(below’s a recent sermon I preached.  for those interested the podcast & video are on my church’s website)

When my wife and I got married eight years ago we of course thought about using this passage as our text for the service.  And why not?  It’s all about love (though it doesn’t mention marriage, and actually Paul doesn’t seem so interested in marriage a few chapters back…), but marriage is about love so it should be perfect.  But as popular as this passage is for Hallmark cards and wedding ceremonies, it has much more to do with what we’re doing here as church, what we do when we take communion, or the meals we eat together during the week as c-groups.  That’s because this chapter actually comes up just as Paul is trying to figure out what on earth could possibly bring this dysfunctional family, also known as the church in Corinth, back together.

Paul was writing to a church that was a mess.  If you look back at the previous chapters you find a string of problems in the Corinthian church.  There’s incest, there’s people suing each other, there’s some folks who have become Paul-followers and others who are tried and true Cephas-followers.  Folks are trying to one-up each other and see who is the better Christian based on the quantity and quality of their spiritual gifts.  Even something as good as having a meal together during communion has become a place where the well-to-do form cliques and exclusive eating clubs and the poor go home hungry.  Dr. Phil could have set up shop here for quite some time.

So, it’s no surprise that by the time Paul gets to chapter 12 he wants to talk about the problem of unity.  Paul’s already emphasized the fact that they are a family by repeatedly addressing them as brothers and sisters.   Now Paul hits on a new metaphor for the church by reminding them that they are Jesus’ body.  And what they are doing with their lack of regard for one another is pulling apart that body.  They are disfiguring and dismembering Jesus’ body.

Paul reminds them that they are not just a big, gelatinous eyeball, or a foot with a tiny head sprouting out.  No, they are a whole body, Christ’s body.  And as such they should not only should honor and care for one another, they need one another.  In fact, the weak, the unlearned, the slow of speech are as needed and as valuable to this body as the apostles, preachers, and worship leaders.  This is the context out of which the “love chapter” arises.

I can imagine the hearers of this letter thinking, “great, Paul, we may be family, but how are we going to survive intact?  What’s going to actually compel us stay together?”  1 Corinthians 13 is Paul’s answer to those questions.  It is both about the nitty gritty of how we do life together as a Christian community as well as what inspires us to keep at it.

Before diving into chapter 13, let me pause for a moment to point out something from this quick overview of the Corinthian church that we can easily miss because it’s so obvious: community is difficult.  The very fact that Paul had to write this great chapter on love is evidence of the fact that community is messy.  If it was hard for a church started by none other than Paul just a few decades after Jesus had walked the earth, you can bet it will be hard for us as well.

Now, granted, if when we think of church, we primarily think it’s about going to church, about being an attender at a performance then it won’t be so hard.   But that’s not being church, it’s not being a family, and it’s not being the body of Christ.  It’s more like being a bucket of marbles.  A bucket of marbles has lots of self-sufficient, haphazardly piled, balls of glass, but the only thing that keeps them together are the bucket’s walls.  If we’re going to be church, and not just an entertaining production, if we’re going to be a body and not just a bucket of marbles, then it will mean investing ourselves in becoming rooted and connected with one another—and we can be sure it will be difficult at times.  The more you put into community, the more you get out of it, and the more you’re going to get your toes stepped on.

I remember when I was fresh out of college, I wanted the church and the people in it, to be everything, and to be it now!  I wanted our church to bring down the walls of racism, share our food with the poor, minister to the sick and dying, incarnate the good news of Jesus, and for everyone get on famously as BFFs while doing it.  I had grand visions about the idea of church, but little experience with being church with real flesh-and-blood people.  C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, where a senior devil writes to his underling, Wormwood, on how to derail Christians sums it up quite well:

You probably know that pastor Eugene recently tore his achillees.  I’ve been intrigued by the fact that a torn tendon like his can heal itself.  Somehow the cells at both ends know that they aren’t meant to be separated and so they go into overdrive producing collagen so that eventually the two parts of the muscle are fused back together.  However, the process takes time, at least 6 to 8 weeks for an achilles rupture.  Becoming the body of Christ takes time as well; it takes patience.  We could go all over the map with everything in chapter 13, but I want to camp a little while on just the first part of verse 4.  Love is patient.  Patience doesn’t sound like a very exciting aspect of love.  Love is all fire and emotion, and patience seems tame, so laid-back, so unexciting.  I think of patience and I think of letting others go first in line.  Or raising my hand to speak as a first grader.

Yet Paul lists patience first in his description of love.  Further, patience is echoed in many of his other descriptions of love: “Love is not easily angered,” “Love always perseveres,” “Love is not self-seeking.”  All are different angles on the practice of patience.  Why would Paul spend so much time on an such a mundane aspect of love as patience?

This summer I learned a little something about patience from a mountain.  I had a chance to climb Mt. Rainier with some friends from Quest.  I didn’t really have a clue what climbing the mountain would involve, but I had made it a New Year’s resolution and was determined to give it a go.  At the parking lot I somehow got saddled with the 25 pound rope, but it wasn’t until we got half way up that I learned why we were carrying it all the way up there.  To ensure that one of us didn’t end up falling into a crevasse we all attached ourselves to the rope.  Now if someone started falling all we needed to do was throw ourselves to the ground and dig our ice axe into the snow and we’d all be fine.  Or so the guide assured us.  We never ended up falling, but I did quickly learn what it meant to be bound together.  It meant that we all got to the top or none of us got to the top.  It meant that even when I was starting to freak out because it was getting late in the day which makes the climb more dangerous, we went only as fast as the slowest person in the group.  In short, I learned that day that patience can be aggravating. It can also be risk to throw your lot in with other people.  But also that patience is absolutely essential when you’re bound up with others.

So why is patience so inextricably linked to love?  Because Christian community can’t happen without it.  For one, it takes patience to get to know those who aren’t like us.  It takes time for the hand to notice and appreciate the foot, for the heart to realize it needs the stomach.  How is this fleshed out?  Well, it’s part of the reason simply eating together is an important aspect of our c-groups and church life.  Meals help us linger and they help us make space where we can start to hear each others stories.

Perhaps, though, patience is made most concrete in the way we talk to each other.  Our culture and our self-centeredness have made it easy to speak at or over those who disagree with us.  Even when we aren’t speaking, patient listening is no easier with the constant distractions of cell phones and our propensity to spend the time when someone is speaking thinking about what we want to say in reply.

I’ve found c-group to be no exception to this.  If I don’t take time to slow down, to ask God to help me to be present to the others, I won’t hear them or God.  Patience is love’s bulldozer.  Patience makes space for friendships to build, for sinews to grow.  By training us to stop, listen, and then ask if we heard correctly we learn to love with our ears.  By pushing us into time-consuming dialogue rather than angry diatribe we learn to love with our mouths.  And by asking us to take time to invest in real people and a real church rather than only facebook friends or church shopping we learn to love with our bodies.

As we continue through the passage there’s much we could observe, such as how quickly pride and a lack of love can turn even good things like giving away our money into something worthless.  Or we could talk about the importance of trust and hope as the soil in which love grows best.  But I actually want to skip down to the last section of the passage because it hints at an explanation of why community, love, and God are so intertwined.

In verse 8 Paul shifts gears from practical details about how to love one another to trying to express something that he can’t quite capture with words.  Paul ventures to the edge of the cliff and looks towards the future, towards the consummation of history, the coming Kingdom of God, to try and capture just what it is that makes what we experience now so pale in comparison to what we hope for.

Why is it that love is so compelling, so attractive, worth so many of our songs, but at the same time so fragile, as likely to be a source of pain as joy?  Even in a community of brothers and sisters in the body of Jesus, we know that disunity is easier than unity, that impatience and pride can easily triumph over the way of love.  Paul’s answer: we are incomplete, and in some mysterious sense the whole cosmos is incomplete and yearning for completeness to come.  Paul strings together a series of different images as he reaches to the limits of knowledge to express just what is that we hope and yearn for.  It will be like when you grow up, says Paul, and the world takes on new depth and meaning.  Or, it will be like turning the focus on your camera and the world goes from blobs of color to vivid detail.  The coming of the Kingdom of God will mean the coming of completeness, of wholeness.  What we yearn for and where God is bringing us is to know in full, and to be fully known.

It’s that final metaphor, of knowing and being known, that weaves together love, community, and the Triune God.  When I started preparing this sermon, my first inclination was to come up with some bulletproof Biblical justification for being a part of church and community groups.  And then I realized that not only am I likely to come up with something that’s forced, it also wouldn’t be that compelling or interesting.  Because being a part of Jesus’ body, and by extension being part of that body in small groups, isn’t something you or I have to do, it’s something we get to do.  It’s something to which we are invited and for which we yearn for because it is the place where we get to know and be known by the family of God.

To know and be known is at the heart of where community and love meet.  We have been made with an innate desire to know and connect with others, and with God.  One way of defining love is that to love is to venture out towards someone we don’t know and say “I want to hear your story.  I want to know what makes you tick.  I want to know your joys and sorrows simply because you are made in God’s image and to know you is to know something about God.”  Another way of describing love is that it is to allow ourselves to be known, to trust that as we confess our sins to one another, share our sorrows, delight in our joys, and take off the masks we will find God’s grace sufficient to heal and sustain us when our toes get stepped on.

Not surprisingly, the idea of knowing and being known are ways in which we can understand the salvation of God.  God wants to be known by us.  God wants us to know more than just ideas or words about him.  So much so that God became flesh and blood and then sent the Spirit to set up camp in our midst permanently.  Still more, the God who knows all still wants to take the time to know us, to hear our prayers, and even to wrestle with us, like he did with Jacob, in our doubts.  We can be known by a God who comes to us.  That ought to stop us in our tracks.  God initiates.  The God who holds our cosmos together reaches out.  God looks at humanity, at Seattle, at Quest, at you and I with the patience and kindness described in this passage and then asks us to be known by his gaze.

God is the one who has given us this desire to know and be known.  God has begun the work of knowing us.  But remember that God loves bodies, not just ideas or ephemeral spirits.  He loves this body of Christ and so gives us the opportunity to start upon the journey of being that body that’s learning to travel love’s road.  When we answer the invitation to be a part of the body we can be sure it will be hard at times, but we can also be sure that it is the best place to begin learning love’s patient ways of reaching out to know and being known in turn.

To bring in ol’ C.S. Lewis again, my favorite line at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia series is where evil has been defeated, the animals and people healed, and they start running after Aslan, the lion who represents Jesus in the stories.  But they realize that being saved from evil is only the beginning of what Aslan has in store for them, because Aslan keeps calling for them to run “further up and further in!”  There is no “having arrived” at community, it is always the patient practice of learning to better love and be loved by our brothers and sisters.  Similarly, there is no end to an infinite God, no place where we have finally arrived at knowing the love of God completely or being reflections of that love—we are always called further up and further in.

On how Eckblad envisions himself as a midwife in Bible studies:

In my preaching and teaching I envision my role as that of a facilitator and midwife….  As midwife I assist during the birthing process recognizing that the work is done by the Spirit in intimate communion with people in the depths of their beings. I seek to be present as appropriately as possible—getting out of the way or intervening when necessary. I set up the birthing room as it were, making sure that the interpreting process gets off to the best start with a given group and text…

My objective is that people would find themselves inside the text as met or addressed by YHWH, Jesus, one of the apostles—or whoever mediates the message or saving action in the Biblical story. I see myself as one who pulls people together for a potential encounter: a life-giving meeting between individuals and God that may result in comfort, healing, a change of heart, call. I am an unknowing midwife at best—not knowing what the encounter will birth…

His critique of the pedagogical method of many churches and Bible studies:

Paulo Freire critiques what he calls the “banking method” of communication—which corresponds in many ways with the religious system embodied by the Pharisees in John’s Gospel. According to the banking method, knowledge or information is disseminated to passive recipients in ways that reinforce comfortable and oppressive patters of dependency.

Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.

They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.

For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, people cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry people pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other

In contrast to the banking method, a truly liberating pedagogy happens best using a dialogical approach. The pedagogue must deliberately subvert the system of dependency. This is done by creating an environment of trust whereby the voices of the “voiceless” are sought after and elevated—a first step in education for a critical consciousness and empowerment…

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the later strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

The lure of Christ’s gracious presence invites us onto a wandering path of discipleship that leads into forgotten places—the margins of highways and the wilderness of slums. As the title of Ernst Käsemann’s landmark book on Hebrews puts it, we become The Wandering People of God. We are nomads who set up our tents where others don’t want to live. We wander into relationships where we share burdens and hope to encounter the living presence of Jesus among the disfigured, disordered and disheveled. “Can we see Jesus?” The answer depends on where we go and with whom we await Christ’s presence.

In an interview before the 2008 election, Professor Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University offered some comments that could justify my ambivalence. He said, “A National election is like the Roman circus in the first century. It is entertainment to keep us distracted from the real issues.” The commotion surrounding presidential elections distracts us from truly democratic political participation—for example, community gardening, eating with the homeless, Habitat for Humanity, protests, Industrial Areas Foundation, visiting prisoners, and church meetings, among others. These organizations and practices form political communities of change and hope. But their political significance is diminished because we find the happenings on Capital Hill much more exciting. Who wants to eat dinner with a stinky homeless person when you can watch the news or call your Senator’s office while sipping some fair trade, organic coffee?

But none of this would necessarily rule out voting. One can still cast a ballot while admitting the political insufficiency of the election booth. The roots of my troubles grow out of traditional Mennonite convictions, which are probably now passé among many in my adopted denomination. It’s simple, really. We don’t elect someone to a position that requires her or him to decide who gets killed. Yet despite my old-fashioned Mennonite sensibilities, I fell for Senator Obama. I couldn’t resist his charms. His speech in Philadelphia on race was a remarkable gift to this country. I couldn’t agree more with Obama’s constant refrain about how the decision to invade Iraq was a colossal mistake. He had my enthusiastic support when I found out that he was an advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people. I joined my voice to the multitudes and cried out, “Yes we can!”

However, as the campaign dragged on I heard a change in Obama’s political tune. He returned to the Senate to vote for wiretapping and eavesdropping. He followed his comments about Iraq with a call to divert troops to Afghanistan. And the Palestinian situation seemed to drop from his discourse as he courted the Zionists. I lost track of the ‘real’ Obama in the midst of all his savvy political posturing. I was beginning to lose my way to the voting booth. In a political landscape that looked like a “Where’s Waldo?” picture book, I could not find the Obama I had come to love: the grassroots organizing, non-flag wearing, unpatriotic peacenik. I decided I couldn’t vote. He’s a politician, and I can’t stand politicians. I wanted a community organizer from Chicago who smokes cigarettes.

But, true to form, I changed my mind again. I flip-flopped back to my original position! I decided to vote. Not because I was excited about Obama. I wasn’t. I did not hail him the “Son of promise, Child of hope” as the subtitle of a recent children’s book claimed—Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope, by Nikki Grimes (Simon & Schuster, 2008). This is what changed my mind again. When I watched the last debate, I thought Obama cleared up the nonsensical allegations by Senator McCain concerning his association with terrorists like William Ayers. Well, the day after the debate I received an automated phone call from McCain claiming that Obama associates with terrorists and so we should be afraid of him. The recorded message completely stunned me. Didn’t Obama answer the question the night before? I began to wonder if I should vote for Obama the alleged terrorist simply to spite McCain and his pals.

Later that week I went to dinner with a friend. He is a Muslim. His name is Ali—a good Muslim name. He told me about the difficulties of having a Muslim name. People look at him differently when he introduces himself. The discourse of Islamic terrorism since the tragedy of 9/11 has only made it worse. Personal mail has been looked through and some confiscated—I should say, stolen by the government. (Hopefully the US Homeland Security officer who stole his book on Walter Benjamin found time to read it.) The American discourse of Islamo-terrorism and Muslim fundamentalism terrorizes our Muslim friends and neighbors. Ali is now a possible enemy, a suspected terrorist, especially when he does radically Islamic things like prays on a mat in public.

That evening I decided to vote for Obama. I had no illusions about the “change” he would bring. I did not share his audacious hope for this country. None of that was important to me. I voted because my friend’s name is Ali and people think he looks like a terrorist.

Here’s my hope, audacious or not: Once US citizens see that a man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama can be president, then people will realize that someone’s name or radical religion doesn’t make her or him a possible terrorist. If an alleged terrorist like Obama can be president, then maybe my friend Ali can again enjoy the freedom of his American citizenship. Hopefully he will be taken off whatever Homeland Security list that he and his Muslim friends are on. My vote for Barack Hussein was a vote for my friend Ali. Only time will tell if my vote made a difference.

Sure, Pullman is an atheist. But that doesn’t mean he can’t write good literature, and that Christians shouldn’t read it. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we have nothing to learn from him.

I don’t quite understand this boycott of the movie, The Golden Compass. There’s so much fear—I would say misplaced fear. Some Christians believe that this movie, and these children’s books, will corrupt their children and malign our faith.

Concerning the corruption of children… Instead of militant protectionism, why not use the film (or the books) as a chance to have a truthful conversation with our children? It’s an opportunity for catechesis about what we do and do not believe as Christians. Of course our kids will encounter atheism throughout their lives. Why not take this chance to help them learn the critical tools necessary to process differences?

This is not to say that we should simply throw our kids into the constantly changing winds of the age and hope they figure out how to critically engage all of it. There are important powers to be fearful of, powers that may cause lasting damage. Yes, we should be afraid of some things, and help our children steer clear of dangerous waters. But fearing this film and these books is misplaced. If we want something to boycott (I guess this is like a spiritual practice for some), or stand up against for the sake of our children, it should probably be something like refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag—there’s only one Lord to whom we pledge allegiance, anything else is idolatry. That’s real corruption of our vulnerable Christian children.

Concerning maligning our faith… That’s an easy one. The books describe a faith and a church that do not belong to us. It’s not our church. It’s not our God. This is where Pullman may expose some of the heretical notions that have sneaked their way into popular American Christianity. This is what I mean: If Christians are challenged by the books (and movie), then it shows that Christians somehow think Pullman’s “The Authority” maps well onto what Christians call “God.” And that’s reason for concern.

The Authority in the books bears no resemblance to what I worship as God. And if people think that their God looks or sounds like The Authority, then, yes, that God deserves to die because it’s a false God—a “god.”

If we believe that God is part of creation, part of the metaphysical furniture of our world, then that’s called an idol. Our biblical story is full of these false gods. And Pullman does us Christians a favor by exposing that conception of God as a hoax—a sorry excuse for an old man with gray hair up beyond the sky. But the Christian God isn’t a man, nor is she a woman; our God isn’t a created being, nor is God a control-freak. Those are all the characteristics of The Authority in Pullman’s trilogy.

Also, the church in the story doesn’t bear too much resemblance to the one I’m a member of, or the one I confess as the “holy catholic church” when I proclaim the Nicaean Creed. The church in the world Pullman creates is a farce. As the Archbishop of Canterbury says in an interview with Pullman, the church in the trilogy is “a church without redemption,” a religion without Jesus (nowhere does Pullman talk about Jesus, nor does he have a figure that bears any implicit likeness to Jesus—and if there’s no Jesus, then it’s not my religion… maybe it’s someone else’s, and if it is, then they have reason to be offended and disturbed).

I find it quite interesting that the same people who encouraged folks to attend Mel Gibson’s horrendously dishonest (and offensive) film, The Passion, are more or less the same folks who want to discourage everyone and their grandmother from attending the Pullman movie. Gibson does violence to the story of Jesus, and Christians celebrate it. Pullman offers our culture the “God” of this world (i.e., a thoroughly immanent God) and a completely fanciful world (or, better, worlds), and Christians pull out the picket signs. Very strange.

Maybe The Golden Compass will be a chance for Christians to let their pagan images of God get killed, so we can come to discover the true God of Jesus Christ. If the film offends us, then maybe we should wonder if we really believe in the mysterious God who raised Israel out of Egypt, and raised Jesus from the dead. Christians can receive Pullman as a gift, for he is an iconoclast who may free us from our self-serving images of God, our idols. And, as Nicholas Lash has always said, “Christianity is inherently iconoclastic”—we are called to constantly destroy our images of God because we always turn them into idols (A Matter of Hope, p. 158). To be an iconoclast, to engage in the critique of idolatry, is “the stripping away of the veils of self-assurance by which we seek to protect our faces from exposure to the mystery of God” (Theology on the Way to Emmaus, p. 9).

Medieval scholars dubbed Ecclesiastes one of the Bible’s “two dangerous books” (along with Song of Songs). Told from the perspective of Qohelet, a wise, if not a little jaded, preacher who lived during an affluent age in Israel’s history, Ecclesiastes also bemoans the vanity and meaninglessness of everything “under the sun.” Qohelet sees the vanity in life: death is the great leveler, life is often unfair, and we cannot know what the future holds. Yet, at the same time he affirms that life is worth living: “people should eat and drink and enjoy the fruits of their labor, for these are gifts from God” (3:13).

What are we to make of these contradictions?  Is Qohelet just a cynic with a penchant for hedonistic living?  Or is he struggling to answer the perennial question of how we are to live authentically amidst life paradoxes?  As you might guess I lean towards the latter.  Either way, if you’re looking for a way to spend those long summer evenings, but (like me) have a complex about your activities being “meaningful,” check out the book Useless Beauty by Robert Johnston which started this whole process for me.

Hugo Schwyzer sums up how I also felt after the Sunday match: “It strikes me as one of the most self-destructive moments I’ve ever seen in sport. No words—no matter how ugly or vicious—could have justified the violence and thoughtlessness of Zidane’s reaction. I’m sad for how this will forever color his legacy.” What was Zidane thinking? Isn’t he a world-class soccer player? Shouldn’t someone in the global spotlight now how to act (and not to act)? How irresponsible! Hugo is right to call this a completely “self-destructive” act, a total disregard for Zizou’s own legacy…

Then I read a brilliant piece by Bernard-Henri Levy in today’s (July 11) Opinion section of The Wall Street Journal:

the only explanation is that there was in this man a kind of recoil, an ultimate inner revolt, against the living parabola, the stupid statue, the beatified monument, that the era had transformed him into over these past few months. The man’s insurrection against the saint. A refusal of the halo that had been put on his head and that he then, quite logically, pulverized with a head-butt, as though saying: I am a living being not a fetish; a man of flesh and blood and passion, not this idiotic empty hologram, this guru, this universal psychoanalyst, a natural child of Abbe Pierre and Sister Emauelle, which soccermania was trying to turn me into. It was as though he were repeating, in parody, the title of one of the very great books of the last century, before the triumph of this liturgy of the body, performance and commodity: Ecce Homo, This is a Man. Yes, a man, a true man, not one of these absurd monsters or synthetic stars who are made by the money of brand names in combination with the sighs of the globalized crowd. Achilles had his heel. Zidane will have had his—this magnificent and rebellious head that brought him, suddenly, back into the ranks of his human brothers.

First, check out Eric Lee’s piece on Stanley Hauerwas. Eric gives us a great window into Hauerwas’ political vision for the church while confronting some critics of Hauerwas with some overlooked texts: Engagements between Hauerwas and the nation-state. If you want the check out my particpation in that conversation, check out these posts: the excess of stanley hauerwas and Steve Bush and Stanley Hauerwas.

There’s a short piece that appeared in the International Herald Tribune last week that highlights how important the secular tradition, not Christianity, is for the war-making of Britain’s Tony Blair and the USA’s George Bush: The twisted religion of Blair and Bush, by Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst. Here’s a random excerpt from the article:

The usurpation of the great faiths by secular ideology is not usually recognized. This process has a historical and a contemporary dimension. For all the major monotheistic faiths, their primary historical distortion lies with their utilization for the purposes of state formation and nationalism.

These questions came to mind the other day as I was driving, listening to some Cash. I’ve listened to his songs for years. But this time, my mind became the site of a conflux of thoughts—streams from distinct corners of my life all converging in one song, on some interstate highway. Here’s the thought: Does Johnny Cash, the man in black, give us a lens through which to understand the political vision of the apostle Paul? I know, it’s a crazy connection. Let me try to connect some of the synapses.

When I heard “Man in Black” I was struck by the pain Cash feels as he looks at the world. The injustice all around him pricks his heart as he strums those guitar strings and sings in that rumbling, dark tone. Of course, you have to hear it for yourself to feel the affect of his groans. But, if you can’t listen to it, here are a few lines from the beginning and end in order to get the gist:

Well you wonder why I always dress in black
Why you never see bright colors on my back
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone
Well there’s a reason for the things that I have on
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin’ in the hopeless hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he’s a victim of the times…
Oh I’d love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything’s okay
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
Till things’re brighter I’m the man in black.

What does this have to do with a political vision?

Well, what came to mind is Jeffrey Stout’s discussion of the role of tragedy in democracy. He criticizes the movement of Black Nationalism and those moments in Cornel West when despair rules the discourse, when people resort to the rhetoric of excess. In Democracy and Tradition, Stout writes, “We have allowed ourselves to slip into a cycle of mistrust that makes it hard to persuade those who have ceased to identify with the civic nation that there is something tangible to be gained by identifying with it” (56). Those who, like Cash seems to, give themselves to the articulation of pain without also finding reason for hope in current social arrangements slip into a cycle of mistrust that calls into question our desire to identify with the civic nation. The key here, though, is that for Stout the hope may not be transcendent—everything must stay on the plane of immanance, the present social arrangements, the civic nation. Tragedy must not run too deep. If it does, then it can’t be used as fuel for reforming the civic nation. Johnny Cash’s sort of despair breeds mistrust, cynicism, suspicion: “The worse the social circumstances appear, the deeper the suspicion that we may be characters in a tragedy, awaiting only the final compensation for the flaws in our character. The deeper that suspicion goes, the stronger the temptation will be to place one’s hope in some temporal power other than, better than, higher than, stronger than, the people” (21).

The trouble, for me, is that Stout refuses the political nature of those extremely tragic voices—like Cash—because they are not useful for his project: the perpetual reform of the civic nation. On Stout’s account, one must not turn away from the people in search for hope. The dark voice of the likes of Johnny Cash would not be politically relevant for Stout because it “looks away from his own people to find hope and value in some other place and time” (57). But what’s so wrong with a political vision that looks for a hope that breaks in from beyond the present configurations of power? Well, according to Stout, all this rests on a wager, a conviction, a leap of faith: “My democratic wager is that the grounds for this-wordly hope and the evils we need to resist are both to be found among the people.” It all boils down to a wager.

But what if Stout is wrong? What if his confident conviction is misplaced? What if we have to wait in the dark cloud of history with Johnny Cash till things’re brighter at the consummation of the eschaton? What if it never gets better this side of Christ’s return? What if human political arrangements are destined for destruction, for damnation?

But why would anyone want to believe that, right? Why choose this nihilistic view of the promises of civic nations? I don’t really want to believe that. I’d rather be more hopeful about civic reform and social progress—all those good, enlighted convictions. But the problem is that I hear echoes of the apocalyptic ferver of the apostle Paul when I hear Johnny Cash. Paul:

The appointed time has grown short. From now on,... let those who deal with the world deal with it as as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. (I Cor.7:29ff)

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for the full revelation of the adoption, the redemption of our body. For only in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom.8:22-25)

What sort of political vision is this? And what would it mean for those who consider the letters of Paul authoritative? I have to admit, I am not quite sure. I can say that part of what it means is that the church witnesses to the world to come by the way it lives in the love of Christ, the agape available in the living body of Christ. But what about the groaning of creation, the pangs of this world as it passes away, as it heads towards self-destruction? Maybe that’s why Johnny Cash wears black. That’s what he wants us to see. Maybe.

But can we sing those sorts of songs at church? Not necessarily Cash’s songs, but songs that proclaim the painful groaning of this present darkness? And that’s what brings me back to Jacob Taubes’ articulation of the political/ecclesial theology of Paul, and the despairing characterization of “nature” in that vision:

You notice that Paul has very peculiar worries about nature. Of course they’re not ecological worries. He’s never seen a tree in his life. He traveled through the world just like Kafka—never described a tree, or mentioned one… He doesn’t write: Dear Friend, Nice weather here, or: Glorious nature all around me—he doesn’t notice any of that. Just find me one place in a Pauline letter where he lets up from this passion, from this obsession, from this one theme that moves him… And yet nature is a very important category—an eschatological category. It groans, it sighs under the burden of decay and futility. What does ‘groans’ mean? There he explains that we too groan. You must imagine prayer as something other than the singing in the Christian church; instead there is screaming, groaning, and the heavens are stormy when people pray… This is how Paul experiences the praying congregation. (73)

It’s the inverse of some of Brian Eno’s projects. Many call him the father of electronica—but that’s a bit misleading because his stuff sounds nothing like today’s “electronica.” Anyhow, he made a few soundtracks… but they weren’t soundtracks to any movie. Instead, he created music-scapes for imaginary movies, imaginary lives, imaginary landscapes. Great stuff. But my friends and I did the opposite sort of thing. Music was the language that held our lives together and we wanted a compilation album that made sense of us, or helped us make sense of our ordinary worlds; or, probably more true (maybe even painfully true), we were a bunch of kids stuck in the middle of an uninteresting town with middle-class lives and middle-class problems that struggled to escape the ordinary, to make things a little more interesting, more edgy—you know, piercings and tattoos, and stuff like that. This is indie America, friends. It’s no accident that Conor Oberst and his constantly shifting crew (i.e., Bright Eyes) are from Nebraska.

Well, I don’t know what this says about me, but I still carry around this idea of a soundtrack to life. Most of my songs are still in limbo; I’m not ready to release an album. But there are two that you can be quite sure will make the final cut: Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” and U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Yeah, that U2 song, in particular, says it all—as Lauryn Hill and the Fugees might say, “Telling my whole life with his words.” It’s one of those songs that I can’t live without; the sounds and melodic words reach deep down inside me and accompany those Romans 8:18-24" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%208:18-24;&version=31;">groans too deep for words. It’s a song that walks with me, whose music moans with a world waiting in eager expectation for something to happen—the arrival of something that will make sense of the shadows. When I hear it I feel something stirring in this present darkness: a fleeting beauty, a glimpse of eternal light, something unspeakable,…maybe divine?

But it has to be the live version from Rattle and Hum, not the one from Joshua Tree. There’s something about that African-American gospel choir that sings along with Bono—it just makes more sense. In the Madison Square Garden, singing with a full gospel choir, Bono sings these words that, in a sense, become my words, the words of a pilgrim—or, better said, a refugee:

I have climbed the highest mountain; I have run through the fields, only to be with you. I have run; I have crawled; I have scaled these city walls, only to be with you. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for… He will lift you higher and higher. He will pick you up when you fall. He will be the shelter from the storm. I believe in the Kingdom come, then all the colors will bleed into one, bleed into one, but yes I’m still running. You broke the bonds, loosed the chains, carried the cross of my shame, of my shame, you know I believe it. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Maybe years of listening to that song predisposed me to the Epistle to the Hebrews. That letter makes me feel the same sorts of things I feel when I listen to U2’s song. Right in the middle of the description of those great saints who lived by faith, we read about the wandering people of God, the Hebrews 6:18" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews%206:18;&version=50;">refugees:

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11:13-16)

Unsettling. The text and song disturb any sense of belonging: “Where’s home?” “Who are my people?” Of course this unsettling provocation calls into question civic commitments and political ‘responsibility’—this is not our country. But the way Hebrews and the U2 song unsettle me runs deeper than the issues surrounding citizenship and belonging to the nation-state. My question: who am I? If I am without place, without a context, without frames of reference, my identity (dare I say ontology?) is insecure, tentative, unstable. It’s like being stuck in the middle of the Atlantic without a compass or stars above that could set the bearings for the journey. This, I think, is Bono’s desperate longing; this is Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, desperately awaiting the promised land—a people without land, looking for “the world to come,” as the writer of Hebrews puts it.

Is this the ecclesia? A people always called out? A people never arriving, never fixed or settled; rather, always to come—a provisional people, nomads living in tents, worshiping in tabernacles. The church: a people hastening to the edge of history’s collapse, and waiting for the city of promise to come down from heaven; a wandering people, marching (in circles?) in this chaotic wilderness at the border of the promised land, the heavenly city. The temptation in our wilderness is to build lasting houses, comfortable accommodations filled with the comforts of accommodation, which promise to shield permanently the desert winds—structures of order that promise reasonable and responsible defenses against the relentless bombardment of violent sand-storms, anarchic whirlwinds.

This is the ecclesia: the pilgrim people of God, refugees that witness to the world to come through wandering, through breaching the walls of security erected by those who fear the desert…

…Aliens and strangers on earth, longing for a better country—a heavenly one.