vulgar homiletics and lowbrow theology
why vulgar homiletics? | about dave | contact dave
After making mp3s of Ethel Smith: Galloping Fingers, I’ve been enjoying listening to old recordings in the public domain. There’s some real gems here. There is also a lot of stuff that just hurts to listen to.
God makes one person
forgets to make a helper
then splits the Adam
I’ve posted before that one of my favorite online comix artists is Carol Lay. I especially enjoy her one-strip parables, like this one.
A parable is a story which, instead of making a point, describes a parabola about a point. Truth is slippery, and you can often tell the truth better by coming at it indirectly. In this case, Lay says something powerful about relationships and decision-making and human nature, but you cannot summarize it without reducing the truth to a set of facts or clichés.
Say these words:
carnal
carnival
carnage
charnel
carnation
carnivore
chili con carne
All have the same root word as “incarnation.” When you think about the word family this high-falutin’ theological notion comes from, it’s actually pretty shocking. Incarnation is the doctrine that God became meat.
John 1:14 says, “the word became flesh and lived among us…” “Flesh” sounds a bit better. Unless you know German. In German, “fleisch” is also meat.
Sure, at Christmas time it’s very cute meat. It gurgles and coos and lies in a manger with a bunch of animals whose destiny is also to be meat. But for a time it’s sufficient that the animals and the baby be adorable. We can cover the whole thing with a veneer of respectability and sentiment and pretend that it isn’t terrifying. But the fact is that we are so afraid of being mortal, of being worm food, that we dare not contemplate a God who trades a “spiritual” transcendence for life as flesh.
Maybe calling him the “bread of life” sounds a bit more reverent. A loaf of bread, wrapped in a napkin, lying in a feeding trough. Any way you slice it, he’s still food.
Merry Christmas!
Here’s how it begins
Speaking becomes becoming
From chaos, order
I just stumbled across a trailer for Flatland: The Movie. Hooray!
One passage of the Talmud, concerning how to carry a purse if sunset on Sabbath eve overtakes one who is traveling, runs thus:
If there is a Gentile with him, he must give his purse to the Gentile.
Why not put it on the ass in the first place? Because concerning the ass there is a commandment to let it rest, but no such commandment exists for a Gentile.
How is the case if the man had accompanying him an ass, a deaf-mute, an idiot, and a minor? To whom must he give his purse in that event? He must put it on the ass.
Why so? Because the deaf-mute and the minor are human beings, and he might by accident give it to an Israelite who was not a deaf-mute or a minor.
How is it if he had with him a deaf-mute and an idiot only? He must give it to the idiot, because a deaf-mute has more sense than an idiot.
How is it with an idiot and a minor? He must give it to the idiot.
And so to this day we continue to give our money to asses and idiots.
That the people suffer, none can deny;—that they are afflicted in a more than ordinary manner. Thousands and tens of thousands are at this day deeply afflicted through want of business. It is true that this want is in some measure removed in some large and opulent towns. But it is also true, that this is far, very far, from being the general case of the kingdom. Nothing is more sure than that thousands of people in the west of England, throughout Cornwall in particular, in the north, and even in the midland counties, are totally unemployed. Hence those who formerly wanted nothing, are now in want of all things.
From John Wesley’s Sermon National Sins and Miseries
