Living within earshot

The lectionary in Luke passes through apocalyptic pronouncements from Jesus. It’s a tone we don’t assign to Christ, preferring his gentleness.  Of course it is there, the toughness.  It’s all over the Bible, not just the strange world of the Old Testament. Today the passage from Acts was one of those tough ones, where Ananias and Sapphira, who hold back a little from the collectivism of the early Christian community and promptly drop dead.  Anything short of total commitment carries the ultimate price.  

Today was the Pride festival in Nashville.  We gave out water to the marchers from in front of the church, and then went down to the festival on Public Square.  These days, our church flies a rainbow flag, and we have a sign on the fence that says “Love Thy Neighbor” with “thy” in rainbow colors.  Marchers stopped to have their photo taken in front of it.  This act of giving out water was just right for us, it let us not just show support but care for the people in the march.  It gave us a good reason to interact with everyone and share greetings.

When we went to the festival, we came across a familiar sight, the counter-protesters, street preachers inveighing against gays. They’re there every year.  It’s part of the show.  Their preaching is literally fire and brimstone, inspired by the tough talk parts of the Bible, days of vengeance and all that.

Later that day, my wife and I saw the movie A Very Sordid Wedding.  It was fun—to boil it way down, about a gay wedding in a small Texas town.  Much of the movie concerned the religious, specifically Christian, views on being gay, in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage.  The local Baptist church is holding an “Anti-Equality Revival,” but one of the members is coming to terms with her recently married gay son. She and her kin are making the case that love is all in the Bible, and that it takes cherry-picking to turn Christianity into an anti-gay faith.

One thing that strikes me about this movie, set in Texas, and the events of Pride weekend in Nashville, is the debate about religion.  Wouldn’t it be easier just to walk away from the church, and all of Christianity.  Write it off as sexist, biased, superstitious and frankly just strange.  But in the movie, and here, people don’t.  It still matters to keep the church.  The gay son in the movie even has a job with Faith in America which gives him a reason to give some lines about affirming churches.   

We want to keep the church, keep the faith of our families, and don’t see why it’s not completely consistent with full acceptance of people in different relationships. The faith as we see it inspires us to come out and celebrate with the marchers at Nashville Pride. I see Christianity as pushing me into that embrace.

One of the street preachers is the brother of a former member of our church.  He’s a good guy.  We aren’t close, but I’m always glad to run into him. I don’t agree with his religious views, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t exist for me or that I would shun him. Living here, we live together.  Somehow.  On some level we can’t help talking to each other.  Even if sometimes it’s more talking at each other.  But we’re within earshot.  We are connected.

Psalm 62

Today’s Psalm 62 contains lines about God as a mighty fortress.  All I have to do is see that one word and I’m automatically forwarded to the Luther hymn.  While the hymn is apparently a paraphrase of Psalm 46, as a layman the association here is almost as strong. All the lines in our faith get filtered through so many layers of translation—out of Hebrew, maybe into Latin, into Luther’s German and back to us in English. And we look at our layers of English translation, where the word of God makes a series of stops before it reaches us.  First in King James—well actually Tyndale before that—through the Revised Standard Version into whatever PCUSA chooses to use these days.  And of course the Bible quotes itself constantly, so the echo effect—the psalm doesn’t read as Luther’s words, but some partial reminder of it.  That may be a function of paraphrasing in the 16^th or 20^th century, or a function of paraphrasing in the ancient times these texts were composed. 

This weekend my stepson came back from church camp and was noodling on his keyboard.  He has been experimenting with some music composition (or is it assembly) software on his keyboard and then brought our electronic keyboard into his room where eventually we’ll connect as a controller.  He’s never studied piano, but can pick out pretty complicated things out by ear when he’s interested.  Mostly video game songs.  But he also improvises.  We just let him go, free range.  Try never to shush him.

That Friday night, my wife and I both thought we caught a strain of A Mighty Fortress in the middle of his noodling.  I think it was the second phrase, which marches down the scale with one step back. She asked him to play it again but he couldn’t or wouldn’t go back. Most of what they sing at camp seems to be contemporary group worship songs, songs I don’t know but everyone at say UKirk (PCUSA’s campus ministry) knows.  Not the old hymns.  But maybe they sneak in a few. Or maybe he does remember it from a church service.  Or is it such a natural progression that one stumbles into it, like the chromatic chord progression I once found that seems to come from Rosenkavalier?  Memory and instinct help keep us tied together. Maybe in spite of ourselves.