Americana Week: Day 5

Okay, last day of the Americana series. I haven't nearly done justice to the amazing diversity of this music. I haven't featured the Blues at all, nor the rich and ongoing musical harvest from the Mississippi Delta (which, heck, isn't even really a delta..what's with that). Like Bluegrass, the Blues is thriving, producing young innovators who keep reshaping the tradition and drawing in other influences. It's really rather amazing. Jorma Kaukonen was once one of those young innovators, and as he's gotten older he's simply grown more rooted in the Blues tradition. Here's a nice example. Not a great video, but a great sound.



And just for good measure, here's the great Reverend Gary Davis:



There's so much good music being made today, and so much available from the past, I believe we're living in a culturally rich era when it comes to music. And that ends my brief tribute to Americana.

Americana Week: Day 4

Jimmie Rodgers was one of the popular "hillbilly" artists in the early days of recorded "country" music. Many give him credit for practically inventing the genre. Along with the Carter family, he was important in bringing blues and "old time" music to a popular audience. Here's a classic country blues:

Americana Week: Day 3

Americana, when it refers to music, is a loosely defined collection of musical styles, but the common denominator may be that each of these styles is clearly rooted in American traditional music. Thus, you've got Cowboy Americana, Folk music, Blues, Bluegrass, work songs, etc. You might call it "roots music." Over the years it continually draws in new influences (from new immigrant communities, for example), and changes in musical technology have also clearly impacted these traditions. The point is, it is a diverse musical form and it is clearly not a "dead" tradition. In fact, we seem to be enjoying a time of particular creativity in the Americana movement. Younger musicians are rediscovering "old time" music and playing with the tradition in very creative ways. This happened in the '50s and '60s under the influence first of bands like The Weavers and then Joan Baez, Peter Paul & Mary, The Kingston Trio, etc.

In my opinion, we are living in a kind of roots music renaissance. Musically speaking, this is one of the most enjoyable periods of my lifetime. I'm particularly partial to the Appalachian strain of roots music, sometimes called "Bluegrass," although that's actually a prominent subset. Here's an ensemble of some of my favorite practitioners, led by Tim O'Brien on vocals. I love the lyrics here, O'Brien's wonderful singing, and the musicianship is of course exceptional.

4 Things

Found this over at DashHouse:

The way of health and humility is for us to admit to ourselves that in the final analysis we do not and cannot know the measure of our success as God sees it. Wisdom says: leave success ratings to God, and live your Christianity as a religion of faithfulness rather than an idolatry of achievement. (J.I. Packer)

Found this at The Blazing Center:

You’re stuck in a happiness rut and you want to know how to get out.

I understand. I’ve been there before. Sometimes I just get so sick of being happy that I’ve got to take drastic action.

There is one sure fire to get yourself out of a happiness rut:

Make yourself the center of everything.

Found this at Mockingbird:

Forgiving love is a possibility only for those who know that they are not good, who feel themselves in need of a divine mercy, who live in a dimension deeper and higher than that of moral idealism, feel themselves as well as their fellow men convicted of sin by a holy God and know that the difference between the good man and the bad man are insignificant in his sight. (Reinhold Niebuhr)

And I found this at DesiringGod:

The hope in hearing the old, good news is that it would perpetually break new ground in our lives. Our hearts are like a jungle. There is untamed wilderness and darkness that has not yet been brought, as it were, under the rule of the One who has laid claim to it all.

We need to hear the gospel again and again so that the old, good news of Jesus Christ would reach into these unchartered territoties of our lives and fly the flag of its dominion. This is how we are "being saved." This is what it means to be overcome by the gospel.

Americana Week: Day 2

This comes from NPR (the Juan Williams debacle aside, they feature some pretty good music). Welch and Rawlings are premium. I like everything about them. I like the single mic, I like the guitar playing of Rawlings, I like their harmonizing, their lyrics, everything. The second song, Ruby, is one of my favorites. These two have marked out a musical territory that no one else can occupy. In the tradition, but utterly unique.

Americana Week

I think I'll make this Americana Week at Wilderness Fandango. Five days, five choice selections. I love the ensemble in this video. Add a flute, accordion, and simple drum kit to a bluegrass lineup and you've got a pretty rich sound. And Darrell Scott can sure write a lyric.

All Good

This morning I:

1. listened to an inspiring word of exhortation from John Piper.
2. read all of Hebrews aloud to myself.  BTW, don't do this if your life's goal is to avoid being humbled.
3. was pleased to learn that my brother-in-the-faith Abraham is letting go.

And I enjoyed me some Garcia and Grisman:

Saturday Cha Cha Cha

Nothing can beat Sam Cooke's original version, but this is pretty dang good.



Doncha love Billy Preston?

4 Books

I'm reading a couple of history books. One of them is a history of popular music, which happens to be a subject in which I've always been interested. The book is called The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, by Donald Clarke. Written in 1996 and now out of print, it's one of those books you can get for a penny (plus shipping of course) on Amazon. I picked it up at a library sale for a dime! I'm particularly interested in the early decades of popular music. Everyone knows it's all been downhill since about 1934!

The other history book I've been reading is The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes. These books are more like judicious compilations of facts than actual narratives. I would prefer the latter, but am enjoying them both nonetheless.

Meanwhile, I've moved on to my third Frank Viola opus, this one being From Eternity To Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God. I think Viola gets the focus right, consistently. I've just started this one, but I fully expect it to consume my attention and push those other two books to the back burner.

By the way, I'll probably be sharing from this book in future posts, but for now I would strongly urge you to listen to one of his podcasts here. I just listened to Living by the Indwelling Life of Christ, an excellent rendition of a sadly neglected aspect of Biblical (and practical) theology. That is, union with Christ. That neglect, by the way, has had a woeful effect on the church, imho.

Finally, I'm slowly reading Lyle Vander Broek's Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World (another 1-cent book at Amazon!). I loved the introduction so much that I had to summarize it (here). This will be a slow read, and probably the last to finish among these four.

There, that's what I'm reading. Meanwhile, I'm glad I haven't lost the discipline of turning pages, like Bill Kinnon!

Faith and the Fear of Death

This morning, after a couple of weeks away, I got back to reading Hebrews. The Epistle to the Hebrews, that is. I started from the beginning, just to reacquaint myself with the early chapters, and was arrested by this passage:

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. (Hebrews 2:14-18 ESV)

I want to take note of a few things here.

1. Fear of death and sin are connected.
2. All who are mortal (bound to die) live in fear of death.
3. This fear amounts to a kind of slavery.

The human condition, I suppose.  But God in Christ enacted a plan, conceived before time, to release men and women from this fear and, thus, this slavery.  Christ is the key that releases us from the shackles of slavery to fear and death and utter helplessness with regard to temptation.  The life of freedom from fear that results, for those who believe, is elsewhere in the New Testament called "new life," or life "in Christ."

Question: why then do we still live in fear of death?

Here's an observation that may hold a clue to the answer.  Our conception of faith, here in the LaLa-land that is American Christianity, is deeply skewed.  I would describe it this way: faith is understood as the confidence that the things we desire will be given to us, and soon.  We may rhetorically attribute this confidence to Jesus, but in truth it has nothing to do with him, and is far from the New Testament conception of faith.  

Nothing puts the damper on this kind of desire-centered faith more quickly than the fact of ensuing death.  If what we desire most is to avoid dying, then death will trump faith every time.

Another question: seeing as how Jesus has defeated death, why then do we not spend more time and ministry preparing ourselves and others for dying well and in peace, rather than acting as if, right up to the very end, all we really need to do is pray harder for a miracle (and then of course believe God will grant it).

Story: there's a new couple in the church.  The husband has ALS (Lou Gerhig's Disease).  It has advanced far enough now that he can no longer speak clearly, and the wife must speak for him.  They're desperate.  The medical diagnosis is utterly hopeless (that is if you define "hopeful" as the possibility of not dying from ALS).  What they need is a miracle, and so they have come to church to find one.  They go forward for prayer at the end of the sermon.  A prayer-warrior listens empathetically and quickly prays for just that: a miraculous healing.  Then he says encouragingly, "I'm believing for a miracle!"

But doesn't there come a time, sooner or later, when we must see our dying at last as inevitable.  I am not suggesting that we not pray for miracles, but I am suggesting  that our prayers for miracles may reveal more about our fear than about our faith.

The author of Hebrews says that death holds sway over us, enslaves us, and that it is at the root of our helplessness with regard to temptation.   Our fear of death shapes our desires, and our lives--even our lives of faith--become consumed by the pursuit of these desires.  And the one desire we pursue most avidly, and yet with the least hope of satisfaction, is the desire not to die.  The tragedy is that we import this attitude into our faith. In fact, we make our faith serve our fear!  The rags of the old man still cling to the new.  Our faith turns out to be nothing more than desperate and worldly (flesh-derived, flesh-oriented) optimism.

My ultimate point here is that we should spend some time on this, we Christians.  Should the fear of death so control us that it even shapes our understanding of faith?  Did it control Paul (see Philippians 1)?  Shouldn't our preaching and teaching contain a prominent component concerning the Biblical attitude toward death?  Where is the wisdom in avoiding this topic?  And shouldn't our church ministries include, prominently, a ministry to the dying that is something more than simply believing earnestly that God will not allow their death?

Sadly, with regard to the subject of death and dying, we are deeply influenced by the flesh, and not by the Word of God.

Shadowfeet

Here's something I discovered through the excellent blog, Out Walking. The blogger's style is thoughtful and even elegant. He describes the blog as an "extended meditation on God's common grace in the world." Check it out.

Breaking Barriers

I picked up Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World at a library book sale. I think it was a real steal.

In the introduction, Vander Broek first visits the oft-noted "crisis of community" that is a hallmark (so people say) of contermporary America, and he suggests that the same crisis is reflected within the church. "'Christians without community' has become the hallmark of the American church." (p.12)

The author goes on to describe the causes of this "declining social capital" within the wider culture. He pinpoints individualism, materialism, and post-modernism as the driving forces that tend to undermine community. This should be familiar ground to most of us, but Vander Broek covers the material adroitly and then moves on to his key point, which has to do with the alternative community in Christ, which is presumably specially equipped to resist these undermining cultural forces.

Every community is defined by what its members share and how they share it. Vander Broek proceeds to ask, what is it that Christians share and how do they share it? He writes,

It is impossible to understand how Christians share without also understanding what they share, and both the how and the what of this commonality are radically different from what we see in society's definition of community. (p.18)

There are many passages of the NT that indicate what is shared among Christians, but they all essentially derive from our shared salvation. Community originates in God's saving work.

Christian community is, first and foremost, a corporate experience of God's grace. What we share has its source in God and is a transformative movement from death to life. (p.20)

This may be so, but it is a truth that is not experienced apart from what Vander Broek calls "temporal dissonance." This is the tension between the now and the not yet aspects of Christian community.

If "angst" is perhaps too negative a way of describing our reaction to being a redeemed people in an unredeemed world, the experience of "temporal dissonance" is not. We share with other Christians the dilemma of striving to be in actuality what God says we already are in Jesus Christ. (p.21)

So we have this shared salvation and all that follows from that (including the indwelling Spirit of God), but we have also the experiential reality of indwelling sin, which always works against unity, community, relationship. Sin divides. We form cliques, tribes, interest groups, exclusive clubs, etc. We define who's in and who's out. In other words, even as we desire community, recognizing its great worth (as a reflection of the very nature of the life of God, Frank Viola would remind us), there is something in us that sets up an alternative desire for autonomy, the one warring against the other.

This is the human predicament, and the community of the saved in Christ is God's foretaste of his repair of creation, his solution to the human dilemma. What we share, what we hold in common, is salvation, and the way we share it is by loving one another.

Together as Christians we recognize what God has done for us and respond in a worship that permeates all of life. In short, what we share as community is our new relationship with God, a relationship that so shapes our reality that it forever changes who we are. It is this love relationship with God that determines what our relationship with our fellow community members will be, or how we share with one another. (p.23)

Love, such as Paul describes famously in 1 Cor 13:4-7, is how we share that which we have in common. It is love that marks us as ambassadors of the kingdom of God. Barriers are broken down. "Christians love one another with a love that is blind to the distinctions so common in society."

Again, this seems an idealized vision, for our experience is not nearly so wholesome. We have barrier-making tendencies within ourselves. We have community-rejecting tendencies. We draw back from what we know to be essentially good. To illustrate this point, Vander Broek concludes with a description of Scott Cairns' poem, The Entrance of Sin (read it here).

Cairns' poem is an apt finish to Vander Broek's introduction. In the poem, Adam refuses Eve's proffered hand, and the sense of autonomy that follows is beguiling, even in some way "irresistible." This "new taste for turning away," becomes our burden and our curse, and the cause for which, from the very beginning, the Godhead planned to sunder its own beloved "community" in an act of self-giving that would be the essential centerpiece of His plan to restore all things.

That's a summary of Vander Broek's introduction. The book, again, is Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World.

Hirsch on "Jesus is Lord"

4 Things

Amazing Victorian era photographs, salvaged from the trash!

Greensboro, NC, is crawling with writers! [Aside: who would think of calling Greensboro, population well above 200,000, a "hamlet"?]

I went to the book sale at my local public library yesterday. Came home with two grocery bags full of books, costing me all of two bucks! One of them is called Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World, written by Lyle D. Vander Broek and published by Brazos in 2002. Looks like an engaging read, but I notice no one has reviewed it at Amazon! That's rare. This book was not particularly engaging for anyone else, it seems.

Christians need to take seriously the notion that there is an important place for weakness in the belierver's journey.

An Agenda for Personal Revival

Did you read the poem a couple of posts back?  I'm serious about what I said there.  I've been dying lately, it seems.  I need reviving.  Here, quickly, are some of the things I need to be about.

1. I need to be making.  There's the poetry, but it would be well to find other outlets for this as well.  
2. I need to be learning.  And not from books exclusively, but from practice.  I need to be working out new skills, working with my hands, etc.
3. I need to be serving.  All sorts of ways to do this.  But I should be watchful about these opportunities.  This one begins at home, but must not be limited to the home.
4. I need beauty.  Look for it.  Name it.  Celebrate it.
5. I need body life. (See 1Cor 12:12).

I'm working on these things.  I'm sure there are others, but these seem to be the "felt needs" of this particular season of my life.  I feel as if I've been wasting away lately, and I think these are some of the things that will help in my own personal revival.

Re-imagining Church

I just finished Frank Viola's Reimagining Church. And I think he's right.

Could I have said this a year ago? Probably not. Although I was bored by the standardized church experience, I didn't question that it was essentially the right (the only) format--the approved and anointed format--for doing church. Oh, perhaps the music could be tweaked a little (or a lot), and the sermon should have contained more of this and less of that, but I didn't question the necessity of sermons. I sensed that there was something false and cloying about much religious rhetoric, and something annoyingly self-serving about the promo-culture of church life (you know, promote the book, promote the movie, promote the latest church-based program, promote evangelism, promote volunteer-ism, promote morality, promote leadership training so more folks can take the lead in this culture of promotion). Toward the end of my 18-year career of pew-sitting (except when ushering, at which time I showed other people to their pews) I even began to wonder if sitting in rows listening to a lecturer/showman for 45 minutes every Sunday morning was really all that helpful. But what was the alternative?

Viola presents the alternative in Reimagining Church. In short, he's describing "organic church." A community of Christ followers that involves the cultivation of real relationship and life-sharing, untethered to institutional structures and Sunday morning verities.

Am I ready for that?

I have no idea.

But Viola has definitely started me wondering and imagining. The subtitle of his book, "Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity," is an invitation. Shall we?

Reading Prospects

Some books that have caught my attention lately:

The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption This one is by Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote the marvelous Seabiscuit.

Fifty-Nine in '84 Baseball history is one of my favorite subjects. This one looks like a beaut.

The Fort, by Bernard Cornwell

The October Poem: After the Wedding

Back from lovely Brown County, Indiana, where the wedding of my son, Tim, took place. Everything was wonderful, and I came back inspired in multiple ways. Which leads to my October poem. You may recall that I'd pledged to write at least one poem per month and share them here. This poem is called, After the Wedding.

Coming home
after seeing my youngest son
set sail for the undiscovered country known as marriage,
I determined, inspired,
to work a little harder at my own life:
I would take up the ukulele (again),
I would pick up the litter in the park,
learn the calls, markings,
and peculiar habits
of the local birds,
listen carefully to those who speak and also to those
who do not speak, write
lengthy desiderata in the sand,
and tell all sorts of people in all sorts of ways
that I too am entwined with them
in the troubled bliss
of mortality.

Celebration and Contemplation Break

Hey folks, I'm going off-line for about 12 days or so, as I will be traveling to Indiana for my son's wedding! Yahoo! So lots of celebration awaits me, but also, I hope, a little contemplation. I'll see you on the other side!

Reading Viola

I started reading Pagan Christianity a few days ago, and found I couldn't put it down. I temporarily set aside my other reading in order to focus on PC. It's a powerful and important book, in my opinion.

Viola makes two fundamental arguments here. First, that much of what we routinely assume to be part and parcel of doing church--a special building, a paid pastor, the worship set, the sermon, the collection of the tithe, the rather odd practice of "communion"--is really a borrowing from the surrounding culture and not intrinsic to the NT conception of "church" at all.

But Viola's second point is more important by far. Not only are so many of these taken-for-granted practices not intrinsic to the NT church, but they actually hinder spiritual maturity and the full flowering of what Luther called "the priesthood of all believers." Church, Viola argues, church as we know it, stands in the way of spiritual growth.

I'm not going to replay Viola's arguments in detail here, but all I can say is that my own experience has shown me that he's right. Since I drew back from institutional church life in the past year, I've struggled to find expressions of "body-life" outside the institutional setting. Fact is, I struggled to find it inside the institutional setting as well. I've said often enough that the life of the Christian, in company with brothers and sisters in shared-life relationships. This is the picture drawn by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together. Bonhoeffer was forced by the deadly circumstances of his times to seek an understanding of church--of the communion of saints--apart from the traditional practices of the "institutional church," which in his day was sold out to the Nazis. He went back to the New Testament, back to the 50 or so "one another" passages scattered like gems throughout those pages, and then he sought to put this into practice with a band of brothers. Life Together is his manual for that life.

As I read Pagan Christianity, I kept thinking of Bonhoeffer and Life Together. These two authors would no doubt disagree on some things, but heartily agree that on the mutuality and interdependency of the life under Christ's headship. Sunday morning church gatherings are to true community as Sunday morning "communion" is to a true meal. Ritualized, lip-serviced, tragically attenuated and manipulated.

I'm looking for something better than this. I'm looking for something organic. I'm not sure how to go about this, but I'm confident that it is God's plan for his people, and he will guide me into it.

By the way, I've now begun reading Viola's Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity. Here's a quote from chapter 1 (p. 48):

The church is organic. If her natural growth is not tampered with, she will grow up to be a beautiful girl--a living witness to the glories of her Bridegroom, Jesus Christ. She will not grow up to be an organization like General Motors or Microsoft. She will be something wholly different--completely unique to the planet. Just as unique as Jesus Christ was when he walked the earth. For after all, the church is His very body, and its nature is identical to God's.

In my experience, church people get very antsy when the church is criticized. But it must happen. Life together in the body of Christ, under His headship, has got to be something more than audience-like attendance at the high-ceilinged hall across town. I'm determined to find out for sure.

Things that Belong to Salvation 2

I picked up this quote over at Kingdom Grace. It's something she picked up at ReligionFacts. I think it describes the Hebrews understanding of salvation pretty well. Salvation is the restoration of communion!

In the Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, sin, grace, and salvation are seen primarily in legal terms. God gave humans freedom, they misused it and broke God’s commandments, and now deserve punishment. God’s grace results in forgiveness of the transgression and freedom from bondage and punishment.

The Eastern churches see the matter in a different way. For Orthodox theologians, humans were created in the image of God and made to participate fully in the divine life. The full communion with God that Adam and Eve enjoyed meant complete freedom and true humanity, for humans are most human when they are completely united with God.

The result of sin, then, was a blurring of the image of God and a barrier between God and man. The situation in which mankind has been ever since is an unnatural, less human state, which ends in the most unnatural aspect: death. Salvation, then, is a process not of justification or legal pardon, but of reestablishing man’s communion with God. This process of repairing the unity of human and divine is sometimes called “deification.” This term does not mean that humans become gods but that humans join fully with God’s divine life.