Category: Blog

I read recently that many bird species now sing at night in our cities.  The day is so filled with the noise of people coming and going, with the sounds of shops and shoppers, that the birds must sing at night in order to be heard.  The honest songs of nature are drowned out by the din of our commerce.

In a world full of salesmen, where everything seems to be an advertisement for one thing or another, the interrelated questions of sincerity and character often seem to be fading in significance.  We are a people who have forgotten who we really are behind our own sales-pitches.

The film “The Big Kahuna” makes my list for its focus on the question of sincerity and character, as shown in the following clip alone.  The story follows three salesman who are on the road, waiting to make a sales pitch to the CEO of a large company.  Tension builds as the young, pious baptist unknowingly befriends the CEO, but rather than talking business, asks the CEO about his faith before sharing his own belief in Jesus.

I’ll let the clip speak for itself, but it makes me wonder how often the church is guilty of adding to the noise, as the young, baptist salesman is accused of doing.  In a world so full of people just waiting for their turn to speak, and usually speaking in order to sell you something, I wonder whether the church might better witness to Christ by simply taking a step back and listening.  Or perhaps listening and asking the right questions, questions that give people space to think about what is going on in their life, what is truly important, and who they are.  That moment of silent receptivity may be what people need in order to then hear what is being said.  I’m beginning to think the most “prophetic” possible act in our culture may be to simply slow down and listen to the voices usually drowned out by the noise, including the honest songs of birds.

I also think the film is brilliant for connecting sincerity to character.  Our culture tries to produce artificial character instantaneously like we would a twinkie.  As a consequence, one usually gets a reputation for being of good character more often than not by just hiding their s@%& better than average.  One of my favorite line from the film is when Phil tells Bob, “I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret, you just don’t know what they are. [Character] is when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done, and you wish that you had it to do over, but you know you can’t, because it’s too late.”

The more years I have under my belt, the more I screw up and the less excuses I have.  At the same time, the more I realize what true wisdom means, what character means.  If such a simplistic division can be made by someone as young as myself, I think the first half of your life is spent learning to be honest with yourself about who you are, and the second half is spent learning to be okay enough about it to open yourself to God and a community.  Character, then, is the honesty that comes from humility, the humility that comes from honesty.

I decided not to take the time to organize my thoughts better, hopefully the big picture behind the disconnected thoughts makes sense.  Go rent the movie, whoever produced it deserves a little of your money.

This entry is a sort of preface to a series I’ll be beginning next week:  My Unabashedly Biased Top Ten Spiritually Significant Films of the Past Two Decades.

While I was writing about the first film on the list, the video (at the bottom of the post) of Mark Driscoll’s comments on “Avatar” during a sermon came to my attention.  Instead of spending much time criticizing it, I’ll just present it below and add that, based on Driscoll’s criteria for accusing “Avatar” of being demonic, “The Lord of the Rings” series should be seen as an equally pagan, modernist-industry bashing movie that hooked audiences through special effects.  Hopefully the absurdity here is evident.  Especially since it seems to go against some of Driscoll’s own comments concerning cultural engagement.

Though he may not appreciate the category, Mark Driscoll is, here in this one video clip, a poignant example of someone who is taking a “Worldview Approach” to cultural engagement.  He sees the world as a battleground between competing worldviews.  One convinces another to become a Christian by pointing out the flaws in their worldview and demonstrating the reasonableness of their own.  Part of a pastor’s job is to attack worldviews that may be influencing his flock.

Another typical evangelical method of engaging culture is known as the “Market-Driven Approach,” or also the “attractional model.”  In this method, one sees what is culturally popular and attempts to use that as bait to draw people in.  For example, there is (was?) a church in Chicago that regularly has a raffle for cash prizes (with the “Price is Right” music playing in the background, nonetheless) during services in order to attract people to attend their church.  There’s nothing more popular than money, and as long as it gets people in the door…

The last method I wish to highlight is what New Wine tries to espouse, however unsuccessfully, the “Incarnational Approach.”  The Incarnational Approach (also known as missional), looks to build relationships in the community.  While hopefully also showing the reasonableness and attractiveness of the faith, one simply loves other people in word (and so verbal evangelism is not left behind) and in deed.  Despite the fact that this seems to more closely resemble Jesus’ and the apostles’ ministry, people are rarely argued into a different position anyway (especially emotionally laden beliefs like religion or politics), and rarely stick around when the “raffle” is over.

I hope the following series will be an imperfect example of how the church can engage the arts, and specifically films, in an incarnational way.  I hope it shows how each of these films get at profound questions that the gospel is dying to answer.

Sometimes a ridiculous caricature of something or someone is useful for confronting and correcting the screwed up “images”  that somehow get “filed” in the cracks of our gray matter.  These videos were created by a youth group to confront the wacky, though often unspoken, “images” people have of Jesus.  \”Vintage 21 Videos\

Check out this U-Tube video on leadership. Very interesting demonstration of how leadership works, and what it takes to really start–and be a part of– a movement! Pertaining to New Wine, who do you think the Lone Nut is, (eh-hem) and how well are we following/leading?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of the Lenten season leading up to Easter.  I have been looking for a little inspiration/instruction to aid me in my participation of the Lenten season.  Thankfully,I came across a little article in a devotional anthology, “Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter.”  It provided me with the “entry point” that I was looking for.

The title of the first entry, “Repentance”, is written by Kathleen Norris, a teacher who teaches parochial grade school.  Ms. Norris, in seeking to expose her students to the spiritual and poetic wealth found in the Hebrew Psalter, gave her class the assignment of writing their own personal psalm.  One psalm in particular stood out to Kathleen. It was the psalm of a little boy titled, “The Monster Who Was Sorry.”

“He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him: his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town.  The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.”

I just love that little poem.  Why do I love the poem of the little “monster” so much?  I love it for the same reason that Ms. Norris loved it. I love it for its honesty, “the emotional directness”, and I love it for the subtle yet powerful lessons that it teaches us about repentance, an often misunderstood spiritual practice.

There are several lessons from “the psalm of the monster” (not surprisingly these lessons are found in the biblical variety as well).  First, it teaches us that people who practice repentance have this defining trait: they are “messy.”  The problem of course, is nobody wants to be “messy.”  Why do we have such a hard time with this – the fact that in God’s economy it really is okay to be messy?  This should be obvious: only “messy” people need to “clean up”.  Doesn’t the Bible say something like, “for all of us are messy and no one is clean, no not one”?

The second lesson from “the monster” is that it’s not enough to just be messy – you also have to be honest, and not just with yourself.  People who practice repentance are honest with themselves and with at least one other person (the monster wrote a poem for others to read).   Repentance is a process that begins with an honest assessment, which leads to a confession – “I’m angry”, “I’m hurting”, “I’m tired of living with the pigs.”

The third lesson on repentance comes from the closing thoughts of Kathleen Norris who writes, “If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human.” Like Aslan in, “The Silver Chair”, Jesus doesn’t give up on his children even when they turn into “monsters”, but like Aslan with Eustace, Jesus comes to the rescue of the boy trapped behind the “scales of the dragon”, and he patiently works at setting him free.

Repentance does not erase our sins, for only Christ can do that, but it does help us to recognize the “mess” we are in.  We are so easily deluded by our own assessment of things and confession breaks the spell of our denial, our delusions and our “blind spots.”  Confession puts us on the path of discovery, where we discover that if our room really is “messy”, perhaps it could be cleaned. Perhaps it could be a room we could be comfortable sharing with others . . . maybe even with God.

Here’s to all you “monsters” out there – Have a happy and penitent Lenten season!

C