The Darkest Night of the Year

"Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you Good News of a great joy... This day is born the Savior", that is, he who, as Son of God and Son of the Father, has traveled (in obedience to the Father) the path that leads away from the Father and into the darkness of the world. Behind him omnipotence and freedom; before, powerlessness, bonds and obedience. Behind him the comprehensive divine vision; before him the prospect of the meaninglessness of death on the Cross between two criminals, Behind him the bliss of life with the Father; before him, grievous solidarity with all who do not know the Father, do not want to know him and deny his existence. Rejoice then, for God himself has passed this way! – Hans Urs Von Balthasar

The musical group Over the Rhine entitled their 1996 Christmas album TheDarkest Night of the Year.  The tone of the record matches the title.  It is Christmas sung from somewhere near St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul.  Granted, not everyone will find that appealing, but I have a soft spot for it because anyone who knows me knows that I have a fascination with darkness.  I’m fascinated by our collective instinct in relation to it.  I’m fascinated by the mystery and unknown quality of the darkness, and the potential it has to reveal something of the Being and actions of God.  And I’m fascinated to survey a landscape that God promises will be transformed and imagine what it might look like after that transformation. 

It seems to me most folks aren’t comfortable with the dark, and I include myself in that number.  Leave me alone in a dark unknown room, and the heebie-jeebies that follow have the potential to cause a panic.  So we often try to mitigate the dark, and introduce some level of light into the murk.  I suppose we could ignore it and make due until our eyes adjust.  Or we could sit quietly and wait for a light source to present itself.  Some actually enjoy the dark, and are irritated at any inroads the light might make.  It’s rare though that anyone who prefers a lit room to a pitch black one would be willing to enter a pitch black room and remain there until given permission to leave it, though that of course is the heart of the story we celebrate every December 25. 

With that in mind, I think I’m going to make it a Christmas tradition to post a link to the homily below every year on this blog.  It is a relatively short, but potent review of a story we can tend to be overly familiar with.   It’s also the sermon from which this blog takes its title, Into the Dark With God.  Enjoy.

Lemony Snicket, Martin Luther and Madonna: Truth is Truth is Truth

If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. – Lemony Snicket

Blessings at times come to us through our labors and at times without our labors, but never because of our labors, for God always gives them because of His undeserved mercy. – Martin Luther

Based on some of the reactions I received when I posted the Lemony Snicket quote on my Facebook page, I imagine many of those who read this will cringe a bit at the proposition that success is not always contingent on hard work, and that hard work does not always breed success.  If the latter were the case, African women would be the richest people on the planet, but alas they are not (yes, I stole that from a friend’s Facebook post).  The Lemony Snicket quote originated in an online post from the character Lemony Snicket/author Daniel Handler entitled, “Thirteen Observations made by LemonySnicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance.”  He makes several keen observations in relation to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.  Much of the post resonated with me, particularly the quotation above.  I tend to be an intuitive thinker, so sometimes it takes me awhile to digest an idea or thought.  In relation to the quotation something about it seemed to “line up” with ideas I already owned and believed.  It wasn’t until I heard the second quote from Luther that it occurred to me why.  Luther essentially says something very similar to Handler (though 500 years earlier), while simultaneously recognizing the Divine source/principal behind why this is the case, the reason why being grace.  This of course means that both express, in varied measure, something of Divine truth.  To draw this out a bit, a bit of scripture may be helpful.  Some of the core of the truth of both of these quotations can be found in Jesus’ Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in the beginning of Matthew 20.

In the parable a vineyard owner hires workers for his vineyard very early in the morning and agrees to pay them a days wage for a days work.  Later in the morning he decides he needs more workers and so hires more agreeing to pay them fairly.  He does the same at about noon, 3, and 5.  At the end of the day all the workers, those hired at 5 and those hired first thing in the morning, are paid a full day’s wage, which of course raises the hackles of those who had actually worked all day.  When presented with the protests of unfairness, the vineyard owner replies, “I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (NIV)  Jesus begins this parable by suggesting that what follows is a metaphor for the Kingdom of heaven, and ends the story by suggesting that in the story we see a dramatic rendering of the free and gracious application of the landowner’s (God the Father’s) generosity.  Many will grasp onto the spiritual application of this and it’s relation to salvation, but many miss the principals in play in the here and now.  God has the freedom to bless whomever God wants to bless through whatever means God chooses.  If God chooses to bless the lazy with “success” (however you might choose to define it) that is entirely God’s prerogative.  If God chooses to bless hard work, that’s God’s prerogative.  One of the truths being fleshed out in the story is that blessings are always from God. No matter how much sweat equity we’ve invested into any given project, we cannot claim the fruit of that labor.  The fruit is always God’s to give.

Now this is no argument against hard work, or for inaction while awaiting a blessing from God.  In fact all of this is a merely the infrastructural support for the point I really want to touch on, which is that both the Lemony Snicket quote and the Martin Luther quote reference the same Biblical truth; perhaps one more intentionally than the other (Handler describes himself as a Secular Humanist), but the viewpoint of any author, or speaker doesn’t change the truth of what they convey.  Neither the person speaking or writing, nor the intent of the person speaking or writing ever changes the truth of what is said or written.  The point, to quote the great theologian Madonna, is that “truth is where you find it.” 

Because of (what I believe to be) the accuracy of this truism, truth isn’t always easily recognizable.  It’s often dressed shabbily, and associates with those of ill repute.  I believe we would benefit greatly if we were able to develop the ability to recognize truth in whatever form it presents itself.  Not only would we benefit personally, particularly if that recognition lead to meaningful, Christ-like action, but we would benefit those around us as we were able to recognize God at work in the culture at large and come join in that Divine labor.  Perhaps a good place to start is to take that song, movie, book, television show, or viral video back to scripture to find out where it resonates, and what it shares in common as a first instinct.  You might be surprised at where you might find God already at work in the culture around us.

The Book of Ruth: A Love Song to the Law

So Boaz said to Ruth, “My daughter, listen to me. Don’t go and glean in another field and don’t go away from here. Stay here with the women who work for me. Watch the field where the men are harvesting, and follow along after the women. I have told the men not to lay a hand on you. And whenever you are thirsty, go and get a drink from the water jars the men have filled.” – Ruth 2.8,9 (NIV)

Ruth is a wonderful and wonderfully out of place love story, stuck between the dark and bloody pseudo-nihilism of Judges and the road toward a Kingdom in 1 Samuel.  It is short, sweet, and in its own archaic Hebrew way, romantic.  One can make the case that Ruth is the Harlequin Romance of the Hebrew Bible, though Song of Solomon might throw its pomegranates in the ring to be included in that conversation.  The inherent drama of the love story between Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi, and then between Ruth and Boaz seems to have a filmic quality to it, hewing closely to many of our own cultural romantic narratives.  And the Hollywood-ready happy ending is the icing on the cake.  You can just picture Ruth riding side saddle with Boaz behind her, his arms around her trotting into the sunset at the end.  I recently finished a 2 month Bible study on Ruth. In our discussions and debates I began to see another love story in the book float to the surface, one which I had never seen before, and one which I might suggest reveals some truly practical applications for the way those of us who endeavor to trust and follow Christ live out our faith.  This love story was one between the book’s author and the Hebrew law. 

Now that begs the question, is this an unrequited love story?  How can the Hebrew law love the author in return?  It’s a good question, and one I will table for the moment and return to in a bit.  I suppose a more immediate question is, “How is there anything in the law to love?”  Isn’t it just a bunch of do’s and don’ts that we don’t have to pay attention to anymore because Jesus fulfilled the law?  We don’t sacrifice bulls, or rams or goats anymore, so why should we pay attention to the rest of it?  I might suggest Ruth provides us with a partial answer to that question.  The part of the law that Ruth’s author reveals his or her (though given the circumstances most likely his) affection for concerns its concern for the marginalized, in this case the widow and the foreigner. This concern is the foundation on which the book is constructed.  So I suppose we should peel back the building and inspect this foundation a bit.

In Deuteronomy 10, after Moses received a second copy of the law (since he had destroyed the first copy on frustration), God shares the following with Moses and Israel, giving a glimpse into why God had acted on their behalf in Egypt, and what that meant for the manner in which they were to live their lives:

To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.  Yet the LORD set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations—as it is today.  Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.  For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.  He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.  And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. – Deuteronomy 10.14-19 (NIV)

This is the heart of God’s actions on behalf of Israel, including God’s provision of the law.  In fact, I would suggest this is the heart that beats at the center of the Law because this is the heart of God.  God chooses to work through a vehicle that doesn’t yet exist (Israel) cultivating and maturing it through interactions with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  When it does begin to sprout it grows as a marginalized community of slaves in service to a political powerhouse in Egypt.  God’s choice of Israel here was entirely based in God’s absolute freedom, and God’s grace.  God goes on to suggest that Israel’s actions should mirror God’s in this way: that they value and love those on the margins of their culture and social structures, in this case the fatherless, the widow and the foreigner.  After they are freed from their slavery in Egypt and have a land of their own God concretizes this even further in Leviticus 19 and 23 where God shares this directive, “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you.” (Leviticus 23.22 NIV)  These passages form the foundational scriptural and ethical assumptions on which Ruth was written.

You may ask why I think the author of Ruth loved this law.  The first clue to the author’s love of the Law is the story’s historical setting, “In the days when the Judges ruled.”  These days were practically lawless and tragically violent.  The book of Judges itself characterizes this era as a time where “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”  Needless to say this is not an era characterized by a widespread love for or adherence to the Hebrew Law.  Yet here we have Boaz not only adhering to it, but going above and beyond the Law’s requirements.  He acts as if he is more concerned with the heart of the law than with the law itself.  He not only does what is right by its stated requirements, but does what is right by the widow (Naomi and Ruth) and the foreigner (Ruth) acting in accordance with the love of the God that loved Israel when they had done nothing to earn that love.  The law here is, in essence, the bare minimum of what is required to behave in a way which is consistent with the character of God.  To truly act in accordance with the heart of God one must go far beyond the bare minimum, which is what Boaz does.  This going above and beyond is the second clue toward revealing the author’s love of the law. 

As I asserted earlier Boaz lived in a time where the law was barely followed.  In fact, truth be told, the Hebrews had a tough time consistently following the law’s moral, social and ritualistic requirements through the whole of the Biblical narrative.  What we see in Boaz’s “above and beyond-ness” in Ruth is what the practice of the Law was supposed to look like.  It’s the ideal.  We get to see God’s intent for the law put into practice.  You not only have a widow, Naomi, who was at the margins of that patriarchal society because of her dependence on her husband and sons for her provision and survival (and she’s lost her husband and both of her sons), but you also have a widowed foreigner who was even further on the margins because of her lack of standing within the community.  The story places them at the mercy of the function of the law, and in this (I would suggest rare) instance the law works as it was intended.  When it does, we get to see, as if acted out on a stage, the glimpses of what the Hebrew culture could have been had they kept to the law, which would have been a place that rendered visible the loving heart of God.  (And I didn’t even get to the concept and practice the kinsman-redeemer)

So what does this mean for us?  So the author of Ruth loved the Hebrew Law, why should we?  I would suggest we should love the Law because it allows us to “see” the inside of God.  In this Law God rips open God’s chest to reveal the passion of God’s metaphorical heart.  God reveals a love for the humble, the inchoate, and the powerless.  God goes out of the way to reach out to them/us.  I would suggest that God’s heart has not changed in the years since either the giving of the Law or the writing or Ruth.  So if we’re to love what God loves, that must include those on the margins in our own culture.  At the beginning I acknowledged that the Law could not love the author back, but the God of the Law can and does, and I believe the recording of this story is part of the author’s recognition of and returning of that love, for all of posterity to see.  So I would suggest this is the/a practical application to be taken from Ruth: It’s up to us to allow that passionate love to seep into us and the experience of our relationship with God and then allow it to flow out of us as we learn to love and embrace with our actions that which God loves and embraces.  The more this becomes part of our experience of faith, the more we may find the hands of Boaz revealing themselves in our actions, and we can all agree, the world could use a few more Boaz’s couldn’t it?

***The picture above is a reproduction of a woodcut done by Margaret Adams Parker from the book Who are you My Daughter?: Reading Ruth Through Image and Text.  In it Theologian Ellen F. Davis provides her own translation of and commentary on the book of Ruth, inter-cut with Margaret Adams Parker’s wood cuts.  It is highly recommended.

Heaven, Hell and the Handbaskets for Each

...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.”
― N.T. Wright

The world is not going to hell in a hand basket.  “What?” you say?  “Have you seen the poverty in Africa?  Have you seen the individual and corporate greed run amok?  Teens are killed for their shoes.  Children are abused by those they trust.  Pornography is a billion dollar industry.  The rich are healthy.  The sick are poor. We waste precious resources for our creature comforts.  Those on the margins of survival are systematically corralled on the margins by those who benefit from their hardship.  The defenseless are slaughtered.  Government chips away at freedom as if they’re sanding off old paint in order to apply their own new color scheme.  And there’s a Democrat in the White House.”  To all of that I say, “Ok there are a few good points there.”  It’s easy to see that the world around us is a wreck.  It’s easy to look at the world and become discouraged, and even to despair.  I’ve been there.  Sometimes I visit discouragement and despair.  Sometimes they visit me.  When we listen to their voices, the world can seem like a pretty dark and foreboding place, and in all reality it is.  However there is another voice speaking into the wreck, one which should be recognizable to those who have pursued a trust in Christ.  It’s a still small voice, singing a redemptive melody.  It’s hard to hear, and can often be entirely inaudible, but I would suggest that an anchored faith that that voice exists and is active in its song is essential to both preventing our own despair, and to breathing hope into the larger cultural conversation. I’d like to focus in on the theology that is the back beat of that song and draw a few practical applications out of it, if you’d be willing to humor me and my metaphors.

The hub around which this wheel turns is the notion that God is in the process of completing God’s redemptive work in the world.  We get snap shot images in scripture of the shape and feel of this completed work.  See Isaiah 25, 35, 61 and 65, and Revelation 19-22.  If we were looking for words that we could glean and reconstruct from these passages that would help provide that feel, we might come up with: peace, justice, equality, love, joy, sanctuary, and community.  In these passages God reveals to us how the story ends; or to push the music metaphor a bit, the song, or better, the symphony God has been composing, conducting, and perhaps even improvising through history has a glorious end which God is longing to share with this beloved world.  What must be remembered if we’re not to be overcome by the voices of discouragement and despair is that this symphony is still being written, and those of us living here now are caught in one of the symphony’s taut movements, full of dissonance and unresolved tensions.  If we allow these dissonances to define all the symphony is in our minds, we lose the beauty and attractiveness of the story being told through the music.  This, I believe is part of the reason God lets humanity in on the end of the story, to provide a modicum of hope that the unresolved tensions that surround us do not define the whole of reality.  What is even more beautiful is that God at times allows us to hear hints or foreshadows of the glorious conclusion that is waiting at the symphony’s end, both in scripture (see the Resurrection) and in our experiences.  God even allows and requests us to participate in the playing of this song.

Thus, our efforts to learn the prior movements and glorious end of this symphony, and recreate them using the instruments God provides (ourselves) are a good part of what we have to offer the world around us.  To unwind the metaphor a bit, the more Christians share the good news of God’s self revelation of the depths of God’s love for humanity revealed through the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the more we embody that love and the peace, justice, equality, joy, sanctuary, and community that characterize the symphony’s conclusion the more we get to participate in the still small voice’s part in the larger cultural conversation.  It’s then that we not only fight our own despair, trusting the promise of the symphony’s finale, but play our part in the symphony, attracting people to its composer and come alongside God as a voice of hope, continually singing to the world.  It’s then that we learn and trust that the proverbial hand basket is not heading toward entropy and destruction but is actually heading toward a bright, glorious and divine future.

Occupy Church?

The “Occupy Wall Street” protests have captured my imagination, and probably not for the reasons you might suspect.  There is a lot to be said for the collective indignance being articulated by the Occupiers in relation to earnings and wealth disparity.  On a side note, for all the voices that speak of their expectations to the contrary, they are revealing that “Gen Y” does possess a moral center.  It may not be your moral center, but they are making moral arguments against the current economic construct.  Now, there is also something to be said for the oddness of much of the protest, and many of the protestors.  Another strike against the Occupiers is their difficulty in succinctly articulating either all that they’re for, or even all they’re against.  They seem to represent a pretty diverse group of interests who seem to share in common a frustration with a financial system they see as constructed by the rich and powerful for the benefit of the rich and powerful.  Well, they seem to share that frustration, and a collective interest in horizontal as opposed to hierarchical organization.  This is actually what interests me most, particularly in relation to the church.

I’m intrigued because the occupiers are embodying a means of organizing I’ve been fascinated by for years, particularly in regards to how it relates to the church.  I was introduced to this idea of a horizontal organization of church by Tom Sine’s Mustard Seed Versus McWorld, and Neil Cole’s Organic Church: Growing FaithWhere Life Happens.  Both suggest a radical rethinking of how we organize church, creating smaller community structures, less dependent on brick and mortar facilities, and allowing for greater spontaneity and liquidity in movement.  In different ways they argue that hierarchical structures have the strong potential to slow the church’s work as those involved commit considerable amounts of time to both the organization and the facilities associated with the organization.  I have to say their ideas held and continue to hold my imagination.  As much as I love church as I’ve known it, and as much as I love being a part of the organization and the family atmosphere of the organization, it has always seemed rather unwieldy to me.  The trouble is I’ve had a hard time imagining what an alternative would look like.  I even tried to find ways to take these ideas from the page to the real world; from the construction of an intentional community to alternative liturgies and ecclesial structures, without much success.  Enter the “Occupy Wall Street” folks and their experiment in “horizontal democracy.”

This is what seems to me to be at the heart of their protests, and the one thing shared in common, a commitment to shy away from hierarchy.  You can see this in their decision making process, attempting to decide by group consensus as opposed to majority vote.  Granted it takes longer and less gets “done”, but by doing so they embody the alternative to that which is the root of their indignance, the power of the few over the many.  I appreciate this commitment to live this philosophy given my interest in the idea of Incarnation.  Given the importance of Incarnation to Christianity, this should get our attention.  Their message in reality is their action.  Because of this the value of this protest thus far, at least as I see it, isn’t in their propositions, but in their actions.  I pray that some day the same can be said of me.

Dry Bones, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Visual Hermeneutics

“Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” So I prophesied as I had been commanded. – From Ezekiel 37

I suspect there’s a good chance you have not heard of the St. John’s Bible.  It is the first hand written, illuminated Bible to be produced since the invention of the printing press in the 16^th century, around 500 years ago.  It is also the first hand written copy of the Bible ever produced in English.  I learned about it as part of a gathering I attended where the focus was (surprise, surprise) theology and the arts.  I have to say the book is stunning in its craftsmanship, and imagination.  If you have time, please click on the link above and explore the Bible.  You can actually turn through the Bible’s pages on their website.  The illuminations are stunning aesthetically, and do an amazing job of opening up the text it illuminates to a type of visual hermeneutic.  At any rate as part of a seminar I attended in relation to this Bible, I participated in a community Lectio Divina, which is a Benedictine meditative practice of reading and praying through scripture.  It’s typically done alone, but the director of the St. John Bible Project, Tim Ternes, led us through a modified arrangement of the practice where a portion of a text would be read, and those in the seminar would speak out phrases, words, or groups of words from the text.  It became something of an open, communal, improv-like, free form scriptural poetry reading.  Our text for this exercise was Ezekiel 37.1-14, The Valley of the Dry Bones.  As a group we drew a lot more out of the text than I have ever personally gotten out of, or seen in the text before.  There’s one concept in particular that stuck out to me that I’d like to share here; not the main point of the text, but something the text and the production of the Bible had in common, the importance of human agency in materially and dramatically rendering God’s heart and desires visible to a world bound to their physical senses.

The text itself is a dynamic drama born out of the imagination of God and shared with Ezekiel.  Ezekiel of course then shared it with those around him, and it was recorded in writing for the benefit of posterity.  What interests me is what the vision reveals about that which God holds dear, and the part God expects Ezekiel to play in this drama of disclosure. 

As the vision unfolds to Ezekiel, God reveals a deep love for the Hebrew people, and a desire that they live and experience the type of full life associated with living in the awareness that they are loved absolutely and unconditionally.  Ideally, the product of this awareness is trust and hope.  At the end of the vision God indicates to Ezekiel that the entire purpose of the vision was that the Hebrews would, “know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”  This action is entirely God’s initiative, unmerited and on their behalf.  God essentially flings open the metaphorical Divine ribs and reveals a heart beating with a madly overabundant, uncontainable love for these people.  God allows Ezekiel and by extension us to see the Divine insides so to speak, and we are left with the knowledge of the security and thus comfort of God’s love.  Look closer though.  How is it that we get to “see” this?  How is this made visible?  We can’t see feelings.  We can only see actions.  So who is acting here?  Ezekiel.

In the vision Ezekiel is commanded to prophecy to the bones.  God doesn’t resurrect the bones directly, but employs Ezekiel as a mediator.  In doing so, God reveals God’s love through Ezekiel’s obedient actions.  There is a similarity here to Moses’ experience at the Red Sea.  In Exodus 14 God tells Moses to lift up his hands to both part the seas and return them to “normal.”  In both instances the text records that Moses lifted his hands, and then God parted the waters, and then returned them.  God didn’t act until Moses did.  God didn’t return flesh and life to the bones in the vision until Ezekiel prophesied to them. 

God has left us and the Church of our times with many a command as well, revealed through prophets, the teachings of Jesus and the letters of the New Testament. God I believe still wants to reveal the Divine heart that beats with a madly overabundant, uncontainable love for all the peoples of the Earth.  But God it seems limits the initiation of the revelation of that love to the text of Bible (which at its core is a result of obedient human action) and acts of those on the stage of the world.  Our job as those trusting in that Divine love is to use our agency, our choices, and our gifts to participate with God in revealing that love to others through our words, yes, but even more so through our actions as they relate to our attempts to obey, and dramatically live out the commands God has shared in scripture.  In doing so, we also become something of a “visual hermeneutic” ourselves, in a manner similar to that of the illuminations in the St. John Bible.  In the same way that calligrapher and artist Donald Jackson, and the creators of that Bible used their agency, choices and gifts to produce an object that creates the opportunity of Divine encounter, so our lives lived in loving actions of obedience to God can create that opportunity as well.  Notice I said earlier it seems that God limits the “initiation” of the revelation of God’s love to our obedient action.  Once we act it seems God steps in and does what only God can do, bring life where there was death, and hope where the was despair.  That seems like a pretty good deal to me, and one I want to be a part of. 

(The picture is from the Exodus 20 illumination in the St. John's Bible)

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.