Straight Outta Compton and the language of lament

Posted on 31 October 201517 November 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

I’m not sure why so many people in Hollywood were surprised when Straight Outta Compton took over the box office this past August. Interest in the movie was running high, from what I saw, and it’s not as if there was much competition in the theaters by that point. For that matter, though there were some big hits this year, there wasn’t all that much worth watching for most of the summer. What’s more, SOC was released by Universal, which was well into its “all your box office are belong to us” routine. According to the Grantland article linked above,

Universal has already put together a box office year for the ages, and Straight Outta Compton notches the studio’s sixth no. 1 opener of the year. With Straight Outta Compton, Universal could release nothing else this year but a two-hour video of the staff taking selfies and it would still break Warner Bros.’ $2.1 billion record for domestic box office. By the way, that’s a record set in December 2009, which Universal will break in August.

Finally, while the main reason projections for the movie were low was that “it had no stars,” that wasn’t really true. I understand why people would say that (since the only actor in the movie with any reputation to speak of was Paul Giamatti, and he’s not exactly your classic leading man), but it missed the point. The stars of the movie were the characters in the story; it wasn’t the name value of the actors but their ability to bring the characters to life that mattered (as is the case most of the time). N.W.A has been defunct for a long time, but Dr. Dre and Ice Cube still have more pull than most movie stars. As long as they were behind it and the movie told the story in a compelling way, it had all the star power it needed. Having Ice Cube’s son playing him only reinforced that.

While it was mildly amusing watching the commentary and analysis of SOC‘s success, I was more interested in how little controversy there was. I’ve never been a rap fan, but N.W.A was a mammoth cultural presence in my high-school years. I remember the fury they caused, and I remember articles over the years asserting that gangsta rap was celebrating and even inciting violence against the police. I don’t know if those articles were correct or not, but I was surprised that when N.W.A came back in some sense with this movie, I didn’t see the opposition come roaring back along with it. Apart from a personal essay by Dee Barnes, who was brutally assaulted by Dr. Dre in 1991, the dominant cultural response seemed to be nostalgia.

This is unfortunate, because N.W.A shouldn’t be uncritically celebrated.Read more→

The humility of preaching

Posted on 29 October 201517 November 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

Early in my first pastoral call, I preached a sermon on the Trinity. I figured my little congregation knew that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one God, but I wanted to help them understand why that matters for our salvation. As I was shaking hands after the service, a woman came up to me, smiling, and said, “As a lifelong Unitarian, I just want to tell you that was a wonderful sermon.”

Bemused and taken aback, I thanked her and watched her go, wondering what on earth she had meant. Unfortunately, she took sick and left the community soon after, so I never had the chance to find out. I’m still wondering what, as a lifelong Unitarian, she actually understood that sermon to mean, and how it affected her.

This isn’t the only puzzling reaction I’ve ever had to a sermon, of course. Another example among many is the woman who thanked me for making it clear that Christians must support the government of Israel, leaving me thinking, I didn’t say that. At least, I don’t think I did. I think most pastors can relate to encounters like that. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of “But I didn’t say that!” stories from various colleagues. Sometimes, the messages people have taken away from sermons I’ve preached have been more insightful than anything I actually said—which is a humbling thought.

But then, that’s part of the reason for such experiences, isn’t it? God uses them to keep us preachers humble and to remind us that the work of preaching isn’t nearly as much about us and our skills and talents as we like to think it is. My preaching professor in seminary, the Rev. Dr. John Zimmerman, used to tell us, “One sermon preached, a hundred sermons heard”—an axiom that in my experience varies only by size of congregation. He often said that what really matters in people’s lives isn’t the sermon we preach, but (in his words) the counter-sermon they preach to themselves as they listen.

Sometimes congregants hear what they expect to hear, rather than what we’re actually trying to say. That can sink even the best-crafted sermons. Often, though, such sermon reinterpretation is clearly the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s hearts and minds, using our words to address individual realities of which we are unaware and telling people things he knows they need to hear, even if we don’t. In either case, what’s really going on is outside of our control, and not finally the product of our work and skill at all. That doesn’t mean the sermon is irrelevant, just that the credit for whatever good may come of it belongs not to us but to the Spirit of God.

Debunking the myth of the “Dark Ages”

Posted on 27 October 201517 November 2015 by Rob Harrison | 2 Comments

I have another book to put on my Christmas list. I’m not sure how I missed the publication of James Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, or why it’s taken me this long to discover it, but from the review I just read, it looks like a fascinating work. Usually, you hope a book is as interesting as the review says it is; in this case, I hope it’s as interesting as the review, and for that matter the reviewer. The reviewer in question is an Australian medievalist named Tim O’Neill who appears to specialize in the history of medieval science and technology. He’s also an atheist who gets as irritated as I do at the ways atheists abuse and misuse history to smear Christianity. (Rest assured, I get just as irritated at the ways Christians abuse and misuse history. In this area, my first allegiance is to the discipline.)

O’Neill writes,

One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.

Perhaps it’s because I can’t think of any parallel consolation, but I’ve had to accept that the average person’s grasp of history and how history is studied is indeed so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing. I’d like to believe that atheists and secular humanists are worse than Christians in this respect—but, no. Indeed, as O’Neill notes in passing, the myth of the Dark Ages is as much the creation of Protestants attacking the Roman church as it is of atheists attacking Christianity in general.

It’s an excellent review essay because O’Neill has a fine eye for nonsense, a firm command of his subject, and apparently no use for people who value scoring cheap rhetorical points over getting their facts right.

In the academic sphere, at least, the “Conflict Thesis” of a historical war between science and theology has been long since overturned. It is very odd that so many of my fellow atheists cling so desperately to a long-dead position that was only ever upheld by amateur Nineteenth Century polemicists and not the careful research of recent, objective, peer-reviewed historians. This is strange behavior for people who like to label themselves “rationalists”.

Speaking of rationalism, the critical factor that the myths obscure is precisely how rational intellectual inquiry in the Middle Ages was. While writers like Charles Freeman continue to lumber along, claiming that Christianity killed the use of reason, the fact is that thanks to Clement of Alexandria and Augustine’s encouragement of the use of pagan philosophy, and Boethius’ translations of works of logic by Aristotle and others, rational inquiry was one intellectual jewel that survived the catastrophic collapse of the Western Roman Empire and was preserved through the so-called Dark Ages. . . .

Hannam . . . gives an excellent precis of the Twelfth Century Renaissance which, contrary to popular perception and to “the Myth”, was the real period in which ancient learning flooded back into western Europe. Far from being resisted by the Church, it was churchmen who sought this knowledge out among the Muslims and Jews of Spain and Sicily. And far from being resisted or banned by the Church, it was embraced and formed the basis of the syllabus in that other great Medieval contribution to the world: the universities that were starting to appear across Christendom.

Read the whole thing—it’s well worth your time.

Unshrinking the church

Posted on 27 October 201517 November 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

I’m not familiar with Mark Brouwer, a Christian Reformed pastor at Loop Church in Chicago, but I had a post of his recommended to me a few weeks ago. Titled “Second thoughts about ministry, church, and faith,” the Rev. Brouwer asks, “Am I the only one who thinks this?” He isn’t, and thankfully, neither am I. It’s an excellent piece. I particularly appreciate his point #3, which I think is fundamental to the others:

For me, the central message in the Bible — and the interpretive overlay to the Bible and the spiritual life — is multi-faceted reconciliation through the establishment of the Kingdom of God. . . .

Atonement through the cross is obviously an important part of salvation, but it needs to be understood in the context of the bigger picture of the Kingdom of God. This is, in my view, the key insight that separates Reformed theology from the typical Evangelical and Fundamentalist church. In today’s evangelical church, the emphasis is on a reductionist version of “the Gospel,” which boils down to the need to believe a certain atonement theory about the cross so that your sins can be forgiven.

If we don’t understand that this “Gospel” is part of a larger story, we misunderstand the Bible, and we will become increasingly individualistic in our faith-life, and will become irrelevant in our culture. The Gospel is about reconciling people together, setting captives free, overcoming injustice, bringing healing to hurts . . . it’s not just getting our sins forgiven so that we can go to heaven when we die.

The message of the cross stands at the center of that center, but he’s right: when we narrow our focus too much, we shrink the work and purpose of Jesus on the cross to something just our size. God is on about something much bigger than me. (Thank goodness.)

Image: Dave Pape. Public domain.

Enter the phoenix

Posted on 25 October 201517 November 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

This site replaces two blogs—my personal blog, The Spyglass, and my sermon blog, Of a Sunday. The Spyglass went dormant about five years ago, and the sermon blog went silent when I left the church I had been serving for seven years. I’ve still been writing, it just hasn’t been posted anywhere. I’ve still been collecting articles and ideas, I’ve just been storing them on Facebook or in Evernote. It’s time to change that.

I won’t do all my writing here, because I’m working on a book on the Sermon on the Mount; I borrowed my working title for the title of this blog. That project continues to be a priority for me, but it does have one great disadvantage: that conversation is only with other books, which don’t talk back. I’m looking forward to starting some conversations outside my own head.

In my previous blogging incarnation, I spent a lot of time writing about politics. I expect to do so far less here. The biggest reason I stopped posting five years ago wasn’t the birth of our fourth child, though the sleep deprivation that caused did play a part. The biggest reason was that I lost hope in the American political process. I didn’t have the energy to keep writing on politics, and I didn’t want to abruptly shift the focus of the blog, so (foolishly) I did nothing. Starting over, I can let all of that go.

I have brought over all the posts from both blogs, though I’ve deleted a number of duplicates and near-duplicates. The importation process mangled a lot of the formatting, however, and I haven’t cleaned it all up. There were over 1900 posts imported (rather fewer now), and I may have fixed half of them. If you happen upon a post for which the formatting is still a mess, please drop me a line through the contact page at the top of the site and I’ll try to get to it fairly soon.

I’m sure there will be more to fix, and more to tweak, but in this world, the search for perfection is often just a way to never get started, and it’s time to get started. For now, I’ll leave the last word to the great Mark Heard.

Rise from the Ruins

There ain’t nobody asks to be born;
There ain’t nobody wishes to die.
Everybody whiles away the interim time
Sworn to rise from the ruins by and by.

The engines are droning with progress,
The pistons are pounding out time,
And it’s you and me caught in this juggernaut jaunt,
Left to rise from the ruins down the line.

We will roll like an old Chevrolet;
The road to ruin is something to see.
Hang on to the wheel,
For the highway to hell
Needs chauffeurs for the powers that be.

Go and tell all your friends and relations;
Go and say what ain’t easy to say.
Go and give them some hope
That we might rock this boat
And rise from the ruins one day.

Did you ever try to carry water in a basket?
Did you ever try to carry fire in your hand?
Did you ever try to take on the weight of the everyday freight
Til you find that you’re too weak to stand?

Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Why so downcast and desperately sad?
We can walk, we can talk,
We ain’t yet pillars of salt,
We will rise from the ruins while we can.
We will rise from the ruins while we can.

Words and music: Mark Heard
© 1990 iDEoLA Records
From the album Dry Bones Dance