Is this kosher? L’chaim!

– Summer Hebrew is almost over. Friday is our final exam. L’chaim!
– We hear a rumor that Lindford Detweiler himself has read Peter’s commentary. L’chaim!
– We heard a sermon today that began “God used to be my co-pilot. But we crashed. And I had to eat him.” L’chaim!
– We hope to be finished with our recording very, very soon. It is fan-smackin’-tastic. L’chaim!
– Bono has entered a new phase of his life with us– the annihilation phase:

Notice my formerly perfectly comfortable black flip-flop and a $6 chew toy purchased just 30 minutes before…

 

 

 

Kids these days… Where do they get the idea that their behavior is appropriate?

 

The Trumpet Child – 4

The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonious notes from up above
He’ll improvise a kingdom come
Accompanied by a different drum

The way this verse combines musical imagery with theological insight is simply fantastic. It is interesting that the musical imagery conjured up in this song is mostly associated with jazz: two jazz musicians, Satchmo and Thelonious, make an appearance, the song is about a trumpet, and here in this verse there is mention of improvisation. What is the significance of this? As mentioned in an earlier post, Karin and Linford are American musicians. Their music wrestles with the complicated business of being American, and no music is more American than jazz. Accordingly, when they go to make sense of and appropriate the musical strands of eschatological hope found in the Bible, they do so through the lens of jazz music. Jesus becomes a jazz musician, he riffs, and improvises, and plays like Satchmo!

One might object that they are using the Bible for their own purpose, taking it out of its ‘original context’ and loading it with inappropriate meaning. Such a judgment, however, is far too simplistic. A better way to understand what is happening here is to see that Jesus is being allowed to permeate the world in which Karin and Linford find themselves. It is akin to painting a Black Jesus, or an Asian Jesus, or a White Jesus, or making a female crucifix. Such artistic works are not substituting the ‘real’ Jesus for a culturally specific Jesus, but creatively imagining how the ‘real’ Jesus can be portrayed through the cultural idioms at hand. It is an attempt to universalize through particularity rather than abstraction, to show concretely that Jesus is the light of the world, that “in him all things (and peoples) hold together” (Col. 1:17). This sort of creative imagining is what happens in the New Testament. The writers try to make sense of and elaborate on Jesus’ significance, not through some untarnished, timeless set of concepts that offer immediate clarity, but through the very particular language and patterns of thought that are ingredient to their time and place. For an example of this, look at what Paul does in 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11. All sorts of (culturally specific) metaphors and images are being combined to make sense of Jesus. It requires imagination to read the passage.

To be sure, there has to be some norm by which we judge whether our creative imaginings are faithful to what is trying to be imagined. And we must make a distinction between artistic freedom/imagination and theological proposal. Theologically speaking, Jesus is one and only one ethnicity: Jewish. And it is all-important that we hold fast to this. It is only when we take very seriously Jesus’ Jewishness that we can properly depict him as a black man or as an American jazz musician. Why such a stipulation? Because Jesus’ universality (his ability to be depicted and grasped and related to in all sorts of ways) lies in his fulfillment of the promise given to Abraham that through him “all nations will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). If you base Jesus’ universality on any other basis than the promises given to Israel, you embark down the same road that the Nazis and German Christians took toward what Karl Barth identified as “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” namely, antisemitism. Only because Jesus is Jewish is he all-inclusive, only because he comes from Israel can you make him Black or White. The only way to the Gentiles is through the Jews: “Salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22). If you make Jesus anything else he becomes a tribal god.

For the New Testament writers, the norm for their creative imagining was the history of Israel with the crucified and risen Jesus as its fulfillment. For us today, the norm is the same, with the caveat that we have access to this norm only through the prophets and apostles. And the nature of this norm is not such that it requires passive, unthinking assent. The Bible does not imprison us, requiring that we leave our minds at the door. Rather, the Bible sets us free; it occasions new language and creative engagements with everything we find in the world. This is why Judaism and Christianity have always been inseparable from artistic expression. The words of the Bible are restless; they can never simply remain on the page. They demand to be taken up and sung, or painted, or acted out, or put into poetry with other words. Karin and Linford understand this.

What about jazz itself? How does it illumine Jesus and how does Jesus illumine it? Most significantly, jazz is the music of a suffering people. It is rooted in the African-American experience, which has been one of unspeakable suffering. By depicting Jesus as a jazz musician, the song affirms Jesus’ solidarity with all those who suffer. Jesus does not play the music of the oppressor but of the oppressed: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). But this is no misery-loves-company solidarity. Jazz music is not a woeful capitulation to the oppressor, but a defiant refusal to be defined by the oppressor. Jazz music breaks boundaries, it refuses to be boxed in or predictable, it teaches us that life always finds a way, that love always wins. One group of humans can never completely stamp out the life of another group. The jazz music of the African-American community is a testimony to this.

Jesus, then, as one who plays like Satchmo and Thelonious, is one who refuses the world’s oppression. He does not capitulate to it but overturns it with the irrepressible life he embodies. He is the ultimate jazz musician. He defiantly breaks through the boundaries of this violent world, he improvises a new way, a new creation; he riffs on love in the face of hatred and self-centeredness. This is my favorite line of the whole song. The trumpet child will riff on love. It is packed with meaning and insight, and yet it is so irreducibly beautiful that I am almost afraid to comment on it. How can I make the message of the song any more clear than it already is in this line? The musical imagery and theological meaning of the song reach near perfect unity here.

He’ll improvise a kingdom come
Accompanied by a different drum

These two lines elaborate on the above line. The notion of improvisation has recently gained some traction in the theological community, being used as an analogy for faithful Christian living or discipleship. Christian living is improvisation. We don’t have hard and fast rules to follow, but a person, which requires openness and a willingness to be surprised and change direction. And anyone who knows anything about improvisation knows that it is not an abandonment of any sort of structure, a free-for-all. Improvisation takes place within a structure; indeed, you can’t have improvisation without a structure. Improvisation means positive freedom, the opening up of a set of concrete possibilities, not negative freedom, an aimless wandering. So the analogy is very rich. But here it is applied to Jesus himself. Jesus will improvise a kingdom come. Theologically, this is wonderful language. It points to a real encounter between God and the world, not one that is rigidly predetermined. God’s creation has a life or integrity of its own distinct from God, and describing God’s interaction with the world through Jesus as improvisation gets at this truth in a profound way. We need not take it to mean that God does not know where things will end up, but rather that at every moment God upholds the creature’s freedom. There is real interaction between God and the world, not phony posturing on God’s part. But, of course, God’s interaction with the world is always disruptive. It is always accompanied by a different drum. God respects the creature’s freedom by refusing to let it fall into the bondage it has chosen for itself. The creature will flourish! She will be loved! He will love! And for us who always refuse to give and receive love, who march to the drum of self-interest, God’s kingdom of out-going love comes to us as a disruption.

First Comes Love…

I was not very good at being single. I was not a good date, a good girlfriend, or a good bridesmaid. Despite my shining veneer of confidence and independence, I wanted to be someone’s woman, someone’s bride, someone’s wife. And, despite my shining veneer of, say, intelligence and feminism, I was fairly certain that my life was and would remain meaningless if I did not have someone with whom to share it. And so I watched my friends dropping like icicles from the chilly bridge of Singledom into the warm and flowing waters of marriage below. The more often I peaked into those waters, the more I began to see the reflection of a lonely troll standing firmly on that bridge. So, occasionally, I spit into it. We all have. It is not good for a human to be alone.

So, this past Saturday marked the end of my first year of marriage. (For Peter, too, in case you’re wondering). We spent the morning driving to Delaware to meet up with a friend, brought the friend back to stay with us for a few nights, went to a brewery in Princeton and to an ice cream shop, and watched a few reruns of The Office on DVD. We hugged and kissed in the morning and evening, told each other we were still pretty pleased with our vow-making a year ago, and called it a day. And this, my friends, is the married life.

[Now, before you jump to the conclusion that I am not very good at being married (albeit, not a crazy jump to attempt—what does it mean to be ‘good’ at it anyway?), entertain your eyes and mind with these thoughts of mine, for they have been stewing in this brain for about a year now, and there just might be a good morsel here after all.]

It might be best to get this out in the open before proceeding any further: there is, perhaps, no more intense experience of aloneness possible than the aloneness of a newlywed couple on their wedding night. I realize that this is overlooked by many-an-eager Christian couple for whom the wedding day is little more than the means to an end. Peter, however, was a bit too introspective to let such an experience pass without comment, and I was a bit too preoccupied extracting myself from the eighteen layers that accompany a standard wedding dress. But there was no denying it—we were alone. Alone, but together. Marriage 101.

In the weeks that followed that day, Peter and I traveled together, moved to the Northeast together, decorated our first apartment together, began attending seminary together, ate, drank, studied, and slept… together. All alone. There was something so unnerving about it all, this whole two-shall-become-one process. Suddenly, we were meeting new people and introducing ourselves together, as a package deal. The standard grounds for friendship that had served us so well since the beginning of our lives came to an abrupt halt. Gone were the days in which a similar hairstyle was a good indication of commonality. We first found ourselves confronted with the Great Wall of China Patterns—if you were among those who had scaled it and had your left ring finger banded as evidence, then you were out, other, foreigner, exiled along with the other married people! We then discovered that friend-shopping took on the feel of deciding upon a major purchase together—were we sure we wanted to make this kind of commitment, did the offer before us really meet both of our needs, what kind of interest did we expect to accumulate over time, etc. Consequently, much of our first months of marriage consisted in time spent together, all alone.

One day, as I was doing laundry-for-two, the reason for the oddness of our new situation struck me with alarming clarity. This whole thing, him and me, me and him—it was exactly what I had been told it would be, exactly what anyone with eyes to see could observe. When Peter and I stood in front of our friends and family on that humid day in August of 2006 and promised the virtual stranger before us that we would do these superhuman things and feel these superhuman ways ‘til death do us part…we did not suddenly transform into Superhuman. We remained, well, us. As it turns out, the two-becoming-one thing does not and cannot newly endow life with meaning where it previously had none. In fact, though everything greatly changes, everything also stays the same—I still drink copious amounts of coffee in the mornings, hate exercising, and am annoyingly vain about the appearance of my eyebrows, while Peter still reads complicated theology with laborious titles and calls it fun, eats three times more than me and doesn’t gain a pound, and picks up and masters any new instrument in a bit under an hour. Married life is, we discovered, ordinary life lived by ordinary people.

At first this discovery was moderately infuriating: ‘You mean the wedding industry lied to me with seductive advertising and catchy slogans? Say it isn’t so!’ But, we quickly moved on. And we also realized the miracle that is marriage’s ordinariness. We came to see in marriage a daily opportunity, a microcosm if you will (and I think I will) of Christian living. Daily, we must humble ourselves and entreat the Lord for sustenance, for guidance, for patience and love and, basically, for the superhuman ability through the power of the Holy Spirit to do that which we promised we would do. We must place the others’ needs before our own and, hallelujah, we get to do so. (On the noteworthy flipside, we also get to experience the impact of selfishness, greed, etc. at an amazing proximity. We ‘sharpen’ each other’s ‘iron’ quite a bit. For example, I have learned and been working on the reality that my pre-marital gift of ‘discernment’ was merely a cover for my penchant to judge others quickly and, more often than not, incorrectly. Thank you, Peter! And Jesus.)

I (cautiously) liken this experience of marriage’s ordinariness to communion these days. What a bizarre thing communion is, eating and drinking and somehow believing that something really significant is going on? (I think that’s the technical way of explaining the Eucharist). How bodily and strangely ordinary! How many times have I just started chewing a minty piece of gum to hide the traces of coffee-breath only to realize that today is the first Sunday of the month and my perfectly good piece of gum must now be disposed of! But where, and how? Forgive me, Lord, for I am guilty of failing to be in the right frame of mind before partaking of the elements, this transformative and holy sacrament. But I know that I am being transformed, that You are meeting us in a special way, even in this simple bread and wine (or, often in my case, stale crackers and grape juice). And similarly, though some days are so utterly ordinary, we have learned and we believe that, in this thing called marriage, something special is happening. Two are becoming one.

We are still a work in progress. So are you. Stay tuned.

 

The Trumpet Child – 3

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

Here we get a description of the trumpet child’s trumpet. What is this all about? Looking carefully at this verse we see that the trumpet is inseparable from the child who plays it. The instrument used in the re-creation of the cosmos is not borrowed or meant for something else; it is fashioned for this specific use. The trumpet is the product of the child who plays it. The child and his trumpet are one. If we transpose this idea into the theological realm it gets us into some fairly profound and exciting theological concepts.

Reflecting on the history of Jesus Christ, the church has always struggled (usually not so successfully) to hold together and elaborate simultaneously the twin pillars of the Christian confession: the person and work of Christ. The temptation is always to separate them: to talk about the person of Jesus apart from what he does or to talk about what Jesus does apart from who he is. One way to explain this temptation is to look at the complicated and troubled relationship Christian theology has had with the Greek philosophical tradition. Christianity is rooted in Jewish or Hebrew thought, which speaks of God primarily by describing what God does. For the Jewish people, God is the one “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Deut. 5:6). Accordingly, the primary theological question for Jewish thought is not what is God? but who is God? Jewish thought is oriented toward the concrete and the personal. This is why, if you were to ask the writers of the New Testament to describe God, they would say something like, “God is the Father of our Lord Jesus who raised him from the dead by the Spirit.” Very concrete. Very personal.

Greek thought, however, is oriented toward abstraction and universality. It was the Greeks who taught us to think of God as the Supreme Being or First Cause, the great untouchable, timeless, omnipotent source of everything. How did they arrive there? The answer is quite interesting. Colin Gunton argues that it is actually the raucous and unpredictable gods of Greek mythology that are the source of polished Greek theism. When Greek philosophers went to talk about God in conversation with their own tradition, they were compelled to tidy up the picture of the gods they inherited. Instead of a ring of jealous and whimsical gods, they posited a single, self-contained, unmovable God. Much easier to deal with, right? Instead of tribal gods that did nothing but start wars with each other, they wanted a universal God who could bring universal justice (theology and politics have always been inseparable!). The general pattern was to strip the mythological gods of their negative qualities and assume that the real God is everything they are not. From this came other ways of talking about God, all of them starting with what is observable in the material realm and then abstracting to arrive at ‘God.’ By the time Christianity came on the scene, the Greek idea of God had reached some formal (not material!) similarities with the single, all-powerful God of Israel. Christian theologians who were looking for a way to make Christianity credible (and hence avoid martyrdom) saw this as a golden opportunity. They began adopting Greek terminology and patterns of thought in order elaborate the Christian doctrine of God.

The problem with this is that the Greek way of speaking of God is often in deep conflict with the Hebrew way of speaking of God. Because Greek thought is oriented toward abstraction and universality, it resists particularity. The God of the Exodus and Resurrection is very particular, though. Something, therefore, had to give. Sadly, God’s biblical character (living and thoroughly involved in history) tended to be read through the lens of the Greek abstractions—omnipotence, omniscience, impassibility, etc. To be sure, there was always a focus on the concrete actions of God in the biblical story, but the ontology underlying the explanations of the biblical story was usually Greek. When theologians came to Christology with this Greek/Hebrew conflict, Jesus’ person tended to be abstracted from his work. His work, i.e., his very particular actions in history, had a hard time being fitted to his person, the eternal Son of God. This all comes to the surface when you consider Jesus’ crucifixion. How can the eternal, immutable God suffer and die? He can’t! was the typical answer, so in order to talk about the crucifixion you had to put the question of his divine personhood on the back burner, or offer some lame solution, like Jesus’ divinity wasn’t involved in his suffering and death. Until the 20th century, there was never a sustained attempt to elaborate God’s being—and hence Jesus’ personhood—on the basis of the concrete events of Jesus’ history.

This is all relevant to Over the Rhine’s song, right? Of course! In this description of the trumpet, there is a remarkable interweaving of who the trumpet child is and what he does. See, I told you they were adept theologians. The trumpet (signifying the child’s activity) flows from his very person, and the trumpet child’s personhood is wholly bound up with and invested in this trumpet. The trumpet and the child (the work and the person) do not relate like oil and water. They are indistinguishable, intimately related to each other. A musician playing an instrument is probably as good an analogy as possible for imagining the interrelation of Christ’s person and work. Rowan Williams uses it in his excellent book, Tokens of Trust. It is the constant back and forth between musician and instrument that is the heart of the analogy. When watching a musician, you are always led from musician to instrument and from instrument to musician. You can’t make sense of what the musician is doing apart from their instrument, and you can’t make sense of the instrument apart from the musician playing it. And there is no way to sequence the relationship between musician and instrument. Everything happens at once. How appropriate, then, that Jesus is the trumpet child! Theologian Robert Jenson has picked up on this musical analogy and recently tried to elaborate a musical ontology of the divine being. He says God is a fugue. I like it.

Now of course I am reading a lot into this verse, but that is what you are supposed to do with music! Boring songs only mean one thing, and that is why they don’t last very long. Good songs stick around, usually because they can generate lots of different meanings for lots of different people. You can’t really write a theological commentary on a Brittney Spears song (well, you could!), but you can for an OTR song. That is their greatness. Their songs work on so many different levels. You can just sit back and listen to it, or you can write an excessively long blog series about it. I recently heard (I think from my brother) that Bob Dylan is beginning to be taught in universities. See, that is what I am talking about. His music is brilliant. That doesn’t mean that it is not accessible, it just means that it merits different kinds of analysis.

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire

There is a significant strand in the Bible that associates fire with God himself. There is the famous Exodus 3 passage where God speaks to Moses in a burning bush; there is Pentecost with the flaming tongues of the Holy Spirit; and there are the books of Deuteronomy and Hebrews with their description of God as “a consuming fire.” From this divine fire comes the child’s trumpet. It is the product of God himself. The trumpet child’s activity is the very being of God set in motion. As Jenson would say, God is the music that comes out of the child’s trumpet. The present tense nature of the fashioning is important. In the context of the song, the present tense verb is connected with future promise that the trumpet child will play his tune. Something is happening now that is significant for what will happen when the trumpet child appears. God is, so to speak, getting ready. The trumpet is being forged; a place is being prepared for us. The kingdom of God is at hand. Stay awake!

The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

This is great stuff, especially the last line. The first line takes me immediately to Isaiah 6. The mouthpiece of a trumpet, of course, touches the player’s lips. In Isaiah 6, Isaiah sees a vision of God in the temple, which causes him to declare, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips.” An angel then approaches Isaiah with a burning coal and touches it to his lips, saying, “Look! This has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” The burning coal is from the altar, the usual place where atonement for sin happens. Here it happens on the prophet. God’s fire consumes his unclean lips, and he is sent out to speak the Word of God to the people of Israel. The song is right to associate the trumpet child with a prophet. The Christian tradition has long recognized that Christ embodies and brings to fulfillment Israel’s history. He is prophet, priest, and king all in one. Here in Isaiah we get a small prefiguration of this, as Isaiah the prophet is associated with priestly activity. Atonement for sin happens on him. Very strange. Christ, though, sheds light on all of this. He is one who endures the full weight of God’s burning fire. He is not merely singed, as Isaiah was, but consumed. “He descended into hell.” He steps into our place and takes our sinful bodies to the grave. Atonement ultimately happens on his body. He is the king who rules by performing the priestly action of offering himself as a payment for sin, and he is the prophet who now proclaims himself to us. The trumpet child, therefore, will play his tune pressing his lips to the burning coal of God’s fire. What an incredible image! His song comes from the fire he endured for our sake. It is a song written out of suffering love.

The bell of the trumpet is a burst of wild desire. What fuels such suffering love? God’s wild desire! As I said, this verse holds together person and work in a remarkable way. The Greeks could never speak of God’s actions as bursts of wild desire. They were trying to get away from speaking like this. But the God of Israel and the church is certainly wild and full of desire. Just read the Bible! And there is nothing back behind such desire, no boring part that is the ‘real’ part of God. When God makes a trumpet with a burst of wild desire, he is being true to himself, acting from the depths of his being. The way the church has conceptualized this is with the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine is not fuzzy math: 1+1+1=1, huh? In fact, it is not about math or numbers at all. It is about who God is, God’s identity. And who is he? Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! An eruption of outgoing love! An outburst of wild desire! That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is meant to tell us. Explaining to his eight-year-old granddaughter what God is like, Robert Jenson says it thus: “The life of God is just, as it were, one big excitement, a kind of explosion of excitement.”

The Trumpet Child – 2

With Gabriel’s power and Satchmo’s grace
He will surprise the human race

Who is Gabriel? Playing various roles in the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), Gabriel is an angel, a messenger of God. He is often given the status of an archangel—a “chief” or “top” angel. In the Christian canon, he shows up in Daniel and Luke. In Daniel, Gabriel helps Daniel make sense of some bizarre visions (Daniel 8-9), and, in Luke, he announces the births of both John the Baptist and Jesus (Luke 1). Zechariah doubts Gabriel’s announcement that his wife will conceive (a common thing for biblical characters to do), and Gabriel in turn strikes him mute. This is no Precious Moments angel: “When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear” (Lk. 1:12). The song is therefore right to speak of Gabriel’s power. It is also right to associate Gabriel with the trumpet child. In the biblical passages just mentioned, it is the eschatological future that Gabriel either interprets or announces. Daniel is a highly eschatological and apocalyptic book, and John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ births signify the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God. The trumpet child will play with Gabriel’s power. He is the apocalypse that Gabriel interprets; he is the child whose birth Gabriel announces. He therefore carries with him Gabriel’s power. Or, more properly, Gabriel’s power lies wholly in that which he announces—the trumpet child.

Who is Satchmo? None other than the great Louis Armstrong! Armstrong was a prolific American Jazz musician who had a significant impact on the genre. He made improvisation central to the art of jazz and pushed the limits of both performance and composition. But was he graceful? For now, we’ll submit to the judgment of Wikipedia: “Armstrong’s improvisations were daring and sophisticated for the time while often subtle and melodic. He often essentially re-composed pop-tunes he played, making them more interesting. Armstrong’s playing is filled with joyous, inspired original melodies, creative leaps, and subtle relaxed or driving rhythms. The genius of these creative passages is matched by Armstrong’s playing technique, honed by constant practice, which extended the range, tone and capabilities of the trumpet.” The trumpet child will play not only with power and authority but also with grace. As John Webster says of the risen Christ, he is “radiant and eloquent.” The trumpet child’s performance will be beautiful, stunningly beautiful. His listeners will be awash with the beauty of God, a beauty that, as Jeremy Begbie describes it, is “the beauty of out-going love.”

So the trumpet child will bring together what is so often torn apart: power and grace, strength and subtlety, authority and beauty. Accordingly, he will surprise the human race. What a great line! It is so rich, and I could run with it in a variety of ways. In a world stuck in the ruts of ugly power and insolent politics, the trumpet child will surprise us by doing what seems impossible: ruling the world with grace, patience, and love. The cross and resurrection is the paradigm here: God exercises power through weakness? What!? This poor, executed, wondering prophet-teacher is the exalted Lord? Give me a break! And note well, it is the human race that will be surprised, not simply the heathens and non-Christians. The over-confident and self-assured church is a disobedient church. Matthew 25 is also a paradigm here. Both parties, the righteous and the un-righteous, are surprised at what they hear from the eschatological Judge. We ought not think that we know what the trumpet child’s tune will be. He will surprise us.