which are not things I was particularly unaware of before, just in case anyone was wondering). I have been trying and failing in my job hunt for nearly half a year now. I discovered that an old high school associate has come down with cancer. Another person I was acquainted with just after my college days was murdered by her stalker. So I am more than a little acquainted with the reality that even in the midst of life we face death.
I know iMonk is going to die, possibly even before the year is out. I trust the Lord has him in His hands. I have no problem praying the Lord would be gracious enough to heal him of this sickness even as I myself have had family praying for me for decades to be healed of a physical condition that has never actually improved and at one point got catastrophically worse. That Christ Himself prayed in the garden a prayer that was given a resounding 'no' that sent Him to the Cross means I do not have to feel bad praying that the Father would intervene even in a case that is utterly hopeless. As the three young men said, "We are confident that God will deliver us yet even if He does not we will not bow down before that idol." There are reasons that the Gospel is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, even those Gentiles and Jews who, as it were, are within the Christian faith.
What I have most appreciated about Michael's blogging is that he has found ways to articulate what it looks like to be the professing Christian who, nevertheless, when confronted with who Christ is finds His actual teaching to be foolishness or a stumbling block. I have respected him for being able to criticize even those teachers and preachers he respects.
I've never met the man. We've traded emails a handful of times over the years and he is at least acquainted with some people I know, but I have benefited a great deal from his writing over the years. Thanks to a link he posted I found a church in Seattle I have been attending after a significant crisis in my life about where exactly I would fellowship. A friend had advised me around that general period to not leave merely out of dissatisfaction but that if the Lord opens up a positive direction forward (as He did for a friend of mine) that that was a great reason to move into a new direction. Thanks to a link from iMonk, that positive new direction materialized when I heard a sermon that helped me better understand one of the psalms and to have a clear sense of a place where scripture was taught in a way that reached me in areas where I am weak. I have iMonk to thank for that, even though we've never met and at best are merely strangers who have traded a handful of emails.
At some point we all struggle with whether or not the Lord is good, if we are Christians. It is not merely inevitable it is a necessary part of the journey of faith. If we never doubt whether or not God is for us and have no pangs of conscious then how certain can we really be the Lord is actually for us, He who died for our sins out of love? Michael wrote clearly and succinctly about those sorts of struggles, and also wrote clearly and succinctly about how in many ways American evangelicals invite resentment and distrust because we are the Pharisees that we claim to not be like. We are the Sadducees who have traded in the eruptive power of Yahweh for a settled society that gives us what we want and the stability and prosperity we lean on as a gift of God given to those who are wise and prudent. This quality in us is so pernicious we can embrace it fully while being certain we are NOT exemplifying it. We are, like Peter, apt to say "though all others desert you, Lord, I will not forsake you." Michael has done a good job of writing about what it is like to be Peter and to discover that you are not as faithful to the Lord as you imagined you would be.
When Christ comes to you having gone to the cross you have the opportunity to run from Christ or to run to Him. What I have always appreciated about Michael's writing is that he lays out that stark set of options and has always urged people to run to Christ and not from Him. It can be easy to find yourself effectively saying "No" to Christ because of the sinners He keeps company with. This is especially true for those who have been hurt by churches, who would sooner live their lives in a bar picking up people than to set foot in a church after the things they have been hurt by.
It could have been an opportunity for Michael to say something like, "you cannot have God as your father unless you call the Church your mother". He has not, by and large, said that. The mother of God's people is so far from perfection that many of the debates about the Bride more or less center on which limb is less gangrenous than the other! God's bride (Israel) is depicted as a cheating whore who goes so far as to PAY others so that she can commit adultery. That is a bad and pathetic prostitute indeed who has to pay her customers to use her. That is who the Bride of Christ is, ourselves who are being redeemed by Christ from that impulse, from that embrace of death as life.
Michael has, I believe, done an effective job of reminding those of us who are Christians that we badly need the savior we often present as not having so badly been needed. He has been effective in arguing that in many cases we in the Church present ourselves as the mediator of Christ whle little realizing how badly we need Christ to mediate for us, not the other way around. We have often been the very obstacles to Christ that have been stumbling blocks to those who would otherwise come to Him and yet we feel ourselves to be persecuted because of an often listless and lacklustre faith. For all these things I have appreciated Michael's persistence even when he wrote things I didn't agree with or just found a bit dull. I kept returning and keep returning to his blog because his passion for Christ is indisputable.
demagogues and self-exoneration
I have thought lately about how demagogues attain their place. They manage to appeal to our basest instincts while employing our loftiest rhetoric, they delude us with our own delusions and drive us forward by appealing to our basest fears.
What may be considered both a liberal and a conservative canard is formulating an argument that "YOU" are part of an oppressed and beleaguered group of people with whom the speaker identifies. The land and its wealth do not really belong to you until it is you, specifically, who have some kind of ownership in it. You become representative of the whole and the demagogue speaks in such a way as to make the appeal, you feel, directly to you.
He or she proposes to be the fractal image of the whole by example and, if you will, presents himself or herself as a kind of enacted parable to embody those down and out qualities you feel in yourself even while rising steadily through whatever cutthroat measures he or she deems fit to use in ascendency. Cue some smug axiom that you should be thankful for all the little people because it was over them you crawled to get to the top. It sounds cute to say when you're not crushing opposition a la Tianneman Square or Krystalnacht. Everyone who rises to the level of being able to crush someone else's reputation is able to employ the rhetoric of the underdog.
That alpha dog so revel in selling themselves as underdogs regardless of their cause should make us all the more skeptical about its deployment. It is the smartest of smart weapons in rhetoric because it seems so patently dumb! It is the sort of glorious assertion that can appeal to trust fund liberals who believe they should bring some kind of socialist utopia to it just as it can appeal to wage slave conservatives who think that if they just make the case that their overpaid bosses be allowed to speculate with investor capital that that will bring real freedom to them. I, obviously, look with no small amount of suspicion on both directions for using this sort of rhetorical device.
Yet, I suppose, in a sad sort of way it isn't hard to suggest that a great way for a demagogue to become a demagogue is to appeal to young men, particularly because young men who have been stymied or thwarted professionally and sexually are so ready to cast about for something, anything, that can help them attain what they desire. Indeed, anyone who can help them galvanize their desires into what feels like an acceptable outlet becomes a hero no matter how checkered or even dark that person's history and personality may be.
We exonerate our favorite demagogues because through them we exonerate ourselves. This will not do. We should not exonerate the screeds and abuses and harm done by our warriors, whatever those causes and whomever those single combat combatants might be, simply because it helps us to feel we are on the right side. One of the great enemies of integrity manifests in special pleading. If you excuse in your hero rhetoric that you would damn in another, if you excuse in your pet champion what you decry in your self-appointed foe then you've lost the battle in moral terms. This is why I have for years been persuaded that Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would have allowed Him to live. The "Christian nation" would have crucified Christ faster than Israel did and for lesser reasons.
Yet I am immensely grateful to have been born in the United States and to have benefited from the almost limitless beauty of the culture it has embraced. I am pleased that I am able to so thoroughly study works by Shostakovich who lived in a nation Reagan called an evil empire. I am grateful to live in a land where people have developed the internet and mass communication and art in ways that are amazing. The ugliest appeals appeal to our longing for beauty and say that if you just make this sacrifice that beauty can be yours.
The line of a demagogue could be easily summed up in a line from Michael Bay's first Transformers movie, "No sacrifice, no glory." The question can easily become then, "what sacrifice?" and then "what glory?" It may be instructive to ask these questions in another way, "Whose sacRIFICe?" and "For whose glory?" If you sacrifice yourself for your own glory what is left of you to share in that glory? If you sacrifice others for your own glory then you have made a sacrifice of others and what good have you accomplished?
We must recognize the demagogue in ourselves before we can repudiate the demagogue outside us. This doesn't mean that we cannot or should not want the things that tempt us to encourage the demagogue within and without. Satan tempted Jesus to make stones into bread because Jesus was hungry. Christ repudiated the path of the demagogue for our sake. Christ accomplished on our behalf what we continually fail to achieve for ourselves, a sacrifice that revealed His glory. Our sacrifices frequently reveal our shame even in the midst of the things we are most proud of. Our sacrifices reveal our idols. Our sacrifices reveal whom other than Yahweh we value even as we claim to do His will. After all, those who killed Christ and the apostles were, as Jesus warned the disciples, certain that in so doing they were doing God a favor!
God through Ezekiel rebuked shepherds whose ultimate goal was to feed themselves off the flock He appointed them over. It is not merely shepherds who seek to feed themselves and not others. If you go into service amongst God's people seeking to gain something prepare for the bitterest of disappointments. John who said "he must become greater and greater while I must become less and less", even he struggled in the end and asked, "Are you the one we are seeking or should we seek another?" It was to John through his own messengers that Jesus said "blessed is the one who does not take offense at me". Many of us struggle even to muster up the curiosity to ask. John went to his death having the answer that Christ gave him.
Christ is not the demagogue we can turn to so that we may exonerate our own desires and dreams. He is the one who asks us to fail for the sake of the success only He can give us. Who ever loves his life will lose it but whoever hates his life for the sake of Christ will gain it. Certainly as someone who keeps trying to find work this is not merely an abstraction to me. I fail every week I fail to write a cover letter and resume that gets anyone even slightly interested in calling me in for an interview. I do not know what the future holds and the dread of a disastrous future looms more prominently than disappointments of the past.
A demagogue is the sort of person who can sense this general malaise amongst many and capitalize on it. He or she can step into this anxiety and say "If you follow where I am going you will reach the promised land." For young men this temptation is uniquely strong because, it seems to me, we have a job market and have had a job market in which people struggle to find work and where many professions no longer seem to even have a place. It has been ever thus but every generation is bound to feel profoundly lonely in the moment when the moment strikes them. You apply for jobs that other people get, maybe foreigners, maybe people that you are certain can't even be legal citizens. They might be, you can't know for sure.
It is into this sense of anxiety of wanting SOMEONE to be to blame so that you don't feel like you bear the weight of your own failure yourself, that a demagogue becomes useful. It is perhaps the case that were demagogues not volunteering for the position we should have to go nominate them against their wills on the basis of their compelling talent! We can blame the demagogue after the fact for being one ... but do we count ourselves responsible for basking in his or her light? Do we see in him or her the mirror that their vice holds up to ourselves? Does he or she even need to be OUR demagogue to reveal this lack of charity in us?
What may be considered both a liberal and a conservative canard is formulating an argument that "YOU" are part of an oppressed and beleaguered group of people with whom the speaker identifies. The land and its wealth do not really belong to you until it is you, specifically, who have some kind of ownership in it. You become representative of the whole and the demagogue speaks in such a way as to make the appeal, you feel, directly to you.
He or she proposes to be the fractal image of the whole by example and, if you will, presents himself or herself as a kind of enacted parable to embody those down and out qualities you feel in yourself even while rising steadily through whatever cutthroat measures he or she deems fit to use in ascendency. Cue some smug axiom that you should be thankful for all the little people because it was over them you crawled to get to the top. It sounds cute to say when you're not crushing opposition a la Tianneman Square or Krystalnacht. Everyone who rises to the level of being able to crush someone else's reputation is able to employ the rhetoric of the underdog.
That alpha dog so revel in selling themselves as underdogs regardless of their cause should make us all the more skeptical about its deployment. It is the smartest of smart weapons in rhetoric because it seems so patently dumb! It is the sort of glorious assertion that can appeal to trust fund liberals who believe they should bring some kind of socialist utopia to it just as it can appeal to wage slave conservatives who think that if they just make the case that their overpaid bosses be allowed to speculate with investor capital that that will bring real freedom to them. I, obviously, look with no small amount of suspicion on both directions for using this sort of rhetorical device.
Yet, I suppose, in a sad sort of way it isn't hard to suggest that a great way for a demagogue to become a demagogue is to appeal to young men, particularly because young men who have been stymied or thwarted professionally and sexually are so ready to cast about for something, anything, that can help them attain what they desire. Indeed, anyone who can help them galvanize their desires into what feels like an acceptable outlet becomes a hero no matter how checkered or even dark that person's history and personality may be.
We exonerate our favorite demagogues because through them we exonerate ourselves. This will not do. We should not exonerate the screeds and abuses and harm done by our warriors, whatever those causes and whomever those single combat combatants might be, simply because it helps us to feel we are on the right side. One of the great enemies of integrity manifests in special pleading. If you excuse in your hero rhetoric that you would damn in another, if you excuse in your pet champion what you decry in your self-appointed foe then you've lost the battle in moral terms. This is why I have for years been persuaded that Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would have allowed Him to live. The "Christian nation" would have crucified Christ faster than Israel did and for lesser reasons.
Yet I am immensely grateful to have been born in the United States and to have benefited from the almost limitless beauty of the culture it has embraced. I am pleased that I am able to so thoroughly study works by Shostakovich who lived in a nation Reagan called an evil empire. I am grateful to live in a land where people have developed the internet and mass communication and art in ways that are amazing. The ugliest appeals appeal to our longing for beauty and say that if you just make this sacrifice that beauty can be yours.
The line of a demagogue could be easily summed up in a line from Michael Bay's first Transformers movie, "No sacrifice, no glory." The question can easily become then, "what sacrifice?" and then "what glory?" It may be instructive to ask these questions in another way, "Whose sacRIFICe?" and "For whose glory?" If you sacrifice yourself for your own glory what is left of you to share in that glory? If you sacrifice others for your own glory then you have made a sacrifice of others and what good have you accomplished?
We must recognize the demagogue in ourselves before we can repudiate the demagogue outside us. This doesn't mean that we cannot or should not want the things that tempt us to encourage the demagogue within and without. Satan tempted Jesus to make stones into bread because Jesus was hungry. Christ repudiated the path of the demagogue for our sake. Christ accomplished on our behalf what we continually fail to achieve for ourselves, a sacrifice that revealed His glory. Our sacrifices frequently reveal our shame even in the midst of the things we are most proud of. Our sacrifices reveal our idols. Our sacrifices reveal whom other than Yahweh we value even as we claim to do His will. After all, those who killed Christ and the apostles were, as Jesus warned the disciples, certain that in so doing they were doing God a favor!
God through Ezekiel rebuked shepherds whose ultimate goal was to feed themselves off the flock He appointed them over. It is not merely shepherds who seek to feed themselves and not others. If you go into service amongst God's people seeking to gain something prepare for the bitterest of disappointments. John who said "he must become greater and greater while I must become less and less", even he struggled in the end and asked, "Are you the one we are seeking or should we seek another?" It was to John through his own messengers that Jesus said "blessed is the one who does not take offense at me". Many of us struggle even to muster up the curiosity to ask. John went to his death having the answer that Christ gave him.
Christ is not the demagogue we can turn to so that we may exonerate our own desires and dreams. He is the one who asks us to fail for the sake of the success only He can give us. Who ever loves his life will lose it but whoever hates his life for the sake of Christ will gain it. Certainly as someone who keeps trying to find work this is not merely an abstraction to me. I fail every week I fail to write a cover letter and resume that gets anyone even slightly interested in calling me in for an interview. I do not know what the future holds and the dread of a disastrous future looms more prominently than disappointments of the past.
A demagogue is the sort of person who can sense this general malaise amongst many and capitalize on it. He or she can step into this anxiety and say "If you follow where I am going you will reach the promised land." For young men this temptation is uniquely strong because, it seems to me, we have a job market and have had a job market in which people struggle to find work and where many professions no longer seem to even have a place. It has been ever thus but every generation is bound to feel profoundly lonely in the moment when the moment strikes them. You apply for jobs that other people get, maybe foreigners, maybe people that you are certain can't even be legal citizens. They might be, you can't know for sure.
It is into this sense of anxiety of wanting SOMEONE to be to blame so that you don't feel like you bear the weight of your own failure yourself, that a demagogue becomes useful. It is perhaps the case that were demagogues not volunteering for the position we should have to go nominate them against their wills on the basis of their compelling talent! We can blame the demagogue after the fact for being one ... but do we count ourselves responsible for basking in his or her light? Do we see in him or her the mirror that their vice holds up to ourselves? Does he or she even need to be OUR demagogue to reveal this lack of charity in us?
Sunday, March 14, 2010
A pet peeve: "We all have problems"
There has been a discussion over on a php forum I participate in about the least favorite cliches people have. It tends to read more as a litany of colloquialisms people find annoying or offensive rather than a discussion of cliches in their narrative or musical form. No one over there is saying stuff like "Oh how I hate the tear drop motiff in Baroque music! It's so fake and condescending!!" No one has yet opined that they can't stand trite I-IV-V progressions presented as though that were sufficient to be musically compelling. No one has yet groused about the egregious use of the rising major sixth from the tonic to mediant scale degrees after some verklemt chromatic noodling as a way to emotionally manipulate gullible audiences attending Romantic concertos in concert.
By the same measure no one has vented their spleen about the cliche of the lonely special boy or girl who has within themselves the key to unlimited greatness who just needs to withstand all the haters and discover their inner John Galt or Luke Skywalker or Alladin or whatever messiah/chosen one/neo trope you care to employ. No one has complained about the routines of the romantic comedy or the "rebel story". The most pernicous cliches are the ones through which we guide our own lives and understand ourselves, not the figures of speech that streamline and simplify communication. The cliche enquiry of "how was your day?" is not as dangerous as the cliche assumption that you are special and if the world just recognized how special you were life would be better or the cilche assumption that if you just work hard enough you won't really be subject to time and chance as Ecclesiastes warns you that you are.
Perhaps I should suggest that the cliche can be that which aspires to the status of a proverb but is not actually tested and found adequate by the measure of wisdom. Or, perhaps, the cliche does not attain the status of a proverb because it does not contain in it any actual wisdom because it amounts to the sapiential equivalent of "Where ever you go, there you are" or "Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before." A proverb may be a trite expression but a trite expression does not carry the weight of a proverb.
The vituperation over on the forum is generally reserved for the verbal equivalents of "have a nice day". There are comments about how some figure of speech sets their teeth on edge, like "action steps", "corporate speak" or the like. I understand that but none of those are quite on the same level for me as the false empathy and dismissive power of "We all have problems."
Well, I have of late realized that one of my peeves is about a particular rhetorical device that comes up as a blunt change of course in conversation, most often when a person wishes to either redirect a conversation or to tacitly express a lack of empathy in a way that allows them to exonerate themselves. That rhetorical flourish is, "We all have problems."
Yes, but in many cases that gesture can be either the means by which a person chooses not to turn a self-critical eye on themselves or to settle comfortably into not being particularly concerned about someone else. "We all have problems" might better be said as, "Well, see, I don't care because I'm fine, really. We all have problems but mine aren't important and that other person's problems are worse than mine."
You may, perhaps, know how this rhetorical flourish comes up in conversation. It can often come about by way of someone expressing concern about another person's situation (gossip this may be or not). A person might say something fairly dismissive of the person themselves and if you, say, suggest that we also may have similar character flaws and hint that this should give us pause the reply may come forth, "We all have problems."
What it means is "I'm not as bad as the person I'm not caring about." I may have problems but it's more fun to talk about the problems that other person has. That other person has a poor work ethic or has unrealistic standards in the opposite sex or is too fearful. Suppose I am bad at founding businesses that last longer than a couple of years because the basis of my business model needs improving? Suppose I lack empathy for others because I have become too cagey due to feeling used by other people? Suppose I think, mistakenly, that if I just avoid trusting people that people will be less likely to hurt me? All of those are significant, even spectacular problems, and yet I could dismiss all of that by saying "We all have problems." It's a brilliant conversational flourish. I'm not perfect ... but at least I'm better than you or that other person I was possibly just talking about. It is the would-be conversational panacea that accomplishes no healing. It speaks of peace even though there is still war.
The wisdom in Jesus' rebuke to Judas was not in saying "The poor you will always have with you." That by itself would merely be saying, "We all have problems". Jesus went further and said, "But you will not always have me." Now Jesus' observation that there will always be those who are poor IS wise but the crux of Jesus' wisdom in correcting those who looked down on the woman lay in going beyond observing what was obvious. Jesus was killed for telling people they had problems who thought they were the solution to the problems of other people. Jesus was killed by those who believed that they had in themselves the solution to their own problems, and not only those but the problems of the world. They had that solution in the form of what they believed was given to them. It was not, however, merely given to them but also, through Christ, to those whom they thought were not worthy of the gift through a means they considered unworthy of the gift.
By the same measure no one has vented their spleen about the cliche of the lonely special boy or girl who has within themselves the key to unlimited greatness who just needs to withstand all the haters and discover their inner John Galt or Luke Skywalker or Alladin or whatever messiah/chosen one/neo trope you care to employ. No one has complained about the routines of the romantic comedy or the "rebel story". The most pernicous cliches are the ones through which we guide our own lives and understand ourselves, not the figures of speech that streamline and simplify communication. The cliche enquiry of "how was your day?" is not as dangerous as the cliche assumption that you are special and if the world just recognized how special you were life would be better or the cilche assumption that if you just work hard enough you won't really be subject to time and chance as Ecclesiastes warns you that you are.
Perhaps I should suggest that the cliche can be that which aspires to the status of a proverb but is not actually tested and found adequate by the measure of wisdom. Or, perhaps, the cliche does not attain the status of a proverb because it does not contain in it any actual wisdom because it amounts to the sapiential equivalent of "Where ever you go, there you are" or "Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before." A proverb may be a trite expression but a trite expression does not carry the weight of a proverb.
The vituperation over on the forum is generally reserved for the verbal equivalents of "have a nice day". There are comments about how some figure of speech sets their teeth on edge, like "action steps", "corporate speak" or the like. I understand that but none of those are quite on the same level for me as the false empathy and dismissive power of "We all have problems."
Well, I have of late realized that one of my peeves is about a particular rhetorical device that comes up as a blunt change of course in conversation, most often when a person wishes to either redirect a conversation or to tacitly express a lack of empathy in a way that allows them to exonerate themselves. That rhetorical flourish is, "We all have problems."
Yes, but in many cases that gesture can be either the means by which a person chooses not to turn a self-critical eye on themselves or to settle comfortably into not being particularly concerned about someone else. "We all have problems" might better be said as, "Well, see, I don't care because I'm fine, really. We all have problems but mine aren't important and that other person's problems are worse than mine."
You may, perhaps, know how this rhetorical flourish comes up in conversation. It can often come about by way of someone expressing concern about another person's situation (gossip this may be or not). A person might say something fairly dismissive of the person themselves and if you, say, suggest that we also may have similar character flaws and hint that this should give us pause the reply may come forth, "We all have problems."
What it means is "I'm not as bad as the person I'm not caring about." I may have problems but it's more fun to talk about the problems that other person has. That other person has a poor work ethic or has unrealistic standards in the opposite sex or is too fearful. Suppose I am bad at founding businesses that last longer than a couple of years because the basis of my business model needs improving? Suppose I lack empathy for others because I have become too cagey due to feeling used by other people? Suppose I think, mistakenly, that if I just avoid trusting people that people will be less likely to hurt me? All of those are significant, even spectacular problems, and yet I could dismiss all of that by saying "We all have problems." It's a brilliant conversational flourish. I'm not perfect ... but at least I'm better than you or that other person I was possibly just talking about. It is the would-be conversational panacea that accomplishes no healing. It speaks of peace even though there is still war.
The wisdom in Jesus' rebuke to Judas was not in saying "The poor you will always have with you." That by itself would merely be saying, "We all have problems". Jesus went further and said, "But you will not always have me." Now Jesus' observation that there will always be those who are poor IS wise but the crux of Jesus' wisdom in correcting those who looked down on the woman lay in going beyond observing what was obvious. Jesus was killed for telling people they had problems who thought they were the solution to the problems of other people. Jesus was killed by those who believed that they had in themselves the solution to their own problems, and not only those but the problems of the world. They had that solution in the form of what they believed was given to them. It was not, however, merely given to them but also, through Christ, to those whom they thought were not worthy of the gift through a means they considered unworthy of the gift.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
a few stray observations about writing fugues
Since starting my set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar I have been reminded of things that I had forgotten over the last fifteen years. Perhaps the foremost observation is how few composers of fugues (outside of J. S. Bach among those I have studied) actually use countersubjects! Most people opt for free material. Leo Brouwer, Beethoven, Hindemith, Shostakovich, they all "tend" to eschew countersubjects in favor of basically free material. Clearly I generalize but I trust you get the idea. Mendelssohn would sometimes employ at least one countersubject, though, so I can't say that it's just Bach, obviously, who used them.
But the thing that was least discussed in my study of fugues that I feel warrants mention beyond the absence of countersubjects entirely in many fugues is that there is far more liberty to the countersubject than a strictly academic explanation would lead you to believe. In one of Bach's B minor fugues in the 48 (I think ... ) he presents the countersubject in prime form in the first answer and when the subject returns he presents the INVERSION of the countersubject. It is also commonplace to transpose countersubjects when they would not work in their initial form over the subject.
I have also noticed that while strict adherance to the interchangability of the subject and countersubjects makes for a more impressive fugue there is plenty of room for free material both in middle entries as well as episodes. I prefer to stick to George Oldroyd's hoary axiom that it is crucial to have all the material in your exposition be the best stuff you can come up with because THAT is the stuff you'll have to live with for the rest of the fugue. I don't recall that he said that resorting to free material "may" mean that you're unhappy with some of your exposition but it could be inferred. Then again, Oldroyd never really indicated what Bach seems to have noticed, that in a three and four strand contrapuntal composition some of those puppies grow up to be dogs that just don't hunt, so you don't take them with you for most of the hunting exposition.
All of this becomes even more potently practical when composing contrapuntal works for solo guitar. It seems too bad that so many of the few who have composed fugues for the guitar never took the time to compose countersubjects. To be fair, I suppose, any guitarist, let alone a non-guitarist, who composes a fugue for the guitar should be proud of pulling off a multi-line work for solo guitar! Yet I aspire to something more demanding and perhaps that just makes me a pedantic snob, but the whole beauty of counterpoint to me lays in its capacity for inversion and rotation. Simply because other composers for the guitar have not generally bothered to write invertible counterpoint for the instrument doesn't mean no one should try it.
Then again, most guitarists and those who write for the guitar have never sung in choirs and may thus be unfamiliar with how contrapuntal art can be developed within the severely limiting yet practical confines of ensemble singing. Perhaps I am a guitarist/composer who had the supremely unfair advantage of singing a William Byrd motet in high school and later on sang any number of contrapuntal choral works by Fux and Sweelinck and Durufle in college. So many guitarists have gulped down the notion that the guitar is a miniature orchestra and too few seem to have benefited from the more practical observation that the guitar is much like a choir (without the wonderful ability a choir has to sustain, which means it's more like a harpsichord with some room for vibrato)!
Learning what is possible within the confines of a choir makes the guitar, by comparison, easier to navigate. After all, for both the guitar and the choir it is dangerous to have voices cross each other because the clarity of the melodic line can be lost. For both the guitar and the choir the range of the "instrument" is similarly restricted to the lowest notes baritones can handle to the highest notes the sopranos can squeak out on a good day with some solid rehearsal.
But the thing that was least discussed in my study of fugues that I feel warrants mention beyond the absence of countersubjects entirely in many fugues is that there is far more liberty to the countersubject than a strictly academic explanation would lead you to believe. In one of Bach's B minor fugues in the 48 (I think ... ) he presents the countersubject in prime form in the first answer and when the subject returns he presents the INVERSION of the countersubject. It is also commonplace to transpose countersubjects when they would not work in their initial form over the subject.
I have also noticed that while strict adherance to the interchangability of the subject and countersubjects makes for a more impressive fugue there is plenty of room for free material both in middle entries as well as episodes. I prefer to stick to George Oldroyd's hoary axiom that it is crucial to have all the material in your exposition be the best stuff you can come up with because THAT is the stuff you'll have to live with for the rest of the fugue. I don't recall that he said that resorting to free material "may" mean that you're unhappy with some of your exposition but it could be inferred. Then again, Oldroyd never really indicated what Bach seems to have noticed, that in a three and four strand contrapuntal composition some of those puppies grow up to be dogs that just don't hunt, so you don't take them with you for most of the hunting exposition.
All of this becomes even more potently practical when composing contrapuntal works for solo guitar. It seems too bad that so many of the few who have composed fugues for the guitar never took the time to compose countersubjects. To be fair, I suppose, any guitarist, let alone a non-guitarist, who composes a fugue for the guitar should be proud of pulling off a multi-line work for solo guitar! Yet I aspire to something more demanding and perhaps that just makes me a pedantic snob, but the whole beauty of counterpoint to me lays in its capacity for inversion and rotation. Simply because other composers for the guitar have not generally bothered to write invertible counterpoint for the instrument doesn't mean no one should try it.
Then again, most guitarists and those who write for the guitar have never sung in choirs and may thus be unfamiliar with how contrapuntal art can be developed within the severely limiting yet practical confines of ensemble singing. Perhaps I am a guitarist/composer who had the supremely unfair advantage of singing a William Byrd motet in high school and later on sang any number of contrapuntal choral works by Fux and Sweelinck and Durufle in college. So many guitarists have gulped down the notion that the guitar is a miniature orchestra and too few seem to have benefited from the more practical observation that the guitar is much like a choir (without the wonderful ability a choir has to sustain, which means it's more like a harpsichord with some room for vibrato)!
Learning what is possible within the confines of a choir makes the guitar, by comparison, easier to navigate. After all, for both the guitar and the choir it is dangerous to have voices cross each other because the clarity of the melodic line can be lost. For both the guitar and the choir the range of the "instrument" is similarly restricted to the lowest notes baritones can handle to the highest notes the sopranos can squeak out on a good day with some solid rehearsal.
There is in the end no substitute for slogging through the work it takes to compose fugues and to discover through trial and error what the material you are building with, as it were, suggests to you. The house you build with wood is not the same kind of house you would build with bricks and the house you build with bricks is not the same sort of house as the one you would build with sheet metal. Of course in the real world no one builds a house only with one of these materials or the other but I trust you get my point.
By way of extending this metaphor each additional melodic element or strand in the fugue may be thought of as the plumbing, the wiring, the insulation, and the heating of a house but the foundation is ultimately the subject. If you build your house on a solid foundation that can withstand the weight of all the other elements then your house will stand and people will actually decide to live in it. If you don't then odds are pretty high in a musical idiom as unforgiving as the fugue that no one will live in it. What is more if you are not willing to live in the house you built for yourself no one else will want to live in it.
In a way this is all a roundabout way of saying to study the old masters, see how they built the houses that they lived in, see how they built the houses that people have been living in since. You don't learn merely by building your own houses, you apprentice yourself by way of study to the builders and houses of the past. This is not always because all those houses built in the past are better, you may find that the houses you build are in some cases sturdier homes but if you study the masters of the past you will understand how at the level of true mastery one builder can be strong in one area and another builder may be strong in another.
At the risk of reciting a hoary cliche you're safest bet is to study J. S. Bach and to see how he assembled his fugues. Then you can turn to the likes of Haydn and Beethoven (Haydn tends to be under-appreciated as a composer of fugues). You can turn to Mendelssohn, you can turn to Bartok, Hindemith, Brahms, and others. You can go further back to Byrd and Purcell and also to Handel. You will find in different periods certain things change and others remain the same. The unalterable foundation of any fugue is its subject and though this should go without saying it constantly bears repeating.
The most important observation I can make now that I've been working through composing some dozen fugues is that your subject must be a tune that submits to developmental processes and which, perhaps most importantly, beyond this initial observation, is something you will not soon quickly tired of either hearing or playing. Writing a decent fugue is like writing a decent pop song except that you must start right away with your hook and the hook must withstand immediate transposition and repetition for the entire length of your pop song. Really these musical arts are not so disparate as many people on either side of that pop/classical divide would have you believe but I've already written at some length about that elsewhere here.
So beyond studying the old masters of fugue-writing there is another task that you should consider. I will aproach this by way of a necessary digression--the comic book author and artist Andi Watson once put it, the lines in the sand are social. Someone interested in comics can benefit as much from a study of Peanuts and Garfield (yes, I admit I said that) as Calvin & Hobbes or Krazy Kat or any other comics story. If you study fugues don't forget that you will learn as much by studying other non-fugal compositional procedures as you will be studying them. Both negative and positive space are parts of composition in musical as well as visual art.
Don't rule anything out, not even the things you dislike, as something you can learn from. You can learn a lot from the things you like but you can learn as much from the things you hate. When I was young I was assigned Bruckner and I hated Bruckner (I still hate Bruckner)An essential part maturing as an artist is to recognize that it is wiser to learn from everything than to set some things off limits.
You may want to compose fugues but you will benefit from listening to popular music. Why? Because you will hear the kinds of tunes that people keep singing over and over again and just as the hook is the foundation of a popular song the subject is the foundation of the fugue and you will find, particularly in the works of Bach, that popular hymns can become the foundations of amazing fugues.
To pick just one easy example the giant fugue for solo violin in C major is derived from a subject that relies on the German hymn that can be roughly rendered as "Come Holy Spirit". You can even detect, with some careful study and historical cross-referencing, how the fugue subject and the hymn from the German tradition connects to the old venerable tract Veni Creator Spiritus with that stepwise oscillation around the dominant scale degree. At a more ostensibly mundane level you can see connections between the bass line in Weezer's "Island in the Sun" and the opening first violin line in Haydn's "Fifths" quartet. The more widely you cast the net the more fish you will discover have more in common than you could have guessed.
So now we have, it seems, come full circle. Paul wrote in one of his epistles "study to show yourself approved." It applies to the study of the scriptures and pastoral care but it applies everywhere else, too. You won't get anywhere if you "learn by doing" alone just as you won't get anywhere if you learn merely by "book learning". Fail to combine the two, fail to integrate all these (often by themselves) unhappy disciplines and you will fail to see the happy integration of many beautiful disciplines.
There may be many people who might tell you that you will benefit more from the study of Bach than enjoying Stevie Wonder; that there will be more benefit in listening to Mozart than listening to the Who but if you love the art of music and love it broadly this will be of more benefit to you then loving only the specialized things that you focus on.
The narrow furrows of detailed study are for when you are cultivating your particular specialty crop in your own garden. If you do not love gardening altogether then you don't have the opportunity and inclination to specialize. You will be more likely to write a decent fugue if you love a beautiful tune or even incline to study tunes you hate than if you just tell yourself, "I'm going to get good at writing fugues." The disposition of the mind and heart to explore are most important ... because it will be this that allows you to find the fun in the endless trial and error and dissatisfaction of slogging through subject after subject that don't work and the even more endless array of countersubjects and contrapunal lines that just don't work.
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