WARNING: THE POST YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ WAS NOT WRITTEN BY ALEX.
Alex has asked me to be kind and gracious to his readers as I blog on his behalf while he's at Rockbridge. Thus, I won't be mentioning things like "The woman caught in adultery is a story that probably shouldn't be in the Bible based on textual evidence;" or, "Jesus probably didn't say, 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do;" or, "The Lord's prayer doesn't really end with, 'For thine is the kindom and the power and the glory forever.'" Nope, I won't even mention that stuff!
Instead, I want to start my forray into the Piebald Life with the disturbing lyrics of Busload of Faith, by Lou Reed. The tag line seems warm and fuzzy enough: You need a busload of faith to get by. But...
Reed lists all the things in the world you can't depend on, beholding the world in all its darkness. You can't depend on:
familyfriendsintelligencegodthe goodly heartedthe sacramentfather, son, holy ghosta miraclethe aira wise man
So, what can you depend on?
a murder's drivea rape victim getting pregnantpro-lifers' wraththe worst always happening
Most of all, though, you can depend on needing a busload of faith to get by.
Now, I'm not the guy who is ever going to be accused of looking at the world through rose colored glasses (ahem), which means that I see the picture Reed paints of the darkness and think that he's probably just about right. But in a way somewhat similar to Peter Jackson's attempt to render The Lord of the Rings for the screen, he gets evil right but can't figure out what the good looks like. What is "faith"? What is it in? This is an empty hope, an empty faith, providing nothing but a warm sentiment in the vague sense that ... what? There is no object of faith that's going to help shine the light here.
Perhaps this is the lyric that needs to be transformed in order to see the way forward is this one: "You can't depend on a beginning, you can't depend on an end." That is precisely where the Christian vision of faith transforms the darkness into light. Not only is there the darkness, not only the evil, not only the crucifixion--there is also light, the triumph of good and the resurrection; that is to say, the end has begun, and because we know how the story ends (with resurrection life, the triumph of good over evil, the triumph of light over darkness, the triumph of God's wisdom over human folly, the triumph of vindication over injustice, the triumph of the family of God over the rejection of loved ones) there is an object of faith worthy to be pursued.
Yes, it does take a busload of faith to get by. Not the stirred up emotion with no object, the vague sense that something "out there" keeps me going. Faith that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that evil, therefore!, does not win.
6 comments:
So...
Did Steven say "Lord, do not hold this sin against them?" If so, where'd he learn that sort of behavior from?
If Jesus didn't say it, Stephen couldn't?! That's not all that compelling to me. It's probably why some scribe put the same sort of thing in Jesus' mouth, though--copying Stephen's speech.
Look at me, arguing Biblical scholarship with a Bible scholar. I suppose I don't know what I'm talking about, but if we never talked except when we did, we'd never learn anything, right?
But seriously, this is a pretty big change in the martyr tradition, no? The Maccabeean martyrs hurled insults at their persecutors, Stephen prayed for their forgiveness (or some Christian did, and some scribe saw it and put that same sort of thing in Stephen's mouth). It just makes more sense to me that they are looking toward one particular decisive example, you know, by the one who some scribe wrote about saying "I have set an example, that you should do as I have done for you."
I think I promised not to talk about this stuff, not even to mention it. Stop making a liar out of me!
Uh Oh... I hear the condemnations of Mark 9:42 coming down on my head! I sure hope Jesus never said it...
;-)
If you care to educate me further on this fascinatingly forbidden topic, send an email my way. That's far easier than me doing my own research and then making up my own mind.
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