Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Where Have All the Troublemakers Gone?

What follows is a reflection/review of The Good Lord Bird by James McBride



Some people are born in the right time and right place for who they are and others miss their time by a century or so. There is a wonderful scene in the film Sin City where one character is noting that Marv, the big, strong, and ugly individual is someone who would have flourished in the time of gladiators or of Vikings. Marv would have been a superstar in those times. But in the 20th century he was just a big ugly mug.

John Brown is someone who was born at the right time. In McBride’s work we are given a close insight into the person and character of John Brown the radical, religious, devoted person. We see someone who will pray for hours at end if given the opportunity, someone who walks with a myopic modernism upon which he claims moral authority to break laws, harm others, and push people into lives they may never have wanted to claim. One who is not well studied in history may read McBride’s work and wonder if we are receiving a caricature of the John Brown. It can be easy to see the John Brown person as an archetype of the crusading vigilante who is on a “mission from God” and will not be strayed from his cause no matter what.



Yet while it is a work of historical-fiction, McBride is not offering an exaggerated view of this iconic character of American History. We are seeing the madman as he probably was and given a good and real taste into many of the experiences and the overall ethos of a powerful time in our nation’s story. It is a strong work that offers many layers of a complex time – a time when an individual like John Brown could thrive.

What of today? Is there room for the radical, the religiously committed crusader? I do not doubt for a second that someone like John Brown would be labeled a terrorist in today’s context (and may already be considered one by folks who live south of the Mason-Dixon). We have someone who is fueled by religious ideology, who raises money for his cause, and who does not seem to have any problem with the use of violence to bring the nation/world to the place that he believes we all need to be. Give John Brown a different faith tradition, a different nationality, and it is easy to imagine people labeling him as a religious radical and terrorist. You could even keep him in this country, let him hold to his Christian faith and throw him in some mid-American state with vast reaches of wilderness and it would be easy to apply the oft seen pejorative label.

John Brown lived in the right time and many might argue that the archetype that he has become and the character that he was would not work well today. (Let us not forget that he was arrested by federal troops and tried in a federal court – he was not accepted by many in his own time)

Yet I wonder. Putting aside his proclivity for violence for a moment, I wonder if we need those individuals who wrap themselves with that modernistic fervor around a truth that they believe everyone should embrace. Just thinking about Christianity, we have an overwhelming supply of vanilla believers. These are people who are upstanding, respectable, regular attenders of church, soft-spoken, and safe. Churches are full of people who like to worship God and then go about their lives without experiencing any real repercussions that may follow one’s commitment to God. Many of these vanilla believers are pastors who worry about feeding their family, keeping the Deacons happy, and just want to be able to spend their free time playing with their model trains and raising their sheep dogs. Such people emerge from a safe, comfortable faith and churches are full of those folks. Those believers can fit in with any time period and will be fine. Churches full of these believers become safe, vanilla churches that will avoid rocking the boat at all cost. This is a deadly and prevalent faith that can be found in all denominations and traditions.
We need the individual who will stand up and “speak truth to power.” We need the believer who is willing to lose friends for a cause that he or she feels passionately about. We need the John Brown radical who will again and again call other believers to step out of the sphere of complacency, out of the realm of atrophied commitment, and to embrace that which is causing our God to grieve. We need these modern day prophets, radicals, rebel-rousers, and troublemakers.

We need the John Brown types, but sans violence.

I do not believe that there is any way someone who claims to follow Christ (someone who approaches a violent death with a heart of peace) can justify the use of violence as a part of their commitment to God. I do not believe it was right in the 1850s and 60s and do not believe it is right today.

So John Brown without the violence is what I am looking for today.


So where is John Brown? Where is that individual who sees moral decay, that which the prophets described as offensive to God and speaks? Let there be unrest, discomfort, stirring, problem-causing, and let it begin with me.

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Storytelling and Floods

There has been some talk about the Noah movie on the Internets. For some reason the majority of the talk (whining and complaining) is coming mostly from Christians, but what else can you expect? Apparently a part of our faith is to whine and complain at every possible opportunity.



I gave a cursory glance at some of the complaints. Here is a dramatic recreation of some of them from Facebook and Twitter:

it isn’t accurate
it is heretical
it isn’t accurate
it is showy
I stubbed my toe going to see this movie
it isn’t accurate

One of the recurring complaints is that the movie is not accurate to the text. I wonder if those same folks complain with the basic children’s Bible version of the Noah story. Those are stories that usually depict a two-dimensional, smiling Noah (bald with a beard) building an ark, smiling while all the animals get on the ark, smiling while it rains, and smiling when the rain stops and everyone gets off of the ark and smiling when looking at a rainbow in the sky. I have looked at a number of different translations, looked and the Hebrew, and nowhere in the text do I see that Noah is smiling. Conclusion: Children’s Bibles are heretical and should be burned because they are not accurate.

My friend Scott Paeth made the astute observation that if the movie was going to be “scripturally accurate” it would be very short because it is not a very long story. I respectfully disagree because, as Stephen Colbert pointed out in his interview with the Darren Aronofsky (the director of Noah) they did make three movies out of The Hobbit.

So I guess the message that many conservative, evangelical Christians are trying to get across is that we are not supposed to trust the move because it is not biblically accurate, or at least that is what we are told. What I think is closer to the truth is that many Christians are claiming that they are not supposed to trust the movie because it does not tell the story that they want to hear. Or more specifically, the movie is not telling the Noah narrative that a conservative stream of Christianity is used to telling (not enough killing and anger and judgment?).

Remember when that wonderful, happy, and horribly inaccurate movie The Passion of Christ, directed by Mel Gibson came out? There were many added sections to the narrative that could not be found in scripture. Yet it was embraced by most conservative evangelical Christian circles as a “powerful and moving telling of Christ’s suffering.” Not because it was so close to the Bible story, or because it was historically, because neither is the case. It was embraced more because it told a narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion that conservative Christians liked to tell. One that involves lots, and lots, and lots of the color red.

Let’s be honest, it is not about Biblical accuracy – it is about telling the story you want to hear.

No one has a monopoly on the stories of the Bible, especially when they pervade our popular culture in many ways. People are going to take stories from Scripture and retell them in religious and non-religious contexts. If you don’t like it, go live in a culture that imposes laws and restrictions on people using religious stories in popular culture. There are countries where that occurs and maybe you would be happier in such places.

On the other hand, why not go and watch the movie, but first do some work. Read the Noah story (Genesis 5:28 – 10:32) and ask how you read this story. What are the major themes that jump out at you? What can you say about God based on the way you hear and engage this story? What can you say about Noah and the other characters in the story? How do you engage with the narrative? Have a good idea how you hear this story and then go and watch the movie looking for the differences and similarities in the hearing and telling of the story. Don’t go to see “what really happened,” but go to be pushed and challenged and maybe inspired.


If nothing else, enjoy the popcorn with a boat-load of butter.