The Point of Praise

A question skeptics ask religious people, a question many religious people have quietly asked, myself included: What is the point of praise? Doesn't God know God is great without us blabbering on about it? Wouldn't God, like any properly modest person, say to our hymns and, "Glad you like me, but hell, enough's enough!"
We forget about the majesty of God. In the midst of "Jesus is my boyfriend" culture and music-- (seriously, one Christian writer said we need to go on dates with Jesus and make sure to shave our legs for him because he deserves to see his princess all dolled up. Gross! I'm not shaving just for Jesus, that's for sure. And what, may I add, if you're a guy and not a metrosexual?!)-- we forget about John's vision:
 "I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as a white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame a fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead" (Rev 1:13-17). 
God is not our imaginary friend. God is the living God infinitely beyond our comprehension. Praise and worship are one level an assent to the fact of God's greatness, a fact unchanged by our worship or lack thereof. 
But that helps us see the original question-- why does God care about our praise-- in a whole new light. Why, indeed? Why does the Master of the Universe-- to use the Jewish phrase, and Jews are so much better at this reverence thing than we are-- give a flying flip whether I worship him or not? I'm just a speck on the cosmic landscape. As the psalter says:
"When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established: what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" (Ps 8:3-4)
As a mother loves even a chicken-scratch, construction paper Mother's Day card, so God loves our worship. He cares about our worship because he cares about us. He wants us to praise him because he wants us-- and not in the Jesus is my boyfriend way, but in this way:
"By the mercies of God, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Rom 12:1). 
He doesn't want our unshaved legs, or even just a couple pretty hymns on Sunday. He wants all of us, and part of that surrendering ourselves over to God includes worshipping the God whose glory is beyond compare, whose love for us nailed his Son to the cross.
But event the fact of the question-- What's the point of praise?-- betrays our rugged, unholy American productivity. Everything has to have a purpose, a point. But relationships don't work that way. Relationships don't have a point, and worship certainly doesn't have a point. There are times to work hard for the kingdom, interceding boldly for others, asking God for help, and generally striving. But there are times to just praise God. As Scripture says: 
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (Eph 1:3).
The Jewish prayer formulation, "Blessed be God..." highlights the uselessness of praise. How can we bless the God who already gives us every blessing? But God wants us to bless him anyway. Because he loves us with the love that "surpasses knowledge" (Eph 3:19). 
Blessed, indeed, be God! 

What Song, Then?

One of many of Kathleen Norris' terrific poems. 

What Song, Then? 

When my life is alien soil

and a wind

like fear

makes restless ground

of all I have done—

what song, then,

to send out roots

that will drink the rain

that does not come—

how could I sing?

Watch light come

from dark and mist rise

from waters

as sky and shore

emerge out of night

and a tree half-green

half-bare.

Half-afraid of what is in me

(though God has called it good)

I sob over nothing,

desires I cannot name.

Sing us, they say,

a song you remember…

Thinking Theologically With A Four Year Old

If you want to really do some good practical theology, grab your favorite four year old. That's what I did over break. My sister, who is also my goddaughter, is four. And she and I did some good theology together.
"And a little child shall lead them" (Is 9:2). 
"Jessica, Jessica, will you read my Bible to me?" she asked with excitement, and ran and grabbed the white Beginner's Bible my parents gave me the Christmas after I turned five. It was the first Bible I ever had, and when I imagine Jesus sometimes I still think of that cartoon drawing-- Jesus wide-eyed and friendly, clad in royal purple, beautiful and alive.
We read about Adam and Eve, and my sister gasped after Eve took the fruit. "She shouldn't do that!" my sister exclaimed. 
When was the last time I gasped aloud at Scripture? 
"Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 18:3)
We read the Nativity story, since Christmas was approaching. "And Gabriel, the angel..." I began. "What's an angel?" my sister interrupted me. I, the amateur theologian, was taken aback. "Well," I stammered, "they're like God's helpers."
When we got to the journey to Bethlehem, with the picture of Joseph walking and Mary on the camel, my sister asked why they weren't driving. "They didn't have cars back then," I said, smiling. "But Joseph's feet will hurt!" she said. 
Yes, surely they did. And I had never thought of it.
"I want to read more stories with girls in them," my sister whined as she flipped through the colorful children's Bible. There she is, I thought with fierce pride, my budding little feminist!
The night I got back, over rich lasagna and ice cold, expensive milk, my mother said the other day my sister was in my room and picked up one of my books and announced, "Jessica really likes God's word." 
Oh, my lovely sister, I pray I will become half of what I am in your eyes. 
On Christmas Eve, my sister joined me in my room as I wrapped Christmas gifts for other family members. I put on some Bing Crosby Christmas hymns-- don't judge; he should be required Christmas listening for everyone at any age. Anyway, bent over the wrap-- isn't wrapping gifts a horrible chore? shouldn't Gift Wrapping 101 be a college course?-- I murmured along with Bing, "Do you hear what I hear?"
"What?" my sister asked with exasperation. "What do you hear?"
What, indeed. That, too, a parable.
Another day, we are doing our makeup together. Don't worry; I don't actually apply makeup to my little princess. We just pretend-- although I suspect she really thinks she is getting a makeover. One of my favorite hymns is "Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus," and whenever she needs to stand up to let me tie her shoe or brush her hair or put on her jacket, I belt out, "Stand up, stand up for Jesus!" and she stands up! So as she stands up to dig through my makeup bag on the counter, she sings, "Stand up, stand up for Jesus! He sees you when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake."
Grinning so broadly I disturbed my recently applied lipgloss, I asked my sister, "Who are you singing about?"
"Jesus!" she exclaimed, and continued to sing these lines loudly, proudly. May we all sing with my sister's exuberance and budding faith the glory of our God, who out of the mouths of babes ordained his praise. 
Another thing about my sister? Her middle name is Grace. 

I Am A Little Truck

I am a little truck
Blue, but many colors beneath
Filmy, dirty gray over top
A little androgynous
Compact, but not neat
Half turned in, half turned out
Slow and creaky with
New old noises.

I am faithful, mostly
But liable to slide
Liable to need a new this
New that; regularly serviced
And traveling, plodding-- on.

A Christmas Nightmare

Last night, I had a nightmare. Not one of those vague anxiety dreams about too many papers to write and an endless drive-thru at McDonalds, where I work. No, last night was truly horrible: I am-- in the dream-- pregnant. I am a Truman student as I am in real life, with no husband, without even a boyfriend. I am panicking as I have never panicked before; how could this possibly be happening to me? My friends' reactions range from disappointment to embarrassment to anger. My body aches and my belly feels as though it will burst. I tell my professors I am dropping out of college to raise my baby, and they look back with shock and sorrow. I quit my church out of shame, unable to look anybody in the eye, my dreams of ordained ministry shot. I am on the floor in front of my father, groaning, "Daddy, Daddy, can you believe that I'm a virgin?" My father laughs mirthlessly, shakes his head silently, seemingly unable to speak. I run throughout Truman's campus in desperation, begging God to take this baby away from me...
And then I woke up. For one horrifying moment I felt my stomach, full of Christmas sugar cookies my mother had baked, and thought it was true. Reality set in and I knew I had a lot of plates to spin, but a pregnancy was not one of them. But the dread, the physical terror, remained vivid. I love babies. But being pregnant now, at twenty one, would be devastating. Psychologically, relationally, educationally, physically, vocationally... I would be devastated. 
(I don't mean to offend people who became parents young. I know things happen, and I applaud anyone who can shoulder that sort of responsibility at such a young age. I am simply saying for me, and for many of my fellow Truman students, a pregnancy now would be terrible.)
As I lay in that twilight between sleep and wakefulness, it hit me: Two thousand years ago, give or take, for a teenager named Mary, my nightmare was reality. 
What did Mary's friends say? What about the people at synagogue? The neighbors? How did she tell her grandparents, her parents? How did she tell Joseph? One day, she was daydreaming about their wedding, plotting their new life together. Then, she had to bear a dangerous secret and the scorn of everyone she knew and loved.
But Mary had a choice. God always gives people choices. She could have told Gabriel to go fly away. She could have asked God to pick some well-off, married lady instead who could better provide for this little bundle of joy, whose life would not be marred by scandal. 
Instead, Mary said, "Here am I, the maidservant of the Lord."
Being the Lord's servant can lead to a lot of heartache. Mary could have been stoned, as she surely knew when the angel approached her. She nearly lost Joseph. Christmas tell us plainly that sometimes God asks us to risk everything.
We so often sentimentalize Christmas, whitewash a rather harrowing story. God used my nightmare to make me think about the shame and fear and desperation Mary must have gone through. But Christmas doesn't stop there, of course. 
Christmas promises that God asks ordinary people to do extraordinary things for his kingdom, even though it might involve extraordinary danger. 
Christmas promises that God wants to partner with people to accomplish God's tasks.
Christmas promises that God rewards radical faith like Mary's.
I don't want to have a baby like Mary did now. Or ever, really-- the giving birth video in sixth grade health class achieved its goal of scarring me for life, thank you very much. But I pray for the faith like Mary's to keep saying, Here am I, Lord, even when the going gets tough. 
(And P.S., in case anybody reading this takes my dream seriously-- I am in absolutely no danger of getting pregnant now or in the foreseeable future!)

A Month of Sundays

I just finished A Month of Sundays, John Updike's at once haunting and hilarious novel composed of journal entries by the wayward Rev. Tom Marshfield. This married Episcopal priest carries on a months-long affair with his organist and soon moves on to sleep with women of all ages in his congregation. The organist is upset he is cheating on her and spills all. Tom's bishop sends him to a rehab program in which he must write a journal entry every day. By the end he has reflected upon the whole story with some soberness, but plenty of snark, and in the final entry he examines his tryst with his therapist at the rehab program!
I'm embarrassed to say I devoured the book. I couldn't stop reading late into Saturday night, knowing I would be tired for church in the morning but Updike had sucked me in! The book is definitely R-rated, but pornography this is not. Instead, it's a fascinating work of art that traces the psychological and spiritual path of a dramatic fall from grace. What does this book mean? More than I can figure out. But I have some ideas.
Tom has some fantastic lines, words I want to wrench from the context of this lurid book and misattribute and use in sermons or something else because they're just so wise. Like this one: "Compassion is not simple. That is where you so heretically condescend. You give your simple compassion to those whom you imagine to be simple." What a great insight into so much flat, paternalistic, "Christian" "charity." Or, "Irony is the style of our cowardice." Or, "Our body looks up at us as from a cloudy pool, but it is us, our reflection." So good! 
And I suppose that's partly Updike's point. People can say wise things without being wise themselves. Smooth words are not necessarily indicative of an unstained soul. Jesus says that at the end people will say "Lord, Lord!" and Jesus will reply, "Go away; I never knew you." As soon as we're lying to God we're in huge trouble. That kind of empty, insincere piety can't fool Jesus, but it sure can fool people, like Tom's congregation.
And Tom himself. He seems unaware of the consequences of his own actions. He insists he doesn't want to separate from his wife, yet continues to blatantly sleep with more and more women. In a bizarre scene, while in bed with a deacon's wife Tom practically coerces this stunned woman to recant her belief in God and howls that Christianity is just a fairy tale. Yet he stubbornly clings to his profession and is surprised to face disciplinary action even though his harem has swelled to alarming ranks. Tom is out of touch with reality; he sees himself as untouchable. That blind, relentless pride is a major factor in his moral decay. If normal rules no longer apply to me, I am free in the most dangerous way possible, free to destroy myself and everyone around me. 
And I say I because I could do it too. Bed a third of the congregation? No, fornication isn't my style. But I think massive pride, though, and an ego of soul-crushing proportion is an omnipresent danger for most people, myself included. A lot of clergy and leaders in general seem susceptible to that sort of egoism. And it can lead to a whole host of sins, of which Tom's sensational serial adultery is but one. 
Another thought: Tom was no longer accountable to anybody. Having ceased believing in God, he was certainly not holding himself to the Spirit's refining fire of examination. And he disengages with his wife, disdains his associate pastor, and never makes mention of colleagues in ministry or any sense of participation in community. His mistress the organist makes some apparently salutary suggestions about improving his preaching and cutting back on music-- all during their trysts! And the final journal entry's description of his sleeping with the therapist highlights that he isn't being challenged by her, either. Without anyone to lovingly question us, inquire how much sleep we're getting, take us out to dinner and refuse to budge until we divulge what's really on our minds... we lose the Spirit's movement in the community. Everybody, especially pastors, is in doubly big trouble when they've isolated themselves. Tom has become an expert in adroitly cutting off this kind of sacred intimacy, barters it away for cheap sex, which resembles but ultimately avoids the kind of intimacy Tom desperately needs. I think Updike wants us to ask ourselves if we're guilty of the same sin, perhaps committed in smaller, less grandiose ways. 
I can't quite explicitly recommend this book since it is so explicit in parts-- body parts. Detailed body parts. But it's such a fine literary work and a thought provoking study in the anatomy of sin for anybody over eighteen, I'd say. Updike's choice to make A Month of Sundays a series of journal entries makes us feel awfully close to Rev. Tom. Which is a good thing, because most of us aren't that far from becoming, in one way or another, like him.

A Certain Kind of Afterlife

A couple weeks back, in my Death and Dying class, we watched a documentary entitled, "A Certain Kind of Death." It was probably the most frightening movie I have ever seen. It follows coroners, autopsy people, and basically all the government services that process dead people. They were following people who had no living family or friends nearby to make the phone calls, do the cleanup, go to the funeral, right to the crematorium. Unflinchingly honest, this documentary showed even severely decomposed bodies. At multiple points I nearly lost my breakfast and at other times I could only watch through trembling fingers. 

Thank God, and knock on wood, I have never seen a dead body up close and personal. Rotting, black flesh, eyes and nose caving in, maggots in their orifices... it was extremely disgusting. And at the end, they showed bodies at the crematorium, with blood and other fluids dripping everywhere. The technicians put the body in the oven like a pizza, then open it and with a rake break up pieces of bone. Then the bone pieces get ground up in a blender. And if the remains go unclaimed for years... they have to make room for new boxes, and dump them all into a hole in the ground. Clouds of ashes, pieces of people floating through the air... this movie was nothing short of horrific. And yet, it is reality.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

Everyone I know, their heads will one day be black and maggots will crawl from their shrinking lips and their orifices will ooze body fluid into the earth. My friends. My professors. My brother and sister. My parents. Me. 

That day we watched the movie, I had already planned to go to the nursing home to visit some people from church. I already knew I needed to go, but I felt even more sure about the decision after this chilling documentary. But the whole time, in the back of my mind, I thought: one day these gnarled hands gripping mine will go pale and ghostly and then rot away. And the rest of my mind suppressed the thoughts, knowing that my contemplation of death would show on my face, that people in the nursing home need hope and life, not death, spoken to them.

And as Christians, we have the greatest hope in the world. We do not deny our bodies will become ashes and dust. We know that isn't the end. The clouds of ash, the clouds of people will turn to flesh. The rotting corpses will turn to fresh, shiny life. We believe, as the creed says, in the resurrection of the body. 

What must that mean to my old people, whom I love, whom I pity, who stand on the precipice of death so far away from me in my naive youth? The ones with wheelchairs and walkers will run again. The ones who can't hear or see anymore will behold the face and voice of God. 

A physical, literal resurrection of the body, not a spiritual heaven but a coming new heavens and new earth... after watching that documentary, I think I understand a bit better. Death is horrible, it's disgusting, frankly. I thought of Martha, who told Jesus Lazarus' body would smell. In that culture, death was more frequent and more public without hospitals and coroners and funeral directors. But death is always unsanitary. Belief in a certain kind of afterlife, the biblical one, in which we will live a perfect, embodied, healed existence, means we can have hope even as we look on the grisliness of death. 

And after that horrible Friday, Jesus' body turned that awful translucent, pale color, his tongue lay askew, the hands that healed the blind were like rancid meat...

All so that won't be the end for me. Or for you. 

If you can stomach it, it was a good documentary. But keep some tissues and a trash can and a Bible handy.