vulgar homiletics and lowbrow theology
why vulgar homiletics? | about dave | contact dave
vulgar homiletics and lowbrow theology
why vulgar homiletics? | about dave | contact dave
I’ve been on a movie binge, since I’m home alone for part of this week. So I thought I’d share some short reviews.
Dawn of the Dead (2004 version): Great, simple zombie flick set mostly in a mall. You could almost replace the zombies with aliens, or rabid boars, or whatever you wanted. I can’t say how it stands up against the 1978 version, which I haven’t seen. I hear that the 78 version is more of a satire of consumerism.
Matchstick Men: Nicolas Cage plays a con artist with OCD who reunites with his 14-year old daughter who wants to learn his trade. It’s somewhere between a comedy and a heist movie with an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist-ending that you can pretty well guess is coming. Not bad, though.
Mystic River: A good movie with excellent acting and a powerful but ambiguous moral message. Worth watching.
Sexy Beast: Ben Kingsley is an amazing actor. This is a strange little movie that is divided into two parts: the first part when Kingsley’s character, Don, tries to convince Gal, the main character, to come out of retirement to do a heist. The second part is the job. I’m still trying to make up my mind if I liked it or not.
Matrix: Revolutions: Why did I check this out? Watching the second Matrix movie was like eating a manure sandwich. Why did I go back for seconds? Maybe I though it would taste better with mustard? As pretty as the graphics were, it was tough to get past the mad libs dialogue. I would actually finish their lines before the actors would.
Smith: “Why do you keep fighting?”
Me: Because I choose to.
Neo: “...Because I choose to.”
It was physically painful. I knew better than to keep watching. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back! Why did I watch this? Why did I do it? Why? Why? ...Because I chose to.
Trinity: “I love you, Neo, would give my life for you, blah blah blah blah. Do you know what’s changed in the last six hours?”
Neo: “No.”
Me: Nothing.
Trinity: “Nothing!”
Oh, what a tasty sandwich! May I have a urine-flavored milkshake to wash it down? Yes, yes, I know. What else did I expect? I suppose I checked it out in part simply out of curiousity, to see if it was possible to continue along a trajectory which would take us into subterranean levels of suckitude. To boldly suck where no movie has sucked before. Once, when I was in high school, I chose to watch all - 7? 8? - of the Howling movies. Seriously. I even watched Hell Comes to Frogtown all the way through, an experience which was not unlike hitting myself repeatedly in the kneecap with a hammer just to see how the sound would change as my bones turned into sand. I would almost rank this one below Frogtown, but at some point such comparisons become meaningless. I promise, next time I will choose the blue pill.
I preached my first sermon for Contact as the official preacher guy. I haven’t been that jittery about a sermon for a couple of years. But I think it went well. People laughed in the right places. I showed a clip from The Son of Man (actually it was from the video of Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew) which I think is one of the best pieces of Jesus-inspired film ever. I also put up a poll asking people to vote for their favorite Jesus movie. If I get enough responses, I’d like to include that non-scientific data in some future sermon. The podcast should be up sometime on Wednesday.
We had an adult baptism during the service, which is always cool. There’s just enough Baptist in me to wish we had a baptistry in the church building so we could do immersions.
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings together two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other - by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attacks.
-Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1999), 278.
It’s probably not surprising that I, a professional religious guy, am not satisfied with Jared Diamond’s analysis of religion. But I have to say the whole book is a great piece of work. He traces the evolution of societies, their various technological and cultural achievements and conquests, back through time, and concludes that variations between cultures are not due to any inherent genetic, moral, or political advantage. It all boils down to geography. And even though I’m not thrilled with my social function being classified as a “justification of kleptocracy,” his argument is very persuasive.
The economic perspective is interesting to me, especially in light of comments I’ve heard from people (many of whom are nominally Christian) who resent religious institutions asking for money. I’ve heard clergy described as “parasites” before - that we professional religious types have our salaries paid by donations is a bad thing (as opposed to government-subsidized farmers, movie actors, stock analysts, and international arms dealers who have to work for a living). I’ve thought about that for a while and have decided that even if the cynical view is correct (which it isn’t), I’m comfortable with it. But my thinking was more Marxist in nature - that in terms of economic function, the clergy might work as a wealth-redistribution mechanism downwards. We create and support food pantries, mission projects, and the like so that surplus resources can be diverted to the poor, who otherwise might create social unrest. According to this view, Institutionalized religion provides social stability. The opiate of the masses and all that.
Diamond says, by contrast, that religion helps justify and maintain the transfer of resources upwards, to the wealthy. I can see that that could be the case where religion and political power are the same, and perhaps it still operates that way in our country behind the scenes (with political campaign contributions and that sort of thing). Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. I guess either way the idea is that institutional religion maintains the power of the status quo.
Anyway, I don’t really go in for either of those views. I think Parker Palmer has a much better perspective:
At bottom, religion, like public life, has to do with unity, with the overcoming of brokenness and fragmentation, with the reconciliation of that which has been estranged. The very root of the word religion means to “rebind” or “bind together,” so deep does this meaning go.
...We misunderstand public life if we equate it with politics, with the activities of government. Not only do we misunderstand it, we also strangle our sense of public possibilities. The heart of public life is simply the interaction of strangers, and that is a basic and vital human experience, not a specialized political process.
-Parker Palmer. In The Company of Strangers (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 22.
I think religion plays a complex role in the development of societies. It’s one of those evolutionary elements, like opposable digits, that have a variety of uses depending on the context. But I think in order to appreciate it fully, we need to think of how religion operates in public life.
There is clearly an explicit ideal society which religion has in mind. Without an image of how things should be, there can be no basis for any kind of social ethics. So I’m wondering how Jesus’ parables and explanations of the Kingdom of God support or undermine Diamond’s (or Marx’s) view of religion in human society.
I’m looking forward to reading Diamond’s other book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
This is one of those things that has to be seen to be believed. So rather than summarize I’ll simply describe its effects:
First, you will chuckle…
Next, you will involuntarily cover your mouth with your hand…
And by the end you will be looking between you fingers. It is not unlike watching a hydrogen-filled blimp crash to the ground in flames. If the blimp is full of kittens.
But it is funny.
So the big news with me is that I’ll be leading CONTACT, the contemporary service at Trinity beginning next Sunday. You can hear sermon podcasts from the service here.
This is one of those awkward moments in ministry. All those adolescent anxieties paw at the back door of your mind. What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t fit in? What if I botch it? It helps to voice these fears. Speaking them robs them of their power. In silence they become demonic, dark fears. When you speak them, dragging them into the light, you realize they are just the cries of frightened children.
Wade has done an awesome job with the worship service and building up the community. We had a good “passing the torch” service today, with both of us serving communion.
My Dad and I had a good conversation last month about these kinds of thresholds in our lives. If you have a sense of God’s grace touching your life, you can look back and say “my whole life has prepared me for this.” Every new situation becomes a commencement, a graduation of sorts. It gives you a sense of connectedness. In spite of my theological opinion against what we normally call “predestination,” in my spiritual life I feel God’s direction. Call it synchronicity, serendipity, or whatever you like. I’ve seen how God has set the stage. I don’t see it so much as a scripting of events as an invitation to participate in God’s world. Dad and I both agreed that you certainly could see it as just one damned thing after another: that it may simply be that when we follow our passions and skills all our life experiences build on each other. But I think that is part of seeing the Kingdom of God emerging all around us.
So - God has prepared me for this. And he has prepared the community. I think it will be a fun ride.
I’m still struggling with site design. I’m working on the distinction of most site makeovers in a year. Most of it stems from not knowing enough about design to do what I want to do, but some of it is not knowing what I want to do in the first place. So bear with me. Maybe I’ll get my head sorted out soon.
