Friday, September 30, 2011

Holy Fools: Singing the Praises of Judas?


Lady Gaga’s song Judas is very Lady Gaga-ish; brash, aggressive, contentious, yet engaging, and perhaps even thoughtful.  The song reveals her familiarity with the Madonna playbook.  Step 1: Create a song charged with Christian imagery intended to toe the line of the church’s perception of irreverence and blasphemy.  Step 2: Release that song during Holy Week.  Tempest meet tea cup. Though, to their credit, a good many in the church have learned to recognize these public relation slights of hand and refuse to be baited into the furor they may have been worked up to in the past.  What is not common in the church is the vision to see that the use of Christian imagery in the arts and pop culture, even if deemed offensive by some, is often one side of a spiritual conversation waiting to be had.  Here Lady Gaga is considering how to handle betrayal and forgiveness, using the Biblical account of Judas as her metaphor.  This is Lady Gaga inviting the biblical narrative into a very broad cultural conversation, engaging notions that form the heart of the gospel.  Now I understand the discomfort.  She is singing she’s in love with the person who betrayed Christ to the Sanhedrin, the Romans and his execution while pushing the bounds of tailored modesty.  I was uncomfortable the first time I heard it myself.  But let’s take a look at this song and attempt to put aside our discomfort, and possibly offense, and see if we can’t open ourselves to a more constructive conversation.

So let’s hear from the Lady herself.  What does the song mean to her?  She says,

'Judas' is a metaphor and an analogy about forgiveness and betrayal and things that haunt you in your life and how I believe that it's the darkness in your life that ultimately shines and illuminates the greater light that you have upon you…the song is about washing the feet of both good and evil and understanding and forgiving the demons from your past in order to move into the greatness of your future.

Now the purpose of this little post isn’t to critique the content of her take on the Judas narrative, but simply to point out that she is actively engaged and wrestling with it, and to engage in a bit of the other side of the conversation.  Let’s recognize that she is acknowledging the importance of forgiveness.  In the song you find her wrestling with how to treat someone you’ve forgiven, yet who continues to betray you.  The song recognizes the social consequences of that type of relationship as she continues to attempt to constructively love her betrayer, yet finds herself clinging to him or her instead.  This is the struggle of many a co-dependent relationship.  This is also a question often asked by those in the Church as well.  The blanket availability of forgiveness for all taught in the Gospel, and Christ’s command to axiomatically forgive individuals 70x7 times for the wrongs they do you is something Christians struggle to live out in their lives.  The absoluteness of this circle of inclusion plays out dramatically in the Judas narrative as Jesus on the night Judas betrays him, and knowing of the betrayal, washes Judas’ feet.  Jesus loved and served Judas to the end.  How do we as Christians forgive our betrayers without encouraging further betrayal, or should the second half of that question even be a consideration?  Sometimes we Christians have the same questions of the Bible as the culture around us.

Additionally, Lady Gaga isn’t just engaging scripture, she’s also engaging the Christian tradition.  Interestingly enough Gaga asserts that she is “obsessed” with Christian and Religious art.  In the chorus of the song she identifies herself as a holy fool.  Now this really doesn’t have much meaning to Evangelicals and other Protestants, but the holy fool seems to have greater relevance the further east you travel in the Christian world.  This notion has its roots in medieval Christianity.  According to our friends at the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, holy fools are, “Figures who subvert prevailing orthodoxy and orthopraxis in order to point to the truth which lies beyond immediate conformity.”  These were figures who were often employed in the extravagant late medieval European Passion Plays.  At any rate she is drawing on this tradition and casting the “character” singing the song (though I strongly suspect this is how Gaga sees herself) as someone attempting to engage the Church with perspectives they just aren’t comfortable with.  Whatever you think of her methods of accomplishing this, shouldn’t we in the Church be open to hear from those who place themselves outside of the church, or at its margins?  Isn’t this a constructive way of learning how we’re seen through their eyes?  The Spirit works in strange ways, perhaps even through holy fools.

I would suggest that we ignore these opportunities for cultural spiritual engagement at our own peril.  For us to unilaterally wash our hands of or write off these types of artists and songs and films and shows and other pop culture texts is to pass a type of overconfident judgment on both the creation and the artist.  Humility would suggest a more measured approach.  Just as the group U2 ponders the fate of Judas at the end of their song about his final days, Until the End of the World, we too will have to wait until the end of the world to determine their ultimate value.  But in the same way that we may ultimately be surprised by Judas’ fate, which is entirely dependent upon God’s justice and mercy, we may also be surprised in retrospect at the value of lovingly engaging the button pushers and holy fools in our cultures.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

9/11 and the Dangers of Conflation

Conflation: the process or result of fusing items into one entity.

10 years... September 11 I think will always be a scar that aches a bit, with the ache asserting itself more aggressively when that date rolls around every year. The round numbered anniversaries of course tend to be occasions to more consciously rub that ache and remember what that day means to us. This is one of those years. Christians living in the US remember along with everyone else. We were no less affected by the violence because of our faith, and struggled to make sense of the senselessness of it all just like all of our neighbors. Our anguish, fear and even our injuries and deaths were no different than those of our fellow Americans who don’t count themselves as followers of Christ. While we all experienced the attacks as Americans, those of us who identify ourselves with Christ also experienced the attacks as Christians, meaning both identities experienced the trauma simultaneously. I would suggest this experience and our response to it reveals a tension that exists between these two identities which plays itself out in our experiences of both our common communities and our communities of faith. I would suggest our attempts to resolve this tension between our Christian identity and our American identity can sometimes carry us to places which are dangerous to both our faith and our nation. It’s this danger, which also plays itself out in the shadow of this anniversary, that I think I’d like to briefly survey here.

I want to acknowledge up front that there are a lot of sacred cows in play here, and the probability of divergent takes and visions are a given, particularly given the brevity of this format. This will in no way be an even remotely exhaustive, comprehensive, or thorough exploration. It’s just a few thoughts on this tension played out in 500-600 words or so. That being said, I want to begin on the civic side of this tension and acknowledge the Biblical ideas and principles that found their way into much of the mythic narrative of our founding and into many of our founding documents. We are a nation born partially out of the frustration with the sectarian persecutions and wars which took place in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. This “new” land presented people of marginalized faith practices with economic and religious opportunities not accessible to them in their old home. Even as the Enlightenment pushed the theological heart of these nascent ideas toward the margins of public discourse in the 18th century, the country’s founding generation still leaned on the existing religious, philosophical and linguistic framework as they constructed the governing bodies and institutions of this country. Many were men and women of faith themselves. Many were not. But most kept to some form of faith, which was part of our collective national heritage to that point.

It’s because of this framework, and the founders’ choices to work within it that Jefferson is able to write, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Jefferson is building on a Christian theological foundation, asserting that all are created equal because of a common Divine Creator who values all equally, while simultaneously tweaking those constructs to reflect contemporary Enlightenment thinking, citing, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” just a few lines prior as the core foundation upon which his Declaration of Independence was being built. The point here is that this nation was built on a unique foundation of faith which was already morphing before the Constitution was even written. The nation was built on a civic faith in these ideals which was not necessarily a theologically “orthodox” faith. Christianity here was politically engaged toward a civil end, much as it has been throughout its history to both noble and ignoble ends, from Constantine to Jim Crow.

In contrast, the Christian experience, both individually and collectively, particularly as it is described in the New Testament, seems to be markedly unlike this civic faith. In fact both Jesus and Paul seem to acknowledge the tension in loyalties that exists within one choosing to follow after Christ, with both counseling their listeners and readers to show respect for and demonstrate appropriate loyalty to those in positions of civic authority and the political institutions they represent, Jesus in Matthew 22, Mark 12 and Luke 20 and Paul in Romans 13. However, these same readers and listeners are also instructed to actively resist immoral and corrupt cultural practices, replacing them with moral and just ones, which will of course have subversive political implications and thus reveals the tension I spoke of in the opening paragraph. This tension seems to be assumed in the Bible. It seems to be a subset of the larger tension between the Kingdom Jesus speaks of and every political establishment that demonstrates little or no interest in that kingdom.

The difficulty we as Americans face is that our political establishment does have some vestigial and perhaps even some active interest in the principles and actions that characterize Jesus’ Kingdom. I would suggest however that this seeming slackening of that tension is more apparent than it is real. Anecdotally, if this were not the case the reigning general consensus among Evangelicals regarding the state of our culture and government would probably not include the words “hell” or “hand basket.” So where does this leave us? I would suggest that Biblically speaking, this tension between the Christian and their government, even if that government takes a welcoming stance toward them, is a good thing and that some of the confusion we often feel and experience, which often makes it way into our liturgies around civic holidays and remembrances such as Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and 9/11, has its roots in our attempts to resolve or work out this tension. We are right to want to recognize the faith of our country’s founders. We are right to recognize the unique role the ideas that rose from that faith have played in our national and political institutions. But we do a disservice to both our faith and our nation when we merge the two into one entity, and then merge both into one personal identity. Without the tension we lose the ability to speak prophetically to those in power. We become more easily co-opted by those in power as a means to accomplish the ends of this kingdom. And most dangerous of all we begin to lose our identity and the unique identity of Jesus’ Kingdom. This is dangerous then not only to us, but also for our nation in that it loses the unique Christian voice that in many ways serves as its conscience. Attempting to resolve this tension allows it to be quieted and silenced. Something to keep in mind as we struggle to live with both identities…