The things I carry

or, All that you can’t leave behind.

I used to know my Bible a lot better.

Probably a function of my obsessiveness, or legalism, or just general mental disturbedness, but I knew my Bible, chapter and verse, like a freak. (I still remember my college roommate joking early in our acquaintance that I knew the entire New Testament, cover to cover and verse to verse. That wasn’t as much a joke as I think he thought!)

I’ve noticed recently more of that inner voice saying, ‘that’s Biblical, but I just don’t know where…’.

That’s a little disturbing.

But maybe, to turn things around, it shouldn’t be.

Very early in my seminary career I started wrapping my mind around a shift, of sorts, in nomenclature as concerned Christians interacting with their world. Dear Dr. Krieder forever rocked my socks by describing certain musicians (knowing him, they were probably U2) not as “Christian musicians” but as “Christians who do music”.

That has proven no small distinction. Stick with me and I’ll show you why.

It seems that the final, highest goal in formal Christian education (it certainly is at the school where I teach) is that teachers teach from a fundamental Christian worldview. This is a pretty tough thing to think through, but it basically boils down to this: your Christian faith should so inform your perspective on the world and how you interact with it that it just sort of comes out, and lives in, the way you handle ideas. Think of your fundamental Christian perspectives (keep your finger right here; you’re gonna want to come back to this page) functioning sort of like glasses, or contacts, or even the very corneas of your eyes, so much that you can’t consciously separate it from how you process new information on your world. And then, because of that, distinctly Christian “fingerprints” are all over everything you do.

Put even simpler: your Christian faith isn’t something you have to just “turn on” or “turn off” or “revisit,” and how developed your faith is one way or the other shows up in everything about your life.

Hence my spin on forgetting Bible verses.

I think that perhaps some progress I’ve made in my maturity as a Christian could be found in that. Now of course, I’m not trying to say that there never is and never was any value in memorizing Scripture… But the whole point of our time together is to wonder this: which is of more value, learning more Scripture by rote and being able to adroitly unfurl it from the depths of your intellectual satchel, or being so changed by it that it lives inside you and nourishes you even unconsciously because you’ve already digested it so well?

So then, all that said, take a look at the things I carry:

Art and beauty: All things done well and excellently are things the Scriptures encourage us to harvest for clues about God that will encourage us further toward a life of grateful reflection upon Him. Because I am a Christian I understand this world as a place where God’s handiwork is on display anywhere I look and thus I appreciate beauty far more deeply. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

Dignity of human life: I take great offense, because I am a Christian, at any devaluing of human lives or people made in the image of God due to their station in life. The poor, a janitor, a prostitute or a some greedy old tycoon are all of equal worth in the eyes of God to that of even His Son. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

Lordship of Christ: Because I am a Christian, I believe that He is in control-regardless of human machinations otherwise, my own weak faith, or hostility toward my our values. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

Truth: Since I am a Christian, I believe that all truth is God’s truth and that anything I can find that I know to be true should be a cherished nugget pointing me back toward Him. I am not quick to stamp things as “true,” but once I realize such a sighting, I rejoice. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

I’m not really sure which Dixon I’d prefer to have in my crew, the one writing today or the one with the biggest, thickest Bible keychain.

Actually, I think I do know now.

If we can’t say that we’ve wisened as the calendar pages have ticked onward, I’m not sure we should want to be around ourselves. (I feel like that too is a scriptural idea, by the way.)

Yup, you got me there, I said it: sometimes forgetting Bible verses is a good thing.

Maybe that is because if they really are what we say of them, then in fact they truly are… all that we can’t leave behind.

Recipe for a god

[This is the second part to this post.] 

I could prattle on a great deal longer about my former days, but the light I am hoping to shine from that journey looks like this: 

 You can tell a great deal about how a person understands God, the world around them and what God is doing in that world by the way they handle products of human culture, things like movies, books and music. By just this little bit, you can evaluate the health of some core level, fundamental beliefs a person has about God Himself.

Here’s why: in the Scriptures, God is revealed to us as one apart from whom, or outside of whose hand, nothing happens. Because of His sheer “bigness,” there are no places and no productions we can facilitate that don’t ultimately yield clues about Him somewhere. Everything humans do is thus something for which we cannot avoid saying, ”God has given humanity some extraordinary gifts, and He does amazing things”.

Unless of course we believe that God is as ashamed, confused, and mixed up about our brokenness as we are.

Unless of course we humans in our infinite wisdom have tinkered with the details of that soul-shuddering “bigness”.

As a function of our own confusion and befuddlement over the majesty of a God who isn’t scared off by the shatteredness of what He’s made, it comes naturally to us to simply contrive one who is as mixed up as us.

Anne Lamott has a classic quote, wherein she says that, “You can safely assume you’ve made God in your own image when it turns out He hates all the same people you do.”

(Feel free to substitute verbs like ”is confused by,” “despises,” or “regrets” to get my point.)

If God is only as big as those few places where you don’t see His image being soiled in the culture, I think He’s been recast into something vastly inferior. This comes very naturally to us, so at precisely this point we need to examine ourselves on a regular basis. It is of such a soul-level, natural inclination to refashion God in terms we can understand better that it really is not tough at all to understand the devastating tumble Christians began making in the early 18th century toward understanding God as being “alive” in one arena of human experience but far from other ones. 

This yielded of course the perfect storm then in which the worldview that understood God as only “able to be found” in stuff made by Christians and for Christians came into play. That in turn yielded the perfect ecosystem of slick producers and rapt consumers, with quasi-liturgical code language, an inexhaustible client base, and no doubt most worrisome of all, the supposed Biblical and theological frameworks to sign off on every bit of it.

The end result of all that, hear me boldly say, equals an extraordinarily small view of God, one with an ominous wind at its back as it drools downward upon idolatry, heresy and every step between and beyond.

That, my friend, is the recipe for the pitiful wretch before which I began bowing in August of 1996, and in whose honor I burned those 100-some odd CD’s the following winter. 

Yet, with the correct glasses on, we Christians can learn to spot and trace the things God has astir below the surface of our culture by discerningly engaging the good and the bad things of human culture. I truly do hold that there is no end to the insights we can get about God, people, and ourselves from reading the non-Christian culture around us. Is it Scripture? No way. But if what we’re pulling from what others, gifted by our good God, is in fact true, then it’s gonna line up with Scripture, and what we learn of our world, when compared to Scripture, can only make us better stewards of God’s creation and better at offering Him the praise He’s due.

A friend sent me this quote some years ago, and it seems apt right now:

“It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the centre, not in weakness but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

 As we process God’s dare to do the work of deep and honest interaction with the culture around us, we learn to strip and pluck the nuggets, the reminders, of God’s beauty and hand of grace at work in our world. In so doing we find confirmations, reminders, and deeper reflections upon the Scriptures we so cherish. When, grounded in the Scriptures, we engage our world and trace how others have made use of the breath of life God has given them, we risk a far better understanding of just how terrifying the life of faith can in fact be. Sometimes, we’re reminded of just how shallow our faiths are, and most times we reflect anew at the goodness of our King.

In the same way that secluding oneself in a world informed by only positive and encouraging Christian music distorts one’s perspective into one that believes that the deep mysteries of an authentic faith could possibly fit in four minutes and three verses, equally distorted is on in which we try and imagine a world in which God is elusive in the secular arts. Truths about God are no less removed from a movie like “Juno” than grief and Tough Questions are removed from the worlds from which Christians produce art. If God is true, and what He is doing cannot be frustrated, why do we insist that it is best that we hide from those things? 

With all that said then, I hope you will take the risk of seeing what truths about God you can find in movies like “The Shawshank Redemption,” or books like Eric Clapton’s autobiography, or an album like Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue“. Trying or not, conscious or not, and willing or not, culture simply reflects God’s handiwork amongst us Down Here. My question is, do you have enough faith to risk what you might find?

Of Christians, Led Zeppelin and…

Of all the painful, self-destructive and ignorant things I’ve inflicted upon myself, today I offer my expert testimony that what I did in the winter of 1997 shall never be dethroned.

In the closed, manufactured world of my church in those days, one synonym for balance was “compromise,” which history had proven was most times just the hurried intermission before ”heresy”. To this newly converted, sixteen year old kid who’d given himself without abandon to a fundamentalist, charismatic, non-denominational, non-affiliated, five year old church that had no real organizing or correcting framework* except for the senior pastor, every exhortation made to us about “secular” music and media found a tailor-made incubator.

One Sunday night in January I myself lit our youth group’s massive ”sin fire,” with every drip of solemnity any non-stoned human could hold in staring down the Joe Walsh Anthology.

I fully realized at that time that I was giving over irrevocably to the Lord an entire limb of what had supported the deepest frameworks of my soul of souls, my passion for experiencing life through wide forms of music. I believe to this day that was one of the most solemn (however misguided!) sacrifices I’ve ever offered the Lord in faith.

I sauntered on there for a good three or four years, as passionate as ever about all things music but with a dark and zealous glee for attacking anything that wasn’t readily discernible as “Christian”. The makeup of the music on which I was feasting during that period was of a highly specific flavor of evangelical charismatic Protestantism, with just a sprinkle of that month’s flavor of CCM hits thrown in as well.

The “Christian” clamp could get ever tighter, I soon found out. I remember pondering even under those circumstances whether the stuff I was listening to was “Christian enough,” and I toyed more than once with the idea that stuff like Vineyard praise and worship music was the only authentic and true music one would expect “fully sold out” Christians to be listening to. I also remember discussing with my buddy Brad whether instrumental stuff like jazz or Bach was “Christian,” as it never explicitly took the opportunity to delineate itself as pro-Christ. (We decided “no,” if memory serves me.)

Sometime in the winter of 1998 my most musically inclined uncle asked me, with a frustration in his voice unique to people trying to reason with religious people slightly deranged, how in the world stuff like Led Zeppelin or the Beatles could be “of the devil”. I stood my ground, stamping it a closed issue by virtue of there not being an explicit record of any pro-Christian sentiments allegiance on either of these artists’ behalf. (The colors black and white are both quite simple to those trained that God interprets the world colorblind.)

So fast forward a year or two, and that framework begins to crash down around me (interestingly enough, not long after I departed for college-imagine that).

My beloved roommate had already covered some of this ground in his own life. With grace he began to pull that worldview apart, piece by piece, and help me start to examine each and every warped part of that twisted edifice. Long story short, through guys like him I eventually arrived at the place where once again I ravenously lap up music of all shapes and practices, all the while finding great fodder for worship in every bit of it. (Napster came around at just the right time, too.)

I believed as I sparked that blaze that Sunday night with every bit of faith in my young soul that I was giving over one of the most cherished parts of my being to the Lord that I had to offer.

And in one way or another, He’s given it all back; laundered it, if you will.

Suffice it to say, I’ve come far, far from those days of such an entrenched, puny faith. And the farther I’ve come from that world, the better life’s gotten. 

I’ll tell you why in the next piece.

*The abundance of descriptors here was deliberate, with the humble hope that if you ever happen to come across a church fellowship meeting this description you won’t settle there.

Number(ing) the stars

Every once in a while I slow down enough to spend some time in the DFW Metroplex’ closest approximation to ‘nature’. Tonight I tripped over that on the front porch of my apartment.

So I was lying in front of our door, iPod ablaze, front porch light disabled and the troubles of tomorrow simmering in the sea of forgetfulness.

And I just stared at the stars for a while, probably no more than twenty minutes. (I’d been meaning to do that for some time now, truth be told.)

Well, my first thought was to grouse about the lack of stars visible in the Metroplex and how happy I’d be to one day be back in Arkansas, or Colorado, or Utah, or really anywhere where stars happened to always be on tap just for me.

Once I settled though, I began to see that there were more stars than I’d seen at first. And more. And even more. I couldn’t focus in hard enough to find the ‘bottom’ of them; the harder I stared, the more triangles my eyes tried to make and the more phantom star trails I thought I saw. Reminds me of the Carol King line that James Taylor popularized, “and the stars at night/they put on a show for us/for free”. And what a show it was!

I think the questions and grounds for meditation are as infinite as the very ranks of those stars themselves, but two are settling over me:

-Upon further examination, there is always more to ____________ than what you thought at first. Always, be it the Dallas stars, the Dallas Cowboys, the Bible, or what some kid said the other day. Everything in life bears digging a little deeper, and everything yields more.

-I wonder if, the deeper one digs into that non-finite expanse of starrage, those stars grow closer together, so much closer such that outer space is no longer cold. I wonder if most things warm up the closer they get to things of similar kin. I wonder what else changes about things as they grow closer to others like them. Stars don’t move, but I sure can.

Pray with me that you’ll dim not the stars. It doesn’t take much work to see them every single day.