Undeception

The latest episode of Mark Goodacre‘s always excellent NT Pod regarding Jesus’ brothers gave me the perfect opportunity to present this long-time candidate for Theologically Interesting Lyric. I have problems with some of the historical-critical assumptions and theological claims of the lyrics, but concerning the lyrics as art, it’s great stuff. I’ll interact with the NT Pod’s material a bit more below.

Fly from Heaven
written by Glen Philips, performed by Toad the Wet Sprocket on the album Dulcinea

Verse 1:
Paul is making me nervous
Paul is making me scared
Walk into this room and swaggers
Like he’s God’s own messenger

Changed the name of my brother
Changed the things that he said
Says that he speaks to him
But he never even knew the man
But I’d give my life for him

Chorus 1:
Like water through my hands
You’d give him any endin’
But if he’s all you say
Would he fly from heaven
To this world again
To this world again

Verse 2:
Take whatever you’re needing
Take whatever you can
We are broken from within
Run to another land

Chorus 2:
Like water through my hands
Or is it just beginning
But if he’s all you say
Would he fly from heaven
To this world again
To this world again

Bridge:
They took my brother
They ripped him from me
To twist his words as they did his body
Denied his family
Denied his beauty
To lay him down at the feet of those he couldn’t save
Couldn’t save, couldn’t save

Chorus 3:
Will it be the end
Or is he still ascending?
But if he’s all you say
Would he fly from heaven
To this world again
To this world again

(link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPvWAeprmI)

The song assumes the validity of the claim that Paul was a Johnny-come-lately who glommed onto some of the teachings of a relatively ordinary Jewish teacher/martyr and created a religion essentially out of whole cloth.

Songwriter Glen Philips, a Jew in upbringing turned spiritualist/agnostic, explains that he set out to write how a brother of Jesus (presumably but not necessarily James) might have felt to hear someone as outspoken, influential, but relatively foreign as Paul come on the scene and claim to speak on Jesus’ behalf, name him the Christ (“changed the name of my brother”), and create a religion around him despite the fact that “he never even knew the man.” It doesn’t take a professing Christian biblical scholar to see problems with some of this, but it works as a take-off for the song, which is quite poignant as a character sketch.

The NT Pod episode I referred to above highlights the varying depictions of the brothers of Jesus in the New Testament. In none of the Gospels are they accounted among Jesus’ followers, and in both the earliest and the latest Gospels there is evidence of tension: Mark 3 shows Jesus’ family doubting his sanity and Jesus essentially disassociate himself from them, and John 7.5 asserts that they did not “believe in him.” In contrast, both Acts and Paul’s epistles show Jesus’ brother James as a particularly prominent leader of the church. Goodacre discusses a couple possibilities accounting for this difference in (at least) James’ attitude toward Jesus, including a post-Resurrection conversion experience or the Gospel writers’ attempts to discredit or downplay the authority of Jesus’ family, and James in particular, in the church.

As most biblical scholars are aware, the Gospels also frequently show the disciples/apostles in a bad light, particularly in Mark. If the Evangelists gave his family the same treatment, it might well lead one to suppose either that Mark was part of a community that eschewed all currently known leadership alike or that the denigration of Jesus’ followers in his Gospel should not imply a profound criticism of their post-Resurrection leadership. Regardless, this would have been an extremely weak tactic for the Evangelists to take: showing Jesus’ followers as not believing or understanding his mission prior to the Resurrection would surely not have been anything but a weightless potshot considering the well-known belief and devotion of the apostles and James in the church-era.

All this to me suggests another case of creatively reading too much intrigue into the texts; my guess is that, for Mark at least (and maybe John), there was dramatic power in showing Jesus’ disciples and family as original failures who everyone knew became important leaders — the least becoming greatest in stereotypically Christian fashion. This does not mean that James or Jesus’ other family members were indeed skeptics converted by the Resurrection of Jesus: it could well have been dramatic license on the Gospels’ part that showed them having a hard time believing Jesus. But it is striking that this same license was utilized by more than one Evangelist independently.

In any case, the song by Toad the Wet Sprocket certainly seems to paint a different picture, showing a loving and supportive brother who can’t figure out why someone’s gone and concocted a religion by twisting his brother’s words. That there was tension between James and Paul is implied in more than one place in the New Testament, but it wasn’t because Paul had created a religion out of Jesus: James was leader of the Jerusalem church, and he did indeed end up “giv[ing his] life for him.”

It’s a theologically interesting lyric, nonetheless.

I dare you not to love this song from my favorite band, King’s X. The lead singer has joked that in every one of their songs, no matter how serious, there’s at least one throwaway line that means absolutely nothing. Knowing this sort of propensity, I wouldn’t read too much into a lot of the specific examples (“give me a coat or give me a bite”? Whaaa…?), but at the core of this song is certainly something theologically interesting. Here’s a hint: there are multiple possible meanings to the word “dogman”.

Despite the minimal response I have had to this series so far, I fully expect my blog readers to contribute in helping me unravel this one!

hard link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDBy5aKFG2k

Dogman

written by Ty Tabor and recorded by King’s X on Dogman

Give me a dollar, or give me 50 cents
Let me take it back if that ain’t what I meant
Give me a coat or give me a bite
Give me a light bulb and make sure it’s bright
Give me the moon or give me everywhere
Give me some powder to spray up in the air

Let me take my thoughts away
To think about another day
Remembering the times I pray
To help me deal with me
To be the Dogman

Give me some attention, lend me your ear
Give me what to do and get me outta here
Give me a book give me something to read
Give me a horse race and give me who’s in lead

Let me take my thoughts away
To think about another day
Remembering the times I pray
To help me deal with me
To be the Dogman

All the sleeping, never waking
All the leaves in need of raking
All the business undertaking
All my bones and muscles aching
Thoughts and mind are surely flaking
Over luncheons hands are shaking
Surety of no mistaking
Cars and horns and
Glasses breaking

Give me a color, make it black or white
Give me a newspaper, tell me if it’s right
Give me a nail, or give me a bat
Give me a skinny, or give me a fat

Remembering the times I pray
To let me thoughts away
And think about another day
To help me deal with me
To help me deal with me
To be the Dogman

I know, this artist has already appeared in my young Theologically Interesting Lyrics series. But I heard this song again today and because I related to it more strongly than ever, I feel compelled to share it.

Mark Heard was no sappy idealist. He was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” Most of his songs — at least the best remembered ones — tend toward the depressing side. This guy had major problems with the dominant evangelical culture of his day, but he wasn’t one to let God off too easily, either. A man with a keen sense of social concern and an empathy for the plighted, he took on their role of crying out to anyone that would listen. An unconventional Christian who unnerved many believers by his penchant for “un-Christian” personal habits and for openly airing his theological concerns, he probably left many people listening to him wondering, “Why did he even bother self-identifying as a Christian?”

As if to finally answer this question, this song from Heard’s last album Satellite Sky (1992) speaks in words that could almost come from my own mind (more eloquently, naturally), as he describes something that perpetually drew him back to belief, trust, and hope in God. Despite all the problems in our universe, some of us hang on to an unshakeable sense of His love; not some mamby-pamby, touchy-feely love that merely winks at whatever we do, but a fierce, invincible force that will stop at nothing to have us clean and birth such love in us. (music below the lyrics)

Hammers and Nails
written and recorded by Mark Heard on Satellite Sky

Fire in my shallows, sap of my soul
I’m hungry for mercy and thirsty for slack
Out in the outland, the flesh and the dust
Weight of the tired earth is breaking my back
Hope where I left it under the skin
Countenance of maidens, the stance of the laddies
The healing of old wounds, the trust of my kin
The voices of children calling me Daddy

Your love
Never can fail to pierce me
Hammers and nails
Rhythm of passion louder than Hell
Thunder of Heaven
Hammers and nails

Light in the dark eyes, coal into diamonds
Shelter from heavy skies, sand into pearls
Bread for the breathless, cloth for the fresh wounds
Order and chaos orbit the half-world

The taste of a color, the flavor of light
None but a blind man can measure that weight
I am a deaf-mute idle as statue
Music of hemispheres lost in the half-haze

Your love
Never can fail to pierce me
Hammers and nails
Rhythm of passion louder than Hell
Thunder of Heaven
Hammers and nails

Hum in the graveyard, whistle in the dark
Stains on the stained glass, pains in the heart
In darkened corners love lies forgotten
In the heat of the moment it waits to be spotted

How could I slight you, how could I turn
How can you take it when I’m blind to your pain
The burning of fingers, the smoldering nerves
How can you take me back over and over again

Your love
Never can fail to pierce me
Hammers and nails
Rhythm of passion louder than Hell
Thunder of Heaven
Hammers and nails

YouTube – Mark Heard – 11 – Hammer And Nails – Satellite Sky (1992)

At the suggestion of a certain rather busy diplomat, I decided to treat this trending ditty as a Theologically Interesting Lyric. It is indeed theologically interesting, because it dovetails into my recent discussions about contrasts in the OT writers’ conceptions of God and those of some of the NT writers.

First the song: “Pray for You” by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. In order to avert the potential spambot activity they would attract I have elected not to reproduce the lyrics here, but here they are in case you don’t want to watch the video:

[Hard link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atBg9zLI2bA]

Potential humor aside, when I first saw this my first thoughts were of just how anti-Christian in spirit such sentiments were. Jesus told us to forgive, turn the other cheek, walk the other mile, etc. My mind searched for a Scripture that would point out how invoking the Lord’s name to do what is evil is condemned and an affront to God.

There may be such verses, but before I got there, my mind rammed into a wall: I remembered the imprecatory Psalms.

Any student of Scripture knows of these psalms in which the psalmist begs God to take revenge on the psalmist’s enemies. These sometimes take the form of simple requests for salvation with the contextual implication that the desired manner of salvation would involve some form of retributive or preemptive violence.

Then there are more sadistic cases in which the psalmist expresses his hope for vengeance that seems to exceed the ill will in our song selection:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,

Happy is he who repays you

For what you have done to us-

He who seizes your infants

And dashes them against the rocks.

Psalm 137.8-9

In his Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis famously referred to such “cursing Psalms” as expressing “contemptible”, “devilish” sentiments. Ironically, these judgments of Lewis are themselves deprecated similarly by many inerrantists.

Lewis’s point is that we can’t necessarily assume that every attitude expressed by even the godly men in Scripture is prescriptive for us or indicative of how we ourselves should respond or believe. We should not just uniformly accept every teaching of Scripture as equally authoritative, not treating the whole thing “as an encyclopedia or an encyclical” but rather “steeping ourselves in its tone and temper and so learning its overall message.”

Too often, evangelicals with “higher” views of Scripture disagree and try to redeem these statements as justifiable, if perhaps hyperbolic, appeals to God for justice rather than personal revenge. But the problem is the definition of “justice” underlying this: the psalmist believes that justice is served by retributive revenge, and apparently the more dramatic the better: if the simple downfall of a foreign nation is a sign of God’s intervening hand, surely the skulls of the infidels being crushed against the rocks is a sign that God’s people are especially vindicated! This is something the psalmist may have believed, but it’s certainly not something we should follow him in.

How can I say this?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matt. 5.43-48

Sometimes it is believed that we should hold our peace, turn the other cheek, etc. because “‘Vengeance is Mine,’ says the Lord. ‘I will repay.’” Just let ‘em be, I have heard countless times, because God’s got something nasty in store for those wicked folks that He might just spare them from if you dare usurp His privilege of enacting vengeance.

But notice the subtle twist in the last sentence of the above passage from the Sermon on the Mount that is seldom duly noted: loving one’s enemies is to be undertaken not in deference to God’s priority for wrath but in imitation of God’s perfection exemplified in self-sacrificial love of one’s enemies! It is when we forgive and show grace that we are acting as our Father in heaven.

Again we see that a faithful reading of Scripture does not automatically deify the thoughts of the authors and contort them so that they appear to be in full concord with one another. As people who self-identify as Christians, surely it is no scandal that we should insist upon reading all Scripture through Christ, judging all Scripture through Christ.

I foresee that many of my evangelical friends will not have a problem with recognizing the circumstantial angst of the psalmist and understand that his emotions may have gotten the better of him. To these I say, you and I are not as far apart as you might think. I simply extend consideration of the limitation of humans in their circumstances in more of the Bible than the imprecatory Psalms.

This installment of “Theologically Interesting Lyrics” features a song by the late Mark Heard, master lyricist, connoisseur of several stringed instruments, and pariah to the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) industry of his time. Although widely acclaimed for his songwriting acumen, he was always an industry outsider: not only did he stand out as a “profane saint” who smoked, drank, and cussed, but because of his acute empathy for the outcasts of society and resulting social concerns, he even identified with the political left (whom he perceived to be more committed to those causes), setting him firmly at odds with mainstream evangelical culture. His lyrics are often melancholy, ironic, sarcastic, and rarely offer solutions.

Heard accused the Christian music industry of stifling the artists who strayed from the CCM norm of plastered smiles and facades of ethereal hope and who instead frequently deemed it necessary to use their lyrics to grapple with the problems of life and mourn the unfulfilled hopes that rightly plague us all, believers and unbelievers alike. On the last of over two dozen albums he released before his untimely death, he penned this song describing the plight of those artists like himself who felt exploited and whose not-always-pretty messages were essentially censored by what he considered to be a profit-seeking industry that held a seeming monopoly over Christian music.

(I’ve half a mind to leave the lyrics out so that you’ll just play the video and allow his expressive voice and the fitting music to carry you along. But nah, I’ll just post the lyrics below the video.)

(URL: http://www.youtube.com/v/N58edukzT8c)

The Orphans of God
written and recorded by Mark Heard on Satellite Sky

I will rise from my bed with a question again
As I work to inherit the restless wind
The view from my window is cold and obscene
I want to touch what my eyes have not seen

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants ’til our pockets are clean
‘Til our hopes fall ’round our feet
Like the dust of dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate
Beating our wings against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe the unbelievable truth

But they have captured our siblings, they have rendered them mute
Disputed our lineage and poisoned our roots
We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we’re out on the streets with a lump in our throats

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins
And make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

To date there have been two tribute albums making flutes of Mark Heard’s bones. There’s a marked contrast between his essentially incarnational approach to life’s difficulties in which he stands among the sufferers to give them a voice and the tendency of the CCM industry to offer advice from an enlightened position outside. The greater CCM lyrical tradition rejections the lyrical tradition of the orphans of God for bitterly complaining and offering no answers, while the orphans of God criticize the CCM model for merely offering platitudes and purely emotional pick-me-ups as solutions that too often prove hollow and illusory in the harsh realities of life. Those who prefer Heard’s approach will likely feel that his remains have been somewhat desecrated by a recent song from the CCM camp using his title that somewhat illustrates this tension. In this “Orphans of God”, the Christian pop vocal group Avalon offers this answer to the hopeless:

There are no orphans of God
So many fallen, but hallelujah
There are no orphans of God

Oh, you just feel like an orphan. God has made everything wonderful, if only you have the eyes of faith to see it.

CCM has changed; it is no longer such a monolith of pop/inspiration, and the degree to which CCM was actually stifling his music rather than, say, reflecting a low demand among the buying public that didn’t want to hear his moody, Appalachian-twanged music is certainly debatable. Either way, there are many more artists within and a robust movement outside of the mainstream industry labels who speak from the rubble, in the voices of the “fallen”, than there were in Heard’s day. But the tendency Heard identified remains in American suburban Christianity to eschew negative observations unless prepackaged with the dressed up “church talk” answers that most who go through a real dark patch find essentially dismissive. Most who have lost a loved one to a tragic circumstance tell us later that the least helpful and often most offensive thing they heard was, “It’s God’s will, and He loves you.” Yet that cold comfort is still routinely offered by Christians in “the bubble”.

Now, it is absolutely clear that mere words in songs, however poetic they might be, can never themselves resolve crises of distress, despair, hunger, sickness, fatigue, etc. in the same way that crying out accomplishes nothing but an appeal for an actual response. So in the end, the effectivity of Heard’s empathetic and others’ sympathetic approaches to lyrics will be judged by their comparative abilities to stir up the resolve to find real-world responses beyond pat answers within those who listen. From what I’ve seen, simplistically offering disembodied theological explanations that amount to gnostic escapism (particularly when those explanations seem to fly in the face of the facts) is perceived by those dealing with problems as taking those problems none too seriously. Those the most committed to not ignoring the emotional and physical hardships of life recognize that the suffering often sincerely need a shoulder to cry on and an empathetic acknowledgment of their pain rather than a tear and a lecture. In this, and in the potential to increase dissatisfaction with an intolerable state of affairs among the unaffected who might otherwise remain oblivious, I think Mark Heard’s approach triumphs.

So ends my hymn.

I embedded a video at the bottom so that you can hear this TIL while you read it.

All This Time

written and recorded by Sting on The Soul Cages

I looked out across the river today
I saw a city in the fog and an old church tower where the seagulls play
I saw the sad shire horses walking home in the sodium light
Two priests on the ferry, October geese on a cold winter’s night

All this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea

Two priests came round our house tonight
One young, one old, to offer prayers for the dying to serve the final rites
One to learn, one to teach which way the cold wind blows
Fussing and flapping in priestly black like a murder of crows

All this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea
If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river
And I’d bury the old man,
I’d bury him at sea

Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle
As these words were spoken, I swear I hear the old man laughing
“What good is a used up world and how could it be worth having?”

All this time the river flowed
Endlessly like a silent tear
All this time the river flowed
Father, if Jesus exists
Then how come he never lived here?

Teachers told us, the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple in a edge-of-the-empire garrison town
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods but the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled, ’til all that was left were the stones the workmen found

All this time the river flowed
In the falling light of a northern sun
If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
They only get better one by one

One by one…

Hard link: http://www.youtube.com/v/OcXmO-CkxKg
(Please note that the actual studio video for this song is dated, lame, and distracting, so I chose this one instead.)

These are some of my favorite lyrics, but they certainly are haunting! Sting presents a valid critique, but I consider it more of a warning than an inescapable fate.

Now what do you think?

Ok, this is the beginning of a series I’ve been meaning to start up for quite some time.

My mission: I’m going to post a lyric that attempts to make theological/philosophical observations I find interesting. I may or may not choose to highlight my own specific thoughts on the subject (but you’ll probably be able to get some idea from looking at the post tags).

Your mission: Tell us what you think of the message of the lyric. For instance, tell what you think the lyricist(s) observations were, what you think of those observations, or how well they performed lyrical artistry in this song. Don’t concentrate so much on why you do or don’t like the artist/musical genre, etc.

Electric Train

written by Larry Tagg, recorded by Bourgeois Tagg on Bourgeois Tagg

In the beginning…I had nothing to do
I was all alone in a big empty room
So I decided to build myself an electric train
It took six days’ time, things were never the same

Monday I built the track
It looked straight but it came right back
‘Cause it curved so slow if you leave from here
You go far as you can go and you’ll be back in a year

Monday, Tuesday, line the railway
Wednesday, Thursday, make it straight
Friday, Saturday, watch out that day
Saturday could be a big mistake

Chorus:

Monday, Tuesday, line the railway
Wednesday, Thursday, make it straight
Friday, Saturday, watch out for Saturday
That day could be a big mistake

Friday I took my train
I shined it, I greased it, I shined it again
I set the groove of the wheels on the rail
But it only moved when I pushed it myself

So by Saturday evening I wasn’t alone
‘Cause I took it and gave it a mind of its own
It’d grease its own wheels, it’d make its own way
I said to myself, “This train is gonna run ’til judgment day.”

Monday, Tuesday, line the railway
Wednesday, Thursday, make it straight
Friday, Saturday, watch out that day
Saturday could be a big mistake

Monday, Tuesday, line the railway
Wednesday, Thursday, make it straight
Friday, Saturday, watch out for Saturday
That day could be a big mistake

Sunday was my day of rest
I sat back and watched it go
It went backwards and forwards, it went too fast
It heated up the track ’til it started to glow
And pretty soon the rails were fried
My electric train jumped the track
And there it was, it lay on its side
All twisted and burnt black

Monday, Tuesday, line the railway
Wednesday, Thursday, you gotta make it straight
Friday, Saturday, next time no Saturday
That day was a big mistake

I’ll make it again, work out the kinks
You can’t win with a train that thinks