i never claimed to be a promise keeper

unfortunately i have yet to write the review of doug pagitt's preaching re-imagined that i promised. however, i found a fairly interesting interview with doug that was posted at christianbook.com.

please note: neither i, the management of musings, nor lifeway endorse the consumer-driven, subtly liberal, crypto-communist website that this interview was posted on. peruse this site at your own risk.

happy haiku friday!

i spent the morning

lamenting hypocrisy

while chewing a pen



while we serenade

God's love and Christ's compassion

He responds with rage

undone

yesterday, in the midst of categorizing a stack of books, i stumbled across the reprint edition of the faces of Jesus by frederick buechner. after reading the copy on the front jacket flap i flipped the pages en masse so that i could see if there was an author photo featured on the back.

fortunately there was a photo. upon seeing it i was almost undone. buechner has always been incredibly photogenic, as the covers of his little autobiographies attest, but this photo pierced me so deeply that i almost wept. in this photograph, buechner looks old and bemused. his h-frame mouth is open just enough to offer a sympathetic smile and his eyes bear witness to a lifetime full of tightly clinched, discerning squints that were occasionally overwhelmed by wide-eyed wonder. as i scrutinized uncle freddy’s liver spots and last wisps of hair, i realized how grateful i am that my life has overlapped with this liberal, literary prophet and how utterly afraid i am of the day that he finally departs.

so many of uncle freddy’s words have opened my heart to the Word and his constant reminders to “listen to your life” have helped me salvage a few remnants of sense from this shipwrecked, chaotic world. as odd as it sounds, i hold him as close as i hold family and, as pagan as it sounds, i pray that when he passes God will grant me a portion of his spirit.

is there an author that simultaneously helps hold you together and enables you to hold out hope for the future? if so, i’d love to hear about it.

“look kids! It’s a…it’s a…it’s a rocket ship!”

i haven’t been there yet, but i would still be willing to bet that hell is a lot like bolivar, missouri. it was there, on the unsuspecting stage of baptist bible college, that i revealed my adolescent indulgences to three hundred, hormone-driven teens.

we had been doing hand motions for three days, i was ready to kill one of the other sponsors and was dying for a cigarette. so to say i was sick of c.i.y. was an understatement. on wednesday afternoon, killing time before the alternative alleluia band was supposed to play kevin greer decided to stage a mid-afternoon timewaster. as he began to hand-select the objects of his ridicule from the crowd, i began to feel sick. he was going to pick me. i knew he was going to pick me and all of my self-determined denials wouldn’t do me a damn bit of good. i was right.

as i made my way backstage, barely bottling my rage, the stage manager directed me to a sound-proof green room where i received my assignment. “when you get on stage,” the pimple popping ozark intern told me, “make-believe that you are taking off in a rocket ship.” “is that all you have to tell me,” i asked. “oh yeah, one more thing,” he said, “there’ll be a black chair on stage that you can use however you want.” so there i sat, cursing my fate and awaiting my fifteen seconds. although i couldn’t hear kevin from the green room, i could hear the crowd roaring. in that moment, i knew i was being set up. i was right.

when my moment came, i swept the curtain aside as inconspicuously as possible, tried not to look at the six hundred eager eyes that were staring at me and made my way to the chair. i immediately tipped the chair so that its back was resting on the stage, sat down in the chair so that my back and legs were parallel with the stage, clasped my hands together and put them right below my crotch. then, at the word “go” i trembled violently, made thundering rocket ship noises and rapidly adjusted the imaginary yoke between my legs.

after fifteen seconds of my antics, i was overwhelmed by the roar of the crowd. when i stood up, straightened my shirt and looked in kevin’s eyes, i could see that they were filled with tears. when i looked out at the crowd, i saw my youth minister on his knees laughing. i immediately began to panic.

after i made my way off the stage, flush red in the face, i asked my youth minister what the set up was. he told me in a rushed, hyper-ventilating voice that i was mimicking “what i did in the bathroom.”

that was the last time i waxed my rocket ship in a public setting. and that, my friends, is yet another reason that i am not a youth minister.

amidst the atmospheric “pop”

after diagnosing spiritual schizophrenia
he said

prayer is the prescription
the community provides counseling

why do i feel so fragmented
if i was created to be whole?

amidst the firing synapses
is there room enough for soul?

perhaps this is the result
of exchanging absolutes for ambiguity

and getting a quarter on the dollar

or rather an expression of humility
of contemplation outstripping capability

let us pray for the latter

memorandum from captain random

it's 9:37p.m. i'm drinking my second cup of reheated coffee, seriously considering a glass of wine and committed to defraging my spirit for the next sixty minutes. i thought for some odd reason you might enjoy seeing my blue screen incrementally overtaken by the little white boxes of underdeveloped thoughts.

9:42 p.m. - regardless of how this series unfolds, i am incredibly proud of the way the cardinals have played over the last six weeks. since the all-star break four of our regulars (molina, walker, rolen and sanders) have been injured and they have gone 16-10. i had hoped they could play .525 ball during this stretch, so obviously they have surpassed my expectations. if we can just treat water until mid-september, get molina/walker/sanders (rolen appears to be d-u-n) on track and perhaps get some bullpen smoke out of reyes, we might be able to make a strong run in october.

9:45 p.m. - life lessons i have learned from baseball:

• slow the game down


• play a hard nine


• replicate your mechanics


• candlesticks always make a nice gift

9:54 p.m. - the cardinals are showing some life, mark prior does not appear to be the god i once thought he was and i would like to recommend a superb cardinals blog to you. it's called viva el birdos, which i think is spanish for the cardinals are the shiz-nite, and the author's attention to detail and analysis are excellent. even a summary perusal of the posts will show you why i am not a full-time baseball blogger (i.e., i have neither the time nor the statistical ability to develop such sophisticated proposals).

10:00 p.m. - if the cardinals had as much organizational talent as the cubs and did as little with it, i would be on psychotropics by now. over the past three years i have been constantly mystified by their inability to dominate the central.

10:04 p.m. - that is the nicest thing you will ever hear me say about the cubs. speaking of that glass of wine, i would like to thank alex for providing me with such a generous portion. i wish he was here to enjoy it with me.

10:06 p.m. - several years ago, i thought of myself as mr. social justice. i challenged apparent evangelical indifference towards the urban poor, parroted jim wallis and spent my vacations serving with the l'arche community in downtown toronto. now, although i am actively engaged in social concerns on the local level, i am remarkably ignorant about darfur, the developing famine in niger and a million additional concerns i am unaware of. the upside of my current situation is that i have a number of friends, especially dr. james, rick and craig that are constantly reminding me of these concerns. in this area i set out to be a leader, but am now being led. i think i'm ok with that.

10:16 p.m. - i have been reading moby dick over the past couple of days in an attempt to reintroduce myself to american classics and start preparing for the secondary ed. prep exam that i'll be taking next spring. anyway, i have found melville's sense of humor striking and his religious thought unexpectedly progressive. would you like to hear a few quotes? i thought you might...

• "heaven have mercy on us all - presbyterians and pagans alike - for we are all somehow directly cracked about the head, and sadly need mending" (pg. 90).


• "i know what he is - a good man - not a pious good man, like bildad, but a swearing good man - something like me..." (88-89)


• "if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves, and it is in disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists" (48)


• "yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow" (45. wonderful quote, eh? too bad i don't believe it)
• "better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken christian" (26. yeah, it's a bit reductionistic and derivative, but i like it)


• "what of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? what does that indignity amount to, weighed, i mean, in the scales of the new testament?...who ain't a slave? tell me that" (6)

10:32 p.m. - over the past week or so another new character has been given a reoccurring role on the gentry show. his name is ken and he's a twenty year old magician, student and all around nice guy. ken grew up in colorado springs, where he was turned off by megachurches, humored by evangelicals who would approach his mohawked brother in restaurants only to say things like "god is right there in your hands" and briefly employed by focus on the family as an extra in a movie who's plot he described as "non-christian teenage parties are bad, christian teenage parties are good." anyway, for reasons both obvious and unknown, ken is not committed to living in the way of Jesus. however, our conversations this weekend have touched on the church more often than not. why the rambling narrative, you ask, good question...here's the rub. ken is obviously interested in our church or at least continuing to be a part of our community, but i have yet to directly ask him to "come to church." early this afternoon he asked me what time we met (the fact that i spent all day sitting on my ass reading tipped him off to the fact that we didn't read on sunday) and when he stopped by for dinner this evening he asked what a regular service was like, but i still did not invite him.

i've invited him to join us before, but he seemed uninterested. now, i'm going to leave him to his own initiative. i hope this intuitive approach is wise.

10:45 p.m. - so i've broke the sixty minute mark. sue me. you're the one who is bored enough to read this shit. as the allusion in the previous snippet was intended to suggest, i've been reading nick hornby this weekend. if you enjoy his rapacious wit, have been charmed by his humorous, humane novels and/or prefer to read about reading literature rather than actually reading it yourself, you'll love polysyllabic spree.

10:55 p.m. - i think the crumbling discus thrower anti-steroid ads would be much more effective if they provided virile young men with an image of how steroids de-values the family jewels. i don't think that the demise of their calves is going to weigh on the future "physical education" and "recreation science" majors of america. but irreversible shrinkage? that'll keep a few of 'em up late at night.


11:00 p.m. - i just heard that tracy "tickner" monts, one of my favorite people in bible college, and her husband aaron are moving to boston next summer. from what i've heard so far, it appears that they are planning on staying and serving with a new church plant for a defined amount of time. however, i am already hoping that they decide to stay in the area of become a part of our community after their enlistment in the boston project is up. a boy can hope.

11:05 p.m. - this is the sound of me spell-checking. good night!